Many prominent intellectuals, poets, jurists, historians, and philologists were obsessed around 1800 with the idea that a German nation-state could only be achieved by overcoming the "foreign" Roman law and restoring a "native" law. Even in 1846, the later member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, Georg Beseler, regarded Roman law as a "national misfortune." This continued a thought that had been presented since the beginning of the "German Movement" in the 18th century. Christian Lück examines the discourse of Justus Möser, who around 1770 provided important impulses to Goethe and Herder, through Savigny’s Historical School of Law, political Romanticism, Fichte, Kleist, Adam Müller, the Brothers Grimm, up to the Germanists' conference in 1846. The studies are intended as a contribution to the founding history of German studies as a historical science.