The first part of the 1800s on the continent was basically a mourning period for the death of the Holy Roman Empire. The Biedermeier music of Schubert was reflective and mournful, whereas by the revolutions of 1848, composers were finally looking forward to the future and asking the question: "What does it mean to be German?" - If Schumann began answering the great lingering question of "What is Germanness?" in 1850 with Rhenish, then that question finally began to be answered definitively by Wagner in works such as Die Meistersinger here by the later part of the century. From the death of the HRE in 1805 to the formation of the Third Reich, it took the Germans more than a century to figure out who they were as a people. We Americans are going through a similar process as our empire dies. Who are we? What does it mean to be American? to be White? We have just begun to ask ourselves these questions and although we can look to the experience of the Germans for guidance, we must ultimately come to our own conclusions and solutions - and we should not expect that process to necessarily take any less time.