National consciousness formed through literary and philological revival in Eastern Europe

Evidence

This term was first coined by Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die österreichische Sozialdemokratie, Vienna, 1907. Historical consciousness played a great role in the formation of national consciousness. The emancipation of nations from dynastic rule and the overlordship of an international aristocracy was accompanied by the emancipation of literature from the “international” language of the learned (Latin first and later French) and the growth of national languages out of the popular vernacular. It seemed that peoples whose language was fit for literature had reached national maturity per definitionem. The liberation movements of Eastern European nationalities, therefore, started with a kind of philological revival (the results were sometimes grotesque and sometimes very fruitful) whose political function it was to prove that the people who possessed a literature and a history of their own, had the right to national sovereignty. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2491

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the intellectual origin and mechanism of the concept of national consciousness (Otto Bauer’s coinage) that undergirds the imagined-community toolkit.
• XREF: Connects directly to Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ — vernacular print-languages as the basis of national consciousness — which the Islamophobia readings will presuppose. — connects to: Twentieth-century Balkan revolutionary situations were overwhelmingly national in character — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1040