In the 19th and 20thcenturies , the historiography of the German territories - or at least of the territories of "Central Europe" (Mitteleuropa) - moved in different directions, in part following a pendulum movement driven by tendencies that were sometimes nationalistic, sometimes striving to transcend a national ideology. It has been observed that, at several decisive moments, Germany's history was channeled through European and international concertation, as was the case in 1648, 1815, 1918 and 1990. At various stages in its history, an anachronistic mismatch between the prevailing ideology and its interpretation of the past has led to contrasting conceptions of political historiography. Thus, in the aftermath of the Second World War, German historiography proceeded to rehabilitate the Holy Roman Empire, which had often been seen by generations of nationalist historians as an obstacle (certainly to the Modern Age). This rehabilitation was apparently in line with the predominant ideology of European construction in the post-war period.
The real legacy of the Holy Roman Empire, for Germany and for Europe in the present day, consists more in providing a laboratory among others (but one for which German constitutional history of the 19th and 20thcenturies presents a continuity of later examples) for grasping all the possible modalizations, according to political circumstances and constraints, of what political union means in a context of competing particularisms. Such an awareness of possible modalizations is undoubtedly far more useful for thinking about what a political union can be, in all its diversity, than the reference of an abstract notion of sovereignty, devoid of its historical contexts.
