Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (The Making of the Modern World)

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 416 pages
• Published by: Oxford University Press, USA July 26, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0192803425
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0192803429
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Weighs: 1.8 pounds

Product Review

"This stimulating, scholarly and shrewd book is as rich in original ideas and accounts of unfamiliar aspects of World War I as it is energetic in its revisionism."--New York Times Book Review


Product Description
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 and the behavior 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.
As award-winning historian Alan Kramer shows in this gripping and insightful volume, the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a vast wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept across the map of Europe at the time of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and striking eye-witness accounts from England, France, Germany, and elsewhere, Kramer brings home the reality of the Great War, painting 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. Kramer looks at the psychological impact of trench warfare, addresses the question of German atrocities (were the Germans particularly barbaric, or was savage behavior common on all sides?), and offers a disturbing summation of the war's impact on European culture.
From the Western Front to the Balkans, from Italy to the war in the East, the First World War was the most apocalyptic the world had ever known. This book tells you how and why the civilized nations of Europe descended into unprecedented orgy of destruction.

Reader Reviews
Having read widely in World War I histories, I must say I have some considerable difficulty in placing this book among them. On the one hand, the author does a good, if not unique, job of describing the wholesale destruction which marked the German advances in the West at the beginning of the war and the seemingly epidemic destructiveness which infected the other armies as they went about their business of devastating their enemies. Thus, he goes some way toward fulfilling the promise of the title chosen for his work. On the other hand, and it's hard to tell whether this was planned or he just couldn't help himself, he also provides a tangential but I thought quite interesting examination of other aspects of the war including the fallacies which arose and have persisted about the terms and effects of the Versailles Treaty and the tenuous connection between the politics of the German defeat and the rise of the Nazis. The upshot is the reader's confusion about what exactly the author was up to. If the book was intended as a general history of the war, it fails badly if only because it does not address so many significant events and personalities. If it was meant to demonstrate that the wholesale destruction which characterized the behavior of most of the combatants was an historical first, it's all pretty much been said before, and just about as convincingly. Not at all a waste of a reader's time, but the hours might be better spent reading Messrs. Keegan, Gilbert or Strachan.