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Gordon Craig, professor emeritus of history at Stanford University and author of The Germans, sums up this tragic period: "The Germans from earliest times were a free and independent people, and dreadful things happened to them, which inhibited those qualities and induced others. After the Thirty Years' War, habits of authoritarianism and dependence crept into the behavior of average Germans. One result is what one German writer has called the 'retarded nation.' The nation never did have the opportunity to get a political education, as in the English Enlightenment or the American Enlightenment."
The feebleness of the Habsburg suzerainty over fragmented Germany inspired not only the aggressiveness of France but also that of a newcomer -- Prussia. Originally a Baltic tribe, the Prussians were conquered and Christianized in a 13th century "crusade" by the Order of Teutonic Knights, but only in 1525 was the remote duchy of Prussia acquired through a marriage by the Hohenzollerns, the family that served as electors of Brandenburg. Brandenburg- Prussia was a rather bleak and impoverished land, its capital, Berlin, little more than a dusty garrison town. But its ruling Hohenzollern family was shrewd and single-minded in building up its wealth, its holdings and its army. When King Frederick the Great acquired the throne in 1740, just as Maria Theresa became Empress of Austria, he ruthlessly attacked her and seized the prosperous province of Silesia. Maria Theresa fought two bitter and unsuccessful wars of revenge, then shamelessly joined Prussia and Russia in partitioning Poland. Frederick thus put together for the first time the various Hohenzollern holdings from East Prussia to the Rhine.
Frederick's Prussia claimed with some justice to be a major power in Europe, but his successors lacked his many talents, and when the French once again appeared on the horizon, Prussia ignominiously collapsed before Napoleon on the battlefield at Jena. Napoleon finally abolished the moribund Holy Roman Empire in 1806, keeping the title Emperor for himself. He seized all German territory west of the Elbe and created a French-dominated Confederation of the Rhine, with his brother Jerome as King of Westphalia. As Napoleon was retreating from Moscow in 1812, however, the repeatedly beaten Germans rose up again to fight what they still call the Wars of Liberation. An allied army defeated Napoleon at Leipzig, drove him back to Paris and then into exile.
The Europe that was reconstituted at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 included a new German Confederation, headed by the Habsburgs of Austria, but also containing 38 other kingdoms, duchies, free cities and such. It had a great culture -- this was the age of Beethoven and Schubert, Goethe and Hegel -- but it was hardly a nation. The very idea of German unification was nothing more than an abstract concept, a dream of liberal intellectuals.