From the hills of the Caledonians

National identity in Scotland and Germany in the late 18th century

Abstract

During the last three decades of the eighteenth century German men of letters sensed that they had something to learn from their Scottish counterparts about the forging of a cultural and linguistic identity. By the second decade of the nineteenth century the pupils had far outstripped the teachers and were already embarked on a quest for a full blown national identity. The Scots, by contrast, had completed a long and complex process of disowning their memory of a distinct Scottish sovereignity, discarding the intellectual apparatus that might have supported it - national myths, separatist historical scholarship and the ideas of uniqueness and superiority. The fate of James Macpherson's Works of Ossian (1765) serves as an illustration of these contradictory developments. In Scotland the success of Ossian was shortlived as the complexity of Scottish enquiries into history and society stretched far beyond Macpherson's idealized Highland world. Scottish historiography and political theory dispensed with the indigenous and ethnic dimensions essential for the emergence of Romantic nationalism. For many continental readers Ossian provided a model for their own search for a national identity through the revival of the indigenous cultural legacy. The German quest for a politically distinct national identity rose to pre-eminence in social and political discourse. By the early nineteenth century the Enlightenment affinities beween Scottland and Germany had given way to profoundly different political and cultural agendas. In Scotland the future was soundly British, Scotland's past had become the stuff of folklore, while Germany's past was being recast into a new form of national self-assertion.