Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- List of Figures and Maps
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Revisiting Prussia’s Wars against Napoleon
- Part One A History of Defeat, Crisis and Victory
- Part Two Discourses on the Nation, War and Gender
- Part Three Collective Practices of De/Mobilization and Commemoration
- Part Four Literary Market, History and War Memories
- 12 Politics, Market and Media
- 13 Inventing History
- 14 Remembering the Past
- Conclusion
- Part Five Novels, Memory and Politics
- Epilogue Historicizing War and Memory, 2013–1813–1913
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
- Plate section
- References
14 - Remembering the Past
The Napoleonic Wars in Autobiographies and War Memoirs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2015
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- List of Figures and Maps
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Revisiting Prussia’s Wars against Napoleon
- Part One A History of Defeat, Crisis and Victory
- Part Two Discourses on the Nation, War and Gender
- Part Three Collective Practices of De/Mobilization and Commemoration
- Part Four Literary Market, History and War Memories
- 12 Politics, Market and Media
- 13 Inventing History
- 14 Remembering the Past
- Conclusion
- Part Five Novels, Memory and Politics
- Epilogue Historicizing War and Memory, 2013–1813–1913
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
- Plate section
- References
Summary
The decades after the Napoleonic Wars witnessed the publication of a veritable flood of autobiographies and war memoirs in Germany as in many other European countries. The sheer number of these texts differentiates this postwar period from all earlier ones. And yet it was also the distinct quality of these accounts that set them apart from previous texts, as David A. Bell emphasizes:
Up until the late eighteenth century, only a relatively few military figures (virtually all officers) composed military memoirs. These men almost never included reflections on their interior lives and had little concern for the flavor and color of particular events. They celebrated deeds that fit stereotyped images of noble valor, making the writing flat and tedious to modern sensibilities. The post-Napoleonic accounts broke dramatically with this tradition, in their vastly greater numbers, their concern for realism, and their frankly personal style.
Emerging Romantic notions of the self inspired the autobiographies and war memoirs not just of middle-class men who joined the army as volunteers; even texts by many noblemen who served during the wars as professional officers or generals reflect the trend to greater realism and the psychologization of autobiographical accounts. This confirms the shift to a more “modern regime of selfhood” based on interiority and innate qualities.
The dramatic historical experiences of revolution, war and crisis that many educated contemporaries underwent in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries promoted a turn toward historical self-reflection and with it autobiographical writing. Literary fashions too, especially those texts that were intensely discussed among the literary public, strongly influenced these new types of writings. Of considerable impact were, first and foremost, the more self-reflective autobiographies by well-known authors, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s From My Life: Poetry and Truth (the first three volumes were published in 1811–14 and the fourth and final one a year after his death in 1833).
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- Chapter
- Information
- Revisiting Prussia's Wars against NapoleonHistory, Culture, and Memory, pp. 301 - 334Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015