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Religion and Patriotism in German Peace Dramas during the Thirty Years' War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Extract
One of the most important analyses of the rise of German nationalism was Koppel Pinson's Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (1934). This study was one of the first to apply the methodology of Tawney, Dilthey, Troeltsch, and Weber to the analysis of early nationalism. Pinson held that the intellectual and social content of seventeenth–century Lutheran pietism “unknowingly” created many preconditions of the peculiar type of German nationalism that appeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pinson argued that the qualities of pietism which were transferred to later German nationalism were strong emotional fervor, moral purity, the experience of conversion, and the cultivation of the German language. All social classes would be able to cultivate these spiritual aims, producing what Pinson called a general priesthood of believers, or salvation within and through the group. The identification of the qualities of the good German with those of the good Christian was for Pinson the crux of the process.
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- Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1971
References
1. Pinson, Koppel S., Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (New York, 1934), p. 14.Google Scholar
2. Ibid., p. 181.
3. Ibid., p. 161.
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28. Ibid., p. 69.
29. Ibid., p. 71.
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31. It might be useful to keep in mind the similarities and differences between the Thirty Years' War in Germany and the English Civil War that raged in the same period. The idea of the chosen people, of a national purity, of the comparison drawn with the Hebrews renders the English Puritan patriotism of the period similar to that of the pietistic patriotism of the Germans. But the similarities end here: English religious patriotism was wedded to political and constitutional issues, rather than to the purity of a semi-paganized, heroic past. It did not arise in the destruction of the nation, but in the struggle against royal authority. Above all, English Puritan patriotism was optimistic; it was backed by a victorious army and parliament. German pietistic patriotism was far more nonpolitical and much less optimistic.