The Thirty Years War

24 Historically Speaking September/October 2006 The Thirty Years War Peter H. WUson The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) retains a place in the historical consciousness of most Europeans at a time when school curricula and TV history channels truncate the past to the last hundred years. General knowledge and interest is naturally deepest in German-speaking Central Europe , the war's epicenter, where works of popular history still regularly describe the level of destruction as exceeding diat of World War II. Tour guides mention traces of the Swedish and imperial armies almost in the same breath as recounting the effects of Allied bombing. The same is true for the Czech Republic, especially Prague where the famous Defenestration took place in May 1618 when angry Protestant nobles threw three Catholic officials from the window of the Hradschin palace. The event and its aftermath are deeply etched on the national consciousness as die last attempt to free the Czechs from German-speaking Habsburg absolutism that persisted for another 300 years. The conflict has long found a firm place among professional historians who generally view it as dividing the age of religious controversies and renewal in the 16th century from the subsequent, allegedly more secular "old regimes" after 1648. The Spanish hegemony of Charles V and Philip II is replaced by French preponderance, personified by Louis XIV whose reign began as the peace talks opened in die Westphalian cities of Münster and Osnabrück. International relations specialists and political scientists regularly cite the Peace of Westphalia as marking the birth of die modern state system, whereby fully independent and theoretically equal sovereign states replaced a single, hierarchically structured Christendom. Not only has this system become the basis of the global order, but the European conflict had a world dimension, with considerable fighting in Brazil, western Africa, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Events such as these have naturally left their mark in millions of printed pages. This was already apparent at the time, and the war is now recognized as having stimulated a new media or communications revolution manifest not only in thousands of printed broadsheets, but also the expansion of a regular press. Subsequent scholarship has added gready to the contemporary printed and archival legacy. A bibliography published in 1996 listed over 4,000 tides on the Westphalian Settlement alone, while the 350th anniversary of the Peace produced another flood of publications two years later.1 For all this there are surprisingly few general histories; someSi thing that accounts for the longevity of some popular accounts, like those of Ricarda Huch (1912) and CV. Wedgwood (1938) diat remain in print, if not necessarily in English editions. These, togedier with more recent books intended largely for the student market, display remarkably similar characteristics, both in format and often interpretation. One notable feature is the tendency to concentrate on the period before 1635, condensing coverage of the second half of the conflict and generally running this togedier with an assessment of the Peace and its legacy. The deaths of major figures like Gustavus Adolphus Opinions differ on whetherthe war wasprimarily a German or an international conflict , if it involved religion or political power, and whether it expressed some deeper "General Crisis ofthe 17th Century. (1632) and Wallenstein (1634) seem to deprive the story of its principal actors, conveying the impression that the subsequent fighting was devoid of direction and merely prolonged Germany's agony. Closer examination of the more specialist literature reveals other shortcomings. A good example is Günther Franz's analysis of the war's demographic impact.2 First published in 1940, this is one of die most influential books published on the war, and the losses of 1/3 of the urban and 4/10 of the rural population calculated by Franz are still widely cited today. However, his book was a compilation of work by local historians, many of whom accepted contemporary estimates at face value. Franz's enthusiasm for National Socialism hardly inspires confidence, but he took an important step toward dispelling die dominant image of aie war as all-destructive . This had its roots in the late 1 8di-century fascination with tales of horror and die German...