Political Poetry in Periodicals and the Shaping of German National Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This study shows that between 1840 and 1871 German periodicals regularly featured poems as part of the public debate over politics. These poems constituted direct responses to the Rhine crisis of 1840, the revolution and counterrevolution of 1848-1849, the war against Denmark in 1864, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, events central to the evolution of German nationalism in the nineteenth century and to German unification in 1871. The poems sought to influence public opinion and helped to shape German national consciousness. This book also examines how such poems and the publications in which they appeared created a literary discourse that built upon and revised its own traditions. The accompanying CD-ROM includes 950 poems, an annotated key word index, and additional indices.