Abstract
Over the last three decades, historians have extensively studied the perception of war and wartime violence in nineteenth-century Germany. Nevertheless, in his monumental monograph, Mark Hewitson discards previous interpretations and promises an alternative perspective on the topic. In his view, historiography until now has concentrated too much on trying to fathom how far nationalism established the widespread acceptance of wartime violence, and – just because of this focus – earlier studies have overestimated the force of nationalism. Hewitson’s aim is to show that, especially for ordinary soldiers, idealized notions of wartime heroism, rather than nationalism, served as the main stimulus. During the relatively peaceful period between 1815 and 1849, such romanticized attitudes towards war could prevail over more drastic eyewitness accounts of the anti-Napoleonic wars. Only the advent of modern weaponry brought about more ambivalent views. This observation in itself is not new: other historians have underlined before how much the ideal of heroism influenced notions of warfare. However, Hewitson’s interpretation differs from former research in attaching greater weight to this ideal than to nationalism – a hierarchy that might appear problematic as both were closely intertwined and thus it is not easy to disentangle them. The other particularity of Hewitson’s analysis is his periodization. Unlike other historians for whom it was the attrition warfare of the First World War that broke with the ideal of heroic warfare, for him, the real turning point was the Franco–Prussian War. He argues that, already in 1870/71, many soldiers were unable to reconcile their romanticized ideas about fighting with the horrors that they confronted on the battlefield.
The design of the analysis has three major particularities that are at the same time its strengths. First, unlike many other studies on the topic, the monograph covers the long period from the anti-Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Franco–Prussian war of 1870/71 and its geographical scope comprises – at least in some parts of the book – Austria as well as the (future) German Empire. Second, the author does not only examine the perception of wartime and revolutionary violence but also places it in relation to the history of peacetime violence and its perception. Third he combines a large spectrum of areas of investigation and makes use of a broad range of sources: encyclopaedias, military and political writings, the press, novels, theatre plays, poems, pictorial representations memoirs, diaries, and letters.
The opening two chapters mainly confirm earlier historiography. Hewitson starts his study with a review of how encyclopaedia articles from the first part of the nineteenth century defined war. He ascertains a widely accepted consensus that warfare was inevitable or even a necessary precondition for state building. The second chapter is dedicated to pervasive attitudes towards the military and especially towards recruitment. Here, the author traces the mixed feelings many Germans had about universal conscription. Particularly, liberal democrats tended towards a militia system as it was used in Switzerland. However, all in all, military service was widely accepted.
The next chapter seeks to summarize the development of different types of violence in the daily life of civilians. In this context, it examines crime, violent rioting, corporal and capital punishment, duelling, hygiene, as well as sickness. Following Norbert Elias, Hewitson underlines that the level of self-control increased while at the same time the threshold of violence rose. The author thus concludes that the perception of wartime violence and suffering must have changed correspondingly.
Focusing on the years of 1848/49, in the next chapter, the author argues that revolutionary violence in general remained limited. Thus, wartime violence still was mainly experienced ‘vicariously’ (p. 180) in this period through reports about the campaign against Denmark in 1848, the Franco–Austrian war of 1859 as well as about the conflicts in other parts of Europe and the world. Although some of these reports drastically depicted the harsh consequences of modern weaponry, such bluntness was rare and its effects remained restricted. Heroic accounts of wartime bravery continued to dominate the popular notion of soldiering.
The following four chapters discuss the three German Unification Wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870/71. While the Second Schleswig War and the Austro–Prussian War were too short to question the traditional perception of warfare, according to the author, the ideal of heroism was no longer able to withstand the industrialized killing of the Franco–Prussian War. Consequently, the commemoration of the war, which is the subject of the last chapter, also reveals the ambivalence experienced by many veterans.
Some of the author’s interpretations will remain a matter of discussion, but this is what will inspire further research. All in all, Hewitson’s elaborate study provides an important overview on the history of warfare in nineteenth-century Germany and it will certainly become a reference work for this field of research.