Analyzing war representations of the past and present is a sobering experience. In addition to a rich tradition of texts that valorize war, many of which are not the works of marginal writers but form the very core of our literary canon, we find numerous examples of texts that are highly critical of war on one level but remain implicated in its logic on another. Moreover, if we analyze representations of war in the eighteenth century, we quickly discover that the Enlightenment was by no means innocent of the martial fantasies that we associate with later periods.

Numerous writers around 1800 cast warfare as an ennobling and creative endeavor, attribute to war the ability to strengthen a man's character, and credit it with the potential to transcend the mundane and move toward the sublime and transcendental; a tradition that is carried forth into the twentieth century when war is endowed with an intensified reality that surpasses that of civil life. Clearly, many of the glorifying notions of war that we attribute to the culture of the First World War were already fully developed around 1800.

As part i shows, the writings of Schiller and Kleist left a mixed legacy. Schiller was acutely aware of the cruelty and corruption that accompany every war, of the devastation it wreaks on every form of civil life, material, moral, and spiritual, and of the tendency of war to spiral out of control and elude the political goals and ethical imperatives that seek to confine it.