Rethinking the Age of Emancipation

Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Family, and Religion in Italy and Germany, 1800–1918

Martin Baumeister, Philipp Lenhard, Ruth Nattermann, Martin Baumeister, Philipp Lenhard, Ruth Nattermann

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781836950752, 9781789206326
• eBook ISBN: 9781789206333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Since the end of the nineteenth century, traditional historiography has emphasized the similarities between Italy and Germany as "late nations", including the parallel roles of "great men" such as Bismarck and Cavour. Rethinking the Age of Emancipation aims at a critical reassessment of the development of these two "late" nations from a new and transnational perspective. Essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the discursive relationships among nationalism, war, and emancipation as well as the ambiguous roles of historical protagonists with competing national, political, and religious loyalties.

SECTION 1

CONCEPTS AND PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER 1

Nineteenth-Century Italy and Germany beyond National History

Amerigo Caruso

“The natural intellectual superiority of Italy and Germany can easily be demonstrated, and we urgently need to nurture the feeling of affinity between these two great nations of Central Europe.”¹ In 1873, just a few years after the formation of Italy and Germany as nation-states, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote to the Italian diplomat Anselmo Guerrieri Gonzaga with these chauvinistic ideas. Treitschke projected his radical nationalist credo from the German into the Italian context, and from the late nineteenth century onward, several generations of commentators, entrenched in the narrative tradition of national history, held in common the conviction that the two nations shared a parallel history.² A wealth of supposed parallels contributes to this enduring narrative: the retrospective notion of “belated” nation-building; the trauma of national humiliation at the peace negotiations after World War I; the affinities between the Fascist and Nazi regimes; the transition to democracy and the “economic miracle” in the aftermath of World War II; from the early 1970s on, the consequences of the end of the long postwar boom; and, finally, the terrorist campaigns by the radical left-wing Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades.³ The persistent tradition of parallel Italian and German histories is permeated by teleological thinking, which has inevitably influenced the approach of comparative history that emerged during the 1970s and became a mainstream methodology in the 1990s. Because comparative studies on the two countries have been influenced by the tradition of parallel history, a comparative analysis of Italian and German history can not only explicitly reproduce political and ideological nationalism, as in the case of Treitschke, but also perpetuate a less evident methodological nationalism.

During the last four decades, comparative research projects have put forward new interpretative and methodological approaches that are without doubt a far remove from Treitschke’s radical nationalism. However, the end of national history may have been too hastily declared after the comparative and transnational turn. The two main purposes of this chapter are to highlight the persistence of methodological nationalism and to present some “best practices” employed by the new historiography that has moved on from purely national histories. I start by discussing the impact of comparative and transnational history on the traditional interpretative paradigms of Italian and German nation-building and, in particular, on more recent approaches such as gendered and Jewish perspectives. I then analyze the way that national histories have been constructed in time and space. In my third section, I explore the issue of whether methodological nationalism can be avoided by using combined approaches, such as that of comparison, transfer, and entanglement history. How can this three-step method be employed in practice? My concluding remarks examine the vitality of national history, which still tends to overlook the manifold foundations and plurality of collective identities, not just national, in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany. The construction of national identities, the problem of multiple social, political, and cultural loyalties, and the tensions between national emancipation and the emancipation of minorities are some of the key aspects discussed in this volume.⁴

New Interpretative Paradigms and the Persistence of Methodological Nationalism

In the field of the history of nationalism, one significant reason for the persistence of interpretative traditions that focus on the national is the assumption, either deliberate or unconscious, that this is the most important dimension of history.⁵ This methodological nationalism has particularly weighty implications in the cases of Italy and Germany, because it overlaps with the tradition of parallel history. The persistence of methodological nationalism is strongly connected to the narrative impact of nationalism during the nineteenth century. Especially in the second half of the century, nationalist poets, artists, historians, and politicians employed teleological thinking to imagine and present the nation-state with great success as a consensual, natural, and modern historical outcome. In the final decades prior to World War I, there were also aggressive claims of cultural superiority and racial exclusivity made by more-radical nationalists. Despite the emergence of these racist and chauvinistic views, the rise of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe was in fact a transcultural, transnational, highly contested, and open-ended phenomenon. The multiple foundations and contradictions of nationalism and nation-building had often been ignored, and they still pose a major challenge for historical studies.

A further methodological problem is posed by the plurality of historical identities in Europe and their close relationship to “essentially contested concepts” such as nation, religion, gender, race, ethnicity, and class.⁶ In John Breuilly’s view, historians should study the nation and nationalism as mutually independent concepts in order to overcome the analytical challenge of examining nationalism and nation-building. He emphasizes that nationalism should not be considered as the expression of a unique national history but as a “distinct phenomenon with general characteristics which is productive for the national.”⁷ Achieving the aim of detaching nation from nationalism is particularly difficult in the case of Italy and Germany, because of the apparently simultaneous emergence of nationalism and nation-building on both sides of the Alps during the nineteenth century. As a result of the enduring influence of national and parallel histories, nationalism and the creation of the nation-state appeared to historians to be connected exceptionally closely in these “belated” nations. For this reason, binational comparisons are still the dominant approach to studying Italian and German history, while surprisingly few studies follow the more recent approaches of transnational and transfer history.⁸ To some extent, the comparative method belongs within the tradition of parallel history, while transnational and transfer studies have more explicitly rejected the national framework.

Despite historians such as Federico Chabod proclaiming the cultural differences between German and Italian nationalism after World War II, the traditional paradigm of parallel history launched by Treitschke and Croce still influences historiographical and public discourses. Use of the lenses of parallel history and, at least in some cases, of comparative history has often led to an underestimation of the differences between Italian and German national ideology and nation-building. These include the role played by nineteenth-century history in the national culture of remembrance and the role of volunteers in the nation-building process, both of which are given greater prominence by Italian historians than by their German colleagues.⁹ In addition, female education and assumptions about gender roles were significantly different in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, primarily because German culture was predominantly Protestant.¹⁰ Parallel history tends to unduly emphasize the similarities between the Italian and German national paths, but without dislodging the stereotypes regarding the different “national characters” that emerged in the nineteenth century and grew stronger during the twentieth.

The persisting narratives of parallel history can be challenged by using a combination of the methods of comparative, transnational, and entangled history, and by adopting an approach that is equally open to the local, regional, national, and global scales of history. However, before further discussion of these methodological and theoretical steps, this chapter explores the main trends in research regarding nationalism and nation-building in Italy and Germany. During the last four decades, there has been impressive development in this field of research due on the one hand to the emergence of comparative and transnational history, and on the other to the attention that historians have given to marginal traditions as well as to cultural and gender history. Alberto Banti’s monograph L’onore della nazione remains one of the most comprehensive and controversial studies on the connections between masculinity, nationalism, and violence in European nationalism during the long nineteenth century.¹¹ Banti argues that racially exclusive and heterosexual masculinity was deeply connected to the construction and representation of nationhood. Taking the perspective of cultural history, he demonstrates that ideas about gender and sexual identity circulated transnationally as common ways of thinking within emerging national and patriotic discourses. Banti’s interest in narrative structures was recently complemented by feminist scholars who have examined “the specific forms of women’s participation in the patriotic movement” and charted “the multiple connections between the ostensibly private realm of the family and the emerging political sphere of the nation.”¹²

Recent publications on nationalism and nation-building have rejected the dichotomy between public and private spheres and reassessed interpretative traditions regarding the construction of imagined communities. Ilaria Porciani’s studies show that nationalism implied a broad process of imposing order on domestic life as well as on the nation’s public affairs.¹³ In the wake of the pioneering work by George Mosse on nationalism and sexuality, Karen Hagemann’s book on the gendered history of war and nation-building in postrevolutionary Prussia and Ute Planert’s studies on women’s emancipation, antifeminism, and nationalism in Imperial Germany were major influences on the development of a gendered perspective on national history.¹⁴ This and subsequent work by Hagemann clearly demonstrate that the modern world’s understanding of gender roles was deeply interwoven with narratives of national identity and nation-state formation in nineteenth-century Europe. The gendering of national history was a transnationally circulating element common to many national metanarratives. Its clearest expression was in the “routine feminisation of enemies, and the positive self-ascription of allegedly male, manly values.”¹⁵

In order to rethink the mainstream themes of national history such as war, diplomacy, monarchy, and high politics, recent studies on historians and nationalism stress the importance of examining marginal traditions.¹⁶ A focus on the themes mentioned still prevails and is “in itself an unconscious legacy of nineteenth-century nationalist historical traditions.”¹⁷ In the case of Italy and Germany, informal networks and nonmainstream ideas were of fundamental importance to the initial galvanization of national movements. Nationalism only became politically dominant in the late nineteenth century; in the meantime, on the one hand, nationalist ideas were disseminated from above, while on the other the transnational and nonstate component played a major role in the process of nation-building.¹⁸ The importance ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1. Concepts and Perspectives
• Section 2. Family and Nation
• Section 3. Religion and Education
• Section 4. Politics of Women’s Emancipation
• Section 5. Patriotism and Gender
• Section 6. War and Violence
• Section 7. War Experience and Memory
• Index