Postwar scholarly interest in the Holy Roman Empire (1648–1806) has produced a large and distinguished literature. Most recently, a series of symposia, exhibitions, and publications marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the Imperial Recess (1803), which hopelessly compromised the legal-political order upon which the empire had been based. But the empire's actual disbandment in 1806, following nearly a thousand years as a mainstay of the European political order, has been little regarded. To its credit, the study under consideration here calls attention to this remarkable event. Wolfgang Burgdorf, the author, questions the inherently implausible, if common, older view that the empire disappeared “unwept and unsung” by contemporaries.

The book opens with a lengthy set piece on Regensburg, as the seat of the Imperial Diet and traditional nerve center of the empire, in the summer of 1806. This is followed by a reconsideration of the immediate political circumstances that led to the dissolution itself, focusing on the significance of the creation of the Rhenish Confederation, Napoleon's ultimatum to Austria in late July, and the abdication of Francis II on 6 August 1806. This section also discusses first reactions in Regensburg to the empire's end and factors, such as censorship, widespread roadblocks, and the renewed outbreak of war, that muffled the initial echo. The book's third part pans to responses elsewhere in the succeeding weeks and months, especially in Vienna, Prussia, and the Saxon states. The conclusion is that Germans, far from being indifferent to the empire's destruction, regarded it as a “catastrophic turning point” (218). This finding relies principally on the testimony of leading literary and cultural figures and could have been reinforced by that of countless nobles, clergy, magistrates, and officials whose existences and identities had been interwoven with the empire's political fabric. The interesting passages on “the end of the Holy [Roman] Empire in prayer” (211) suggest the influence of the imperial order on the consciousness of everyday people. In their liturgies, the Christian confessions and Judaism had included (outside of Prussia) prayers for emperor and empire that disappeared after 1806. For the educated elite, a further blow to self-understanding came when imperial jurisprudence, intellectually among the liveliest and most popular subjects of study at eighteenth-century German universities, lost its raison d'être literally overnight. The concluding part of the study takes a look at reasons why the events surrounding the empire's dissolution were officially distorted or seemingly forgotten, the policies of those who contributed to or profited by the outcome—many of the German states themselves—being of prime interest. This study is not responsible for freeing the Holy Roman Empire from the constraints of Borussian historiography, which understood German history as moving inexorably toward Prussian-dominated unification and thus regarded the late empire as little more than a failed nation-state.

The rehabilitation of the imperial “system” on its own merits has been going on for the last two generations. Picking up on this work, however, the author offers a corrective to the ways that the long-standing “small German” nationalist interpretations distorted our understanding of the empire's last years. Francis II's abdication has traditionally caused Austria, conveniently the loser in the later national struggle, to be assigned greatest responsibility for the empire's end. Burgdorf demonstrates, on the other hand, that the general contemporary view was that the imperial structure ceased to exist not on 6 August (the date of abdication) but, rather, on 1 August when Napoleon's German allies announced at the diet in Regensburg their withdrawal from the empire.

Much less persuasive is the book's general conceptual framework. Having highlighted the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist historiography falsified perceptions of the empire's dissolution, the author incongruously avows constructing a (different) national historical paradigm himself (283). This leads to misinterpretations little different in principle from those that he is at pains to correct. Most problematically, the text conflates the terms “empire,” “state,” and “nation.” The findings of recent research on the nature of the Holy Roman Empire, that it was not a “state”—much less a “national state”—even along the lines of early modern England or France, are almost entirely ignored or disputed with little supporting evidence.

There is also no sense that nation building occurred in the revolutionary and post-Napoleonic period, the existence of the “nation” in the modern sense being regarded as self-evident and reactions to the empire's loss interpreted almost exclusively in such terms. Thus the turn to the Middle Ages by historical scholars of the day is construed as psychological “compensation” for the “loss of national unity” (270) rather than as a form of nation building. The empire's destruction becomes the German nation's Urkatastrophe (263), comparable in its enormity to the period 1933–45. Questionable secondary sources, such as Heinrich von Srbik (president of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, 1938–45), who contended that “German men” cried in Hamburg at news of the empire's end (219), are used without qualification to back up the thesis. Some passages unfortunately do not lack pathos reminiscent of the older national-historical tradition. We learn little, in contrast, about how confessional, regional, and social factors, so important in German history, conditioned responses to the events of 1806. The German states that benefited from the empire's dissolution are characterized as “artificial” (249, 268, 270), recalling the now discredited nineteenth- and twentieth-century view of Germany's patchwork principalities before 1803–06. The book is clearly aimed at a German audience, raising more generally the question of the value of the national paradigm in the European and global contexts.