The Politics of Postwar: Negotiating Peace and Agency in Germany from Leipzig to Carlsbad, 1813–19
As soon as an end of the Napoleonic Wars seemed to be in sight, questions of peace and postwar order arose in European societies. Particularly in Germany, contemporaries formally excluded from political decision-making participated in the debate about the transformation of wartime ruptures into a sustainable future. By approaching ‘postwar’ as a space of imagination that transcends the boundaries of war and peace, this paper sheds light on both the discursive strategies of creating agency and the processual negotiation of post-Napoleonic order. It draws on pamphlets and journal articles which have hitherto received only peripheral attention. It carves out the many shades in which peace was conceptualised and shows how the postwar discussion continued until the Carlsbad Decrees.
Jonas Wernz is a researcher the Institute of History at the University of Cologne. His working on a PhD thesis entitled ‘Open Futures: Concepts of Political (Re)Order between the Napoleonic Empire and the European Concert of powers, 1813–19’.
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This page was last updated on 7 May 2025
