The language-norm debate in the last third of the 18th century did not revolve solely around the linguistic question "What is High German?" Rather, it was preformed and organized by mentalities, general schemata of thought and evaluation. By collapsing a number of different social-constructivist theories (sociology of knowledge, cultural memory, discourse analysis), the study develops a model of the genesis of language awareness that draws on deep-semantic analyses to enable us to read the language-norm debate as a discourse on national identity inspired by cultural criticism.