During the course of his long scholarly career, Herfried Münkler has established himself as one of the most visible political scientists in Germany. In recent decades, his research has increasingly focused on the changing expressions of warfare, culminating in 2013 in a much-discussed history of World War I titled Der große Krieg. With his new study, Münkler moves even further back in time. In almost one thousand pages, he examines the bloodshed that previously formed the measure of all wars in German history until the twentieth century provided newer and even more terrible points of reference.

Münkler decries a lack of comprehensive new reinvestigations of the Thirty Years War, with recent literature consisting primarily of narrowly circumscribed monographs or synthesizing reinterpretations indebted to earlier research. With some exceptions, Münkler, too, relies primarily on older literature, especially Moriz Ritter's monumental Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Gegenreformation und des Dreißigjährigen Krieges, which was published between 1889 and 1908. A number of newer debates that challenge or nuance traditional interpretations, for example the purported dichotomy of obedient Lutheranism and rebellious Calvinism, are not fully integrated into the analysis. This aligns Münkler's assessments more often with older literature than with newer, which is not inherently a drawback. In many respects, the author puts some of the revisionist newer interpretations into perspective.

The author underscores that he did not want to write an antiquarian history of the Thirty Years War that is only relevant to other scholars and lacks significance for the broader public. Instead, he wanted to show parallels with contemporary events and draw lessons from the past. Implicitly, he also wrote the book as a warning to a German public that, in his eyes, has lost the ability to think strategically and pragmatically and puts its trust in a quasi-automatic enforcement of legal and moral guidelines (37‒39).

Münkler shows a clear interest in military history and tactical developments and regularly quotes theorists such as Clausewitz. He also provides extensive portrayals of central military figures and developments, supported by detailed battle descriptions and historical illustrations. The study regularly integrates contemporaneous narrations—such as soldiers' diaries—as well as literary and artistic representations. Whereas many aspects of so comprehensive a topic must by necessity be treated summarily, select other ones, such as the prewar conflict about Jülich-Kleve-Berg, receive a noticeably more detailed investigation.

In opposition to many recent historians, Münkler emphasizes the strong confessional component of the conflict. He therefore also defines the 1629 Edict of Restitution as Emperor Ferdinand II's biggest mistake. The attempt to revert much of northern Germany to Catholicism prevented the transformation of military victories into political stability. By concentrating on the advance of recatholization, the emperor and Duke Maximilian of Bavaria prioritized the confessional dimension over the political.

Yet the war was also a European power struggle. The author shows how difficult it is to assess the driving forces of the conflict from official declarations. In one of his central interpretations, Münkler defines the war as a threefold conflict that consisted of a religious component, disagreements about the imperial constitution, and a struggle for European hegemony. These elements increasingly merged in the course of the conflict, but their relative significance also varied over time. The success of intermediary peace efforts during earlier phases of the war depended to a large degree on the prioritization of select components. Their neglect of the remaining dimensions, however, also doomed these efforts in the long run.

With Wallenstein's murder in 1634, Münkler's narration has passed its high point. The remaining fourteen years of bloodshed receive a considerably terser treatment, summed up under the headline “The War That Would Not End.” Sweden remained in the war because it required the associated French subsidies to retain a powerful army. Vienna was similarly dependent on Spain. When the Spanish defeat at Rocroi in 1643 essentially took this country out of the war, even confessional diehards began to accept the inevitability of compromise.

In the end, the author sees the religious stipulations of the peace agreements as a Protestant victory (803). This assessment might be correct in regard to those populations that were allowed to remain Protestant, but it does not account for those—especially in the southeast of the empire—that had lost their rights in the early phase of the war. It is true that grand designs for a substantive recatholization of the empire had failed. Yet by establishing 1624 rather than 1618 as the benchmark for confessional conditions and exempting the Habsburgs’ hereditary lands from confessional safeguards, the peace accord confirmed the advance of Catholicism relative to prewar conditions.

As a political scientist, Münkler also tries to deduce general lessons from the war. Primarily, he draws parallels with the present-day conflicts in the Middle East. Some of his observations appear plausible. Questions of religion and power merge in the contemporary Middle East as much as in early modern Europe. Individual wars that fail to resolve underlying tensions might in retrospect merge into one drawn-out conflict. Other parallels, such as the analogy between the Bohemian rebellion and the Arab Spring, seem more debatable. The biggest problem with these theoretical comparisons over time, however, is that they serve as a substitute for a genuine historical conclusion. This deprives a well-argued and well-written historical study of the powerful closure it deserved.