Cartographies of War: Star Charts, Topographic Maps, War Games

Introduction

Warfare has long been a driving force in the development of cartography. It is easy to understand why: orientational knowledge is indispensable in times of war where the specific topographic lay of the land, the details of the terrain, and the possible routes through it can be decisive for the outcome of the conflict. As Thucydides relates in his History of the Peloponnesian War, the sudden death of a native guide could have as a consequence the destruction of almost an entire Athenian army.¹ A good military map is therefore one of the most important tools for the military commander. An apocryphal but often quoted statement attributed to Napoleon summarizes it well: “A detailed map is a weapon of war.”² As such, military maps were often surrounded by secrecy, and sharing maps with competitive nations was considered an act of treason.³ On the other hand, national cartographic centers have often published incorrect maps of their own territory with intentionally misplaced cities and nonexistent rivers so as to confuse the enemy.⁴

Yet, for all the importance of topography, actual and fabricated, within military cartography, war maps also reveal an important linkage of spatial representations and temporal projections. While the map itself constitutes a projection of three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane, one of its central functions is to generate a viable projection in the fourth dimension. As an instrument of tactics and strategy, the orientational knowledge of space serves as the basis for attempts to orient oneself in time. From the ancient divination of celestial constellations and star charts to the gradual development of an accurate topographic military cartography in the eighteenth century to the birth of the modern war game and its transformation in contemporary virtual simulations, cartography has formed the site where possible worlds, scenarios, and hypothetical events are imagined, projected, and tested. Above all else, the war map is a symbolic tool for the management of future events.⁵

In this respect, war maps give rise to a precarious epistemology. They produce knowledge, not of the actual world, but of possible worlds whose very existence is in the balance. They operate with conjectures, probabilities, and guesses, and serve as tools to govern the type of event that Aristotle termed “potentialities.”⁶ Via Boethius’s Latin translation, “contingens,” they have become known as “future contingents” and designate events that are neither impossible nor necessary.⁷ Evidently, like all plans for the future, the projections of military strategy are highly uncertain, but they are based on a specific and carefully calculated transformation of spatial order into events, and this translation is authorized in different ways from one cartographic genre to the next. We might therefore regard war maps as event maps—that is, maps that in various ways serve the complex translation of space into time and virtual scenarios into actual deeds. But how, under what conditions, to what extent, and with what validity do war maps convert symbolic spatial arrangements into actions and events?⁸

In this chapter I would like to examine three main genres within the cartography of war: star charts, topographic maps, and war games. At the same time, in a parallel track, I examine a number of literary works. For the questions concerning the workings of event maps in military cartography have been posed explicitly in fictional accounts of war. The war map forms a central topos in literary history, not least because the representation of war and the management of its complex events have challenged authors just as much as they have challenged military commanders and topographers. While a driving force in the history of military cartography has been the utilitarian one of optimizing the map as a tool for the management of contingent futures, of tightening the link between spatial organization and projected events, literary history offers a reflection on the precariousness of the link. In a number of fictional narratives, the encounter with military maps sparks a metareflection on the very possibility of representing and managing war—both with narratives and with maps. A full-fledged history of war mapping and war writing is well beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead I sketch out a basic typology of three main genres in the history of military cartography, and I juxtapose them with a handful of literary scenes that reflect on the assumptions about the military event map inherent in each genre. Comparing astrological star charts and Friedrich Schiller’s drama Wallenstein, the topographic map and the realist war novel, as well as war games and Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich, the chapter explores some of the ways literature at once draws on, calls into question, and transforms military event maps.

The Celestial Event Map

In 1625 Johannes Kepler responded to a request he had received from Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland and soon to be Generalissimus of the Holy Roman Empire. Wallenstein had asked Kepler to update the horoscope he had made for him in 1608, for his life seemed out of sync with the original horoscope. Some of the predicted life events had occurred too early and some too late. In particular he wanted to know how long he would continue in military service and whether he would be blessed with luck in all his military endeavors.⁹ The letter he received from the famous scientist, however, contained a clear rebuke and a lecture on the limits of the science of astrology: the stars did indeed influence events in the sublunary realm, but it was mere superstition to believe that it was possible “to predict particular matters and futura contingentia from the skies.”¹⁰ Nevertheless, Kepler updated the horoscope and predicted a series of events until the month of March in 1634, in which, as he wrote, “horrible disorder” threatened.¹¹

As supreme commander of the Habsburg forces, Wallenstein followed a long tradition in politics and war of looking to the stars for guidance in terrestrial affairs. Since its emergence in ancient Mesopotamia, the science of astrology informed the decisions of rulers and generals seeking the most propitious moment of action for their political and military endeavors. The basic assumption was that celestial constellations carry an effective force, that spatial arrangements in the sky translate into terrestrial events. As Ptolemy puts it in Tetrabiblos, the standard reference for all things astrological for over a millennium, “The cause of both universal and of particular events is the motion of the planets, sun, and moon; and the prognostic art is the scientific observation of precisely the change in the subject natures which corresponds to parallel movements of the heavenly bodies through the surrounding heavens.”¹²

The nature of the correspondence was the task of the science of astrology to determine and interpret. Over the centuries astrologers developed elaborate and competing systems of spatial notations that could determine the nature of the influence. The significance of a star event was, among other things, contingent on its position in the twelve houses of the zodiac and on the planetary aspect. The aspect concerned the planets’ position relative to one another, such as a conjunction when two or more planets are lined up along the same longitude. While the rules and the exact layout of the spatial notations within the system were the topic of intense debate among astrologers, the variations all relied on the belief that the exact position of the stars within the spatial system at a given point in time was key to the influence they exerted.¹³ The science of astrology is infused with a spatial metaphysics: the celestial configuration in itself carries an “effective power.”¹⁴ Star events are made possible because astrologers project a spatial field infused with metaphysical assumptions onto the planets and their movements. For the astrologer looking up at the skies, the heavens constitute a field of possible events at once celestial and terrestrial.¹⁵

Charts and Horoscopes

This double reference point transforms the heavens themselves into a vast map. The differences from a conventional geographic map are of course immediately evident. Against the background of infinite space the starry skies lack all topography, they do not contain any coordinate system, and with the planets in constant movement they are ever mutable. Infused with metaphysical assumptions, however, they function as spatial representations of earthly events. The stars could therefore be read and interpreted as maps that offered a temporal orientation in terrestrial affairs. Actual star charts such as the Imagines coeli Septentrionales et Meridionales zodiaci, the very first printed star chart made by Albrecht Dürer and two collaborators in 1515, often include the zodiac constellations and their astrological symbols (figure 16.1). But while such charts depict the basic elements of the astrological belief system, they had little use as maps of terrestrial events, since they represented the fixed stars but not the wandering stars (i.e., the planets).

Figure 16.1. The first printed star chart by Albrecht Dürer from 1515. In the corners, surrounding the zodiac constellations and their astrological symbols, four major astrologers—Aratus, Ptolemy, Marcus Manilius, and Al-Sufi—represent the combined wisdom of, respectively, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, and Islamic astrology (Albrecht Dürer, Konrad Heinfogel, and Johannes Stabius, *Imagines coeli Septentrionales et Meridionales zodiaci*, 1515). Courtesy of Daniel Crouch Rare Books, crouchrarebooks.com.

The central astrological map was therefore the horoscope. On astrological nativities, the metaphysical spatial projection is particularly evident, and the horoscope Kepler made for Wallenstein in 1608 is exemplary in this regard (figure 16.2). Divided into twelve contiguous triangles, each representing the houses of the zodiac with their individual significance, the horoscope shows the exact position of the sun, the moon, and the planets within this spatial order at the time of Wallenstein’s birth. Kepler first noted the “Conjunctionem magnam Saturni et Jovis in domo prima”—that is, the major conjunction or alignment of Saturn and Jupiter in the first house—giving those planets the greatest influence on Wallenstein’s life.¹⁶ Based on such observations, Kepler proceeded to predict a number of events in Wallenstein’s life and concluded that the horoscope “was not a bad nativity, but contained exceptionally important signs.”¹⁷

Figure 16.2. The original horoscope Kepler made for Albrecht von Wallenstein in 1608 (Johannes Kepler, *Die Astrologie des Johannes Kepler: Eine Auswahl aus seinen Schriften*, ed. Heinz Artur Strauss and Sigrid Strauss-Kloebe (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1926), 185).

As in the case of Kepler and Wallenstein, horoscopes were made to reveal the personal characteristics of individuals, the course of their lives, or the propitious moment to undertake an action. In their function as event maps, horoscopes are therefore only indirectly concerned with the spatial relations of celestial bodies. As their etymology suggests (from the Greek hōro-skopos: hōro ‘time’ and skopos ‘observer’), horoscopes constitute a snapshot of the movements of the stars at a particular time. They map a fleeting celestial event, and, extrapolating from the patterns of the constellations, astrologers transform the spatial order into knowledge of future events for a given individual.

Kepler’s wry response to Wallenstein, however, marks a fundamental limitation in the epistemology of the astrological nativity map. He writes:

I state this solely for the purpose of removing the illusion entertained by the subject of the nativity that all the Particularia can be predicted from the heavens. This much is true, that from the heavens follow heavenly Particularia, but not terrestrial ones, neither specialia nor individua, rather, all terrestrial Eventus take their form and shape from terrestrial causes, since every particular has its particular cause.¹⁸

According to Kepler, the celestial pattern of Wallenstein’s horoscope can only be regarded as an indicator of general trends, but it is beyond the ken of astrology to predict particular events. It is not simply the case that the prediction of future events is precarious and uncertain; its spatial pattern cannot be translated into particular “terrestrial Eventus.” Too many terrestrial factors muddle the picture. As an event map, the horoscope does not contain a detailed topography of events, only larger tendencies and probabilities. While the metaphysics of the astrological system remains intact, Kepler goes out of his way to emphasize that his map cannot provide the information Wallenstein demands of it.

In the exchange between two of the leading figures of the time, one in astronomy, the other in warfare, we encounter the clash of opposing conceptions of the epistemology of the nativity map. On the one hand, the horoscope is an epistemically highly robust representation that accurately maps spatial constellations onto future contingents at all levels, if only for the trained beholder. On the other hand, the horoscope functions as a representation that accurately maps the positions of the stars onto supraindividual future events, but that generates no reliable knowledge at the level of the individual and the particular, only random fictions. The horoscope as a large-scale event map contrasts with the horoscope as a small-scale event map, so to speak. That Kepler nevertheless agrees to update the horoscope and offers a series of often fairly particular predictions is a good example of what Dan Edelstein has called the “Super-Enlightenment”—the curious blend of the hermetic and the occult with what we today recognize as well-reasoned science. With its amalgamation of astronomical observation and astrological metaphysics, the horoscope precisely maps the “epistemological no-man’s land” in which many scientists operated at the time.¹⁹

Schiller’s Poetic Stars

In fictionalized form the celestial event map plays a central role in Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein. By the time Schiller conceived the drama in the late eighteenth century, astrology was no longer enmeshed with the scientific curriculum and had been banished to the field of the occult.²⁰ Written with hindsight, his drama reflects a late Enlightenment response to the epistemological follies and metaphysical superstitions of the past. But, as I will show, it also transforms the celestial event map into a productive poetic device that comes to organize the event structure of the fictional text. In the following, Wallenstein will therefore serve as a salient example of how literature has engaged with and retooled military cartography.

A key scene in the drama’s engagement with astrology opens the third part of the play. Surrounded by maps, globes, and quadrants, Wallenstein is facing a large blackboard inspecting a speculum astrologicum—a diagram, in other words, of the planets’ position relative to one another—when he suddenly exclaims: “Fortunate aspect!”²¹ According to the diagram, three planets have entered into a significant conjunction: Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. In Wallenstein’s interpretation their alignment is the outcome of a celestial warfare. Jupiter and Venus act as military commanders who have outmaneuvered the cause of the conflict, Mars, and have forced him into submission. As he puts it: “Now they have vanquished the old enemy, / and bring him to me as a prisoner”²²

Elated by the “Glücksgestalt,” the figure of luck visible on the speculum astrologicum, Wallenstein is, in his own interpretation, looking at a diagram of his military future. Indeed, the astrological beliefs of Schiller’s Wallenstein are such that he, like the historical Wallenstein, has transformed his palace into a vast map of the heavens, painting the zodiac signs on the walls and surrounding himself with pictures of the planets.²³ Immersed in his own star chart, he has become oblivious to its alleged referent, to what Kepler called the “terrestrial causes.” When Sesina, one of Wallenstein’s allies, is captured and Wallenstein’s plans to betray the emperor are revealed, this unforeseen event therefore challenges the entire metaphysical order of his belief system. The auspicious constellation on his star chart did not translate into auspicious military events on the ground.

In an attempt to save the science of astrology, however, Wallenstein reconceptualizes the celestial event map. No longer a representation of the immediate future as it is about to unfold, the stars now represent what ought to unfold according to the natural course of things: “The stars don’t lie, that however / took place against the course of the stars and against destiny. / The art is honest, but this false heart / brings lie and deceit into the truthful heavens. / Divination is based only on truth, / Where nature exceeds its bounds, all science errs.”²⁴The event map of the heavens is transformed from an ontological map into a normative map: from events that will be, to events that should have been. And in the end Wallenstein’s celestial map loses all its metaphysical underpinnings. Paying no heed to the warnings of his astrologer, Seni, Wallenstein eventually abandons astrology as a guide in military affairs. As he puts it: “Such signs I do not fear.”²⁵ Deprived of their signifying power, the heavens have ceased to be a map and now constitute only an infinite, meaningless territory. Where Kepler lectured Wallenstein on the limits of astrology, Schiller seemingly dismissed it entirely.

Readers and Astrologers

Seemingly. Even though Wallenstein recapitulates the end of military astrology and the metaphysical notions associated with it, Schiller at the same time endows the stars with a poetic function. While in early drafts the astrological material appeared only as a “ridiculous caricature,” as he writes to Goethe, he became increasingly intrigued by the material and put it to use as a literary device in at least two ways.²⁶ At a fundamental level, the dramatic action is organized by the malfunction of the astrological map as a transformer of constellations into actions and events. While the heavens are filled with potentially significant movements, Wallenstein as a play is pervaded by an almost complete terrestrial eventlessness. The notorious hesitation of its protagonist as he ponders the heavens and the star charts generates a wealth of hypothetical scenarios, but none of them are ever actualized.²⁷ Eventually his virtual web of alternate worlds leads only to his demise—the one actual event of the play that in turn brings an end to the proliferation of possible scenarios. Instead of developing the drama through actions as the dramatic genre prescribes (drama, from the Greek dran ‘to do, act’), Schiller organizes the drama around its absence, the central void of Wallenstein’s nonaction.²⁸ At an impasse, the stalled dramatic action progresses only through distant events in the margins of the play such as Sesina’s capture. Schiller thereby transforms conventional dramatic progression into a prolonged debate about the metachoice of choosing whether to choose or not to choose. And this peculiarly undramatic structure of the drama is a direct effect of the celestial map. Not of its incorrect interpretation, but of the failure to choose among its multiple latent possibilities.

At a different level, however, Schiller addresses the hermeneutics of the map. To see how, it is necessary to consider for a moment the interplay of maps and texts. Once astrological maps enter the play, they become part of a different signifying system that changes the way they operate. Yuri Lotman’s statement about literary texts that they are “secondary, model-building systems” that construct possible worlds of signification, applies equally well to the signifying systems of astrological representations.²⁹ As the official master semiotician of the play, Seni explains the underlying hermetic principle in simple terms: “Nothing in the world is insignificant.”³⁰ From the point of view of semiotics both astrology and literature share a hermetic ground insofar as they are representational models in which everything is potentially significant. Once one such model enters another one, however, it is subject to resignification by the operative principles in the new sphere of signs. While Schiller recapitulates the demise of the heavens as an astrological and military signifying system, he also refunctionalizes the stars and endows them with a different hermeneutic significance determined by the symbolic economy of the literary realm.

The resignification process is entwined with the permutations of the tragic irony that pervades the play. Watching or reading a play on a major historical character, the spectators and readers of Wallenstein knew full well the fate that awaited him. Moreover, in the prologue Schiller states that Wallenstein’s treason can in large part be ascribed to his belief in the stars.³¹ Readers are therefore not only fully aware that his interpretation of the speculum astrologicum, namely that the constellation of the stars forms a “figure of luck,” is misguided; they are instructed to regard all astrological claims as pure superstition. Yet, just when Wallenstein’s own belief in the stars begins to waver, they appear to carry an actual predictive force. Toward the end of the play Schiller intervenes in the natural celestial order and rearranges the stars. While astronomically impossible, Schiller’s literary stars morph into an ominous celestial pattern a mere three days after the auspicious conjunction: “The signs are in a horrible position, close, close / Are the nets of doom. … Come, read it yourself in the constellation of the planets, / That calamity threatens you from false friends.”³² While Seni incorrectly believes the false friends to be the Swedes—the ostensible enemy with whom Wallenstein has been negotiating clandestinely—and Wallenstein dismisses Seni’s warning entirely, the readers, with their superior knowledge of the plot against Wallenstein among his allies, are invited to offer an interpretation of future events that confirms the astrological signs. False friends are indeed threatening his life. Astrological authority is transferred from Wallenstein and Seni to the readers, whose superior hermeneutics establishes the tragic irony of the play: just when the stars cease to signify to their main disciple, their astrological power is confirmed. At this level, astrology is not dismissed out of hand. But neither Wallenstein nor Seni are sufficiently skilled readers of the mutable map of heaven. For the reader-cum-astrologer the tragedy becomes one of a fatal error of cartographic misinterpretation rather than a superstitious belief in the occult power of the stars. Inserting one signifying system into another, Schiller transforms astrological maps into a literary device to capitalize on their suggestive predictive powers. In a double gesture, he recapitulates the demise of the astrological event map while, at the same time, he superimposes astrological and literary hermeneutics and makes of the heavens a truthful event map for the astute readers of literary astrology.

Topographies of War

From the metaphysics of the astrological map we move to the immanent workspace of the topographic military map. This genre became particularly important around 1800. By then the large-scale warfare of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had replaced the smaller cabinet wars that dominated the eighteenth century. As Carl von Clausewitz wrote, the French had unshackled “the horrible element of war from its old diplomatic and financial fetters: it now marched forth in its raw violence.”³³ The scale and extensiveness of the new wars meant that accurate topographic military maps became a sine qua non of military operations. To manage their troops in the vast theater of war, commanders and officers became deeply reliant on the topographic knowledge that a detailed map could offer. (See figure 16.3.) As a result the period around 1800 witnessed an explosion in the production, dissemination, and use of military cartography.³⁴

Figure 16.3. A topographic map by Johann Georg Lehmann from 1799 displaying hachures to mark the differentiations between various degrees of incline (Det Kongelige Bibliotek).

The effects of this media event were varied and profound. The Swiss military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini developed a cartographically inflected theory of war, and in his Précis de l’art de la guerre he went so far as to claim that “strategy is the art of waging war upon the map.”³⁵ In Prussia, topographer Johann Georg Lehmann, who also developed an influential method for depicting incline, sought to improve cartographic literacy among military topographers and planners for, as he wrote, “if even the best maps become dangerous objects in the hands of the strategist who does not know how to read and use them, how much more the bad ones that can lead even the most skilled officer astray if he does not know how to check them.”³⁶ At around the same time his fellow Prussian, retired soldier and writer Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, claimed that the officers should themselves become cartographic media. In the absence of maps they should be able to project triangles and other geometric figures directly onto the terrain in order to transform it into a legible and manageable mental map. As he put it, the inside of an officer’s skull must be “wallpapered with maps.”³⁷

As the ideas of these military thinkers indicate, the topographic military map was a tool that encompassed both spatial and temporal orientation. Commanders and officers needed detailed knowledge of the terrain, but their two-dimensional planes also served as the workspace on which various contingent futures were projected, simulated, and compared. This function is perhaps most clearly evidenced by the reports of some of the people who witnessed the emperor’s work habits firsthand. Agathon-Jean-François Fain, Napoléon’s personal secretary, describes the process:

D’Albe was called whenever the Emperor wanted to read the dispatches on the map; with red and black pins d’Albe marked the sites occupied by our troops; he then highlighted the signs of the most important rivers, mountains, and borders with nuanced colors; finally he prepared the calculations of distance, underlined the scale and opened the compass next to the map. Once the dispatches had been applied to the map in this manner, the Emperor would begin to study it.³⁸

In this setup, the map serves as the pivot of an information processing system. First, reports are procured from the actual world, which Bacler d’Albe, Napoleon’s chief cartographer, proceeds to visualize with symbols on the map. Then Napoleon reaches a decision and dictates it to his secretary, who eventually transmits it back to the actual world. In this information processing system the two-dimensional plane of the map, along with the pins and the compass, functions as an experimental workspace in which various hypothetical scenarios can be tested. The military map, the instruments of inscription, and the pins together constitute a tool that can generate a plurality of worlds and a plurality of battles—all hypothetical, to be sure, but worlds and battles whose hypothetical management had immediate effects. As the aide-de-camp Louis François Lejeune writes in his memoirs: “This conjectural work prepared us for the more serious operations that we were about to undertake on the terrain.”³⁹

Compared to the star chart, the topographic military map constitutes a very different kind of event map. In the transition from celestial constellations to topographic maps of the terrain as the preferred cartographic tool for managing war, the mode of engagement with the maps shifts from hermeneutics to manipulation, from the teasing out of the future by way of astrological interpretation, to the invention of the best possible future by way of practical operations on a piece of paper.⁴⁰ The colored pencils, the pins, the compass are part of an operational praxis that seeks to realize the latent tactical and strategic knowledge that lies hidden within the map. Louis Marin has suggested that the printed, completed map constitutes a matrix of all possible movements.⁴¹ Using it as a workspace for the projection of hypothetical military scenarios, however, the commanders sought to weigh the best possible movements against one another and choose the optimal virtual world with the greatest chance of being actualized in real events. According to the regulatory ideal of military cartography, the future is a map effect generated by the strategist.

Map Illusions

But was this regulatory ideal valid? To what extent might contingent futures invented on a map actually be realized out in the field? For a number of nineteenth-century war novels that was precisely the question. With different emphases, authors such as Stendhal and Tolstoy articulated a critique of the assumptions of the military event map. Tolstoy is the most explicit. In several scenes throughout War and Peace maps are at the center of attention. More than a mere literary prop that illustrates the pervasive use of cartography during the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy interrogates the military map as an object of knowledge.⁴² He asks us to consider how information is ordered on maps, what semiotic models they rely on, what governing power they possess, and how virtual scenarios are transformed into actual events. At one point during a Russian war council the Prussian General Phull has had enough of the vocal critique of his dispositions:

“Where’s the difficulty? Nonsense—it’s child’s play!” He went over to the map and began poking at it with a desiccated finger, jabbering away as he demonstrated that the effectiveness of the Drissa camp was immune to all contingencies, every development had been foreseen, and if the enemy did try a pincer movement, then the enemy would inevitably be destroyed.⁴³

The map spread out on the table is the emblem of Phull’s theory of warfare. He excludes a consideration of time, of probability, and of the opponent’s moves—that is, of the game-theoretical aspect of war. Such exclusions are highlighted when another general dismisses the objection that his disposition is useless, because it assumes knowledge of the enemy’s situation though such knowledge is highly doubtful. “A certainty,” the general rejoins, his elaborate battle plan will be as effectual on the terrain as it is on the map.⁴⁴ In Tolstoy’s satire of military cartography, the map guarantees the actualization of virtual scenarios. But this is only because the map has lost all connection to the territory. Accordingly Tolstoy claims that not one but two Battles of Borodino took place, the planned one and the actual one: “On paper, every one of these columns arrived in position exactly on time and destroyed the enemy. As always in such dispositions everything had been superbly thought through, but as with all dispositions not a single column arrived anywhere on time.”⁴⁵

The split between the map and the territory reveals just how radical Tolstoy’s claim really is. In war, symbols lose all referential power. The glue that connects signifiers to their signifieds is dissolved in the haze of chaotic events. As Tolstoy’s own narrative depictions suggest, war is a stochastic phenomenon that comprises “[a] hundred million contingent factors” in which his characters continually get lost because “everything develops from the interplay of infinitely varied and arbitrary twists and turns!”⁴⁶ As such it can neither be managed nor comprehended. All cartographic attempts to govern contingent futures with scenarios and projections are doomed from the beginning. In Tolstoy’s view, Phull’s desiccated finger tapping the map during the war council touches a fantastic object: static, achronic, manageable, comprehensible, the map presents a negative image of war. Confined to the sphere of virtual events, the military event map is a grand illusion.

Sketching War

In his critique of the military event map, Tolstoy took his cue from Stendhal.⁴⁷ In the section of The Charterhouse of Parma that would win him accolades from both Balzac and Tolstoy, Stendhal constructs the Battle of Waterloo as a dizzying, fragmented literary topography. Immersing his protagonist Fabrice del Dongo in the swarm of contingent events of war, Stendhal erases even the faintest outline of any coherent plans in the process of being realized. As Fabrice is tossed around randomly on the battlefield he sees only the immediate surroundings “to the left” and “to the right,” and experiences space in real time: “At this moment, the road disappeared into a thicket of trees.”⁴⁸ Without a map or a vantage point from which he can survey the field and get his bearings, Fabrice’s movements across the terrain chart a space that is continually in the making.

The topographic instability correlates with the unpredictability of military events. Around the single narrative line drawn by Fabrice as he moves around the battlefield, the scene constructs a nimbus of virtual plots. Surrounding Fabrice is a seemingly infinite number of potential events that only break into actuality when they enter the circumference of his experiential field. “Suddenly” musket shots bring down two soldiers next to Fabrice, and “suddenly” four soldiers appear out of the haze—soldiers that he first mistakes for the enemy.⁴⁹ The white smoke that veils everything is a figure of the plot cloud that surrounds the protagonist’s every move. These invisible plots form a series of causal chains of pure effects. They are registered only on impact. Predictability therefore tends toward zero. Stendhal constructs a scene of military events composed solely of effects. Fabrice’s one attempt at autonomous action, his one chance to link a cause to an effect, comes when he shoots a Prussian soldier. But later we learn that he missed the target and the soldier had been killed by someone else.

The protagonist of The Charterhouse of Parma serves the narrative function of a meeting point for a number of randomly intersecting events. One might regard Fabrice as a probe that has been submerged into the war matrix to make the logic of its event structure visible. And this logic is one in which there is no linear relationship between causes and effects. The two have been disjointed to such an extent that causes have no effects, while effects arise seemingly without causes. Events proliferate but they are not the strategic result of cartographic planning. Inside the war matrix the subject of war has ceased to be the author of his actions. He has become its object and effect.

We might say that in Stendhal’s version of a grand Napoleonic battle, the regulatory ideal of the military event map meets its other in a literary topography of war that marks only the impossibility of all efforts to manage the complex interplay of events on the field. This applies to Stendhal’s narrative version of the battle, but it is also curiously evident in his cartographic version of it. In the margins of a printed copy of Charterhouse, which he annotated for a revised second edition, Stendhal penciled a small sketch map (figure 16.4).

Figure 16.4. Sketch map of Fabrice’s oblique movement on the battlefield of Waterloo, penciled by Stendhal in the margins of the second edition of *The Charterhouse of Parma* (*La Chartreuse de Parme*, édition critique contenant les notes et additions de Stendhal, ed. Michel Crouzet (Orléans: Éditions Paradigme, 2007), 61). The map is also reprinted in the Di Maio edition, 712n.

As we may glean from the text, the sketch depicts Fabrice’s oblique movement on the battlefield. It is not oriented by any of the cardinal directions and the scale differs vastly. On the left the distance to Brussels suggests a small-scale map, but the section on the right-hand side is rendered in a very large scale. The dotted line marks Fabrice’s movement as he crosses a ditch, veers to the right to join a contingent of French soldiers, and falls to the ground from fatigue. A soldier then tosses him a piece of bread, indicated by the French word pain. When Fabrice doesn’t react, the soldier stuffs it into his mouth.

Without borders or a frame to create a sharp division between the representation and its outside,⁵⁰ the sketch indicates not just the experiential field of Fabrice, but the fact that this experiential field forms a small island surrounded by an epistemic void. As in the narrative, most of the battlefield in the sketch is a blank space, an invisible but constant threat. More than a question of orientation, of finding one’s way, the sketch is an image of the complexity of events in the war matrix. Displaying the random incidents during battle and the limited point of view of a participant, Stendhal’s simple sketch map forms the cartographic negative of the strategic military event map. In his laudatory review, Balzac labeled Stendhal’s novelistic account of the battle a “military sketch” (croquis militaire) because it offered no overview of the events in the battle.⁵¹ In like fashion Stendhal’s actual sketch map depicts the stochastic operational logic of war. It displays war as the ungovernable tout court.

Playing at War

But might contingency be trained? Might the individual faced with numerous contingent futures somehow be taught to bring them under control? A third major genre in the cartography of war was developed as a response to these questions. Along with the advances in military cartography, the period around 1800 also witnessed the development of an elaborate tool designed to provide tactical war experience by proxy—das Kriegsspiel, or the modern war game.⁵² Against the backdrop of large-scale Napoleonic warfare the game underwent two important changes. Earlier games were only slightly more elaborate versions of chess. Now, however, to the two-dimensional board inventors added the illusion of a third dimension in the form of terrain differentiations. Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig’s game from 1803, Das Kriegsspiel—ein Versuch die Wahrheit verschiedener Regeln der Kriegskunst in einem unterhaltenden Spiele anschaulich zu machen (The War Game—an Attempt to Illustrate the Truth of Various Rules of the Art of War in an Entertaining Game), includes a board of 1,617 squares with two different obstacles represented by the colors green and red (figure 16.5).⁵³ To increase verisimilitude, other officers and inventors suggested playing directly on one of the topographic maps that were made and used for actual warfare.⁵⁴

Figure 16.5. The board for Hellwig’s war game features a space of 1,619 squares. The colors indicate different terrain types that complicate movement (Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, *Das Kriegsspiel—ein Versuch die Wahrheit verschiedener Regeln der Kriegskunst in einem unterhaltenden Spiele anschaulich zu machen* (Braunschweig: bei Karl Reichard, 1803)). (Forsvarets Bibliotek.)

The second major change was the simulation of chance. In 1806 Johann Ferdinand Opiz brought a minor revolution to the war game. Das Opiz’sche Kriegsspiel, ein Beitrag zur Bildung künftiger und zur Unterhaltung selbst der erfahrensten Taktiker (The Opiz War Game, a Contribution to the Education of Future Tacticians and to the Entertainment of even the most Experienced Tacticians) included dice as a key component. Chance was thereby installed as the basic operative logic of the war game. As Clausewitz would later advocate in his treatise On War, commanders had to contend not just with the inscrutable will of the enemy but also with “friction”—the numerous unforeseen chance events that beset any concerted action in war. With Opiz’s invention these unforeseen events were given a material correlate in the form of the dice.

As indicated by the various subtitles of the books just cited, the purpose of war games was and is to offer military training by proxy, to teach soldiers the basic rules of tactics and strategy in circumstances pervaded by contingency, and to do so in the comfort and safety of their homes or in the military academy. Georg Venturini, another inventor, wrote in 1797 that war games are the best tools with which “to teach young soldiers the often difficult doctrines of the art of war as if through experience.”⁵⁵ While today computer simulation has become the preferred military training technology, board games still play a pedagogical role in the training of tactics and strategy. As Philip Sabin writes in his book Simulated War: “The most important function of wargames is to convey a vicarious understanding of some of the strategic and tactical dynamics associated with real military operations. Besides learning about the force, space and time relationships in the specific battle or campaign being simulated, players soon acquire an intuitive feel for more generic interactive dynamics associated with warfare as a whole.”⁵⁶

Compared to the two other cartographic genres, horoscopes and topographic maps, the war game constitutes a new kind of event map. Blending entertainment with serious purpose, war games create purely potential events separated from the immediate context that would allow them to be realized. Unlike the horoscope, whose power is supported by a metaphysical belief, and unlike the commander’s military map, which forms part of a concrete political and military situation, the war game is not tethered to an immediate reality. Instead it allows for an almost infinite set of situations and variations intended to teach the general logic of military operations in the form of a varied set of patterns. While hypothetical scenarios mushroom, the probability that they will ever be actualized—their chances of ontological success, so to speak—have diminished greatly. In the particular genre of historical war games that simulate famous wars and battles of the past, the inability of the game to effect a military event is obvious from the beginning. The simulation of historical events might change our understanding of them, but never the events themselves. Yet, as in the genre of counterfactual historiography, they lure with their nimbus of virtual alternate versions of the past.⁵⁷ As an event map, the war game in its different forms functions as a generator of a multiplicity of military fictions with, even in the best of cases, only a general and very slim chance of realization.

The Third Reich

How might a literary work interact with this third genre of military mapping and its tenuous link to actual events? Roberto Bolaño’s El Tercer Reich (The Third Reich)⁵⁸ is named after a famous war game developed by John Prados in 1974: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, known to gamers simply as The Third Reich. Bolaño not only takes the specific game as the gravitational center of the plot, he models his text on a war game. Narrated by the protagonist himself, the novel follows the increasingly nervous and unreliable German war gaming champion Udo Berger during a vacation with his girlfriend Ingeborg in Spain. Udo sets up The Third Reich in his hotel room and spends most of his time trying to come up with a new “strategic variant” that will guarantee a German victory (figure 16.6).

The world outside his hotel room, however, slowly begins to take on the properties of the game. Not only do games of all sorts appear—local and international soccer games, card games, TV shows featuring simulations of accidents (i.e., various forms of sublimated warfare that all seem on the verge of breaking out of their sphere of virtuality)—but the world itself appears to be a series of variations of Udo Berger’s life. The vacation itself is a repetition of his childhood vacations; Udo and Ingeborg befriend another couple of about the same age who also hail from Germany; the women are “almost the same size”; the man, Charly, mistakes their own town for the next one up the coast, which, incidentally, also has a hotel with the name Costa Brava, and so on. Just as the board and counters in The Third Reich are “like a stage set where thousands of beginnings and endings eternally unfold, a kaleidoscopic theater,” the actual world appears to be “something unreal”—a proliferation of alternate versions of Udo, his game, and the Third Reich.⁵⁹ An avatar of the past, Udo himself appears to be living in a game, a ludic multiverse whose variations dissolve any sense of a solid, singular reality.

In a countermovement, the game gradually begins to leave the realm of fiction and break through the border between the virtual and the real. A game of entertainment, The Third Reich is not designed to have immediate consequences. The board ought to produce only virtual events. Increasingly, however, the events in the actual world seem to be directly influenced by the action on the map. When Udo’s local opponent, a man charred beyond recognition who goes by the name of El Quemado or The Burn Victim, slowly gains the upper hand over the German champion, the stakes seem to have risen to a new level where Udo’s life is in the balance. People in town now believe that Udo is not just a commander of virtual Nazis on the board, but an actual Nazi, and the game a “trial of the war criminals.”⁶⁰ Against the protestations of the increasingly unstrung Udo, who insists that a game is just a game, The Third Reich serves as a catalyst that transforms fiction into reality and the past into the present. It forms the basis not merely of a replay or a reenactment, but of a veritable repetition of World War II in miniature. Unlike conventional war games that produce only a nimbus of hypothetical worlds, Bolaño’s literary war game becomes indistinguishable from actual war.

Blending actuality and games, realism and the fantastic, the past and the present, Bolaño fuses what the narrator tries to keep apart as “categorically opposed things.”⁶¹ The result is a novel made up of a haze of fictions, its events hovering in an undecidable ontological realm between the virtual and the real. Out of the entertaining or pedagogical virtual events of the traditional war game, Bolaño fashions a war delirium in which all distinctions collapse. Fictional war and actual war are merely variations of one another.

What is the point of these blends, one might ask? If we consider the literary war game as an event map, its curious temporality alerts us to the underlying purpose. Like Schiller’s astrological event map in Wallenstein, The Third Reich serves the poetic function of generating and managing reader expectations. Everything gravitates toward a literary future in which a fatal event will bring the game to a conclusion. But at the same time Bolaño turns the event map around, so to speak. The game repeats a historical war, not a war to come. Udo’s strategic variant turns out to be a perverse form of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The variant is a past contingent with which he tries to rectify not the actions of the Nazis, but their mistakes. In his own words: “It’s as if we want to know exactly how everything was done in order to change what was done wrong.”⁶² Not performing an act of retribution in a “game of atonement” as a compatriot sees it, Udo plays to lead the Nazis to victory.⁶³ Ostensibly pointing the readers’ expectations toward a calamitous future, the map instead becomes a tool for dealing with the problematic events of the German past. The military mindset, Udo’s latent belligerence, the insanity of the fanatical war delirium that made generals ponder their maps to conceive the best possible world of destruction, have been forgotten and repressed by “an amnesiac Europe,” but now become manifest on the hexes of the board.⁶⁴ By means of the game, the novel makes explicit that war is anything but that. The entertaining virtual “events” produced by gamers with maps and dice are sublimations that repress their serious purpose as instruments of death and charred flesh.

In the end all reader expectations are thwarted. Udo loses the game, but only to return to Germany and withdraw from all gaming activities. The curiously anticlimactic nonevent of the game, however, precisely marks the central event of the game-cum-novel: the end of the obsession with war. As a response to the purpose of the traditional war game, The Third Reich inverts its raison d’être. Instead of teaching us to handle the potential events of future wars, it conjures from the past their horrific reality to make us desist from military activities altogether, be they actual or invented.

The Futures of War

Geography is the “eye of history” (Historiæ oculus), wrote Abraham Ortelius in 1570.⁶⁵ Surveying the main genres in the cartography of war, we are enticed to reorient his gaze. Within the military sphere, the map serves as a strategic tool that might offer a glimpse of the plural futures of war. Ortelius’s statement is also pertinent in this context, however, for the futures of war have a history. While star charts and horoscopes, military topographic maps, and war games exist side by side as distinct cartographic genres, their genealogy marks three significant moments in the development of the military future. From the metaphysical grounding of astrological predictions in the movement of the celestial orbs, the future of the topographic map becomes an immanent product of strategic planning. Now grounded in the skill and creative genius of the commander rather than in a cosmological belief system, the future loses some of its givenness and emerges as an artifact that can, at least partially, be made. And with the emergence of war games and their recent instantiations in computer simulations, the future takes the form of a repetition, but a repetition of something that has never happened, of an imagined future that has already been played through multiple times. Accordingly, the primary mode of engagement with military maps shifts from hermeneutics, to manipulation, to play. Such shifts in cartographic habitus suggest a growing control over the futures of war, but it is accompanied by a widening of the military future and its increasing virtuality as possible scenarios burgeon and the nexus between map and event becomes ever more hypothetical.

In some of the main literary works that examine this nexus, the very notion of a “cartography of war” even appears to be a contradiction in terms. For authors such as Stendhal and Tolstoy conventional cartographic virtues like control, visibility, and power, which should ground the temporal projections and ensure the tractability of contingent futures, are deemed impotent in the context of war. In these texts, it seems that war is not simply a complex object that is difficult to govern, but one that evades the government of maps entirely. Texts and maps are linked not as supplemental media that enmesh literature with cartography, but as opposing ones in perpetual conflict. Yet, all the authors examined here at the same time co-opt military cartography, adapting and retooling it into productive poetic devices that structure the literary representation of war and the way we are instructed to read their texts. Whether it malfunctions as in Schiller, whether it serves as a foil for the narration of war as in Tolstoy, whether it is redrawn according to the precepts of a literary sketch as in Stendhal, or whether it is turned around and its purpose inverted as in Bolaño, the military event map has shaped the ways literature has represented and imagined the space and the events of war. And while these texts merely sample some of the literary refractions of military maps, they all suggest that it is from the friction between texts and maps that the silhouettes of the imagined futures of war are drawn.

Notes

3. See, for example, Ute Schneider, Die Macht der Karten: Eine Geschichte der Kartographie vom Mittelalter bis heute (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 2006), 116. For numerous examples during the Napoleonic Wars, see Henri Marie Auguste Berthaut, Les Ingénieurs Géographes Militaires 1624–1831 (Paris: Impr. du Service géographique, 1902). In our time the geographic knowledge provided by satellites is also surrounded by secrecy. For years the U.S. military followed a policy of “selective availability” after they had launched GPS, considering it a “dual-use technology” that allowed only limited accuracy for civilians (they scrambled the signals), and retained its actual pinpoint capabilities for military purposes. See Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2013), 40.

20. The changed status of astrology is unmistakable in a contemporary text by Johann Gottfried von Herder. In “On the Knowledge and Non-knowledge of the Future” from 1797 he delivers the following diatribe: “It wasn’t the fact that astrology dealt with the science of the future that made it contemptible and ridiculous; but the fact that it dealt with it groundlessly, that it sought a science in combinations that did not contain any. It is the same with chiromancy, metoposcopy, with auspices and auguries. They sought omens where there could be none and deceived people’s minds with a false science that they believed or pretended to be true” (Johann Gottfried von Herder, “Vom Wissen und Nichtwissen der Zukunft,” in Werke, Vol. 8: Schriften zu Literatur und Philosophie 1792–1800, ed. Hans Dietrich Irmscher, 283–297 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), here 286). An early literary critique of the projection of the heavenly order onto the terrestrial one is already articulated by Cervantes in Don Quixote. See Jörg Dünne, Die Kartographische Imagination: Erinnern, Erzählen und Fingieren in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 2011), 245–367.

16 Cartographies of War: Star Charts, Topographic Maps, War Games