Bismarck in Walhalla. The cult of Bismarck and the politics of national identity in Imperial Germany, 1890-1915

Diverse groups elevated Bismarck into a symbol of national identity through the building of monuments and the invention of new public ceremonies in order to appropriate for their political agendas the legitimacy that is inherent in the acknowledged right to speak for the nation as a whole. Chapter one describes the transformation of Bismarck from chancellor to cult figure between 1862 and 1898. Chapter two discusses Bismarck-fire-pillars, unique volkish monuments invented in 1898 as the supreme architectural expression of a deified \u27Bismarck in Walhalla\u27 and as a focal point of large-scale annual Bismarck-summer-solstice ceremonies. Drawing on the new cultural history that sees politics, culture, ideology, and social developments as linked in a dense web and paying close attention to the language of politics, chapters three to eight offer a detailed regional survey of the cult as it spread across German speaking central Europe. The emphasis is on the way class, confession, ethnicity and regional political traditions shaped local responses to the cult that ranged from approval over reluctant acquiescence to public protest. Chapter nine concludes that German national identity was not a fixed set of ideas that represent all Germans but rather a complex process of constructing and contesting identities in the public sphere. This process centered on public symbols of a national identity such as the Bismarck-fire-pillar and involved, in addition to a broad range of political and national organizations intent on translating the respect Bismarck commanded as the author of German unification into legitimacy for their diverse agendas, a large number of common Germans from all walks of life whose voices are usually not considered in discussions of German national identity