Moments in Time: The Thirty Years' War (part 2)

Twice a year, I record a broadcast (or series of broadcasts) for my college's public radio station, WUCX, for their Moment in Time segment. I decided to collect the texts of these together here, as I have not been using this blog for anything else. Bear in mind these are aimed at a popular audience, so they are not the most cutting-edge scholarship. I have oversimplified a little at times, but hope I've avoided any outright errors.

This entry is the second in a pair that were first broadcast in July 2017.

The audio of this broadcast can be found here.

1618: The Thirty Years' War (part 2)

This year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, a conflict that is little known outside Germany, but was one of the bloodiest in European history. Last time we looked at how a complex of religious and political issues came together; Protestants and Catholics fought one another, while foreign powers such as Sweden, Denmark and France were drawn in as they tried to prevent the Catholic Habsburg dynasty dominating central Europe.

Historians estimate that by its end in 1648, the war had killed up to 8 million people, most of them civilians, or about 25% of the German population. Armies consisted mainly of foot-soldiers who were highly trained and equipped with muskets and pikes. They were arguably the first modern, professional soldiers, but were still supplied the old-fashioned way by living off the land. They saying went that ‘the war will feed itself’ which in practice meant soldiers sustained themselves with what they could steal from the local peasant population, and billeted themselves in peasant houses (the Second Amendment to the US Constitution is a reminder of how much early-modern populations hated being forced to have soldiers quartered in their homes). The need for land to pay for the armies merely encouraged further conquest of enemy territory, restarting the whole sorry cycle of violence and theft. Starvation followed the pillaging of peasants’ harvests, and diseases such as typhus and bubonic plague were spread by the marauding armies. The craze for witch-hunting, which reached its height in seventeenth-century Germany, may have been a by-product of the war, as communities disrupted beyond endurance looked for scapegoats to blame for their horrific experiences.

The Thirty Years War has left little impact on the imagination of the English-speaking world, but the same cannot be said for Germany. Many great works of German literature took the war as their theme: Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, a picaresque account of the war possibly based on the author’s experiences as a mercenary soldier, is often regarded as the first great German novel; the eighteenth-century playwright and poet Schiller wrote a trilogy of plays based on the life of the imperial general Wallenstein; and when Bertolt Brecht addressed the horrors of war (and the greed of those who exploited it for profit) in his play Mother Courage and her Children, he used the Thirty Years’ War as his setting as Nazi tanks rolled over the Polish border in 1939.

The Thirty Years’ War may seem very distant to the modern world; at most, we might compare it to modern day religious conflicts such as the civil war in Syria. However, it gave us modern international politics and diplomacy. Before the war, Germany was (at least theoretically) part of the diffuse and fairly powerless ‘Holy Roman Empire.’ The Peace of Westphalia that ended the war recognized the individual powers within the empire as sovereign entities, establishing the idea that states, not individual rulers, were the building blocks of international politics. Everything that is carried out in the name of the distinct, unified entities that we call nation states – from democracy and law to genocidal wars - is to some extent a legacy of the Thirty Years’ War.