Anne Lipp. Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung 1914-1918. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003. 354 S. + 18 Abb. EUR 45.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-525-35140-6.
Reviewed by Rainer Pöppinghege (Historisches Institut, Universitaet Paderborn)
Published on H-German (January, 2005)
Originating the
Since the 1980s historical research on the First World War has used innovative methodological approaches which have led to a shift in paradigms. The classical topics of military and operational history and questions of socio-economics have been abandoned while patterns of interpretation and experience have attracted more and more interest. Thus particular attention has been paid to the ordinary soldier's wartime experience and life at the "home front." Anne Lipp's book convincingly adds to the cultural history of the Great War by taking into account how the soldiers' war experience was guided by military authorities.
A Representative Sample?
When in the course and at the end of the First World War it became clear to insightful contemporaries in Germany that the German Army would not be victorious, one of the explanations was that opposing propaganda was more professional and more powerful. While historians so far have analyzed daily newspapers and their role before and during the war, in her dissertation Anne Lipp focuses on a more particular topic: she analyzes a sample of 5 of the 110 German battlefield magazines (Feldzeitungen) and integrates them into the wider context of the soldiers' patriotic instruction (Vaterländischer Unterricht). Regardless of the small number taken into account, she tries to prove that due to their circulation these five most important Feldzeitungen are representative of their kind. One has to distinguish between magazines with origins in the trenches, which were originally grassroots publications by low-ranking solders (Schützengrabenzeitungen) without propagandistic targets, and official magazines. The intention of trench newspapers was to cheer up the comrades. By ridiculing the war's circumstances, these publications were somehow subversive. On the other hand we find official magazines, provided with a better infrastructure and published by at least semi-professional journalists (Armeezeitungen). They were distributed by military authorities and served to counterbalance disharmonies and lacking motivation among the soldiers in the trenches. Lipp carefully analyzes both kinds of battlefield magazines, proving that in the long run all of them served propagandistic purposes among the troops. In 1917 the army press center (Feldpressestelle) was founded, which provided articles for Schützengrabenzeitungen as well as official magazines. Thus official doctrine penetrated all kinds of publications at the front.
Reactions to Discontent
From today's critical perspective one might assume that battlefield magazines with their huge amount of manipulative articles and censure are worthless as a source treating soldiers' experiences. But Lipp quite convincingly demonstrates their analytic value: the official articles can be regarded as the military leadership's reactions to widespread discontent in the trenches. They took up rumors and complaints, and tried to convince the soldiers of what, in the eyes of the military leaders, was the truth. In this way the articles in the magazines represent what the military leaders regarded as the soldiers' experience and interpretation--just like a color slide-negative. Is it this defensive character that proves the deficiencies of German propaganda? The soldier-journalists working at the editorial boards or in the army press center did a more or less professional job. But they lacked a feeling of how to reach soldiers' hearts. The magazines shared an educational and highly rational approach, refraining from emotional appeals. Here one might wish to compare them to French and British trench magazines. If German propagandistic activities failed to succeed both among the soldiers and the international public, this failure was mainly due to structural contradictions. For German combatants in the trenches it was hard to believe that after four years of fighting, the military operations of the following week should bring final victory. To them it was obvious that holding the line was the best they could do. And after the United States entered the war in 1917, it became clear that not even this mission could be accomplished. The post-war discourse that the homefront stabbed the combatants into the back--that strikes and social protest finally led to military defeat--was widely influenced by battlefield magazines and the contemporary discourse (p. 306). But it sounds a little too simple when Lipp claims that propagandistic manipulation and guidance ran from top to bottom. One could argue that certain patterns of interpretation had to have reflected particular mental dispositions. Even members of the propagandistic department IIIb of the General Headquarters were convinced of what they were doing until summer 1918. They did not regard their work as manipulation, but rather as helping the truth find its way to the public. However, together with further media, battlefield magazines helped conserve or initially create the stereotype of the male soldier who defended Germany against allied troops. This heroic image was transferred to the peacetime ideal of the post-Versailles Wehrhaftigkeit and constituted one of those heavy burdens of the young Weimar democracy.
Anne Lipp convincingly demonstrates that, in writing a cultural history of the First World War, we must closely examine communicative structures. She integrates a variety of approaches. One of the great merits of the volume is that she not only analyzes the content of the publications themselves but also the files and documents of the wider propagandistic context: the Feldpressestelle and the Vaterländischer Unterricht. Her book is a fine example of how to integrate military and gender history as well as the history of communication into an innovative approach.
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Citation:
Rainer Pöppinghege. Review of Lipp, Anne, Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung 1914-1918.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10113
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