I

There is tacit disagreement among historians about how contemporaries' conceptions of conflict were created and shaped. Arguably, what mattered most was whether a subject had experienced war directly, as a civilian or – especially during a period of conscription after 1806 – as a combatant. Thus, Varnhagen only became ‘ready for anything’, an opinion he expressed in the wake of the ‘retreat and destruction’ of French forces in 1812, after he had volunteered to serve in the Austrian army in 1809.Footnote ⁴⁹ At the battle of Wagram in that year, which was the scene of the largest massing of troops in history to date, the diarist revealed how he had been overcome by the ‘enormous sound of repeatedly renewed fire’ and the impression made by ‘so-called small arms, these weapons by means of which our new battles habitually become murderous’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Having been shot during the enemy's first attack, with ‘two streams of blood pouring out where the bullet had gone right through’, he was dragged behind battle lines, where he was left in the open, suffering ‘just like the others from terrible thirst’ and letting his wounds bleed ‘the entire night’.Footnote ⁵¹ Abandoned in a billet with his femur broken, which was ‘a kind of death sentence’, Varnhagen awaited the end in a more or less constant state of fever.Footnote ⁵² From a reading of his diary, there is every indication that the author's attitude to war was altered by this and other subsequent experiences of combat but there are few signs that such sentiments found an echo away from the fighting, not least because combatants generally kept their feelings to themselves.Footnote ⁵³ Correspondingly, Varnhagen assured his fiancée, the writer Rahel Levin, with whom he enjoyed an unusually frank intimacy, that his wounds were ‘nearly healed’, which was a fabrication.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is difficult to gauge how significant such experiences were and to determine what kind of relationship existed between experience and mediation. On the one hand, few soldiers had returned from the worst campaign of 1812 in Russia and many who had survived the other campaigns were apparently unwilling to divulge the full horror of what they had seen and felt. On the other hand, a large number of men – approximately 190,000 troops, mainly conscripts, from the Confederation of the Rhine in 1812 and 848,000 men from Prussia and the Habsburg monarchy in 1815 – had been mustered, with many of them experiencing combat directly.Footnote ⁵⁵

The majority of subjects – and, certainly, writers – were not combatants but they nonetheless had direct or intimate, indirect experience of war. Some such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, who witnessed the Coalition's attack on and occupation of Dresden in August 1813, seemed to remain almost nonchalant, at least in their public accounts of events. ‘Ah, dearest! It's war! – wicked, evil war!’ he wrote to his publisher:

Others, like the writer Johanna Schopenhauer, were much more earnest. As Weimar was set on fire in October 1806, ‘few dared to come out of their houses’, fearing the French soldiers, she had written to her son Arthur:

Seven years later, in 1813, the same burghers of Weimar – whose number still included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Christoph Martin Wieland, and other prominent writers – feared ‘a similarly violent catastrophe’ to that of 1806, in the words of the diarist Johannes Falk, with Napoleon ‘throwing himself on the city with more overwhelming force and giving it up to the flames out of a desire for revenge’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Goethe himself was notoriously aloof from such events, recording the alternation of ‘quiet’ and ‘disquieting’ October days and nights in his diary.Footnote ⁵⁹ He, too, accepted the centrality of warfare between states, however, despite treating it – in Wilhelm von Humboldt's opinion – in a ‘very relaxed and casual way’, maintaining that ‘world history must also have its fun’.Footnote ⁶⁰ All the same, the philosopher and linguist continued, ‘the devastation wrought by the Cossacks, which is very bad, takes away all his joy in the fun’: ‘He maintains that the cure is worse than the malady; one will be free of servitude in order to go under.’Footnote ⁶¹ To Falk, in Weimar, it seemed that the menace of war had provoked a ‘general fear and trembling’.Footnote ⁶² Those who had not witnessed such events, even Hoffmann conceded, could have ‘no idea’ what it was like to be ‘in the midst of war’.Footnote ⁶³

What effect did these infrequent but repeated experiences of what Johanna Schopenhauer called ‘terrible misery in the city’, which was duplicated – albeit unevenly and at different times – throughout the German lands in the Napoleonic era, have on subjects' understanding of military conflict?Footnote ⁶⁴ This question can be seen, at once, as a communicative and political one. The majority of subjects seem to have balanced their own experiences – or those of relatives, friends, and neighbours – against second-hand rumours, stories, and reports provided by various types of commentator. There is evidence from contemporary correspondence and diaries that members of the Bürgertum and many others making up a ‘reading public’ relied on such external accounts, mediated by word of mouth, letters, and newspapers, to verify and make sense of local impressions and circumstances. In Hamburg, for example, the bourgeois memoirist Marianne Prell, who was a child in 1813, recalled how her family's view of the ‘terrible’ conflict was moulded by press reportage in spite of censorship and disruption, which had meant that even news of the victory of Coalition armies at the battle of Leipzig had ‘come to us drip by drip’.Footnote ⁶⁵ With the city still under siege from French forces in 1814, her father used to read the Altonaer Merkur in secret and had gladly paid 60 Pfennigs for cuttings of reports smuggled across French lines.Footnote ⁶⁶ In Prell's ‘recollection’, which she had garnered from family records and interviews, citizens were hungry for news. According to contemporary correspondents elsewhere, this hunger was shared by others. It extended, in the words of Amalie von Schön (the wife of a Prussian official living temporarily in Dresden), ‘down to the least important man, at least in my house’, and it complemented letters from those in authority or closer to the fighting.Footnote ⁶⁷

Governments were interested in all such ‘opinions’ because they were mindful of popular resistance and were reliant, in ways which were particular to periods of war and occupation, on public support.Footnote ⁶⁸ For reforming ministers such as Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, as he wrote to his successor as Prussian Staatsminister Karl August von Hardenberg in August 1811, ‘public spirit (der öffentliche Geist) can only be brought to life through institutions which awake, inflame and maintain religious feelings and through such political institutions which make use of all the forces of the nation’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Beyond the church and the political institutions of the state, the press was expected to play an important part in awakening ‘the forces of the nation’, with the former first minister taking the time to specify – in correspondence with a newspaper editor – what was required of journalists in 1814: namely, an ‘adequate political and historical knowledge’, so they could ‘follow the course of world events and the tendency of public opinion attentively’, together with an attachment ‘to a German fatherland with their heart and their mind’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Stein's principal adviser on the press and his main propagandist during his collaboration with Russia in 1812 and his time as head of the Allied Central Administration Authority (Zentralverwaltungsbehörde) in 1813, Ernst Moritz Arndt, shared his evaluation of the role of newspapers and periodicals in the public sphere, notwithstanding occasional despair at the distance of some writers from ‘life’ and at the defencelessness of journalists before an ephemeral course of events, flowing ‘thoughtlessly with the tide of the time’.Footnote ⁷¹ In an era of occupation and war, in which he feared that he might ‘go under’, ‘to tell the truth is not easy’, he recorded in the first volume of Geist der Zeit (1806).Footnote ⁷² Tragically, went on the publicist, ‘the machinery of state’ in Europe continued to move people around, using its subjects like ‘blindfolded mill-horses’, and – even ‘in the new order’ – tolerating the ‘old inequalities and injustices’ and fostering a ‘sense of slavery’ among its populations, with few links ‘between citizens and the state’.Footnote ⁷³ Nevertheless, these residues of absolutism or ‘despotism’ in the German lands had not prevented the ‘enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, ‘to which we all belong’, and the historical transformations of the revolutionary era, of which a growing ‘family’ or ‘social class’ (Bürgerklasse) of ‘writers’ (die Schreiber) had become the most important mediators.Footnote ⁷⁴ ‘The age is in flight and flashes its momentous pictures past in such rapid change’, he wrote in 1806: ‘Whoever has lived through the last twenty years has lived for centuries.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Although Arndt opposed the ‘one-sidedness’ of the French Revolution, he was convinced that it had raised ‘the political – the overthrowing of old thrones and constitutions, destructive wars, the exploitation and downfall of peoples' – to unprecedented prominence and popularity.Footnote ⁷⁶ French revolutionaries had produced ‘thousands upon thousands of pamphlets, broadsheets, annuals and newspapers, by means of which the Volk was enlightened or confused and was prepared for the most disgusting scenes of abomination or infused with the fieriest enthusiasm’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Writers both interpreted this new form of ‘politics’ and helped to create a political sphere.

The notion of a single German public sphere, within which writers publicized their views, is a contested one.Footnote ⁷⁸ Certainly, such Öffentlichkeit was characterized by fragmentation and discontinuity during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods compared to that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hegel's remark that the act of reading newspapers had become the morning prayers of ‘realistic’ nineteenth-century men dated back to his time as an academic in Jena in 1806, before he became the pro-Napoleonic editor of the Bamberger Zeitung in Bavaria a year later.Footnote ⁷⁹ Clearly, during the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, the ‘men’ to whom the philosopher alluded were preponderantly the notables of German towns, with whom he socialized and into whose circles he eventually married. In wartime, even these notables occasionally found their access to the press restricted, but their desire for ‘news’ seems to have increased, satisfied by the smuggling of newspapers and the circumvention of censorship. According to one prefect of the Rhineland territories annexed by France, newspapers from Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Augsburg, and Neuwied, all of which were banned, were read avidly by significant sections of the population on the left bank of the Rhine and were thus considered ‘dangerous’ by the French authorities, since they were ‘continually sounding the alarm about the fate of our armies and about the domestic situation of the Republic’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Much of this continuous and extensive, if also precarious, public sphere was perpetuated by ‘writers’ – poets, academics, essayists, editors – who contributed to and published books, periodicals, and newspapers; people such as Arndt himself, who edited Der Wächter in Cologne, the Jena historian Heinrich Luden (Nemesis), the Rhineland publicist Joseph Görres (Rheinischer Merkur), the Swabian publisher Friedrich Cotta (Deutsche Beobachter), and the Freiburg historian Karl von Rotteck (Teutschen Blätter). The published views of these writers and publicists reflected and informed changing conceptions of warfare in the public sphere, which constituted the main political reference point for ministers, beyond the social circles of officials, officers, and courtiers. The next two sections investigate, respectively, the opinions of prominent exemplars of such ‘enlightened’ and ‘conservative’ writing.Footnote ⁸¹

II

Under public scrutiny, the nature of revolutionary warfare and the meaning of peace altered after 1792. To Friedrich II, who had wanted to conceal the very fact that the state was at war from his subjects, the distinction between war and peace was largely a diplomatic matter, to be decided by the monarch and his officials in accordance with raisons d’état. Military conflicts were instruments of policy designed to attain important goals which were assumed to outweigh the costs of combat, despite the possibility – evident during the Seven Years War – of escalation. ‘All wars whose sole design is to guarantee against usurpation, to maintain unquestionable rights, to guarantee the public liberty and to ward off the oppression and violence of the ambitious are agreeable to justice’, he maintained: ‘When sovereign states engage in wars of this kind, they have no reason to reproach themselves with bloodshed; they are forced to it by necessity and in such circumstances war is a lesser evil than peace.’Footnote ⁸² Wars were part of a constant struggle on the part of states to defend, consolidate, and expand their territories and interests, acceptable in terms of their financial and human expenditure and justifiable on a number of grounds ‘as a lesser evil than peace’. Pre-emptive strikes and other forms of aggression could be warranted in many instances, went on the Prussian monarch: ‘Great men have always been successful when they make use of their forces before their enemies take such measures as tie their hands and suppress their power.’Footnote ⁸³ The transition from ‘peace’ to ‘war’ to ‘ceasefire’ was marked by ambiguity in such circumstances. Peace treaties were regarded as ‘little more than war-terminating instruments, mere cease-fires, … despite their flowering terminology of “perpetual amity” and concern for the “tranquillity of Europe”’, in the opinion of one scholar.Footnote ⁸⁴ Words such as ‘Krieg’ and ‘Frieden’ were certainly distinguished from each other by contemporaries, with some enlightened thinkers foreseeing and others denouncing the end of all war and the institution of a perpetual peace before the French Revolution.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nonetheless, the terms were widely perceived to encompass different forms of relation and conflict on a continuum of inter-state rivalry and competition.

There was a movement away from arguments for a perpetual peace in Germany's various public spheres during the 1790s. Even in the 1760s, 1770s, 1780s, and early 1790s, such arguments had been salient rather than dominant, opposed by authors writing after the Seven Years War such as Thomas Abbt, who had sanctioned – in the words of his most famous work – ‘death for the fatherland’, provided that the government of that land was ‘enlightened’ and its wars ‘defensive’; Wilhelm Friedrich von Meyern, whose anti-military ‘Indian’ fiction Dya-Na-Sore (1787–91) had championed the notion of a patriotic war as a source of ‘immortality’; and Johann Valentin Embser, who had aimed to replace the ‘gods’ of the ‘philosophical’ eighteenth century by starting with the ‘first idol’, namely ‘ewiger Friede’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Looking back in 1788, the popular and academic historian Johann Wilhelm Archenholz was confident that his thesis about the transition from war as a purely state affair before 1756 to freedom-loving, patriotic, and national conflicts as sources of spiritual renewal after that date would find broad support: ‘The culture of the age, and the type of freedom which resulted from it, had produced a patriotism, awoken by the admiration of Europe, amongst the inhabitants of North Germany, especially amongst those of the Prussian territories, which had hitherto been alien in Germania.’Footnote ⁸⁷ His history was designed to demonstrate ‘to the Prussian patriot of every estate’ the ‘moral greatness of his people’ and ‘to the German patriot of other provinces’ ‘what can be achieved by the efforts of a whole nation (Nation), directed towards a single goal, under a wise government’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Previously, conflicts had been perceived only as ‘the piling up or distancing of new burdens’, according to Archenholz, giving succour to the idea that they should be abolished altogether.Footnote ⁸⁹ This hope, it seemed to many of the advocates of patriotic warfare, had become the framework of the debate about war and peace as a whole.

For the ‘enlightened’ philosopher and essayist Kant, whose Zum ewigen Frieden (1795) found a comparatively wide readership and was reviewed in at least twenty publications, war had previously fostered the development of culture but it was now being replaced by the steady progress of humanity and by the expansion of trade, which demanded peaceful relations as a matter of individual and state self-interest.Footnote ⁹⁰ To both the Königsberg philosopher and to critics such as Wilhelm Traugott Krug, ‘The idea of peace is contained within the idea of law … Thus, the ultimate tendency of all pieces of writing which treat so-called natural law through the inclusion of the state and international law (Völkerrecht) necessary for it is none other than to demonstrate the viability of the idea of law in its greatest possible scope, which is then tantamount to coming up with a design for perpetual peace.’Footnote ⁹¹ Kant overturned the premise of natural law that the right to declare war could be derived from a state of nature, where contemporary states could be compared to earlier human beings, claiming instead that ‘the state of peace amongst people living together is no state of nature (status naturalis), which is much more a state of war’: a state of peace had ‘to be created’ by one neighbour for the other, ‘which can only happen in a legal set of conditions’.Footnote ⁹² Although not attempting to rule out military conflict forever, the majority of proponents of natural law, too, had been anxious to limit and inhibit warfare.Footnote ⁹³

The limitations which advocates of natural law attempted to place on the waging of war – that conflicts required an injury or insult to justify their declaration, that they should serve to recreate peaceful and legal conditions, and that they should be conducted through means proportionate to the injury incurred – could themselves be seen to facilitate a barely distinguishable alternation of war and peace, typical of absolutist states.Footnote ⁹⁴ Such states had, contended Kant, ignored their subjects' interests and availed themselves of standing armies, which ‘threaten other states constantly with war, by their readiness always to appear to be armed for this’, and which ‘make use of people as mere machines and tools in the hands of another (of the state)’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The establishment of republics in the place of absolutist monarchies, together with the institution of international law and a Völkerbund, as a ‘federalism (Föderalismus) of free states’, would remove the root cause of war, the philosopher believed: ‘if (which in this constitution cannot be otherwise), the consent of the citizens (Staatsbürger) is required in order to determine “whether there should be war or not”, nothing is more natural than that they should weigh the matter well before undertaking such a bad business’.Footnote ⁹⁶ By contrast, in a monarchical state, the ruler did not have to bear the costs of conflict and often chose to go to war. Other ‘enlightened’ commentators such as Wilhelm von Humboldt disagreed with Kant about a perpetual peace, accepting that the role of the state was to safeguard the security of citizens, through a delegation of power to the judiciary and police at home and through the formation of a militia and the direct exercise of violence by the citizenry abroad, which should always be ready to fight for its ‘fatherland’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Humboldt concurred, however, that absolutist states and standing armies could not be entrusted with the powers needed for the defence of the nation, not least because they menaced the rule of law, domestic ‘politics’, and good governance. The breadth of support for a reform of the army bore witness to the unpopularity of ‘absolutism’.Footnote ⁹⁸

For many subjects, war was a regular but distant occurrence in the eighteenth century. In pictorial terms, which were known to town-dwellers from prints and – more occasionally – private collections, galleries, and museums, conflicts had been largely contained within long-range panoramas of troop formations on the battlefield, as well as in traditional, increasingly hollow symbols of martial grandeur and images of monarchs and commanders.Footnote ⁹⁹ On the Baltic island of Rügen, Arndt, in his early twenties, barely registered the outbreak of war in 1792, despite his ‘participation in world events’ increasing ‘from year to year’ and his becoming ‘not merely an eager public reader, but also an assiduous private reader of newspapers’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As a student in Greifswald in 1793–4 and at Jena in 1794–6, he passed his time learning and living from hand to mouth, without remarking on the revolutionary campaigns in the west. He first acknowledged the existence of war during a year-and-a-half-long voyage in Austria and Italy, when he was ‘surprised’ by conflict ‘breaking out again’ in Tuscany in 1799 and was ‘chased away’ more quickly than he had anticipated, returning home via Nice, Marseille, Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Berlin.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Although troubled by ‘every French victory against the Germans’, despite being ‘far from the scene and uproar’ in Swedish Pomerania, Arndt recognized that French revolutionaries' aims were ‘undeniably right and holy’, creating turmoil in ‘the hearts of half of Europe’ and finding ‘more friends than enemies’ in the academic's ‘Heimat’.Footnote ¹⁰² Napoleon's defeat of Austria in 1805 and Prussia in 1806 purportedly altered the journalist's view definitively, persuading him ‘to love Germany’, together with the Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies, ‘with true love and to hate the “Welschen” with a true and loyal contempt’.Footnote ¹⁰³

Another North German academic, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, who had studied at the university of Kiel in the mid-1790s before entering the Danish civil service in 1796 and, again, in 1799, likewise paid little attention to the early revolutionary wars, continuing to harbour the hope of becoming a professor at the new École normale in Paris as late as November 1794 and prophesying ‘great happiness and general enlightenment, which will serve to excuse much of what has happened’ in France during the Jacobin ‘terror’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The first real impact of war came in 1798, he reported, as rumours of a French expedition against Hanover and Hamburg began to circulate, with the prospect of an extension of ‘the terrible consequences of such an undertaking’ into Holstein, which was ‘the most valuable thing in the world’ to him.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Niebuhr's desire was for ‘the experience of a glorious war, combined with the abolition of privileges and the formation of a general militia with civilian officers who are partly elected’, to dispel the people's ‘fear of the military estate’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The academic and administrator's conception of war, notwithstanding the fact that it seemed imminent, was still characterized by historical distance and disinterest. When he again was caught up in hostilities, as Britain prepared to bombard Copenhagen in 1801, he was filled with ‘wonderment’ at the prospect of writing ‘of war and armaments, and of things which are quite alien to us’, he wrote to his life-long confidant in Kiel, Dore Hensler.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It was only when Copenhagen was actually bombarded in April 1801, with thousands reportedly dead, that Niebuhr was faced with ‘the terrible picture of a murderous struggle, which only experience gives us knowledge of’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Such experiences meant that, when the wars of Austria and then Prussia against ‘this terrible empire’ of Napoleon and against ‘French tyranny and outrage’ took place in 1805–6, the academic, banker, and administrator portrayed the conflicts in much darker colours.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Entering the Prussian administration of Stein in the summer of 1806, he was confronted by a ‘tragedy of horrors’, after the kingdom's defeat in October.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Even at that late date, however, other subjects elsewhere continued to welcome invasion and occupation by the French, as Heinrich Heine recalled in Das Buch Le Grand, which recounted his youth in Düsseldorf in half-fictional form. As well as a cipher for Napoleon, Le Grand was a drummer billeted in the Heine household, whose drumbeats told the writer that ‘the Prussians had been dumb, dumb, dumb’ and promised equality, fraternity, and to ‘hang the aristocrats from the lamp-post’.Footnote ¹¹¹ To such citizens, who constituted – if Heine is to be believed – the majority of the city's inhabitants, French wars, as late as 1806, remained a matter of enthusiasm and exhilaration, not fear or repulsion. Their responses arguably betray how far away military conflict had appeared in the late eighteenth century to the burghers of many German towns, whose opinions were at once formed and reinforced by depictions of the more or less capricious and self-interested armed disputes of princes and their standing armies.

Both the relative distance of late eighteenth-century warfare from civilian society and its greater impact after the turn of the century could be perceived in the writings of one of the few remaining advocates of a perpetual peace, the writer Jean Paul. Commenting after the defeats of 1805–6, the author, whose early novels in the 1790s had made him appear a literary equal of Goethe as he moved from Weimar via Berlin to Bayreuth in the early 1800s, was criticized for suggesting that German states should accept the imposed Peace of Tilsit (1807) as the basis of a new, French-dominated international order.Footnote ¹¹² With his adopted city of Bayreuth occupied by French troops after 1806, having been taken by Prussia in 1791, Jean Paul saw defeat at Austerlitz (1805), Jena, and Auerstädt (1806) as proof that ‘we had lost the old regime earlier than we had lost our battles’: ‘War exposed the weaknesses of our constitution rather than taking it from us.’Footnote ¹¹³ In some respects, the writer's critique of the old order was an extension of that of Kant and the late Enlightenment, depicting military conflict as the corollary of the ‘bellicose disposition’ of absolutist states and noting a ‘growing insight’ into the ‘injustice’ of war, which was a sign that ‘the head always precedes the heart, amongst peoples, by centuries, as with the trade in negroes; even by millennia, as perhaps is the case with war’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Over time, he hoped – in his Rousseauian discourse on education, Levana oder Erziehlehre (1806), which was written before Jena – there would be a movement, beyond sovereign states, towards a ‘universal republic’, which would make every conflict a destructive and avoidable ‘civil war’ (Bürgerkrieg) and which would be accompanied by the spiralling and inhibiting costs of warfare.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In other respects, however, Jean Paul's Levana, Friedens-Predigt (1808) and Dämmerungen für Deutschland (1809) betrayed how publicists' attitudes to war had altered during the late revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, as conflict came to seem like a more or less constant state, with deleterious consequences for civilian life. ‘War’, he wrote in 1806, ‘is like a river of hell encircling and constraining the living earth.’Footnote ¹¹⁶

From such a starting point, the novelist attempted to shatter common illusions in the press and literature that war was a test of manly virtues and that it was a source of reputation, glory, profit, and strength.Footnote ¹¹⁷ It was necessary to dispel ‘press commonplaces’ and popular misconceptions of heroism, which honoured the ‘arsonist’ – or general – more than those who had built the temple – namely, citizens – and which ignored the fact that heroic acts rested on ‘mechanics’, ranks of soldiers (‘die Sieger’ not ‘der Sieger’), and the common-sense and reason of citizens during peacetime.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Whereas the duel of two individuals produced ‘honour’, the duel of millions, which should be proscribed by ‘morality’, resulted only in ‘unhappiness’: ‘the misfortune of the earth until now rests on the circumstance that two people have decided on war and millions carried it out’; it would be better, ‘although not good, if millions decided on it and two fought’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The contrasting examples of representative government in Britain and the tyrannies of the east showed that internal order and peace could be extended, through the participation of citizens, to the relations of states, continued Jean Paul: ‘The Orient lives at the same time in perpetual wars and perpetual powerlessness; England, by contrast, without land wars and without acts of cowardice.’Footnote ¹²⁰ Yet, the writer accepted, as the very form of his warnings made plain, that ‘public opinion’, urged on by ‘big mouths’ such as Arndt advocating wars of national defence, was still to be convinced of the case for peace, not least because, ‘until now, the chapters of history were filled with war, between which peace placed a few footnotes’.Footnote ¹²¹ This ‘perpetuum mobile of the devil’ remained in place in the Napoleonic period, like a ‘machine of hell’, perpetuating a ‘history of annihilation’ which had existed since the ‘history of creation’.Footnote ¹²² In such conditions, defensive wars against Napoleon and ‘death for the fatherland’ were justified, notwithstanding the bloodiness of battle, it seemed by 1812.Footnote ¹²³ Any transformation of popular conceptions of conflict and the order of states looked likely to be slow and uncertain.

Like other ‘enlightened’ publicists of the Napoleonic era, Jean Paul was aware of the proximity, destructiveness, and – at least momentary – inescapability of war, even though he never gave up the ultimate goal of peace.Footnote ¹²⁴ Paradoxically, his raising of the possibility of perpetual conflict in Friedens-Predigt and of a ‘war declaration against war’ in Dämmerungen für Deutschland served to distinguish, more markedly than in the late eighteenth century, between war and peace as separate states of affairs, with the former relying on the latter for the accumulation of resources necessary for combat.Footnote ¹²⁵ During the 1790s, many commentators had, at different points in time, repudiated the French Revolution and a French-backed peace. In Weimar, one of the pillars of German classicism, Wieland, had championed the French National Guard, the National Gendarmerie, and ‘national soldiers of the line’ in 1792 as ‘particles of the sovereign’, from whom ‘shines a ray of original majesty (Ur-Majestät)’ and who ‘only obey whom, when and how they want to’.Footnote ¹²⁶ By 1793, he was condemning the declaration by French revolutionaries of an international civil war for the alleged emancipation of oppressed peoples because it risked starting a conflict with ‘all the kings and princes of the earth’ at the same time as offering ‘peace and brotherhood to all peoples’.Footnote ¹²⁷ The following year, Wieland warned that ‘bloody experiences should … finally convince us that violence can do little or nothing against this fanaticism for freedom and equality, by which the majority of the French nation is already possessed’.Footnote ¹²⁸ War during the revolution seemed to have become more similar to the civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹²⁹

In the Rhineland, the ‘enlightened’ Catholic journalist and writer Joseph Görres – like Fichte, who changed his mind after 1797 – took longer to distance himself from events in the neighbouring state, where ‘a form of government, in which public opinion has a decisive weight’, looked set gradually to rule out ‘the proclivity towards war’, as he put it in an essay on ‘the ideal’ of ‘general peace’ in 1798.Footnote ¹³⁰ After a trip to the French capital between November 1799 and March 1800, the later editor of the Rheinischer Merkur outlined the ‘Resultate meiner Sendung nach Paris’ (1800), in which he alluded to the ‘inevitable self-tearing-apart of popular sovereignty and absolute democracy’.Footnote ¹³¹ As a result, ‘the emancipation of humanity’ had not been achieved and French wars in its name were suspect.Footnote ¹³² In turn, ‘the great idea of a perpetual peace in the world of states’ had proved a deception, he wrote in 1802.Footnote ¹³³ War, Görres later held, was a ‘potent life force’ with a positive function, akin to the ‘destroying’ element designed to determine and check ‘every great life process in nature’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Although still subject to many limitations, the use of force was warranted in defence of nations and their territories: ‘No tribe has a claim on the possessions of another; none may drive their neighbour out of its territory.’Footnote ¹³⁵ Since Napoleonic France was acting aggressively, German states had ‘the higher right of defence and retaliation’ in a ‘holy crusade’ by 1814.Footnote ¹³⁶ ‘A nation (Volk) should never let itself be ridiculed and injured in an unpunished fashion’, he asserted in May of the same year, implicitly criticizing Germany's passivity in the past vis-à-vis its neighbour.Footnote ¹³⁷ What was more, ‘hellish powers have again found their centre in France, where Lucifer has returned and everything is moving and running in all haste to the taking up of weapons’.Footnote ¹³⁸ Within a decade or so, Görres had passed from anticipation of a perpetual peace to the justification of military conflict against a national and religious enemy.

III

Surprisingly, many ‘conservative’ authors followed an intellectual trajectory on the subject of war similar to that of their ‘enlightened’ counterparts. The distinctions between positions were, of course, blurred in German states which – although ‘their greater or lesser powers', in Wieland's words, were ‘limited on every side by laws, tradition and in many other ways’ – had been partly protected from ‘public’ discussion and from ‘politics’ by the structures and practices of absolutist rule.Footnote ¹³⁹ Friedrich Gentz, a former Prussian and later Austrian official and one of the most prominent conservative publicists of the period, made the same transition as Görres. As an old student of Kant, his first articles in the Berlinische Monatshefte at the start of the 1790s were in support of natural rights, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, as ‘the first practical triumph of philosophy’, according to a letter of December 1790: ‘It is our hope and comfort in the face of the multitude of old evils under which mankind sighs.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Although Gentz later became known as a ‘conservative’ (or advocate of ‘reaction’ or ‘preservation’), after he translated Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in 1793, he refused simply to repudiate natural rights, preferring to reinterpret them as part of the conjunction between the rule of law, the normative principles, and empirically describable institutions of the political order and the idea of evolutionary progress, as outlined by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Thus, he opposed Fichte's notion of autarky as a means of creating peace, since it militated against the curiosity, competition, and strife which underpinned economic and cultural advances.Footnote ¹⁴² Because war could become purely destructive, as the revolutionary conflicts had demonstrated, the role of politics was to contain such violence, which remained inevitable and – in certain circumstances – necessary, in order to permit the development of European societies and economies. French revolutionaries had failed to curb violence at home, the countering of which was Gentz's priority until the turn of the century, and they had encouraged the unleashing of destructive conflicts abroad, prompting the publicist to concentrate on the relations between states during the 1800s and 1810s, before becoming one of Clemens von Metternich's main advisers at the Congress of Vienna in 1815: ‘When a nation’ severed ‘all ties of duty, loyalty and subordination’, overrode the highest power in the state through an ‘act of violence’, claimed sovereignty for itself ‘amidst this horrible and self-constituted anarchy’, abolished hierarchies and mocked religious ideas, ‘then the right of other nations to lead it back within the limits of social order are incontrovertibly established’.Footnote ¹⁴³

In the Historisches Journal, which he edited and supplied with articles, Gentz openly opposed Kant's idea of a perpetual peace in ‘Über den ewigen Frieden’ (1800) with the claim that any attempt to impose a Völkerbund and rights without the agreement of the majority of states would provoke another war. France, with the help of a new type of warfare resting on the revolutionary zeal, defence of the republic, and love of glory of citizen-soldiers, had ignored the injunction that ‘relations between states’ should be regulated ‘in the same ways as relations between individual members of civil society’ and it had, instead, exported ‘armed opinions’ to territories – above all in Germany – defended by a badly organized, under-funded, sclerotic Coalition, which ‘forgot about the revolution’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Although Gentz still entertained the possibility that Napoleon Bonaparte might reverse revolutionary changes in 1797–9, he conceded ‘that the French Revolution has really happened’, in a letter to the Romantic conservative Adam Müller in 1802: ‘“It is immortal, for it exists.” Nothing on earth can make it un-happen.’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Napoleon's ‘European federative system’, which was nothing more than a bid for ‘world domination’ (Weltherrschaft) or an attempt to set up a ‘universal monarchy’ (Universalmonarchie), was an outgrowth of the interventionism and expansionism of the French Revolution, which was founded on the disruptive ‘principle of so-called popular sovereignty’, or ‘the pivot around which the entire revolutionary system turns’, as Gentz had declared to Metternich on 15 February 1814.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ French revolutionaries had aimed to end war and create an alliance of nations, but they had succeeded only in precipitating the ‘most terrible world war’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Military conflict was necessary as a means of channelling human aggression and maintaining domestic order; it was also required, in a new form but ‘with regular troops alone’, to counter the military threat of the revolutionary Napoleonic regime.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The main way of controlling such war was not to revert to an eighteenth-century ‘balance of power’ – or ‘anarchy, in the sense of international law’, as Gentz termed it in ‘Über den ewigen Frieden’ – with its constant warfare and misleading fiction of ‘equality’ of states, which had been easily overturned by France after 1792, but to institute ‘an extensive social union … among the states in this part of the world, of which the essential and characteristic aim was the preservation and mutual guarantee of the well-won rights of each of its members’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ ‘Men became aware that there were certain basic rules in the relationship between the strength of each individual part and the whole, without whose constant influence order could not be assumed’, wrote the publicist in Fragmente aus der neuesten Geschichte des politischen Gleichgewichts in Europa (1806):

The ‘diverted, split forces of our great nation, channelled into weakly flowing streams, into foul swamps or disloyal, outflowing canals’, had been responsible for much of the disorder of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods: ‘Europe fell because of Germany, and it must rise again through Germany.’Footnote ¹⁵¹ In order to end the ‘slavery’ of Germany and entrench a more stable international order, which might bring the regular conflicts of the eighteenth century and the constant warfare since 1792 to an end, the Allies needed to organize themselves for the decisive defeat of France.Footnote ¹⁵² In all such calculations, Gentz at once recognized and sought to control a different type of revolutionary conflict, necessitating a sharper and more effectively enforced distinction between war and peace.

Influential conservative writers such as Adam Müller, Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, and Achim von Arnim, many of whom were connected to overlapping circles of Romantics in Vienna (Müller, the Schlegels, Gentz, Beethoven), Heidelberg (Brentano, Eichendorff, Arnim, Loeben, the Grimms, Görres), and Berlin (Arnim, Kleist, Tieck, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Fichte), shared Gentz's opinion of war as part of a natural, historical order. For Friedrich Schlegel, who entered the Austrian civil service in 1809, Christian states were perceived to have prevented internal feuding, or a war of all against all, but they were not believed to be capable of eliminating a God-willed struggle of good against evil: military conflicts were an indication of the imperfections of humanity. Although, like Gentz, initially backing Kant's idea of a perpetual peace as ‘brave and worthy’, with ‘universal and complete’ republicanism as its prerequisite, the academic and poet quickly realized that the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars constituted an ‘age of the violence of war’, with the French as the ‘Huns of the new times’.Footnote ¹⁵³ Similarly, Arnim, despite earlier anticipating the ‘political dissolution’ of states as an obstacle ‘to the spread of knowledge and the arts’, came to see conflicts between states as a series of dichotomies of good and evil, being and appearance, spirit and matter, providing, in idealistic terms, the judgements of ‘partial world courts’: ‘Whoever wins becomes the spirit of the world.’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Although they could appear to be little more than the ‘common slaughter of people’, with ‘the individual appearing infinitely small compared to the mass’ in the ‘great events of war’, requiring ‘schnapps rather than heroic courage’, battles could be seen to be exciting – ‘Nothing on earth is more fun than we hussars on the field, when we are in battle’ – because they constituted part of a meaningful religious dialectic: any order ‘in which war is merely calamitous’ destroys itself, for ‘this order is only a foreground, and leads via its own destruction, as its antithesis, to the synthesis of a higher truth, to world harmony, in which calamity stands in the service of salvation, and negative produces positive, evil creates good’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In Arnim's opinion, conflict was creative.

Peace could not exist without war, Müller averred, as a constituent of his ‘theory of opposites’ and as an element of the natural order, ‘where laws are shown in nature and its unending wars’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Just as individual freedom was founded on restless and defensible activity, with ‘every single character who belongs to the state as a whole’ being ‘able to create, argue and defend themselves in their own way’, so nations and states had to be allowed to compete and fight for their own sets of values and goods: ‘Wars are, from the standpoint of individual people, unpleasant things, which the living-side-by-side-with-one-another of individual peoples brings in its train’, wrote the philosopher and administrator in 1809: they ‘cannot be separated from the living-side-by-side-with-one-another of individuals’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Whereas the ‘old Staatswissenschaften’ had looked on war as an exceptional state and had strived to attain perpetual peace, Müller saw such propositions as ‘madness’, ‘as if wars between nations (Völker) were a suspension of law, i.e. illegal conditions, and the disputes of private persons within the same state were legal, because a real and effective judge exists for them’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ It was possible to achieve ‘perpetual peace between peoples, i.e. security from wars’, and ‘perpetual peace within states, i.e. security from revolutions’, by establishing a ‘Weltpolizei’, but at the expense of ‘the competition of forces, true war, freedom, the good of all goods’, which was unthinkable.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Conflict was part of the disputation necessary for life: ‘Peace only becomes a living idea through war, the law only through freedom’, he concluded.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Like his fellow Catholic-convert Friedrich Schlegel, Müller assumed that the moral and legal precepts generated by free disputes would, together with Christianity, limit war and prevent savagery.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Military conflicts, with the standing armies of absolutism in retreat, were not seen to endanger but rather to constitute and maintain political and cultural life.

IV

In literary and artistic circles, especially within those of the Romantics but also beyond them, war had become an important and acceptable theme, not least because it seemed to pose fundamental questions about human existence and death. In revolutionary France, artists' representations of battles and the other events of war quickly became a ‘drama of the passions’, with large allegorical and real figures occupying the foreground in struggles of principle and survival.Footnote ¹⁶² In Germany, the subjects and traditions of art changed less markedly and more unevenly, with some artists like Christian Gottfried Geissler producing detailed, realistic, unjudgemental studies of everyday life, as in his depiction of the colourful, ragged, pilfering soldiers of Französische Infanterie zieht in Leipzig ein (1807) or his account of the delivery and protection of a baby by French troops in Straßenszene in Lübeck (1806–7), and with others such as Jacques François Swebach portraying, in a mixture of fantasy and nightmare, the realities of killing in Der Tod des Prinzen Louis Ferdinand (1807), where the French cavalry converge on the isolated, flailing, bare-headed Hohenzollern scion, in the middle of a corpse-strewn battlefield, in order to end his life.Footnote ¹⁶³ This same sense of dream-like, subjective isolation could be found in the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich's painting of Der Chasseur im Walde (1813–14), in which a helpless, dismounted French cavalryman faces death, alone before a dark, snowbound forest. Yet, such depictions were rare, even if echoed in many of Friedrich's other portrayals of lone figures and motifs within a meaningful, sometimes foreboding, natural world. They were more common and better known within poems, prose, and plays.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

One of the most famous plays, although only staged in private before the 1820s, was Heinrich von Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1809–11), which referred obliquely to the death of Prince Louis Ferdinand von Preussen at the battle of Saalfeld (1806), four days before Jena and Auerstädt, and to the battle of Aspern (1809), which Kleist had witnessed.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Set in Brandenburg during the war of 1675, as the Elector's forces were attempting to push Swedish troops back to the Baltic, the plot turns on the sentencing of the prince of Homburg to death, after he had attacked the retreating Swedish army too early in defiance of his orders (he is still in a trance, which he is unable to separate from reality), allowing the Swedes to escape across a river. The Elector refuses to revoke the sentence in the name of the law, despite the fact that his general had attacked early in part because he had believed his ruler, who had switched horses, to have been slain. Yet, the Elector is opposed by his niece, Natalie, and his own officers, one of whom tells him, in direct reference to Prussia's defeats in 1806, that what matters is not rules but the vanquishing of the enemy. At first, when he learns of the Elector's decision and sees his own grave being dug, Homburg pleads for his own life at any price: ‘Since I saw my grave, I want only to live, and won't ask whether honourably or not.’Footnote ¹⁶⁶ He has been wrenched from his reverie and confronted with the finitude of existence. He subsequently rejects the offer of a pardon, declaring that ‘to triumph over one's own weakness means more than gaining a cheap triumph in battle‘Footnote ¹⁶⁷. As he declares from the scaffold, before being freed from the sentence at the last minute by his ruler:

Recovering from a faint, as his blindfold is removed, the prince asks ‘Is it a dream?’, to which an officer replies: ‘What else?’ Simultaneously, other soldiers raise the cry ‘to battle, to victory …; into the dust the enemies of Brandenburg!’Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Amongst other things, the play examines the tension between law and military discipline and individual initiative and passion, and between reality and life and dreams and death, where Brandenburg's fate – or Prussia's in 1806 – depends on a military encounter and the predicament of a soldier represents the choices, in a stark form, facing every subject.

The gap between war and peace is at once shortened and deepened in such works, as the audience learns of the humanity and exceptionality of soldiers' actions and fates. In the most celebrated plays of the period, Friedrich Schiller's trilogy Wallenstein (1798–9), war reveals truths which are obscured in peacetime. For Goethe, its historical subject matter was merely a thin cover for the purely human.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Albrecht von Waldstein or Wallenstein was an unknown Bohemian noble who became the commander of the principal Habsburg army in the first half of the Thirty Years War and who was assassinated in 1632 with the consent of the Kaiser, as he contemplated switching to the side of the Protestant princes and bringing the war to an end through a compromise peace. The first play of the series, Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein's camp), focuses on the army itself, with the audience learning of Wallenstein's position (fearing the intrigue of the emperor and court and failing to keep control of his divided forces) from the snippets of conversation of common soldiers, set amidst the open spaces of the encampment, which Schiller conceives of as ‘a small universe’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Here, the leader and the mass of individual troops, who are not named, merge in a series of actions which will decide the fate of the empire and the religious settlement of Europe. Low-born men have been liberated from the conventions, corruptions, and distinctions of a society of estates through association with a successful general and they have been freed from the constraints of daily life, able to rob and to kill. Their courage also liberates them from a fear of death, which limits the lives of others, pointing to the paradox that external adversity and regimentation are compatible with inner freedom, as the closing song of the play spells out: ‘Saddle up, comrades, to horse, to horse,/On to war and to freedom./In war a man still counts,/His heart is still weighed and valued./No one can take his place,/He is on his own.’Footnote ¹⁷² ‘Freedom has passed from this world of lords and slaves./… Only the man who can look death in the face,/The soldier, is free!’ continues the second verse, before the song ends with, ‘And if you don't stake life,/You will never have gained life.’Footnote ¹⁷³

As the action switches in the second and third plays to the enclosed chambers of castles, to the high politics and intrigues of his generals and figures from the court, and from informal German to the blank verse of nobles, the fortunes of the protagonists become tragic, caught within an accelerated sequence of what Schiller termed ‘interlocking events’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴Die Piccolomini follows the deception of Octavio Piccolomini, one of Wallenstein's generals and a close friend, as he plots on behalf of the Kaiser, leaving his son Max, for whom the commander is a second father, to escape from the corruptions of his milieu through death in battle. Octavio's warning that Max has known only war and that he must accommodate himself to peace, prosperity, and tradition is undermined by the audience's awareness of the father's own civilian-inspired duplicity. The final play, Wallensteins Tod (Wallenstein's death), shows how the soldiers refuse to betray the emperor and how power slips from the commander's hands. On one level, the trilogy anticipates the struggles of the revolutionary regimes and the emerging Napoleonic one, with the prologue of Wallenstein's camp identifying the French general and later emperor – ‘You know him’ – as ‘the creator of strong armies, idol of the camp and scourge of many countries, the adventurous son of fortune.’Footnote ¹⁷⁵ On another level, the works, which recreate Wallenstein's last days in what Hegel described as a horrific, unredeeming, and desolate – rather than tragic – way, reveal to spectators how the soldiers' lives, including that of their leader, illuminate and expose their own, by removing the hindrances and increasing the tempo and stakes of social existence.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

The soldier-poets of the ‘wars of freedom’, who achieved popularity in the 1810s, attempted to extend, aestheticize, and heroicize Schiller's intimation of soldiers' special knowledge, deriving from their proximity to death and their separation from civilian society. The Weimar playwright's account of warfare is certainly not heroic, with Wallenstein subject to overwhelming historical forces, yet responsible for his own actions, the consequences of which eventually lead to his death. By contrast, the poems of Max von Schenkendorf and Theodor Körner were heroic, resting on many of the new commonplaces about war – that it was inevitable and natural, that it should be waged by citizens not standing armies, that it was a moral, social and political test rather than a danger – but radicalizing such tenets for the sake of soldiers' martyrdom. In Körner's posthumously published Leier und Schwert (1814), after he had been killed in combat in August 1813 at the age of twenty-two, all except five of the thirty-seven poems are about dying and death, conceived of in valedictory terms, as the poet's dedication to the Lützower Corps, in which he had served, evinced: ‘And should I be missing in the victory march home:/Don't cry for me, envy my good fortune!/For what, intoxicated, the lyre had sung,/The free act of the sword had already done.’Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The war of 1813 was not merely a national necessity, it was a religious calling, as Körner explained to his father on volunteering in March:

To Körner, ‘This is no struggle for the goods of this world, [since] we are protecting the most sacred thing with the sword’; ‘This is no war that the kings of the earth lead’, but a struggle led by the king of heaven; ‘This is not war which crowns know of, it is a crusade, it is a holy war.’Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Enemies were demonized in a war against ‘hell’, an ‘edifice of lies’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ To Schenkendorf, Napoleon was ‘satan’, an anti-Christ, a ‘wolf’, a tyrant, and ‘a prince of slaves’, from whom – as a ‘devil’ – Germans should free themselves forever, after imploring the ‘holy spirit’ in accordance with ‘the justified enmity of the majority’.Footnote ¹⁸¹ It was not evident how a conflict against such an enemy could be limited, especially when death was ‘a mockery’ and offered the promise of immortality: ‘Let us inherit the earth,/You, eternal, true God …/ This is a beautiful war/In such holy hatred.’Footnote ¹⁸² Action and death seemed to be linked to ‘life’, bringing poets such as Schenkendorf and Körner to long to die in a good cause. ‘Tranquillity kills, only he who acts, lives, and I want to live, and will not die in front of death’, intones Körner's Soliman, before dying.Footnote ¹⁸³ In such romanticization of death, war is not only the opposite of peace, it is a means of reinvigorating life; it is no longer a distant and necessary event after the breakdown of peace, but a constant fantasy which citizens are encouraged to create and to make real in order to escape the ‘tranquillity’ and constraints of peacetime.

Most commentators, of course, did not perceive war in such terms. There were many ways to think of death, some religious and others not, which invoked fear and suffering rather than action, truth, and immortality. What was more, the relationship between military conflict, dislocation, violence, and death was a confused one. The starting point of the majority of authors, however, was that war and peace were at once more clearly defined and more closely connected than in the past.

V

Representations of conflicts changed between 1792 and 1815, as the nature of warfare altered and as a succession of wars, waged by seven separate coalitions, affected all the German lands. Most notably, long-established critiques of absolutism and hopes of a long-lasting or perpetual peace were eclipsed by new conceptions of ‘revolutionary’ conflict and wars of the ‘Volk’. Although their reports varied, the majority of commentators came to assume that greater popular participation in wars was required in order to defeat – or protect German states from – the revolutionary or Napoleonic regimes of France. Such mobilization of the Volk was often ‘patriotic’ – that is, linked to the defence of individual German states – rather than ‘national’, which required the conceptualization of a future German polity.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Either type of mobilization, however, permitted the heroicizing of combat in the press, academic treatises, literature, and art.

In spite of the injunctions of Arndt and others for citizens to hate their enemies, heroism, bravery, and bloodlessness, rather than terror, were characteristic of press, literary, and artistic accounts of war, which generally avoided the worst consequences of military campaigns. Thus, even Körner, who confronted death most directly in his poems and constantly used words to allude to the senses, referred only to ‘der Tod’ as a ‘duty of heroes’ and to flesh and blood as elements of life, to which heroic acts gave meaning: ‘That is my body, which I have given to you, that is my blood, which I have spilled for you. For your life, I go to my death.’Footnote ¹⁸⁵ He envisaged ‘corpses on corpses’, ‘hills of corpses’, as well as ‘floods’ and ‘earthly fires’, as obstacles which it was necessary to traverse in the quest for a promised land: ‘Through! There is the Vaterland!’Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Death for the fatherland offered the chance of martyrdom ‘in the temple of immortality’, deriving from Christian and classical sources: ‘Calm kills, only he who acts lives, and I will live, I will not die in the midst of death.’Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The poet was not waging a war ‘of which crowns know’, but a ‘crusade’ against hell and for the salvation of ‘justice, morals, virtue, belief and conscience’.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ For Körner and other Romantics, the senses faced death in order to give meaning to it and to escape it. Although their outpourings have been described as ‘fantasies of annihilation and bloodthirstiness’, they rarely, in fact, ran out of control, despite their descriptions of sounds, sights, movements, emotions, and the body.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Accordingly, Körner's ‘Song of Revenge’ summoned up thunder and wild furies, dogs, hell, and the devil as it appealed for vengeful killing, but at the same time as acknowledging that it would be limited to soldiers (‘all who carry a blade’) and that it would require a religious demonology (with the enemy as ‘the crop of hell's seed’ and ‘the devil's brood’) to overcome his compatriots' reluctance to avenge their ‘betrayed’ brothers and to keep to their ‘oath’:

Here, in the drunkenness and fury of slaughter, as elsewhere in the representations of the early nineteenth century, there was little acknowledgement of the pain and meaninglessness of military killing.

For the majority of writers, artists, and academics, ‘war’ during the Napoleonic era was not merely different from ‘peace’, it was also a necessary and, frequently, heroic means of defending one's own Volk, state, or fatherland, notwithstanding the existence of problematic cases such as the partitions of Poland (in 1772, 1793, and 1795), during which the aims of absolutist states and patriotic or national-minded publicists could be seen to have converged but which were generally glossed over.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Discussion of worthy or heroic wars of defence within a German public sphere helped to shape educated citizens' opinions of military conflict, influencing (but not dictating) the formulation of policy. These findings militate against the case presented by Planert, using local records, who has cast doubt on the fact that Napoleonic warfare was different in important respects from that of the eighteenth century, that civilians' attitudes to war had changed, even if unevenly, throughout Germany and that policy-making had, correspondingly, been affected.Footnote ¹⁹² Whereas ‘the French Revolution and the changes that accompanied it marked the beginning of modern political history’, from ‘the perspective of military history’ the French Revolution is held to be ‘less of a caesura’.Footnote ¹⁹³ Consequently, ‘after the Congress of Vienna, the European states returned to limited warfare’, she continues.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ This military ‘restoration’ was supposedly disrupted less by nationalism, which had been stimulated in the states of the Confederation of the Rhine ‘only among an educated minority’ and even in Prussia ‘principally in urban centres’, than by ‘the battle of competing ideologies’ which – ‘with the survival of the revolution or Europe's dynasties at stake’ – meant that ‘neither side was able to compromise’ and that both sides pursued a ‘quest for decisive warfare’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ By contrast, I have argued here that commentators' views of warfare altered in similar ways, under the force of extreme circumstances, notwithstanding their different ‘ideological’ or ‘national’ positions. These commentators played an important part in ensuring that post-war attitudes to conflict, including myths of 1813, were fundamentally different from those of the eighteenth century, with heroic conceptions of war quickly overshadowing diverse private and publicly enacted memories of suffering.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ What was more, their shared view of ‘war’ was a relatively narrow one, resting on an imagined essence of combat rather than the wider effects of warfare, even though most writers had not been conscripted and had no direct experience of fighting. In such writers' and artists' images of conflict, which shaped discourses after 1815, stories of economic hardship, political disruption, opposition to conscription, disease, and co-operation or conflict with ‘foreigners’ were regularly linked and subordinated to dominant narratives about violence, death, and heroism, qualifying – although not denying – the significance of ‘the recognition’ given by recent scholarship to ‘the diversity of war experiences’, in the approving judgement of Aaslestad and Hagemann.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

This study has relied on a close reading of some of the most prominent ‘writers’ in their different, often interchangeable, early nineteenth-century guises – ‘enlightened’ critics, ‘conservative’ supporters of states, observers of contemporary events, contributors to newspapers, academics, and poets – in order to investigate the manner in which public discussions of warfare changed. Its approach has been selective, showing – for example – how a well-known advocate of peace such as Jean Paul came to accept the necessity of war, or how a defender of the right of states to declare and use war as an act of policy such as Gentz sought to limit the consequences of the resort to that right. Writers and artists put forward their views in a German public sphere which extended, if sometimes haphazardly and discontinuously, beyond the localities explored by much of the recent historiography. Their articles, treatises, and other works did not merely reflect ‘public opinion’, which remained tied to the educated strata of towns; they also helped to confirm or challenge burghers' opinions about the meaning of conflicts, which had come to play an important part – for many, at least – in their attitudes to ‘politics’, government, conscription, and diplomacy. ‘News’ and discussion of warfare in the public sphere, on the one hand, and subjects' more or less direct experience of warfare, on the other, seem to have combined in a multiplicity of ways and with many exceptions to make conflicts between states appear inevitable, momentous, yet controllable. Thus, even before volunteering to fight, Varnhagen von Ense's conception of war had changed fundamentally, after Prussia's defeat in October 1806. ‘From day to day, the defeat of Prussia was shown to be greater and more humiliating’, he wrote in the immediate aftermath of battle, hinting that circumstance, reportage, and reflection had ‘shown’ the scope and significance of the kingdom's defeat:

By 1809, he noted, everything in Austria, and possibly in Germany, seemed ‘to be heading towards a genuine people's war (Volkskrieg), and enthusiasm and strength of every kind seem to be increasing’.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ In the absence of a compelling alternative evaluation by contemporaries of the impact in Germany of French warfare, it is likely that such affirmative representations of military conflict had wider ramifications in the public spheres of the German lands.

Conflicts that had been refashioned as wars of the people, or Volkskriege, achieved a degree of popular legitimacy which, although still limited, would have been inconceivable before 1792. The ways in which contemporaries experienced and made sense of such wars were heterogeneous and complex, giving credence to scholars' criticisms of Dann's apparent conflation of warfare – or attitudes to warfare – and nationalism. Unlike the majority of commentators, many subjects seem to have had neither patriotic allegiances – in support of individual states – nor national aspirations. Even amongst writers and publicists, there were those – proponents of Rheinbund patriotism, for instance – who openly opposed the anti-French stereotypes and enmity identified by Jeismann.Footnote ²⁰⁰ What such writers meant when they referred to a German ‘nation’ and how they assessed its significance compared to other sets of affiliations and allegiances varied considerably. What united most of them was a conviction that the nature of warfare had altered, shifting the parameters of wartime and, especially, post-war diplomacy, conscription, and military strategy, and making war ‘constitutive’ of ‘processes of nation-building and the establishment of new nation-states’, as Leonhard has rightly suggested, but not making nationalism necessary for the waging of wars.Footnote ²⁰¹ Historians' continuing focus on the relationship between war and nationalism, which derives from a desire to debunk earlier scholars' creation of myths of national ‘wars of liberation’, obscures a more fundamental point, which tends to be disregarded as self-evident but whose consequences have not been adequately evaluated: namely, that representations of war (and peace) in the public sphere had changed as a result of contemporaries' experiences of warfare. Both ‘enlightened’ and ‘conservative’ commentators, from different backgrounds and with opposing views of politics and state policy, altered their conceptions of, and attitudes to, war during the years between 1792 and 1815, at least in part, it appears from a reading of their works and other writings, because of what they had seen and learned of military conflict.Footnote ²⁰² War had come during the course of the revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns – often without national legitimation or a demonization of enemies – to be accepted by most writers and artists, and probably by many of their readers and viewers, as a discrete, threatening, and necessary state of affairs. What to do about that necessary threat remained a matter of profound dispute, dividing advocates of ‘national’, Prussian, ‘federal’, ‘confederal’, ‘reactionary’, ‘liberal’, and other solutions.Footnote ²⁰³ Few nineteenth-century German commentators, however, denied that the threat existed.