WEEK 21
Germany After Napoleon (1815): The German Confederation (German: Deutscher Bund) was founded as a result of the Vienna Conference of 1815 and a a loose union of 39 states was established (35 ruling princes and 4 free cities) under Austrian leadership, with a Federal Diet (German: Bundestag) meeting in Frankfurt am Main. It was a loose coalition that failed to satisfy most nationalists. The member states largely went their own way, and Austria had its own interests. In 1819 a student radical assassinated the reactionary playwright August von Kotzebue, who had scoffed at liberal student organizations. In one of the few major actions of the German Confederation, Prince Metternich called a conference that issued the repressive Carlsbad Decrees, designed to suppress liberal agitation against the conservative governments of the German states. The Decrees terminated the fast-fading nationalist fraternities (German: Burschenschaften), removed liberal university professors, and expanded the censorship of the press. The decrees began the "persecution of the demagogues", which was directed against individuals who were accused of spreading revolutionary and nationalist ideas. Among the persecuted were the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt, the publisher Johann Joseph Görres. In 1834 the Zollverein was established, a customs union between Prussia and most other German states, but excluding Austria. As industrialisation developed, the need for a unified German state with a uniform currency, legal system, and government became more and more obvious.
REQUIRED READING
RECOMMENDED READING
Institute Library Call Number: 940.28 Cra
The author is one of the greatest historians of Germany who ever lived and a professor at Stanford. Bruce Thompson was his teaching assistant and is now editing various collections of correspondence and articles.
TIMELINE OF GERMAN HISTORY: