Political Friendship: Liberal Notables, Networks, and the Pursuit of the German Nation-State, 1848-1866

From the 1840s through the mid 1860s, a network of liberal academics, journalists, and artists across the German Confederation (1815-1866) formed close personal relationships with one another and with monarchs and state ministers. The resulting network rested on what contemporaries often called “political friendship.” My dissertation assesses how pro-Prussian liberals formed, maintained, and used these relationships in part to cultivate influence over leaders in Baden, Coburg, and Prussia. They sought to advance liberal policies and kleindeutsch national unification, largely parallel to such well-studied organizations as the Nationalverein. In the process, members of the liberal network shaped accommodations with conservative officials while demonstrating the centrality of political friendship to German political culture in the nineteenth century. Analyzing the debates and actions of this network, this dissertation argues that German liberals “thought with their friends” to reconcile liberalism’s ideals with everyday personal, professional, and political realities in an era marked by crisis. The Revolutions of 1848/49 and the First Schleswig War (1848-1851) accelerated the interweaving of individual political friendships into an informal network of mutual support. The end of the Revolutions and the conclusion of the war in Holstein in 1851 drove most members into internal exile. In this post-Revolutionary context, the political friends expressed emotions—particularly in their correspondence—to build trust, check political non-conformity, and ensure the reciprocation of professional favors. The opening of German political society around 1860 offered the political friends new opportunities to develop their views outside the network: in civic associations, state legislatures, and monarchical courts. Although they never questioned the merits of forming a unified kleindeutsch state, members of the network did differ on how to reach this goal. Because the political friendships they had cultivated in the 1840s and 1850s equated political consensus with emotional wellbeing and professional advancement, their policy debates became increasingly adversarial in the 1860s. Failing to unify around a set of policies and political tactics, the network finally dissolved with the Seven Weeks War of 1866. The historical dynamics of political friendship in this network illuminate previously neglected aspects of nineteenth-century liberalism and the uncertain path to a German nation-state.

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