Political Poetry in Periodicals and the Shaping of German National Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

This study shows that between 1840 and 1871 German periodicals regularly featured political poems as part of the public debate over politics. This book includes a CD-ROM, which presents 950 poems collected from 81 German newspapers and journals. These poems constituted direct responses to the Rhine crisis of 1840, the revolution and counterrevolution of 1848-49, the war against Denmark in 1864, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, events central to the evolution of German nationalism in the nineteenth century and to German unification in 1871. The poems sought to influence public opinion and, most importantly, helped to shape German national consciousness. This book also examines how such poems and the publications in which they appeared created a literary discourse that built upon and revised its own traditions. The CD-ROM includes an annotated key word index as well as several additional indices.