Public Expectations and Bureaucratic Experts: The Commissions of the German Confederation as Places of Political Bargaining (1816-1848)

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The research project investigates the formation, the inner structure, the staff and the activities of the committees of the German Confederation between 1816 and 1848. The object is to show how the federalist system of the German Confederation was put into political practice, how the Bund attempted to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the public and which were the social and cultural negotiation processes involved with this. In the context of a multi-faceted cultural history of administration, the project intends to shed new light on the manifold communication processes between administration and society and the interaction between bureaucratic agents and the objects of administrative actions. This will also allow to increase our insight into the symbolic enactment of the constitution of the German Confederation as well as its practical impact on the lives of the population. In the first phase of the project the research has focused on governmental source material. In the extension period, a closer look will be directed at sources from non-governmental agents, in order to analyse the perception of the German Confederation in the German public and to describe in detail the expectations of the public with regard to the Confederation. In connection with this, it is also intended to research the forms and the content of the Confederation’s self-representation as a political order of the German nation. In this way, the project aims to present the perspectives of all the agents involved in the negotiation processes, the governmental as well as the non-governmental. For this purpose, the following additional source material will be analysed: 1. leading organs of the daily and periodical press; 2. the minutes of the parliaments of important member states of the Confederation; 3. separate political pamphlets and books. The insights gained from these sources will be incorporated into the extensive monograph which is being prepared. A further object of the extension period is to make provision for the backup, storage and re-use of the research data which have been collected in the course of the project (committees of the German Confederation, members of the committees, petitions directed at the Confederation). For this purpose, the research data will be made accessible in an online database.