1. What was Germany like in 1871?

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we consider the diversity of the German people before 1871, and think about the origins of German national identity in the travel writings of people such as Theodor Fontane as well as in the landscapes of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich.

Course

In this course, Dr Anna Ross (University of Oxford) explores the unification of Germany, starting with the proclamation of the German Empire on the 18th January 1871, and moving back in time to consider how the Germans had reached this point. As we move through the course, we think about concepts of the nation, nationalism and national identity, before focusing on the events that led the unification in 1871—including the 1848 Revolutions, the Crimean War, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War. We finish by considering the astonishing impact of one man in the whole process: Otto von Bismarck.

Lecturer

Anna is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford and History Faculty Member.

Her expertise lies in modern German history, focusing on political history and histories of political culture. In her first monograph – Beyond the Barricades: Politics and Society in German-Speaking Europe, 1848-66 (forthcoming) – she examines the transformation of conservative politics across German-speaking Europe in the 1850s. Anna is currently expanding her work to consider post-1848 urban-extension projects as a way of exploring identity formation across the cities of the German empire up to 1920. In this work, she documents the creation of new neighborhoods in capital cities, second cities, and colonial territories such as the German and Austro-Hungarian Tientsin concessions. During her postdoctoral research fellowship Anna has paralleled her interest in German cityscapes during the age of industrialization with several smaller projects on reurbanization in the twentieth century in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and she has written comparatively on modern Spain.