Abstract
The outbreak of the war catches Rückert, a so-called one-year volunteer for the army, on holiday. He returns home to his regiment, along the way encountering the euphoria of civilian patriots, who believe that the Germans will easily defeat France. The common soldiers are far less enthusiastic. They have little sense of German nationalism. They see the war as a calamitous disruption of their lives. He describes the excitement and confusion of the mobilization, his awkward relations with the noncommissioned officers because he is an educated volunteer, and the difficulties of incorporating the Hessian military into the Prussian model. There is a heart-breaking goodbye to his father at the railroad station. Earlier, as he clinked glasses in a toast to his mother, his own glass shattered. They fear it is an omen of his fate.
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Notes
- 1.
The reference is to the defeat of Austria and its allies (including Hesse) in the Austro-Prussian War and the subsequent annexation of most of Hesse by Prussia.
- 2.
In other words, the older men were grandfathered into the old Hessian system under which you could pay a substitute to perform military service for you if you drew a bad lottery number. This was no longer possible under the Prussian system in which educated men were required to serve as “one-year volunteers.” (See Translator’s Introduction.) As is clear below, the adoption of this system in Hesse created—at least at first—an awkward situation in the army.
- 3.
In fact, under the old system, there were too few seekers of paid substitutes to provide an opportunity for more than a few men to earn money by serving as a substitute; yet now there was no opportunity.
- 4.
Rückert studied at a technical institute, not at a more prestigious traditional university with its humanistic curriculum.
- 5.
Another name for the Austro-Prussian War of 1866.
- 6.
The Battle of Sadowa (or Königgrätz) was the decisive Prussian victory over Austria and its south German allies in July 1866. The French were alarmed by the rise of Prussia and its domination of the Catholic south German states, whose independence the French sought to preserve.
- 7.
On the Hohenzollern candidacy, see the Introduction. The Luxembourg crisis of 1867 refers to the diplomatic confrontation between France and Prussia over the status of Luxembourg, which Emperor Louis Napoleon thought Bismarck had promised to France in return for neutrality in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The two nations came close to war when Bismarck reneged. The crisis ended with the Treaty of London, which made Luxembourg independent and neutral.
- 8.
The English used German mercenaries against the American revolutionaries. Napoleon created a new Kingdom of Westphalia in 1807, putting his brother Jèrôme on the throne. He was called “Morgen wieder lustig” (roughly, “Happy-Again-Tomorrow”) because that was the only German phrase he knew.
- 9.
Emperor Louis Napoleon III, the nephew of the Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte, was captured after the Battle of Sedan and placed under house arrest at the Wilhelmshöhe.
- 10.
The Wartburg, seat of the landgraves of Thuringia, was the site of Martin Luther’s house arrest by the Holy Roman Emperor and a symbol of German national identity; a landgrave was a count with jurisdiction over a local territory.
- 11.
That is, would he be in the state army of Baden, where his old home Karlsruhe was; or in the state army of Saxony, where his new home Leipzig was?
- 12.
In other words, in his present patriotic mood, Rückert preferred the more natural German landscape of Thuringia in central Germany to the French-influenced artificial parkland of the Wilhelmshöhe.
- 13.
The Prussian mobilization against Austria in 1866 was remarkable as the first systematic military use of the telegraph and railroad in Europe.
- 14.
He’s referring to the wars of Louis XIV.
- 15.
The Chassepot (introduced in 1867) was the standard French rifle; the Prussian needle-gun dated from 1841. Neutral military observers agreed that the longer-range Chassepot was superior.
- 16.
Austria went to war separately—not as part of the loose German Confederation—against France in 1859; the war was over by the time Prussia and the other German states had to decide whether to attack France; the slow pace of mobilization of Prussia motivated the King of Prussia to reform the army in the early 1860s.
- 17.
The Belt was the strait separating Schleswig in northern Germany from the Danish island of Fyn; the river and the strait are mentioned in the “Deutschlandlied” (“Song of Germany”), which was popular in 1870. The song has been the official German anthem since 1922, though the territorial claim was dropped after 1945.
- 18.
A quotation from Friedrich Schiller’s play Wallenstein’s Camp. In other words, talk is cheap; what counts in the army is quietly doing your duty.
- 19.
Presumably, the Grand Duke of Hesse.
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Kelly, A. (2019). Introduction. In: Carl Rückert's Memoirs of the Franco-Prussian War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95804-0_2
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