Germany 685
the French Revolution with enthusiasm, and to believe that in French hands,
thanks to French faults, these principles had miscarried.
The problem of its nationality, and later its nationalism, was for a long time the
compelling theme in historical thinking about Germany; but since the Second
World War, as in other countries, interest has attached to other matters, accentu-
ated in Germany by the actual division of the country. The question, crudely sim-
plified, is whether Germany really belongs to the world of Western constitutional-
ism and democracy. For one’s view on this question the years of the 1790’s are of
importance. The Mainz “Jacobins” of 1792, for example, have been variously inter-
preted as traitors who in collaborating with the French betrayed the true spirit of
their country, as simpletons whose ineffectual antics showed the political immatu-
rity of the Germans only too well, and as predecessors of a later democracy of ei-
ther Eastern or Western type. “German Marxists,” wrote an East Berlin historian
in 1957, “consider the Mainz Commune and the Rhine Convention as the first
democratic republic on German soil.” But such German republicans can be seen as
forming part of a background to Western democracy also. Recently the tendency
in West Germany, breaking with an older tradition that put high value on the
special peculiarity of Deutschtum, has been to argue that Germany in the 1790’s,
while of course different, shared in the common experience of Western Europe.^1
The Ambiguous Revolution
There was no revolution in Germany before 1800. The great changes came in the
following decade, when the Holy Roman Empire was converted into some twenty
1 The huge literature on Germany at the time of the French Revolution is currently dominated by
two outstanding works, F. Valjavec, Die Entstehung der politischen strömungen in Deutschland, 1770–
1815 (Munich, 1951), and J. Droz, L’Allemagne et la Révolution française (Paris, 1949), of which Droz
gave a compact preview in the Revue historique, Vol. 198 (1947), 161–77. Valjavec and Droz in a way
supersede the older books by G. P. Gooch and A. Stern, which drew heavily on memoirs and literary
materials. Recent East German works, more assertively Marxist than those written elsewhere in East-
ern Europe, in the present author’s experience, include W. Markov and F. Donath, Kampf um Freiheit:
Dokumente zur Zeit der nationalen Erhebung 1785–1815, Verlag der Nation [East Berlin, 1954]; H.
Vo e g t , Die jakobinische Literatur und Publizistik 1789–1800 (Berlin, 1955), which reprints many ex-
tracts from the publicist Rebmann; and P. Stulz and A. Opitz, Volksbewegungen in Kursachsen zur Zeit
der französischen Revolution (Berlin, 1956). The West German school, arguing for an affinity between
Germany and the West, is chiefly represented by Valjavec, mentioned above; see also W. Groote, Die
Entstehung des Nationalbewustseins in nordwest Deutschland 1790–1830 (Göttingen, 1955); an article by
W. Stammler, “Politische Schlagworte in der Zeit der Auf klärung,” in Lebenskräfte in der abendlän-
dischen Geistesgeschichte: Dank- und Erinnerungsgabe an Walter Goetz (Marburg, 1948), 199–259, where
it is argued that the words for liberty, tyranny, equality, humanity, and natural rights were used in
Germany as in the West; and the significant older work of E. Hölzle, Das alte Recht und die Revolution:
Eine politische Geschichte Württembergs in der Revolutionszeit, 1789–1805 (Munich, 1931). The work of
the American S. S. Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France: A Study in French Diplomacy during
the War of the First Coalition, 1792–97, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), suffers from the author’s
unconcealed distaste and hence impoverished understanding for his own subject. For the minutely
fragmented political geography of Germany, with both textual explanation and large- scale folding
map, see G. Franz, Deutschland 1789, Frankfurt, 1952. The quotation from Markov in the paragraph
above is from Annales historiques de la Révolution française, No. 148 (1957), 285.