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  • Enlightened War: German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz
  • Hew Strachan
Enlightened War: German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz. Edited by Elizabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2011. Pp. viii + 348. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571134950.

One of the apparently great divides in modern German history, that between learning and militarism—or, as the editors of Enlightened War put it, between Weimar and Potsdam—is a product of hindsight, evident more in the aftermath of the two world wars than from the perspectives of the late eighteenth century. Indeed, the Prussian reformers of 1795–1813 presumably would have been delighted to know that by 1914, a united German state would be both the world’s model for higher education and one of its preeminent military powers. Just as the shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism can create a false antithesis, so can that between the humanities and war.

The concept that unites the two most forcefully in the essays contained in Enlightened War is that of Bildung. Neither Immanuel Kant nor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for all their unhappiness about war, could rid themselves of the notion that war “has something sublime in it.” Those words are Kant’s, as quoted by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Porter, and Kant went on to say—in views that would be reflected by Werner Sombart in late 1914—that “a long-lasting peace tends to bestow dominance on a more commercial spirit and with it the basest egotism, cowardice and effeminacy.” That phrase is also quoted (if translated differently) by Galili Shahar, in his essay comparing Kant’s reasoned approach with Heinrich von Kleist’s emphasis on spontaneous action.

Kleist the romantic is the most obvious challenge to rationality discussed in Enlightened War. Kleist served and fought. Goethe accompanied the Duke of Weimar on the Valmy campaign in 1792, and he believed, as Krimmer makes clear in her own [End Page 149] essay on war in Faust II, that war could be as productive of genius as art. But Goethe could not accept war as morally necessary. Kant’s position, as interpreted by David Colclasure in his chapter on Kant and “just war,” was more ambivalent. Colclasure contrasts Kant’s acceptance of state sovereignty with his requirement that war must be waged with the assent of a state’s citizens, in order to argue that Kant accepted that there could be wars that were permissible.

Colclasure’s argument for the necessity of war is shaped by the Nazis, the Holocaust, and humanitarian intervention. Kant wrote on perpetual peace in 1795, and so his conception of war was more limited than that of today. However, even by 1806, the defeat of Prussia at Jena had made the moral imperative to fight look different. Johann Gottlieb Fichte regarded wars of national liberation, as war had now become for powers subordinated to the Napoleonic yoke, as morally defensible. Clausewitz regarded them as morally necessary. The Enlightened tradition had seen war as “a more bloody form of chess,” the description of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose views on Bildung are discussed by Felix Saure. But Clausewitz described it as a game of cards: in chess the board is open, and both sides start with equal forces; cards are kept close and hands are unequal. This distinction, made by Arndt Niebisch in a chapter that revisits the discussion of military intelligence in On War to excellent and illuminating effect, shows precisely how Clausewitz straddles both traditions, Enlightened and Romantic.

The fact that Clausewitz was part of a school of thinking, rather than an isolated phenomenon, is precisely why it is possible to talk about “enlightened war,” but only Heinrich von Bülow is mentioned here. So for those interested in the history of warfare, only two other chapters are important: Ute Frevert provides a summary of her arguments on Germany’s experience of conscription, and Wolf Kittler makes good use of Carl Schmitt’s theory of the partisan to examine the U.S. Army’s 2006 Field Manual 3–24 on counterinsurgency. This is an essay that tells us more...

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