Historical Developments: Aspects of German Division and Unification

Abstract

Chapter 4 turns to social development processes – here arguing comparably in broad, generalising strokes as a meta-perspective approach. In doing so, the authors emphasise certain striking landmarks, others taking up less space in comparison, whereby Olaf Kühne and Florian Weber reconstruct and construct a history of Germany, i.e. depicting histories of Germany that were and are decisive from their point of view – and contribute to an understanding of today’s Federal Republic in a decisive way. The term “Germany” was originally only used in a political sense towards the end of the fifteenth century. In the Renaissance, the designation Teutschland acquired its political dimension, namely, of a culturally approximated uniformly conceived space, beyond the small-scale territorial dominions. If the construction of togetherness based on a common language was initially practised by elites, a widespread awareness of a “German nation” emerged in the nineteenth century. The further explanations serve a differentiated classification from prehistoric times to the twenty-first century (Sects. 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7).