Global Germany Circa 1800

Global Germany Circa 1800 asks two interrelated questions: How did Germans participate in the European conquest of the world, and how were they different from other imperial powers? In other words, what is the relation between the German form of empire, the old Reich, and the modern European empires that emerged in the global age?In this book, Todd Kontje presents a revisionist literary and intellectual history, inviting readers to consider how we might understand ¿Germany¿ at the turn of the nineteenth century if we remove the nation-state as the inevitable goal of cultural and political development. Focusing on the pivotal era around 1800, when many of the concepts that define the modern era first came into being, Kontje investigates how thinkers in and around Weimar¿from Goethe, Schiller, and Kant to Georg Forster, Heinrich von Kleist, and Alexander von Humboldt¿worked within existing political structures to make sense of the region¿s place in the world. Ultimately, he reveals how W