Alan Kramer. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 446 pp. $34.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-280342-9.
Reviewed by Andrew Donson (Departments of History and German and Scandinavian Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Published on H-German (February, 2008)
Total War Everywhere
This ambitious book is in a class by itself. There are many textbooks on individual countries during the First World War, as well as comparative histories on peacemaking, military operations, capital cities, and the origins of the conflict, but until now no one has attempted to cover the effect of the war on both soldiers and civilians across all of Europe, including the oft-neglected Italian and Balkan theaters. Through this mega-synthesis, Alan Kramer suggests that a primary goal of the belligerents across Europe was to defend their national cultures or to export them on their way to becoming a world power. Because the means to do so was now industrial warfare, they consequently engaged in immense cultural destruction and tolerated mass killing of soldiers as well as civilians.
This disregard for the enemy culture and civilians lives, Kramer argues in an original analysis, had origins in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, during which the Ottomans, Bulgarians, Croats, and Serbs killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and deported even more. Such a wanton approach toward civilian lives in turn became standard during the First World War in the operations of the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and, later, Italian armies. Their soldiers knowingly fired on enemy civilians and starved them by requisitioning food. Their officers tolerated the theft of civilian personal property, including private art collections, but also purposely destroyed their enemies' public cultural symbols, such as libraries and cathedrals, and deported tens of thousands of enemy civilians to work behind the lines at making munitions to use against their compatriots. At the same time, the governments of the warring nations accepted mass slaughter of their own soldiers, which, Kramer rightly points out, was as horrendous on the Italian as on the western front. Supporting the armies and civilian governments were countless poets, academics, artists, and other intellectuals throughout Europe who took fascination with the violence. This devaluing of civilian life and foreign culture--particularly in central, eastern, and southern Europe--made it possible for the postwar fascist and communist movements to take violence against civilians to even further extremes.
As it is largely a synthesis, much in this book is not new. Comparison to previous wars in history undermine its implicit claim that the First World War was somehow singular in the extent of the civilian killing and cultural destruction: The deaths of non-combatants far outnumbered soldiers in the Punic Wars, the Thirty Years' War, the Latin American Wars, and the Hui Minorities War, among others, and large wars with minimal civilian deaths have been the exception in history rather than the rule. The book's thesis at times falters in sections that revert to long narratives on military operations and political developments, many of which suggest that imperialist aims motivated the war, even after it began, rather than the goal of exporting or defending culture. The book could be more concise; its length and detail would make it a difficult read for undergraduates.
The contribution of this book lies its multi-national analysis using sources in English, French, Italian, and German. By giving attention to the usually overlooked southern fronts in addition to the eastern and western ones, it presents evidence that undermines the now increasingly popular argument that the German army was unique in its ruthless treatment of enemy civilians and exploitation of their property. Dynamics of Destruction breaks new ground in showing that, across Europe, the First World War undermined respect for enemy cultures and cheapened the lives of not only soldiers but also foreign and domestic civilians alike.
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Citation:
Andrew Donson. Review of Kramer, Alan, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14223
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