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Abstract: The article is accessible in full; instead of an abstract, the beginning of the article is cited:
I would like to begin my lecture with a little fairy tale. I found it, if I remember correctly, in an Asterix volume. It was called, I believe, “Asterix and Patriotism.”
"We find ourselves in the eighteenth century. All of Germany is occupied by French-speaking nobles and princes. – All of Germany? No! One village, populated with unshakable Germans, persists in offering resistance to the intruder.
It called itself the German bourgeoisie, this village, and it developed a new and beautiful idea. Each person was to have his fatherland, in which he grew up and for which he bore responsibility. And in this fatherland equality and civic freedom were to rule, and all the people were to be enlightened and to honor science and reason and nature. Each person was to love his own fatherland and to be friendly to the fatherlands of other people and to the other people too.
And the citizens in the village said to themselves: this is our idea, and when we tell it to our princes, they will be amazed at what we have invented. They will give us our freedom and say: “Since you are like this you may rule alongside us.”
And the citizens in the village were very taken with their idea, and they called it patriotism, and they cultivated it throughout the whole eighteenth century.
And there were famous people in the city, such as Kant and Lessing and Goethe, and they looked upon all this activity benevolently. Although they called themselves citizens of the world, they found that it was also good that there were patriots. And so patriotism and cosmopolitanism lived in peaceful harmony and pushed ahead with the business of enlightenment and freedom with high hopes.
And then one day there broke out in France the French sickness, the revolution. For in the meantime, in the dark womb of history, real nations had risen up, and the French were the first of this new kind, and Napoleon put himself at their head. And Napoleon went so far as to come to Germany too, and to infect the Germans with his evil French nationalism. And look! the evil nationalism broke out among the Germans, infecting Fichte and Ernst Moritz Arndt and Achim von Arnim and Turnvater Jahn, and Kleist wrote his dreadful Hermannsschlacht. They forgot the fatherland and cried out: We want a nation like that too! And in the nineteenth century things got even worse, and nationalism grew from generation to generation.
But patriotism is still with us, too. Because what was once so good and beautiful, must also have been true."
A nice fairy tale – but alas, only a fairy tale. Historians have been telling it for fifteen years, and Germanists have faithfully parroted them. It would indeed be comforting if there had ever been such a thing: pure, innocent patriotism.
But both of this story’s presuppositions are false. Nationalism did not put an end to patriotism, beginning with the Wars of Liberation and as an outside force. And nations did not grow in the womb of history and later give rise to nationalism. Rather, nationalism was there first and produced the nation.
And because it all came about so very differently, I will leave the fairy tale behind now and tell a story which I believe to be somewhat more correct. I will organize it into two sections, first a theoretical segment, outlining the state of research concerning patriotism, and then a practical segment, seeking to apply the results of this research to selected patriotic texts from the outset of the Seven Years War.[1]
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