Beyond the Barricades: Government and State-Building in Post-Revolutionary Prussia, 1848–1858. By Anna Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. v + 223. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0198833826. - Volume 54 Issue 1

Cette étude de cas porte sur les liens entre les villes hanséatiques et saxonnes et la Grande-Bretagne (échanges de lettres, culture imprimée et philanthropie) et l’émergence d’associations civiles de secours qui, dans les dernières années des guerres napoléoniennes, visent à atténuer les souffrances dues à la guerre. Cet article montre que les guerres napoléoniennes ne mobilisent pas que des soldats et un soutien patriotique à l’effort de guerre ; l’étendue du conflit amène la société civile à faire face aux souffrances des non-combattants au niveau local et à l’international. En fait, les secours apportés par les associations locales qui émergent dans les villes hanséatiques de l’Allemagne du Nord et en Saxe entre 1813 et 1816, ainsi que leurs relations avec le Comité britannique de secours aux Allemands dans la détresse constituent le premier exemple moderne d’aide humanitaire transnationale en contexte de guerre et serviront de modèle à l’action humanitaire lors les guerres à venir, au XIX e et au début du XX e siècle.

Reviewed by: The People's Wars: Histories of Violence in the German Lands, 1820–1888 by Mark Hewitson Katherine B. Aaslestad The People's Wars: Histories of Violence in the German Lands, 1820–1888. By Mark Hewitson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 512. Cloth $130.00. ISBN 978-0199564262. During the nineteenth century, war became an affair of the people—a Volkskrieg. So claims Mark Hewitson in the second of three volumes exploring war experiences, changing sensibilities to violence, and attitudes to warfare across nearly three centuries of German history. Inspired by scholarship on the American Civil War, Hewitson seeks to understand what motivated soldiers to fight. As in the first installment of study, Absolute War (2017), Hewitson attempts to separate war from national sentiments and the aspirations of the nation state, as he explores the readiness to go to war among Germans during the second half of the nineteenth century. He argues that [End Page 621] the acceptance of peacetime conscription and rallying for war transcends nationalist sentiments and focuses on the three wars of unification as separate conflicts. Building on themes established in Absolute War, Hewitson presents the Napoleonic Wars as conflicts involving heightened levels of violence and suffering, which were paradoxically commemorated and remembered as romanticized struggles. He claims that the mythology of 1813 generated popular acceptance and legitimacy in shaping nineteenth-century attitudes to war. Despite a growing awareness of modern warfare due to popular war reportage, the German public, especially soldiers, accepted war in 1866 and 1870–1871, and faced gruesome and savage modern combat conditions that cultivated heroic and horrific "Janus faced images" of war prior to 1914 (525). Although the Volkskriege of 1866 and 1870–1871 also fostered a patriotic mythology, such national mythmaking did not dispel veterans' dark recollections of violence and destruction. Veterans after 1871 harbored contradictory feelings of patriotic pride and physical revulsion when they recalled the campaigns of war (511). Hewitson views the nineteenth century as a deceptive era of peace and divides his book into two sections: "The Romance of War 1820–1864" and "The Horror of War 1864–1888." The first section describes the romanticization of war after 1815 and its normalization in German society. He asserts that the Napoleonic Wars generated a fundamental change in the ways war was represented and understood by the public. The "myths of 1813" and the persistent "arming of the people" (53) in postwar military service rendered armed conflict legitimate and inevitable. He reviews a rich literature on the role of the post-1815 military to illustrate the many views expressed in the public sphere on the value of militias and a professional army of the line, pointing to the public role of the military in daily life at guard posts, garrisons, and in domestic pacification. He concludes that military service was an accepted fact of life and outlines the military's participation in the revolutions of 1848–1849. Finally, he analyzes war reportage to illustrate popular interest in the conflicts in Greece, Schleswig-Holstein, the Crimea, the United States, and Piedmont. The press offered readers a vicarious experience of increasingly destructive modern warfare—albeit at a distance—at a moment when public commemorations of the Napoleonic Wars positioned the army prominently in daily life. In the "Horror of War" section, Hewitson focuses on the mobilization, publicity, and experiences of what became known as the three wars of unification, focusing on the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars. Hewitson contests scholarship that emphasizes enmity, race, demonization of the enemy, or sacralization of conflict, instead choosing to present these campaigns as Volkskriege. As "people's wars" and conflicts that would determine the existence of the states involved, they were accepted and legitimized by the German population. Highlighting soldiers' accounts and press reports of major battles, Hewitson points out that battlefield violence differed markedly from the romanticized war stories. In fact, by 1870, the savagery of rapidfire [End Page 622] warfare made the balance between patriotism and horror difficult to maintain (438). Although patriotic mythology, established during the conflict with unification of German states, defined the Franco-Prussian War after 1871, the "heroic and the horrific" nature of this war coexisted in...

At the 41st German Studies Association (GSA) conference in Atlanta, Georgia the interdisciplinary Network, »War and Violence« (Krieg und Gewalt) sponsored three panels on the theme »War, Violence, and Visual Culture,« organized by the three outgoing coordinators of the Network: Jörg Echternkamp (Potsdam), Stephan Jaeger (Manitoba, Winnipeg) and Susanne Vees-Gulani (Cleveland, Ohio). Literary scholars, cultural, military and architectural historians presented eight original papers on three panels that explored different facets of visual representations of war and violence. The organizers developed the panels to explore ways in which visual culture presented and transmitted war and war-related violence through many different visual forms in battle paintings, popular culture, architecture, photography and film. The papers succeeded in fulfilling this goal and provided interesting analyses of war and visual culture from the Napoleonic Wars to the conflicts of the twentieth century to contemporary drone warfare. The first panel session, »Marketing Patriotic Products and War Goods across State and Enemy Lines?« included papers by Katherine Aaslestad (Morgantown, West Virgina) and Claire Zimmerman (Ann Arbor, Michigan) whose presentation shared a common exploration of under-explored manifestations of violence in popular culture and wartime architecture. Aaslestad’s paper »Visual Representations of the Napoleonic Wars in the German Confederation« analyzed caricatures, drawings, watercolors, prints, and votive paintings produced by trained and untrained artists during and immediately after the Napoleonic wars. Unlike most studies that feature battle paintings

A fun book to read, Adam T. Rosenbaum’s study of the tourist industry in rural and urban Bavaria speaks to the intersection of locality, region, and nation as well as that of tradition and modernity. Modern tourism, as discussed here, transcended mere escapism and embraced purposes ranging from recreation to politicized pilgrimage. Drawing on four case studies from about 1850 to 1950, Rosenbaum explains that Bavarian tourism celebrated the modernization of timeless landscapes and historical cityscapes. He identifies a strategy in the Bavarian tourist industry that he terms “grounded modernity, a romanticized version of the present that reconciled tradition with progress, consistency with change, and nature with technology and science” (2), to market a variety of sites over the course of a century. Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950, moves beyond conventional approaches that view modern Germany as at worst a tense binary model of modern vs. anti-modern, and at best an uneasy mix of tradition and modernity. This work focuses on compatibility on two levels: between locality and nation as well as between a neoromantic infatuation with nature and the past and technological and urban modernity.

"Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things. By Anders Engberg-Pedersen. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. i, 336. $45.00.)." The Historian, 79(4), pp. 888–889

In 2001 the »Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift« (MGZ

Cities and war have a long shared history, but the historical constructs to explain the place of the city in modern warfare during the Revolutionary era and nineteenth century are underdeveloped. I define this experience as 'modern military urbanism' and explore the examples of Hamburg and Leipzig during the Napoleonic Wars and in their immediate aftermath to highlight the responses of urban society to wartime mobilization, destruction and civilian displacement. To reveal these practices, I analyse how volunteer militias and civic associations operated and intersected with central urban institutions, churches, public spaces and the press and print media in times of war and civilian distress. Associational life, churches and the press formed a trinity that embodies key elements of modern urban militarism in co-operating to support local and state armies, patriotic wartime mobilization, humanitarian relief and postwar commemorative practices and rituals.

'The years 1813 and 1814 are happy years indeed in deciding the inner independence of Europe [from French rule]. But they have also cost tears'.1 With this bittersweet observation Pastor Karl Zimmerman began his account of the destruction of Hamm, his village outside Hamburg. The clergyman celebrated the Allied defeat of Napoleon in 1814, but stressed the burdens of war bequeathed to the postwar period. Merchant and shipowner Peter Godeffroy recounted these hardships in a series of letters in 1814. Godeffroy's letters to his daughter in England from his estate in Dockenhunden on the Elbe outside Hamburg, describing the destruction of Hamburg's suburbs, villages and gardens, provide lengthy accounts of requisitions by the occupying French military, and enumerate the fiscal cost and the miseries of those inside and outside of occupied Hamburg. His letters narrate the daily burden of billeting large numbers of soldiers as Russians replaced the French on his estate, the physical destruction of occupied Hamburg under Marshal Davout, and the many impoverished expellees who sought shelter on his property. Godeffroy's greatest loss, however, was beyond calculation; his son Jack, a second lieutenant in the cavalry of the Hanseatic Legion, a volunteer unit formed from citizens of the Hanseatic cities, fell in the Battle of Dutzow in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.2 The social trauma and costs of the war continued after the fighting ceased and armies moved on, as Godeffroy's case reveals.

Given the current challenges to European unity, in particular Russian aggression in Ukraine and dissent in the European Union over economic policy toward Greece, Europeans should remember that, two hundred years ago, they celebrated together a long-awaited peace, as their statesmen collaborated on a lasting settlement to solve territorial questions and ensure international stability. Revisiting the Congress of Vienna, however, is not an exercise in nostalgia. New works on the Congress underscore the critical international stakes in 1814 and 1815, following two decades of war and revolution, and reveal the complexity of the negotiations, political goals, and the unsettled nature of postwar Europe. The Congress was so successful in solving the existential problems of Europe that Europeans would not fight a comparable war against each other for another century—until the Great War in 1914. The challenges that Europe faced in the twentieth century suggest, in fact, that the type of collaborative diplomacy developed at the Vienna Congress remains essential to limit conflict.

ing and Indexing Information: Articles in Central European History are indexed or abstracted in Historical Abstracts, America: History and Life, Humanities Index, Book Review Index, Internationale Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur (IBZ), Current

Journal Article Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution: Nordic Political Cultures, 1740–1820. Edited by Pasi Ihalainen, Michael Bregnsbo, Karin Sennefelt and Patrik Winton (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. xvii plus 381 pp., £85.00) Get access Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution: Nordic Political Cultures, 1740–1820. Edited by Pasi Ihalainen, Michael Bregnsbo, Karin Sennefelt and Patrik Winton (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. xvii plus 381 pp., £85.00). Katherine Aaslestad Katherine Aaslestad West Virginia University katherine.aaslestad@mail.wvu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 49, Issue 1, Fall 2015, Pages 276–279, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shu122 Published: 23 June 2015