Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin

This book focuses on a remarkable group of nineteenth century Berlin artists and thinkers to examine the ways in which selfhood and cultural solidarity came to be understood and experienced as components of historical identity. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Felix Mendelssohn, Jacob Grimm, Friedrich Karl von Savigny and Leopold von Ranke became associated in 1840 with the cultural agenda of a regime that hoped to forge solidarity among its subjects by encouraging identification with a constructed public memory.