Culture played an important role in creating the idea of the nation: art and poetry, stories and music helped express and shape nationalist feelings.
Romanticism: a cultural movement which sought to develop a particular form of nationalist sentiment.
Romantic artists and poets generally criticized the glorification of reason and science, and focused instead on emotions, intuition and mystical feelings.
Their effort was to create a sense of a shared collective heritage, a common cultural past, as the basis of a nation.
Romantics such as the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) claimed that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people – das volk and through folk songs, folk poetry and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation (volksgeist) was popularized.
The emphasis on vernacular language and the collection of local folklore was not just to recover an ancient national spirit, but also to carry the modern nationalist messageto large audiences who were mostly illiterate.