In November 1816, an article on the latest exhibition at the Berlin Academy of Arts appeared in the Zeitung für die Elegante Welt. Held one year after the end of the 1813–15 wars against Napoleon, this exhibition was entirely devoted to “patriotic art.” One of the works introduced in the report was the diptych On Outpost Duty – The Wreath-Maker (see Figures 1 and 2), painted in 1815 by the Saxon artist Georg Friedrich Kersting, who had joined the artistic group of “Dresden Romanticism” some years before. During and after the wars of 1813–15, Kersting expressed his German-national and early-liberal convictions in his paintings more explicitly than most of his artist friends. When he painted the diptych, the wars against Napoleonic France were coming to an end, and hopes for a German-national rebirth and greater political liberty were running high in the circles of “patriots” to which he belonged: reform-oriented, educated middle- and upper-class civil servants, officers, clergymen, educators, writers and artists whose objectives were the “liberation of the fatherland” and frequently more political liberty as well. His diptych depicts the complementary figures that embodied those hopes: young military volunteers and a “German maiden.”

On Outpost Duty, which Kersting himself had entitled “Theodor Körner, Karl Friedrich Friesen and Christian Ferdinand Hartmann on Outpost Duty,” portrays three men who, like Kersting, served as volunteers in the Lützower Freikorps (Lützow Free Corps), which had been authorized by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III one month before his declaration of war against France on 15 March 1813. The corps was to enlist into its ranks mainly “young men from abroad” – that is, from German regions outside Prussia – who could arm and outfit themselves. Because of its all-German composition and the activities and publications of its best-known members, for the contemporary public and in collective memory it symbolized the German-national and early-liberal goals of the struggle for liberation. Among the most enthusiastic propagandists of the volunteer corps were Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Friedrich Friesen and Theodor Körner. Jahn, a Prussian teacher and journalist who is today known as the Turnvater – “the truly German father of gymnastics” – was one of the most influential activists of the early national movement.

Looking back at the aims of Prussian reformers and patriots between 1807 and 1813, to whom he had belonged, the Prussian statesmen Baron vom Stein wrote:

As he had before, Stein emphasized in his reminiscences written in 1823 that, after the devastating defeat in the 1806–07 war, all aims of Prussian policy were subordinated to one “universal objective” – military liberation from Napoleonic domination. All Prussian reform initiatives were dedicated to the “chief idea” of a “national rising” (Erhebung). In his view, this applied not just to policies for which he was responsible as Prussian Minister of State between October 1807 and November 1808; the governments under Baron vom Stein zum Altenstein and Burggrave zu Dohna-Schlobitten (1808–10) as well as Baron von Hardenberg (1810–22), who followed him in this leading position, set similar priorities.

Some historians share this assessment, stressing that Prussia “had to rebuild a state which had been defeated and sliced in two, and which was still bleeding from its wounds,” and that, until 1813, the three governments differed only in their specific responses to this challenge.

A History of Defeat, Crisis and Victory

The events of 1806 and their aftermath were one of the most important subjects in German historiography until 1945 because they stood at the heart of the national myth of Germany’s “renewal” after the “debacle” of the crushing Prussian-Saxon defeat. If we want to understand the importance of this defeat and its aftermath for the history and memory of the period of the Anti-Napoleonic Wars, we need to understand more fully the experiences of war and occupation and to take into account the distinct regional differences within German Central Europe. These variances can explain why in Prussia and other parts of northern Germany the hatred of Napoleon and all things French was more intense in 1813 and the patriotic-national movement more developed than elsewhere in German Central Europe – in particular the south and west. These northern regions had suffered more during the war of 1806–07 and the subsequent occupation by the French army under Napoleonic rule than the southern and western territories belonging to the Confederation of the Rhine. The experiences of warfare and occupation fed anti-French sentiment far beyond “educated circles.” The distinction between an “inner” and “outer fringe” of the Napoleonic Empire introduced by Michael Broers is helpful here. The southern and western territories of Germany, alongside the Low Countries and Northern Italy, belonged to the “inner empire.” These territories profited from French rule; here, the Napoleonic system left a powerful institutional heritage. In the “outer empire,” to which the old Prussian and other northern and eastern territories belonged, Napoleonic rule “was traumatic and destabilizing.” It was “ephemeral, in that it left few institutional traces.” This difference was felt not only by contemporary politicians but also by the people, a fact that has been ignored in some of the recent scholarship.

This assertion opens an article entitled “Patriotic Novels” that appeared in the most important national-liberal cultural journal, Die Grenzboten, in 1852, penned by one of its two editors, presumably Julius Schmidt. The essay intensively elucidates the function of the historical novel and its relationship to historiography on the one hand and prose literature on the other. The author – who interestingly enough equates the historical novel with the “patriotic novel,” that is, assumes that it mainly treats the writer’s own national history – recognizes the importance of the genre but regards it as a “lower art form.” For him, the historical novel’s main task was “to recreate for us, based on earlier research, the manners of the past era in all respects.” Only such an approach, he believed, could produce works “that arouse in the imagination and sentiments anything approaching the impression engendered by free creation.” The author of this contribution was clearly convinced that the chief object of novels was to address the imagination and emotions.

Not just Die Grenzboten, but also other cultural and literary magazines intensely discussed the form and function of the historical novel that became popular in the 1820s. From that time, novelists and literary critics negotiated the new genre’s position in the literary world. Today, Benedikte Naubert is considered the founder of the historical novel that emerged in German in the late eighteenth century. Up to her death in 1819, she published more than 50 such works, most of them anonymously, many of which were translated into English and French. Her books influenced the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, whose Waverley (1814) and subsequent novels made the genre so popular across Europe that it experienced its first literary heyday in the 1820s and 1830s.

The wars of 1813–14 were the first in Prussian history to be conducted based on universal conscription. A first step was the enactment on 9 February 1813 of the “Edict Lifting Previous Exemptions from Cantonal Duties for the Duration of the War,” drafted by General Scharnhorst, which introduced compulsory military service for all men between the ages of 17 and 24 who had previously been exempt. Those who volunteered for a rifle detachment on foot or horseback or an artillery detachment within eight days could choose their own units. Those who came later had to serve in the unit assigned to them by the military authorities. Young men in frail health; those whose fathers had died and who had inherited the running of a town house, farm or larger property; the sons of widows without older brothers who were not serving in the military; those who were known as the sole breadwinners of their families; and “active and salaried officials” of the Prussian state as well as clerics remained exempt. The edict thus retained broad exemptions from service in the standing army. As the military reformers intended, service in the standing army became exclusively a matter for young, unmarried men with no domestic establishment of their own. In order to make service attractive, they were assured that “every man in the military, without regard to estate and wealth, shall be given the chance, according to his abilities and conduct, to be promoted to officer or non-commissioned officer as soon as he has served one month and the opportunity arises, and shall have a preferred claim to a position in the civil service.” In addition, more political rights were promised to all men who willingly fulfilled their military duties.

The first two decades of the nineteenth century in Central Europe were decisively shaped by the political hegemony and military expansionism of the Napoleonic Empire. The new form of warfare already introduced during the French Revolutionary Wars – national war conducted with mass armies – which Napoleon retained after he assumed power in November 1799, left its mark on the age. It not only forced the princes of the ancien régime and their governments to make at times far-reaching reforms of army and state, and indeed even the economy and society, in the interest of defending or regaining full state sovereignty, but also shaped the process of political and cultural nation-building. In the German-speaking region, the form and content of this process were influenced in a highly ambivalent manner by experiences with the French Revolution and Napoleonic rule: many protagonists of the early national movement were well aware of the modernizing character of the Napoleonic reforms in the armed forces, society and state, and some of them even propagated elements of these reform ideas in modified form and adopted modes of political culture and national mobilization that had been successfully tested in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, while still distancing themselves from the enemy with increasing vehemence in response to France’s policy of expansion. As the second part demonstrates, the early-liberal protagonists of the German national movement combined liberal political demands for themselves and their kind with national chauvinism, anti-Semitism and conventional views of the gender order, which they shared with conservatives of every stripe. Their nationalism, like the political thinking of most conservatives, also bore a thoroughly Christian stamp. Such ambivalences had a lasting influence on the political culture not just of the era itself, but also of the entire nineteenth century.

Collective Practices of De/Mobilization and Commemoration

It was one of the finest evenings of my life, when, on the 18th of October, I joined several thousand merry people to stand on the Feldberg, the peak of the Taunus, and saw the sky reddened all around for a great distance by more than five hundred blazes; for the glow of the fires burning on the highest peaks of the Spessart, the Odenwald, the Westerwald and the Donnersberg was visible to us. The news that came later, that on that evening flames glowed in the farthest reaches of the fatherland, was sweet as well.

Ernst Moritz Arndt offers this comment in the preface to the second edition of his On the Celebrations of the Battle of Leipzig, which appeared in the late summer of 1815. In this text he describes his emotions on the first evening of the “National Festival of the Germans” (Deutsches Nationalfest) which was celebrated in hundreds of towns and villages on 18 and 19 October 1814 to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig. For Arndt, the widely visible fires on the mountaintops linking Germany’s various regions must have been a very remarkable experience, since the initiative for these festive bonfi res as well as the celebration more generally came largely from him and a small circle of likeminded men, including Jahn. They had met in early May 1814 to discuss the next two projects of the nascent national movement, the initiation of “German Societies” (Teutsche Gesellschaften) and the introduction of an annual “Festival of the Battle of Leipzig.”

On 22 February 1813, just a month before the official declaration of war on France, Friedrich Wilhelm III ordered the introduction of a “Prussian National Cockade” as an “outward sign” of the “universal expression of loyal patriotism” by all citizens of the state. All honorable men over the age of 20 who lived in Prussia were to wear the black and white cockade on their hats. Any man who refused to do his military service, prevented his male relations from doing so or brought shame upon himself through “cowardice before the enemy” forfeited the honor of wearing the national cockade. He was also threatened with loss of citizenship and exclusion from all state and municipal offices. The model for the new national insignia in Prussia was the blue, white and red cockade of Revolutionary France. Educated contemporaries interpreted the Prussian cockade as a “serious and manly” countermodel. Unlike France, where at least in the early phase of the revolution women were also permitted to wear the national cockade, in Prussia it was reserved for men. The surviving accounts are unanimous in depicting the public reaction to this decree as extremely enthusiastic. Educated male contemporaries regarded the symbol as a “national insignia” in the colors of the “Prussian nation,” representing patriotism and a masculine willingness to defend the country. It seems to have been especially important for contemporaries that all men – king and subjects, noblemen and peasants – were to wear the national cockade. Officers and soldiers were required to affix it to their headgear alongside the Prussian eagle. After the wars against Napoleon, the Prussian army retained the black and white cockade as a national emblem.

Literary Market, History and War Memories

This book takes us back to the time when the German people learned to conceive of itself as a single entity, when the Germans’ new national sentiment emerged, the time whence comes the political unity we enjoy today: to the year 1813, then to 1848 and 1870; and there have doubtless been changes and conflicts, and some contradictions and unfinished business remain, but ever since 1813 the German people has harbored thoughts of unification and inner consolidation: it has awakened.

These words introduce an extensive two-volume work entitled The Time of the French in the German Lands, 1806–1815, a collection of lavishly illustrated eyewitness accounts and documents from the period of the “Wars of Liberation.” The Leipzig fi rm of R. Voigtl ä nder published the first edition in 1908. Its editor Friedrich Schulze had studied literature and art history in Jena and Leipzig. From 1910 he was on the staff of the newly founded Leipzig Museum, where he became director in 1918. Schulze was one of the many authors who published commemorative works to mark the centenary of the Anti-Napoleonic Wars of 1806–15. His work was extraordinarily widely read, reprinted several times, and can be found even today in many libraries. It was among the numerous richly illustrated, glossy publications that middle-class Germans displayed in their living rooms as a mark of their education and patriotism.

Novels, Memory and Politics

In the decades following the Napoleonic Wars, history books, autobiographical accounts and novels evolved into three at once complementary and competing media in the production of memory about these wars, which would shape collective memory for a long time to come. They all reflected the “emergence of history” – the formation of a new postrevolutionary and postwar historical consciousness that began to develop in the first half of the nineteenth century. The conditions in which they arose were influenced by a mixture of differing and shared factors. Changing political circumstances affected all the media of memory. The creation of all three types of texts was also subject to the structural transformation of the literary market. However, this applied less to history books, which tended to serve a relatively small and specialized market segment, than to autobiographies and war memoirs and especially to novels intended for a wide audience. While historians were increasingly expected to meet the expectations of a professionalizing discipline, which narrowed the accepted forms of historical writing, and memoirists who hoped for success could only operate within a framework constructed as “true” by historians and eyewitnesses, novelists had greater latitude. Their interpretation of the period of the wars from 1806 to 1815 simply had to strike the reader as credible and plausible. In order to create this impression, novelists had to acknowledge the historical master narratives and the basic, accepted historical facts, but in general they could interpret the era more freely, a possibility that increased with the temporal distance to the remembered events. Even more than history books and autobiographical recollections, novels could therefore be used to comment on present-day society, culture and politics. In writing about the past, novelists remarked upon and criticized or affirmed the society and politics of their own day. These authors were driven by their political ideals, but many others primarily tried to serve the market by choosing topics that would sell. Most novelists wrote to earn a living. Those who were freelance writers depended far more than most authors of history books and autobiographies on the market, because for many of the latter writing was not their main source of income.

In the first two decades of the nineteenth century in Prussia and other parts of Germany, the patriotic-national discourse was to a remarkable extent shaped by war and used for the intellectual mobilization for war. The new form of mass warfare was distinguished not merely by the size of the armies, but also by its infusion with patriotic and national ideologies, which facilitated the mobilization of vast forces, now increasingly composed of conscripts, militias and volunteers, as well as long-service professionals. As conservative regimes like Prussia also deployed mass armies, not only was the conduct of warfare transformed, but the social and gender order and political culture along with it. Soldiers and civilians of all classes – men and women alike – had to be mobilized for war on an unprecedented scale. In 1813–15 the Prussian and other German governments thus promised men political rights in return for military service. They had to use a highly gendered patriotic-national rhetoric in their war propaganda to serve the zeitgeist and gain the support from society, which they needed to be able to win the war against Napoleonic France. Not just conservative-monarchic regents and regencies, but also their early-liberal and German-national opponents used such rhetoric, which led to intensive debates about the meaning of key concepts in the political discourse on nation and state, military and warfare and the social and gender order, both in war and in peacetime.