ABSTRACT
Germanic tribes’ famous defeat of the Romans in the Teutoburger Forest in AD 9. But agreeing on what constituted ‘Germanness’ was more tricky, and it was only towards the end of the eighteenth century that Germans began seriously to consider what this meant in practice. A further complication was that German nationality was, until very recently, understood as being granted on the basis of blood lineage (see Chapter 6). ‘Germans’ living many miles apart therefore felt some allegiance to one another through the prism of what came to be known as the Kulturnation (‘cultural nation’). Resolving to everyone’s satisfaction issues of where a German state, incorporating as many Germans as possible, should actually be therefore proved immensely difficult.
