Today, the Hanseatic League is anchored in the general consciousness of Germans as the ‘secret superpower’. Around 1800, however, the Göttingen professor Sartorius chose it as the subject of a major work because he could find nothing more irrelevant than this ‘half-forgotten antique’. How could a half-forgotten antique become a superpower? The lecture will trace the mnemonic strategies which were used by historians from 1830 to anchor the Hanseatic League in the minds of the Germans, first as a history of the Third Estate and the Free Cities, then as a (proto-)Protestant unifier against the hated Habsburgs, and finally as a Germanic national maritime power against England.
