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fundamental geopolitical units: Prussia and Austria constituted two of these and stretched respectively from the Slavic north-east and south-east towards the third unit which consisted of the cluster of states that previously formed Napoleon's Rhine-Federation. From 1815, they all regrouped as the German Federation with its proto-parliament called the Bundestag, a two-house assembly in Frankfurt which met at the palace of Thurn and Taxis. In truth it was hardly more than a talking shop of querulous fiefdoms and mini-states all pushing and shoving for advantage with the biggest players, Austria and Prussia, in the upper ‘Presidium’ making the major decisions.
    The Bundestag representatives weren't elected and it was very far from being ‘democratic’ in the modern sense. As unlikely as it may seem today, these various states, including Prussia, muddled along under the respected but distant Austrian emperor who historically had been the inclusive figurehead of all the German-speaking people of Europe. Napoleon's defeat of the Austrian Emperor Franz II and the dissolution of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire in 1806 still left the Austrian Emperor with an historic entitlement unmatched by other German rulers. The Holy Roman Empire had existed since 962 and had maintained its seat in Vienna since the sixteenth century, though it had long ceased to be either ‘holy’ or ‘Roman’. Even by 1806, it was an anachronism.
    One bit of diplomatic horse-trading to come out of the Congress of Vienna was a foretaste of what a unification of the German mini-states under Prussia might become: it was agreed to hand the Rhineland to Prussia as a sop for agreeing to let Russia take Warsaw. Significantly, this included the Ruhrgebiet,an area rich in mining and industry that guaranteed Prussia great wealth and allowed it in the coming decades to rise above rival German states. The result of this decision, added to the other regions that already made up the patchwork of Prussia, was the near encirclement of the independent states of the northern and central German Federation. As a purely German State, Prussia, despite its smaller share of Slavic holdings in the north-east, now far exceeded Austria, whose realm reached into Italy, Hungary, and deep into the Slavic East.
    Biedermeier Life and the Revolution of 1848
    The years 1815 to March 1848 are often referred to as the ‘Biedermeier Age’, portrayed usually as a period of comfortable bourgeois self-satisfaction. Indeed, the very name of ‘Biedermeier’ was concocted by the satirist Ludwig Eichrodt as a composite of two smug figures named ‘Biedermann’ and ‘Bummelmeier’ (‘Bieder’ in German means ‘conventional and stuffy’). Nevertheless, the Biedermeier years were anything but stolid and comfortable. The period immediately following the Congress of Vienna often evokes cosy images of ‘Hausmusik’ and intimate performances of Schubert Lieder and chamber works; yet Hausmusik, or musical evenings in private homes, were about the largest assemblies allowed by Metternich's secret police. Schubert himself was not as innocuous as one might believe. He occasionally used coded metaphors to spice up the texts of some of his best-known Lieder. 10 Eduard Hanslick, Wagner's subsequent bête noir , moved to Vienna from Prague in 1846 and recalled the two years before the revolution of March 1848 as offering only a diet of empty virtuoso recitals; intellectual and artistic life had stagnated. The secret police made political discussion impossible and censorship of all publications became obsessive. Metternich's suppression of national ambitions by keeping all debate under tight surveillance was a wilful misunderstanding of the aspirations of the growing middle classes and it inflamed rather than controlled the national mood. Yet powerful voices were being heard. The genteel age, peopled by genteel ‘Biedermeier-Burgers’ who were themselves mindful of recent revolutions in France and