The Thirty Years' War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648, was occasioned, if not caused, by complex disputes over religion. Fought mainly in Germany, it was a European war, involving powers from Spain to Poland. The three decades of merciless warfare in the heart of Europe undermined the old awareness of a universal Christendom, shattered the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, and contributed to the consolidation of the territorial entity or nation state. The war ended with Germany weakened and divided, and with the once proud Kingdom of Bohemia bereft of its former national and confessionla identity.

Historians Max Braubach, Michael Doeberl, Erwin Hölzle, and Franz Schnabel developed in the interwar period a new understanding of the role of the “Third Germany,” in particular the south Germ an states of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, in the shaping of the new European order in the beginning of the nineteenth century: they viewed these governments as masters of statecraft and as liberal counterforces to conservative and nationalist Prussia. Recent scholars have continued to focus on the “Third Germany” but in a different vein. Contemporary writers Helmut Berding, Christof Dipper, and Elisabeth Fehrenbach, for example, examined the reforms in Rheinbund-Germany and concluded that everywhere liberal innovations remained stunted and incomplete. Furthermore, they no longer view the “Third Germany” as an antithesis to Prussia but, instead, perceive all of Vormärz-Germany as engulfed by an overly statist and antipluralistic mind-set.