This interdisciplinary study shows how the emerging awareness of historicity shaped the concepts of modernity, identity, and culture in German thought around 1800 and how this awareness determined the German notion of the priority of cultural identity. By contextualising key texts from Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, German Romanticism and German Idealism in relation to post-Enlightenment debates on historicity and modernity, the study reveals the Goethezeit to be far more intellectually coherent than has been previously assumed.