Ernst Moritz Arndt wrote these words in May 1817 to his friend Councilor of War Johann Georg Scheffner in Königsberg. Like many of his contemporaries, he sensed that he was living in a period of transition and rapid transformation. The experience of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had changed the perception of time in many ways, leading to a “memory crisis” that educated contemporaries responded to in large numbers by turning toward history. The intensity of the renewed “historical impulse” since the early nineteenth century expressed the powerful perception of a “deprivation of the past.” In the German-speaking region this development became evident not just in the political journalism and Romantic literature of the time, but also in the writings of early historicism, which turned with heightened interest to the German past, including the most recent events. The first accounts of the history of the wars of 1813–15 and the “time of the French” appeared soon after it was over. In subsequent decades, this historical impulse expressed itself in the development of history into a professional academic discipline and the accompanying triumph of historicism, the founding of a variety of archaeological and historical societies as well as local historical and museum associations, in the culture of monuments and not least in the first boom in autobiographies and war memoirs and the growing treatment of subjects from history in other literary texts such as biographies and novels. The development of this history boom suggests that – apart from a number of more general factors that led to a discovery of the past and a growing interest in historical topics among the broader public – the period of the Napoleonic Wars itself was such a formative experience for contemporaries and subsequent generations that it required intensive processing in individual and collective memory beyond the national politics of memory pursued by the state, the military and churches.