The Great War And Urban Life In Germany

Roger Chickering offers the most comprehensive history ever written of a German city at war.

This book represents the most comprehensive history of Germany during the First World War.

The challenges of post-war recovery from social and political reform to architectural design In the months and years immediately following the First World War, the many (European) countries that had formed its battleground were confronted with daunting challenges. These challenges varied according to the countries' earlier role and degree of involvement in the war but were without exception enormous. The contributors to this book analyse how this was not only a matter of rebuilding ravaged cities and destroyed infrastructure, but also of repairing people’s damaged bodies and upended daily lives, and rethinking and reforming societal, economic and political structures. These processes took place against the backdrop of mass mourning and remembrance, political violence and economic crisis. At the same time, the post-war tabula rasa offered many opportunities for innovation in various areas of society, from social and political reform to architectural design. The wide scope of post-war recovery and revival is reflected in the different sections of this book: rebuild, remember, repair, and reform. It offers insights into post-war revival in Western European countries such as Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, as well as into how their efforts were perceived outside of Europe, for instance in Argentina and the United States.

A transnational comparative history of lived religion and everyday Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary during the Great War.

The centenary of the First World War in 2014-18 offers an opportunity to reflect upon the role of gender history in shaping our understanding of this pivotal international event. From the moment of its outbreak, the gendered experiences of the war have been seen by contemporary observers and postwar commentators and scholars as being especially significant for shaping how the war can and must be understood. The negotiating of ideas about gender by women and men across vast reaches of the globe characterizes this modern, instrumental conflict. Over the past twenty-five years, as the scholarship on gender and this war has grown, there has never been a forum such as the one presented here that placed so many of the varying threads of this complex historiography into conversation with one another in a manner that is at once accessible and provocative. Given the vast literature on the war itself, scholarship on gender and various themes and topics provides students as well as scholars with a chance to think not only about the subject of the war but also the methodological implications of how historians have approached it. While many studies have addressed the national or transnational narrative of women in the war, none address both femininity and masculinity, and the experiences of both women and men across the same geographic scope as the studies presented in this volume.

The first English translation of writings that capture the lives and thoughts of German soldiers fighting in the trenches and on the battlefields of WWI. German Soldiers in the Great War is a vivid selection of firsthand accounts and other wartime documents that shed new light on the experiences of German frontline soldiers during the First World War. It reveals in authentic detail the perceptions and emotions of ordinary soldiers that have been covered up by the smokescreen of official military propaganda about “heroism” and “patriotic sacrifice.” In this essential collection of wartime correspondence, editors Benjamin Ziemann and Bernd Ulrich have gathered more than two hundred mostly archival documents, including letters, military dispatches and orders, extracts from diaries, newspaper articles and booklets, medical reports and photographs. This fascinating primary source material provides the first comprehensive insight into the German frontline experiences of the Great War, available in English for the first time in a translation by Christine Brocks.

Germany, 1914-1933: Politics, Society and Culture takes a fresh and critical look at a crucial period in German history. Rather than starting with the traditional date of 1918, the book begins with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and argues that this was a pivotal turning point in shaping the future successes and failures of the Weimar Republic. Combining traditional political narrative with new insights provided by social and cultural history, the book reconsiders such key questions as: How widespread was support for the war in Germany between 1914 and 1918? How was the war viewed both ‘from above’, by leading generals, admirals and statesmen, and ‘from below’, by ordinary soldiers and civilians? What were the chief political, social, economic and cultural consequences of the war? In particular, did it result in a brutalisation of German society after 1918? How modern were German attitudes towards work, family, sex and leisure during the 1920s? What accounts for the extraordinary richness and experimentalism of this period? The book also provides a thorough and comprehensive discussion of the difficulties faced by the Weimar Republic in capturing the hearts and minds of the German people in the 1920s, and of the causes of its final demise in the early 1930s.

Translated into English as the Winner of the Geisteswissenschaften International Translation Prize for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences 2015. During the Great War, mass killing took place on an unprecedented scale. Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War explores the practice of violence in the German army and demonstrates how he killing of enemy troops, the deaths of German soldiers and their survival were entwined. As the war reached its climax in 1918, German soldiers refused to continue killing in their droves, and thus made an active contribution to the German defeat and ensuing revolution. Examining the postwar period, the chapters of this book also discuss the contested issue of a 'brutalization' of German society as a prerequisite of the Nazi mass movement. Biographical case studies on key figures such as Ernst Jünger demonstrate how the killing of enemy troops by German soldiers followed a complex set of rules. Benjamin Ziemann makes a wealth of extensive archival work available to an Anglophone audience for the first time, enhancing our understanding of the German army and its practices of violence during the First World War as well as the implications of this brutalization in post-war Germany. This book provides new insights into a crucial topic for students of twentieth-century German history and the First World War.