What is the importance of the Thirty Years' War in the novel, Tyll?

The Thirty Years’ War represents the insanity and inhumanity of civilized people. The war represents the perfect and compelling logic of humanity’s entirely illogical hunger for violence, brutality, and suffering. It represents the abandonment of reason and the embrace of the animal need to defend and secure territory. The Thirty Years’ War is particularly compelling as it escalated without clear cause or logic from a regional turf war in central Germany between Catholics and Protestants until it engulfed nearly the entire reach of Europe. And in so doing it became the bloodiest war with close to eight million casualties fought on the continent of Europe until World War Two. The novel captures the brutality of the war, the senselessness of wreaking such ruin and rubble, the suffering and starvation of the people, the arrogance and self-interest of those in charge, and above all the grinding sense that the war continued, blindly and stupidly, compelled only by its own momentum.