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Full Idea
People who speak one language and read the same newspapers today call themselves 'nations', and also want much too eagerly to be of common ancestry and history.
Gist of Idea
People feel united as a nation by one language, but then want a common ancestry and history
Source
Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[203])
Book Ref
Nietzsche,Friedrich: 'Fragments from 1885-86 (v 16)', ed/tr. Del Caro,Adrian [Stanford 2020], p.60
A Reaction
This sort of nationalism is still with us, as white supremacy, and as history as mythology. But we can't just shake off a sense of which gene pools we come from, and which lines of history are our personal inheritance.