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This study will examine the phenomenon of the elevation of Wagner from relative obscurity under Bismarck to the symbol of German Nationalism under the Third Reich, and will attempt to ascertain the reasons for Mann's continuing dedication to Wagner despite his growing apprehension about Germany's destiny under Hitler.

En analysant les almanachs illustrés et les autres publications associatives [1880-1918], on tente de cerner la culture politique propre au milieu national-allemand d'Autriche. On étudie tout d'abord les lieux de mémoire mis en avant par les intellectuels et les leaders nationalistes, tels qu'ils se manifestent dans la liturgie politique et dans les grandes narrations historiques. On s'emploie à montrer que suivant leur degré de radicalité, les militants ne leur donnent pas le même éclairage et n'établissent pas la même hiérarchie entre les référents historiques. On montre également que les activistes observent très attentivement les organisations rivales [tchèques, slovènes, italiennes] et s'approprient leurs lieux de mémoire, tout en leur donnant une interprétation radicalement di é- rente. On montre ensuite que les leaders associatifs cherchent à mettre le sentiment d'appartenance locale au service du sentiment national. Pour ce faire, la jeune discipline de la Volkskunde [ethnologie nationaliste] leur apparaît comme un instrument adéquat, parce qu'elle théorise l'insertion des individus dans des cercles concentriques [famille, lignée, communauté linguistique, etc.]. On s'intéresse donc aux collections des petits musées locaux créés par les antennes locales des associations, au catalogue de leurs bibliothèques, qui ont toujours pour mission de sensibiliser les visiteurs aux spécificités de leur environnement géographique immédiat, et de leur montrer que ce dernier s'insère harmonieusement dans la grande nation allemande. / Working from an analysis of illustrated almanacs and other publications by nationalist organizations established in Austria between 1880 and 1918, this study attempts to outline the political culture of the German-national milieu in Austria. It focuses first on the significant landmarks of historical memory which nationalist intellectuals and leaders called attention to and which were highlighted in the political commemorations and the grand historical narratives which they upheld. Our work shows that depending on their degree of radicalization, activists did not regard these landmarks in the same way, and they didn't establish the same hierarchy between them. It also reveals that activists observed rival [czech, solvene or italian] organizations very closely, and that they appropriated their signi cant "realms of memory", albeit with radically different interpretations. This study then attempts to explore how organization leaders sought to make the sentiment of local belonging serve the feeling of national belonging. With this aim in view, the new discipline known as Volkskunde [nationalist ethnology] was perceived as an adequate tool, because it provided a theoretical frame inserting individuals into a series of concentric circles [family, genealogical line, linguistic community, etc.]. This work looks at the collections of small local museums created by local branches of organizations, and at their library catalogues, whose mission was always to make visitors aware of the specificities of their immediate geographical surroundings and to show them how these surroundings were a part of the overall harmony of the great German nation.

The Nazi utopian ideal Volksgemeinschaft, both as a core concept in the Nazi ideology and a vocal point in German ideological history, attempting to build up the national community in the German particular way, has contributed as the key element to contrive people's consent both in achieving the Nazi power-seizure and in forming the dynamics in the Third Reich. The term itself involves, however, not only an exploration of shaping a national community of the German people united under denotations like Volk, Gemeinschaft, Volksgemeinschaft, but also redefined the boundaries and relations between the individuals within to this community. This paper aims to present the trials in the German ideological history in pursuing national unity through community building as a foreground, to put forth an explanation for Nazi reception in the interwar German circumstances: the Nazi interpretation of national community under Volksgemeinschaft, its similarities and divergencies from the former community concepts, the efficacy and power in winning public at its takeover and thirteen-year-long national practice. The analytical structure of the entire paper is tailored according to this research design, starting from national endeavor in the German ideological history, followed by extensive analysis of Weimar Germany...

Amidst the upheaval of the French Revolution, the British parliamentarian and political theorist Edmund Burke received a vibrant reception in German-speaking Europe. Anxious to uncover the ideological roots of the anarchy that enveloped France – and worried that their own society might be vulnerable to a similar fate – a series of important German thinkers began studying his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This dissertation brings into focus the diverse interpretations of Burke that were assembled in this turbulent era, and explains them vis-à-vis contemporary debates among German idealists (Kant and his heirs) about the philosophical nature of freedom. This dissertation centers on Burke’s three most perceptive and influential students: the civil servant and philosopher August Wilhelm Rehberg; the journalist, translator, and diplomat Friedrich Gentz; and the political economist and cultural critic Adam Müller. For many decades, both German- and English-speaking intellectual historians have shoehorned these thinkers into a rigid ideological box labeled ‘conservatism’. Inspired by Burke, they are said to have turned away from the ideals of Enlightenment, theorizing an illiberal form of politics that was traditionalistic, authoritarian, and reactionary. A careful, contextualized reconstruction of their engagements with Burke, however, renders this thesis untenable. Far from triggering a monolithic backlash against Enlightenment, Burke in fact inspired a series of divergent, and often incompatible, analyses of the Revolution’s origins, grounded in different readings of his Reflections. Rehberg, for instance, saw Burke as a principled skeptic: he admired the Reflections as an incisive critique of the revolutionaries’ philosophical dogmatism. Gentz, an erstwhile student of Kant, disagreed completely, arguing that Burke’s politics were entirely compatible with Kantian metaphysics. In his view, the Reflections’ central insight was that it takes political prudence to realize the rights of man in practice. Müller, finally, read the Reflections as a lament for the fall of Christendom, and as a diagnosis of the social alienation and moral confusion that had followed its demise. In other words, whereas Rehberg was a Humean skeptic and Gentz was a Kantian liberal, Müller was a Trinitarian Christian. Each of these men, moreover, claimed Burke as an ally. What this means is that Rehberg, Gentz, and Müller cannot have jointly invented a single thing called ‘conservatism’, and Burke cannot have inspired it. This becomes clear only after we recognize that at the turn of the nineteenth century, neither the meaning of Enlightenment nor the crux of Burke’s Reflections was clear: these were not fixed variables, but points of contemporary debate. By recapturing the diversity of Burke’s German reception, this thesis invites scholars to consider the ways that his students shepherded their differing visions of Enlightenment through the fires of the Revolution, down into the nineteenth century.

The article examines (dis)continuities with regard to organisational frameworks, individual careers, ideological foundations as well as practices of nationalist activism in contact zones. On the example of today’s Austrian-Slovenian borderland, the contribution focuses on specific German Nationalist (and later National Socialist) aspirations to homogenize the diverse population of targeted territories in favour of ‘Germanness’. It takes into account the preconditions and histories of German nationalist ‘Grenzland’ consciousness in the Austrian provinces of Carinthia and Styria as well as their neighbouring Slovene territories (Upper Carniola and Lower Styria) and traces the development of what is termed ‘Grenzland’-activism across the ruptures of 1918, 1938/39/41 and 1945 up until the 1970s. With this spatial and temporal focus, the article not only shows the intertwinements of as well as changing emphasis on historical, biological and cultural justifications of this nationalist activism in the context of shifting state borders. By working out and relating the specifics of each phase, the paper at hand also uncovers the striking continuities of ideological, individual and practical aspects of German nationalist activism from its beginnings to the extremist peak during the Nazi period up until the mid-/late 20th century.

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