The Founding of the German Confederation

The French Revolution, Napoleon’s ascension to power, and the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire at Napoleon’s hands robbed people living in Central Europe of all certainties. With the end of the Holy Roman Empire and the territorial reorganization of the German states, notions about the divine legitimacy of monarchical power disappeared and made space for new concepts of political power and state identity. In the middle of the chaos created by Napoleon’s conquest of Europe, Johann Gottlieb Fichte developed a vision of the German nation and of German identity based upon language and heritage. Ideas about a German nation fell onto fertile ground and enticed historians, linguists, and poets to breathe life into this nation. Historians identified the first Germans and the first heroic battle, thereby providing a place where German history began. Linguists exhumed the ancestry of the German language and identified its vocabulary. Poets collected fairytales that provided the essence of the German national character and identified in poems and songs the geographic and linguistic space that belonged to the German nation.