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

5. German Gothic

5. German Gothic Atrocity Narratives Historians have long debated the actual extent of the material damage the Thirty Years’ War inflicted on German economic development and the veracity of contemporary accounts that described Germany after the war as a wasteland of empty villages, overgrown fields, and impoverished towns.1 Robert Ergang, in a famous revisionist monograph published in 1956, attributed “the myth of the all-destructive fury of the Thirty Years’ War” to what he characterized as the “romantic” inclinations of the historians of the early nineteenth century, particularly Schiller, who were “novelty seekers . . . interested in the fanciful, the romantic, the sanguinary.” Ergang explained their rediscovery of Grimmelshausen, the seventeenth-century chronicler of the war, and the frequent verbatim incorporation of details from his Adventures of Simplicissimus into their histories, as a legacy of romanticism’s affinity for an earlier period’s “Baroque delight” in exaggeration and cruelty; a cultural predilection that persisted into the nineteenth century as what I believe could be more accurately labeled “German Gothic.”2 Despite the acknowledged unreliability and fragmentary nature of statistics distilled from contemporary accounts and records, the consensus of modern scholarship is that (the political, cultural, and psychological damage aside) the material losses of Germany during the war were significant . A 60–70 percent loss in population (through mortality and migration) has been noted in the most devastated areas, the Rhine Palatinate, Bavaria, and Mecklenburg, while losses of between 15 and 30 percent of the entire prewar population of approximately 20 million have been estimated. At either end of this scale, it is clear that the German Gothic 179 impact of the war on Germany was catastrophic. Equally obvious is the fact that, subject to regional variations, recovery would be slow and economic growth would be stagnant for a long period. The intuitions behind the admittedly inflated claims of the nineteenth-century historians were largely correct.3 The Adventures of Simplicissimus, written in 1668 and 1669 by the Catholic convert Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1625–76), provided nineteenth-century historians with an inexhaustible source for the narratives of atrocity, torture, and devastation that dominated collective German remembrance of the Thirty Years’ War. Parts of Grimmelshausen’s tale, especially those recounting the torture and rape of peasants by the Swedish soldiers and the retribution meted out by the peasants, were often reproduced word for word and, in the case of Protestant authors, the Catholic identity of the victims was switched to Protestant. Within the first sixty pages of the book, Grimmelshausen describes two scenes of mass rape, the administration of the infamous “Swedish Punch” (liquid offal and manure forced down the victim’s throat), the roasting alive of a peasant in an oven, the binding and crushing of skulls with knotted ropes, the crushing of thumbs in the flintlocks of pistols, and the cutting off of ears and noses.4 Just as the story of Magdeburg became the model for narratives of the heroic city, so the story of Simplicissimus, Grimmelshausen’s protagonist, became the model for the narratives of German suffering. After Christoph Wagenseil’s “modernized” edition appeared in the late eighteenth century, Grimmelshausen’s novel steadily gained popularity in Germany. Barbara Salditt believes that the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the tale stemmed from three main factors: the compelling theme of an authentic German literary hero and survivor emerging from the destruction of the war; the search to rediscover the lost treasures of an authentically German “people’s art” (Volkskunst); and the nineteenth-century taste for the “realism” of historical novels and regional folktales (Heimatserzählungen). Between the mid-1830s and the 1870s, the book’s reputation within an emerging national German literature was established and exploited as several scholarly, bowdlerized , and juvenile versions came off the presses.5 German Gothic 180 Another important element needs to be added to this explanation for nineteenth-century Germany’s attraction to the explicitness of the atrocity narratives of the Thirty Years’ War: profound anxiety about the transformative and potentially annihilative effects of war and revolution . Peter Paret has noted this same aesthetic and psychological inclination and the romantic obsession with ruin, decay, and regeneration in post–Napoleonic German historical art, particularly as it focused on detailed and realistic representations of the “central element of violence” in an age of revolution, as seen in Rethel’s woodcut series Another Dance of Death (1848) and Menzel’s March Casualties Lying in State (1848...