If there wasn't a modern Germany before the Second Reich was declared in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in January 1871, there was no lack of talk and thinking about Germany. Indeed there were any number of Germanies in play; Germanies of the mind.

The problem here is twofold in that it is both seemingly empirical and utterly theoretical. On the one hand there was endless speculation in the early decades of the nineteenth century and before as to what Germany “now” was and what it was to be, and, on the other, there arose the possibility that the very quintessential character of “Germany” was that it was not, in any fundamental geopolitical sense, to be at all.

Perhaps, by way of an aside, these two factors can be seen as oddly coupled if we consider some of the fantastic ideas that were current following the wars of liberation against Napoleon. Here, of course, one is up against the brutal fact that whereas there was no Germany to talk of in geopolitical terms, there was, now standing on the European stage with an authority hitherto unequaled in its history, the very concrete fact of triumphant Prussia. Prussia was both a promise and a threat, in that when Germans thought about Germany they certainly thought of Prussia as an indispensable part of the unified nation (whereas about Austria they were ambivalent), but they were absolutely clear that Germany would mean a great deal more—both geopolitically and metaphysically—than Prussia alone could ever mean. It is nonetheless bizarre that both Freiherr vom Stein and August von Gneisenau considered various political arrangements with Britain. Influenced in part by the Hanoverian connection, they imagined a union between Britain and northwest Germany and even looked to what was then, after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, the supreme power in Europe to impose a constitution on the various parts of Germany and then to incorporate them into the British Empire. When political thought, ostensibly dealing with practical empirical matters, takes a turn as fanciful as this, it is clearly the product of a culture profoundly influenced by idealist values.