ABSTRACT

What was the relation between German Philhellenism and German nationalism? To what extent, and in what ways, was the modern enthusiasm for ancient Greece, which gathered force throughout Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century and then climaxed in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century-and it is to this movement that I refer in the course of the present argument when I use the term “Philhellenism,” not to the related but obviously quite different European sentiment of affection and admiration for the modern Greeks1-influenced by, and to what extent and in what ways did it itself contribute towards shaping, the forces of national identity, with its attendant phenomena of competition and militarism, which grew in strength through all Europe during the course of the byand-large comparatively peaceful nineteenth century but then exploded catastrophically in the two world wars that disfigured the first half of the twentieth century? Must Humboldt bear part of the blame for Hitler?