VI. Der deutsche christliche Staat: the Prussian Conservatives’ Model of the People’s Nation during the Vormärz

Summary Since the late eighteenth century German conservatism – conveyed primarily by Prussians – was imbued with certain reactionary ideas, but at the same time did not deny the importance of changes in state and society. Conservatives recognized the irreversibility of the Reform Era that followed the defeat by Napoleon, and the need to accommodate changes required for the survival and development of a unified German state. One of the major challenges they had to face in this context was the rising concept of nationalism and the efforts to establish a German nation-state. This article argues, however, that until the 1848 Revolution, conservatives formulated a political theology which aimed to respond to the growing German national movement and the gradual spread of popular national sentiment. Such a response was neither anti-modern nor an outright denial of nationalism. Rather, many of the conservatives, who were associated with the reemergence of Christian Pietism, namely neo-Pietists, sought to accommodate nationalism by forging a religious-national synthesis that invested the people with the task of representing the essence and true spirit of the ‚Deutsche Nation‘ For these Christian devotees, the Volk had an organic identity that defined the national state. And while according to the conservative theory the people were not to be entrusted with full sovereignty, in fact they formed a German nation that eventually – especially during the 1848 Revolution – won certain political rights. The conservative religious-national synthesis, which advocated confessional reconciliation within German Christianity, introduced a specific democratic concept of the nation based on the people’s identity and solidarity as the core of the nation. It was embedded in the ideal of the ‚Christlicher Staaf‘.