Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow

Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755-1813) spent the first nine years of his military career in two very different institutions. From the summer of 1773 to the summer of 1778 (and thus between the eighteenth and twenty-third years of his life), he studied at the at the Wilhelmstein, the military academy of Count William of Schaumburg-Lippe Bückeburg. From 1778 through the summer of 1782, he served as a junior officer in the 8^th Cavalry Regiment (‘d’Estorff’s Dragoons’) of the Hanoverian Army.

Each of these two periods exercised a powerful influence in the education of the young soldier. Nonetheless, biographers of Scharnhorst have invariably paid far more attention to the five years that Scharnhorst spent at the Wilhelmstein than to his four years as a dragoon. Even Ludwig von Estorff, the great-grandson of the eponymous commanding officer of d’Estorff’s Dragoons, devoted four full paragraphs of his pocket biography Scharnhorst und Wir (‘Scharnhorst and Us’) to the time that Scharnhorst spent as a cadet, but only one to his tour of duty as a horse soldier.

Books Examined

Georg Heinrich Klippel Das Leben des Generals von Scharnhorst (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1869)

Max Lehmann Scharnhorst, (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1886)

Viktor von Lignitz Scharnhorst (Berlin: Behr, 1905)

Ludwig von Estorff Scharnhorst und Wir (Berlin: Koehler, 1926)

Siegfried Fiedler Scharnhorst: Geist und Tat (Herford: Maximilan, 1963)

Charles Edward White The Enlightened Soldier, Scharnhorst and the Militärische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801-1805 (Westport: Praeger, 1989)

Klaus Hornung Scharnhorst: Soldat, Reformer, Staatsmann, Die Biographie (Munich: Bechtle, 1997)

Notes

For the familial relationship between Ludwig von Estorff (1859-1943) and his great-grandfather Emmerich d’Estorff (1722-1796), see Deutschen Adelsgenossenschaft Jahrbuch des Deutschen Adels (Berlin: Bruer, 1896), pages 609-610 and 617.

As my copy of that splendid book sits at the bottom of a box of books, I was not able to consult the first volume of Dr. White’s definitive biography, Gerhard von Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, 1755-1801 (Barnsley: Casemate, 2020) (Casemate)

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