Several hundred military comedies and dramas were written in eighteenth-century Germany. Most were of limited literary quality and written to be performed in theaters, as well as by groups of actors moving from town to town or village to village. Scholars often dismiss them as worthless copies of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's serious comedy, Minna von Barnhelm, which was written at the end of the Seven Years’ War and first performed in 1767, and which has been a mainstay of German theater ever since. In this superb study, Tilman Venzl identifies these often dismissed plays as documents that have a value of their own. Whereas many preceded Lessing's play, the others were, no doubt, influenced by its success. In any event, Venzl sees their authors as significant witnesses of, and commentators on, the political and economic changes brought about by the development of standing armies in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. These changes broke down the institutional and social isolation of the armed forces, significantly affected society, and prepared the way for another major change in continental Europe, namely, universal military service.

Military dramas in eighteenth-century Germany were only rarely about war. They generally treated soldiers as members of an expanding, integrative social group. As Venzl explains, “By mobilizing the entire theatrical and aesthetic riches of the age, the military plays reflect[ed] the conditions and processes resulting from embedding the military in society” (500). To explore in greater detail the variety of themes and interpretations of these hundreds of plays, the author chooses four works, the plots of which range from the political and inner conflicts experienced by a head of state, to dramas about bourgeois life, to a text that reads like the preliminary version of a libretto for a comic opera or Singspiel.

The first and earliest, Johann Georg Ludovici's Karl XII. vor Friedrichshall of 1724, contrasts the drama of the Swedish king's emotions and political-strategic decision-making during the final crisis of his reign, with the buffoonery of an ordinary soldier and his female partner; the piece, far from obscuring, instead reveals the common humanity of people at two extremes of the social scale. In the second play Venzl examines, Staps ein Recrüte, written by an author identified only as J. E. R. and printed in the 1740s, a peasant saves his beloved from an officer, but he is then captured and forced to become a soldier. This is followed by an analysis of Der Officier, a 1755 work by an anonymous author, in which the hero, a veteran, tests the morality of his beloved and her family by keeping his better-paying promotion to captain a secret. The final work is a play from 1773, written by Johann Gottlieb Stephanie the Younger, one of the authors of the libretto for Mozart's 1782 opera The Abduction from the Seraglio. In Der Deserteur aus Kindesliebe, the hero tries to help his impoverished parents by pretending to desert. Each of the plays depicts and compares the values, methods, and attitudes of civilian and military individuals and institutions, commenting on their coexistence and reminding—or alerting—the audience to a novel element in their lives, namely, the new everyday reality of the military in German society.

The author concludes his study by turning to a more serious literary work: Jakob Michael Lenz's Die Soldaten, about which much has already been written. Unlike the other dramas Venzl discusses (except for Minna von Barnhelm), this one does rise above primitive theatricality. It is a play that “develops society's need for reform according to the concepts of [Jean Jacques] Rousseau's social philosophy” (494). Whereas both Lessing's and Lenz's works analyze and interpret, the vast majority of the military dramas written for traveling groups of actors mainly reported on and reacted to the specific ways in which the world in which their authors lived was changing. These lesser dramas are documents produced by immediate witnesses, whose statements are enriched both by their ability to communicate with the barely educated and by their effort to bring together parts of the civilian and military past that, despite their constant and profound interaction, are too often addressed separately in the historical and literary scholarship.

An image in the work's introduction appropriately symbolizes the rich, integrative analysis on display here. It is a pen-and-ink sketch that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe made in 1779, while serving as a secret councilor and war commissar of Saxony-Weimar. In this capacity, Goethe had to register the duchy's young males for military service, and his sketch shows a hall in which one officer measures a young man, another turns away a pleading woman, and a third leads a recruit through a door, above which stand the words “Gate of Glory” (it is accompanied by a painted laurel wreath, with a gallows in the center). Like the plays that Venzl analyzes, this image is another document of culture, politics, and war that scholars active in any one of these fields should not ignore if they wish to understand better the military and social transformation of this period.