The Myth of the All-Destructive War: Afterthoughts on German Suffering, 1618–1648

German History Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 380–403 The Myth of the All-Destructive War: Afterthoughts on German Suffering, 1618–1648* Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/gh/article-abstract/29/3/380/593049 by Maynooth University user on 14 August 2019 David Lederer I: Do Germans Suffer? A provocative question, perhaps, but taken to the superlative, it immediately caricatures several major theoretical and methodological problems of modern German historiography. Absurd as it seems on the surface, there is more to this rhetorical flourish than first meets the eye, and its ideological roots run deeper than one might expect. A partisan earnestness characterizing current discussions on victimization during the Second World War has given rise to unease. One such discussion concentrates on the traumatizing effects of Allied bombing on the German civilian population. Discussions over the post-unification memorialization of this and other aspects of German wartime suffering (such as civilian losses at the front, civilian casualties during the torpedoing of the Wilhelm Gustloff, or expatriate Germans seeking reparations from countries in East Central Europe), have proved surprisingly contentious.1 Anxiety over the normalization of twenty-first century memories of past suffering in Germany threatens to reopen the old wounds of the ‘historians’ dispute’ (Historikerstreit). Far from a resuscitation attempt on the corpse of the Sonderweg, a sober evaluation of the current state of historiography on the Thirty Years War offers us an ironically reversed perspective on German suffering, thereby evidencing theoretical paradoxes in master narratives of modern German history. Beyond providing us with a compelling contrast, the present afterthoughts on suffering during the tragic three decades from 1618 to 1648 remind us of general obstacles to any historical representation of emotional suffering.2 They query whether a universal understanding of suffering is politically viable or even desirable, and whether the historical study of suffering in wartime is ultimately useful or simply a fashionable question mal posée. * Support for this study was provided by a grant from the Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine under the aus- pices of research on the history of despair conducted in conjunction with the Centre for the History of the Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London, and research on fear during the Thirty Years War conducted as a fellow at the Shelby-Cullom Davis Center, Princeton University, during the 2008 cycle on the history of fear. 1 See the discussion in Central European History, 38 (2005), especially the fine overview of the debate instigated by J. Friedrich’s Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–45 (Berlin, 2003) by M. Nolan, ‘Germans as Victims during the Second World War: Air Wars, Memory Wars’, pp. 7–40. Conference collections continue to take up the theme, among them: L. Cohen-Pfister and D. Wienröder-Skinner (eds), Victims and Perpetrators, 1933–1945: (Re)Presenting the Past in Post-Unification Culture (Berlin and New York, 2006); B. Niven and C. Paver (eds), Memorialization in Germany since 1945 (Basingstoke, 2010); G. Margalit (ed.), Guilt, Suffering and Memory: Germany Remembers its Dead of World War II (Bloomington, 2010). 2 As an emotion, suffering is both biologically universal (nature) and culturally constructed (nurture), a historical problem cogently analysed by W. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001). © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghr045 The Myth of the All-Destructive War 381 Contradictory perceptions of German suffering during the two wars—the Second World War and the Thirty Years War—poignantly illustrate the basic underlying paradox. In the Second World War, German suffering is viewed against the backdrop of an evil dictatorship held legally responsible for the war and its consequences. In this scenario, German suffering is mitigated by the Nazi regime, democratically elected by Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/gh/article-abstract/29/3/380/593049 by Maynooth University user on 14 August 2019 the German people. As willing supporters, their implied culpability lessens suffering resulting from a war justly prosecuted against them. In the Thirty Years War, however, no such legalistic contention can be presumed. Politically, the imperial estates did not express the popular will. In stark contrast to the Second World War, political memories of the Thirty Years War have faded, leaving us little more than a legacy of suffering. Today, secular historians usually define it as a pointless struggle brought on by irrational religious intolerance that quickly devolved into a senseless orgy of violence and mayhem. Modern historians generally view the final outcome of the Thirty Years War as politically indecisive at best and, at worst, a European tragedy. As Ronald Asch puts it, the war was ‘one of the longest and, in its later stages, most indecisive military contests in the history of early modern Europe’. Peace followed in 1648 not as the consequence of a total defeat of one or the other powers, but because the principal belligerents, ‘were too exhausted to continue fighting, at least on the same scale as during the past decades’.3 Accordingly, the principal belligerents simply agreed to quit without adjudicating blame in Münster and Osnabrück. Powers such as the Papacy, which refused to sign the Peace of Westphalia since it recognized the legal rights of Protestants, were effectively sidelined. Taken to its logical conclusion, suffering becomes the central meaning of the Thirty Years War. By the eighteenth century, the conflict from 1618 to 1648 had already entered encyclopedic memory as the great ‘German War’, but the article in Zedler’s Universallexicon concerned itself solely with a narrative of political and military events from a Protestant perspective, passing over the issue of human suffering in silence.4 Contrarily, early modernists now cite a twentieth-century survey that calls attention to the enduring scars etched upon the German psyche by the Thirty Years War to substantiate Germany’s long-term collective memory. In 1962, an official questionnaire distributed among the rural population of Hesse listed seven great catastrophes in German history and requested participants to rank them. In their responses, the Thirty Years War still occupied pride of place, followed by the German defeat in the Second World War, the Third Reich, the Black Death, the defeat in the First World War, the Napoleonic Wars and the Seven Years War, in cardinal order. Comparisons between sufferings during the Kosovo conflict and the Thirty Years War were a recurrent theme in the German media as late as the 1990s.5 In the collective German consciousness of the twentieth century, the Thirty Years War provided a rare and politically correct moment-in-time for self-referential lamentations of national grief otherwise relativized 3 R. Asch, The Thirty Years War: The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618–1648 (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 150. 4 J.H. Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 7, 1453f. (search for ‘Dreyßig-jähriger oder Teutscher Krieg’ at www.zedler-lexikon.de/suchen/suchergebnisse.html?suchmodus= standard, accessed 1 Sept. 2010). 5 H. Medick and B. von Krusenstjern, ‘Einleitung: Die Nähe und Ferne des Dreißigjährigen Krieges’, in Krusenstjern and Medick (eds), Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: Der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 34–36. The Hessian survey is cited most recently in P.H. Wilson’s monumental study, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), p. 6. 382 David Lederer by the injustice of the Holocaust.6 Zedler’s Universallexicon could not possibly have envisioned this. For seventeenth-century Europeans, religious tensions instilled suffering with strong sectarian connotations of Christian justification with decidedly moralist overtones. Baroque literature generally evinced a macabre familiarity with death and suffering, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/gh/article-abstract/29/3/380/593049 by Maynooth University user on 14 August 2019 recognizing many scourges upon the just: recurrent famines, plagues and a climatic downturn (the Little Ice Age).7 In response to suffering, the late sixteenth century even invented a novel literary genre, the so-called books of consolation (Trostbücher). In consolation for general suffering, they offered Christians justification, purification and eternal life beyond the transience of mortality. Their great success confirms a public desire for consolation. On the eve of the Thirty Years War, contemporaries became convinced that the current and widespread suffering visited upon true Christians reflected the punishment of God. As an act of appeasement, a strict penitential regime demanded discipline, repentance and campaigns to hunt down the enemies of God. The penitential regime shaped perceptions of suffering throughout the war, when the Empire coincidentally witnessed the worst bouts of witchcraft persecution in its history, especially vicious in the ecclesiastical territories where religion and reason of state closely aligned. Like Christ, the just suffered at the hands of the unjust for the sins of the few. Their suffering identified them as the people of God, the just. The incarnations of their suffering—such as witches

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