EN
This study aims to disprove a thesis about the exceptional impact of this Crisis upon the qualitative and quantitative transformation of German nationalism in this part of the German Confederation, using an analysis of the response of the population of the Cisleithanian part of the Austrian Empire on the Rhine Crisis of 1840. It simultaneously aims to throw doubts on the as yet black and white perception of Austria as “Europe’s China,” whose inhabitants were cut off from the events beyond their borders by an information barrier erected by state repression. Yet, as this study aims to prove, educated Austrians, in particular, were acutely interested in international events; they had sufficient access to relevant and often highly reliable information and, in fact, no one prevented them from discussing these events in public. If the Rhine Crisis had a completely negligible impact upon the development of German Nationalism in Cisleithania, then, clearly, the main reasons for this state of affairs were to be found somewhere else than in the repressive apparatus of the Austrian Empire.