Political Unity and Linguistic Diversity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

A central theme of the present volume is the interplay of centralizing and divergent tendencies in ‘Germany’, the problem of unity and diversity which is introduced in Maiken Umbach’s chapter. One of the crucial problems within this is the question of national identity — effectively ‘who is a German?’ and how can ‘a German’ be defined? What binds together those groups which constitute the political entity ‘Germany’ in a contemporary and a historical context? And how is this perception of unity related to the feelings of local or regional identity encapsulated in the untranslatable German word Stammesbewusstsein which are clearly real within present-day Germany and have clear historical roots? Although ‘federalism’ is not a necessary consequence of such regionalism, the connections are clear and can be ultimately perceived by a significant proportion of the population as forming part of the justification for the federal structure of the present German state.