Self-racism?

[Norman Humann]

It depends on how you count, though. What would you consider the beginning of the german nation?

The creation of the national anthem, or more generally the Deutschlandlied, by von Fallersleben, in the 1840s, falls into an epoch where Europe (apart from england and france or so) was, as you probably know better than me, divided into an uncountable number of duchies and kingdoms and what have you, with some Napoleon thrown in. The "national" movement to unify Germany as a single nation state was the progressive party back then - as opposed to today where nationalism is considered conservative regressive.

That's an interesting point, but considering national anthems, the Polish one was created in 1927 and the country existed before as a sometimes sovereign nation.

The creation of the unified German state out of the (Nord)deutsche Bund, the kingdom of Bavaria etc dates to 1871. The United States hence have a 100 years more of unified "national" history behind them if you count like that. Although... of course the US of the 1780s looked much different from today, which still shows in the separatist tendencies of some southern states *cough texas cough*, doesn't it If you count starting from the civil war, it's the same age, interestingly.

If you count the German "holy roman empire" as the beginning (which was neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire, as Voltaire remarked), we go waaaaaay back. But then we'd have to sing a hymn to emperor Otto or something The consensus opinion seems to be that the people living in and running the holy roman empire didn't really feel a strong national unity and identified more with their local tribe, the rulers being more interested in their particular small patches on the map, and relations between noble families, than a unified german nation.

You're right, I forgot about the whole mess with most of the European nations. I just kind of have this idea in the back of my head from learning Polish history. Poland was one country from 966 and it never was as divided as most other countries.