In his Geschichte des dreißigjährigen Kriegs (1793), Friedrich Schiller chronicled a war that, “from the interior of Bohemia to the mouth of the Scheldt, from the banks of the Po to the coasts of the Baltic, depopulated countries, destroyed harvests, and left cities and villages in ashes; a war in which thousands of combatants met their end, that extinguished the glimmering sparks of civilization in Germany for half a century, and that delivered the barely improving morals of the people back to an ancient barbarity and wildness.” The driving force behind this conflict, Schiller insisted, was religion, namely Protestantism's rejection of the “absurdities” and “abuses” of Catholicism and the Church's determination to reverse this rising tide of “religious freedom.” While private and state interests influenced the course of events, it was religious sympathies that drew the armies of Europe into central Europe, setting the stage not only for the despoilage of wide swaths of Germany by foreign invaders but also for the emergence after 1648 of a “community of states that … may in itself be sufficient to reconcile the cosmopolitan observer to this war's horrors” (Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Peter-André Alt [Munich: Hanser/dtv, 2004], vol. 4, pp. 366–7). Later historians would come to rather different conclusions about the long-term significance of the Thirty Years' War—most Catholics rejected Schiller's characterization of the war as a battle for Protestant religious freedom, while nationalists saw it as an early struggle for German independence and unity. Yet despite such differences in outlook, over the next one hundred years a wide range of writers and scholars came to share Schiller's sense of the ongoing relevance of this most divisive and destructive chapter of modern history, especially as Germany entered what Olaf Blaschke has characterized as a “second confessional era.”

It is these nineteenth-century debates about a seventeenth-century war that form the basis of Kevin Cramer's fascinating study. Drawing not just on the works of historians but also novels, plays, poems, and the records of public commemorations, Cramer has reconstructed the main fault lines in scholarly and public attitudes toward the Thirty Years' War while convincingly demonstrating the “presence” of this past as Germans experienced the successive upheavals of the nineteenth century. In particular, Cramer shows how the Thirty Years' War became the basis for a series of competing secular/sacred narratives that integrated a distant catastrophe into a vision of Germany's future as a nation. Thus Protestants saw the destruction and loss of life during the war as a form of sacrifice and a mark of their status as a “chosen” people, a promise that would be redeemed in the resurrection, renewal, and eventual unification of the German (Protestant) nation. Catholic narratives of the war, by contrast, dwelled on the missed opportunities of 1618 to 1629, when Kaiser Ferdinand II seemed on the verge of reunifying the empire under Catholic auspices, while expressing fears of exclusion and exile in a Germany increasingly dominated by Prussia. According to Cramer, “Catholic recollection of the war could not point to the formation of a vital and resilient national character emerging out of collective suffering. Rather, Catholic narratives articulated an anxiety about the loss of identity and marginalization within the German nation” (p. 209).

The theme of confessional polarization informs each of the book's chapters. For example, Cramer shows how sympathetic historians transformed the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus into a German Protestant hero. In 1831, the citizens of Breitenfeld staged a ceremony in honor of Gustavus's famous victory over imperial forces two centuries earlier, leaving behind a monument with the inscription “Religious Freedom for the World Saved at Breitenfeld by Gustavus Adolphus, Christian and Hero.” A year later a memorial service, featuring songs, prayers, and children dressed in blue and yellow sashes, was held at the “Schwedenstein,” the spot where Gustavus was said to have fallen after the battle of Lützen in 1632. Catholic historians, for their part, sought to challenge this image of the Swedish king by presenting him as a foreign invader and marauder, intent only on turning the German lands into vassal states. Another key point of contention was the siege and destruction of Magdeburg in 1631 by imperial forces under Johannes Tilly. In their accounts of this catastrophe, Protestant historians dwelt in almost pornographic detail on the atrocities carried out against the town's inhabitants (especially its women), while drawing on plot devices from the Old Testament, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Catholic writers, for their part, dismissed the “Swedish lie” and contended that responsibility for the disaster lay not with Tilly but with Gustavus Adolphus, his emissary Dietrich von Falkenberg, or perhaps the town's own citizens. Whatever the scholarly merits of their arguments, one gains the impression that Catholics faced an uphill battle in their attempts to capture the narrative high ground of the Thirty Years' War.

While Cramer explores the theme of confessional conflict in detail, other aspects of the nineteenth-century context (such as the impact of new sources and methodologies, changing institutional frameworks, and shifting political ideologies and regimes) are dealt with more briefly or in ways that will be largely familiar to historians of this era. At the same time, those without a strong grounding in seventeenth-century history may find themselves running to reference works in order to follow the book's sometimes cursory allusions to the events of 1618 to 1648. For these reasons, I imagine that this study will find the most resonance not among nineteenth-century specialists but rather with two other groups of scholars. First, historians of early modern Germany will find Cramer's discussion of the popular and scholarly historiography of the Thirty Years' War illuminating, sobering, but also encouraging of their own efforts to plumb the depths of this conflict. Second, this volume should attract the attention of scholars interested in the comparative history of memory. Cramer writes that, “as an epic cataclysm of fratricidal gore, [this war] had no less an impact on the Germans' conception of their nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than the seventeenth-century Civil War had on the British, the Revolution of 1789 on the French, and the Civil War on the Americans.” But rather than providing the basis for a “reconciling historical myth,” the memory of the Thirty Years' War only served to reinforce existing confessional and religious divisions in Germany (p. 224). At the same time, Cramer argues, it forged a link between national identity, collective trauma, and apocalyptic thinking that was in place well before 1914, anticipating the “catastrophic nationalism” that Michael Geyer has identified as a key feature of post-World War I Germany. Indeed, this study suggests that it might be time to rethink conventional chronological markers and reexamine the nineteenth-century antecedents of the twentieth-century German experience.