War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I

Description

War Land on the Eastern Front is a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of their encounter with Eastern Europe. It presents an 'anatomy of an occupation', charting the ambitions and realities of the new German military state there. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, it reveals how German views of the East changed during total war. New categories for viewing the East took root along with the idea of a German cultural mission in these supposed wastelands. After Germany's defeat, the Eastern front's 'lessons' were taken up by the Nazis, radicalized, and enacted when German armies returned to the East in World War II. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.

"The book could be commended solely for bringing to light valuable source materials. Thorough and inspired research is complemented by clear and cogent prose. It is a pleasure to encounter a study of cultural history that is free of the jargon and impenetrable writing for which the field is fast becoming famous. Above all, rigorous and imaginative analysis of personal experience and culture reveals the unique and seldom seen face of war in the East. This book will be of interest to all students of the First World War, and one hopes that it will wpur further investigations into the neglected Eastern Front." The Journal of Military History "Drawing on an imporessive array of German and Lithuanian archival sources, and displaying a real flair for the integration of cultural and political theory with empirical research, Liulevicius has written a brilliant, engrossing, deeply insightful history of a failed imperial enterprise in which the material and human costs to the occupied were outweighed only by the moral price paid by the occupiers." Aviel Roshwald, Central European History "In a dense and well-crafted work, the author has written a book which rewards careful reading even by those familiar with the Eastern Front of the Great War. This is a thoroughly researched social and political study of the evolution of wartime German policy and a valuable addition to the scholarship of the era." Stand To "The premise of this carefully researched, well-written monograph is that the experience of German soldiers on the eastern front in WW I decisively shaped Nazi policies and helps account for the atrocious behavior of its military and civilian personnel in the East during WW II... Liulevicius's important book directs our attention to and illuminates important threads of continuity in modern German history." Choice "a well-researched, scholarly work that does much to explain why Germans, during the rise of Nazism in the decades that followed the Great War, viewed eastern European peoples as uncivilized... This publication is a must acquisition for the researcher who may later explore the German home front of World War I." Jrnl of Slavic Military Studies "Liulevicius is certainly right to point out that the Eastern Front has been neglected in the historical literature on the First World War, and from that point of view alone his book is a welcome addition." The International History Review "All of this is superbly researched and analyzed ... this book makes a genuine contribution to the historiography on World War I." Historian "This fine book examines German occupation policies in Lithuania during World War I and their legacy on the mind-set of German soldiers for whom the experience of war on the eastern front proved to have a profoundly disorienting impact." Slavic Review Winter 2001 "there can be no doubt that Liulevicius's study, arguably the first cultural history of the German occupation of eastern Europe in the First World War, is truly path-breaking." Canadian Journal of History