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Comment by throw-the-towel | Hacker News Reader

But a much older culture.

There was no unified "German" culture before Germany, so it doesn't make sense to talk about a "German" culture. Is it the northern maritime German? The southern Bavarian German? The Rhinelanders? The Swabians? Swiss germans? Northern Italian germans? Austrian Germans?

There was the German ethnicity, and a mosaic of Germanic languages.

Nonsense. Just because there was no stricly "unifed" (whatever that means) German culture does not mean that German culture does not exist. There is clearly a shared core of culture and ethnicity to all the listed peoples.

But again you can continue with trying to make it seem as if everything is equal to everything else.

I'll leave you with this little thought experiment. If we put a northen German, a Swiss German and a Spaniard in a room, how long will it take for the two germans to realize they have more in common with each other than the spaniard?

> If we put a northen German, a Swiss German and a Spaniard in a room, how long will it take for the two germans to realize they have more in common with eath other than the spaniard?

Switzerland is actually quite different from Germany.

Why would German culture start before unification, but American culture pops out of nothing at the founding of the nation?

Because they've been living where they're living now for about 1500 years, speaking the same language or more precisely speaking a group of closely-related languages, descended from the same small initial population.

US culture also starts earlier but the reality is a majority of what makes up US culture only showed up in the region much later. As well as expansion into Spanish and other areas that were absorbed.

I actually disagree with you. If you look at the centuries before 1870 there clearly was a recognition of a common culture, this isn't really controversial.

People often laugh about the Holy Roman Empire (mostly people who have not studied it) but it did actually serve as a distinct legal and cultural tradition for much the area that is now Germany (and more).

The language are different but not that different, with some effort you could understand each other. Many Germans from different parts fought together in mercenary bands or for Holy Roman Empire armies.

During the Revolution in the 1850 they tried to establish a unified Germany, so clearly the idea had wide recognition by then. You don't have movement like that spring up out of nowhere. After the Napoleonic war, German Confederation was a very recognized and understood fact.

Sure if was not fully 'unified' but neither is French or Spanish culture.

- Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History

- Helmut Walser Smith, Germany: A Nation in Its Time

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