Nations need creation myths. For the Prussian-German nation-state that arose in 1870, the military struggle to liberate Central Europe from Napoleon in the years 1806–1815 served as a crucible of nationhood. As Karen Hagemann persuasively argues, such myths were “a unifying metanarrative” about the “birth of the nation,” a touchstone experience that defined national identity, citizenship, and social order (17). But, in whose name were the wars fought? Were they about liberation from a foreign enemy or about new political liberties? Did war reinforce loyalty to princes, or did it announce the sovereignty of the Volk? And how do wars script the public and private roles of men and women? For Karen Hagemann, the “place of the wars in history, historiography, and memory” (7) is pivotal; they shed light on the contest to define the nation and the political and gender orders that underpin it. But the fluidity and malleability of historical memory in post-Napoleonic Germany resists any direct path to Borussian authoritarianism. Although Hagemann's research amply confirms the eventual dominance of Prussia's triumvirate of monarchy, manly valor, and religious patriotism, it sets this strain of conservative remembrance against the competing story lines of liberal constitutionalism and democratic populism. Enriching the social and political history of military experience with gender analysis, print-culture studies, and a wide-ranging literature on memory, Hagemann surveys a vast cultural landscape to explore the war's evolving representations over the long nineteenth century.
Organized into seventeen chapters in five sections, the book lays out the intertwined elements of the history and historicization of the years between Prussia's stinging defeat in 1806 and the so-called Battle of Nations at Leipzig in 1813. At issue are the “contested contemporary perceptions of the wars” and their transformation into “the creation of collective memories” (7). By the end of the nineteenth century, the social and cultural institutions of buildings, monuments, rituals, art, and academic history had forged a cultural memory that glorified soldiers as “models for succeeding generations”; its “major function,” Hagemann writes, “was to create national unity across political, regional, and social differences as well as foster the population's willingness to make sacrifices for the nation” (18–19). But how contemporaries perceived the wars, and derive meaning from it, was far more complex. An array of motives and experiences blurred the aims of liberation. Alongside Francophobic revenge and Christo-Germanic antisemitism were calls for liberal constitutional reform and national unity. Whereas some regions celebrated their hatred of the French, others acknowledged benefits of the Napoleonic state. Deploying an impressive array of contemporary print matter—including flysheets, songs, pamphlets, newspapers, and sermons—Hagemann shows how regional patriotisms, military service for Napoleon, and dynastic restoration muddied the conceptual clarity of the “patriotic-national mobilization” (22). While contemporaries disputed their experiences, subsequent generations refashioned alternative memories of the military struggle.
The role of gender in the formation of national narratives is central to Hagemann's analysis. If an examination of the social construction of gender identity is not a new approach, the evidence and historicity with which Hagemann approaches the entwined relationship between citizenship and masculinity certainly mark a milestone for German historical writing. To underscore the mutually reinforcing relationship of gender and political orders, the book opens with two color plates of Georg Friedrich Kersting's diptych canvas, “On Outpost Duty—The Wreath Maker.” One painting portrays three soldiers of the Lützower Corps on watch, all of whom died for the fatherland (the poet Theodore Körner is one of the three); the corresponding canvas depicts a woman, dressed in a plain white dress, making an oak-leaf wreath. This “allegorical incarnation of the moral and domestic German maiden” (4) renders women as onlookers to the national drama. Their role, notes Hagemann, was to strengthen martial mettle, honor victors with wreaths, commemorate fallen heroes, and, above all, embody a feminine domestic virtue that endowed war with a higher meaning.
As subsequent chapters demonstrate, the diptych's evocation of dutiful passivity did not correspond to the hundreds of women's associations that asserted an “active patriotism” and “female heroism” (202) with nursing and charity work. By claiming the “masculine right to act in the public arena” (206), patriotic women transgressed the boundaries of accepted decency. Responding to this gender anxiety, organizers of homecomings and demobilization festivals distanced women from the national spectacle of ceremony and symbolism, just as publicists and subsequent academic historians wrote them out of the national narrative. Official memory would suppress active female patriotism, but historical novels did not. Authors such as Louise Mühlbach, Fanny Lewald, and Caroline Pichler wrote historical fiction that nurtured the “varied war experiences of civil populations,” including “representations of female patriotism that are lacking in so many history books and memoirs” (353). For female bourgeois readers throughout the nineteenth century, such novels acted as a key source for building a collective memory of the Napoleonic era that undermined the paradigm of exclusive male citizenship.
Not surprisingly, novels of both the Vor- and Nachmärz periods provide some of the most subversive material for rethinking national mythmaking. The work of Willibald Alexis, Theodore Fontane, Gustav Freytag, Friedrich Spielhagen, August Sperl, and others offered counternarratives in varying registers of dissent. If Theodore Fontane's Vor dem Sturm (1878) questioned the excessive nationalism of his day, Gustav Freytag's Aus einer kleinen Stadt (1880) squarely characterized the conflict's meaning as a popular struggle for freedom, reaffirming political visions of 1813 and 1848. The discussion of Spielhagen's Noblesse Oblige (1882) is particularly insightful. Set in Hamburg in 1812, the historical novel criticizes the “dogmatic nationalism and overt anti-French invective” of the post-unification era and, furthermore, uses a strong female character to underscore the “limited opportunities of action” (389) for women, whether in 1813 or in the 1880s. Such close readings are situated within broader analyses of publishing landscapes; discussions of editions, translations, and distribution provide context for assessing reception. This salutary use of imaginary literature should set a signal for future research in cultural history. How drama and dramatic criticism made meaning of these wars is, for example, one prominent question that arises from Hagemann's inquiry. Similarly, a systematic study of linguistic tropes could tell us much about narrating the German nation. More than any single work or the oeuvre of any one author, underlying changes in figurative expression, such as the shift from tragic pathos to comic irony, reveal patterns of representation that offer structural evidence for linking linguistic and political orders. How and when Germans grew skeptical of national ardor is as important as their reverential remembrance.
In teasing out the many representations of German patriotic valor, Hagemann draws on the concepts of Maurice Halbwachs and Aleida and Jan Assmann to distinguish between communicative and cultural memory, forms of remembering that contribute to the phenomenon of collective memory. Whereas communicative memory refers to discursive practices that generated recollections in a loose, haphazard fashion over a generation or two, cultural memory denotes the institutional forces—e.g., monuments, professorships, official ceremonies, medals—that structure remembrance in “a more lasting and normative mode” (23–24). The latter is ultimately the more dominant driver of collective memory. Following this template, Hagemann's opus comes into sharper focus. So much of the evidence on the various perceptions of fatherland, nation, family, and Volk recovers the communicative memories of the long nineteenth century, which are then set in conversation with the cultural and collective memories of the Prussian-German master narrative.
In mapping the highways and byways of national remembrance with new texture and depth, the book achieves three major goals. First, it clarifies the cultural operations that wove nation, manliness, God, and family into the mystic chords of a collective memory that buttressed an authoritarian, monarchical nation-state. Second, the book, in so doing, exposes the free play of competing memories within a dominant narrative, challenging us to reimagine the alternative memories of national citizenship that filled communicative arenas through the 1880s. Finally, the book forcefully demonstrates the foundational character of Europe's first “total war” by showing how it forged modernity's gender and political orders. Recent historiographical trends that have foreshortened the chronological arc of modern German history should give pause to readers. With the Sonderweg paradigm (and its emphasis on historical continuities) no longer holding sway, and with new archival opportunities in former East Germany and Eastern Europe inviting the reassessment of fascism and communism, research has shifted significantly toward twentieth-century topics. But, as Reinhart Koselleck and others argued long ago, the ideological spectrum of political modernity germinated in the late Enlightenment and took firm root in the revolutionary era (1789–1830). Hagemann's research confirms the primacy of the early nineteenth century for understanding the gendered foundations of modern nationalism. Equally important for historians of the twentieth century, Hagemann shows just how deeply national memory distorted the past. Modernists will avoid her work at their peril.
In view of the book's title, the author can be forgiven for using Prussia as a proxy for German experience. To be sure, Hagemann is aware of the pitfalls of “equating Germany with Prussia” (69) and cites the scholarship of Michael Rowe, Katherine Aaslestad, Ute Planert, and others, whose work has so effectively undermined Prussocentric approaches. Such “caveats are vital,” she notes, “but they cannot really diminish the importance of the patriotic-national movement itself, which went beyond Prussia, at least briefly touching North, Central and West Germany” (69). Too true, but Hagemann's argument would have benefited from a wider lens to balance the intense Francophobia of the Mark Brandenburg region against more varied responses in other Prussian provinces. A broader comparative framework might have enabled the reader to assess modalities of patriotism, citizenship, and nationhood not originating in Prussia. The fusion of patriotism with the liberal constitutionalism of southern Germany, for example, provides an arena of experience for appreciating the complex reception of Napoleon in Central Europe. Differentiating the unalloyed “eat-the-French” response (Franzosenfresserei) of Brandenburg from that of regions such as Württemberg, Bavaria, Saxony, the Hanseatic cities, Hesse, and the Rhineland (among others) enhances the book's critical point that collective memory elided realms of experience.
In this spirit, future research should include the Austrian reception of patriotic and nationalist literature of this era. Flysheets, song booklets, and oppositional pamphlets did not stop at the Habsburg border. The Nuremberg bookseller Johann Philipp Palm was executed in 1806 for printing and distributing Deutschland in seiner tiefen Erniedrigung, but the same military court tried in abstentia Austrian bookdealers from Vienna and Linz for distributing patriotic tracts. Tyrolean patriotism, shaped by both Napoleonic and Bavarian foes, similarly displayed affinities with the patriotic-national movement. Its circulation of patriotic literature was surprisingly extensive: Johann von Hormayr's Aufruf an die Tiroler (1809) had a print-run of eleven thousand, just as Adolf Bäuerle's Spanien und Tyrol tragen keine fremden Fesseln (1809) moved twenty-five thousand copies. The liberal national elements that smoldered under Klemens von Metternich after 1815 contributed to a vibrant, interegional, participatory political culture, thus buttressing the revisionist glosses on Austrian nationalism published in 2016 by Pieter Judson (The Habsburg Empire: A New History) and Erin Hochman (Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and a Greater Germany).
The winner of the 2016 Hans Rosenberg Book Prize of the Central European History Society, Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon deserves a wide and enduring readership. Military historians will study this book as an erudite iteration of the “new military history,” which situates military experience in broader sociopolitical frames, just as Hagemann's arguments about gender and nation-building will enrich social and political historical research. Her sound overview of the literary markets and readerships that sustained communicative memory is admirable, and should spur others to deploy print-culture studies to tackle broader debates about identity formation and political behavior. Above all, historians are indebted to Karen Hagemann for opening up a vast new landscape on the memory of nationhood. In so many ways, she argues, post-1945 historians still acquiesced in the historical authority of their “Wilhelmine forefathers,” failing to apprehend the “liberal potential” (395) that inhered in the wars’ patriotism. Hagemann exhorts us, then, to cast a gimlet eye toward the ceremonial nationalisms of the late nineteenth century and discover anew the “hotly contested collective literary memory” (395) of the Napoleonic Wars that rendered nationhood unsettled and variable. In reconnoitering this lush and varied landscape of memory, Hagemann stakes out wholly different terrain from conventional accounts of nationalism, offering us contingencies and continuities that are agreeably unfamiliar. To paraphrase L. P. Hartley's quip, the nineteenth century is indeed a “foreign country,” and Hagemann's work beckons us to repay a visit to that land.
