Forschungsstelle "Westfälischer Friede": Dokumentation

DOCUMENTATION | Exhibitions: 1648 - War and Peace in Europe
Essay Volumes > Tome I: Politics, Religion, Law and Society

HEINZ SCHILLING
War and Peace at the Emergence of Modernity - Europe between state belligerence, religious wars and the desire for peace

I.

In a bird's eye view the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia lie at the point of convergence of two secular processes which fundamentally changed the lives of the people in Europe. One was the rise of the early modern state, beginning in the Middle Ages and developing towards the nation state of the 18th and 19th centuries. The other was the renewal of religion and the church, an equally long-term change. In view of the close relationship between religion and politics at that time, between church and state, both the process of ecclesiastical reform and that of state-formation affected society as a whole. Furthermore, they were of universal historical significance, affecting not only Europe and individual European countries, but the way in which people lived together in general.

The processes of state-building and church reformation were each imminently fraught with conflict, both within and between the individual European societies. Both processes were closely interwoven from the very beginning - mainly developing in one and the same direction, but often in bitter opposition to each other. In the late Middle Ages Europe thus entered a period of crises and open conflicts, which in the early 17th century flowed together to become the first great Europe-wide conflict which we call the Thirty Years' War. Referring to conflicts which arose in particular in the process of state-building, the idea of a structurally-determined "European belligerence" in the early modern age has recently been advanced and a corresponding theory developed to explain why so many wars took place in Europe in the first three centuries of the modern age. [1] It has also been observed that the process of religio-ecclesiastical renewal, which proceeded contemporaneously, was heading towards all-out confrontation. In the age of denominational conflict the religious and political forces throughout Europe thus flowed together to form the explosive combination of "denominational conflict and state-building". [2] There were civil wars such as the Huguenot struggles in France and the Puritan Revolution in England, but also denominationally motivated clashes between of the European powers. Thus especially for the decades around 1600, internal and external religious wars in Europe are considered to have been endemic, i.e. an omnipresent danger. [3]

Yet an examination of the structural preconditions and the long epochs of the history of Medieval Europe tells us something else as well - that alongside the pressures for war there was from the very beginning a corresponding pressure for peace. Furthermore, the conflict-ridden situation and the tendency towards state-based and religious war were structurally connected with the ability to make peace. The theory of belligerence and the notion of endemic religious wars should thus be complemented, not with a theory propounding Europe's inherent peaceableness, but rather with one stressing its ability to consciously bring about peace. On the one hand this ability was the result of precisely the political pragmatism that had arisen in the initial stages of development of the early modern states in order to manage opposing interests. On the other hand it was an expression of particular principles of political and social development which, even at the height of the war, essentially kept the way open for peace, even and indeed especially in the case of such a seemingly absolute confrontation of world views as the denominational religious wars.



II

The pressure towards war between states and for denominational conflict both had their roots in the Middle Ages. The wars between states - or to be more exact the wars accompanying the process of state-building [4] - were a consequence of the application and intensification of domination which we call the early modern process of state-building. It began in the late Middle Ages and progressed at different rates in the various regions of Europe. Additionally, at roughly the same time, great changes began to occur in the way war was waged as well as in the organisation of defence and warfare. This "military revolution" which - in very rough outline - brought about the rapid spread of firearms and the replacement of the medieval armies of vassals and knights with modern ones of foot soldiers dominated by mercenaries, was very closely connected with the process of state-building. The financing of the armies of mercenaries made money the nervus rerum of the early modern state. The task of raising sufficient money was a virtually insoluble problem for rulers and officials for much of the 17th century. This did not change until it became possible for them to tax their subjects on a regular basis. At the same time militarisation drove the process of state-building forward, not least because a powerful army of mercenaries strengthened the ruler in domestic matters, above all in enforcing regular taxation.

There were two sides to the process of state-building in the early modern age: one related to domestic policy and the other to foreign policy. Domestically it amounted to the integration and concentration of all political, social, economic and other power under the supremacy of the ruler. Since the time of Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596) and his "Six livres de la république" written in 1576 this new, domestic centre of power has been referred to as unified "sovereignty" and supreme state authority in the hand of the sovereign or - in the few republics of the time - of an oligarchy of the corporativist or urban elite. Unlike its medieval predecessor under feudalism, the early modern state was no longer based primarily on certain individuals, but on an area, a state territory with borders. [5] Thus at the same time the process of state-building meant a disassociation from the "outside" world, which as a rule was implemented in an offensive, not infrequently even aggressive manner. All the states of the early modern age aimed to augment their state territory through expansion and the annexation of as much territory as possible. Some of them openly propounded an expansive policy of "natural borders".

The process of state-building in the early modern age and the rise of a modern Europe of great powers were thus logically interconnected. This is also true to the extent that the states of the early modern age developed into something like collective individuals which of necessity followed their own laws and inalienable rights. This development did not reach fruition until the nation states of the19th and early 20th centuries. Although on a different basis, the dynastic princely state of the 15th to the 18th century was also a domestically self-contained collective individual, concentrating all its strength in order to act externally in competition with other states.

The internal process of state-building was no different to the external one and the accompanying birth of the modern Europe of the great powers was accompanied by massive disruptions. Internally the rulers and their state elites used violent means against the old forces of the estates, cities, clergy and local associations which laid claim to an independent, non-derived right of political participation which the state could no longer grant under the modern principle of sovereignty. In addition to the above-mentioned tendencies of territorial adjustment between the states conflicts were mainly over "rank", since at this stage there was no generally acknowledged system of states. [6] Therefore, at the end of the Middle Ages, Europe entered a long phase of intense violent upheaval both within and between states.

Very soon the domestic unrest within the states was eliminated step by step. This was due to the fact that the modern state enforced its monopoly on the use of force. In other words, any force that was not exercised by the authorities of the state or bodies they had delegated was now considered illegal or even treasonable, and was persecuted accordingly. This equally affected the nobility, the church and the cities, which in the period before the development of states had all been legally entitled to use force. The last rebellions of the nobility, asserting its freedom and autonomy against the state of the early modern age, were the robber barons of the late Middle Ages, the uprising of the knights of the empire in 1522/23, and numerous similar revolts of the empire's nobility, the last of which was put down in the middle of the 16th century.

In contrast to the internal pacification within the states, unrest between the states and the "war of all against all" remained the norm. No-one described this more aptly than the English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) - the experience of the Puritans' Civil War in England, which raged parallel to the Thirty Years' War, led him to become the theoretician of the leviathan state, which would end the domestic war of all against all by taming the primeval wolflike nature of the people with draconian means. However, taming the wolflike nature of the people and the abolition of the warlike natural state in the interior could not - according to Hobbes - have a counterpart at international level. This was because no renunciation of violence was possible between sovereign rulers who, by definition, recognised no-one superior to themselves. Therefore, according to Hobbes, war was the natural order of things in the Europe of the great powers: "Due to their independence kings and wielders of sovereign force oppose each other at all times in immutable jealousy and with the stance of gladiators." [7]

The denominational conflicts which flowed together in the Thirty Years' War with the rivalry between the states, and their territorial conflicts are generally considered the first great power struggle and clash of world views on a European scale, and as such the expression of the disunity of Western Christianity in the modern age. And yet they too have their roots and predecessors in the Middle Ages. From the 14th until the 17th century - i.e. largely contemporaneously with the process of early modern state-building - Latin Christianity experienced a "temps des réformes", a "time of reformations" as French historians call it, which were not centred on Luther and Wittenberg. This is a reference to the movement for spirituality and piety in the monastic orders, the secular clergy and religious life in general, in particular to the lay preachers who spoke out with ever greater self-confidence. This led to sharp tensions and differences within the church and to major internal disruptions of particular societies - above all in England due to John Wyclif (1320/26-1384) and the Lollards, a short time later in Bohemia and Moravia due to Hus (1370-1415) and the Hussites. The Hussite wars of the 15th century, which were carried far beyond the borders of Bohemia and affected territories as far afield as Franconia and Westphalia in the West, Gdansk in the north, and Austria and Hungary in the south, showed that these religious movements contained an enormous military potential which could turn against external enemies.

In the 16th century the reformations of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, together with the Catholic Reformation represented by Ignatius of Loyola, finally shattered the unity of Latin Christianity. The processes of internal dynamic development and integration, as well as the aggressive delimitation from the "outside world", now reached their climax. Three denominational churches evolved, each differing radically from one another in legal, organisational and theological-dogmatic terms - Lutheran, Reformed/Calvinist, and Catholic. These were to become the most decisive vehicles of integration and dissociation in the modern age because they demanded of their members a "confessio", a formal confession - at first from the priests and clergy, but also from parishioners, particularly when they held influential positions in state and society. This was a prime cause of religious wars becoming endemic in Europe around 1600. Soon afterwards denominational conflict converged with the wars of state-building and the wars between states to lead to first series of large-scale wars between competing powers and world views in modern Europe, among which the Thirty Years' War was only one, albeit the most bitter and protracted.

The power struggles of the late 16th century also acquired a modern dimension inasmuch as the effects of the European wars extended beyond the continent for the first time, if only to a limited degree. This was the result of the rivalry which had recently arisen between the "old" colonial powers Spain and Portugal and the newcomers Holland and England, later also France. The state-based wars and religious wars of the denominational age were thus accompanied by involvement at sea and overseas. Not least, it was a question of access to the precious-metal resources important for the maintenance of the mercenary armies in Europe. When the Dutch admiral Piet Heyn seized the Spanish silver fleet in the Cuban harbour of Matanzas in 1628, this was a triumphal gain in prestige for the young colonial power Holland and at the same time a serious financial setback for Spain, a loss of not less than twelve million florins, of which eight million were in the form of 177,000 pounds of silver. At the same time the economic and power-political rivalry between the old Catholic colonial powers and the predominantly Protestant newcomers meant that the religious wars and the influence of denomination on politics and society in general spread from Europe to territories overseas.

In many places the Thirty Years' War was also an intra-denominational and civil war. This was particularly the case in Bohemia, its place of origin, where a serious power struggle broke out towards the end of the 16th century between the Catholic forces of the crown and the Protestant estates of the empire. In the early 17th century the Netherlands were shaken by similar internal tensions and conflicts - between Arminians, i.e. the moderate reform party of the Regent under the leadership of the theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609) and the politician Johan von Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619) on the one hand, and the Stadtholders of the House of Orange on the other. The latter relied on the determined Calvinists with their theological head Franciscus Gomarus (1563-1641) and the broad sectors of the population these controlled. It was no different in some of the German territories, where at the same time the princes set about establishing religious unity on a denominational basis - be it Catholic, Lutheran or Reformed - using all the force of early absolutism. This triggered off conflicts which continued during the war as peasant unrest, peasant uprisings, and conflict with the estates.

These denominational European wars were not simply a version of the state-building wars or the wars between states. Rather, they had a quality of their own which resulted from the aforementioned overlapping of the political-state and religio-ecclesiastical shift in fundamental principles. This is what gave many of the wars fought between 1550 and 1650 such a degree of principled, one could even say fundamentalist hostility, which plunged Europe into the first large-scale crisis of the modern age, in which human co-existence was at stake both within the states as well as between the powers. [8]

Peace and lasting stability [9] could only be attained through completely new legal and administrative norms, i.e. through a new concept of the political. After the rise of all-out denominational confrontation in the late 16th century the question was no less than whether - to use modern categories - religious fundamentalism would win the overhand in Europe, or whether it would be possible to keep this danger at bay with an intellectually and above all theologically and legally convincing counter-proposal and the political and institutional preparations which this entailed. The fact that this succeeded is what made the Peace of Westphalia an event of such international historical significance. Schiller saw these interrelations clearly in the late 18th century, but they were soon to be submerged in the national-historical zeal of the 19th century and a negative evaluation of the peace agreement began to predominate. Thus he quite rightly celebrated the peace treaties of Münster and Osnabrück as an "exhausting, expensive and enduring achievement of statesmanship, [...] the most fascinating and convincing work of human wisdom and passion." [10]



III

On 24 October 1648, after three decades of total confrontation and long years of tenacious struggle to achieve a workable compromise at the negotiating table, the Peace of Westphalia brought Germany the much-longed-for armistice. At the same time it showed Europe the way, if not to avoid war in principle, then at least to keep it in check and erect an effective barrier against new epidemics of war which could engulf the continent as a whole. Above all the articles on religion laid the legal and moral basis for preventing fundamentalist religious and ecclesiastical war in Europe.

The Peace of Westphalia was also a peace of exhaustion, as an anonymous poet laments:

("The houses have been burned down / the churches destroyed / The villages have been ransacked / all provisions eaten / One sees the cities, the country's hope, ablaze / The splendour of the country can no longer be seen".)

The corresponding woodcut shows the soldier as "The Merciless Peasant Horseman". But this peace settlement was not just a treaty signed by politicians of warring states but above all an understanding reached by two conflicting camps and world views which succeeded in bridging the rift between themselves. As such it was an expression of Europe's ability to make peace, effective even in the deepest of division. It too was rooted in enduring traditions and dispositions - in the very structure of the European model of civilisation - especially in the case of two of its characteristics: its law and its specific religion.

Law in Europe was always an effective force. Particularly in the form of Roman law it left a deep imprint on medieval society - initially mediated by the church with its canon law, and after the rediscovery of the corpus juris civilis in the 12th century above all by the schools and faculties of law, the most prominent of which were in Bologna. [12] From the earliest stages law also shaped the relations between peoples and states. Even when the Europeans attacked other continents and invaded the New World with fire and sword, this tradition of law was not totally ineffective. This was the beginning of a modern European tradition in the theory of international law. As early as 1539 in his "Lectures on the Recently Discovered Indians" ("Relectiones de Indis recenter inventis") the Dominican monk and theology professor in Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria (1492-1546), established the ius inter gentes, i.e. the legal relations between peoples, on the basis of Roman law as natural law, which was derived from natural human reason independent of religion, race or power.

The chaos of self-destruction which threatened all European societies in the rise of all-out denominational confrontation was also averted on numerous occasions by means of law such as the theory of sovereign national law, which the jurists' party in France, the "Politiques", used to direct the Huguenot wars, but above all by the religious peace of Augsburg, which secured two or three generations of calm for the empire. It was based to a significant extent on the determination to use law as an instrument to "neutralise" the irreconcilable religious differences in political and social questions. This was done in particular through so-called "dissimulation" which was developed especially for legal control of the dynamic of denominational confrontation. This was a "particular type of legal thought and structure [...], which - in order to foster denominational reconciliation - [...] [applies] the art of compromise while renouncing the unequivocal decision [and] carefully leaving aside the Insoluble, while reaching for the ambiguous concepts in order to [...] conceal the differences [which at present are irreconcilable]." [13] At the beginning of the 17th century when a later generation began to lose the will for peace and was increasingly prepared to risk war to improve its own denominational and political position [14], the legal barriers established in 1555 collapsed . But when the chaos of the ensuing war and all its brutality revealed the costs of unrestrained confrontation, the Augsburg solution again became the model for the lasting legal settlements of 1648.

Given the immense potential for denominational conflict the Westphalian Peace Congress would probably never have led to lasting success had Europe's essential ability to make peace not been anchored in religion and in Europe's religio-sociological profile. Indisputable as it is that Christianity contributed to violence and strife, not least because the church itself built up a state and developed into a temporal power, so too it is impossible to oversee its achievements in repressing the everyday propensity to violence and spreading the norms of peace founded by Christ, which his missionaries then made fundamental elements of the European model of civilisation. In terms of the attempts to apply these norms of peace in social and political reality, it suffices to mention the Pax Dei movement of the high Middle Ages.

But there were always impediments which hindered a concrete peace policy by the church. Indeed, the church itself repeatedly called for war - the crusades, as well as the wars against the heretics (Albigenses, Waldenses and Hussites). In the 16th century the contradiction between the imperative of peace and the real policy of war seemed to harden into an insoluble problem. This was because, unlike with Hus and the Hussites, the founders and supporters of the West European Reformations could no longer simply be combated as heretics, stripped of their basic legal rights and competence to negotiate agreements. When the Reformations became part of the process of state-building, with sovereigns and city magistrates arising as patrons and defenders of the true teachings, the "heretics" gained legal and political protection, and the medieval heresy problem became the denominational problem of the modern age. At the same time hostility and unrest within European Christianity took on a new quality - the contradiction between teachings and belief was compounded by the conflict potential of the early modern state-building process, and both added to the dynamic of unimpeded confrontation of the politico-denominational factions and blocks.

The fact that it was finally possible to surmount the problems and break the seemingly inevitable dynamic of religio-fundamentalist confrontation - albeit not until the people of all denominations had gone through thirty years of hardship and suffering - was decisively influenced by the particular way in which state and church in Europe were interconnected from the very beginning. [15] It is characteristic of the relationship of state and church in Medieval Europe that religion and society or rather church and state were structurally interwoven - in contrast to their separation in the modern world. But the basis was not monism, as is the case in fundamentalist religious systems, but rather a dualism in which state and church were always distinguishable and neither power could unconditionally subjugate the other to its laws. There was no essential change when the denominationalism of the late 16th and the 17th century led the politico-religious interlocking of Medieval Europe to its climax and channelled the religious passions of denominational politics and society in a seemingly fundamentalist direction.

This religio-sociological pattern had three important consequences for the character of the Thirty Years' War and the conditions of the peace settlement: firstly, politics remained independent of the expanding denominationalisation to such an extent that - as shown above all by Catholic France - from the beginning it could also be pursued against denominational and religious interests, although that was always considered a limited exception from the rule. Secondly, even when the politicians placed their political action in the service of a particular denominationalism - as "defensores ecclesiae" (defender of the faith) in the case of the Catholics or as auxiliary bishops or "praecipua membra ecclesiae" (outstanding members of the church) in the case of the Protestants - in principle they remained bound to both different parts of their office, i.e. both to the religio-ecclesiastical and the governmental responsibility for their subjects. Even at the height of denominationalism Europe was by no means in the sway of a fundamentalist monism for which religion was the only and the ultimate norm. When the war made it obvious that too close an interlocking of political and ecclesiastical rule would bring disaster not only upon state and society, but ultimately also on the churches and religion, it was the dualistic constitution of Latin Christianity which offered the opportunity and the decisive legitimation for a fundamental revision of political denominationalism. On this basis the readiness for war which dominated in the first third of the century turned into the comprehensive desire for peace of the late 1630s and the 1640s.

The solution of 1648, which developed out of this will for peace and from then on excluded the possibility of a religious war of the same kind as the Thirty Years' War in Europe, was significantly stabilised by the fact that Europe's dualistic religious constitution contained an inherent tendency towards secularisation, i.e. a tendency towards the separation of the secular from the religious and towards autonomous self-determination in the political, cultural and social spheres. This process proceeded in stages. After the first great push of secularisation following the so-called Investiture Dispute of the high Middle Ages, the 16th century was marked by a certain counter-movement or even general resurgence of religion in reaction to the Reformation. But this could not turn back the process of secularisation to any great extent. Even at the height of denominationalism secularisation lived on as an undercurrent, particularly in the theoretical and practical problem-solving strategies of the lawyers and in political thought in general. This helped pave the way to peace.

What is perhaps even more significant is that secularisation gave the peace policies of the Catholic and Protestant princes a particular legitimacy, without which denominationalism would hardly have been overcome so swiftly. It is often forgotten that until the Enlightenment the spread of secularisation was not on the whole an anti-religious or anti-clerical movement, but rather a direct reference back to religious and church traditions. The secularisation of Medieval Europe was characterised by a dialectic which did not break with the religious dynamic, but rather incorporated it into the temporal sphere and thus decisively strengthened the effectiveness and legitimacy of political and social action. In a "secularised" context of this kind peace had a religious-sacral dimension even though it developed in a pragmatic-secular way and - like the Peace of Westphalia - did not deal with positions of dogma or church law and least off all with questions of church property. The familiar introductory phrase "pax sit christiana" (May it be a Christian Peace) in the Peace of Westphalia should also be seen in this context, i.e. as a bridge over which the "secularisation of the Political" was legitimated and made acceptable. This context is expressed perhaps even more clearly by the dove of peace with an olive branch in its beak. It was varied widely and used in a whole series of coins and medallions symbolising the Peace of Westphalia. Even today - in secularised form and mainly without the olive branch - it stands for world peace. This is the Old Testament bird of peace which, after the raging of the elements, showed Noah that the Earth was inhabitable again and above all that God was reconciled with the people and offered them his peace.



IV

"Peace through law" and "Peace through secularisation of the Political" in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 were of dual significance - they allowed the resolution of the concrete problems which had plunged the empire and Europe into war; and they offered a model and a strategy to avoid, limit or rapidly resolve future conflicts and differences of a political or religious nature. Germany received a political and a religious constitution which remained largely intact until the end of the Old Empire in 1806. Even today they still point the way for relations between church and state and among the denominations. Europe received a system of states based on the principle of equal rights of its members - this was based on international law, which had only then reached full development. As a religious peace treaty, which unlike that of 1555 was to be lasting, and as a peace treaty both within and between states, the Peace of Westphalia put an end to an epoch marked by "belligerence", Reformations and endemic religious warfare. As such we can speak of 1648 as a turning-point of universal historical significance.

However, "eternal peace" had not been achieved. In the west and north-east of the continent war continued. When the Pyrenean and the Oliva peace treaties were concluded in 1659 and 1660 the weapons were silenced there too, but it was not long before the ambitions of Louis XIV of France led to new wars. However, the Peace of Westphalia continued to have an effect in the Europeans' commemorative culture as a "lieu de mémoire" for a great moment in history where hard work on reaching a compromise had been able to wrest peace even from deepest disunity. Furthermore, the negotiations in Münster and Osnabrück entered Europe's memory in most concrete terms - as a model of approaching this goal by means of peace congresses, which as of 1648 became virtually an everyday event. Thus a vision of peace and a dynamic of striving for peace was created which now could not be extinguished, since the peace settlement had received a religious or quasi-religious aura in the course of secularisation. In this respect both Kant's great concept "On Eternal Peace" of 1796 [16] and the confidence-building measures and conferences on non-violent conflict resolution of the late 20th century are based on the achievements of the Münster and Osnabrück Congress.

In 1648 the future course of political culture in Europe was set in yet another respect - the separation of politics and religion by means of legal settlements was a decision of universal historical significance. The foundations were thus laid for the autonomy and secularity of the modern concept of politics, but also for the autonomy and independence of religion and the church which - at least in German state law on religion - retain a right to autonomy which is to be respected and protected by the state. [17] Consequently hardly anything meets with such uniform rejection by the people of Europe today than the notion of religious war as an option for political action. Every modern European is seriously perturbed if such a war flares up in their backyard or if partisans of religious fundamentalism elsewhere call to such a war. [18]



V

Without a doubt it is principally these long-term influences on the politico-historical culture which constitute the special role of the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia in the historical consciousness of Germany and Europe. But there is yet more to the humane task of history and to making this event worthy of commemoration - it should be realised that the people who lived through the state belligerence and denominational conflicts were not passive extras in processes and structures which the modern historian analyses or depicts in a historical exhibition, conserving them for his or her own present and future. Their behaviour and way of life, their conceptions of the world and views of life deserve our interest precisely because they are "lost" to us today and seem alien to us. Indeed, there is little which can convey to us the changeability and historical relativity of social and cultural structures - including those of the present - with greater vividness than an encounter with that which is foreign in our own history. Unlike most people of today, who have been shaped by the Enlightenment and the expectations of rational explanation derived from the modern natural and social sciences, the people of the age of denominational conflict experienced violence and hatred, murder, exclusion and defamation as the acts of incomprehensible powers at whose mercy they were. They saw the unleashed furies through the prism of a world view and concept of God which is not ours of today; precisely this calls on us to transcend the easy arrogance of posterity and to show respect. The people around the year 1600, caught up in the confusion of a far-reaching crisis in which war and violence were only part of a more extensive syndrome, interpreted the tensions, conflicts and the strife threatening them as a terrible apocalyptic struggle, as a battle of the children of light against the children of darkness, of upright or - as the English Puritans put it - "godly" Christians against the Anti-Christ and his hosts. In hunger, suffering, disease and death they saw God's revenge - retaliation and punishment for sin and misdeeds, for heresies or unrepentance towards the truths of the Gospel.

Thus their longing for peace on earth was so very sincere, perhaps even desperate, but above all it was a wish for cosmic and heavenly peace. The poets of the Baroque lent expression to both, Andreas Gryphius for example, who as early as 1636 wrote the poem "Tränen des Vaterlandes" (Tears of the Fatherland) and laments: Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676) begins his hymn to the Peace of Westphalia by celebrating the suspension of hostilities and pronouncing joy to the world: But in the final stanza he appeals to the trust in God's eternal peace which puts an end to the trials and tribulations of life and reconciles people with God: Two things must be borne in mind: on one hand the long-term structures and processes which are of relevance to us as a background to our politico-historical culture, as parts of our own current existence and the task of building the future; and on the other hand - as alien as they may seem to us - everyday life and the existential worlds of the people of the time who must not be treated as having been mere parts or objects, even when they were at the mercy of events they did not understand. The exhibition "1648 - War and Peace in Europe" and the accompanying catalogue should attempt to bring both aspects to life again: the striving for the system of states and for a religious constitution suited to the spiritual foundations of Europe together with the respective peace settlements; but also "Living in War and Peace", the celebrations and commemorative culture of peace, as well as - last but not least - the reflection of war and peace in literature, music and the fine arts.




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FOOTNOTES

1. Burkhardt 1997.

2. Schilling 1981. The religio-sociological model developed here on the basis of a German territory can be considered to apply, with the necessary temporal and regional modifications, to Europe in general.

3. Schilling 1996, in particular p. 127.

4. Burkhardt 1997.

5. Medick 1991; Sahlins 1989.

6. Considerable detail in article by Johannes Burkhardt in this catalogue.

7. Hobbes 1960, p. 82 (part I, chap. 13).

8. Abundant detail in Koselleck 1973.

9. Rabb 1975.

10. Schiller 1985, p. 557f.

11. Anonymous poem, cited in Mach‚/Meid 1980, p. 140f.

12. An excellent source - Stein 1996.

13. The studies by Heckel are standard works - Heckel 1989, esp. I, 1ff. (see quote on p. 33), p. 233ff.; II, p. 970ff., 999ff.; Heckel 1995. Cf. also Heckel 1983. For general reference see 'Zur Stellung des "dissimulatio"-Verfahrens innerhalb der frühneuzeitlichen Toleranzdebatte' Schlüter 1992, p. 27ff.

14. Abundant detail in Schilling 1988a and Schilling 1988, p. 267ff., 372ff.

15. The following is from Schilling 1998.

16. Lutz-Bachmann/Bohmann 1996; Gerhardt 1995; finally also Höffe 1995.

17. Extent, limits and relevance of this autonomy guaranteed by basic rights were the subject of the so-called "Crucifix Judgement" of the Federal Constitutional Court in summer 1995.

18. Just how much difficulty Europeans have to comprehend fundamentalism at all is shown by the discussion about the presentation of the 1995 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to the Islam scholar Annemarie Schimmel. Documented in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", 16 October 1995, no. 240, 9 and 10.



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