James M. Brophy

The Rhine Crisis of 1840 and German Nationalism: Chauvinism, Skepticism, and Regional Reception*

The Rhine Crisis began with French imperialism. Aiming to expand its influence to Egypt and the Levant, France lent its support in 1839 to Mehmet Ali, Egypt’s pasha, whose ambition to seek hereditary rule in Egypt and Syria challenged Ottoman suzerainty. After Egyptian-led troops pushed theOttoman army beyond Syria’s border in April 1839, Adolphe Thiers, the French president, envisioned a new sphere of influence in the Orient. He thus played with the fragile equilibrium of the Eastern Question, Western diplomacy’s contest to fill the power vacuum of a reduced Ottoman Empire. The démarche stalled, however, during the opening months of 1840, culminating in dramatic failure on July 15with the London Convention: a four-power treaty ðwithout the consultation of FranceÞ that supported the sultan’s retention of his imperial territories. Isolated and humiliated by this diplomatic loss, Thiers’s government and the Chamber of Deputies sought an honorable retreat through compensation elsewhere and therefore reasserted the claim that France’s frontier extended to the Rhine. The French state thus compounded a diplomatic setback with a political dispute over “natural borders.” In

The Political Calculus of Capital: Banking and the Business Class in Prussia, 1848–1856

The emergence of commercial investment banks after the revolution of 1848 was an institutional breakthrough for modern capitalism and one of the central factors in the accelerated development of the Industrial Revolution in Germany between 1848 and 1871. The accumulation and mobilization of capital in concentrated and accessible forms was indispensable for underking such large-scale projects as railroads, coal mines, and iron works. Long-term promotional loans that enabled entrepreneurs to start up new business became a self-evident necessity in the growth of modern business. As one bank director noted, “capital, more than water, steam, or electricity, put the machines into motion.”

“The Modernity of Tradition”: Popular Culture and Protest in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Traditional protest offered a cultural framework within which ordinary Germans shaped political activism. Customs and rites enabled face-to-face communities to build consensus and legitimize their discontent through practices valorized by historical convention. Whether charivaris, Carnival, parish festivals or other religious rites, such practices endured due to their ability to disarm authority. This chapter points to democratic qualities in these kinds of protest, but it also examines aspects of popular culture that fomented anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic hatred, thus illuminating the darker side of popular politics. Whether invoking rights of liberty and justice or violently excluding an out-group, modern politics has employed popular rites to increase political participation and mobilize the public. This chapter assesses the degree to which traditional forms of popular culture have shaped the evolution of participatory politics over the long nineteenth century. A social history of the ideals and practices of rights-bearing citizenship must include the uses and transformation of popular culture.

Irony and Popular Politics in Germany, 1800–1850

Defining irony as an aesthetic trope that constructs distance, difference, and detachment, this essay explores the relationship of irony to political sensationalism in Germany’s evolving popular political culture. Concretely, the essay explores the evolving growth of ironic expression in popular political texts (flysheets, songs, almanacs, calendars, lithographs, and various forms of journalism), all of which encouraged detachment and analytical distance to the social order, spawning in turn critical reflection and partisan engagement. Drawing on the images and popular political texts of the Restoration and Vormarz eras (1800–1848), this essay presents how irony posed enormous problems for censors and their regulation of political discourse. The analysis will particularly focus on the Rhine Crisis of 1840 and the attempted assassination of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in 1844 as examples of sensationalism that transformed popular political identity. By shifting the representative modalities of political sensation and scandal toward critical citizenship, irony assumes a central role in shaping political modernity.

Iron Kingdom. The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (review)

the book, Horn does so by focusing on the importance of praxis: how meetings, publishing, leaflet distribution and the like effected encounters transnational and otherwise. Why does 1968 matter? Throughout the book, Horn draws attention to the persistence of radicalism after that year—as, for example, the rise in worker rebellion through the mid-1970s. In the final chapter, he offers participatory democracy as the signal achievement of the era. Workers, students, and others experienced new forms of participation; even when they did not achieve the specific goals they then aspired toward, they felt liberated from institutional, cultural, or psychological constraints. Horn does not say so—in fact, he seems to share in many activists’ pessimistic perspectives—but this transformation can and should be linked to the political transformations of the last two decades around the world. It is churlish to look beyond the edges of such a complete reworking of a complex era, but what would The Spirit of ’68 have gained by including in its reach the parallel movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Yugoslavia? First, one would be reminded that the rebellion of that decade was not specifically against capitalism, and that the politics of “right” and “left” masked commonalities among repressive, geriatric bureaucracies across the continent. Second, that cultural and student movements could transverse even the Iron Curtain (and there are hints of this in the book) would have, as suggested above, placed 1968 in the context of long-term change stretching up to, for example, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. Transnational history, as it avoids the standard country-biographical narrative, is difficult to write, and not easy to read, either. The Spirit of ’68 assumes a reader already somewhat familiar with the events of that year. Yet do we not all carry with us unexamined myths, grounded in perceptions of 1968: about the left, about the value of protest, about culture and politics, about worker radicalism, or about the place of the intellectual in the public sphere? These myths will have to make room for Gerd-Rainer Horn’s thorough rethinking of postwar European history.

Place and Politics: Local Identity, Civic Culture, and German Nationalism in North Germany during the Revolutionary Era (review)

to reveal some interesting uses of gender in these works. Smith’s demonstrates that many of the female characters in these narratives offer a counterpoint to the image of the emasculating “mom” of postwar culture. Women in these stories are not, or at least not solely, controlling mothers, but are also the glue of ethnic families, the moral strength and core which allows both husbands and children to achieve outside the home. Mothers here are often the characters striving hardest for improvement, both economic and moral, and encouraging their children to improve themselves. These women bear much of the responsibility for the family. While some of these novels seemed to recognize the problems faced by working-class women and their unique power in the family, they celebrated domesticity for women, and were generally critical of women who challenged masculine authority. While these women sometimes work outside of the home, their work is primarily to provide extra income to the family, and it does not alter the place of the men as heads of family. Throughout, Smith does an outstanding job of illuminating the interconnection of theater, radio, television and film. Smith’s following of individual stories through these different media demonstrates the different needs of and restrictions on each form.