45 William Roger Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies, 1914–1919 (Oxford, 1967); Wolfgang Petter, “Der Kampf um die deutschen Kolonien,” in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Der Erster Weltkrieg: Wirkung, Warnehmung, Analyse (Munich, 2000), 392–411.
46 Hew Strachan, The First World War: To Arms (Oxford, 2003), 441–66.
47 Hermann Joseph Hiery, The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I (Honolulu, 1995), 11–44.
48 Strachan, The First World War, 495–643. The pertinent sections of Strachan’s survey are also available as The First World War in Africa (Oxford, 2004). See also Edward Paice, The First World War: The African Front (New York, 2008); Melvin E. Page (ed.), Africa and the First World War (London, 1987); Byron Farwell, The Great War in Africa, 1914–1918 (London, 1987).
49 Richard Henning, Deutsch-Südwest im Weltkrieg (Wolfenbüttel, 2011).
50 Uwe Schulte-Varedorff, Krieg in Kamerun: Die deutsche Kolonie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin, 2011).
51 The best account is now Eckard Michels, “Der Held von Deutsch-Ostafrika”: Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck: Ein preußischer Kolonialoffizier (Paderborn, 2008).
52 Tanja Bührer, Die kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika: Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und transkulturelle Kriegführung 1885 bis 1918 (Munich, 2011); Werner Haupt, Die deutsche Schutztruppe 1889–1918: Auftrag und Geschichte (Eggolsheim-Bammersdorf, 2001).
53 Charles Miller, Battle for the Bundu: The First World War in East Africa (New York, 1974), ix.
54 Strachan, The First World War, 637.
55 Michels, “Der Held von Deutsch-Ostafrika”, 235–6.
56 Strachan, The First World War, 641.
57 Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1968); Frank G. Weber, Eagles on the Crescent: Germany, Austria, and the Diplomacy of the Turkish Alliance, 1914–1918 (Ithaca, NY, 1970).
58 Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009), esp. 436–62. See also Donald McKale, War by Revolution: Germany and Great Britain in the Middle East in the Era of World War I (Kent, OH, 2008); Martin Kröger, “Revolution als Programm: Ziele und Realität deutscher Orientpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Michalka, Der Erster Weltkrieg, 366–91.
59 Mustafa Aksakal, “Jihad made in Germany? The Ottoman origins of the 1914 jihad,” War in History 18 (2011), 184–99; cf. Tilman Lüdke, Jihad made in Germany: Ottoman and German Propaganda and Intelligence Operations in the First World War (Münster, 2005); Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, “Jihad ‘Made in Germany’: Der Streit um den Heiligen Krieg 1914–1914,” Sozial Geschichte 18 (2003), 7–34.
60 Jehuda L. Wallach, Anatomie einer Militärhilfe: Die preußisch-deutschen Militärmissionen in der Türkei 1835–1919 (Düsseldorf, 1976).
61 Norbert Schwake, Deutsche Soldatengräber in Israel: Der Einsatz deutscher Soldaten an der Palästinafront im Ersten Weltkrieg und das Schicksal ihrer Grabstätten (Münster, 2008).
62 On the military dimensions of the story, see Strachan, The First World War, 729–814.
63 Herbert Landolin Müller, Islam, Ğihād (“Heiliger Krieg”) und Deutsches Reich: Ein Nachspiel zur wilhelminischen Weltpolitik im Maghreb 1914–1918 (Frankfurt am Main, 1991); Ulrich Gehrke, Persien in der Deutschen Orientpolitik während des Ersten Weltkrieges (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1960); Wolf-Dieter Bihl, Die Kaukasus-Politik der Mittelmächte: Ihre Basis in der Orient-Politik und ihre Aktionen 1914–1917 (Vienna, 1975); Thomas G. Fraser, “Germany and Indian revolution, 1914–1918,” Journal of Contemporary History 12 (1977), 255–72.
64 Thomas L. Hughes, “The German mission to Afghanistan, 1915–1916,” German Studies Review 25 (2002), 447–76; Renate Vogel, Die Persien- und Afghanistanexpedition Oskar Ritter von Niedermayers 1915–1916 (Osnabrück, 1976).
65 For a good introduction to this problem, see Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005). The most comprehensive account is now Raymond Kévorkian’s The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (New York, 2011).
66 Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 263–90.
67 Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 115–33; cf. Vahakn N. Dadrian, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Watertown, MA, 1996).
68 Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, 1994); Holger H. Herwig, “Luxury” Fleet: The Imperial German Navy, 1888–1918 (Amherst, NY, 1987), 143–257.
69 Herwig, “Luxury” Fleet, 6.
70 Frank P. Chambers, The War behind the War: A History of the Political and Civilian Fronts (New York, 1939), 199.
71 Michael Epkenhans, Jörg Hillmann, and Frank Nägler (eds.), Skagerrakschlacht: Vorgeschichte – Ereignis – Verarbeitung (Munich, 2009); V. E. Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective: A New View of the Great Battle, 31 May 1916 (London, 1995).
72 Halpern, A Naval History of World War I, 328.
73 Bernd Stegemann, Die deutsche Marinepolitik 1916–1918 (Berlin, 1970).
4 The war embraces all
In October 1914 a story circulated in the German press about Peter Edlbauer, a seventy-six-year-old man who lived alone with his fifty-year-old daughter deep in the woods of southeastern Germany. He received neither mail nor newspapers, so he remained oblivious of the war for two months, until a passing tourist broke the news to him. Incredulous, he went to town to inquire at the local garrison, where he learned of German successes on several fronts. “Things will be all right,” the old gentleman remarked, then returned to his retreat.1 The press did not report about his subsequent fate, but even a hermit could hardly have long remained impervious to this war’s impact. The dispatch of millions of young men to the fighting fronts, the wrenching reorganization of the economy for military production, and mounting deprivations and shortages of every description touched everyone in Germany in the most profound ways. This was, one is tempted to say, total war by definition.
The fact that no one was exempt from these exertions and disruptions poses formidable challenges to the social and cultural history of the war. The adversities were comprehensive, but no two Germans endured them in the same way. Edlbauer’s detachment represented an extreme. It was far less typical than the devastation visited on the historian Georg von Below in Freiburg, whose family suffered through the deaths of two sons in combat. The hermit represented an extreme case in another respect. The vast majority of Germans lived through the war not in isolation but as members of social groups, whether these were marked out by class, confession, gender, generation, or geography. This proposition applies to Kriegsalltag, to the banal routines of life in wartime, as well as to the war’s dramatic moments.2 It applies especially to the war’s many burdens, for social groups were vulnerable to different degrees and in different ways. They also seized upon different strategies for giving meaning to the burdens they bore.
Warriors
The war opened amid the promise that social divisions would dissolve into a transcendent national community. The most conspicuous embodiment of this community was the soldiery, the 13,123,011 Germans who served in the army between 1914 and 1918.3 This group, whose badge of membership was the military uniform, was defined by gender and age, for most of the men who served were between the ages of twenty and forty. The great majority of them – over 80 percent – were linked above all, however, in the common experience of combat on one or more of the several European fronts. They were pioneers in the new forms of warfare; most of them endured the paralysis imposed on mass armies by the lethal new machines of destruction. In this role they were, paradoxically, members of a broader, international community, however, which the English writer Vera Brittain characterized as a “tragic profound freemasonry of those who accepted death together” on both sides of the front.4
Like the British and French tro
ops who faced them on the western front, German soldiers here watched helplessly as the new modes of fighting made mockery of the visions of adventure that had underwritten initial enthusiasm for the war. Strategic immobility rendered the war instead a continuous siege, which offered the proximity of boredom and death – the monotonous tyranny of daily routine alongside the prospect of its sudden, horrible termination. Images of individual heroism survived only in the sky, in the figures of aviators such as Willi Boelcke and Manfred von Richthofen, whose celebrity was the issue of a wedding between modern aerial technology and medieval modes of combat. These, too, soon receded into the anonymity of squadron tactics, however. Heroic images had no relevance for the masses of the foot soldiers, who were more aptly portrayed as the proletarians of industrial war, troglodytes, or as animals that burrowed into muddy labyrinths for shelter until they emerged – in what were called offensives – to offer pale challenge to the modern machines that ruled the battlefield and blocked access to enemy trenches.
This numbing, frightful experience put enormous strains on the power of conventional ideas and language. In this respect, too, in trying to find a “symbolic key” to make sense of the slaughter, German soldiers confronted the same problems that plagued their enemies.5 During the first two years of the war, while it was still possible to hope that the next great battle might be the last, the theme of heroic sacrifice survived as a guide for Germans under fire on the ground. The theme found its most poignant and resonant symbol in the “Battle of Langemarck.”6 This label attached to a series of German infantry attacks on French and British positions near the Belgian town of Ypres in the fall of 1914. The action was of no particular strategic significance, and the wholesale carnage inflicted on the attackers, many of whom were ill-trained reservists, was already a standard feature of this war. The official German report from the front combed out these aspects of the action; it told instead of youthful volunteers who successfully rushed enemy positions singing Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. Whether or not it had any basis in fact, this representation of the action exerted enormous popular appeal, for it transformed defeat into moral victory, highlighting the enthusiasm and sacrifice of young warriors who had carried the “spirit of 1914” onto the battlefield.
Metaphors of heroism and sacrifice depended on a belief in transcendent moral purposes, which turned death on the battlefield into the vehicle of collective redemption and renewal. Patriotism and Christianity provided the most durable foundations for this belief. The one situated the sacrifice within a narrative of national fulfillment, the abiding security and prosperity of the German nation state; the other situated it within a transcendent narrative of human redemption in the hereafter. The congruities were basic, so the two visions tended to reinforce one another, particularly at the hands of the Catholic and Protestant chaplains who attended to the spiritual needs of their units.7 If belief in the transcendent meaning of sacrifice survived into 1915, let alone the monster battles of 1916, the heroic exhilaration did not. To judge from letters home from the front and from newspapers that circulated in the trenches, the prevalent imagery soon lost the idealism of the first months, emphasizing instead the soldier’s stoic, if not fatalistic, endurance of adversity in hopes of an early peace.8 The watchword was now to “hold out” (Durchhalten).9 The roots of an altogether different set of images could be found in the trenches during the later phases of the war. This imagery later took on chilling energy in the writings of Ernst Jünger, a veteran who aestheticized industrial warfare into an apocalyptic experience, a “storm of steel,” the quest for self-transcendence by a new breed of warriors, who were bereft of moral sentiment and honed to the violent rituals of death.10
Because all these images homogenized the Fronterlebnis, the “front experience,” in an effort to lend it meaning, they misrepresented the diversity of military experience in this war. The most indelible images originated on the western front, where the world’s most modern armies clashed in circumstances that brought strategic stalemate to its senseless fulfillment. But this was but one of the myriad social experiences offered to men in the German armed forces of this war. Different conditions governed combat on the eastern front. Here great disparities of military power among the contending forces bred a much more mobile war, which appeared to develop with more strategic purpose and less unremitting direct engagement. Some 75,000 Germans who served in the navy experienced the war on still different terms. Because the surface fleet was confined to its ports on the North and Baltic Seas for most of the contest, the men who populated these warships endured the tedium of war without the intermittent excitement. When the marginality of the surface fleet translated into reduced rations for the sailors, frustrations below deck began to fester towards turmoil. In this respect, life in the navy was less akin to service in the front-line army than in the army’s many support units, be they in the Etappe, the rear staging areas and along the army’s lines of communication, in units stationed in occupied Europe, or in the reserve or convalescent units in Germany itself, where soldiers trained or rehabilitated before being committed to the front.
The prevalent imagery misrepresented the situation in another basic respect. Military service was portrayed as a major unifying force, which brought Germans of all stations together in a great common effort, to defend the fatherland. The reality of the situation was different. The common experience of military life failed to suspend the divisions and tensions that had unsettled German society before the war. Suspicion, ill will, and mutual incomprehension were common in the relations among military units, which displayed the linguistic peculiarities or confessional preferences of the different regions from which they were recruited. Soldiers’ newspapers, which proliferated among units at every level of the army, played to these peculiarities even as they attempted to gloss over the tensions.11 Ethnic friction was particularly sensitive. Regiments recruited in Alsace-Lorraine or Prussian Poland were deployed as far from home as possible, for fear of their desertion to units of co-nationals in the French or Russian armies.12 The most widespread tensions were social, however. The German army faithfully replicated the basic class distinctions of peacetime society. Most of the officers in the army (and navy) came from families of property, education, or high birth; most of the non-commissioned officers and common soldiers or sailors did not. The privileged university students who enlisted during the first weeks of the war transgressed this principle, but the brutality and chicanery that they experienced at the hands of their sergeants and fellow recruits betrayed class resentments that were as a rule directed by common soldiers at commissioned officers.13 The arrogance and arbitrary exercise of authority by officers (Prussian officers in particular) headed a long list of grievances, which included the preferential treatment that officers routinely enjoyed in matters of quarters, food and supplies, battlefield decorations, furloughs, and access to bordellos behind the lines. The perception that corruption and “connections” worked to the special advantage of officers compounded broader resentments. These surfaced in hostility between front-line units and soldiers to the rear, who evaded combat in staff offices or administrative and support services in the Etappe.
The persistence of regional, confessional, and class tensions fed the misery of life at the front. The mounting adversities did not, however, produce any organized collapse of discipline in the German army like the mutinies that terrified the French high command in 1917. Instances of desertion were often hard to determine, to distinguish from absence without leave, or, for that matter, even to define. In any case, desertions evidently did not exceed 100,000 in total, or about three per 1,000 soldiers per year – a rate comparable to figures in the French and British armies.14 Desertion was rare at the front, more common in the rear or during furloughs home, and, as a rule, it grew more out of private grievances than political intent.
Forms of resistance more subtle than desertion likewise suggested the growing difficulty of setting intellectual bearings for the front experience, as
immobility sapped the meaning from words such as “victory” and “progress.” The fraternization of German soldiers with their enemies in no-man’s-land on Christmas Day in 1914 represented the spontaneous suspension of military discipline; and alarmed German officers took pains to prevent its recurrence, for it seemed to repudiate the war’s very premise.15 The practice then modulated into informal agreements across the trenches, which kept large sectors of the front quiet, except for ritual exchanges of fire undertaken in order to appease the officers. Self-mutilation offered an escape to the common soldier that was difficult to brand as indiscipline, however suspicious the circumstances. It was much less common than the several varieties of emotional disorder, the so-called “war neuroses,” which baffled military doctors, outraged officers, and were rewarded generally with brutal psychiatric treatment back home.16 The number of these cases (over 600,000 were reported) pointed, like desertion, less towards calculated acts of resistance, however, than to private afflictions – intellectual disorientation now of massive and clinical proportions.
As the war dragged on and the instances increased, the problem of military captivity – German soldiers being taken prisoner of war – began to strike the German military leadership as possibly a form of resistance, although soldiers who surrendered risked being shot in the process.17 Whatever the circumstances, just under 1 million German soldiers experienced at least part of the First World War as prisoners of their enemies, primarily (in descending order) France, Britain, and Russia.18 The shadow of the Second World War hovers over this story, too. In general, soldiers of the First World War on all sides were spared the brutalities that defined the experience of captivity in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Japan during the Second.19 For German soldiers who were taken prisoner in combat during the First World War, captivity was like occupation inverted: prolonged residence in enemy lands, in the midst of a hostile population, but now utterly without power. For most prisoners of war, captivity meant confinement in special camps, in circumstances that ranged from appalling to almost comfortable. The most fortunate were the officers, who had camps of their own and faced no obligation to work. The others, to the extent that they were physically able, were put to work in a variety of occupations, whether in agriculture, industry, or construction. The grimmest conditions confronted some 200,000 German prisoners who were herded by their French and British captors into labor battalions close behind the front lines, often within range of German artillery (despite prohibitions on such practices in the Hague Conventions). The plight of these and other categories of prisoners could be mitigated, however, in the choreography that governed military captivity generally. No belligerent state was entirely at liberty to maltreat its captives, because soldiers from all belligerent states were in captivity. Buttressed by international agreements and supervised by representatives from the neutral states, the International Red Cross, and many other relief agencies, a system of communication linked prisoners with home via letters and parcels. Conditions in the camps were thus generally known, and for the captors the risks of maltreatment lay in collective reprisals against their own soldiers who were in enemy hands. In 1916, to cite one instance, in retaliation for alleged mistreatment of German prisoners in French camps in north Africa and in British labor companies in France, the German army sent British and French prisoners to work under harsh conditions in the occupied Baltic provinces of Russia.
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