-
Introduction
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction The Thirty Years’ War! What a fateful epoch for Germany, an epoch of the most fanatical and savage conflict, a bloody time of religious war, whose flame was lit in Bohemia in 1618 to rage through Germany with devastation and fire for a quarter of a century. Misery without parallel spread from the Baltic to the Danube. We see ancient and rich provinces afflicted by the fury of rebellion, the bonds of government torn asunder, only to be restored with blood and iron—a time filled with shame and horror! This advertisement appeared on the end sheet of Luise Mühlbach’s Die Opfer des religiösen Fanatismus: Historicher Roman aus dem dreißigjährigen Krieg (The Victims of Religious Fanaticism: A Historical Novel of the Thirty Years’ War) (1871–72). The publisher, Sigmund Bensinger, was clearly not promising light reading for Mühlbach’s devoted fans throughout German-speaking Central Europe. Bensinger knew what his audience wanted.1 Mühlbach’s novel was part of a tremendous flood of histories, plays, novels, poems, and “rediscovered” memoirs and documents dealing with the Thirty Years’ War that appeared in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. In an era that saw the birth of German nationalism and the unification of Germany as a powerful nation-state, the reading public’s obsession with the most destructive and divisive war in German history is a remarkable example of the interplay between collective memory, history, and national identity. This interplay is the distinguishing characteristic of nationalist thinking as it evolved in the nineteenth century. But what is remarkable about the German case is that a story of defeat and humiliation should exert such influence on an emerging national consciousness.2 This should draw the histori- Introduction 2 an’s attention immediately, since national narratives are conventionally understood as stories of triumph. At first glance there seems to be very little to celebrate in the events and outcome of the Thirty Years’ War. This catastrophe overshadowed every milestone of Germany’s progress toward nationhood and European and global power: 1813, 1866, 1871, 1917, and 1941. Yet the collective memory of this seventeenth -century war shaped every debate in the nineteenth century over the ideal form of the German nation. There are many reasons for the Germans’ morbid fascination with the Thirty Years’ War. The popularity of Gustav Freytag’s Bilder aus der deutschen vergangenheit (Pictures from the German Past) and Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (both appearing in countless versions and reprintings) was based in part on pride in how far Germany had come in overcoming the material destruction and political weakness the war had left in its wake. Interest in the war was also stimulated by the midcentury apotheosis of Friedrich Schiller as the German national poet. His interpretation of the Thirty Years’ War as a struggle for German liberty led to a new appreciation of the work as one of the key texts influencing the creation of a national German history. Finally, Prussian historians used Germany’s degradation in the war as a way to further mythologize the Hohenzollern triumph in 1871. Why did the argument over the meaning of the war become so violent, prolonged, and partisan? Why were the battles of the “Great War” of the seventeenth century fought again, in popular remembrance, history, and literature , in the nineteenth? After two hundred years, the unresolved issues that had originally sparked the conflict lingered in collective memory as obstacles to German unification. Germany’s rediscovery of the war in the nineteenth century was ultimately driven by a need to overcome those obstacles through a new understanding of the war as the decisive political event that shaped modern Germany. As Germans looked cautiously forward to political unification in the mid-nineteenth century, the popular memory of the Thirty Years’ War, the presence of a past that refused to pass, caused them to look over their shoulders constantly. Germans relived the Thirty Years’ War as that “sad, joyless time,” in Gustav Freytag’s words, and the defining episode of the German tragedy. To fully understand the broad accep- [35.153.134.169] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:46 GMT) Introduction 3 tance of Prussian leadership of German unification, the issues at the center of the “greater Germany–little Germany” (Großdeutschland/ Kleindeutschland) debate, and the cultural and political marginalization of Germany’s Catholics, we must understand how and why the Thirty Years’ War haunted German memory in the nineteenth century. To understand the clash between...