Document – Johann Gotlieb Fichte, excerpts from “Addresses to the German Nation” (1807–1808)

Abstract and Keywords

The beginnings of German national identity were not political but rather cultural. Already in the eighteenth century, Germans had begun to react against the intellectual domination of the French Enlightenment and against the idea of a purely rational and universal definition of human nature. Instead, German thinkers began to develop the idea that humanity consists of different peoples (in German, Volk, people or folk) who share a common language, culture, and history. This idea was picked up on and carried forward by the Romantic movement, which emphasized emotion and particularity as opposed to the reason and universality of the Enlightenment.

Against this backdrop of growing German cultural self-identity, the military and political humiliation of the crushing Prussian defeat at Jena by Napoleon in 1806 flashed like a bolt of lightning. Prussia was forced to surrender all of its territory west of the Elbe River, and Napoleon even occupied Berlin. This defeat led to reforms of the feudal system in Prussia in 1807, not wholly unlike the changes in Japan after the Meiji Restoration. It also inspired one of the most important statements of German nationalism, a series of lectures delivered in Berlin in 1807–1808 by the most important German philosopher of the time, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814).

Despite his success as an academic philosopher, Fichte’s best-known work derived from a series of lectures inspired by the nationalist awakening he experienced as a result of Napoleon’s defeat and occupation of Prussia, the leading German state. He gave the lectures, entitled Addresses to the German Nation (1807), to raise morale and inspire patriotism among Germans.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (1807–1808), trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press (1979): 3–4, 12–13, 15, 131, 132, 135–36, 138, 143–44, 145, 146–47, 151, 153, 223–24, 264, 266, 268.

Document

[I]t is only by means of the common characteristic of being German that we can avert the downfall of our nation. . . . I perceive that organic unity in which no member regards the fate of another as the fate of a stranger. . . .

[T]o a nation which has lost her independence . . . the means of salvation . . . consists in the fashioning of an entirely new self . . . and in the education of the nation . . . to a completely new life. . . . By means of the new education we want to mold the Germans into a corporate body. . . .

The natural impulse of man, which should be abandoned only in case of real necessity, is to find heaven on this earth, and to endow his daily work on earth with permanence and eternity; to plant and to cultivate the eternal in the temporal. . . .

Hence, the noble-minded man will . . . sacrifice himself for his people. . . . [P]ermanence is promised to him only by the continuous and independent existence of his nation. In order to save his nation he must be ready even to die that it may live. . . .

[O]ur earliest common forefathers . . . bravely resisted the on-coming world dominion of the Romans. . . . Had they no appreciation of the advantages of Roman civilization . . . ? They cannot be charged with ignorance . . . of these things. . . . Freedom to them meant . . . remaining Germans and continuing to settle their own affairs independently and in . . . the original spirit of their race. . . . They assumed as a matter of course that . . . a true German could only want to . . . be . . . just a German and to bring up his children as Germans.

It is neither the strong right arm nor the efficient weapon that wins victories, but only the power of the soul. . . . From all this it follows that the State, merely as the government of human life . . . is not something which is primary and which exists for its own sake, but is merely the means to the higher purpose of the eternal, regular, and continuous development of what is purely human in this nation. . . .

These addresses . . . propose that you establish deeply and indelibly in the hearts of all . . . the true and all-powerful love of fatherland, the conception of our people as an eternal people and as the security for our own eternity.

A particular German State could, at most, have aimed at uniting the whole German nation under its sway, and at introducing autocracy in place of the established republic of peoples. . . . Then, if the unity of government which we are presupposing had itself borne, not the republican, but the monarchical form, . . . it would certainly have been a great disaster for the cause of German love of fatherland, . . . and every man of noble mind throughout the whole length and breadth of the common soil would have been bound to resist it. Yet, even in this most unfortunate event, it would always have been Germans who ruled over Germans. . . . [T]he essential point in our calculation is always that German national love itself either is at the helm of the German State or can reach it with its influence. . . .

[T]he first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself . . .; they understand each other and . . . they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. Such a whole, if it wishes to absorb and mingle with itself any other people of different descent and language, cannot do so without . . . violently disturbing the even progress of its culture. From this internal boundary, . . . the marking of the external boundary . . . results . . .; and . . . it is not because men dwell between certain mountains and rivers that they are a people, but, on the contrary, men dwell together . . . because they were a people already by a law of nature which is much higher. . . . Thus was the German nation placed . . . in the middle of Europe. . . .

Your forefathers unite themselves with these addresses, and make a solemn appeal to you. Think that in my voice there are mingled the voices of your ancestors of the hoary past, who with their own bodies stemmed the onrush of Roman world-dominion, who with their blood won the independence of those mountains, plains and rivers which under you have fallen prey to the foreigner. . . . There comes a solemn appeal to you from your descendants not yet born. “. . . Take care that the chain does not break off with you; see to it that we, too, may boast of you and use you as an unsullied link to connect ourselves with the same illustrious line.” . . . If there are truth in . . . these addresses, then are you of all modern peoples the one in whom the seed of human perfection most unmistakably lies, and to whom the lead in its development is committed!

Review

1. How did Fichte define the German nation? What was the source of national feeling, according to Fichte?
2. What forces were behind the development of German national identity and nation building, in Fichte’s presentation? Did those forces favor a cultural development of German nationalism or a state-oriented nationalism? Why?
3. How did Fichte use history to explain German nationalism? How did he use it to motivate Germans of his day to rally around the German nation, as he defined it?