According to Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum, war is the continuation of politics by other means. Kleist's Berliner Abendblätter (BA), I argue, can be characterized similarly as the continuation of war by means of the printing press, which allows for the wide distribution of concealed, politically explosive messages in the medium of ambiguous news reports and anecdotes instead of weapons. Recent studies have explored how Kleist's poetry reflects the profound practical and theoretical transformations of warfare during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the guerilla counter-insurgences. This article aims to complement these interpretations by showing how the geopolitical changes and subsequent societal challenges of this revolutionary and counterrevolutionary age have informed the editorial strategy and journalistic tactics of the BA —not just to represent and reflect them, but to mobilize the Prussian/German people and to wage war against Napoleon in the virtual public sphere created by this medium.

War is the father of all in-depth thinking about the politics of space, and the totality of war in the Napoleonic era triggered a mobilization of space and dynamization of the status quo that urged political leaders and military strategists to rethink the static, stratified organization of their state and army. Anders Engberg-Pedersen's recent study delineates the series of spatial transformations that originated from the National Convention's decree of national conscription and military mass-mobilization in 1793, the so-called levée en masse. The withdrawal of the distinctions between regular soldiers and civil fighters as well as between the battlefield and the hinterland resulted in an expansion of warfare to potentially any terrain and a general increase of its complexity. In his treatise On War, Clausewitz introduced the concept “friction” as an integrative category of the many new uncertainties and imponderabilities which have turned modern battles into events of chance, and tactics into a science of observing and exploiting the opportunities of the moment for short-term gains and advances. Accordingly, the overall strategic planning of war has become predominantly an issue of intelligence assessments and probability calculations (see Engberg-Pedersen 37–68).