Die Habsburgermonarchie und der Dreißigjährige Krieg ed. by Katrin Keller and Martin Scheutz (review)

The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. Whole swaths of Central Europe were left desolate, in a demographic catastrophe that had previously been known only through plague and that wouldn't be repeated until the twentieth century. What began as a Protestant-Catholic dispute became in the subsequent decades a war involving nearly every state in Europe. Yet the lands that bore the brunt of the fighting and wanton destruction—even after the war had developed into a more general conflagration—remained Central Europe, and specifically the lands under Habsburg dominion, where the original quarrel had developed and where religious and ethnic fault lines were as intermingled as the string in a ball of twine. While different parts of the monarchy were affected to greater and lesser degrees, the whole structure of Habsburg power, politics, and civil society was shattered and remade by the war. It would take Napoleon, almost two centuries later, to so radically upend Central European society again.

In this new edited volume, Katrin Keller and Martin Scheutz bring together a set of essays focused on the experience of the war in the Habsburg lands and among its different classes of peoples. The purpose of the book, they explain, is to investigate how the war was experienced and remembered across the vast geographic and social space of the Habsburg monarchy. As they write in their introduction,

Diese insgesamt gering ausgeprägte Erinnerungskultur im heutigen Österreich steht sowohl in einem Missverhältnis zu konkreten Auswirkungen des Krieges auf die Bevölkerung und zur eminenten Bedeutung der habsburgischen Kriegsherren im Dreißigjährigen Krieg wie zur Relevanz der Kriegszeit für die weitere Entwicklung der Habsburgmonarchie. Die Bedeutung des Krieges für diese lässt sich ja nicht nur in den unmittelbaren Kriegsauswirkungen messen, sondern die steigenden Belastungen der Bauern und Städte, die Einquartierungen und die Entwicklung einer Kriegswirtschaft hatten tiefgreifende Folgen für den Gesamtstaat jenseits der fern oder nah geschlagenen Schlachten des Krieges.

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In other words, this volume is not just focused on places physically scarred by the war. Rather, it is an attempted portrait of the entire workings of the monarchy and its domains, from the princes and cardinals to the farmers and traders, and from the seemingly unaffected hinterlands of, for example, Vorarlberg, to epicenters of destruction, like Bohemia.

The volume, which is divided into six thematic sections, follows a gentle chronological arc. The opening section ("Krieg und Kriegsereignisse in der Habsburgmonarchie") includes essays on the demographic and geographic scope of the war as it occurred in the territories of the Habsburg empire. The second and third sections ("Die Habsburger: eine Dynastie im Krieg" and "Kriegslasten und Kriegsfolgen für die Habsburgmonarchie") focus on the effects of the war on the monarchy itself, from the inner workings of the royal family to the way it responded to local uprisings and religious quarrels. Overall, the argument of these sections is central to the premise of the volume as a whole: The way the monarchy handled itself and its subjects during the war had profound implications for the postwar politics and culture within the Habsburg Empire. As Arno Strohmeyer, in his chapter, writes, "Der Dynastizismus der Habsburger [nach dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg] führte zu einer Kombination von Einheit und Vielfalt zweier Herrschaft sräume, für die es in der Geschichte keine Parallele gibt" (159–60).

The fourth and fifth sections ("Selbstzeugnisse und Medien im Dreißigjährigen Krieg" and "Erinnerungsort Dreißigjähriger Krieg") delve into some of the newer themes and methods identified by the editors in their introduction as unique to this volume, namely, discussions of personal experiences of the war, cultures of remembrance (and nonremembrance), and the spread of information during and after the war. In these sections, the various authors examine a wealth of primary sources to delve into subtle and difficult questions of experience and...