..i do wonder about S H Steinberg's dismissal of the term Thirty Years War as being a misnomer since this period was actually a succession of wars in a European rather than a purely German context, & lasted 50 years not 30, namely 1609-1659. Well, the historians can argue if they like, but even though the conflict between the two Great Powers of the day, the Hapsburg dynasty's empire & Bourbon France & her allies, didn't cease with a sudden jolt with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, it seems that it was that treaty that sealed the fate of the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (which Voltaire snidely remarked was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire) by dismembering the dying 'body' into 230-something more or less sovereign states of varying sizes which were nonetheless German in language & culture
And i've found at least one reference to a Second Thirty Years War here, which seems a fairly broad outline of the period 1914-1945. I can't help wondering about the origin of the term referring to the European conflicts of 1618-1648, since the 1914-1945 hostilities (both 'official' & 'unofficial') were preceded by the Moroccan Crises (1905,1911) & the First & Second Balkan Wars.
Maybe it's just the period in which i grew up that sparked my enduring interest in Germany between the two World Wars. Even when i was a kid at primary school, we knew the dates not only of the 'recent' World War, 1939-1945, but also its predecessor, 1914-1918. And the battle that we were told about was not the drawn-out grimness of Gallipoli, but the slaughter of the First Battle of Passchendaele where New Zealand soldiers suffered their worst ever defeat. I wondered why New Zealand had gone to war against Germany twice within 30-odd years, & also if there might be another monstrous war 25-30 years after my father's war, & if so what would happen then. This almost did not bear thinking about, because we were now in the age of the Nuclear Bomb, which turned the whole strategy of war in the air upside down. From being vulnerable to repeated levels of unacceptable losses, typically 5% or more, bomber forces had now graduated to being able to sustain a 95% loss rate & still succeed in annihilating their targets. The books that considered possible nuclear war & its after-effects were the likes of Neville Shute's "On The Beach", Walter M Miller Jr's "A Canticle for Leibowitz" & Michael Swanwick's "In The Drift". Scary, too, was the phrase "Thinking the Unthinkable", referring to a cold-eyed view of a possibly 'winnable' nuclear war by Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation. Nonetheless, it's a phrase i approve of!! Someone has to look the future, however bleak, squarely in the eye, but if you mention certain topics to some people, they spit the dummy & abuse you for even raising the subject. Science & science-fiction (the real kind) writer Arthur C Clarke accused such people of suffering from failure of nerve and/or failure of imagination..
It's late now, as in stupid-o'clock on Sunday morning, & my brain seems to have stopped fizzing - i might even be able to get some sleep! Failing that, i'll just keep reading British historian Dame C V Wedgwood's immensely readable "The Thirty Years War", the 'first' one that is.. And as she points out, the unfinished business of a fragmented Germany reverberated down to "the explosive forces of liberal nationalism in the nineteenth century and illiberal nationalism in the twentieth".
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