Publisher's Synopsis
Around 1800, many renowned intellectuals, poets, jurists, historians, philologists were obsessed with the idea that a German nation-state could only be achieved by overcoming the "foreign" Roman law and restoring a "native" law. As late as 1846, Georg Beseler, later a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, considered Roman law a "national misfortune." He thus continued a thought that had been put forward with the beginning of the "German Movement" in the 18th century. Christian Luck examines the discourse from Justus Moser, who provided important stimuli to Goethe and Herder around 1770, to Savigny's Historical School of Law, political Romanticism, Fichte, Kleist, Adam Muller, the Brothers Grimm, and the Germanists' Day in 1846. The studies are intended as a contribution to the founding history of German studies as a historical science of German.
