Kevin Cramer. The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2007. xi + 385 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-1562-7.
Reviewed by Brian Vick (Department of History, University of Colorado at Boulder)
Published on H-German (January, 2008)
The Thirty Years’ War and Modern German Memory
two World Wars (“The Second Thirty Years’ War”).
In his provocative study of the historiographical and
commemorative discourse surrounding the Thirty Years’
War in nineteenth-century Germany, Kevin Cramer
delves exhaustively into the contemporary literature on
the subject and reveals it to have been a major venue of
confessional and political conflict among Catholics and
Protestants over the course of the century. In a winning
and telling phrase, he points to the “appellate function
of historical inquiry” as a series of “briefs argued before
the bar of collective memory” (p. 100). When the author
also claims that these debates were absolutely central and
fundamental to the development of German nationalism
and national identity, however, a certain caution or critical distance is advisable.
The book’s principal arguments are developed in the
first two chapters and the last. Cramer first depicts
the struggles over the interpretation of the Thirty Years’
War as a not-so-masked form of contestation between
Protestants and Catholics. The contest took place over
the proper form a new German state should take, and
over the question of which confessional community represented the true essence of Germanness and German
values. Catholic historians looked back to the federal
Holy Roman Empire as a model national polity and supported either the status quo of the German Confederation or the großdeutsch idea of a revived imperial German
nation-state including the Habsburg Austrian territories
The book is organized in five chapters, reflecting (the author does not always distinguish between these
contemporary historiographical controversies concern- positions). In this context, Catholics portrayed the war
ing five different periods or aspects of the Thirty Years’ as political rather than religious in nature. They viewed
War. The first chapter deals with debates about the war’s Ferdinand II as the defender and even restorer of the traorigins in the years 1618-29, while the second focuses ditional central authority of the empire against the reon evaluations of the role of the Swedish king, Gustavus bellious Bohemian nobility and Protestant princes. The
Adolphus. Chapter 3 then considers the historiograph- moment of seeming imperial victory in 1629 was thus ofical wrangling over the figure of Albrecht von Wallen- fered as a model and a “what might have been” scenario
stein, while Chapter 4 treats the symbolic importance for German nationalism, with Ferdinand and/or Wallenof the sanguinary sack of Magdeburg in 1631 and traces stein eyeing Baltic expansion and a naval and commercial
the ensuing blame game between Protestant and Catholic great power status for the rejuvenated empire. Proteshistorians as to who actually initiated the city’s destruc- tants, for their part, are said to have focused upon the
tion. Chapter 5, “German Gothic,” then moves to analyze intervention of Sweden after 1630 as a possible precurthe deployment of atrocity narratives and images of sac- sor of the kleindeutsch or Prussian-led solution to Gerrifice within the historical discourse and “memory work” man unity, with the Protestant military states of northern
surrounding the Swedish phase of the war (1630-38). Fi- Germany and Sweden overturning the outmoded impenally, the conclusion carries the discussion through the rial structure to establish a new Protestant great power
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in central Europe.
Moreover, a chronological problem occurs with the repeated use of the großdeutsch/kleindeutsch division as the
explanatory mechanism for debates prior to 1850, insofar as those positions were by no means so fully developed or hardened in the decades before the 1848 Revolution. Even based on the evidence Cramer offers, patterns of adhesion and argumentation in the nineteenthcentury contestation of history and memory must have
been more complex than argued here. The author builds
on the work of Wolfgang Altgeld and Helmut Walser
Smith on the relationship between confession and national identity in nineteenth-century Germany, but takes
it to an oversimplifying extreme. The Protestant versus
Catholic division was important but does not explain everything.
In the final chapter, the author analyzes the prevalent, often lovingly if gruesomely detailed atrocity narratives concerning the Thirty Years’ War, and establishes the centrality of images of martyrdom and sacrifice to nineteenth-century German nationalism and national identity. Here, two main meta-narratives emerge,
as Protestants and Catholics competed for the status of
the war’s prime victims and based their communal and
confessional cohesion upon that victimhood. The Protestant narrative promised redemption for past suffering in
a future Prussian-led, Protestant German nation-state,
while the Catholic one offered no such comforting teleology, instead stopping at the expression of fear of exclusion from the German nation, or even of annihilation.
The author does note that Catholic fears seem to have
been greater in the case of the more isolated populations
in northern and western Germany, as opposed to those in
the more secure realm of Bavaria (and presumably Austria as well).
The main problem with the book, however, is one of
perspective and context. The account certainly does not
suffer from tunnel vision, to the extent that it tries to relate the discourse on the Thirty Years’ War to many others aspects of German history. The author does, however, fall prey to the tendency to make that discourse
too pivotal to modern German memory and modern German history. The Thirty Years’ War is thus said to have
been “the decisive political event that shaped modern
Germany,” and its memory to have “shaped every debate
in the nineteenth century over the ideal form of the German nation” (p. 2). The Thirty Years’ War even comes to
overshadow the period of the Wars of Liberation (181315) in nineteenth-century German memory. But while
the author is able to find plenty of instances in which
writers or speakers invoked the experience of the Wars
of Liberation when discussing the Thirty Years’ War, he
does not offer any examples where texts or commemorative speeches involving the Napoleonic Wars attempted
to make sense of that experience by referring to the early
seventeenth century. And the same is true for all other
historical periods or political debates, where the author
can show how they fed into discussions surrounding the
Thirty Years’ War, but not how influence operated in the
opposite direction.
This appears to be a neat argument, but some difficulties with Cramer’s analysis do arise. In nearly every chapter, the author introduces important exceptions
to patterns of Protestant and Catholic adherence, with
Protestants supporting (or even initiating) “Catholic” arguments and vice versa. This recognition might have led
to a more nuanced view of the historiographical and political landscape in nineteenth-century Germany, but except in the case of the Wallenstein controversy, these exceptions did not lead the author to relativize his claims.
He gives relatively little consideration to other possible
fault lines within the political and cultural matrix, such
as the position of commentators on the political spectrum, their geographic location, or the brand of Protestant or Catholic religiosity they represented. The predisposition of Catholics towards political conservatism,
for example, is noted but not integrated into the argument (for comparison with other Catholics or with conservative Protestants), and the repeated interventions of
the radical großdeutsch anti-Prussian Protestant historian
It would surely be possible to find such instances,
Karl Adolf Menzel on the ostensibly Catholic side of debut not in equal number. This imbalance underscores
bates are passed over in relative silence.
the author’s tendency to overestimate or overstate the
The author also tends to assume that Catholics must ubiquity and centrality of discourse about the Thirty
have been großdeutsch and Protestants kleindeutsch, but
Years’ War within German historiography and memory.
this was not always the case (particularly for ProtesOther historical periods and episodes were just as imtants), not only in the sense that lines of confessional portant, whether it be the Wars of Liberation, the lateand national unity were often crossed, but also insofar seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conflicts involving
as many religiously and politically conservative Protes- France, Austria, and Prussia, the battles between Romans
tants and Catholics were non- or even anti-nationalist. and Teutons in the days of Arminius, or the medieval
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exploits of Charlemagne and the Ottonian and Hohenstaufen emperors. The book attends briefly to the famous passage at arms between Julius Ficker and Heinrich von Sybel about imperial policy in medieval Italy,
but greater engagement with the literature on the Middle Ages (primary and secondary) would have helped fill
in the picture of conflict among Protestant and Catholic,
pro-Prussian and pro-imperial historians, as for example
Thomas Brechenmacher’s Großdeutsche Geschichtsschreibung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1996), which is not
cited. The book’s tendency to exaggerate the importance
of the discourse on the Thirty Years’ War is also reflected
in its problematic efforts to link it with the German experience of mass death and genocide in the twentieth century, or with debates like the Historikerstreit of the 1980s.
The author makes effective, well-informed use of the narratological literature on the Holocaust and trauma in history writing for theoretical inspiration, but causal connections posited between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries rest on weaker foundations.
Cramer’s account of the history and memory (chiefly
the former) of the Thirty Years’ War in nineteenthcentury Germany offers a well-researched, often insightful window onto the period’s confessional and political
conflicts, but that discourse was not the hub of this world
to the degree claimed, and the interpretation of the patterns revealed in it remains somewhat stark and narrow, especially as regards the divisions adduced between
Protestant and Catholic, kleindeutsch and großdeutsch.
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Citation: Brian Vick. Review of Cramer, Kevin, The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century.
H-German, H-Net Reviews. January, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14117
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