Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany

Historical comparisons between Ireland and Germany are few and far between. Felician Prill and Kimberly Cowell-Myers have written on the parallels between Irish and German Catholicism and Tim Wilson on inter-ethnic violence in inter-war Ulster and Silesia. The discrepancy in size between the island of Ireland and the German Empire established in 1871 appears to most historians, however, an insurmountable barrier to meaningful comparison. Historians of Germany typically look to large states such as France and Britain as comparators. Ireland is rarely treated to comparative analysis of any kind because its subject status, up to the early twentieth century, makes it an apparent anomaly within western Europe and its more obvious comparators—the subject nations found in large parts of the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires—are not well known to historians of Ireland. Shane Nagle eschews these conventions in this compelling study of nationalist historiography in modern Ireland and Germany. He examines the writings of the leading nationalist historians in each country from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Ireland lost its domestic parliament and much of Germany was under Napoleonic rule, to 1932, when Éamon De Valera of Fianna Fáil took power and Hitler prepared to make a claim on the German chancellorship. The names of the subjects under examination here are chosen for their prominence within the nationalist canon and will be familiar to historians of each country, if not of the other. These include, on the German side, Leopold von Ranke, Heinrich von Sybel, Johannes Janssen, Felix Dahn, Gustav Freytag, Heinrich von Treitschke and Johannes Haller, and, on the Irish side, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, A.M. Sullivan, Standish O’Grady, W.E.H. Lecky, Eoin MacNeill and Alice Stopford Green (the only woman to achieve such prominence in the field). Nagle assesses their works thematically, devoting a chapter each to their discussion of the origins of their nations, the influence of confession on their narratives, their definitions of national territory and their attitudes towards outsiders. The final chapter introduces a transnational dimension to the analysis by revealing the considerable familiarity among Irish and German historians with one another’s work and providing examples of mutual influence. An appendix provides brief biographies of the main historians considered

Ancient history · Archaeology · Empire · German · Historiography · Irish · Nationalism · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Subject (documents · Classics · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy