2026 Theses Doctoral

Monuments for a State to Come: Architecture, Historicism, and German Nation-building, 1814–1871

Dessauvage, Maur P.

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which put an end to the religio-political order of the Holy Roman Empire, German architects were tasked with creating monuments to a newly imagined "nation" that had not yet materialized. Although the disparate German lands would remain a fragmentary territorial constellation until national unification in 1871, Prussian, Bavarian, and Austrian monarchs took up major commissions for architectural monuments to lay claim to the artistic, dynastic, religious, and popular traditions of the Holy Roman Empire. By examining this uncertain moment in European history, when the relationship between sovereign and people was actively being negotiated, this dissertation elucidates the dialectic between the conceptual emergence of national histories and the physical and ideological construction of national monuments. In doing so, I show how new kinds of history and historical fields—including the very discipline of art history—became fundamental to nineteenth-century projects of German nation-building.

This dissertation historicizes historicism, a term that designates the new attitudes towards the structure and movement of time that emerged around 1800, by situating historicist architecture in its specific political and intellectual contexts.

While historicism came to be increasingly accepted as a purportedly objective and disenchanted view of history in the second half of the nineteenth century, Monuments for a State to Come uncovers the earlier history of a different kind of historicism, one that sought to build upon the imperial past and re-enchant it with new meaning. I argue that nineteenth-century historical attitudes—far from neutral and value-free—were profoundly shaped by the sacred imagined community of the recently dissolved Holy Roman Empire.

I explore how this religio-political body was given new form in the historicist monuments of architects Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Leo von Klenze, and Heinrich Hübsch, among others. Schinkel envisioned a Gothic cathedral for aesthetic cultivation, religious ceremonies, and political festivals in Berlin, Klenze created a Doric temple for the worship of "national heroes" at the Walhalla near Regensburg, and Hübsch restored the Romanesque cathedral of Speyer as a paradigm for modern church-building. As the dissertation shows, these monuments kept alive the myths and fictions of the Holy Roman Empire well into the nineteenth century.