The Thirty Years War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (review)

In a revised version of his 1998 Harvard thesis, Kevin Cramer traces the revival of interest in the Thirty Years War that followed Friedrich Schiller’s history and Wallenstein drama trilogy in the 1790s and continued unabated into the twentieth century. The book successfully addresses two fields. It provides a sharp and detailed discussion of what nineteenthcentury Germans thought about key aspects of the Thirty Years War, and reveals what their disagreements tell us about the controversial process of German unification. Attempts to understand the Thirty Years War became part of the controversy between a Protestant ‘little Germany’ led by Prussia, and a largely Catholic ‘greater Germany’ that included Austria. The German Confederation suppressed discussion of the national question after 1815 so historical writing, literature and poetry became a way of expressing political opinion and speculating about Germany’s future. Two competing narratives emerged, each associated with the rival Protestant and Catholic solutions to the national question. The ‘Catholic’ perspective was also voiced by some Protestant writers in the smaller states annexed by Prussia in 1866. However, for Cramer, confession far outweighed the significance of local politics and he stresses how even academic history of the Rankean sort remained rooted in Old Testament narratives as stories of suffering and redemption. The central argument is that the historiography of the Thirty Years War contributed substantially to ‘the crippling conviction that German history was an eternal cycle of subjection, sacrificial death and rebirth’ (p. 227). Cramer endorses Michael Geyer’s concept of ‘catastrophic nationalism’ to characterise the widespread dread of imminent, total collapse combined with fantasies of violent redemption expressed as the nation’s alleged potential to arise from the ashes of total war.

The events of the Thirty Years War were interpreted through the conviction that Germany had a special covenant with God who would reward His chosen people with the gift of nationhood only after long suffering. Under the experience of revolution in 1789–1848, Catholics presented the Bohemians and Protestant activists as subverting the legitimate order in the Holy Roman Empire in 1618. The success of Catholic arms by 1629 placed Germany on the cusp of national greatness, symbolised by Wallenstein’s project for an imperial navy in the Baltic. All was wrecked by (Protestant) Swedish and later French intervention, leaving a collective remembrance of sacrifices rejected. The Protestant counterpart that eventually prevailed fitted the War into a positive narrative of ‘German liberty’ from the Catholic yoke beginning with the Reformation.

The central thesis is powerful and broadly convincing. However, it leaves too little room for other forms of remembrance and for the instrumentalisation of the past for more specific, local purposes as was frequently the case in Germany’s rich landscape of history associations and museums. It would also have been helpful to have incorporated the findings of Claire Gantet and others who have studied the commemoration of the Peace of Westphalia from 1648 through public festivals at local level into the twentieth century.