The Reception of the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia in German Literature of the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
While the horrors of war soon disappeared from literary view after Grimmelshausen's memorable portrayals [1], military generals - above all Wallenstein - continued to inspire the imagination of writers. This widespread interest is manifested already in the early broadsheets and pamphlets that record the fate of this controversial hero, while traveling players presented the "Verratener Verräter" ("The Betrayed Betrayer") or "Das große Ungeheuer der Welt" ("The Great Monster of the World") well into the 18th century. Wallenstein's behavior apparently met the expectations of many for the "großer Kerl" ("great fellow"): between 1781 and 1791, six dramas appeared presenting him as a successful warrior or even a patriotic family man. [2] Shortly thereafter, in 1791-92, Schiller published his "Geschichte des Dreißigjährigen Krieges" ("History of the Thirty Years' War"), remarkable for its accuracy of detail as well as its artful rhetoric. The work formed the basis of the two-part dramatic poem "Wallenstein," written at the height of Weimar classicism.
In the prologue of 1798, the poet alludes to current events, thus investing the dramatic material with epoch-making character:
In these latter days we see it crumble, The old, fixed form which once, a hundred
And fifty years ago, gave Europe's realms
A welcome peace, the costly fruit
Of thirty woeful years of war. [3]
The reference is to the upheaval caused by the revolution, to which the Holy Roman Empire soon fell victim. The Peace of Westphalia had been forced to hold fast to this construct and in so doing persistently hampered Germany's historical development. By associating the present with the past, Schiller criticized a disaster whose political results have been discerned by numerous observers in even the most recent past.
To be sure, the real intention of Schiller's great historical work may be explained with reference to its historical context. In close dependence on ideas from the Enlightenment, the author undertakes a "historical theodicy" by interpreting the terrible war - like excesses of disorder in general - as the birth of a new order conducive to human self-government. [4] From this perspective, the Reformation continues to dominate the subsequent course of history: its confessional solidarity helps overcome national boundaries and pave the way for a world culture. To be sure, in the resulting struggles religious zeal serves only as a catalyst, exploited by leadership elites for selfish and political reasons. Only by invoking religious faith can the masses be mobilized over a period of decades; in addition, it deepens the rapprochement between different states, promoting the notion of world citizenship by overcoming national barriers. [5]
The explanation attempted by Schiller makes reference to the cunning of reason throughout the course of history, though this strategy is offset by the persistent emphasis on the history of "great men": Ferdinand II, Gustav Adolf, and Wallenstein appear as the real actors in the confused and mutable course of the war. To be sure, they are subject to varying assessment, but still with the intention of doing them justice.
The peace treaty is discussed with astonishing brevity. Decidedly critical statements imply that the preservation of the empire, already described as a monstrosity by Pufendorf, had tended to worsen the German situation and that Schiller's contemporaries still suffered under this state of affairs. The criticisms are aimed at the majority of German princes; they are accused of a lack of "patriotism," which Schiller sees manifested in the actions of the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony in particular. The latter is expressly characterized as obsequious. Schiller attributes the same mentality to the estates of the empire in general, with reference to the unlawful use of the Aulic Council:
"The title of emperor, a legacy of despotic Rome, was at that time still invested with the notion of absolute power, standing in the most absurd contrast to the rest of German constitutional law, but which was nonetheless ... propagated by the supporters of despotism and believed by the weak." [6]
The criticism of a lack of patriotism on the part of many of the imperial estates and of an anachronistic conception of monarchical power comes from an author who, subject to nationalistic longings, views Germany's retardataire character as a historical burden.
The Wallenstein trilogy emphasizes this theme even more clearly. Wallenstein himself repeatedly states that he, unlike the imperial house, is striving for peace for Germany's sake, and other important characters confirm it. In this way, he explicitly distances himself from the self-centered territorial princes who unscrupulously relinquish parts of the empire to strangers. Alterations in the versions of the work intended for performance evidence the explosiveness of such statements. [7]
In the decades that followed, the fate of the controversial man continued to be popular as the subject of dramas and operas; though inspired by Weimar classicism, such works have deservedly fallen into oblivion. [8]
Only a few years after Schiller's treatment of the Thirty Years' War, representatives of the Romantic movement likewise turned to the 17th century, though their interest was focused almost exclusively on the so-called Old German literature. While Schiller had only alluded to historical events and upheavals, the revolution and wars of the present were now equated with the "Great War," a motif which was to become a topos in the years that followed.
Contemporary points of view, often bound up with anti-French sentiments, doubtless explain the predilection of many Romantics for Grimmelshausen's Jupiter prophecy, whose longings for peace were echoed again in Kant's famous work. To be sure, the evocation of the horrors of war does nothing to prevent the soldier's life from being equated with the freedom of the itinerant adventurer, who breaks out of the narrow world of the bourgeoisie. This approach has rightfully been characterized as a picturesque stylization of the atmosphere of war, one which was also employed with reference to questions of religion. [9] Achim von Arnim's short play "Die Vertreibung der Spanier aus Wesel im Jahre 1629" ("The Expulsion of the Spaniards from Wesel in 1629") incorporates essential set pieces from the contemporaneous literary approach to history. At the end, the rather comedic drama becomes an unequivocal piece of confessional propaganda. The Spaniard embodies the loathed foreigner, not least of all the neighboring France, while the Protestant protagonist stands for unshakeable faith, pure love, and loyalty to the fatherland. The latter are key concepts that occur frequently in the literature of the following period with reference to our theme. [10]
Heinrich Laube's comprehensive opus of 1863-66, "Der deutsche Krieg" ("The German War"), likewise demonstrates the influence of these ideas, though it also possesses specific qualities due in large measure to the literary genre itself. In nine books, the author provides detailed information on historical and cultural events from the beginning of the Reformation to the end of the war in 1648, which he successfully weaves into coherent narrative strands. Though the actions and persons are in part fictitious, in the spirit of a "historical romance" they nonetheless lend vividness and excitement to the work as a whole, while elements of the detective novel are employed as well. The novel is structured around three persons: the first four parts deal with the fictitious "Junker Hans," the next three with "Waldstein," and the last two with Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar. Laube uses Junker Hans, an upright representative of Protestantism, to address confessional conflicts and the various sects, with Hans himself developing utopian ideas as a moderate visionary. As in the proposals of Grimmelshausen, Leibniz, and others, the aim is to overcome a religious struggle intensified by Calvinism, with tolerance as the watchword of a new church:
"Völlige Toleranz und Gleichberechtigung in religiösen Fragen war die Grundbedingung seines Planes." [11]
These demands are part of a petition in which Hans presents not only religious solutions, but ideas for a reform of the empire as well. His insistence on tolerance is results in part from his own situation: imprisoned in Vienna, he awaits execution. His capture was due to the extensive surveillance above all of Jesuit informants, who create an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. This constitutes an allusion, as well, to the biography of the author, who was expelled from the university because of his connections to fraternities and whose books were placed on the Index.
In addition to these hopes, the striving for national unity plays a prominent role throughout the work, implicating the rejection of influences from the outside. This xenophobia is directed at the Swedes and the French as well as at Vienna and Prague. In this view, the imperial power rightfully belongs to a Protestant prince in the empire, and Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar is given preference early on. While Wallenstein is conceded a position of patriotism for Germany in his behavior toward the Swedes, the final assessment is surprisingly negative. He was
"... leiblich und geistig unfähig .... Das Ideal eines großen Vaterlandes fehlte in seiner Seele." [12]
The idea of the "fatherland" is explained by Junker Hans to Wallenstein's illegitimate son. The fatherland is lacking in all Germans: "In der Größe und außerordentlichen Mannigfaltigkeit des Deutschen Reichs ist der Begriff des Vaterlandes verloren gegangen," although "wir seit einem halben Jahrtausend der maßgebende Mittelpunkt Europas gewesen. Wir haben den Familienschatz vergessen über den Schätzen ausgedehnter Macht" and "entfremdeten Dynastien wie der spanischen die Kaiserwürde überlassen ...." [13]
These sentiments, recorded in the 1860s with a listing of the various German lands - the "Friesen im Norden, die Kärntner im Süden" ("the Frisians in the north, the Carinthians in the south"), etc. - reflect patriotic longings against the background of a constitutional structure still infected by the results of the war and the peace treaty:
"Der Westfälische Friede vergiftete das Deutsche Reich in Herz und Nieren. Er vergiftete den Kaiser, er vergiftete die Nation." [14]
Thus ends the voluminous historical novel, the last part of which praises the extraordinary achievements of Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar, named as the presumptive Protestant emperor already at the beginning. If Laube ends by accepting the unproved conjecture of the duke's poisoning by the French, and casts suspicion on the latter as the forgers of his testament, it only serves to show once more his dependence on the Zeitgeist.
In Gustav Freytag's "Die Ahnen" ("The Forefathers") of 1872-80, this anti-French tendency is intensified into undisguised antagonism, not least of all under the impression of the war and the founding of the Reich. [15]
The polemic of Freytag and Laube against monks and clerics, particularly acerbic when it comes to the Jesuits, draws attention to a constant in the representation of the war. Schiller had already been firmly persuaded of monks' intrigues, and this anti-Catholic tendency was to prevail decisively in the decades that followed. This holds true above all for the numerous poems about Gustav Adolf composed in the 19th century. In the Schiller epigones he appears as a champion of Protestant liberty, especially after the founding of the Gustav-Adolf-Verein in 1832. In addition, he was praised incessantly as a hero fighting for German liberty and unity, though the fact that he was a foreigner and even advanced a claim to the imperial throne occasioned a certain amount of irritation. [16] Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's novella "Gustav Adolfs Page" incorporated nearly all of these aspects. Here it is a German who salutes him as emperor, an office for which he is apparently suited, as the unceasing glorification of the Swedish king bears witness. [17]
After the longings of many had been fulfilled without foreign interference in the founding of the Reich, the unified nation rapidly overcame the backwardness with respect to other western European states that had been lamented by so many authors. This spurt of modernity, however, led to anxieties, and seemed to confirm the prognostications of philosophers and literati. Their skepticism regarding the faith in progress was grounded in the uncontrollable decay of human values. The topos already employed by Schiller, in which chaos gives rise to renewal and a better order, awakened conceptions of a transnational struggle. An "apocalyptic mentality" spread among theologians, philosophers, and literati. The Baroque age, the last high point of history with apocalyptic expectations, thus seemed a particularly apt comparison; its literature grew increasingly attractive, a trend which continues to the present. Grimmelshausen's great war novel, whose first sentence speaks to apocalyptic fears, assumed a prominent place in this development. [18]
Thus it is no coincidence that shortly before and shortly after World War I, two such accounts appeared by poets of varying provenience. In 1912-14, Ricarda Huch published "Der große Krieg in Deutschland" ("The Great War in Germany"), and in 1920, Alfred Döblin's novel "Wallenstein" appeared, which he had written in 1916-18 as a participant in the war.
The text of the historian Huch is striking for both its scholarly meticulousness and its power of poetic evocation. Her dependence on Schiller's work can only be affirmed with strong qualifications. [19] While Schiller focuses his entire attention on potentates and diplomats, the victors and the vanquished of battles, in order to explain motives and their results, Huch portrays events from 1585 to 1650 in a profusion of different episodes. By abandoning the attempt at an overall narrative structure, she successfully evokes the variety of circumstances across all levels of society.
The departure from documentary conventions and the translation of grand history into private life and detail painting is successful because, in the essential facts, the author is able to base her account on first-hand testimony. The atrocities committed at Magdeburg by the army of Tilly, for example, had been a symbol of the horrors of war already for contemporaries, who mocked the general's pride in his virtuous self-restraint. Huch presents this glittering character at the scene of the crime:
When Tilly arrived at the cathedral, which was surrounded by the singing circle of flames like monstrous scarlet flags waved in a victory celebration, and when the officers assembled there rode up to congratulate him, doffing their hats, he removed his own hat and folded his hands. The Lord had allowed him, he said, to return this sanctuary to the true church; his heart was full of thanks. After a pause, during which the gentlemen kept silent, hats in hand, the general turned to them and thanked them for the zeal with which they had performed their duty. [20]
The concluding part of the work, entitled "Zusammenbruch" ("Collapse"), begins already in the year 1633 and once again portrays the horrors of a senselessly prolonged war. The peace negotiations, extending over years, reveal the politics of the time as an absurd farce, in which individual princes and numerous military personnel have difficulty concealing their joy over the continuation of war. At the final signing, some of the participants are persuaded that the agreements will offer plenty of occasion for a renewal of hostilities.
The clergy, too, still behaves narrow-mindedly; at joint conferences of the different confessions, its representatives combine the claim to sole possession of the truth with the abuse of those who believe otherwise. Accordingly, even the final scene proves to be thoroughly ambivalent. Taking place in 1650, it brings Catholics and Protestants together for a common Eucharist, but only by chance: the occasion for this ecumenical celebration is the brutal murder of a young Protestant woman by a Catholic officer who, even two years after the peace treaty, is still trying to extort contributions from the poor peasants. [21]
The text is marked by a striving for extreme objectivity, since it rejects monocausal explanations in the face of the numerous imponderabilities. Thus it is also free of propagandistic intention, for reasons of tolerance, a quality the author feels obligated to promote in an age of totalitarian ideologies. The same holds true even more decisively for her three-volume "Deutsche Geschichte" ("German History") from the Middle Ages to the "fall of the Holy Roman Empire." The volumes that interest us here were published between 1934 and 1937, at a time when Hitler was preparing for a new war. In this context, the work becomes an intentional provocation with its portrayal guided by a concern for justice for different people and parties and its unmistakable demand for tolerance in the spirit of the humanistic tradition. [22]
Döblin's "Wallenstein" novel, which deals with the period from 1620 to 1634, likewise uses a plethora of documentary material, yet pursues other goals. The author was among the numerous intellectuals who went to war enthusiastically and were disillusioned by battles whose outcome was determined by material advantage. This experience manifests itself in a predilection for the philosophy of Marx and Nietzsche as well as the psychology of Freud. Döblin's image of Wallenstein is intended to dismantle the hero cult fostered in particular by idealistic writers of history such as Schiller, Ranke, or Srbik, and which had been decisively called into question by Pekar. With Döblin, Wallenstein appears above all as the quintessential capitalist, who shuns no form of manipulation in order to maximize profits. [23]
The author also seeks to unmask all religious strategies of legitimation as ideology in the sense of false consciousness, particularly those employed by the rulers and church. They too are driven not by faith or even reason, but by instinct alone - above all greed, revenge, and sadomasochistic urges. Unbridled sadism runs like a scarlet thread through the series of innumerable scenes; it is practiced by high and low alike. Thus the author reveals the forces by which human beings are overpowered, albeit largely unconsciously, deducing from this that in the final analysis, man is bestial. This deformation is present throughout in an abundance of animal metaphors along with many comparisons to the sea or water in general, which symbolizes depersonalization. [24]
Döblin shares Nietzsche's conviction that history eludes rational explanation and is thus marked by amorality. If it nevertheless brings forth progress, this can only be understood as cunning. Döblin interprets the repeated rebellions, through which norms are called into question and finally abrogated, as progressive achievements. He includes among these the crises of faith, the growing awareness of the questionability of rulers, and the rapid ascent of Wallenstein, who undermines the hierarchy and prestige of the traditional elites.
After Grimmelshausen had been unequivocally identified as the author of the Simplician writings in 1837, the "Simplicissimus Teutsch" in particular underwent a canonization as part of a national literary tradition, a process that continues to the present. While conservative-nationalistic poets discovered the German quintessence in the protagonist of the work and even wanted to employ it as a means of immunization against modern malformation [25], Arnold Zweig and Ludwig Renn found their experiences of the First World War anticipated in the great novel. [26] This tendency to parallelization and identification received new impulses in World War II and continues even today. Shortly after the beginning of the Russian campaign, Johannes R. Becher wrote a drama on the battle of Moscow with direct references to Grimmelshausen. After the end of the war, he referred to himself and Fallada, among others, as "poets of the second Thirty Years' War," a clear allusion to the period from 1914 to 1945. [27] The title of his anthology "Tränen des Vaterlandes" ("Tears of the Fatherland"), published in 1954, is a reference to Gryphius' famous sonnet of 1636, lamenting the devastation of the fatherland. In an imploring preface, he speaks of the common fate of poets in the 17th and 20th centuries and appeals to West German intellectuals to help cultivate a sense of German belonging through another collection of Baroque voices. [28]
In 1949, Ina Seidel edited a series of Gryphius sonnets in remembrance of the Peace of Westphalia which began with the "Tränen des Vaterlandes." For her, too, the similarity is beyond doubt:
"die Wund- und Brandmale am lebendigen Körper des Volkes sind die gleichen, damals wie jetzt ..." [29]
The following characteristics, listed in part by Seidel, henceforth encouraged the frequent comparison of past and present:
The Thirty Years' War was the first war with a global character: nearly all the states of the Occident participated in it, and with the Turks, the Orient was implicated as well.
The developed weapons technology and the use of mass armies lent a new dimension to the events of the war.
Rulers repeatedly used ideological arguments to accomplish their ends.
Ideological intolerance and terrorism decried the opposing side and conduced to an increasingly unfettered brutality that wounded an entire people for an indefinite period of time.
At the end, Germany, the actual theater of war, was not only largely devastated, but was also delivered over to the rapacity of foreign states.
Foreign influence threatened to increase through the authority of other states in German affairs, thus intensifying the fear of strange languages and customs.
New conflicts were latent in the peace treaty, which increased the fear of a final ruin.
The period of the religious wars with their dreadful results played a role already in early attempts to explain Fascism. Thomas Mann developed the thesis of German "continuity," first in a speech, and then in "Doktor Faustus" (1947). The Thirty Years' War, which began as a religious war, appears to him as the first martial consequence of German misconduct; the backwardness of the nation is attributed to the peace treaty with its adherence to the status quo. [30]
Thomas Mann's reference to the period of the religious wars was intended to dismantle a myth that the National Socialists had appropriated as their own. To them, Luther appeared as the epitome of Germanness and the Thirty Years' War as its confirmation, since it contributed to the deliverance from foreign "deviation." During his work on the novel, Mann read Simplicissimus, which he viewed as a typical manifestation of the problematic German state of mind. This distinguishes him from other authors, who shortly after the end of the Second World War used the Simplician writings as a guide for coming to terms with the Nazi past. Brecht's drama "Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder" ("Mother Courage and her Children"), which premièred in 1941 and arose from modern-day fears and insights, also played a prominent role. It addressed a theme of great concern to writers, namely the action, and even more the suffering, of the "little man," who feels helpless in the face of events contrived by the fanatical and mighty and sees no alternative but to conform. Ernst Weiß identified the historical parallels when he called Simplicissimus "the Schwejk of the Thirty Years' War." [31] In this light, the use of the picaresque novel as a model, first adopted in Germany by Grimmelshausen, is very appropriate. For this reason, Günter Grass designates the author of the "Simplicissimus Teutsch" as the most authentic reporter of the Thirty Years' War, since he presented its horrors in all their cruelty "from the perspective of the little man, the loser." Thinking of traditional historiography, he assigns to poets in general the role of "stopgaps of history." [32] In the "Blechtrommel" ("The Tin Drum") of 1959, he took Grimmelshausen's achievement and applied it to the upheavals of the 20th century.
This recourse to history is based on a conviction which, rather than merely noting isolated affinities, postulates a continuity persisting for more than three hundred years:
Yesterday will be what tomorrow was. The stories of today did not necessarily come to pass in the present. They began more than three hundred years ago. Other stories as well. That's how old the history is that is taking place in Germany. [33]
With these words begins "Das Treffen in Telgte" ("The Meeting in Telgte") of 1979, which transforms the first meeting of the Gruppe 47 into a poets' encounter of 1647. The slight discrepancy in time - the 20th-century group met in 1947, two years after the end of the war - is of little importance in view of numerous other parallels. These involve the want and misery in a largely devastated Germany and the uncertainty as to the continued existence of a state that oppresses its neighbors with territorial demands. They are further manifested in the fate of individual persons and the search for a self-understanding aimed at overcoming a seemingly irreparable calamity. The particular attention Grass devotes to Grimmelshausen is due not least of all to biographical similarities; both writers were prevented from pursuing a systematic course of education by their participation in the war and were able to become professional writers only after engaging in casual labor. The careers of other members of the group followed a similar path, particularly those who were refugees or were driven from their homeland. Opitz, who repeatedly changed fronts and died as a refugee in Danzig, enjoyed the highest veneration on account of his efforts on behalf of the German language and its literature.
Opitz's ideal of a pure, unified high language, however, was threatened by the linguistic mingling precipitated by the war, which counteracted the national search for identity.
When, after twenty-nine years of war, no peace had been negotiated, the conference was to take place between Münster and Osnabrück, whether to give new merit to the last remaining bond, the German language, or whether - if only as an aside - to talk a little politics... Where all lay waste, only words retained their splendor. [34]
Because Germany was culturally underdeveloped in comparison to other peoples who had long possessed a national literature, the cultivation of the language and the adaptation of foreign poetic forms was intended to help overcome these deficiencies. The poets of the post-war period concentrated on the purification of a language "slaughtered" by the Nazi mentality and sought to gain admission to world literature again as quickly as possible, from which they had been barred by ideologues. Thus they appeared political in a different sense than originally intended, and despite a pervasive skepticism regarding direct political influence, they saw themselves as those called and even obligated to answer the hopelessness with a "nevertheless." [35]
The idea of an intellectual elite as a community searching for a remedy in dark times is found in earlier authors as well. Huch's novel, for example, incorporates many scenes in which well-known scholars and poets encounter one another according to humanistic custom, in order to cultivate and disseminate irenic attitudes. They appear as peaceful enclaves amid the prevailing barbarism, which continually threatens them as well. In 1934, at the beginning of a volume of poetry, Oskar Loerke praises the poets of the Thirty Years' War, "disinherited by fate," whom he views as his own dead artist comrades from a circle of friends of which he himself was a part. Rist receives the highest praise for suffering bravely and speaking to the consciences of the ringleaders in the peace negotiations. [36] Grass's "Treffen" quotes passages from this foreword, in which Rist presses for the writing of a peace manifesto, though dissension among the participants causes it to founder and finally be burned. The hand with the quill emerging from the heap of ruins, an invention of the author, makes clear that even failure cannot diminish the writer's consciousness of his own role. In the context of the optimistic perspective demanded by East German functionaries, such scruples were foreign to Becher and Günther Deicke. In a Gryphius anthology of 1953 with the programmatic title "Deutschland, es werden deine Mauern nicht mehr voll Jammer stehn" ("Germany, no more will your walls be full of misery"), Deicke characterizes the role of the learned Baroque poets:
In these difficult times, it was once again men of genuine greatness who assumed the leadership as true patriots, in order to accomplish what the acting politicians were unable to do, namely to save the unity of Germany, at least in spirit, to preserve the unity of its language for the German people. [37]
The increase of tensions between East and West quickly undermined wishes or hopes of this kind. Writers in the two Germanies were increasingly constrained by fears of further escalation and the return of a war which threatened to replace the horrors of decades of barbarism with a rapid annihilation of at least of a part of humanity. Such concerns were once again reminiscent of religiously legitimated, apocalyptic fears of the Baroque period and occasioned an even stronger identification with the authors of that age. [38]
These tendencies and aspects are reflected in a version of Simplicissimus composed by the important East German writer Franz Fühmann and intended for filming. The main action is framed by a passage which other writers had favored as well, describing the eating of parts of a human corpse; it serves as a symbol of the deformation of humanity by the war. [39] While the screenplay follows the same course of events as the book, it nonetheless deviates from the original in many respects, including the expansion of the Blocksberg visit. It vividly and unflinchingly presents the power of human drives and desires, which manifest themselves in sexuality, gluttony, and above all in the lust to torture and kill:
Wallenstein's dragoons are no bunglers: what occurs now takes place quite systematically ... (One has only to read Grimmelshausen carefully in order to perceive this quality of teamwork.) Each of the horsemen is shown as a specialist, not only at destruction, but also at torture and extortion. [40]
The intentional, systematically perpetrated sadism bears witness to the concert of drive and reason that clearly characterizes animal rationality. As numerous actions and reactions make clear, human beings are able to control this constellation only with difficulty, and in many cases not at all. In addition, Fühmann sees a close connection between scientific progress and the increasing deficits of humanity, a development which in his opinion received essential impulses during the Thirty Years' War. In view of such preconditions, he sees no chance for lasting peace.
The great majority of modern authors express doubt as to the possibility of a more human world, particularly in view of the after-effects of a phenomenon that received its first terrifying contours in the early modern age. As early as 1919, Döblin noted an effect of the great war:
An attitude of servility pervaded and overshadowed the great, once free ... land; the slave mentality was impressed onto the German with a cruel, persistent stamp, making all his latter thoughts, poems, and discoveries weak and worthless, since his deeds remained impoverished and contemptible. [41]
In 1980, Günter Kunert described the present as "continuation of the Thirty Years' War with other means." [42]
1. Cf. the essay by Walter Schäfer in this catalogue.
2. Rothmann 1977, 141f.
3. "Zerfallen sehen wir in diesen Tagen / Die alte feste Form, die einst vor hundert /
Und funfzig Jahren ein willkommner Friede / Europens Reichen gab, die teure Frucht /
Von dreißig jammervollen Kriegesjahren." Schiller 1949, 5.
4. Pestalozzi 1995, 179-90.
5. Schiller 1986, 10ff.
6. "Dem Namen Kaiser, einem Vermächtniß des despotischen Roms, klebte damals noch ein Begriff von Machtvollkommenheit an, der gegen das übrige Staatsrecht der Deutschen den lächerlichsten Abstich machte, aber nichts desto weniger ... von den Beförderern des Despotismus verbreitet, und von den Schwachen geglaubt wurde." Schiller 1986, 42.
7. Schiller 1949, 411-13; Rothmann 1977, 86.
8. Rothmann 1977, 189-204.
9. Koemann 1993, esp. 208-18; Meid 1984, 211-15.
10. Arnim 1911, 1-33.
11. "Absolute tolerance and equality in religious questions was the primary condition of his plan." Laube 1908, XVII, 56. A "Gustav-Adolf-Tragödie" was performed already in 1830, and the fragment of a play about Bernhard von Weimar was found among his literary remains.
12. "... unfit in body and spirit .... The ideal of a great fatherland was absent from his soul." Laube 1908, XX, 310.
13. "In the greatness and extraordinary diversity of the German Empire, the idea of the fatherland has been lost," although "for half a millennium we have been the authoritative center of Europe. We have forgotten the family treasures for the riches of expansive power" and have "given over the imperial dignity to strange dynasties like that of the Spanish ....." Laube 1908, XX, 109.
14. "The Peace of Westphalia poisoned the German Empire in its heart and loins. It poisoned the emperor, it poisoned the nation." Laube 1908, XXII, 277.
15. Freytag 1887, 3-176. The fifth part is entitled "Die Geschwister" ("The Siblings"). The action takes place from 1647 to the end of the war and combines a tragic love story with a series of historical, albeit tendentiously falsified events.
20. "Als Tilly bei der Kathedrale ankam, die der singende Flammenkreis umgab wie ungeheure, im feierlichen Siegesjubel geschwungene Scharlachfahnen, und die dort versammelten Offiziere, die Hüte lüftend, glückwünschend an ihn heranritten, nahm auch er seinen Hut ab und faltete die Hände. Der Herr habe ihm vergönnt, sagte er, dies Heiligtum der wahren Kirche zurückgeben zu können; sein Herz sei voll des Dankes. Nach einer Pause, während welcher die Herren schweigend die Hüte in der Hand hielten, wendete der General sich ihnen zu und dankte ihnen für den Eifer, mit dem sie ihre Pflicht getan hätten." Huch 1967, III, 576f.
21. Huch 1967, III, 1138-46.
22. Huch 1970.
23. Döblin 1965.
24. Bayerdörfer 1995, 604-12; Müller-Salget 1978.
25. Grimmelshausen 1919, 5; Bruck 1910, 88-150.
26. Zweig 1984, 193f.; Renn 1964, 200f.
27. Becher 1956, 482.
28. Becher 1954.
29. "the scars and brands on the living body of the nation are the same, then as now ..." Gryphius 1949, 67f.
30. Mann 1996, 260-81.
31. Weiß 1982, XVI, 346f.
32. Grass 1987a, 366.
33. "Gestern wird sein, was morgen gewesen ist. Unsere Geschichten von heute müssen sich nicht jetzt zugetragen haben. Diese fing vor mehr als dreihundert Jahren an. Andere Geschichten auch. So lang rührt jede Geschichte her, die in Deutschland handelt." Grass 1987b, 6.
34. "... als nach neunundzwanzig Kriegsjahren der Frieden noch immer nicht ausgehandelt war, sollte zwischen Münster und Osnabrück das Treffen stattfinden, sei es, um dem zuletzt verbliebenen Band, der deutschen Hauptsprache, neuen Wert zu geben, sei es, um - wenn auch vom Rande her nur - ein politisches Wörtchen mitzureden ... Wo alles wüst lag, glänzten einzig die Wörter." Grass 1987b, 20.
35. Grass 1987b, 134.
36. Loerke 1958, 681f.
37. "In diesen schweren Zeiten mußten es wieder Männer bedeutenden Formats sein, die sich als echte Patrioten an die Spitze ihrer Zeit stellten, um jene Leistung zu vollbringen, die die agierenden Politiker nicht zu vollbringen vermochten, die Einheit Deutschlands wenigstens im Geistigen zu retten, dem deutschen Volk die Einheit seiner Sprache zu wahren." Gryphius 1953, 81.
38. Cf. Mannack 1991.
39. Fühmann 1987, 7-178.
40. "Wallensteins Kürassiere sind keine Stümper: Nun, was sich jetzt abspielt, spielt sich ganz systematisch ab ... (Man braucht nur Grimmelshausen genau zu lesen, um diesen Teamwork-Charakter wahrzunehmen.) Jeder der Reiter wird nicht nur als Spezialist beim Zerstören, sondern auch beim Foltern und Erpressen gezeigt." Fühmann 1987, 17.
41. "Der Servilismus dehnte sich aus, überschattete das große, einst freie ... Land, die Knechtsnatur wurde den Deutschen mit grausamem, langwirkendem Stempel aufgedrückt, die später alle seine Gedanken, Gedichte, Entdeckungen schwach und wertlos machte, weil die Taten ärmlich und erbärmlich blieben." Döblin 1972, 58.
42. Kunert 1980. Since only a selected number of texts could be considered within the scope of the present essay, see the following works with the literature cited there for more comprehensive discussion: Weithase 1953, who mentions a number of titles relevant to the literary reception of the Thirty Years' War from the 18th to the 20th century; Milch 1977, who provides a virtually complete list of German and Scandinavian texts on Gustav Adolf; cf. also Frenzel 1992, 282-85; on Wallenstein, ibid., 818-21; Hartmann 1984.