Survivors of a previous era, such as Goethe, may have disapproved, and even Grillparzer, who felt a sympathy for that era as a kind of spiritual home, associated “Nationalität” with “Bestialität” in a well-known epigram. But he could never have been in any real doubt that in the political world which began to take shape in Central Europe after the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, it had become necessary, if only as a defence-mechanism, to think in national terms, with inevitable consequences for historical thinking as well. Under the force of circumstances (i.e. Frederick the Great), Austria had been “created,” under Maria Theresa and Haugwitz, as a centralized administration of the Habsburg dominions; now, propelled by the circumstance called Napoleon, it had to be re-created as a political nation. The publicistic activities of Hormayr and Friedrich Schlegel's lectures Über die neuere Geschichte are among the most prominent examples of this effort during the Napoleonic period proper. This was to be, moreover, a form of nationhood which was a constant balancingact, somehow finding an equilibrium between apparently irreconcilable opposites. It had to be simultaneously both German and not German, and its very existence precluded the proper fulfilment for a majority of its citizens of the idea (established by Herder and the Romantics) of a “Volk” as a national entity demanding political embodiment.