Machiavelli and the Making of German Identity

The Italian Renaissance must be credited with a special value for the later German development. Clearly, the implicit and ideal ‘terminus ante quem’ is represented by Jacob Burckhardt’s influential 'Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien' (1860), which still underpins our view of the Italian Renaissance, yet was very far from being the first encounter of German culture with fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italy. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German authors also dealt with this legacy and appropriated it for their own needs. And what Germans needed the most from the eighteenth century onwards was a national identity. That is where and why Machiavelli comes into play, and what the present volume aims to assess.