The Thirty Years' War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century

1. The Great War

1. The Great War Remaking the Holy Roman Empire How did historians in nineteenth-century Germany come to grips with the complex sequence of events that ignited a fratricidal thirty-year conflict that was also remembered as the Great German War, the Great War, the Great Schism, and Germany’s Darkest Hour? The debate over the origins of the war was a critical part of the decades-long project of historical and collective remembrance that reinterpreted the impact of the war on modern Germany’s national aspirations. The clash between Catholic and Protestant historians also determined to a large extent their competing concepts of a unified Germany and their respective claims to an authentic German identity. It is appropriate, then, that this study of the popular and historical consciousness of the war in nineteenthcentury Germany begin at the beginning. Protestant historians essentially denied the German identity of Catholics, who were in constant fear of marginalization within the German national community, by condemning the imperial cause as part of a brutal Counter-Reformation campaign to bring Germany under the yoke of Rome. Catholic historians vigorously challenged this prejudice. They created an alternative narrative that reimagined the first decade of the war not as a religious war (the consensus Protestant characterization) but as a Habsburg-led counterrevolution and war of unification that aimed at remaking the Holy Roman Empire into a powerful Central European state. This interpretation has been cursorily examined by historians, usually in discussions of Catholic conservatism , and has been generally dismissed as nostalgia for medieval glories. The midcentury debate over how “national” and “German” the medieval empire really was and how the history of this period was manipulated by “greater Germany” (Großdeutschland) advocates has received the most attention.1 Opinion is divided on the extent to which remembrance of the medieval binary of “emperor and empire” (Kaiser und Reich) continued to influence nineteenth-century Catholic ideas regarding a unified Germany. There is a tradition of viewing this imperial patriotism (Reichspatriotismus) as an attempt to preserve notions of a constitutional structure that balanced unity with the preservation of traditional German liberties within a limited, decentralized monarchy. This perspective asserts the positive political legacy of the empire as a “national-German” institution.2 Dissenters point out that the post-1815 tensions between Austria and Prussia over influence within the German Confederation and the irreconcilable großdeutsch/kleindeutsch argument effectively destroyed whatever common idea of Germany that the empire had still represented.3 Besides dismissing it as a romantic protest against Prussian triumphalism, there has been little interest in looking more closely at the pro-imperial stance as a historical justification for a united Germany that was not dominated by Prussia (or, in some cases, Austria). We find this justification in an iconoclastic corpus of history writing that focused on the origins of the Great War. Studying these narratives affords us a clearer understanding of the nineteenthcentury Catholic conception of, and allegiance to, the German nation as a confederal entity than has otherwise emerged from studies of romantic Catholic medievalism. Out of the interlocked series of regional conflicts bracketed by the Bohemian Revolt in 1618 and the imperial conquest of northern Germany under Tilly and Wallenstein in 1629, Catholic historians fashioned a narrative that cast the victory of Ferdinand II over the rebellious Protestant princes as the beginning of a Habsburg counterrevolution that seized the historical moment to remake the Holy Roman Empire. Unfortunately for the future of Germany, in their view, this chance went glimmering when foreign armies, on the invitation of the renegade Protestant princes, intervened in the German civil war. Catholic historians developed the thesis of counterrevolution to legitimate a Catholic vision of a united Germany that could challenge the self-proclaimed Protestant monopoly The Great War 19 The Great War 20 on German patriotism and national feeling. A significant component of the confrontation with Protestant remembrance and interpretation of the war was the Catholic insistence that the war had its origins in a political crisis. They claimed that the uprising of the Protestant nobility in Bohemia in 1618 was the beginning of a revolution against the legitimate authority of Kaiser and Reich. Catholic histories of the Thirty Years’ War assumed a certain positive continuity in German political institutions. The lessons they derived from studying the war did little to undermine that assumption. A vision of Germany as a confederal-imperial state—or rather the potential...