This project, funded by a generous grant from the AHRC and a fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation (held in 2004-2005), uses comparative urban history to investigate the interaction between nation-formation and communal reform during a crucial period in modern German history. The study looks at Ulm, Augsburg and Ludwigshafen, three medium-sized, denominationally-mixed towns exhibiting distinctive historical legacies, political cultures, and patterns of socio-economic development. The project breaks new ground in several respects: it addresses the (under-researched) social history of nationalism; it focuses on ordinary, medium-sized towns, in which a substantial proportion of the German population lived between the founding of the Second Empire and the outbreak of the First World War; it is explicitly and systematically comparative. The methodology and analytical framework employed shed new light on the significant yet so far neglected question of how nationalism and the nation-state were experienced by people of different social, cultural and political backgrounds.

Both nation-building and the responses it provoked assumed a particular intensity in late nineteenth-century Germany, as demonstrated by the eruption of a series of major conflicts, with the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church and the laws against the Social Democrats providing the most obvious examples. German nationalism, and particularly the liberal version that came to predominate from the 1860s, infused the public sphere with expectations of cultural progress, political participation, and international status. The nation became a moral hyper-good (Charles Taylor), which began to undermine the legitimacy of other moral goods and sources of social and political identification. The result was a series of morally charged public struggles in the course of which existing identities and institutions were to some degree reshaped and reformed. It is these struggles – and how they were played out in three different urban contexts – which form the chief concern of Dr Zimmer’s project.

The publications of this project are 'Nation und Religion. Von der Imagination des Nationalen zur Verarbeitung von Nationalisierungsprozessen', Historische Zeitschrift. Vol 283 (3) (2006) pp. 617-656 and a book that will appear with Oxford University Press in 2011, entitled "The Nation in the Town: Reshaping German Communities, 1860-1900". Dr Zimmer also led a workshop on ‘The Nation in the Town: Nationalism and the Reshaping of Urban Communities in Europe, 1848-1914’, in collaboration with the Modern European History Research Centre (MEHRC) in September 2008.