Nikolaas van Eyck’s Occupation of a Village, which hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, offers a glimpse of an everyday occurrence during the war. Van Eyck shows a hamlet surrounded by troops set on plunder, and while some soldiers push their way into houses others loll around on the cannon on the main dirt track waiting their turn to search for food, women and treasure. Helpless villagers wander aimlessly past the incoming wagons; one man comforts his wife and child while another sits beneath a tree, crying. The plundering of villages and towns was the norm. Nothing was spared. Church spires were melted down for lead, farms were stripped and set on fire, villages were burnt for amusement. Peasants were considered fair game for sport: it was common for them to be captured, rounded up like animals and tortured; some had cords tied around their heads so that their eyes were forced out, others had their thumbs pushed deep into gun barrels. Innocent people were bound and tossed into the rivers, thrown out of windows, roasted on spits or boiled in their own cauldrons. Prisoners were sometimes tied in rows and bets placed on how many bodies a bullet would penetrate. Some armies became known for particular forms of abuse: when Wallenstein took hostages in the Mark Brandenburg burghers were repeatedly tortured so that they would reveal the location of ‘treasure’ which had long since been plundered; priests were tied under wagons and made to crawl on all fours like dogs until they died; others were dragged ‘for miles along the rough roads bound to the tails of horses’.19
Despite official attempts to curb the violence to civilians the Swedish occupation was equally horrific. By 1632 there were no young women left in Berlin as all had been taken by the troops; children were reportedly killed in front of their parents in order to elicit the whereabouts of the family valuables. The soldiers, keen to amuse themselves, murdered unknown numbers of Berliners by sprinkling gunpowder on their victims and setting them alight; they also poured raw sewage down the throats of prisoners, a practice so widespread that the foul mixture came to be known as the ‘Swedish drink’. The hatred between the people and the occupying armies was extreme – particularly in the unprotected areas outside the city walls; civilians sometimes attacked soldiers’ encampments and then endured savage reprisals, while a popular expression amongst the troops went: ‘Every soldier needs three peasants: one to give up his lodgings, one to provide his wife, and one to take his place in Hell.’ Colonel Monro complained of the behaviour of Bavarian peasants towards the Swedes in 1632: they ‘cruelly used our souldiers (that went aside to plunder) in cutting off their noeses and eares, hands and feete, pulling out their eyes, with sundry other cruelties which they used; being justly repayed by the souldiers, in burning of many Dorpes [villages] on the march, leaving also the boores dead, where they were found’.20 Both troops and civilians had become brutalized.
The armies consisted not only of soldiers but of whole communities, including army whores, bedraggled children and vagrants who dragged behind the wagons along with their often diseased livestock, horses and cows. All of them had to be supported and the results were ruinous for occupied territories. Berlin was badly affected by famine. Four failed harvests on the Havel between 1625 and 1628 had already weakened the population and entire encampments of wretched refugees were wiped out by starvation in the successive winters. In 1627 the crops had grown well but they were destroyed by the retreating Danes and the victorious imperial army. The land was constantly being stripped bare, crops were trampled or ripped out before they reached maturity, and starvation was widespread.21 In 1629 the Englishman Sir Thomas Roe travelled through the area and wrote: ‘I hear nothing but lamentations nor see variety but of dead bodies … in eighty English miles not a house to sleep safe in; no inhabitants save a few poor women and children vertend stercorarium to find a corn of wheat.’22 In Berlin the starvation in 1631–2 was so extreme that people were reduced to stealing dead animals from the knackers’ yards. The much used gallows were regularly plundered and even graves were found emptied. In one case fresh human bones were discovered in a pit with their marrow sucked dry.
Starvation weakened the population and left them vulnerable to sickness and diseases like smallpox, syphilis, scurvy and typhus. Worse still was the return of the dreaded plague. The first outbreak reached Berlin in 1620 but it continued throughout the war. In 1630–31 2,000 Berliners died of plague; in 1637 over 500 died. Bodies lay out in the streets as there was nobody left willing to push the plague carts or dig the mass graves. Those still alive created strange concoctions of lavender, rosemary, juniper berries, garlic, white onions, vinegar, walnuts, endive, hot poultices, cold compresses, scented masks and bags of herbs in a desperate attempt to halt the disease. People were obsessed with death: drawings of skulls and skeletons appeared on plague sheets and themes of decay and mutability abounded. When the English ambassador travelled to the electoral meeting at Regensburg he reported on a country where a few bedraggled villagers who saw them coming fled in terror, fearing that his party was yet another group of invading soldiers; roads were so unsafe that several of his group were murdered near Nuremberg, and he recounts how he found bodies newly scraped out of graves, ‘fair cities pillaged and burnt’, and people ‘found dead with grass in their mouths’.23 In May 1631 a pastor in Brandenburg wrote in his diary: ‘Catherine, my old servant, shot.’24 There was no other comment. Such things had become commonplace.
The importance of the conflict is reflected in the mass of literature – and the myths – which it has inspired. The Thirty Years War became a subject of particular importance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when German historians attempted to use it to ‘prove’ how much the ‘all destructive fury of the Thirty Years War’ had damaged German interests and to show that both the conflict and the post-war settlement was ‘a monstrous iniquity perpetrated on Germany by foreign powers, especially France’; some even drew parallels between the Peace of Westphalia and the Treaty of Versailles.25 But notwithstanding a tendency to exaggerate the results, the impact of the gruesome conflict cannot be underestimated, and many works have tried to come to terms with its effects. These range from Adalbert Stifter’s 1842 novelle Der Hochwald and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s 1882 Gustav Adolf’s Page to Heinrich Laube’s nine-volume novel Der deutsche Krieg (The German War), completed in 1866. Schiller wrote a History of the Thirty Years War in 1789 and his tragedy Wallenstein (1799) was one of his greatest works. Ricarda Huch’s Der grosse Krieg in Deutschland (published in 1914) and Wallenstein (published in 1915) were praised by Thomas Mann, and modern German perceptions of the war were greatly influenced by Gustav Freytag’s Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (Pictures from German History), published in 1859. But the impact of the war is brought to life most vividly in the works of those who experienced it at first hand; indeed, along with the music of composers like Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schutz, Johann Jakob Froberger and Johannes Crüger in Berlin, literature was one of the few art forms to flourish in Germany during those ghastly decades.
The eyewitness accounts make grim reading. Johann Michael Moscerosch, who fought with the Swedish army and very nearly died of starvation during the war, wrote of the effect of war in his 1643 Adventurers of Philander of Sittewald. Two of the most celebrated poets of the day, Martin Opitz (who died of the plague in 1639) and Paul Fleming, wrote of the longing for peace. Like the other two Andreas Gryphius, born in Glogau in 1616, was forced to flee to Holland for much of the war, but his Tränen des Vaterlands anno 1636 remains one of the most moving descriptions of the devastation caused by the conflict: in it he describes the misery of the people with their towns in flames, the strong maimed, the virgins raped, the streets running with blood and everywhere ‘Fire, plague and death oppress the heart and soul’. His heart-wrenching Epitaph on Mariana Gryphius describes how his infant was killed: ‘Born during the flight, surrounded with swords and conflagration, almost stifled in the smoke … I pressed forward to the light when the furious fire had consumed my country; I looked upon this world and soon said farewell to it, for in one day