As we have seen, when German thinkers turned to culture they inevitably overcompensated for the absence of a national state. Such a state, however much they may have differed among themselves as to the form it would take, became for the majority a wished-for apparatus that would resolve their fears and realize their longings. But in remaining a Germany of the mind it was limited to the status of an ideal form, albeit an ideal form that could be directly and personally experienced. Ranke had said, “Our fatherland is with us, in us.”

All this meant, however, that when it came to speculating on cultural matters the German intellectual was not obliged to shackle himself with sociopolitical reality no matter where he lived in the thirty-odd sovereign lands that emerged from the Congress of Vienna as the German Confederation (or Bund) in 1815. He was free to seek in abstractions ersatz compensation for what the concrete contemporary reality denied him, even as it imperfectly intimated it. Moreover, these abstractions would rig him out in lofty idealized dress. In fact they might even continue to do their ideological duty when matters were most empirically and dangerously upfront. Hitler declared that as long as the German people thought they were fighting for “ideals” they continued the struggle in World War I, but as soon as they were told they were fighting for their “daily bread” they “gave up the game.” This is something of contradiction, as Hitler also wants us to believe that his comrades never gave up; rather they were stabbed in the back. Nevertheless, by this time they did have a Reich to fight for. Before that, however, the parameters of a compensatory German culture could be set as wide as one desired largely because theoretical speculation was unusually untroubled by empirical facts. But where in the cultural field was the intellectual to look in order to discover what was authentically German? The most common and influential answer was: in language.

And language, we might note, was no pedantic respecter of either geography or political frontiers.