The 30 Years War - Fiction

Fiction

• Vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen humor, compuesta por él mismo (Antwerp, 1646). The last of the great Spanish Golden Age picaresque novels, set against the background of the Thirty Years' War and thought to be authored by a writer in the entourage of Ottavio Piccolomini. The main character crisscrosses Europe at war in his role as messenger, witnessing, among other events, the 1634 battle of Nordlingen.
• Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, one of the most important German novels of the 17th century, is the comic fictional autobiography of a German peasant turned mercenary who serves under various powers during the war, based on the author's first-hand experience. An opera adaptation by the same name was produced in the 1930s, written by Karl Amadeus Hartmann.
• Daniel Defoe (1720). Memoirs of a Cavalier. "A Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England. From the Years 1632 to 1648".
• Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein (play) trilogy (1799) is a fictional account of the downfall of this general.
• Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (1842) is an historical novel taking place in Italy in 1629. It treats a couple whose marriage is interrupted, among other things, by the Bubonic Plague, and other complications of 30 Years' War.
• Edmond Rostand's (1897) play Cyrano de Bergerac (act IV is set during the siege of Arras in 1640).
• Alfred Döblin's sprawling historical novel Wallenstein (1920) is set in the Thirty Years' War and centers on the court of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand.
• Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children, an anti-war theatre piece, is set during the Thirty Years' War.
• Queen Christina, the 1933 film starring Greta Garbo, opens with the death of Christina's father, King Gustavus Adolphus, at the Battle of Lützen in the Thirty Years' War. The subsequent plot of the film is entirely set against the backdrop of the war and her determination as Queen, as depicted a decade later, to end the war and bring about peace and resolution.
• The Last Valley (1959) by J. B. Pick. The book upon which the film version was based. Originally published in Great Britain as The Fat Valley.
• The Last Valley (1971). A film starring Michael Caine and Omar Sharif, who discover a temporary haven from the Thirty Years' War. Written by James Clavell, the author of Shogun.
• Das Treffen in Telgte (1979) trans. The Meeting at Telgte (1981) by Günther Grass, set in the aftermath of the war, sets out to make implicit parallels with the postwar Germany of the late 1940s.
• Michael Moorcock's novel, The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981) has as its central character Ulrich von Bek, a mercenary who took part in the sack of Magdeburg.
• Eric Flint's Ring of Fire series of novels deals with a temporally displaced American town from the early 21st century arriving in the early 1630s war torn Germany.
• Parts of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle are set in lands devastated by the Thirty Years' War.
• Magdeburg by Heather Richardson (Belfast, Lagan Press, 2009) is a fictional account of the Sack of Magdeburg and its aftermath, and treats among other things the complexity of Lutheran and Catholic relationships and loyalties amongst both soldiers and civilians.
• In "The Hangman's Daughter" by Oliver Pötzsch the protagonist, hangman Jakob Kuisl, and other prominent characters have served in a General Tilly's army and participated in the massacre and sacking of the city of Magdeburg during the Thirty Years War. "The Great War" and Swedish incursion into north-central Germany are frequently referenced.
• Hermann Löns' novel Der Wehrwolf is about an alliance of peasants using guerrilla tactics to fight the enemy during the Thirty Years' War.