‘Identity containers’ in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue reconsiders the process of nation-building in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany before nationalism formed, for the majority of people, the dominant group identity. We will argue that non-national ‘identity containers’ and their interplay with emerging nationalism were essential for the creation of patriotic sensibilities among Italians and Germans, both before and after the formation of each nation state. The special issue includes contributions that spotlight identity constructions based on class, religion, gender, monarchy, empire, transnational entanglements, cosmopolitanism, and regional particularism. By comparing Italian and German case studies, we will address subjects of high and soft politics (pantheons, museums, opera) as well as working-class sensibilities and religious minorities. How do they interact with ideas of national independence and ethnic identity? This approach enables us to move beyond national narratives and their state-centred view, rethinking the rise of nationalism within a broader framework of non-national, multiple, hybrid, or marginal group identities.

RIASSUNTO

Il presente numero monografico riesamina il processo di costruzione della nazione in Italia e Germania nel corso dell’Ottocento, in una fase antecedente alla definitiva affermazione del nazionalismo come identità collettiva dominante. La tesi principale che discuteremo riguarda i “contenitori di identità” non riferibili alla nazione e il loro intrecciarsi con l’emergere del nazionalismo. Questa sovrapposizione fu essenziale per la costruzione dei nuovi ideali nazionali sia prima che durante e dopo la formazione degli stati unitari. Il numero monografico propone diversi contributi che esplorano costruzioni identitarie non-nazionali e legate piuttosto alla classe sociale, alla religione, al genere, alla monarchia, alla dimensione imperiale, ai contatti transnazionali oppure anche al particolarismo regionale. Comparando il caso tedesco con quello italiano analizzeremo aspetti di storia politica e culturale, prendendo in esame “contenitori di identità” legati a monumenti, musei e opera lirica, ma anche quelli legati al movimento operaio e alle minoranze religiose. Come funzionò la loro interazione coi modelli emergenti di stato unitario e identità etnica? L’approccio scelto dal volume permette di superare le tradizionali narrazioni nazionali e stato-centriche, reinterpretando l’ascesa del nazionalismo nel contesto plurale delle tante identità non-nazionali, ibride e marginali.

KEYWORDS:

• identity
• nation-building
• methodological nationalism
• ‘long’ nineteenth century
• Germany
• Italy

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• identità
• costruzione della nazione
• nazionalismo metodologico
• “lungo”
• Ottocento
• Germania
• Italia

The recent right-wing populist revival in Europe has been a reminder of the vitality and adaptability of nationalist discourses that have their roots in the ‘long’ nineteenth century. Despite the recognition of its destructive potential in two world wars, nationalism continues to play a key role in European culture and politics. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, national conservative parties as well as right-wing ‘sovereignist’ and ‘identitarian’ groups have become more visible, popular, and politically influential. While Matteo Salvini’s far-right League advanced to the rank of Italy’s biggest party in the 2019 European parliamentary elections, in Germany a new right led by the populist Alternative for Germany entered not only the regional parliaments but also the Bundestag in 2017.¹ At the same time, Italy and Germany have recently celebrated 150 years of unification or are still doing so, remembering the process of ‘unification nationalism’ (Breuilly 2013, 8) that began in the early 1860s with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy and culminated at an institutional level in 1870 with the capture of Rome and the (third) German ‘unification war’.²

Obviously, Italy and Germany have different institutional structures (the latter being more federal than the former), and cultural projections for unity prior to national unification. In both cases, however, the contemporary nature of nationalism is deeply interwoven with the formation of modern states. Modern nations and nation states, as noted by Langewiesche, are ‘made’ by revolutions and wars. Thus, given that nation-building is an ongoing process, notions of nationhood are the result of a history of conflicts dealing with a high degree of ambivalence (Frie and Planert 2016; Langewiesche 2019). This special issue reconsiders the process of nation-building in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany before the time in which nationalism formed, for the majority of people, the dominant group identity. Drawing on the social science concept of identity, we argue that non-national affiliations – which we here call ‘identity containers’ – influenced the formation of national ideas as well as the rise of nationalism and persisted after the formation of the two respective nation states.

Nationalism was deeply linked not only with the expansion of the modern state but also with the professionalization of historical writing in the second half of the nineteenth century (Porciani and Raphael 2010; Berger 2015). The interplay between nationalism, nation states, and professional historiography resulted in the rise of a methodological nationalism that influenced historical writing until the late twentieth century, not least in the case of Italy and Germany, which many have considered have parallel histories (Goeschel 2016). In a recent essay, Armitage has explicitly criticized the ways in which for a long time historians assumed that ‘self-identifying nations, organized politically into states were the primary objects of historical study’ (2014, 232). Following from that the focus on non-national identities based on class, religion, gender, monarchy, regionalism, and transnational European encounters in the articles that follow enable us to go beyond state-centred national narratives to rethink the history of the ‘national’ within a broader framework of non-national and always hybrid group identities.

Scholarship on nationalism expanded rapidly in the late twentieth century, and even though historians and theoreticians disagreed on the origins of nationalism, both ‘modernists’ and ‘traditionalists’ turned to the history of national ideas to support both the historical deconstruction of nationhood (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Breuilly 1993) and its reconstruction (Smith 1986; Hastings 1997).³ ‘Traditionalist’ historians traced the origins of nations to late medieval and early modern Europe (Schmidt 2010), while their ‘modernist’ colleagues did the same although emphatically not to find traces of the Italian and German nation everywhere in their histories. Instead they wanted to illustrate the flexibility of the concept (Langewiesche 2000) and to demonstrate how German and Italian ideas of the nation had emerged in different historical contexts. Planert (2002) has convincingly argued for adopting the idea of a ‘national Sattelzeit’⁴ to overcome the dichotomy of modernity and premodernity and to allow neutral investigations of the origins and spread of nationalism. However, it remains evident that ideas about the nation underwent a cultural and political explosion during the nineteenth century. In the context of state-building, growing political participation and the birth of mass media, nationalism became not only the ‘most powerful ideology of modern times’ (Zimmer 2003, 2) but also ‘the most through and through historical’ one, with religion or class as permanent features and based on universal values (Breuilly 2013, 1).

The articles in this special issue examine the plurality of non-national affiliations recurrent in political discourse during the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as their interactions, and overlap with the rise of post-1848 nationalism. As our comparative approach shows, the non-national ‘identity containers’ discussed in the various articles were not exclusive to a specific nation, but represented ideas and sentiments as well as politics and culture that go beyond territorial states. The term ‘container’ evokes the idea of shipping containers, that is, carriers of transnational mobility that are a durable but also reusable means of transporting different goods – in this case, identities. Thus, identity containers are simultaneously or consecutively filled with different contents (related to, e.g. monarchy, religion, gender, class, regionalism and nationalism). The interplay between non-static identities or, to put it in another way, the ‘contemporaneity of non-contemporaneous’ identity (Koselleck 2004, 90), produces intersectionality, entanglement, and hybridity between them. This is a crucial aspect for explaining the mosaic foundations of modern identities and their transformability. To sum up, the concept of identity containers seeks to emphasize the non-static and hybrid character of identity constructions as well as their adaptation in time and space, especially the overlapping of national and non-national identities in nineteenth-century Europe.

‘Identity’ is a recurrent yet polarizing topic in public debates. The persistent success and the current revival of this concept have different reasons. First, ‘identity’ is commonly associated with positive notions, such as authenticity, individuality, a sense of belonging, historical origins, and tradition (Groebner 2018). Second, the positive feelings evoked by ‘identity’ are today even more attractive because globalization has made differences between cultures and countries less visible; thus, people use the concepts of identity and tradition to imagine and reaffirm a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Bettini 2016). The meaningless imprecision of this concept is, along with its largely positive connotations and the power to reinvent distinction, another reason why ‘identity’ is used extensively. The German historian Lutz Niethammer mockingly defined identity as a ‘plastic notion’, describing the comeback of identity as a fateful development (Niethammer 2000). Identity and tradition are inextricably linked concepts, and identity is perceived as the product of traditions and ‘roots’. Thus, historical research on identity is of special importance for critically understanding the narrative that supported the success story of this notion.

Social scientists have increasingly attempted to deconstruct identity since the last decades of the twentieth century. Criticism of the excessive and ‘populistic’ use of this notion and its deconstruction are of course legitimate, but as Brubaker and Cooper have noted:

… the prevailing constructivist stance on identity – the attempt to ‘soften’ the term, to acquit it of the charge of ‘essentialism’ by stipulating that identities are constructed, fluid, and multiple – leaves us without a rationale for talking about identities at all and ill-equipped to examine the ‘hard’ dynamics and essentialist claims of contemporary identity politics. (2000, 1)

This special issue uses the analytical category of identity containers to examine not only the adaptability of perceived and proclaimed identities but also the inter-connections or, by contrast, conflicts between different forms of group identity.

Some recent studies on the ‘nature of identity’ in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany have clearly emphasized the importance of territorial states, monarchical sentiments, and non-national affiliations for state-building processes (Confino 1997; Green 2001; Brice 2010; Heinzen 2017; Caruso 2017). Confino’s research on Württemberg, for example, shows that Germans imagined the nation as an extension of their local region. Heimat is the most popular form of German local identity, which was not in opposition to national integration and to the nation state but remained ‘unburdened’ by the Kaiserreich and Nazi heritage after the two world wars (Applegate 1990). The articles in this special issue seek to complement and extend the current scholarly attention on non-national identities from a comparative and transnational perspective. Italy and Germany had different political cultures, patterns of government, and sub-national institutions, which impacted not only national thinking but also the structure of the emerging nation states: federal in Germany, unitary in Italy (Ziblatt 2006). However, as Meriggi notes in his conclusions on our special issue, a crucial push towards state- and nation-building in both the Italian peninsula and in large parts of Germany came ‘from outside’ during the Napoleonic period, not ‘from above’ as in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Over the last few decades, historical research on nationalism has tried to overcome conventional schemes of interpretation based on ideological and teleological assumptions about the rise of the nation state. Since the publication of Anderson’s Imagined Communities in 1983, historians have focused on processes of nation-building and on deconstructing master narratives and national myths. However, even if the importance of multiple identities has been discussed broadly, the mosaic-like foundations of nationalism and nation-building have often been ignored. Research on non-national affiliations and their close relationship to the rise of nationalism throughout the nineteenth century is still scarce. As Baár points out, studies in comparative historiography are also often ‘informed by the predominance of the national paradigm’ (2010, 2).

An important contribution to the analysis of modern Italy and Germany beyond national history has come from recent studies on the ‘enemies’ of the new nation states on both sides of the Alps. They have examined competing narratives of nationhood (Forlenza and Thomassen 2016), multiple projects of unification (De Sensi Sestito and Petrusewicz 2015), diverse emotional communities (Seymour 2012), and conflicts between national and non-national loyalties (Borutta 2010; Sarlin 2013). Major works on liberalism and exile have underlined the significance of cultural transfer, transnational patriotism, and regional particularism for identity constructions in modern Europe (Isabella 2009; Späth 2012; Núñez Seixas and Storm 2018; Zanou 2018).

This special issue stresses the plurality of historical identities in Europe and investigates their close relationship to identity containers beyond national narratives. In order for concepts such as national identity and nation-building to be re-examined, two key questions need to be raised: First, what kind of modern non-national affiliations were constructed and expanded before the rise of (mass) nationalism, for example, before the formation of the nation state in Italy and Germany? In which way were these forms of collective identities re-used or rather re-invented for nation-building processes? Second, which non-national affiliations persisted or emerged in an age of nationalism, that is, after the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy and of the German Empire? Were there conflicts with nationalism or, by contrast, did some non-national loyalties and identity containers overlap with the discourse on nationalism and nation-building? Recent studies have clearly pointed out that monarchical loyalties and imperial visions were not only resilient but also played a crucial role in the process of nation-building (Berger 2015; Müller 2017).

The special issue consists of two sections. The first three articles in section one will explore a great variety of identity containers in the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, such as transnational culture, monarchy, empire, regional particularism, and cosmopolitanism (Bouwers, Clemens, Körner). They show that it is not only the history of nationalism before the formation of the nation states that is transnational but also the history of the ideas, institutions, and forms of belonging mentioned above.

Bouwers examines how ancient ethics of virtue and the notion of ‘great men’ were progressively nationalized in the decades around 1800, when a string of supposedly national wars against imperial France convinced both an Italian artist and a German prince to create a public pantheon. She compares the foundation, rationale and inclusions in the Roman Pantheon and the Walhalla near Regensburg, respectively, and links them to changing political, social, and cultural realities. Analysing the representation of competing identity containers such as region, religion, class, and gender, she teases out the incompatibilities for the national movements at large. As she demonstrates convincingly, the eclectic selection of great men meant that both monuments remained products of a deeply personal imagination that underscored tensions and cleavages, be it in terms of social or religious belonging, as regards gender, or in the persistence of regional identity. Incapable of rallying the nation as a whole, the two pantheons occupied a marginal position in political culture and never became the national monuments that their creators envisaged them to be.

In her contribution Clemens argues that the emerging national museums in Italian and German states before 1848 followed the pan-European French model and were expressions of various regional identities as well as monarchical loyalties. Intended to increase the fame of the rulers and the prestige of their capital cities, all these museums and art galleries claimed to represent the respective national culture and competed with each other. Emphasizing the continuities of cultural policy beyond the turning points of 1789 and 1815 she shows how culture and transnational elites seemed to be resilient against political ruptures, even ones as important as the French Revolution or the breakdown of the Napoleonic Empire. They rather adopted cultural and monarchical identity containers in the form of a canon of fine art across national frontiers, trying to imitate the template of the Louvre but at the same time transforming it to meet the needs of their proper principality and the requests of their regional princes.

Following a similar line Körner extends the cultural-historical approach towards transnational European entanglements to critically reassess the presumed national character of nineteenth-century opera. He stresses that supposedly national operas were the result of intense transnational exchange and served not necessarily as a reference for Italian or German nationalism but also for regional particularism, monarchical loyalties, and imperial politics. In doing this, Körner’s contribution challenges existing ideas about gender and musical representation as well as the idea that ‘national’ opera played any important role in nineteenth-century history. Referring to various German, Austrian, and Italian examples from the 1820s up to the 1860s, including Mozart, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, and many others, carefully analysis of reception shows that Italian and German opera were based on a transnational musical language. As such, not only did they reveal divisions within national communities but they could also be used for dynastic representation as showpieces of imperial splendor that included a cosmopolitan message with references to local elites’ sense of belonging. Therefore, Italian, German, and Austrian nineteenth-century opera hardly served ideas of national independence and ethnic identity, but rather supported a cosmopolitanism of nations.

The two articles in the second section focus on non-national affiliations that persisted or rather emerged during or after the process of unification in Italy and Germany (Nattermann, Dipper). The identity containers of religion, gender, and class are the centre of interest here. Nattermann’s article discusses the ideological implications of debates on national integration during the second half of the nineteenth century, analysing in particular the role played by women and Jews within the construction of national communities. Focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of integration into these communities, Nattermann reveals divided unities regarding the Italian and German master narrative of nation-building. Inclusion and exclusion went hand-in-hand: while well-off middle-class Jewish women were overrepresented in both national movements, in general Jewish feminists constituted only a tiny minority. Furthermore, even legal reforms and secularization processes that affected women and Jews north and south of the Alps could also nourish anti-Semitic tendencies to exclude the ‘other’ and to deepen divisions within both societies.

The final contribution by Dipper continues the discussion of social groups and their potential for developing an identity container beyond the national. He focuses on five concepts of working-class identities between 1880 and the First World War, clarifying rather different historical paths in the emerging Italian and German nation states. These five identity containers in relation to the working class are worker, work; associations; strikes; poverty and hardship; and, finally, future. Due to considerable social, economic, and political variations in both countries, Dipper retraces little common ground but reveals great distinctions concerning temporalities and intensities within the rise of a labour movement and the growth of a working-class consciousness. Sociologists and anarchists alike were convinced that exploitation and extreme poverty produced class consciousness while orthodox Marxism expected working-class consciousness to grow at the expense of national consciousness. In fact, all of them were wrong. While German workers believed in reform, thanks to real improvements in their living standard while Italian workers continued to believe in revolution, due to Mazzini’s legacy and the ongoing hardship. At the end, the First World War struck a severe blow at international working-class consciousness; national identity turned out to be dominant.

In their concluding observations Meriggi and Planert highlight the common features, specificities, and differences in the experience of nation-building in Italy, Germany, and Europe with reference to different methodological approaches, such as comparison, transfer, and entanglement. They draw broader conclusions regarding the rise and decline of non-national identity containers as presented in the respective papers, while stressing the relationship between competing historical identities, forms of plural belonging, and new ones of unitary and exclusive belonging that emerged after the formation of the nation states.

From a wide range of identity constructions we have addressed a number of key non-national affiliations in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany for this special issue. The five articles that follow reveal the need for a more nuanced understanding of nationalism and nation-building from the important but often overlooked angle of non-national affiliations, especially their vulnerability, transformability, and adaptation in the nineteenth century. Even though nationalism finally prevailed over non-national affiliations around 1900, the history of identity containers beyond nationalism examined in this special issue offer new models regarding the multiplicity of historical identities that pre-existed or co-existed with invented national traditions and imagined national communities. These examples will enable readers interested in Italian history to draw broader conclusions by throwing comparative spotlights on German as well as European history. Last but by no means least, they underline the fact that Italy and Germany did not follow a ‘passive revolution’ or Sonderweg, but followed a quite normal albeit necessarily conflictual patterns of nation-building in Europe during the long nineteenth century. Instead of simply deconstructing national myths again or restating the notion that the nation was simply a local metaphor, the articles that follow take these specific identity containers to describe and analyse modern Italian and German history in ways that are quite different from the old master narratives.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amerigo Caruso

Amerigo Caruso is assistant professor of modern European history at Saarland University. His current research project investigates how different political regimes reacted in times of turmoil and widespread insecurity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before joining the History Department at Saarland University, he was a junior research fellow at the University of Padua, where he worked on political violence and social conflicts in late Imperial Germany. He is the author of Nationalstaat als Telos? Der konservative Diskurs in Preußen und Sardinien-Piemont 1840–1870. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017, an exploration of conservative discourses and nation-building in mid-nineteenth-century Italy and Germany.

Jens Späth

Jens Späth is assistant professor of modern European history at Saarland University. He previously held a postdoctoral position at the German Historical Institute in Rome and taught at the Franco-German campus of SciencesPo at Nancy. Among his most important publications regarding nineteenth-century Italy are Revolution in Europa 1820–23. Verfassung und Verfassungskultur in den Königreichen Spanien, beider Sizilien und Sardinien-Piemont. Cologne: sh-Verlag, 2012; (with Werner Daum) Un primo liberalismo transnazionale? Verso il bicentenario delle rivoluzioni mediterranee del 1820-23. In Rivista Storica Italiana CXXX, fasc. II, 2018; (with Gabriele B. Clemens) 150 Jahre Risorgimento – geeintes Italien?. Trier: Kliomedia, 2014.

Notes

1. On the relationship between nationalism and populism, see Bonikowski et al. (2019).

2. To what Breuilly classifies as ‘unification nationalism’ could be added the Polish case. See Breuilly (2013).

3. For a comprehensive overview of the modernist paradigm and its weaknesses, see Hirschi (2011, 20–49).

4. Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of multiple temporalities and the concept of Sattelzeit – the transitional period between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century – provide a solid theoretical framework for comparing traditional and modern definitions of nationhood.