Blair Worden

Of Margraves and Massacres

Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War

By

Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 992pp £35 order from our bookshop

When Albert Speer broadcast to the German nation in May 1945 to explain the decision of Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s successor, to surrender, he declared that the destruction visited on Germany by the war ‘can only be compared to that of the Thirty Years War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the proportion of that epoch.’ The German civil war of 1618–48, fought between Catholics and Protestants, and between the Habsburg emperors and mutinous princes below them, has been one of that nation’s innermost memories, even if the longevity of the European peace since 1945 has removed some of its potency. The pain of recollection was deepened in the nineteenth century, first through the influence of Schiller and other Romantics, who had dwelled on the suffering and destruction, and then by the movement for German unification, which blamed the war on the jumbled and archaic machinery of Habsburg rule. 

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • RT : It’s two in a row! Another year, another Booker winner I had mixed feelings about. My review in of Anna… ,
    • Jeremy Clarke on Red and White: An Unquenchable Thirst for Wine by ,
    • 'Englishmen Abroad in the Reign of Henry VIII'. Free lecture by Dr Susan Brigden, Thurs 18 Oct, 6.30pm Europe Hou… ,
    • It 'contains twists and near misses and bit-part players, everything you might expect from a true-crime story'. Ian… ,
    • Oh normally a week or two before the ceremony itself - so mid-November. ,
    • Ian Sansom reviews The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World by… ,
    • 'It is hard to think of an economist who could craft such an elegantly readable account of postwar failure as this.… ,
    Follow Us