The aim of this essay is to investigate the concepts of cultural identity and national sovereignty as they emerge in radical German nationalism after 1806 in relation to French revolutionary ideas and to reconstruct a radical revolutionary, i.e. a ‘French Revolution’, context for the idea of German national unity. Such a ‘French Revolution’ context questions the view that the ‘Teutomania’ emerging in the context of the Wars of Liberation and linked to German national liberation can only be interpreted as the precursor to chauvinist German nationalism of later periods. The investigation focuses on the political ideas and militancy of Karl Follen (1796–1840) as they found expression in his outline of an all-German constitution and his martial poetry. It delineates the overlap, and the differences, between Follen's constitutional outline and the French republican constitution of 1793, and asks whether the differences, which derive from a greater focus on cultural specificity in Follen's constitution, could be due to the German need for imaginative nation-building under conditions perceived as cultural and political oppression. The essay discusses this idea by exploring the pronounced similarity between the approaches to national liberation taken by Follen and Frantz Fanon. Both Follen and Fanon insist that a strong cultural identity linked to uncompromising militancy are necessary for national and social liberation to succeed.
The essay (re)locates Schiller's controversial fragment "Deutsche Größe", and the German identity it presents, within the contemporary intellectual context (and within Schiller's own work) by relating it to late eighteenth-century German discussions regarding ancient and modern culture. Crucial parallels emerge between the German identity presented and Schiller's own cultural and aesthetic theories developed in Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung and the Ästhetische Briefe. A comparison with key ideas put forward in Fichte's Reden an die deutsche Nation highlights Schiller's social and political intentions. The essay argues that Schiller presents a post-national German identity that does not contradict his cultural and aesthetic theories.
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