Rethinking the Age of Emancipation: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Family, and Religion in Italy and Germany, 1800–1918

SECTION 1

CONCEPTS AND PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER 1

Nineteenth-Century Italy and Germany beyond National History

Amerigo Caruso

The natural intellectual superiority of Italy and Germany can easily be demonstrated, and we urgently need to nurture the feeling of affinity between these two great nations of Central Europe.¹ In 1873, just a few years after the formation of Italy and Germany as nation-states, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote to the Italian diplomat Anselmo Guerrieri Gonzaga with these chauvinistic ideas. Treitschke projected his radical nationalist credo from the German into the Italian context, and from the late nineteenth century onward, several generations of commentators, entrenched in the narrative tradition of national history, held in common the conviction that the two nations shared a parallel history.² A wealth of supposed parallels contributes to this enduring narrative: the retrospective notion of belated nation-building; the trauma of national humiliation at the peace negotiations after World War I; the affinities between the Fascist and Nazi regimes; the transition to democracy and the economic miracle in the aftermath of World War II; from the early 1970s on, the consequences of the end of the long postwar boom; and, finally, the terrorist campaigns by the radical left-wing Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades.³ The persistent tradition of parallel Italian and German histories is permeated by teleological thinking, which has inevitably influenced the approach of comparative history that emerged during the 1970s and became a mainstream methodology in the 1990s. Because comparative studies on the two countries have been influenced by the tradition of parallel history, a comparative analysis of Italian and German history can not only explicitly reproduce political and ideological nationalism, as in the case of Treitschke, but also perpetuate a less evident methodological nationalism.

During the last four decades, comparative research projects have put forward new interpretative and methodological approaches that are without doubt a far remove from Treitschke’s radical nationalism. However, the end of national history may have been too hastily declared after the comparative and transnational turn. The two main purposes of this chapter are to highlight the persistence of methodological nationalism and to present some best practices employed by the new historiography that has moved on from purely national histories. I start by discussing the impact of comparative and transnational history on the traditional interpretative paradigms of Italian and German nation-building and, in particular, on more recent approaches such as gendered and Jewish perspectives. I then analyze the way that national histories have been constructed in time and space. In my third section, I explore the issue of whether methodological nationalism can be avoided by using combined approaches, such as that of comparison, transfer, and entanglement history. How can this three-step method be employed in practice? My concluding remarks examine the vitality of national history, which still tends to overlook the manifold foundations and plurality of collective identities, not just national, in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany. The construction of national identities, the problem of multiple social, political, and cultural loyalties, and the tensions between national emancipation and the emancipation of minorities are some of the key aspects discussed in this volume.⁴

New Interpretative Paradigms and the Persistence of Methodological Nationalism

In the field of the history of nationalism, one significant reason for the persistence of interpretative traditions that focus on the national is the assumption, either deliberate or unconscious, that this is the most important dimension of history.⁵ This methodological nationalism has particularly weighty implications in the cases of Italy and Germany, because it overlaps with the tradition of parallel history. The persistence of methodological nationalism is strongly connected to the narrative impact of nationalism during the nineteenth century. Especially in the second half of the century, nationalist poets, artists, historians, and politicians employed teleological thinking to imagine and present the nation-state with great success as a consensual, natural, and modern historical outcome. In the final decades prior to World War I, there were also aggressive claims of cultural superiority and racial exclusivity made by more-radical nationalists. Despite the emergence of these racist and chauvinistic views, the rise of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe was in fact a transcultural, transnational, highly contested, and open-ended phenomenon. The multiple foundations and contradictions of nationalism and nation-building had often been ignored, and they still pose a major challenge for historical studies.

A further methodological problem is posed by the plurality of historical identities in Europe and their close relationship to essentially contested concepts such as nation, religion, gender, race, ethnicity, and class.⁶ In John Breuilly’s view, historians should study the nation and nationalism as mutually independent concepts in order to overcome the analytical challenge of examining nationalism and nation-building. He emphasizes that nationalism should not be considered as the expression of a unique national history but as a distinct phenomenon with general characteristics which is productive for the national.⁷ Achieving the aim of detaching nation from nationalism is particularly difficult in the case of Italy and Germany, because of the apparently simultaneous emergence of nationalism and nation-building on both sides of the Alps during the nineteenth century. As a result of the enduring influence of national and parallel histories, nationalism and the creation of the nation-state appeared to historians to be connected exceptionally closely in these belated nations. For this reason, binational comparisons are still the dominant approach to studying Italian and German history, while surprisingly few studies follow the more recent approaches of transnational and transfer history.⁸ To some extent, the comparative method belongs within the tradition of parallel history, while transnational and transfer studies have more explicitly rejected the national framework.

Despite historians such as Federico Chabod proclaiming the cultural differences between German and Italian nationalism after World War II, the traditional paradigm of parallel history launched by Treitschke and Croce still influences historiographical and public discourses. Use of the lenses of parallel history and, at least in some cases, of comparative history has often led to an underestimation of the differences between Italian and German national ideology and nation-building. These include the role played by nineteenth-century history in the national culture of remembrance and the role of volunteers in the nation-building process, both of which are given greater prominence by Italian historians than by their German colleagues.⁹ In addition, female education and assumptions about gender roles were significantly different in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, primarily because German culture was predominantly Protestant.¹⁰ Parallel history tends to unduly emphasize the similarities between the Italian and German national paths, but without dislodging the stereotypes regarding the different national characters that emerged in the nineteenth century and grew stronger during the twentieth.

The persisting narratives of parallel history can be challenged by using a combination of the methods of comparative, transnational, and entangled history, and by adopting an approach that is equally open to the local, regional, national, and global scales of history. However, before further discussion of these methodological and theoretical steps, this chapter explores the main trends in research regarding nationalism and nation-building in Italy and Germany. During the last four decades, there has been impressive development in this field of research due on the one hand to the emergence of comparative and transnational history, and on the other to the attention that historians have given to marginal traditions as well as to cultural and gender history. Alberto Banti’s monograph L’onore della nazione remains one of the most comprehensive and controversial studies on the connections between masculinity, nationalism, and violence in European nationalism during the long nineteenth century.¹¹ Banti argues that racially exclusive and heterosexual masculinity was deeply connected to the construction and representation of nationhood. Taking the perspective of cultural history, he demonstrates that ideas about gender and sexual identity circulated transnationally as common ways of thinking within emerging national and patriotic discourses. Banti’s interest in narrative structures was recently complemented by feminist scholars who have examined the specific forms of women’s participation in the patriotic movement and charted the multiple connections between the ostensibly private realm of the family and the emerging political sphere of the nation.¹²

Recent publications on nationalism and nation-building have rejected the dichotomy between public and private spheres and reassessed interpretative traditions regarding the construction of imagined communities. Ilaria Porciani’s studies show that nationalism implied a broad process of imposing order on domestic life as well as on the nation’s public affairs.¹³ In the wake of the pioneering work by George Mosse on nationalism and sexuality, Karen Hagemann’s book on the gendered history of war and nation-building in postrevolutionary Prussia and Ute Planert’s studies on women’s emancipation, antifeminism, and nationalism in Imperial Germany were major influences on the development of a gendered perspective on national history.¹⁴ This and subsequent work by Hagemann clearly demonstrate that the modern world’s understanding of gender roles was deeply interwoven with narratives of national identity and nation-state formation in nineteenth-century Europe. The gendering of national history was a transnationally circulating element common to many national metanarratives. Its clearest expression was in the routine feminisation of enemies, and the positive self-ascription of allegedly male, manly values.¹⁵

In order to rethink the mainstream themes of national history such as war, diplomacy, monarchy, and high politics, recent studies on historians and nationalism stress the importance of examining marginal traditions.¹⁶ A focus on the themes mentioned still prevails and is in itself an unconscious legacy of nineteenth-century nationalist historical traditions.¹⁷ In the case of Italy and Germany, informal networks and nonmainstream ideas were of fundamental importance to the initial galvanization of national movements. Nationalism only became politically dominant in the late nineteenth century; in the meantime, on the one hand, nationalist ideas were disseminated from above, while on the other the transnational and nonstate component played a major role in the process of nation-building.¹⁸ The importance of women, families, and wider family networks for both the spread of nationalist emotions and the cultural representation of the Italian nation-state is convincingly demonstrated in recent research by Ruth Nattermann, Giulia Frontoni, and Karoline Rörig.¹⁹ Furthermore, an interdisciplinary group of scholars led by Lucy Riall has broadly surveyed nineteenth-century Italian sexuality, shedding more light on personal and political relationships, gender roles, and transnational encounters.²⁰

Other scholars, including Abigail Green and Sarah Panter, have made outstanding contributions to the discussion of gendered and Jewish perspectives on nation-building and modernity.²¹ These approaches now seem to have become well-established ways of interpreting the history of nationalism. However, the pioneering studies by Banti and Hagemann explaining the paradigms of masculinity and honor in Italian and German nationalism are still less than twenty years old. Transnational and gendered perspectives are very recent developments in the research into nationalism and its political significance, which is at least 150 years old. Since its geopolitical explosion in the late nineteenth century, and despite the revelation of its full destructive potential in the two World Wars, nationalism continues to play a key role in European history and politics.²² Even the German historian Theodor Schieder, who was strongly criticized because of his Nazi past, observed that the traditional nationalism of European nations did not completely change after World War II.²³ Historians should never underestimate the persistence of interpretative traditions, and the recent right-wing populist revival in Europe has been a reminder of the vitality and adaptability of nationalist discourses. Since the late 1970s, innovative methods and new research interests have contributed to reassessment of the traditional interpretative paradigms of nationalism and nation-building. However, they have not fully dismantled deep-seated nationalist teleologies; for this reason, the legacy of methodological nationalism can still influence historiographical discourse.

Why has the change in interpretative traditions regarding nationalism been slower and less comprehensive than might have been imagined? One reason is that nationalism and nation-states are politically very sensitive concepts, and scholarly work in this field is to some extent always vulnerable to influence from the field of politics. From the theoretical developments in historiography during the nineteenth century onward, historical practice was tightly linked to institutional frameworks that in turn were deeply influenced by political developments.²⁴ Furthermore, the professionalization and academic institutionalization of the discipline of history were strongly related to the growing nationalization of historical writing, as well as to the exclusion of women from the profession of history.²⁵ After 1848, pragmatism and the claim of objectivity dominated the language of politics; correspondingly, historians were more effective politically when they could lay claim to professionalism and scientificity.²⁶ From the end of the nineteenth century, professional historians became more authoritative and proclaimed their impartiality; however, historiography was no less politicized.

The entanglements between nationalism, historiography, and politics still leave their traces today. The state-supported revival of nationalism when the anniversary of Italian unification was celebrated in 2011, for example, served to perpetuate the myth of Verdi as the bard of the Risorgimento, notwithstanding the convincing rejection of this view of the early Verdi as an "image constructed to a large extent a posteriori."²⁷ Although patriotic commemoration of national awakening during the long nineteenth century has played a different and substantially smaller role in Germany than in Italy, there too national histories experienced a revival after the Wiedervereinigung in 1990. Biographies of Bismarck are still among the most popular history books, and Ulrich Herbert’s recently published comprehensive work on the history of twentieth-century Germany begins by stating that Europe is our present, but our history remains rooted in the national.²⁸ Furthermore, and paradoxically, the new series of books on contemporary European history issued by the large German publisher Beck presents a very traditional history of the old continent as the history of nation-states.²⁹

Countercurrents to the decline of methodological nationalism have come not only from the fields of politics and journalism but also from historiography itself: from the need to adapt to the requirements of publishers and the market, and from lack of communication between historians. Some pioneers of the new cultural history have dismissed the integration of the traditional narrative of the Risorgimento into the transnational perspective. By contrast, the discipline of cultural studies and the linguistic turn have been harshly criticized by traditional scholarship.³⁰ Despite the fact that historians have been trying, at least since the Cold War ended, to detach themselves from the traditional commitment to national histories, there are important reasons to continue analyzing the problem of methodological nationalism. In a recent essay, David Armitage pointed out that like most other social scientists, [historians] assumed that self-identifying nations, organized politically into states, were the primary objects of historical study.³¹ The preferential attention given by European historians to the state, which is a crucial precondition for methodological nationalism, was closely related to the standardization and institutionalization of the discipline of history during the nineteenth century, at the same time as the emergence of nationalism.

Three main options, mutually complementary, are available in order to deal effectively with the persistent tradition of methodological nationalism. First, because the focus on state, high politics, diplomacy, and monarchy has been one of the main components of national history’s metanarrative,³² political history should look further than state institutions and their formal decision-making processes.³³ Its field of inquiry should also be extended to the semantic and affective aspects of politics, and to a variety of social arenas and semiformal political networks. Furthermore, this new political history and its enhanced methodology should be integrated with intellectual and cultural history, and also with the history of communication and conceptual history. The new approaches to political history have understood the study of political discourses in a constructivist way, emphasizing the cultural and medial constructedness of the political.³⁴ However, there should also be more critical questioning of the cultural turn, especially in the case of Risorgimento historiography. The intention to develop the approach further does not necessarily mean to abandon cultural history, but rather to cross-fertilize cultural history with social and political history and vice-versa.³⁵

The second option, aimed at reassessment of the interpretative traditions of nation-building, is to place both the political history of nation-states and the intellectual history of nationalism within a transnational and global framework. Later in this chapter, I return to this theme by discussing comparison, transfer, entanglement, and global history as possible antidotes to methodological nationalism.

The third way of addressing this is to focus on marginal traditions and histories from below, which have been obscured by the metanarrative of the nation-state. Systematic exploration of the role played in nation-building processes by women, religious minorities, and localist movements, and also by exile, migration, and internal enemies, offers historians great advantages for critical revision of the great narratives of nations. These outsider topics are some of the most vibrant and controversial themes in contemporary academic discourse and will be further discussed in the sections that follow.

The Many Faces of National History

Invented national traditions resulted from the clash and reciprocal influence of many different types of allegiance and belonging in spatially, temporally, politically, socially, and culturally diverse contexts. In his respected work on the Italian Risorgimento, the French historian Gilles Pécout argues that if we think of Italian nation-building as a linear and nonconflictual process, then we will not understand the Risorgimento at all.³⁶ One major analytical problem for the study of nationalism is that its hybrid narrative structure resolutely proclaimed itself as the exclusive, natural, and widely desired product of a specific national identity. Despite the strong presence of ethnic, and thus determinist, components in the Italian imagining of the national community, patriotic discourse was developed by cosmopolitan elites, who referred to transnationally circulating emotions, experiences, and narratives of patriotism.³⁷ A second analytical problem is that perceptions of nationalism had customarily been linked to the narratives of progress, liberalism, and modernity, whereas the new nation-states in Italy and Germany were the result of a conservative-led convergence of very varied expectations and experiences of nationhood. After the shock of the European revolutions of 1848, a new alliance of moderate liberals and conservatives formed that hoped to legitimate its constitutional reformism and stave off further insurrection by claiming continuity with the earlier tradition of enlightened monarchical