German nationalism

In the 1930s, the Nazis came to power and sought to unify all ethnic Germans under the leadership of Adolf Hitler eventually leading to the extermination of Jews, Poles, Romani, and other people deemed Untermenschen (subhumans) in the Holocaust during World War II.

Due to post-1945 repudiation of the Nazi regime and its atrocities, German nationalism has been generally viewed in the country as taboo[2] and people within Germany have struggled to find ways to acknowledge its past but take pride in its past and present accomplishments; the German question has never been fully resolved in this regard.

Far-right parties that stress German national identity and pride have existed since the end of World War II but have never governed.

In reality, most group memberships in "Germany" centered on other, mostly personal or regional ties (for example, to the Lehnsherren) - before the formation of modern nations.

This emphasis on the naturalness of ethno-linguistic nations continued to be upheld by the early-19th-century Romantic German nationalists Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who all were proponents of Pan-Germanism.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte's 1808 Addresses to the German Nation, Heinrich von Kleist's fervent patriotic stage dramas before his death, and Ernst Moritz Arndt's war poetry during the anti-Napoleonic struggle of 1813-15 were all instrumental in shaping the character of German nationalism for the next one-and-a-half century in a racialized ethnic rather than civic nationalist direction.

But in our own era of universal internationalism, it becomes necessary to follow this racially linked Romanticism to its core, and to free it from certain nervous convulsions which still adhere to it.

"[19] Joseph Goebbels told theatre directors on 8 May 1933, just two days before the Nazi book burnings in Berlin, that: "German art of the next decade will be heroic, it will be like steel, it will be Romantic, non-sentimental, factual; it will be national with great pathos, and at once obligatory and binding, or it will be nothing.

"[20] German fascism extracted Romanticism from the naphthalene of the past, established its ideological kinship with it, included it in its canon of forerunners, and after some cleansing on racial grounds, absorbed it into the system of its ideology and thereby gave this trend, which in its time was not apolitical, a purely political and topical meaning ... Schelling, Adam Müller and others thanks to the fascists again became our contemporaries, though in the specific sense in which every corpse taken out of its century-old coffin for any need becomes a "contemporary".

[22] Heinrich Heine parodied such Romantic modernizations of medieval folkloric myths by 19th century German nationalists in the "Barbarossa" chapter of his large 1844 poem Germany.

The mood fed on hatred of the French, a fear of Russia, a rejection of the 1815 Vienna settlement, and a cult of patriotic hero-warriors.

Bismarck harnessed the national movement's martial pride and desire for unity and glory to weaken the political threat the liberal opposition posed to Prussia's conservatism.

[31] These nationalists supported a German national identity claimed to be based on Bismarck's ideals that included Teutonic values of willpower, loyalty, honesty, and perseverance.

Social Darwinism, messianism, and racialism began to become themes used by German nationalists after 1871 based on the concepts of a people's community (Volksgemeinschaft).

German colonial rule in Africa (1884–1914) was an expression of nationalism and moral superiority that was justified by constructing and employing an image of the natives as "Other".

Furthermore, the widespread acceptance among intellectuals of social Darwinism justified Germany's right to acquire colonial territories as a matter of the ‘survival of the fittest’, according to historian Michael Schubert.

[37][38] The government established after WWI, the Weimar republic, established a law of nationality that was based on pre-unification notions of the German volk as an ethno-racial group defined more by heredity than modern notions of citizenship; the laws were intended to include Germans who had immigrated and to exclude immigrant groups.

[2] The Nazi Party (NSDAP), led by Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, believed in an extreme form of German nationalism.

Hitler, an Austrian-German by birth, began to develop his strong patriotic German nationalist views from a very young age.

He was greatly influenced by many other Austrian pan-German nationalists in Austria-Hungary, notably Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Karl Lueger.

[44] The desire of the German people to be one nation again remained strong, but was accompanied by a feeling of hopelessness through the 1970s and into the 1980s; Die Wende, when it arrived in the late 1980s driven by the East German people, came as a surprise, leading to the 1990 elections which put a government in place that negotiated the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany and reunited East and West Germany, and the process of inner reunification began.

[39][45] An identity-based nationalist backlash arose after unification as people reached backward to answer "the German question", leading to violence by four Neo-Nazi/far-right parties which were all banned by Germany's Federal Constitutional Court after committing or inciting violence: the Nationalist Front, National Offensive, German Alternative, and the Kamaradenbund.

[46][47] Additionally, West Germany had received large numbers of immigrants (especially Turks), membership in the European Union meant that people could move more or less freely across national borders within Europe, and due to its declining birthrate even united Germany needed to receive about 300,000 immigrants per year in order to maintain its workforce.

[53][54] In a 2011 article published by the University of Pennsylvania, it was stated that:[55]"Patriotism in Germany has been a taboo topic since the time of Adolf Hitler, with the vast majority of Germans accepting that they cannot express any form of national pride".

The Alternative for Germany party was created in 2013 as a backlash against further European integration and bailouts of other countries during the European debt crisis; from its founding to 2017 the party took on nationalist and populist stances, rejecting German guilt over the Nazi era and calling for Germans to take pride in their history and accomplishments.

[65] Whilst it violated the Treaty of Versailles terms, Hitler, a native of Austria, unified the two German states together "(Anschluss)" in 1938.

[67] In addition to a form of nationalism in Austria that looked toward Germany, there have also been forms of Austrian nationalism that rejected unification of Austria with Germany and German identity on the basis of preserving Austrians' Catholic religious identity from the potential danger posed by being part of a Protestant-majority Germany, as well as their different historical heritage regarding their mainly Celtic (It is location of first Celtic culture[68] and Celts were its first settlers), Slavic, Avar, Rhaethian and Roman origin prior to the colonization (of the Germanic) Bavarii.