“Poetry and the law are born in the same cradle”. Thus Jacob Grimm, the great
Romantic philologist and founding father of German studies, wrote in 1816. This
famous statement was inspired by the new juridical science fostered by his ma
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ster, Friedrich Carl von Savigny. With the establishment of the Historical School
of Law in 1814, and by assigning a fundamental role to the jurists’interpretation,
Savigny had proposed to maintain the old Reich’s heritage in Germany rather
than introducing a civil code fashioned after the Napoleonic template, thus lay
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ing the foundations of a bond between the study of the old German law, the Ro
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mantic Lied and the aspirations of many writers and intellectuals who, like Jacob
Grimm, believed in the rediscovery of the German people authentic traditions.
In nineteenth-century Germany, nation building and state building were thus
both conceived and supported by means of that bond between law and literature.
In this case the law-literature paradigm guided the process which combined the
cultural formation of German identity with the political project of national uni
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fication. The essay outlines the development of this fascinating and ambiguous
project and its ultimate failure in 1848.
