The decades after the Napoleonic Wars witnessed the publication of a veritable flood of autobiographies and war memoirs in Germany as in many other European countries. The sheer number of these texts differentiates this postwar period from all earlier ones. And yet it was also the distinct quality of these accounts that set them apart from previous texts, as David A. Bell emphasizes:

Emerging Romantic notions of the self inspired the autobiographies and war memoirs not just of middle-class men who joined the army as volunteers; even texts by many noblemen who served during the wars as professional officers or generals reflect the trend to greater realism and the psychologization of autobiographical accounts. This confirms the shift to a more “modern regime of selfhood” based on interiority and innate qualities.

The dramatic historical experiences of revolution, war and crisis that many educated contemporaries underwent in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries promoted a turn toward historical self-reflection and with it autobiographical writing. Literary fashions too, especially those texts that were intensely discussed among the literary public, strongly influenced these new types of writings. Of considerable impact were, first and foremost, the more self-reflective autobiographies by well-known authors, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s From My Life: Poetry and Truth (the first three volumes were published in 1811–14 and the fourth and final one a year after his death in 1833).