Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansionism and Nationalism 1848–1884. By Matthew P. Fitzpatrick. Monographs in German History, vol. 23. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2008. Pp. x+237. Cloth $99.95. ISBN 978-1-84545-520-0

摘要

“The support and funding of the fleet was articulated by the politically aware German public as a national task,” writes Matthew Fitzpatrick, “with naval associations quickly spreading throughout the German-speaking states and abroad, with private citizens vigorous in their appeals to establish a navy capable of asserting Germany's position abroad” (p. 36). The year is not 1898 but 1848, when all but one member of the Frankfurt National Assembly voted for the establishment of a German naval fleet, and even the lone dissident (Hermann Grubert of Breslau) recognized the potency of a navy as a symbol of national unity. According to Fitzpatrick, the enthusiasm of the 1848 revolutionaries for a naval fleet was no flash in the pan, but typical of early German liberalism's consistent embrace of colonialism and imperialism. “The history of early German imperialism and that of German liberalism were remarkably intertwined,” he observes, “yet the major English language surveys of German liberalism, Dieter Langewiesche's Liberalism in Germany and James Sheehan's German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century, have underplayed to the point of omission the role played by imperialism in the formulation of not only a liberal identity, but of a liberal national ideal” (p. 7). As this quote suggests, the young historian from Flinders University, Australia, is not afraid to pick fights with some of the biggest names in the field: Thomas Nipperdey, Wolfgang Mommsen, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler come in for similar criticism. Each, he suggests, has tended to portray German colonial history “as an historical dead end half a century before it was to become one” (p. 5).