Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: Der Dreissigjahrige Krieg aus der Nahe (review)

Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: Der Dreissigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe. Edited by Benigna von Krusenstjern and Hans Medick (G_ttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999) 625 pp. 98 DM

The 350th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia in 1998 was the occasion not only for a major exhibition in Münster and Osnabrück, where the negotiations were held in the 1640s, but also for the publication of major scholarly re-appraisals of the significance of the Thirty Years' War. One collection, a massive two-volume assemblage of more than 1,000 pages, accompanied the exhibition; the book under consideration is another, the product of a conference sponsored by the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in G_ttignen.

Unlike the exhibition volumes, which mixed detailed scholarly analyses with broad introductions aimed at a more general readership, this book presents only the results of current research into the war and its impact by more than twenty-five of the leading specialists in the field. No short review can do justice to their findings, but these essays clearly will become the starting point for much of the work that is done on this central event of seventeenth-century history in the years to come.

The two editors open the book with a masterly survey of the historiography of the war, indicating how extensively it has been affected by the new attention to social and cultural history in recent decades. That their essay should be followed by Wolfgang Behringer's examination of newspapers and news gathering--in itself an expansive topic only in recent times--which connects the press and the communication of news to changing concepts of the space-time relationship, is a good indication of the shift in historians' interests and perceptions. Taking Behringer's cultural-anthropological approach a step further, Hans Medick elegantly demonstrates how one dreadful disaster, the siege and sack of Magdeburg, gained increasingly mythic proportions until Friedrich Schiller was able to say that German freedom arose from the ashes of Magdeburg.

A similar reflection of new directions in historiography is Jan Lindegren's analysis of Sweden as a "Frauenland," a "country of women," because of the absence of so many soldiers, which puts the issue of recruitment and demographic change into a perspective unimaginable forty years ago. Much the same is true of von Krusenstjern's subtle analysis of attitudes toward death and Karin Jansson's sober study of the outlook, and the capricious incidence of punishment, that governed the ancient connection between soldiers and rape.

But more traditional themes are not ignored. There are sophisticated studies of the economic effects of the conflict on localities, which suggest that the intensive tax gathering had perhaps more long-term effects (as an encouragement to revenue-hungry governments) than the destruction caused by the war. Nor are politics and courts neglected. Even in this context, as John Theibault suggests, traditional documents such as tax and population censuses can be used to uncover attitudes as well as statistics. Moreover, the probing discussions of art, literature, music, and religion, though focused mainly on elites, are at pains to make connections with the concerns of society at large.

The book's most stunning revelation, however, comes toward the end, in a second essay by Behringer, this one about the career of Franz, the acknowledged dean of social and demographic research on this period--his 1940 magnum opus on the war and the German people, revised in three more editions through 1979, may well be the single most cited title in these essays). ¹ Behringer demonstrates beyond doubt that Franz was an enthusiastic and committed member of the Nazi party. Indeed, he makes it clear that the very purpose of Franz's work was political, informed throughout by Nazi racial and demographic theories, antisemitism, and such party-line nonsense as the assertion that the goals of the peasant revolts of the...