Attempts to present a coherent account of early modern German history
are often hampered by the German equivalent of the Whig theory of
history, by which all useful roads lead up to the creation of the
nineteenth-century power state (Machstaat) or institutional state
(Anstalstaat). In this kind of historiography, there are large blank
areas between the important events like the Reformation, the Thiry Years
War, the Seven Years War, and the French Revolution. During the
intervals of apparent stagnation between these events, Germany seems to
disappear, to be replaced by states such as Prussian and Austria,
Saxony, Bavaria, and the Palatinate. Substantial areas are ignored, and
groups such as the parliamentary Estates, which stood in the way of
state-building, are virtually written out of most accounts.
Rather than focusing on the separate histories of the individual German
states, Michael Hughes looks to the structure of the Holy Roman Empire
in its final centuries and writes an account of Germany as a
functioning, federative state, with institutions capable of reform and
modernization.
For nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians, the Empire was seen as
the embodiment of division and weakness. But by examining the first
Reich, Hughes reveals the persistence of the idea of Germanness and
German national feeling during a period when, according to most
accounts, Germany had virtually ceased to exist. At the same time, he
examines the element of continuity in Germany's development . . . in an
attempt to discover how far back in Germany's past it is necessary to go
to find the roots of the 'German problem, ' the Germans' search for a
political expression of their strongly developed awareness of cultural
unity.
