Scholarly opinion over the past seventy years has been almost unanimous in stating that the German nation and identity are modern creations from no earlier than the late eighteenth century. Len Scales challenges this opinion, arguing that the concept of the German nation and adoption of a German national identity by the educated population, if not by the masses, dates to the tumultuous period between the deposition of Emperor Frederick II (1245) and the Council of Constance (1414).
Scales presents his monumental study in eleven chapters. The first provides an overview of the efforts by modern Germans—including romantic nationalists, National Socialists, and most recently, devotees of the European Union—to create a usable past out of the Middle Ages. From the nineteenth century until after World War II, scholars focused on the period between 919–1254, when German royal and imperial power was at its height. Recent works have focused on the German-speaking peoples who came into contact with the late Roman Empire, especially the role of the Romans who worked with tribal elites to create new “nations” through ethnogenesis. Scales argues that these early Germanic nations were artificial constructions of the elite and not the embodiment of the Volk, as earlier scholars had claimed.
Chapter two traces the scholarly tradition that presents monarchy as essential in the creation of national identities. Scales argues, contrary to the prevailing scholarly view, that despite the decentralized nature of the German kingdom, there were still institutions that could create a common identity, such as the royal itinerary, ceremonies held at traditional royal centers, and military campaigns, which are all described in chapter three. Scales also points to widespread reporting on German kings' actions in narrative sources as evidence of their contemporary importance.
Chapters four to six focus on the relationship between the Kingdom of Germany and the medieval empire of which it was a major element. Chapter four focuses on the dual role of the king, who held an imperial title and theoretical sovereignty over the Christian West. Chapter five treats the concept of empire, including the German king's role in maintaining peace and leading Christendom in holy war. Chapter six argues against the concept that German kings' imperial claims were antithetical to the development of a national identity, specifically pointing to Germany's role as the dominant field of action for German kings, as discussed in contemporary texts.
Chapter seven emphasizes the importance of a common origin myth in creating a national identity. Scales argues that there was no German origin myth, given the diverse peoples, such as Bavarians, Saxons, Franks, and Swabians, within the German kingdom. He argues, however, that they adopted a Roman myth, which credits Caesar, among others, with creating a composite people from the disparate Germanic gentes. This model of national origin is similar to the one established by Herwig Wolfram, Walter Pohl, and Patrick Geary regarding the Roman imperial government's role in the ethnogenesis of the Franks, Burgundians, Goths, and other various Germanic peoples during the third to the fifth centuries.
Chapters eight and nine focus on images of the Germans created by writers beyond the frontiers, with emphasis on their ferocity, connection with nature, and barbarity. Chapter eight describes Western depictions of Germans, and chapter nine illuminates the Slavic and Hungarian views and the ways in which two supranational organizations, the Teutonic Knights and the Hansa, treated their own “German-ness.”
Chapters ten and eleven identify two factors that contributed to the creation of German national identity. The first is a putative growing precision in drawing boundaries, including frontiers between kingdoms, which forced Germans to confront differences with those beyond these frontiers and commonalities with fellow Germans. The second factor is the increasing use of the German language in texts, from government documents to literature. Scales argues that the imperial/royal government played a limited role in the diffusion of the written language and was a follower rather than a trendsetter regarding the use of the vernacular. This chapter also discusses the great range of local “lands” and identities, arguing that local identities were not mutually exclusive of a broader German identity and sometimes even reinforced it.
Scales utilizes a broad array of Latin and German written sources, including treatises, chronicles, annals, letters, and government documents, as well as material sources such as coins, seals, banners, and paintings. Scales has deep knowledge of scholarship treating the later medieval period in Germany, though the lack of significant engagement with Caspar Hirschi's Wettkampf der Nationen (2005) is a serious delict. A discussion of Hirschi's conclusions, which cover much of the same ground treated by Scales in his first and eighth chapters, would have been helpful.
Scales's treatment of the scholarship and sources for the period before c. 1250 is also sometimes problematic. For example, he accepts, without reservation, the primitivist model of the tenth-century German kingdom posited by Timothy Reuter, without regard for the substantial body of scholarship that presents the Ottonian kingdom as possessing a rather robust institutional inheritance from the Carolingians. Similarly, Scales draws on the 1979 edition of Michael Clanchy's From Memory to Written Record to argue for a vast increase in the use of writing by governments after 1200 (62). He apparently was unaware that Clanchy published a substantially revised edition in 1993 to take into account Rosamond McKitterick's Carolingians and the Written Word, which detailed the extensive use of writing across early medieval societies.
Scales's lack of familiarity with the existing scholarship, and with the sources for the period before 1250, poses certain challenges to his conclusions that a German national identity was established in the period after the end of the Staufen dynasty. Certainly, Scales has shown that both German and non-German writers from the mid thirteenth to the early fifteenth century extensively discussed a mental construct resembling the German nation and identity. However, the factors identified to support his argument were present and, indeed, well established, long before the deposition of Frederick II. Scales himself notes discussions about Germans by John of Salisbury (d. 1180) and Otto of Freising (d. 1158). One could also look to the charters of Emperor Otto I (d. 973), which discussed the Teutonica lingua and distinguished between indigenous Slavs and German settlers along the Elbe frontier. Scales's argument is apparently based on the assumption that the greater quantities of texts after 1250 were the decisive factors in the development of the concept of the German nation. However, given the increasing production of texts and the greater level of survival of later texts from later periods, it certainly is incumbent on the author to explain why discussions of a German identity before 1250 are not evidence of its existence at an earlier date.
A second issue concerns the author's mode of argument. Each chapter opens with an illustrative scene, such as Emperor Maximilian's address at the Constance Reichstag in 1507, which begins chapter three. Scales tends to argue “through the sheer accumulation of evidence” (14), which consists of piling up passages from vast congeries of sources. Consequently, the argument often becomes lost in the thicket of citations, and the reader is confronted seriatim with texts from different regions, periods, and centuries. It seems unlikely that they all have equal evidentiary value for understanding the developing sense of German identity. This problem is exacerbated by Scales's decision to eschew a discussion of the contexts and audiences—with the exception of a fuller discussion of Alexander von Roes, a canon from Cologne—for many of the texts he cites. One consequence is that he is unable to draw connections to a broader public that may have had a Zusammengehörigkeitsbewußtsein of participating in the German nation.
Overall, Scales has brought together an immense amount of material dealing with the topic of German identity in the later medieval period. He is certainly right to challenge both the historiographical traditions that sought a usable past in the Middle Ages, and those historians and social scientists who are enamored of the view that “big concepts” such as nations were alien to the putatively more primitive medieval mind. But it is also necessary to consider whether the ideas discussed by authors in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries did not play an important role in political thinking in earlier periods as well. Indeed, the natural unity of the lands once ruled by Louis the German (d. 876) was a matter of faith among the members of the Ottonian royal court in the mid tenth century.
This volume will be valuable to specialists and graduate students. However, its lack of clearly defined arguments and general bagginess will severely limit its utility in undergraduate courses.
