This book, a study of the German experience of war from 1792 to 1815, is part of Palgrave Macmillan's excellent “War, Culture, and Society” series that examines the transformation of European warfare in the century between 1750 and 1850. This transformation was driven by the exponentially expanding ability of modern states to mobilize manpower and resources to pursue war without limits. It was in the second half of the eighteenth century, as Roger Chickering points out in his essay, “Total War: The Use and Abuse of a Concept” (Manfred F. Boerneke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, eds., Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 [1999], 13–28), that the economic, technological, moral, and cultural foundations of “total war” were laid. David Bell pursues this argument in more depth in The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (2007). The irresistible energy of the French republic's “citizens' armies,” the ruthless expropriation of men and matériel to maintain Napoleon's imperial war machine, and the German states' uprising against the French in Central Europe in 1813 all foretold the coming age of nationalist war. One contemporary observer, Carl von Clausewitz, was prescient enough to wonder if the limitless savagery of the wars of religion had returned in a new guise, dislocating cultures, societies, and states, and undermining allegiances to traditional notions of authority, order, and community.

In looking at this tumultuous period, Leighton James focuses on the prolonged conflict ignited by the French Revolution as it swept, like a slow-moving natural disaster, through central and eastern Europe, particularly the German states. Using the “self-testimony” (5) found in diaries, memoirs, and letters, James tells the story of the “war of the little man” (2), especially the German men and women, soldiers and civilians, who witnessed the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the fracturing of absolutism. Yet, for ordinary people, these historical turns were subjectively distant, imperfectly understood, and obscured by the immediacy of events on the ground. While we know much about the political impact of the French Revolution on the German states, the “Wars of Liberation,” and the emergence of German nationalism from 1813 to 1848, we know less about the quotidian experience of life during revolution, wartime, and occupation during this period. James tells this important story using published recollections and personal documentation (diaries, journals, travel chronicles, letters) found predominantly in the Prussian State Archives, the war archives of the Bavarian State Archive, the Austrian War Archive, and the German Diary Archive in Emmendingen. Building on pathbreaking studies of the “culture of war” (5)—notably Michael Jeismann's Das Vaterland der Feinde. Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 1792–1918 (1992), as well as the essays in Nikolaus Buschmann and Horst Carl's edited volume, Die Erfahrung des Krieges. Erfahrungsgeschichtliche Perspektiven von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (2001)—James examines personal narratives of the war experience by soldiers and civilians. This allows him to open up an expanded view of the culture of war as it manifested itself in this formative period, a time when the traditional boundaries (cultural, confessional, political) of the German Kleinstaaterei were fractured by revolution, as well as by the wars that followed in its wake.

James structures his argument around three main themes: the resilience of older cultures of warfare; the popular conception of war as the ultimate school for building masculine character (a “testing time” (Prüfungszeit) [85]); the impact of war and the expansion of “military participation” on individual identities. To set the background, Chapter 1 concisely narrates the political, social, and economic impact of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars on the German states, with an emphasis on Prussian “modernization,” the abrupt end of the Holy Roman Empire, the erosion of Reichspatriotismus, as well as the collapse of French hegemony and occupation in central Europe between 1812 and 1814. Chapter 2, “Writing War,” examines the “literary mode” by which individuals assessed the flux of wartime disruption as it strengthened or undermined their allegiances to prince, polity, and place, revealed cultures and peoples beyond the borders of the Heimat, and brought change to traditional ways of life and thinking.

James makes the compelling point that these observations are, in the broadest sense, travelogues from the foreign country that is war. He makes particularly good use of the letters from the German contingent in Napoleon's Grand Army, as it pushes into the “wilderness” of Poland and Russia in 1812, to illustrate the temporal and psychological distance between home and the battlefield. Dealing with military life, combat, travel, captivity, and occupation, chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine the conception of the battlefield and the identity of the solider at a time when it was located within a liminal space between life and death. These chapters constitute the core of the book. War diffuses and shifts the boundaries between east and west, civilization and barbarism, modernity and tradition, “German-ness” and “the Other,” soldier and civilian, enemy and friend, citizen and subject, Prussian and Bavarian. As one of the memoirists summed up his wartime journey: “[it was] a singular feeling to be in the land of the enemy” (112).

In chapter 6, “Resistance and Liberation,” James addresses that most vexing of questions confronting the historian who studies civilian life under occupation: “What constitutes resistance?” What differentiated rebellion from criminality? When did compliance elide into cooperation and fraternization, into denunciation, disloyalty, and treason? Did German unity trump particularistic allegiances? These were not abstractions but rather contemporary dilemmas and moral choices. After all, it was not just a question of what the French or the Russians wanted but, as a satirical ditty heard in Munich in 1806 asked, “What did the Prussians want?” (168).

The war stories that James recovers in this book tell a tale of the German experience of war during a time of revolution and occupation. Historians could (and did) see these years as the great turning point for Germany. Yet, as James' study suggests, there ultimately seemed to be more continuity than change in the daily life of the German soldier and civilian. Did the literate soldiers and civilians whose stories James brings to light understand the experience of war in significantly different terms than their peasant forebears had? James does not really answer this question. The value of his book nevertheless lies in its depiction of a society coming to grips with an unprecedented expansion of state power being driven by the requirements of total war. For better or worse, the individual's experience of war and the narratives it produced remains one of the most important legacies of twentieth-century culture. James offers us a glimpse into the nineteenth-century origins of that legacy.