But Brutus Says He Was Ambitious 241A considerable literature followed, most famously Schiller’s play in 1799,
but continuing up to the present day. Twentieth-century works include
a major novel by the distinguished German author Alfred Döblin and at
least half a dozen others. In German popular consciousness Wallenstein
the myth and Wallenstein the literary character have largely superseded
Wallenstein the man, while even in serious historiography the bounda-
ries are frequently blurred.
The problem in distinguishing between fact, exaggeration and inven-
tion is that the tall stories started to appear early in Wallenstein’s pub-
lic career, no doubt because of the interest which his sudden rise to
prominence created. They were then deliberately publicised, magnified
and exploited by his enemies in the later years of his life, so that they
were well-established common knowledge by the time of his death.
Early historians of Ferdinand’s reign and of Wallenstein’s career were
naturally aware of and influenced by them, shaping their accounts to
conform to this pre-existing popular image of his character. Subsequent
biographers took these early works as their sources, drawing on them
and passing them on, sometimes further embroidered, from one gen-
eration to another, in a manner well demonstrated in Geiger’s study
of Wallenstein’s astrology. By the time document-based historiography
developed in the nineteenth century the traditional view of Wallenstein
was so well entrenched that the genuine original sources were used
principally to confirm rather than to re-evaluate previous concepts.
A second part of the problem lies in the very profusion of these
sources. Wallenstein wrote vast numbers of letters, many of them of
course exclusively concerned with military matters or the affairs of his
estates, but he also maintained a prolific personal correspondence, as
well as frequently adding private postscripts to business letters. Other
key figures in Wallenstein’s life were also active letter-writers, among
them Aldringer, Arnim, Collalto, Harrach, and to a lesser extent many
of his senior officers. Large collections of their missives have survived
in official or family archives, and many have been published. The total
of such extant letters and other relevant documents is reported to run
into five-figure numbers, but even so there are considerable gaps, and
often only one side of any particular sequence of correspondence – and
not necessarily all of that – is still available.^3 Moreover there is reason
to believe that a considerable amount of uncomfortable material was
deliberately disposed of in the aftermath of Wallenstein’s assassination.
Hence significant difficulties of interpretation arise.
Firstly there is the standard historiographical problem that what
happens to be written down, in a document which happens to be