SOURCE: Fulda, Daniel. “Telling German History: Forms and Functions of the Historical Narrative Against the Background of the National Unifications.” In 1870/71-1989/90: German Unifcations and the Change of Literary Discourse, edited by Walter Pape, pp. 195–207. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Fulda discusses the historical writings of Freytag and their connection with German unification.

When Gustav Freytag observed Prussian regiments during the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, he involuntarily associated them with Teutonic hordes.¹ This image gave him a sudden insight into that strange mixture of continuity and change which he understood as national history and which gave him the idea for the cycle of novels Die Ahnen. He meant to trace the stages of the rising evolution of the German nation from the migration of the people (Völkerwanderung) to his own century. 119 years later, however, in another “year of history,” Peter Handke in his search for...