Elisabeth Krimmer & Patricia Anne Simpson 
Enlightened War 
German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz

New essays exploring the relationship between warfare and Enlightenment thought both historically and in the present.


Enlightened War investigates the multiple and complex interactions between warfare and Enlightenment thought. Although the Enlightenment is traditionally identified with the ideals of progress, eternal peace, reason, and self-determination, Enlightenment discourse unfolded during a period of prolonged European warfare from the Seven Years‘ War to the Napoleonic conquest of Europe. The essays in this volume explore the palpable influence of war on eighteenth-century thought and argue for an ideological affinity among war, Enlightenment thought, and its legacy.

The essays are interdisciplinary, engaging with history, art history, philosophy, military theory, gender studies, and literature and with historical events and cultural contexts from the early Enlightenment through German Classicism and Romanticism. The volume enriches our understanding of warfare in the eighteenth century and shows how theories and practices of war impacted concepts of subjectivity, national identity, gender, and art. It also sheds light on the contemporary discussion of the legitimacy of violence by juxtaposing theories of war, concepts of revolution, and human rights discourses.


Contributors: Johannes Birgfeld, David Colclasure, Sara Eigen Figal, Ute Frevert, Wolf Kittler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Waltraud Maierhofer, Arndt Niebisch, Felix Saure, Galili Shahar, Patricia Anne Simpson, Inge Stephan.


Elisabeth Krimmer is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, and Patricia Anne Simpson is Associate Professor of German Studies at Montana State University.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Enlightened Warfare in Eighteenth-Century Germany – Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson

The Point of Recognition: Enemy, Neighbor, and Next of Kin in the Era of Frederick the Great – Sara Eigen Figal

Writing War and the Aesthetics of Political Literature in the 1790s: Daniel Jenisch’s (Un)timely Seven Years‘ War Epic Borussias – Johannes Birgfeld

Agamemnon on the Battlefield of Leipzig: Wilhelm von Humboldt on Ancient Warriors, Modern Heroes, and Bildung through War – Felix Saure

War, Anecdotes, and the Backsides of Reason: Kleist with Kant – Galili Shahar

‚Schon wieder Krieg! Der Kluge hörts nicht gern‘: Goethe, Warfare, and Faust II – Elisabeth Krimmer

Recoding the Ethics of War in Grimms‘ Fairy Tales – Patricia Anne Simpson

On Gender Wars and Amazons: Therese Huber on Terror and Revolution – Inge Stephan

Angelica Kauffmann’s War Heroes: (Not) Painting War in a Culture of Sensibility – Waltraud Maierhofer

Citizen-Soldiers: General Conscription in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries – Ute Frevert

Just War and Perpetual Peace: Kant on the Legitimate Use of Political Violence – David Colclasure

Military Intelligence: On Carl von Clausewitz’s Hermeneutics of Disturbance and Probability – Arndt Niebisch

Host Nations: Carl von Clausewitz and the New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Field Manual, FM 3-24, MCWP 3-33.5, Counterinsurgency – Wolf Kittler

Bibliography

Notes on the Contributors

Index

Über den Autor

WOLF KITTLER is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published widely with monographs on Franz Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist. Recent publications on Impressionism as an effect of the chemical dye industry, on the history of the Greek alphabet from Euripides to Plato, on early wireless technology, on music in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s work, on the history of the concept of ‚risk, ‚ and on transformations in perspective painting from Leon Battista Alberti to Salvador Dalí. Works in progress include: On Wings of Light: A Cultural History of Telecommunication from Antiquity to the Present, and Echo’s Echoes: From Freud to Lacan.