This book argues that we cannot understand the Wars of Liberation - the Prussian struggle against Napoleon between 1806 and 1815 - and their importance in collective memory without recognizing how the interaction of politics, culture, and gender influenced these historical events and continue to shape later recollections of them. Advance praise: "War is the mere continuation of politics ?', Clausewitz asserted, distilling the experience of the Napoleonic Wars. He passed over the fact that in Prussia, as in all of the German lands, politics was a battlefield of contending interests, norms, and values as well as of competing political projects. This latter conflict over competing war cultures and war is the subject of the present book. The divisiveness of war cultures arose amid a novel configuration of war, in which the full force of public opinion underwrote the efforts to mobilize a people only to be confronted with fatal choices. Was the war against Napoleon to be a 'War of Liberty' or a 'War of Liberation'? Karen Hagemann concludes that it was waged by contemporaries for the liberty of the German nation, but won by historians and novelists for Prussia's liberation. Of course, it was a mere paper victory, but the price was paid in blood.' Michael Geyer, University of Chicago