This chapter examines the impact of anticlericalism and secularism on German politics. It charts the significance of secularism in the relations between radicals, revisionists and liberals in the period between the church-leaving campaign 1906-14 and the end of the German revolution in 1923. It examines how factions of the SPD clashed over the church-leaving movement of 1909 to 1914. Special attention will be given to the cooperation of secularist revisionists around Eduard Bernstein with left liberals and anti-political leaders of cultural reform efforts, such as Eugen Diederichs.

This chapter offers an example of the role of the Bank in European state finance. The kingdom of Prussia made heavy use of the Bank during the Seven Years War (1756—1763). Public finance in Prussia during this period was primitive, lacking basic features such as a bond market or central bank. Under heavy financial pressure, Prussian King Frederick II chose to finance much of the war through the production of debased coinage. The task of minting debased coins was outsourced to private contractors (“mint entrepreneurs”), who purchased much of the necessary silver in Amsterdam, making use of credit which was abundant in the Amsterdam market. Details of these transactions are revealed in the Bank’s ledgers. Frederick also relied on gold subsidies from Great Britain, which were paid via Amsterdam and can also be matched to Bank records. Finally, at the end of the war, Frederick called upon his entrepreneurs to engineer a reverse debasement (reinforcement). This activity once again relied heavily on Dutch resources, including remote smelting furnaces, Amsterdam credit, and Bank money. Traces of the entrepreneurs’ activity can again be seen in the Bank’s records.

Germany can serve as short-hand for the “Holy Roman Empire” in the eighteenth century. Long dismissed as a constitutional “monstrosity,” the Empire in reality proved a surprisingly durable fixture of Europe’s Old Regime political and dynastic firmament. Within its confines there existed a multiplicity of sub-units that ranged in size and importance from the Great Powers of Austria and Prussia, to tiny independent principalities and city states. Some of these might be considered vibrant, and others stagnant. Some were ruled by princes who deserved the label “enlightened,” whilst others were governed by despots. A generalization that holds for the Empire as a whole is that it encouraged a political culture distinguished by its legalism and its localism. These characteristics were hardly effective when confronting the challenges posed by the French Revolution, whose real impact on Germany began in 1792 with the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars. These wars ultimately destroyed the Empire, thereby paving the way for the transformation of Germany that occurred under the hegemony of Napoleon.

The Black Death of the fourteenth century reduced Europe’s population by about two-thirds between 1348 and 1420. Since endowments of land and capital remained unchanged, standard economic theory predicts rising real wages, falling rents of land and capital, and hence a drastic reduction of economic inequality. All of this occurred in most of western Europe. Elites eventually yielded, serfdom ended, landowners shifted from labor- to land-intensive production (grazing displaced planting), and labor-saving inventions abounded. In Europe east of the Elbe, by contrast, a formerly free peasantry was reduced to serfdom and landowners specialized increasingly in grain production, much of it for export. A plausible reason for the divergent responses is soil and climate: western Europe was mostly suitable for sedentary animal husbandry, eastern Europe was not; and the two were separated by a sharp dividing line that lay only slightly west of the Elbe. Data on Prussian landholdings suggest a strong correlation between low suitability for animal husbandry and the prevalence of serf-cultivated estates. Western elites could engage in factor substitution; eastern ones could not.

After Napoleon’s triumph at Austerlitz, a new war loomed on the horizon. In 1806, Prussia confronted the growing French ambitions in the War of the Fourth Coalition. It proved to be a mistake as Napoleon routed the Prussian army barely two weeks into the war. After humiliation of Prussia, on the battlefield at Jena, the French Emperor turned his attention to subduing his Russian foe and marched into Poland in the winter of 1806. Six months later, the Russians had been beaten and brought to the peace table and Napoleon was at the height of his powers.

This chapter assesses the importance of educating royal heirs in the nineteenth century. It traces the development of ideas of princely education and explains how this topic moved from being an internal, dynastic matter to being a political issue of public concern and public debate – another weapon in the arsenal of monarchical adaptation and self-defence. The chapter leads to a comparison between the educational programmes imposed upon the several generations of royal heirs in nineteenth-century Britain and Prussia/Germany.

This chapter focuses on the crucial importance of familial relationships within the ruling dynasties – both in terms of securing a successful transition from one generation of rulers to the next and with regard to the individual wellbeing of the royal heirs. Two key relationships are identified and explored through selected case studies: the relationship between the monarch and his or her successor (through the prism of the relationships between Queen Victoria, Emperor Wilhelm I and Emperor Franz Joseph and their oldest sons) and the relationship between the royal heir and his wife – through an analysis of the marriages of Prince Umberto of Savoy, Prince Wilhelm of Württemberg and Prince Friedrich August of Saxony.

This chapter pushes the book’s argument beyond the traditional medieval/modern dividing line around the year 1500 by examining advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While acknowledging that the volume of administrative evidence grows exponentially in this period and regional administrations became better developed, it nevertheless shows that various abuses that had been happening for centuries continued into this period. These abuses included local acts of violence that provide clear evidence for the ongoing difficulties that met attempts by imperial and princely authorities to govern effectively on the ground in their territories. This chapter, therefore, calls attention to the flaws in traditional historical narratives about a sharp dividing line between a medieval period of feudalism and lordship and a modern period of government, bureaucracy and strong states.

In August 1846, the folktale collector, grammarian, mythographer, and lexicographer Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) wrote a letter to the Prussian king, Frederick William IV (1795–1861), in which he urged the monarch to support the German-speaking population of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the areas between Denmark and the German lands. At the time, the Danish king, Christian VIII, was also the duke of the twin duchies; in the summer of 1846, he had publicly declared that they must allow female succession, a reform that would secure continued Danish rule; the Danish royal family was running out of male heirs.

The chapter examines Alberto Franchetti’s Germania, written primarily for the Italian opera market and premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan (1902); and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Der Roland von Berlin, commissioned by the German Emperor Wilhelm II to celebrate the Hohenzollern dynasty, and premiered at the Berlin court opera in 1904. Starting with a brief summary of the two operas’ origins and plots, the chapter illustrates how in both cases operatic italianità was used to represent German national myths. Conventional concepts of operatic italianità were challenged through musical references to German folk songs. German critics employed generic meanings of italianità to articulate their disdain at these 'foreign' depictions of national identity, claiming an exclusive right for German composers to write on patriotic topics. As a consequence, productions of Franchetti’s and Leoncavallo’s works in Imperial Germany provoked some of the most hostile reactions ever articulated against Italian composers during the years before World War I. Furthermore, the defamation of Leoncavallo included a barely concealed criticism of the emperor himself.

Arguments for the 1801 Union of the British and Irish parliaments drew on the intellectual resources of the later British Enlightenment to implement a new system of economic and political regulation of Irish society. Proponents of Union articulated a renewed belief in the ability of commercial integration with Britain to act as a solvent to the confessional and ethnic tensions laid bare by the United Irish rising and attempted French invasions of 1796-8. The 'diffusion' of British capital to Ireland would give Ireland’s shattered Anglican aristocracy the opportunity to re-establish its political legitimacy, while forcing them to share power with a rising Catholic mercantile and professional class. The case for Union was interpreted in a broad European context of state competition and reform. The leading continental defender of British policy, the Prussian diplomat and publicist Friedrich von Gentz, hailed the legislative unification of the British Empire as a model for a necessary consolidation of the European states-system in the wake of French revolutionary violence.

Who should pay the costs of civil unrest? Germans confronted this dilemma in the aftermath of the First World War, as thousands of claimants petitioned the government to compensate for varied losses, from stolen crops to medical bills for bullet wounds. By far the greatest demand for redress came from businesses who described “catastrophic” damages caused by looting crowds. To make their case, claimants invoked a seventy-year-old Prussian law that aimed to suppress protest by making the “community” financially liable for “tumult.” And yet the Weimar Republic owed its very existence to the tumult of agitated crowds. This chapter explores how the Weimar Republic and later the Nazi regime staked their legitimacy on their ability to provide sufficient public order to sustain capitalism. But when the costs grew too high, both tried to extricate themselves from liability: the Weimar Republic by citing economic crisis, the Nazi regime by implementing a racial solution.

This chapter explores a range of possible intersections between music, politics, and Romanticism in France and German lands in the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with a discussion of early German Romantic theories of political organisation and how they influenced Romantic conceptions of art, I subsequently unpick the complicated relationship between the French Revolution and Romanticism in music, and between the politically revolutionary and the artistically revolutionary. I show the extreme adaptability of the Romantic aesthetic when it came to its political interpretation, not only through the contrast between German and French Romanticism, but also through the surprising twists and turns in the political associations of Romanticism in France over three decades. In the second section, I look at the political mobilisation of Romantic symbols in Prussian musical life to nationalist and dynastic ends, before ending with a brief consideration of politicised anti-Romanticism amongst music critics in 1848.