The History of the Holy Roman Empire

Austro-Prussian rivalry had religious overtones, accentuating differences between Catholics and Protestants present since the Reformation. Friedrich Karl von Moerzer termed this the double fatherland of divided political and religious loyalties. More radical thinkers around 1760 began demanding a new kind of romantic national identity based on essentialist criteria like language and culture. These ideas gained ground amid the renewed warfare of the 1790s, when some believed it was necessary for the empire to die in order for Germany to be reborn.