Chapter 2 introduces the two places which were the most significant in Goethe’s life: Frankfurt, the city of his birth, and Weimar, the duchy where he lived from the age of twenty-six. The chapter explains the differing political weight of Frankfurt and Weimar – Frankfurt being the nearest that the Holy Roman Empire had to a capital city, Weimar being altogether more provincial, though nonetheless the capital of one of the more important ‘old principalities’. Moreover, it sets the two places in the context of the upheavals of the time, examining, for example, Weimar’s shifting geopolitical allegiances during and after the Napoleonic era.

This chapter on the German Confederation examines the largest cornerstone of the new European security system, designed to stabilise the European centre and provide an institutional structure for the cooperation of the thirty-eight remaining German states in relation to the other powers. After addressing and commenting upon the (lack of) historiography on the Bund, the chapter squarely puts this analysis of the Confederation in the context of European collective security operations, with the Bund as one of the pillars of this new post-Napoleonic security edifice, especially tasked with securing a ‘double balance of power’. The chapter ultimately fleshes out the role of the Confederation as laid down in the Bundeskriegsverfassung: to provide security for the states of the German Confederation and at the same time be the ‘pacific state of Europe’ (Heeren).

Ambassadorial conferences formed a primary mechanism of the Vienna system of international relations and of the related European security culture that emerged after 1815. These gatherings offered more flexible opportunities for multilateral consultation and negotiation than did the rarer congress summit meetings. The London conferences of 1816–19 were the first to be planned, as part of British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh's efforts to internationalise abolition of the African slave trade, and they ultimately also took up interdiction of the Barbary corsairs of North Africa. The conferences established connections between these issues that are crucial to understanding European policies toward both abolition and the corsairs, and which reveal how these questions were matters of European – and African – security as well as of humanitarian intervention. As the Vienna settlement extended beyond Europe into the Atlantic and Islamic worlds, the projection of European power overseas to protect security of persons and property could at the same time bring violence in its wake.

This chapter analyses the development of transnational policing as a crucial element of the federal–transnational security regime of the German Confederation, which the Congress of Vienna had established in 1815 to maintain external and internal security. Narratives of cross-border political subversion and crime triggered new modes of political and transnational policing in nineteenth-century Europe, resulting in both formal police cooperation as well as in various actors and techniques of transnational policing and securitisation. Through the ‘commission-mode’ and the ‘conference-mode’, policing agencies aimed at intelligence, surveillance and suppression, and contributed to the production and dissemination of a systematic knowledge base on political subversion and international crime. In the process, they influenced the development of security narratives and logics and practices of securitisation, and constituted important elements of the emerging European security culture.