I've noticed that in texts written decades before the formation of Germany as a nation-state in 1871, authors regularly refer to "Germany", despite the fact that no such country existed at the time. For example, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) refers to "Germany", and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels frequently refer to "Germany" in their early texts written in the 1840s.
I understand that there was a German language and a German people, but how did the concept of the noun "Germany" become so common before it came into being as a distinct nation? Was the collection of independent states referred to collectively as "Germany" back then?
Let me know if this is more of an /r/asklinguistics question.
*sigh*
As with all these things, it's all Charlemagnes fault. That said, let's wade again into the muddy waters of the end of the Carolingian empire and the birth of the geographical, political and cultural clusterfuck that is the Holy Roman Empire.
The Carolingian empire was divided into three parts, in a stroke of absolute creative genious they were named West, Middle and East Francia. I am not going to get into the politics and wars surrounding that, nor how the HRE was born and became an elective monarchy, anyway, I've written about that before.
Now, how old is Germany as a concept? Old. The Salzburg annals from 919 mention it although that might a modernization in the oldest surviving copy from the 13th century so let's disregard it. We know for a fact it was a well established idea from the 11th century when it was extensively used in the investiture controversy surrounding Henry IV. The papacy consistently refered to him as King of the Germans whereas he in response refered to himself as King of the Romans. Basically, it was all a feud over whether or not the Holy Roman Emperor had claim to all previously roman lands or merely all "German" lands (this is gros oversimplification but it will serve for now).
In either case, around this time the idea of Germany in the sense that it was defined only as the kingdom in which the Germans lived came to be widely used although the whole notion of exactly to what degree the king of the Germans was also an emperor and maybe even heir to the roman empire continued to be a point of contention for a few hundred years.
TL;DR - Germany is young in terms of a modern nation state but old in terms of the home of the German people.