Citizenship and the German Nation

Abstract

As scholars often note when studying the German concept of citizenship, the German language lacks a term that, etymologically, reveals its basic conceptual roots in the word ‘city’. The German term analogous to citizen, citoyen, cittadino and ciudades is Staatsbürger. Kant, for instance, made it clear that when he spoke of the Bürger, he meant the ‘citoyen, d.i. Staatsbürger, nicht Stadtbürger, bourgeois’ (Kant, 1977, p. 151). Similarly, Wieland, to whom the first usage of the German term Staatsbürger is frequently attributed, juxtaposed the novel term Staatsbürger with the French term citoyen to explain its meaning. In fact, at the end of the eighteenth century, Staatsbürger appeared to many contemporary observers as a—not etymologically, but philosophically—French word, or, amounting to much the same thing, a Jacobin word (Weinacht, 1969, p. 55). Indeed, modern studies of the German concept of citizenship feel obliged to explain to their non-German readers that the analysis requires the use of at least three different expressions: Staatsbürgerschaft, Staatsangehörigkeit and Volksangehörigkeit. These three terms express different elements of an idea that, at least in the Anglo-American tradition, is covered by the single word ‘citizenship’ (Brubaker, 1992, p. 50).

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