Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture and Memory by Karen Hagemann (review)

Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon contributes to a growing literature reassessing the so-called "anti-Napoleonic Wars" of 1806–1807 and 1813–1815, by offering an interdisciplinary interpretation of the role of the campaigns in shaping Prussian (and more broadly German) history and collective memory during the long nineteenth century. Karen Hagemann combines military, political, and cultural history to describe the rise and consolidation of German nationhood in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent appropriation of their commemorative practices for shifting political and cultural climates. This identity politics was driven by a dual process: on the one hand the construction of collective memory as an amalgamation of communicative memory (generational, temporal) and cultural memory (national, institutional); and on the other the history of suppression of gender from that collective memory. While this marginalization was often ascribed to men's and women's divergent experiences of war situations in the public and private spheres, Hagemann demonstrates how the link between late Enlightenment anthropological perceptions about national descent, identity, and character, and assumptions about "natural" gender hierarchies was instrumental in the efforts to collectively forget or "redomesticate" women's wartime participation, which pushed postwar Prussian political culture toward a cult of martial masculinity. The struggle over definitions of gender identities and relations thus provides the prism through which Hagemann reexamines the wars' lasting significance and various legacies.

This interpretative rationale undergirds the book's five parts: from the military and political history of the wars, their representation in a variety of media, commemorative practices, and circulation in the literary market, to their eventual deployment in both remembered and reconstructed German pasts. In contrast to Thomas Nipperdey's famous claim that "in the beginning was Napoleon" as the prime mover of modern German history (32), Hagemann's approach charts the internal experiences of military defeat, emotional crisis, and their catalyzing effect on Germany's subsequent transformation from Kulturnation to Staatsnation. That the campaigns of 1813–1815 came to be known as either "Wars of Liberation" or "Wars of Liberty"—in conservative or liberal interpretations, respectively—underscores their different legacies as either "wars of princes" launched against the external French threat or "people's wars" additionally encompassing internal emancipation struggles along class and gender lines. As Hagemann shows, such legacies were borne by a public sphere that enabled female authors to express themselves politically and wrest a modicum of control over the production of collective memory from professional historians. The book's in-depth analysis of a vast collection of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsheets, and poems, and their uses of "national pathos formulas" (64) as emotional catalysts in support of the war effort, attests to such media's success in entrenching ideas about national unity, gender order, and cultural and historical identity for generating a new sense of "Germanness." Although this assessment of the spread of nationhood via print culture and an "invention of tradition" of shared cultural heritage is not necessarily new, Hagemann points out the conceptual malleability of gendered thinking in both exclusive and inclusive iterations of nationalism: while Francophobia, antisemitism, and German chauvinism were staples of both liberal and conservative national discourses, the virtuous bourgeois family model informed the paternalistic "Volk family" (60) ideology of the nation, espousing the Prussian monarch as father of his people, as well as the more radically democratic (and French-influenced) visions of fraternal civic patriotism.

More broadly, the book raises important questions about the politics of national memory in modern German history. By focusing on autobiographical and memory literature that transmitted the experiences of violence, devastation, and death of combatants and civilians alike, Hagemann's book goes against the grain of the triumphalist war narratives of canonical Prussian and Wilhelmine historiography, which embraced the dominant monarchic-conservative version of German nationalism in the post-1848 era. Although the so-called "nationalist machinery" driving a cult of self-sacrifice and heroic death for the fatherland held...