Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, Maximilian to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493–1648, and The Peace of Westphalia to the Dissolution of the Reich, 1648–1806 by Joachim Whaley (review)

The Holy Roman Empire of the German nation disappeared in 1806. Its passing was unmourned by the German nationalist historians of the nineteenth century. They depicted a powerful late medieval empire that entered a period of decline after 1500, as confessional strife and the pursuit of selfish interests by the territorial princes turned this into the “ugliest phase of German history” (Heinrich von Treitschke). The Thirty Years War was the nadir. But out of the ashes two developments pointed to a better future. One was the rise of Brandenburg-Prussia; the other was the emergence of a truly national German culture in the eighteenth century. These laid the basis for the future German nation-state, so the argument went, and the Holy Roman Empire became increasingly an irrelevance, a moribund and sclerotic institution. Such a view, shorn of its more stridently “Borussian” aspects, remained commonplace through the middle of the twentieth century and beyond. Only in the last decades has a more positive view of the empire gained currency.

Joachim Whaley’s magnificent book gives readers the best, most persuasive available account in any language of the revisionist case. He turns the old view on its head. The late medieval empire was weak; it was the reforms of the 1490s that created a more flexible and durable institution able to absorb the crises of the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and the external threats posed by France and the Ottomans, which in turn created internal unity. The empire was, Whaley insists, a genuine polity, indeed a state (although not a modern nation-state), and he explores the legal and political institutions that held it together. Some of his best passages explore the networks of imperial cities, knights, and cathedral chapters in the prince-bishoprics that give substance to these claims. The empire was not irrelevant, even in the age of territorial absolutist states: it commanded loyalty and attracted reform efforts right up to the end, and it was eventually destroyed from without, rather than expiring of its own weaknesses. Whaley also shows that the idea of the German nation long preceded the eighteenth century. He displays a remarkably wide-ranging knowledge of German culture during the three centuries covered by his book. One of many examples is a superb chapter in volume 1 on Germany circa 1600 (“Irenicism and Patriotism on the Eve of the War”), which depicts the prevailing mood of crisis and responses to it, such as the turn to language reform.

Germany and the Holy Roman Empire has time for plague and poor relief as well as politics. Chapters that deal with the politics of both empire and territorial state form the spine of the book. Interspersed are thematic chapters devoted to economics, demography, social change, and culture, as well as to central topics such as the Reformation, witchcraft persecution, court society, and the Enlightenment. Whaley is especially strong on religion and culture (although he has disappointingly little on music). The stance is insistently antiteleological; the tone, judicious and urbanely argumentative. Close observers of the Cambridge style of history will notice the author’s skepticism about generalizations, whether these concern “confessionalization,” the reach of absolutism, or the contribution that cameralism made to economic growth, but Whaley never falls into an “it-was-all-so-much-more-complicated” nihilism. This is a bracing book of ideas and arguments, sustained over 125 chapters and almost 1,500 pages. It is both scholarly and very readable. In the course of discussing German and European vernacular language-reform movements in the late sixteenth century, Whaley notes the importance of classical standards of rhetoric. Texts, so the reformers believed, should aim for accuracy, clarity, brevity, and elegance. His own work is far from brief...