The battlefield is a world apart. A place that evokes emotions that civilians do not know and veterans try to grasp in their memoirs. There is suffering, agony, fear, exhaustion, but also the pleasure of being with one's comrades, being absorbed in group action, the power of life and death, the excitement of a game: to hit, to win, to be pushed to physical and emotional limits. 1 One of most enduring adages in military memoirs since the late sixteenth century is that it is impossible to imagine what the battlefield is like for those who have never been there. Not only traumatic experiences are difficult to share, many battlefield emotions are loaded with taboos and sometimes shame and guilt. Compared to their predecessors, modern media pay much attention to individual and intimate feelings like fear and dejection suffered by the military subject. The psycho-medicalisation of Western society has turned

Germanic liberation myths play an important role in the development of a national consciousness in both the Dutch Republic and the German countries. This article discusses a selection of German and Dutch theatre texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth century about the uprisings and battles of Germanic tribes against the Romans. In existing studies of the Hermannsschlacht-motif in German literature, some scholars conclude that in the course of the eighteenth century male protagonists (especially Arminius/Hermann) were occupying more and more space at the expense of the female characters. By analysing theatre texts on Germanic myths from a long-term international perspective, I will test the correctness of this hypothesis. In the critical reading of key works like Klopstock's bardic drama piece Hermanns Schlacht (1769), I will especially pay attention to the presupposed masculine power fantasies stemming from a more aggressive form of patriotism that was emerging after 1750. Did these fantasies, as they are represented in theatre texts on early national myths, indeed push off female protagonists from the domain of military and political power? What does it mean that these texts were written in a period in which enlightened visions on the fatherland made that the very notion of patriotic heroism was changing radically? How then should we determine the main field of power in these plays, given the fact that male and female characters could use different power instruments in their attempts to act like 'good patriots'?

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This article studies the visual representation of violence in the Dutch Republic and the growth of a “staple market of images” in the early modern period. It introduces and employs the concept of imagineering for analysing what images can do to people when circulated in the context of a fast-expanding market. The advancement of the early modern print industry and imagery marketing produced a swirl of violent images. It was through this “spectacle of violence” and its related sensory and embodied experiences, that new ways of looking were introduced, which helped to craft new selves and realities. As the public manifestation of violence by ruling powers became less dominant, violence could become a matter of private consumption; a commodity to be enjoyed. Producers needed to create new markets as well as serve an existing one, satisfying clients in their inquisitive search for knowledge and excitement. Imagineering was not just a mimetic duplicate of its historical context, here, it performatively altered the imagination through the effective use of a new cultural infrastructure that enabled a visual abundance and continuous repetition and remediation of images.