What is the importance of Zusmarshausen, Bavaria in the year, 1648, in the novel, Tyll?

The blood-soaked battlefield of Zusmarshausen provides the tipping point in the emotional, psychological, and spiritual evolution of young Martin Von Wolkenstein, the innocuous academic who, from the safety of the Kaiser’s palace, had long dreamed of seeing war first hand. The clash between the last of the standing army of the Holy Roman Empire, some 10,000, against the combined armies of Protestant France and Sweden, more than twice the size of the Catholic forces, in the fields outside Zusmarshausen ended the long and brutal Thirty Years’ War. The battlefield offers Von Wolkenstein, who is looking back on the place as he is writing his memoirs decades later, the opportunity to reveal the shocking horrors of war, the rivers along the field full of mutilated bodies of horses and the swollen corpses of soldiers. “Like visions of hell, the deformed bodies, the festering faces, the open wounds, the heaps of excrement burned themselves into the fat count’s memory. I will never be the same again” (162).