Before and After Nationes: Accounting for Medieval Peoples in Twenty-First-Century Germany

Abstract

Writing in 1933, Eckart Kehr remarked that ‘German historical scholarship has since the middle of the nineteenth century reflected the [contemporary German] political-social situation almost exactly’. 1 The medievalist reading these words will think at once of the Kaiserzeit —the glory-days of medieval western emperorship between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries—as the central theme in a protracted modern historiography of power. The politicized study of Germany’s ‘time of emperors’ had begun in Vormärz , gathered strength in the unification era, and supplied historical legitimation for successive modern German imperialisms, before sinking precipitately in 1945. 2 What had allowed that remote imperial age repeatedly to be appropriated for contemporary ends was the conviction that it was a deutsche Kaiserzeit : an era in which, uniquely among the peoples of Europe, the Germans had (whether to their own long-term benefit or not) gained the rule of Christendom, and come thereby to know themselves as Germans. It was with the aim of stimulating national renewal that, four years after the Peace of Vienna, Freiherr vom Stein had founded the Monumenta Germaniae Historica ( MGH ), to publish the sources for medieval German history but particularly that of the Empire. ‘Sacred love of Fatherland’ was inscribed on the banners of German academic medievalism from the start. 3

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