German Capital Cities: Empowerment and State Construction, 1815–66
The end of the Holy Roman Empire marked the beginning of a new era in the German world. Hundreds of small political entities turned into 37 sovereign states, each one with an individual tale of integration and territorialization. An important role in these processes was that of the capital cities; a role which has been relatively overlooked in historical research.
Although the initial insight would be to define a linear connection between successful state construction and powerful capital cities, I will show a more complex view of the relations between states and capitals. Examining cartographic depictions of capital cities and infrastructural centrality shows that capital cities had to, simultaneously, strengthen and weaken, in order for the territorialization to succeed.
On the one hand, capital cities were seen as focal points for governmental plans, and as cultural, economic and administrative models for the state periphery. As a result, they transformed into demographic, political, economic, administrative and iconic centers. On the other hand, spatial infrastructures, such as the railroad, post, education and religious systems, were not necessarily centered on the capital, since they were intended to connect the whole state, focusing on the periphery. Demographic, geographic and historical constraints determined their shape and form, and not political centrality.
Deconstructing the role capital cities of independent German states, such as Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Wurttemberg and Baden, played in the spatial infrastructure and spatial imagination, shows contradicting processes of capital city development. Moreover, this infrastructural and cartographic analysis of the mid nineteenth century shows that, in contrast to customary historiography of state construction, an important factor of successful German state construction was a slightly weakened capital and strengthened periphery.