Intellectuals and the Nation - Collective Identity in a German Axial Age (Hardcover, New)

Proposes a theory of collective and national identity based on culture and language rather than power and politics. In the text the author applies this theory to what he calls Germany's axial age and shows how the codes of 19th-century German identity in turn became those of the divided Germany between 1945 and 1989. The identity described in the text derives from the ideas of German intellectuals, from the uprooted Romantic poets to the influential German mandarins. Carried by the emerging bourgeoisie, it was constructed on the tensions between power and spirit, money and culture, and the sacred and profane. The book discusses how German identity also took four distinct forms: the nation as the invisible public of Enlightenment patriotism; the nation as the Romantics' aesthetic holy grail; the Left Hegelian nation at the barricades of democracy; and the nation as an extension of the Prussian state.