| Sumario: | This essay discusses the return to mainstream scholarship of the idea of the Thirty Years War as the historical traumatization of the German nation. Although constructed by nineteenth-century historians to nationalist ends, this interpretation culminated in the middle of the twentieth century. After 1945, it initially lost its relevance, with West German historians eventually beginning, from the 1960s onwards, to reinterpret the Holy Roman Empire in a much more positive way. Yet, the Historikerstreit of the 1980s and the consequences of German unification altered scholarly—and interpretive—trajectories fundamentally: as interest in the events between 1618 and 1648 increased again after the end of the Cold War, the idea of a 'German trauma' returned to the mainstream, albeit confined to popularizing accounts. This essay retraces the origins of the traumatization hypothesis, its most outspoken protagonists and its scholarly, as well as real-world, implications.
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