Religionskonflikt und Öffentlichkeit: Eine Mediengeschichte des Kölner Kriegs (1582–1590) (review)

In 1582 Gebhard Truchsess, the prince-elector and archbishop of Cologne, joined the Protestant confession, intending to marry and keep his title with the associated incomes. The decision delegitimized the Cologne government and instantly created a Protestant majority among the Imperial electors, raising the specter of a non-Catholic emperor at some future time. The ensuing War of Cologne, which eventually became mixed up in the hostilities between Spain and Holland, was not only a struggle of guns and pikes; it was also a war of words and a challenge to the communications media of the late-sixteenth century. Eva-Maria Schnurr’s careful and exhaustive doctoral dissertation analyzes 182 texts in German connected with the war, in the light of scholarship pioneered by Bob Scribner on early-modern publicity with special reference to Germany. The pamphlets, poetry, tradefair reports, and news sheets discuss Truchsess’s confessional switch, the petition by the Cologne Protestants to the emperor, and the events of the war. They also debate such basic principles as religious freedom;“German liberty;” and duty to God, Church, and state. Schnurr combines a qualitative with a quantitative content analysis; thus the account of differences in emphasis between the many Protestant and the fewer Catholic examples, and the careful tracing of intertextualities across various media that shows meanings and expressions shared between one work and another, is accompanied by tabulation of the relative importance of discussions of legitimacy over simple information (drawing here on Uwe Jochum), of emotional appeals over appeals to reason (referring to Miriam Chrisman), of the relative importance of oral versus written borrowings, and of geographical and chronological distribution. She uses the term propaganda guardedly, as is appropriate in this time period, while identifying such attitude-building elements as demonization of the enemy (p. 388), charges of “tyranny” (p. 392), and references to the Spanish “black legend” (p. 391). She finds that the more analytical writings, tending to reach into the political decision-making process and the cabinets of princes, are more prominent where the object of attack is weaker—in this case, the Protestant side (p. 403). Nor does she neglect the wider context in which this publication activity occurred, in the presence of efforts at persuasion in the realms of the visual, the theatrical, and the religious.

How effective was it all, considering contemporary rates of literacy and the limited print runs? That, of course, is the key question of this type of research, and there are no easy solutions. As is often the case, the best information we have regarding circulation and contexts of reading, including the crossover between oral and written accounts, comes from the dataset itself. At least the authors were apparently reading each other’s works. No doubt, in principle, “through one communicative act, namely, the publication of a text, uncountable recipients were reachable, unknown to the author” (p. 428), as texts became objects of discussion and debate. Whether the publishing activity actually affected the conduct of the war in any way is almost impossible to assess; in spite of the overwhelming number of Protestant productions and their supposed morale-building function, the Catholic side won and Ernest of Bavaria took over definitively as prince-archbishop. The one potential reader who has left a trace of his impressions about events as they occurred, a certain Hermann Weinsberg, apparently, like many others living in cities, obtained his local news mostly by word of mouth and relied on the printed word only for faraway events. Was there a public sphere in late-sixteenth-century Germany? Because of the emancipatory implications of the concept of Jürgen Habermas, Schnurr, in the conclusion to this fine work, joins Wolfgang Behringer in opting for a notion closer to Manuel Castells’s “Space of Flows,” where critical discussion was first made possible.