Sunday, March 16, 2014
Presidential Board Room (Omni Shoreham)
Late eighteenth-century Europeans recast formerly negative conceptions of the Middle Ages. The medieval past came instead to represent, “beautiful, magnificent times,” in the words of Novalis, for certain audiences by the turn of the nineteenth century. The Middle Ages held particular significance for Germans in Central Europe. The medieval past came to be seen as an era of political, social, and cultural holism, in marked contrast with the violent ruptures of Napoleonic Europe, which had redrawn the map of Germany. In my paper I analyze debates concerning German political and cultural reconstruction, conversations that included prominent figures such as the statesman Baron vom Stein and the historian Barthold Niebuhr. These men believed that a recommitment to German history’s scientific study was essential to post-war recovery. This project was to emphasize Germany’s medieval origins, the structures of which were explicitly invoked as guidelines for modern German renewal. Drawing upon recent scholarship that attends to the framing power of emotions (Frevert, Rosenwein), I argue that the response to Napoleon precipitated this interest in the medieval past. Many had experienced the Prussian war against Napoleon as a “national” German undertaking and the memory of that conflict was bound to radical – national – politics. Analyzing these impassioned debates draws our attention to the ideology of the modern Middle Ages, and also indicates how these frameworks would influence the architects of German unification in the second half of the century.
