The introduction to The Jewish Imperial Imagination provides an overview of Baeck’s life, and of the book’s ventral argument. It shows how the Jewish Question – the discussion about emancipation and the place of Jews in modern society – was intertwined with other questions throughout the nineteenth century, including the questions of colonialism and imperial expansion. Instead of focusing on the nation-state, it shows the need to look at the imperial context. This is valid for Baeck’s thought, and German-Jewish thought more broadly. Finally, the introduction offers a theoretical framework for such analysis by developing the concept of “Jewish imperial imagination” as a way of moving beyond a simple dichotomy of ascribing to or resisting hegemonic narratives.

Everyone knows from experience that emotions are powerful. They motivate us, colour our relationships and views, determine what is important for us and what is not. But it is less clear how they affect history beyond individual lives and interpersonal relationships: how do they make history, and how are they themselves shaped by history? The introduction contextualizes these questions and presents a theoretical and methodological framework.

The outbreak of the First World War presented the German Kaiserreich’s cultural elite with a major dilemma. Should they jettison the output of poets and playwrights, artists and musicians from the newly hostile Entente countries from programmes for public consumption? Or should they claim them as part of the common cultural stock of humanity, and continue to enjoy them as before? These debates rose to an especially acute pitch over the works of Shakespeare, which by 1914 had become a much-loved staple of the Wilhelmine dramatic canon. Rather than abandoning Shakespeare, German elites began an intensive campaign to reframe Germany as his ‘true’ home, rooted in his apparent closeness to the essence of the ‘German spirit’ – with correlative contempt for his supposedly inadequate reception in the Anglosphere. Shakespearean texts and cultural institutions were also co-opted systematically into the Kaiserreich’s war effort: to boost the morale and lionize the calibre of the German soldiery, to mark milestone events in the war’s trajectory, and as part of German diplomatic offensives abroad, especially in neutral countries. Overall, this essay casts wartime Shakespeare in a new and unusual light, illustrating the potential for state military propaganda to engage in projects of cultural reclamation.

In the 1770s, Herder engaged with early forms of poetry and religion, highlighting the moral and political role of poets and priests in ancient Israel and ancient Germany (Saxony) as well as analysing the political systems of these societies as models of ‘unity in multiplicity’. He simultaneously also explored the historical development of ‘northern’ traditions, maintaining that they initially constituted a ‘wonderful mixture’ between Christianity and national poetry. His key idea was that the revival of Greek and Roman models of poetry in the early modern period had created a wedge between religion and poetry as well as the culture of the elites and the people, which in turn contributed to solidifying mechanical forms of government. However, modern historical consciousness—as exemplified in Shakespeare— had an enormous moral and political potential. Modern cultural leaders could cultivate new reflective forms of art and philosophy that would enhance the human capacity for self-determination as well as genuine sociability. This ethic would be fully in line with Christian morality, whilst also enhancing the status of their particular cultural and political community in international contexts. Herder proposed that a ʻpatriotic institute for Germany’s universal spirit’ could serve as centre of such a reform movement.

This epilogue considers the afterlife of music theatre and the Holy Roman Empire as well as its relevance today.

The Introduction places the book into its historical and historiographic contexts. German-language music theatre often plays a supporting role in musical histories of Central Europe circa 1800, as does the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was home to over 300 territories that were linked by politics and culture. Physically networking the Empire was Europe's first systematic postal system, which served as a precondition for the operation of the hundreds of theatre companies that performed within its territories . By first considering the contemporary and scholarly distinctions between German-language theatre and the 'Nationaltheater', this introduction draws on recent historiography to provide a musicological audience with the key features of, and concepts surrounding, the Holy Roman Empire. It then traces this long misunderstood polity's place in music historiography and ultimately posits it as an ideal framework to investigate the world of German music and theatre in the decades leading up to the turn of the nineteenth century.

This chapter turns to Max Weber's thought, situating him within the larger tradition of German social liberalism, to unearth the implicit assumptions that structure current theories of the relationship between democracy, domination, and the welfare state. Weber's thought forces democratic thinkers and actors to confront the inevitability of complex, bureaucratic organizations in the modern state and the distinctive challenges they pose to transformative politics. At the same time, Weber himself had an ambivalent relationship to such democratic politics. He shares with the social liberals the idea that welfare institutions can turn the democratic demands of the German socialists into the objects of instrumental state administration. They could, so he hoped, transform political conflicts over the organization of power within society-and the challenge to entrenched structures of domination that entailed-into conflicts over material needs that could be rendered calculable by state institutions. Weber's thought represents, at once, a necessary point of departure for thinking about democratic action in the welfare state as well as a particularly vivid distillation of the underlying assumptions that narrow the political horizon of current democratic theorists.