CHAIR: Eva Engel

CO-CHAIR: Jesse Angrist

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In 1815, the Congress of Vienna created the German Confederation, a government to coordinate the economies of thirty-nine of the “German” states, but this effort to unite the German-speaking world proved largely ineffective, as did the later efforts to create a customs union among many of the same countries. As nationalism rose in Europe at large, the liberal, nationalist revolutions of 1848 rattled the continent’s aristocracy but were unsuccessful in creating a single, unified German state. German liberals, whose armed, revolutionary zeal had been frustrated, turned their attention to gradually reforming the backwards, autocratic regimes populating Central Europe, chief among them the Prussian and Austrian monarchies themselves. While they tended to their meager parliamentary reforms across the countless states of the Confederation, many harbored hopes that German unification itself would, by whatever means it was to be achieved, be a vehicle to create a more just, free, and equal society for all German speakers in Europe.

In June 1866, when our committee begins, the Seven Weeks’ War had just broken out between Austria and Prussia, with Austria being supported by Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, and other German states. Prussia, led by Otto von Bismarck, went into the war with the expectation of unifying the German region under its rule. The long-term rivalry between Prussia and Austria meant that neither country could settle for just half of the region, and neither country could be incorporated under the rule of the other. Minor German states are now in a perilous position, forced to choose between an alliance with Austria or Prussia in the hopes of maintaining at least some independence after the war. Who will they ally with? Will they still hold on to their centuries-old sovereignty, or bow to a seemingly inevitable nationalism which now dominates Europe? And, following the war, what will the resulting German state(s) look like?