Otto Dix and Weimar Media Culture: Time, Fashion and Photography in Portrait Paintings of the Neue Sachlichkeit by Anne Reimers (review)

Abstract

was Catholic nuns who successfully appealed to the gallantry of Protestant officers and secured their protection. Coping with Life during the Thirty Years’ War focuses on individuals. In many ways, Sigrun Haude has composed a psychohistory of the wartime experience, with an emphasis on how people felt during this conflict. The Cincinnati historian does not attempt a comprehensive reinterpretation of the Thirty Years’ War and becomes somewhat less sure-footed when she moves beyond her core topic. Her terse summary of the war on pages eight to sixteen leaves no room for discussing alternative understandings. Some of the self-made maps, such as the map of the Holy Roman Empire around 1618 on page eleven that, inter alia, seems to include southern Schleswig in that polity and divide Pomerania in an anachronistic manner, can be slightly misleading. A number of lesser oversights or imprecisions—such as making 1527 the norm year of the Peace of Prague (15) or describing the Habsburgs as a royal dynasty that ruled the Holy Roman Empire from 1440 to the late eighteenth century (237)—could have been caught by more careful external proofreading. Yet, drawing on an abundance of sources, Haude has provided a well-researched study of the human experience of the Thirty Years’ War. She describes this experience in great detail, which at times gives the narration the flavor of a chronicle. In this way, her study reminds of Hans Medick’s 2018 volume Der Dreißigjährige Krieg: Zeugnisse vom Leben mit Gewalt, which also focuses on individual experiences and utilizes some of the same sources. Haude does not go quite as far as Medick, who integrates these materials directly into his narrative, but Coping with Life during the Thirty Years’ War impresses above all with meticulous source presentation. Thus, the study might inspire and provide material for additional interpretive studies. Peter Thaler, University of Southern Denmark