The development of modern German literature and philosophy in the 19^th and 20^th centuries was intimately connected to the problem of German nationalism, which was hardly recognized in 1800, but which came to define German politics and culture by the 20^th century. While writers such as Hannah Arendt often attempt to separate a “good” nationalism grounded in liberal values from a “bad” nationalism grounded in race and pan-Germanic movements, some more recent work has suggested that it is not so easy to make such a distinction. Not only is the notion of a Kulturnation essential to the idea of an over-arching pan-Germanic identity, but the classical literary tradition from Goethe and Kleist to Heine and Fontane was also inseparable from the development of a German national consciousness. While the issue of nationalism in the early 20^th century literature saw significant conflicts, they continued to be played out within a literary field between writers such as Ernst Juenger and Gottfried Benn on the one hand and the Mann brothers and Alfred Doeblin on the other. This panel seeks to investigate the way in which the development of German nationalism was essential to the development of German literature and philosophy in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, establishing the framework for which central Europeans could understand their own identity. Jaime Whitney Roots analyzes the the nineteenth-century folktale and song collections of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen in order to trace the instrumentalization of an ostensibly “pure” Germanic past during a time when European borders were continually being redrawn. As the collectors believed the Germanic past to be fading into cultural oblivion, they promoted the appearance of an unbroken link from ancient past to present. The collectors also worked to create and establish a unifying cultural memory and therefore the illusion of a unified history to serve as a foundation for the present and future of German culture. During a time when the concept and role of history as a discipline was developing, the collections sought to establish history itself, as well as what it meant to be “German.” Johannes Steizinger describes a related development in German philosophy in which Bruno Bauch provided a philosophical framework for understanding Germany as a Kulturnation by constructing in the early 20^th century the idea of a distinctively “German” philosophy that was grounded in the idealist tradition of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Bauch uses this tradition to argue that nations were the synthesis of a natural fact (natürliche Gegebenheit) and a cultural fact (kultürliche Gegebenheit), with the nature of a nation consisting of biological, spiritual, and linguistic components. Developing their self-consciousness through their history, nations for Bauch become aware of their historical destiny and express their national consciousness in cultural goods. Geoffrey Wildanger analyzes the poetry of Stefan George to argue that his charisma, which scholars have also found to characterize German fascism, lies in the aesthetics of his poetry, no less than it does in the sociological character of his milieu. While the shape of the George circle was determined by the aesthetically closed-off character of the hermetic poem, the poems themselves demonstrate a relation between poetry and the forms of German fascism. Matthias Mueller traces the rise of nationalism through the lens of German reactions to the Franco-Prussian War and World Wars I and II. While the victory of 1871 had already fueled nationalism, the inability and unwillingness to come to terms with the defeat of 1918 only increased this tendency and enabled the rise of the Nazi party. Only a second defeat in 1945 silenced this nationalism for the decades to follow. Mueller’s paper analyzes the reactions by Friedrich Nietzsche and Heinrich and Thomas Mann to the three wars between 1871 and 1945 in order to discuss the relation between nationalism, victory, and defeat, and analyze the realized and unrealized epistemological potential of being vanquished as it emerges in the utopian moment of defeat. Together, the papers trace the ways in which the issue of nationalism defined the development of 19^th and 20^th century German literature and philosophy.