War Societies. Realist novels in times of bellicism, 1850 to 1900

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Martin Schneider
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566360921

The project aims to conduct the first comprehensive study of the reception of war in the novels of German Realism. Its guiding question is to understand the function these texts fulfilled in the public process of understanding the social significance of war. As previous research on the subject of war and literature has focussed on the Napoleonic Wars and the World Wars of the 20th century, the literary reception of the wars of the second half of the 19th century in the era of Realism has not yet been analysed. However, these wars, especially the so called 'wars of unification' between 1864 and 1871, played a fundamental role for the constitution of German society. The intertwining of war and society between 1850 and 1900 is a well known fact. The military became a socially dominant institution, the wars of unification were accompanied by intensive public debates and bellicose discourses that attempted to historically legitimise the connection between war and nation. The project is based on the hypothesis that the Realist novels written between 1850 and 1900 reflected the socio-historical and discursive foundations of bellicism and contributed at the same time to the semantisation of war. Thus, the focus of the project is how these novels connect war and society and which fictions of 'war societies' they create. Not only the canonised works of authors of 'Poetic Realism' (Fontane, Raabe, etc.) will be considered, but also those of 'popular' Realism of authors like Spielhagen or Riehl. By examining literary journals of the period, a comprehensive bibliography of Realist war novels will be compiled for the first time. The project will analyze the interplay between war, society and literature on the basis of three aspects. Firstly, the relation between Realist novels and bellicose historiography; secondly, the literary semantisation of military and social mobilizations; thirdly, the processing of the consequences of war in 'post-war literature'. On behalf of the scientific methods, the research is influenced by social history, the history of ideas and the history of knowledge. The novels of the corpus will be related to the social and military practices of the time and contextualized with historical and military science writings of the period. The results will be incorporated into a fourth part, which examines the specific war aesthetics of Realist novels. The cooperation with researchers from Germany and abroad has been prepared in the run-up to the application, a workshop is planned for the second year of the project. The results are to be published in a monograph by the applicant and in a special volume of an international journal.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria, Denmark, United Kingdom
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Anders Engberg-Pedersen; Professorin Dr. Claudia Nitschke; Professor Dr. Dirk Rose