The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914-1918 (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern... |
Buy The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914-1918 (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern... here, one of 750 Germany History books offered for sale at discount prices here in the history books section at R bookshop. There are currently 88549 history books in our history books section, and over 1,000,000 books listed in our book store. We greatly appreciate your patronage at R bookshop and look forward to offering you a large selection of great books at discount prices now and in the future. Thank you for shopping at R Bookshop!
|
You Are Here: Home > History Books > Germany History > Item 79
|
The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914-1918 (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern...
|
by Roger Chickering
Sales Rank: 333920
|
List Price: $110.00
$110.00
At Amazon
on 9-12-2008.
|
|
|
|
Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 644 pages
Published by: Cambridge University PressEdition: 1st Edition February 26, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0521852560
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0521852562
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6.3 x 1.9 inches
Weighs: 2.6 pounds
Reader Reviews
I felt like reading on WWI, but not exactly a military or political narrative. I found this book, and its subject seemed interesting to me, so I decided it to give it a chance, in despite of not finding previous comments on it. Sometimes, in order to understand a complex phenomena, it may be useful to focus in a representative case ("ab uno disce omnes", i.e., "from one example judge of the rest", as the Virgilian verse says), although the author, cautiously, warns us that he does not imply that Freiburg experience (with a population of about 85,000 souls in 1914) is valid to understand the way the German homefront live in WWI. The theme of his book is the pervasive impact of war in the live of the city's residents. However, it is not the usual book written in a "ordinary life in the times of..." style. Perhaps, in order to understand the book, it should be reminded that the Entente implemented a quite effective blockage of continental powers, in order for them not to be able to obtain any item necessary or convenient for war. With that background in mind, the final outcome was that war shortages importuned daily life in most basic ways. They crippled Freiburg local economy, created a bureaucratic nightmare, overtaxed the capacity of public authority to provide effective relief to producers or consumers and eroded urban civility. On order to provide us with a complete, even a total, picture of war in Freiburg, we are informed of facts such as the following: - Ecological imbalance. Making land available to grow food raised serious concerns. There was a systematic uprooting of trees, bushes and edges that had grown in the fields before the war. The entire animal population in the region withdrew in the face of increasing cultivation. More aggressive birds (e.g., blackbird, ravens and sparrows) plundered the vegetable crops, while reduced populations of the other birds (and cats) encouraged regular infestations of the city by insects and rodents. - Treatment of war neurosis. The diagnosis of this condition emphasized the mental predisposition, the pre-traumatic weakness of the hysterical patient. As a cure, it was prescribed "active treatment", a regime of draconian, martial discipline (with male supervisors), often in combination with electric-shock therapy -as if the object were to make patients more afraid of their doctors than the trenches. - The feminization of the city was the war's social signature. Women were everywhere in the war economy. They also represented the principal recipients of charity, the most desperate cases of war-born poverty, the most often objects of bureaucratic humiliation, and the bulk of the city's frustrated consumers. - A story of war, love and tragedy. A German domestic servant helped a French prisoner to escape in the disguise of a woman. After the lovers were apprehended in a guesthouse in their way towards the Swiss frontier, the prisoner was returned to camp and the woman dispatched to the penitentiary in Freiburg, where she hanged herself in despair. - Religion and war: Hugo Schwartz, the pastor at the Christ's Church said to his parishioners: "Should there be a man among us who is not resolve to shed his last drop of blood for the Fatherland, to him I say in the name of God: you are no man, you are no German, you re no Christian. Get out of this church". - By the end of the war, the official pronouncements about it were no more credible than official pronouncements about the price of potatoes. All that (and much more that I do not mention in this summary) is exhaustively developed in 568 pages (plus a statistical appendix plus bibliography). The book is no very engaging, but it is not dry either. It can be savoured by the professional historian and by the educated layperson too. Therefore, my rating is between 5 (content) and 3 (pleasure, sometimes falling to 2, sometimes raising to 4). Other books that I would recommend reading more or less as a complement to understand Germany (and German WWI), would be: i) "History of Germany, 1780-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century" by David Blackbourn; ii) "Die sieben Todsünden des Deutschen Reiches im Ersten Weltkrieg" by Sebastian Haffner (I have found no English translation, I have read a Spanish one: "Los siete pecados capitales del Imperio Alemán en la Primera Guerra Mundial"); and iii) setting a more general framework, "The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich" by Robert M. Citino.
Comment | |
(Report this)
Back To Top
|
The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914-1918 (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern...
Available from Amazon
Price: $110.00
Updated on 9-12-2008.
|
NOTICE: All prices, availability, and specifications
are subject to verification by their respective retailers.
| We offer The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914-1918 (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern... and other related Germany History Books here at Rbookshop.com. To view more books about Germany History please use the previous and next buttons near the top of this page.
|
|
Search for books at
