In December 1808, after two years of French occupation, Berlin was “returned” to Hohenzollern rule as a goodwill gesture from Napoleon. The king and queen of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm III and Luise, declined to attend the largely symbolic handover and remained in self-imposed exile in Königsberg; however, the parade of Prussian troops through the Brandenburg Gate did not lack for star power. At the head of the column rode Major Ferdinand von Schill, who was enthusiastically greeted by crowds shouting, “Long live Schill!” How did Schill, who had been an obscure thirty-year-old second lieutenant in the Queen's Dragoons when he was wounded at Auerstädt, become within two years the toast of Berlin society and the most visible and lionized popular symbol of Prussian resistance to Napoleon? Sam Mustafa's engaging book attempts to answer this question as it traces Schill's rise, literally, as a legend in his own time, to his martyrdom in 1809 as he attempted to ignite an uprising against French tyranny in Westphalia. It was after his death, however, that Schill achieved his greatest fame in the popular patriotic hagiography of nineteenth-century Germany as “the manly embodiment of German national fury” (p. 163). The creation of the nationalist cult of Schill in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is also part of Mustafa's narrative.

German history writing and popular historical consciousness have long been populated with immortal warrior icons that have, in various ways and eras, been used to inspire nationalist fervor and unity: Hermann, Götz von Berlichingen, Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein, Friedrich II, Lützow, the heroes of Langemarck. Ferdinand von Schill is also part of this pantheon. Yet, as Mustafa guides us through the stations of Schill's apotheosis, it becomes clear that Schill's utility as a unifying symbol “of the great national struggle” (p. 180) was not limited to the needs of an awakening German national consciousness as it evolved between 1813 and 1871. In their turn, the post-1918 “Germanies,” Weimar, Third Reich, federal, and peoples' republics, also mythologized “Germany's last knight” (p. 137) in monuments along his “long ride” and in countless histories, plays, songs, and poems. He became, respectively, the revolutionary “new man” (p. 215), a völkisch symbol of the “German will” (p. 225), and the selfless “freedom fighter” (p. 264) in the causes of both liberal democracy and the peoples' revolution.

The first half of Mustafa's book narrates the short happy life of Ferdinand von Schill. A nonentity before 1806, Schill was severely wounded at Auerstädt and made his way, with other stragglers from that catastrophic defeat, to the Pomeranian port of Kolberg. This city, already renowned for its dogged resistance against the Russians during three sieges in the Seven Years' War, was still in Prussian hands when the Peace of Tilsit was signed in 1807. Schill's legend began with this second patriotic epic as he led a ragtag Freikorps in wide-ranging cavalry raids that plundered and disrupted French supply lines and communications. With the peace, Schill made his way to Berlin, already the hero of a prolific anti-French press in northern Germany. During his brief stay in the Prussian capital Schill became a patriotic celebrity on a par with the beloved Queen Luise. It was also while in Berlin that Schill insinuated himself within the reformist and resistance circles around Stein and Gneisenau and emerged as an advocate of a guerilla war against the French occupiers as a preliminary to a popular uprising. In April 1809, leading volunteers from his regiment “on maneuvers,” Schill headed south into Saxony and from there turned west and north along the Elbe into the French puppet kingdom of Westphalia. His avowed aim was to foment a rebellion in conjunction with an Austrian-led rising in the southern states of the Confederation of the Rhine. During their “long ride” north, the “Schill'schen” attracted disappointingly small numbers of volunteers, harassed the Westphalian garrisons in brief skirmishes, robbed supply trains and arsenals, and printed and distributed copies of Schill's proclamation To the Germans, which urged Germans to throw off “the shameful chains of foreign domination” (p. 82). Schill's Freikorps, numbering around a thousand men, did not succeed in rousing Westphalia against the French. In the meantime, the Prussian king, fearful of provoking Napoleon, had condemned the Schill'schen as deserters and outlaws (though the legend would maintain that Schill was operating under secret orders passed to him by Queen Luise). Pursued by Westphalian troops, Schill's tiny force eventually straggled into the Mecklenburg port of Stralsund on May 25, 1809, to await British help or, if that failed, to turn the city into, in Schill's words, “a second Saragossa” (p. 107). His French, Dutch, and Danish pursuers closed in and broke into the city on May 31. Schill, shot and killed leading a counterattack, was decapitated, and his head (pickled in spirits of wine) was sent as a trophy to King Jerome. His body was dumped into a mass grave. The surviving Schill'schen would be imprisoned in Wesel and Braunschweig, tried, and executed.

This epic of insurrection would become as an important touchstone of Vormärz German nationalism as that of the Lützow Freikorps during the War of Liberation in 1813. Using archival sources, Mustafa assiduously expands upon and corrects the contemporary and popular accounts of Schill's “uprising” and his and his lieutenants' martyrdom written in the first half of the nineteenth century. Mustafa does us a great service in his scholarly reestablishment of the importance of Schill's narrative in the story of German nationalism and patriotic culture. He is less successful in the second half of the book, where he examines the outpouring of “Schilliana” in the 150 years after the hero's death. Though the preface includes a single portmanteau note citing Rudy Koshar, Alon Confino, Peter Fritzsche, Konrad Jarausch, Michael Geyer, and Anthony Smith, the book itself contains very little substantive contextualization dealing with the themes of war, trauma, and memory; commemoration; and the “romantic,” cultural, and historiographical construction of nationalism. Mustafa's book does leave us, however, with a compelling image, as embodied in the Schill legend, of modern German nationalism: headless, peripatetic, protean.