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In August 1620, the remaining Protestant opposition in the Lower Austrian estates sent an urgent appeal for help to King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden. This article presents and analyses the author’s transcription of this letter of supplication and places it in its historical context. The analy sis shows that the interactions between Central European Protestants and Stockholm significantly pre-dated Sweden’s entry into the Thirty Years’ War, which also sheds new light on the origins of the Swedish intervention in the war.
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Dieser Aufsatz zeichnet die Geschichte der deutschen Nordschleswiger von der Herausbildung einer eigenen Identität zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts über die langanhaltenden Wirren des nationalen Konflikts bis hin zu den Herausforderungen einer zunehmend globalisierten und individualisierten Gesellschaft heute nach. In dieser Zeit waren sie Bürger in der dänischen Doppelmonarchie, in Preußen und im Deutschen Reich sowie in dem kleinen dänischen Nationalstaat, der sich nach 1864 entwickelt hatte. Ihr Selbstverständnis war immer wieder Prüfungen und Anpassungen unterworfen. Doch auch zu Beginn des einundzwanzigsten Jahrhunderts sind die deutschen Nordschleswiger ein fester Bestandteil der dänischen Gesellschaft.
Reviewed by: Coping With Life during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) by Sigrun Haude Peter Thaler Coping With Life during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). By Sigrun Haude. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2021. Pp. xv + 311. Hardback $91.00. ISBN 978-9004466470. Stimulated by pertinent anniversaries, researchers have reexamined the history of the Thirty Years’ War in recent years. A noteworthy aspect has been the widespread focus on individual suffering. Sigrun Haude’s study of personal experiences and coping strategies during the great central European cataclysm of the seventeenth century fits in perfectly with this scholarly reorientation. Having analyzed the confessional era in central Europe in several previous books, Haude came well-prepared for her task. In her current study, she explores how people tried to survive the Thirty Years’ War; on what resources they drew to endure violence, hunger, loss, and disease; and how they tried to make sense of a conflict that appeared ever more meaningless (6). To answer these questions, she primarily turns to well-known contemporary diaries, which she complements with archival sources from southern German archives. Haude centers her investigation on Bavaria and Franconia, which provides for both regional proximity and denominational variation, as Bavaria was strictly Catholic, whereas significant parts of Franconia were Lutheran. The core of the study draws on personal accounts by members of the clergy. These sources might be described as ego-documents, but Haude considers this term insufficient because the texts are strongly colored by their social context and thus reflect more than an individual perspective. Most important for the study are the testimonies provided by the Augustine prioress Clara Staiger, the Benedictine abbots Maurus Friesenegger and Veit Höser, the Dominican nun Maria Anna Junius, and the Lutheran pastor Bartholomäus Dietwar. These personal accounts show a complex web of experiences. Most universally, they express fear. Life had lost all stability—people lived in constant expectation of violence, dislocation, hunger, and poverty. Local governments tried to ameliorate these consequences of war but to little avail. In fact, troops sent to protect the populace were just as likely to commit violence or cause starvation as the invading armies they were supposed to repel. The ravages of war deepened the need for protection not only in military terms but also in spiritual terms. With regard to the latter, the religious remedies offered by the churches frequently proved insufficient, which increased the demand for more unorthodox measures commonly denoted as magic. Another source of resilience was humor, which several protagonists were able to muster even during the most challenging periods. Finally, some of the authors also describe the possibility of respectful interactions and exchanges between supposed enemies. Oftentimes it [End Page 317] was Catholic nuns who successfully appealed to the gallantry of Protestant officers and secured their protection. Coping with Life during the Thirty Years’ War focuses on individuals. In many ways, Sigrun Haude has composed a psychohistory of the wartime experience, with an emphasis on how people felt during this conflict. The Cincinnati historian does not attempt a comprehensive reinterpretation of the Thirty Years’ War and becomes somewhat less sure-footed when she moves beyond her core topic. Her terse summary of the war on pages eight to sixteen leaves no room for discussing alternative understandings. Some of the self-made maps, such as the map of the Holy Roman Empire around 1618 on page eleven that, inter alia, seems to include southern Schleswig in that polity and divide Pomerania in an anachronistic manner, can be slightly misleading. A number of lesser oversights or imprecisions—such as making 1527 the norm year of the Peace of Prague (15) or describing the Habsburgs as a royal dynasty that ruled the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 to the late eighteenth century (237)—could have been caught by more careful external proofreading. Yet, drawing on an abundance of sources, Haude has provided a well-researched study of the human experience of the Thirty Years’ War. She describes this experience in great detail, which at times gives the narration the flavor of a chronicle. In this way, her study reminds of Hans Medick’s 2018 volume Der Dreißigjährige Krieg: Zeugnisse vom...
Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938–1948. By Leslie Waters. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2020. xviii, 234pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Maps. $92.50, hard bound. - Volume 81 Issue 1
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Reviewed by: Germany, A Nation in Its Time: Before, During and After Nationalism, 1500–2000 by Helmut Walser Smith Peter Thaler Germany, A Nation in Its Time: Before, During and After Nationalism, 1500–2000. By Helmut Walser Smith. New York: Liveright, 2020. Pp. 608. Cloth $39.95. ISBN 978-0871404664. In this eagerly anticipated work, Vanderbilt historian Helmut Walser Smith traces divergent expressions of German communality over the past five centuries. He argues that nations have different realities in different times and that there existed a Germany before, during, and after nationalism. German nationalists did not engender the German nation but temporarily transformed its essence and meaning. Interestingly for a book of this nature, it does not clearly define the "nation." At times, the author equates it with a country or fatherland (87); at other times, he differentiates between those terms (96). He comes closest when he defines nationalism as an attempt to form people into active citizens for whom the nation stands above other loyalties (157), which still leaves open, however, what this nation is. Smith's manner of proceeding has two distinct elements. There is the terse chronological skeleton, and there are the interjected in-depth narratives, often based on innovative sources that are as illuminating as they are selective. Accordingly, the reader should not expect a coherent story of the development of German nationhood over the past five hundred years. Indeed, Smith's very argument rejects this coherency. The segmentation is reinforced by the nature of presentation, however, which focuses on individual events and processes rather than on continual development. The study is divided into five major parts. The first two parts examine the scholarly discovery of Germany in the early modern era as well as the subsequent consolidation of territorial patriotism in individual German-speaking polities. This development toward German political polycephality was redirected by the arrival of nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars. The third part describes the gradual dissemination of this new form of allegiance, which long remained only one of several competing options. The definition of Germany, in turn, shifted from the political to the spiritual and ascribed special importance to a reified mother tongue. Whereas the nineteenth century was the period of nationalism in the making, Germany fully entered a nationalist age between 1914 and 1945. Part 4 describes in grueling detail how this ideology exercised political power in its most extreme form. Following the total collapse of the nationalist project, a chastised postwar republic tried to create a more compassionate sense of historical memory that included taking responsibility for the suffering caused to others. In this final part, Smith rounds off his analysis with the conclusion that most Germans of the early twenty-first century [End Page 397] have put the nationalist age behind them and have embraced what he refers to as a living instead of a deathly concept of fatherland (459). But this structural summary cannot provide a full picture of the book's focus and design. The author demonstrates a deep interest in art and literature and an impressive command of literary theory. He immerses the reader in the intellectual and artistic trends of individual epochs, not least of all the pivotal passage from Enlightenment to Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. This makes for a beautiful book in both content and appearance. It also makes for an innovative study that integrates source material frequently neglected in grand historical syntheses. Much of it is an intellectual history that delineates how important thinkers have conceived of Germany. However, the strong focus on alternative sources and narrations comes at a price. The terse summarizations of such crucial historical turning points as the Bohemian conflict that started the Thirty Years' War (63) cannot fully do justice to the complexity of both the original events and the historiographical debate that followed. They also leave room for imprecisions such as the assumption that Holstein proper contained a relevant Danish-speaking population and risked being torn asunder along linguistic lines in 1815 (203, 309). There is a noticeable shift, however, when the narrative reaches the nationalist age between 1914 and 1945, which is clearly the author's primary area of interest and thus...
Following the German surrender in May 1945, many German minorities faced an existential crisis. Throughout Europe, the aggressive policies of the National Socialist government fell back upon local German-speakers. Most devastating were the consequences in East-Central European countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, whose remaining German populations were summarily deported. The experience of the small German minority of approximately 30,000 North Schleswigers offers an interesting comparative study. Their home country of Denmark had been under German occupation for much of the war. The local Germans had cooperated extensively with the occupying forces. The built-up resentment in the majority population surfaced dramatically at the end of the war. The most encompassing consequences resulted from the judicial crackdown. Around 3500 Germans were arrested. Nearly 3000 were ultimately sentenced, predominantly for serving in German military and paramilitary units. By the time the legal process had run its course, however, the mood of the country had begun to change. Unlike in many other parts of Europe, the German minority was able to recover. Its historical experience offers valuable insights into the significance of democratic structures during times of crisis and violence.
