Germany changed dramatically over the hundred years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of World War I. No area of the economy, society, politics or culture remained unaffected. Processes such as industrialization, population growth and urbanization transformed the face of the countryside and cities alike and led to rising social mobility, but they also caused new problems. The steam engine and other new technologies revolutionized craft and industrial production, and the railway system connected businesses and people in different regions. Long before unification, the German economy and society had begun to coalesce. The literary market also became increasingly national. More and more people were able to read. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, nearly 100 percent. Technological changes in paper manufacturing and the printing industry allowed for the production of cheap illustrated reading matter. Books, newspapers and magazines became mass commodities, sources of profit, but also of unease. The conservative elites in state and society feared the spread of “subversive” liberal, democratic and socialist literature to broader strata of the population. As before, the response of governments was political suppression of the opposition and censorship. But the forms of communication control were adapted to the new social and political circumstances.

In this chapter, I first describe the changes in political culture and communication control, which were one important factor that influenced the production of collective memories. Then I explore the transformation of the literary market, which played a crucial role as well, and finally I look at the development of the reading public over the long nineteenth century. My main argument is that the process of constructing nationally shared – albeit contested – collective memories of the Anti-Napoleonic Wars would have been impossible without the evolution of a culture-consuming national public. And, conversely, that the emergence of nationally shared memories in literature contributed to the making of a national reading public.