The Thirty Years' War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Studies in War, Society, and the Militar)

402 Pages·2007·2.19 MB·English

by  Kevin Cramer

The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century
Studies in War, Society, and the Military
general editors
Peter Maslowski
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
David Graff
Kansas State University
Reina Pennington
Norwich University
editorial board
D’Ann Campbell
Director of Government and
Foundation Relations,
U.S. Coast Guard Foundation
Mark A. Clodfelter
National War College
Brooks D. Simpson
Arizona State University
Roger J. Spiller
George C. Marshall Professor of
Military History U.S. Army Command
and General Staff College (retired)
Timothy H. E. Travers
University of Calgary
Arthur Waldron
Lauder Professor of International Relations
University of Pennsylvania
Kevin Cramer
The Thirty Years’ War
and German Memory in the
Nineteenth Century
University of Nebraska Press • Lincoln & London
A version of chapter 2 previously
appeared as “The Cult of Gustavus
Adolphus: Protestant Identity
and German Nationalism” in
Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in
Germany, 1800–1914, ed. Helmut
Walser Smith (Oxford uk:
Berg, 2001).
© 2007 by the Board of Regents of
the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States
of America
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data
Cramer, Kevin.
The Thirty Years’ War and German
memory in the nineteenth century /
Kevin Cramer.
p. cm. — (Studies in war, society,
and the military)
Includes bibliographical references
and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8032-1562-7 (cloth :
alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8032-1562-2 (cloth : alk.
paper)
1. Germany—History—19th cen-
tury—Historiography. 2. Collective
memory—Germany 3. National
characteristics, German—Histo-
riography. 4. Thirty Years’ War,
1618–1648—Social aspects—Ger-
many. I. Title.
dd203.c74 2007
943'.07—dc22
2006039637
Set in Sabon.
To my mother, Mary Helen Lewis Cramer, with love and gratitude

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Great War 18
2. The War of Protestant Liberation 51
3. Wallenstein's Revolution 94
4. The Martyrdom of Magdeburg 141
5. German Gothic 178
Conclusion 217
Notes 233
Bibliography 315
Index 371

Acknowledgments
Since this is a book about war, memory, and place, I think I should
begin by acknowledging the profound influence my childhood had on
the conceptual origins of this study. Although I was born in Michigan, I
grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in the 1960s and 1970s when the
town was being steadily absorbed into the vast sprawl of Atlanta, the
self-declared capital of the “New South.” The growth of Atlanta as a
major American city meant, among other things, the gradual effacement
of the more visible marks the Civil War had left on the north Georgia
landscape. Yet traces remained. Backyards were marked by slowly erod-
ing lines of fortifications. At many an intersection, cast-iron signs com-
memorated the battles, skirmishes, and cavalry raids of the Battle of
Atlanta in 1864. Every spring on Confederate Memorial Day, across
from the gas station where I worked as a teenager, the small cemetery
blossomed with miniature Stars and Bars placed on veterans’ graves.
Blasted into the side of the most visible natural landmark in the area,
the massive granite monolith that gave Stone Mountain its name, was
a huge bas-relief sculpture of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and
Jefferson Davis on horseback. A frequent destination of elementary
school field trips was the Cyclorama in Grant Park Zoo that depicted
the Battle of Atlanta. The memory of the Civil War was an inescapable
presence. Even on the playground, lingering animosities of the war man-
ifested themselves when my friends good-naturedly declared a sharp
line of demarcation between those born in the South, “Rebels,” and
those unfortunates like myself, “Yankees,” who, through no fault of
their own, had come into the world north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Suffice it to say, as I began exploring how Germans had refought the
Thirty Years’ War in the nineteenth century, I immediately recognized
the preoccupation with a past that would not pass. That moment of
recognition was the beginning of this book.
Many people made this book possible. I owe my wife, Linda Santoro