Spatial Mobilization: Kleist's Strategic Road Map for the Berliner Abendblätter and Tactical Displacements in the "Tagesbegebenheiten"

According to Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum, war is the continuation of politics by other means. Kleist's Berliner Abendblätter (BA), I argue, can be characterized similarly as the continuation of war by means of the printing press, which allows for the wide distribution of concealed, politically explosive messages in the medium of ambiguous news reports and anecdotes instead of weapons. Recent studies have explored how Kleist's poetry reflects the profound practical and theoretical transformations of warfare during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the guerilla counter-insurgences.¹ This article aims to complement these interpretations by showing how the geopolitical changes and subsequent societal challenges of this revolutionary and counterrevolutionary age have informed the editorial strategy and journalistic tactics of the BA—not just to represent and reflect them, but to mobilize the Prussian/German people and to wage war against Napoleon in the virtual public sphere created by this medium.

War is the father of all in-depth thinking about the politics of space, and the totality of war in the Napoleonic era triggered a mobilization of space and dynamization of the status quo that urged political leaders and military strategists to rethink the static, stratified organization of their state and army. Anders Engberg-Pedersen's recent study delineates the series of spatial transformations that originated from the National Convention's decree of national conscription and military mass-mobilization in 1793, the so-called levée en masse. The withdrawal of the distinctions between regular soldiers and civil fighters as well as between the battlefield and the hinterland resulted in an expansion of warfare to potentially any terrain and a general increase of its complexity. In his treatise On War, Clausewitz introduced the concept "friction" as an integrative category of the many new uncertainties and imponderabilities which have turned modern battles into events of chance, and tactics into a science of observing and exploiting the opportunities of the moment for short-term gains and advances. Accordingly, the overall strategic planning of war has become predominantly an issue of intelligence assessments and probability calculations (see Engberg-Pedersen 37–68).

In response to these changed conditions, Clausewitz reassessed the relationship between tactics and strategy as the centerpiece of his great theory of war. He defines "strategy" as "the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war" and describes its tasks and challenges as follows:

The strategist … will draft the plan of the war, and the aim will determine the series of actions intended to achieve it: he will, in fact, shape the individual campaigns and, within these, decide on the individual engagements. Since most of these matters have to be based on assumptions that may not prove to be correct, while other, more detailed orders cannot be determined in advance at all, it follows that the strategist must go on campaign himself. Detailed orders can then be given on the spot, allowing the general plan to be adjusted to the modifications that are continuously required. The strategist, in short, must maintain control throughout.²

That Clausewitz insists here on a mobile strategist who remains flexible enough to adapt to changing situations and adjust the general plan "on the spot" must be regarded as a concession to the great extent of friction in modern warfare, which seems to privilege tactics. In a subsequent passage, however, he draws a sharper line of distinction between tactics and strategy. He emphasizes now that it is of greatest importance for the strategist "to follow through steadily, to carry out the plan, and not to be thrown off course by thousands of diversions," whereas in tactics of individual engagements "one is carried away by the pressures of the moment, caught up in a maelstrom where resistance would be fatal, and, suppressing incipient scruples, one presses boldly on" (Clausewitz 178). For Clausewitz, then, the art of war lies in constantly finding the right balance between strategic discipline and tactical flexibility, that is, between the truthful execution of the imagined war plan on the one hand and the spontaneous...