Download or read book Pandora s Box written by Jörn Leonhard and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 1105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Prize “The best large-scale synthesis in any language of what we currently know and understand about this multidimensional, cataclysmic conflict.” —Richard J. Evans, Times Literary Supplement In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany’s leading historian of the period offers a dramatic account of its origins, course, and consequences. Jörn Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy. He captures the slow attrition, the race for ever more destructive technologies, and the grim experiences of frontline soldiers. But the war was more than a military conflict and he also gives us the perspectives of leaders, intellectuals, artists, and ordinary men and women around the world as they grappled with the urgency of the moment and the rise of unprecedented political and social pressures. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Pandora’s Box reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come. “[An] epic and magnificent work—unquestionably, for me, the best single-volume history of the war I have ever read...It is the most formidable attempt to make the war to end all wars comprehensible as a whole.” —Simon Heffer, The Spectator “[A] great book on the Great War...Leonhard succeeds in being comprehensive without falling prey to the temptation of being encyclopedic. He writes fluently and judiciously.” —Adam Tooze, Die Zeit “Extremely readable, lucidly structured, focused, and dynamic...Leonhard’s analysis is enlivened by a sharp eye for concrete situations and an ear for the voices that best convey the meaning of change for the people and societies undergoing it.” —Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers
Download or read book Germany 1914 1933 written by Matthew Stibbe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Loss written by Claudia Siebrecht and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of German women's art produced during the First World War that places the artists' visual responses within the civilian war experience. Traces the thematic evolution of women's art from visual expressions of support for the national war effort to more nuanced and distraught representations of grief over wartime death.
Download or read book Germany and the Second World War written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 1074 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second in the comprehensive ten-volume Germany and the Second World War. The five volumes so far published in German take the story to the end of 1941, and have achieved international acclaim as a major contribution to historical study. Under the auspices of the Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Research Institute for Military History), a team of renowned historians has combined a full synthesis of existing material with the latest research to produce what will be the definitive history of the Second World War. This volume surveys the first year of the war deliberately begun by Nazi Germany. The authors examine the train of interconnected political and military events, and set military operations against the background of Hitler's war policy and general aims, both immediate and long term. The authors show that the conflict took a course quite different from that which Hitler had intended, but nevertheless resulted in a series of conquests for the Third Reich.
Download or read book Captivity Forced Labour and Forced Migration in Europe during the First World War written by Matthew Stibbe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of the First World War as 'the great seminal catastrophe' (Urkatastrophe) of the twentieth century is now firmly established in historiography. Yet astonishingly little has been written about the fate of non-combatants in occupied and non-occupied territory, including civilian internees, deportees, expellees and disarmed military prisoners. This volume brings together experts from across Europe to consider the phenomena of captivity, forced labour and forced migration during and immediately after the years 1914 to 1918. Each contribution offers a European-wide perspective, thus moving beyond interpretations based on narrow national frameworks or on one of the fighting fronts alone. Particular emphasis is placed on the way in which the experience of internees, forced labourers and expellees was mediated by specific situational factors and by the development of ‘war cultures’ and ‘mentalities’ at different stages in the respective war efforts. Other themes considered include the recruitment and deployment of colonial troops in Europe, and efforts to investigate, monitor and prosecute alleged war crimes in relation to the mistreatment of civilians and POWs. The final contribution will then consider the problems associated with repatriation and the reintegration of returning prisoners after the war. This book was published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.
Download or read book Dynamic of Destruction written by Alan Kramer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-11-07 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international community reacted in horror - 'Holocaust at Louvain' proclaimed the Daily Mail - and the behaviour of the Germans at Louvain came to be seen as the beginning of a different style of war, without the rules that had governed military conflict up to that point - a more total war, in which enemy civilians and their entire culture were now 'legitimate' targets. Yet the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a wider wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept Europe in the era of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and eye-witness accounts from across Europe at this time, award-winning historian Alan Kramer paints a picture of an entire continent plunging into a chilling new world of mass mobilization, total warfare, and the celebration of nationalist or ethnic violence - often directed expressly at the enemy's civilian population.
Download or read book Imperial Germany and the Great War 1914 1918 written by Roger Chickering and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the most comprehensive history of Germany during the First World War.
Download or read book Untold War written by Heather Jones and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-05-31 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complex, brutal and challenging, the First World War continues to inspire dynamic research and debate. The third volume to emerge from the pioneering work of the International Society for First World War Studies, this collection of new essays reveals just how plural the conflict actually was – its totalizing tendencies are shown here to have paradoxically produced diversity, innovation and difference, as much as they also gave rise to certain similarities across wartime societies. Exploring the nature of this 'plural war,' the contributions to this volume cover diverse themes such as combat, occupation, civic identity, juvenile delinquency, chaplains, art and remembrance, across a wide range of societies, including Germany, France, Britain, German colonial Africa, Belgium and Romania. With chapters on both military and cultural history, this book highlights how the first total war of the twentieth century changed social, cultural and military perceptions to an untold extent. Contributors: Alan Kramer, Dan Todman, Claudia Siebrecht, Vanessa Ther, Jan Vermeiren, Wencke Meteling, Daniel Steinbach, Aurore François, Edward Madigan, Catriona Pennell, François Bouloc, Sonja Müller, Joëlle Beurier, Lisa Mayerhofer, Heather Jones, Christoph Schmidt-Supprian, Jennifer O'Brien.
Download or read book Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War written by Benjamin Ziemann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The First World War and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy 1914 1918 written by Manfried Rauchensteiner and published by Böhlau Verlag Wien. This book was released on 2014 with total page 1188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of World War I were different and varied. But it was Austria-Hungary which unleashed the war. After more than four years the Habsburg Monarchy was defeated and ended as a failed state.
Download or read book The Forgotten Front written by Gerhard P. Gross and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although much has been written about the Western Front in World War I, little attention has been given to developments in the east, especially during the crucial period of 1914--1915. Not only did these events have a significant impact on the fighting and outcome of the battles in the west, but all the major combatants in the east ultimately suffered collapses of their political systems with enormous consequences for the future events. Available for the first time in English, this seminal study features contributions from established and rising scholars from eight countries who argue German, central, and eastern European perspectives. Together, they illuminate diverse aspects of the Great War's Eastern Theater, including military strategy and combat, issues of national identity formation, perceptions of the enemy, and links to World War II. They also explore the experiences of POWs and the representation of the Eastern Front in museums, memorials, and the modern media. The scholarship on the First World War is dominated by the trauma of the modern, technologized war in the west, causing the significant political events and battles on the Eastern Front to shift to the background. The Forgotten Front illuminates overlooked but vital aspects of the conflict, and will be an essential resource for students and scholars seeking to better understand the war and its legacy.
Download or read book Nurse Memoirs from the Great War in Britain France and Germany written by Jerry Palmer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nurse Memoirs from the Great War in Britain, France, and Germany examines an understudied corpus of memoirs in English, French, and German stemming from the unprecedented involvement of women in the war effort. Jerry Palmer considers the memoirs in relationship to public opinion, collective memory and other women’s writing about the war. Through close-readings of the memoirs and their contexts, the book identifies themes present in the texts and considers the nurse memoir as rhetoric—examining to what extent the texts are promoting or countering arguments in the public sphere about their involvement or more widely about women’s position in society. Palmer explores the multiple contexts related to the nurse memoirs, including public response to volunteer wartime nursing, the organisation of the military health services of the three nations and their conduct in the war, and changes in the post-war organization of public health services and the professionalization of nursing.
Download or read book A Companion to World War I written by John Horne and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-11-23 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the First World War brings together an international team of distinguished historians who provide a series of original and thought-provoking essays on one of the most devastating events in modern history. Comprises 38 essays by leading scholars who analyze the current state of historical scholarship on the First World War Provides extensive coverage spanning the pre-war period, the military conflict, social, economic, political, and cultural developments, and the war's legacy Offers original perspectives on themes as diverse as strategy and tactics, war crimes, science and technology, and the arts Selected as a 2011 Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE
Download or read book The Schlieffen Plan written by Hans Ehlert and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the creation of the Franco-Russian Alliance and the failure of the Reinsurance Treaty in the late nineteenth century, Germany needed a strategy for fighting a two-front war. In response, Field Marshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen produced a study that represented the apex of modern military planning. His Memorandum for a War against France, which incorporated a mechanized cavalry as well as new technologies in weaponry, advocated that Germany concentrate its field army to the west and annihilate the French army within a few weeks. For generations, historians have considered Schlieffen's writings to be the foundation of Germany's military strategy in World War I and have hotly debated the reasons why the plan, as executed, failed. In this important volume, international scholars reassess Schlieffen's work for the first time in decades, offering new insights into the renowned general's impact not only on World War I but also on nearly a century of military historiography. The contributors draw on newly available source materials from European and Russian archives to demonstrate both the significance of the Schlieffen Plan and its deficiencies. They examine the operational planning of relevant European states and provide a broad, comparative historical context that other studies lack. Featuring fold-out maps and abstracts of the original German deployment plans as they evolved from 1893 to 1914, this rigorous reassessment vividly illustrates how failures in statecraft as well as military planning led to the tragedy of the First World War.
Download or read book The Mediatization of War and Peace written by Christoph Cornelissen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-02-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the First World War, mass media achieved an enormous and continuously growing importance in all belligerent countries. Newspaper, illustrated magazines, comics, pamphlets, and instant books, fi ctional works, photography, and the new-born “theater of imagery”, the cinema, were crucial in order to create a heroic vision of the events, to mobilize and maintain the consensus on the war. But their role was pivotal also in creating the image of the war’s end and fi nally, together with a widespread, new literary genre, the war memoirs, to shape the collective memory of the confl ict for the next generations. Even before November 1918, the media raised high expectations for a multifaceted peace: a new global order, the beginning of a peaceful era, the occasion for a regenerating apocalypse. Likewise, in the following decades, particularly war literature and cinema were pivotal to reverse the icon of the Great War as an epic crusade and a glorious chapter of the national history and to create the hegemonic image of a senseless carnage. The Mediatization of War and Peace focalizes on the central role played by mass media in the tortuous transition to the post-war period as well as on the profound disenchantment generated by their prophesies.
Download or read book Ring of Steel written by Alexander Watson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prize-winning, magisterial history of World War I from the perspective of the defeated Central Powers For the Central Powers, the First World War started with high hopes for an easy victory. But those hopes soon deteriorated as Germany's attack on France failed, Austria-Hungary's armies suffered catastrophic losses, and Britain's ruthless blockade brought both nations to the brink of starvation. The Central powers were trapped in the Allies' ever-tightening Ring of Steel. In this compelling history, Alexander Watson retells the war from the perspective of its losers: not just the leaders in Berlin and Vienna, but the people of Central Europe. The war shattered their societies, destroyed their states, and imparted a poisonous legacy of bitterness and violence. A major reevaluation of the First World War, Ring of Steel is essential for anyone seeking to understand the last century of European history.
