AT THE START OF THE eighteenth century, “Germany” consisted of approximately eighteen hundred separate territories, each with distinct sovereignty. While the citizens of the Germanic states felt that their cultural development had been retarded by the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), a certain unity existed among them, centered not so much on a feeling of “nationalism” per se — for the modern conception of nations was just developing — as on a sense of Germanic culture.

The political consequences of the war between Catholics and Lutherans, which embroiled most of Europe, were twofold. On the one hand, Germany was divided into many separate territories each with de facto sovereignty, hampering the power of the Holy Roman Empire and attempts at centralized German power. On the other hand, Spain lost its grip on Germany, the Netherlands, and Portugal, and the Habsburg Empire went into decline, making Bourbon France the dominant power in Europe, a shift that would contribute significantly to German nationalism as the power of France continued to increase in the next century and a half.

German cultural unity would be nurtured by the emerging rationalist theories of what is perhaps an ironic term in light of the subject of this study: die Aufklärung, the Enlightenment.