War Experiences in Rural Germany

War Experiences in Rural Germany PDF Author: Benjamin Ziemann
Publisher: Berg
ISBN: 0857850954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
World War I was a uniquely devastating total war that surpassed all previous conflicts for its destruction. But what was the reality like on the ground, for both the soldiers on the front-lines and the women on the homefront?Drawing on intimate firsthand accounts in diaries and letters, War Experiences in Rural Germany examines this question in detail and challenges some strongly held assumptions about the Great War. The author makes the controversial case for the blurring of 'front' and 'homefront'. He shows that through the constant exchange of letters and frequent furloughs, rural soldiers maintained a high degree of contact with their home lives. In addition, the author provides a more nuanced interpretation of the alleged brutalizing effect of the war experience, suggesting that it was by far not as complete as has been previously understood. This pathbreaking book paints a vivid picture of the dynamics of total war on rural communities, from the calling up of troops to the reintegration of veterans into society.

War Experiences in Rural Germany

War Experiences in Rural Germany PDF Author: Benjamin Ziemann
Publisher: Berg
ISBN: 0857850954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
World War I was a uniquely devastating total war that surpassed all previous conflicts for its destruction. But what was the reality like on the ground, for both the soldiers on the front-lines and the women on the homefront?Drawing on intimate firsthand accounts in diaries and letters, War Experiences in Rural Germany examines this question in detail and challenges some strongly held assumptions about the Great War. The author makes the controversial case for the blurring of 'front' and 'homefront'. He shows that through the constant exchange of letters and frequent furloughs, rural soldiers maintained a high degree of contact with their home lives. In addition, the author provides a more nuanced interpretation of the alleged brutalizing effect of the war experience, suggesting that it was by far not as complete as has been previously understood. This pathbreaking book paints a vivid picture of the dynamics of total war on rural communities, from the calling up of troops to the reintegration of veterans into society.

German Soldiers in the Great War

German Soldiers in the Great War PDF Author: Bernd Ulrich
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
ISBN: 1844687643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
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.

GIs and Fräuleins

GIs and Fräuleins PDF Author: Maria Höhn
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Frauleins, Maria Hohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s. Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Hohn shows that Germany's Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

Hunger in War and Peace

Hunger in War and Peace PDF Author: Mary Elisabeth Cox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019255185X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
At the outbreak of the First World War, Great Britain quickly took steps to initiate a naval blockade against Germany. In addition to military goods and other contraband, foodstuffs and fertilizer were also added to the list of forbidden exports to Germany. As the grip of the Blockade strengthened, Germans complained that civilians-particularly women and children-were going hungry because of it. The impact of the blockade on non-combatants was especially fraught during the eight month period of the Armistice when the blockade remained in force. Even though fighting had stopped, German civilians wondered how they would go through another winter of hunger. The issue became internationalised as civic leaders across the country wrote books, pamphlets, and articles about their distress, and begged for someone to step in and relieve German women and children with food aid. Their pleas were answered with an outpouring of generosity from across the world. Some have argued, then and since, that these outcries were based on gross exaggerations based more on political need rather than actual want. This book examines what the actual nutritional statuses of women and children in Germany were during and following the War. Mary Cox uses detailed height and weight data for over 600,000 German children to show the true measure of overall deprivation, and to gauge infant recovery.

Food, Culture and Identity in Germany's Century of War

Food, Culture and Identity in Germany's Century of War PDF Author: Heather Merle Benbow
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030271382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Even in the harsh conditions of total war, food is much more than a daily necessity, however scarce—it is social glue and an identity marker, a form of power and a weapon of war. This collection examines the significance of food and hunger in Germany’s turbulent twentieth century. Food-centered perspectives and experiences “from below” reveal the social, cultural and political consequences of three conflicts that defined the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars and the ensuing global Cold War. Emerging and established scholars examine the analytical salience of food in the context of twentieth-century Germany while pushing conventional temporal frameworks and disciplinary boundaries. Together, these chapters interrogate the ways in which deeper studies of food culture in Germany can shed new light on old wars.

Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War

Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War PDF Author: David J. Fine
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110268167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War David J. Fine offers a surprising portrayal of Jewish officers in the German army as integrated and comfortably identified as both Jews and Germans. Fine explores how both Judaism and Christianity were experienced by Jewish soldiers at the front, making an important contribution to the study of the experience of religion in war. Fine shows how the encounter of German Jewish soldiers with the old world of the shtetl on the eastern front tested both their German and Jewish identities. Finally, utilizing published and unpublished sources including letters, diaries, memoirs, military service records, press accounts, photographs, drawings and tomb stone inscriptions, the author argues that antisemitism was not a primary factor in the war experience of Jewish soldiers.

Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War

Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War PDF Author: Benjamin Ziemann
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474239595
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
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.

The International Migration of German Great War Veterans

The International Migration of German Great War Veterans PDF Author: Erika Kuhlman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113750160X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
This book uses story-telling to recreate the history of German veteran migration after the First World War. German veterans of the Great War were among Europe’s most volatile population when they returned to a defeated nation in 1918, after great expectations of victory and personal heroism. Some ex-servicemen chose to flee the nation for which they had fought, and begin their lives afresh in the nation against which they had fought: the United States.

The Rise and Fall of Comradeship

The Rise and Fall of Comradeship PDF Author: Thomas Kühne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316841839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This is an innovative account of how the concept of comradeship shaped the actions, emotions and ideas of ordinary German soldiers across the two world wars and during the Holocaust. Using individual soldiers' diaries, personal letters and memoirs, Kühne reveals the ways in which soldiers' longing for community, and the practice of male bonding and togetherness, sustained the Third Reich's pursuit of war and genocide. Comradeship fuelled the soldiers' fighting morale. It also propelled these soldiers forward into war crimes and acts of mass murders. Yet, by practising comradeship, the soldiers could maintain the myth that they were morally sacrosanct. Post-1945, the notion of kameradschaft as the epitome of humane and egalitarian solidarity allowed Hitler's soldiers to join the euphoria for peace and democracy in the Federal Republic, finally shaping popular memories of the war through the end of the twentieth century.

An Army in Crisis

An Army in Crisis PDF Author: Alexander Vazansky
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496215192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Following the decision to maintain 250,000 U.S. troops in Germany after the Allied victory in 1945, the U.S. Army had, for the most part, been a model of what a peacetime occupying army stationed in an ally’s country should be. The army had initially benefited from the positive results of U.S. foreign policy toward West Germany and the deference of the Federal Republic toward it, establishing cordial and even friendly relations with German society. By 1968, however, the disciplined military of the Allies had been replaced with rundown barracks and shabby-looking GIs, and U.S. bases in Germany had become a symbol of the army’s greatest crisis, a crisis that threatened the army’s very existence. In An Army in Crisis Alexander Vazansky analyzes the social crisis that developed among the U.S. Army forces stationed in Germany between 1968 and 1975. This crisis was the result of shifting deployment patterns across the world during the Vietnam War; changing social and political realities of life in postwar Germany and Europe; and racial tensions, drug use, dissent, and insubordination within the U.S. Army itself, influenced by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the youth movement in the States. With particular attention to 1968, An Army in Crisis examines the changing relationships between American and German soldiers, from German deference to familiarity and fraternization, and the effects that a prolonged military presence in Germany had on American military personnel, their dependents, and the lives of Germans. Vazansky presents an innovative study of opposition and resistance within the ranks, affected by the Vietnam War and the limitations of personal freedom among the military during this era.