Professor%20Oliver%20Zimmer: List of publications

Across Europe, the late nineteenth century marked a period of rapid economic growth, increased migration, cultural and technical innovation, religious conflict, and inter-state competition. In Germany, these developments were further accentuated by the creation of the imperial state in 1870/71 and the conflicting hopes and expectations it provoked within the larger public. Attempting to make sense of this turbulent period of German history, historians have frequently reverted to terms such as industrialization, urbanization, nation-formation, modernity, or modernization. Using the prism of comparative urban history, this book highlights the limitations of these conceptual abstractions and reveals the artificiality of the separation of local and national approaches to the past. It shows how men and women drew on their creative energies to instigate change at various levels. Focusing on conflicts over the local economy, elementary schools, the theatre and citizenship, and looking at nationalist and religious processions, Remaking the Rhythms of Life examines how urban residents sought to regain a sense of place in a changing world: less by resisting the novel than by reconfiguring their environments in ways that reflected their sensibilities and aspirations; less by lamenting the decline of civic virtues than by creating surroundings that proved sufficiently meaningful to sustain lives. In their capacity as consumers or citizens, members of religious or economic associations, people embarked on a multitude of journeys. As they did, larger themes such as religion, nationalism and the state became intertwined with everyday affairs and concerns.

If we still know rather little about how ordinary men and women experienced nationalism and the modern nation-state, this is in part because the communal embeddedness of people’s national imagination has received scant attention in a field in which many works are pitched at a highly abstract level. In the terminology of Benedict Anderson, the most influential theorist of recent decades, nations are imagined communities; what had enabled people to imagine a large and abstract community like the nation was print capitalism: a language- based revolution in the means of communication that started with the Reformation and reached its apogee in the mass-produced newspapers and novels of the nineteenth century.1

On a sunny day in June 1897, the Augsburg councillors Kusterer, Doll, and Martin joined the town’s main Corpus Christi procession. Given that the three men represented the Center Party, a Catholic political party in Augsburg’s liberal-dominated city council, their taking part in this most important of Catholic religious feasts was by no means exceptional, as each year thousands of inhabitants either joined the Corpus Christi procession or lined the streets as bystanders. In the local press, both liberal and ultramontane newspapers covered the event in the usual way, noting, among other things, that the town’s garrisoned military had lined the route of the procession, or that “many houses” had been decorated “with birch branches, wreaths, and images.” They also mentioned, without further ado (and without naming names), that “three councillors” had joined the procession. None of the newspapers covering the event reported that anything extraordinary, let alone improper, had happened before, during, or immediately after the procession. As we learn from the controversy that ensued, however, what was unusual was the three Catholic councillors’ choice of dress: that they had decided to participate in the procession wearing their officeholders’ livery, the so-called Amtstracht, apparently marked a departure from established custom. At the council’s next meeting, the three men were thus promptly reminded by Chairman Stolz that by wearing their councillors’ livery at a religious festival, they had violated the dress code that was adopted in the late 1860s for such occasions. A Catholic and the editor in chief of the liberal Augsburger Abendzeitung, Stolz insisted that any councillor attending an event devoted to a single denominational group did so in an entirely private capacity and from hence arose the need for councillors to wear normal dress rather than the council’s official garb. Aware that he was representing the view of the liberal majority, Stolz concluded by asking the three Center Party members to either play by the rules henceforth or file a motion in favor of changing them.

This volume analyses and compares different forms of nationalism across a range of European countries and regions during the long nineteenth century. It aims to put detailed studies of nationalist politics and thought, which have proliferated over the last ten years or so, into a wider European context. By means of such contextualization, together with new and systematic comparisons, What is a Nation? Europe 1789-1914 reassesses the arguments put forward in the principal works on nationalism as a whole, many of which pre-date the proliferation of case studies in the 1990s and which, as a consequence, make only inadequate reference to the national histories of European states. The study reconsiders whether the distinction between civic and ethnic identities and politics in Europe has been overstated and whether it needs to be replaced altogether by a new set of concepts or types. What is a Nation? explores the relationship between this and other typologies, relating them to complex processes of industrialization, increasing state intervention, secularization, democratization and urbanization. Debates about citizenship, political economy, liberal institutions, socialism, empire, changes in the states system, Darwinism, high and popular culture, Romanticism and Christianity all affected - and were affected by - discussion of nationhood and nationalist politics. The volume investigates the significance of such controversies and institutional changes for the history of modern nationalism, as it was defined in diverse European countries and regions during the long nineteenth century. By placing particular nineteenth-century nationalist movements and nation-building in a broader comparative context, prominent historians of particular European states give an original and authoritative reassessment, designed to appeal to students and academic readers alike, of one of the most contentious topics of the modern period.

This book examines the ways in which the Swiss defined their national identity in the long nineteenth century, in the face of a changing domestic and international background. Its narrative begins in 1761, when the first Swiss patriotic society of national significance was founded, and ends in 1891, when the Swiss celebrated their 600-year existence as a nation in a monumental national festival. While conceding that the creation of a nation-state in 1848 marked a watershed in the history of Swiss nation-formation, the author does not focus one-sidedly - as many others have done - on the activities of the nationalizing state. Instead, he attributes a key role to the competitive and contentious struggles over the shaping of public institutions and over the symbolic representation of the nation. These struggles, to which the nation-state and civil society contributed in equal measure, were framed increasingly along national lines.