The making of modernity: The Italian Renaissance in the German historical imagination, 1860-1930

Though the invention of the Renaissance as the 'mother of modernity' (Jacob Burckhardt) in the second half of the nineteenth century was by no means their work alone, German historians and writers played a particularly important role in the formation of a periodic concept, the Renaissanceidee or idea of the Renaissance, that is still with us today. While previously the Renaissance had been identified with the rebirth of classical antiquity and an evanescent flowering of the arts and sciences, these German authors conceived it as a momentous epoch in its own right, an intellectual and cultural revolution that fundamentally transformed man's understanding of his place in the natural as well as the social world and that gave birth to the central values (rationalism, secularism, individualism), ideologies (humanism, republicanism) and institutions (capitalism, the centralized nation-state) of modern Europe. Almost exclusively members of the educated middle class (Bildungsburgertum), they constructed the Italian Renaissance as a heroic new beginning after the 'backward' Middle Ages and as an antecedent of their own emancipatory efforts: an energetically meritocratic world of atomized individuals competing with one another on an equal basis, without regard for traditional religious, social and moral constraints.;This dissertation traces the vicissitudes of the idea of the Renaissance in German historiography and literature from the publication of Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) to Hans Baron's formulation of his 'civic humanism' thesis in the 1920s. Examining the writings of key figures, including Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Ernst Kantorowicz, it analyzes the immense initial appeal and the eventual decline of the Renaissance as a cultural and historical ideal for the German middle class. In particular, the dissertation shows how the German discourse on the Renaissance was tied up with questions of religion, Kultur, and national identity and how it was determined by rival tropes such as medievalism and the cult of the Reformation. It analyzes the Renaissance as a site of contestation and a concept fraught with the expectations, hopes and fears that defined the German bourgeoisie's experience of modernity.