The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914-1918 (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare) [Hardcover]

Roger Chickering (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521852560 | ISBN-13: 978-0521852562 | Publication Date: February 26, 2007 | Edition: 1

In deference to the principle that total war requires total history, Roger Chickering traces the all-embracing impact of the First World War on life in the German city of Freiburg. His book shows how the war took over every facet of life in the city, from industrial production to the supply of basic material resources, above all food and fuel. It documents the breakdown of distinctions between the home front and the fighting front, as the city fell victim to strategic bombing. It analyzes the war as a sensory experience, which could be seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted as it exhausted the city, drained it of residents, and eroded civic bonds among those who remained. Roger Chickering offers the most comprehensive history ever written of a German city at war. The book will appeal to urban and military historians, as well as to social and cultural historians.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The first impression of this book is that it is a labor of love that took many years to complete. It is a well-balanced account of Freiburg during the Great War..."
--Jeffrey R. Smith, Northwestern State University of Louisiana, German Studies Review

"Chickering's study of Freiburg does not revise the conclusions of more recent social research, but its thoroughness and insight provide a much more exact understanding of how war actually works on the homefront: requisition, distribution, censorship, taxation, charity, etc. A chapter about the assault on sensory experience... is new and fascinating, as is Chickering's account of the disintegration of organizational life. One can literally feel the war tear Freiburg apart."
--Isabel V. Hull, Cornell University, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"The book is extraordinary, almost a reference book: that is likely how this 26-page monster will be used. Chapter by chapter, Chickering analyses, in Freiburg, the home/front connection/divide, mobilization, propaganda, women, crime, prisoners of war, food, class, and religion, among other subjects...formidable learning is on display." --The International History Review

"...compelling reading for the specialist, students of Wilhemine Germany, and those interested in twentieth-century total war...a welcome addition to the literature on the Great War, for it demonstrates that, in the modern age, few can avoid the fall-out of conflict." --Frederic Krome, University of Cincinnati Clermont College: Canadian Journal of History

"Chickering's goal, he tells us, was to produce an account that was "comprehensive, coherent, plausible, and ... easy to read" (p. 9). It is well met." -Jesse Kauffman, H-Urban

"This is the best and most revealing of several recent books dealing with the urban social history of The Great War." -Len Shurtleff, Stand To!

"a marvel of nuance and insight" -Central European History, Michael Geyer

"Chickering's unfailingly observant, detailed and comprehensive study of civilian life in Freiburg in Breisgua during World War I is a marvel of nuance and insight." -Michael Geyer, Central European History

Book Description

Roger Chickering traces the all-embracing impact of the First World War on life in the German city of Freiburg. His book shows how the war took over every facet of life in the city, from industrial production to the supply of basic material resources, above all food and fuel.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 644 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (February 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521852560
• ISBN-13: 978-0521852562
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #329,162 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A tale of shortage, attrition and exhaustion, June 10, 2007

By 

César González Rouco (Madrid, Madrid Spain) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914-1918 (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare) (Hardcover)

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.