Fighting for the Fatherland traces and analyzes three and a half centuries of the evolution of the German fighting man and the armies in which he served. It sets his patriotism against his cultural background and against the ever-changing national imperatives of his time.The German soldier's cultural legacy encompasses the romanticized Teutonic legends of Germanic mythology. The more immediate and pragmatic imperatives of Brandenburg's and Prussia's national survival during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reinforced the Germans' emerging awareness of their wider national...