Krieg und Aufklärung: Studien zum Kriegsdiskurs in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts by Johannes Birgfeld (review)

In this two-volume study, which is deeply impressive in both breadth and depth, Johannes Birgfeld disputes the idea that the eighteenth century was not a century of war and asserts that, throughout the century, a “sich kontinuierlich entfaltende und […] vielschichtige, vielgestaltige und vielstimmige Kriegsliteratur” is in evidence (3). His choice to limit himself to texts “die explizit eine Auseinandersetzung mit Kriegserfahrung bzw. Kriegsereignissen des 18. Jahrhunderts vollziehen” (20) is both logical and practical. He concedes that these wars did not have the same duration or death toll as those of the seventeenth century but points out that there were only thirty-three years in the entire century during which various of the German states or German soldiers were not involved in military conflicts. Perhaps the boldest and most interesting claim of the introduction, which is borne out in the subsequent study, is that eagerness for news of war was part of what cultivated a taste for the current in literary publics, which is a fruitful corollary to the notion that changes in reading tastes resulted entirely from vast increases in leisure time. Throughout, Birgfeld weaves together the treatment of portrayals of war and its effects in literature with aesthetic debates, making these volumes valuable both to historians interested in how actual wars and military techniques were depicted in literature and to literary scholars investigating the development of literary trends throughout the eighteenth century.

In part 1, Birgfeld provides a brief summary of military tactics, which changed little from the beginning until the very end of the century. Rather than miring this section in unnecessary technical detail, he astutely chooses to point readers to the extensive scholarship by military historians so as to turn his attention more quickly to the literary. Part 2 is an overview of the myriad ways in which war was an integral component of eighteenth-century authors’ lives: in addition to those who were soldiers, authors were military doctors and pastors, educators of soldiers and princes, administrators, and diplomats; some of them profited from war, while others fled from it or suffered as residents of cities under occupation; still others earned money or fame by publishing articles and essays on current war news. While this section is occasionally dizzying in the speed with which it moves from one author to the next, it does much to counteract received wisdom that authors in the eighteenth century had a distanced or critical relationship to war – rather, as Birgfeld concludes: “Tatsächlich jedoch lässt sich nicht nur literarisch, sondern auch biographisch eine ausgesprochen intensive, zeitlich das ganze Jahrhundert umfassende und alle Formen des wechselseitigen Einflusses aufweisende Begegnung zwischen Krieg bzw. Armee einerseits und den Autoren andererseits beobachten” (108).

It is this multifaceted encounter that Birgfeld treats in parts 3 and 4, which form the bulk of the study. In them, Birgfeld devotes significant space to analysing, in roughly chronological order, a wide selection of eighteenth-century texts. He first treats Christoph Heinrich Amthor’s ode “Die triumphierende Reinholds-Burg” as an example of the extensive knowledge of military strategy that authors in the period possessed and of the transformation of that knowledge into stylistically advanced literary texts. Amthor’s use of technical terminology shows, Birgfeld argues, that audiences were familiar enough with this military vocabulary that they were not hindered in understanding the work. Here, as in many other sections, Birgfeld considers who that audience might have been and what the position of the author was – as propagandist or protester – apropos ruling entities. His next major case study is Johann Ulrich König’s unfinished epic poem August im Lager, written on the occasion of joint military exercises between Saxony and Prussia in 1730. He argues persuasively that König’s failure to finish the work had less to do with the obsolescence of his literary style (König corresponded extensively...