alt Hacker NewsI've really been fascinated with how explicitly people set out to build nations in the 19th Century. I read Christopher Krebs' _A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich_ and it traces a different lineage in the same process- the process of turning someone who, say, lived in Mainz and thought of themselves as Hessian in 1800, into the person who lived in the same building in 1900 and thought of themselves as German.
In some ways, I've long suspected that there was a lot of freedom in that to build a culture ideally suited for the then present situation. "Fuenf minuten vor der Zeit, ist des Deutschen Puenktlichkeit" (1) in particular always struck me as something invented because it made the factories and the trains run better. It was first written down in 1880, attributed by a Silesia newspaper to Pomerania, and I really don't know that many people 100 years earlier, say, would have had a conception of what a "German" was in that sense. And before trains and factories, in an era when time is primarily told by the bells of the town clock tower and looking at the angle of the sun, no one would have had a real conception of what five minutes meant. So it couldn't really have been some ancient saying, carried down for hundreds of years. It had to be invented right around 1880.
1: German "on time" is five minutes before it starts.
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> town clock tower
breaking days into two sets of 12 hours, and sixty minutes per hour with sixty seconds to a minute, has been practiced since Biblical times, no?
How difficult or easy was that book as a read? Sounds interesting but Im hoping its somewhat casual?
One has to be careful not to backdate our current understanding of identity. Identities were rich and very fluid, being German was an identity, which the Dutch ("Deutsch") had until very recently. But for example religion was very important as an identity, as well as even European once like being a Frank. The Roman Empire was much more important than often credited in German/Prussian history, because it was precisely part of the nation building process to downplay the Empire, to build a Prussian Germany. My parents are boomers, and I remember how my mother was complaining about Prussian coffee. Also in Highschool I was learning Saxonian history, right now my daughters are also learning Hamburg's history.