War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare) by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius - 9780521661577 - Compare Prices on New & Used Textbooks, Cheap Textbooks

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		War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare) by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius ISBN-10: 9780521661577 ISBN-10: 0-521-66157-9 ISBN-13: 9780521661577 ISBN-13: 978-0-521-66157-7 Hardcover 2000-05-18 Cambridge University Press Find Lowest Price
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Product Description Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius presents a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of this encounter. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, he reveals how German views of the East changed during total war, and how these views affected the return of German armies under the Nazis. This persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.
Book Description Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius here presents a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of this encounter. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, it reveals how German views of the East changed during total war, and how these views affected the return of German armies under the Nazis. This persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.
Download Description War Land on the Eastern Front is a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of their encounter with Eastern Europe. It presents an 'anatomy of an occupation', charting the ambitions and realities of the new German military state there. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, it reveals how German views of the East changed during total war. New categories for viewing the East took root along with the idea of a German cultural mission in these supposed wastelands. After Germany's defeat, the Eastern front's 'lessons' were taken up by the Nazis, radicalized, and enacted when German armies returned to the East in World War II. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.
Reviews

Flawed Anatomy of an Occupation................. Winston Churchill titled his book on the Eastern Front during the First World War: The Unknown War (1931). 75 years since then, the War in the east (1914-18), still remains an "Unknown War". Between 1920's and now only a handful of books have appeared in English on the Eastern Front, the most well known being that of Prof. Norman Stone's (1975). Most of these books focus on the military strategy and tactics of the conflict. Yet the German military occupied and ruled a wide swath of territories of the Russian empire, including Lithuania, Latvia and parts of Poland. So far no book has focused comprehensively on the experience and cultural impact of this German encounter with the "East". This is all the more surprising since within a generation these lands were again the site of fierce ideological combat, harsh German occupation policies and the Holocaust. Dr.Vejas Liulevicius' ambitious book aims to remedy this deficiency in scholarship. The author seeks to investigate the Eastern Front experience during this occupation (called "Ober Ost" after the title of the Supreme Commander in the East, Oberbefehlshaber) in detail, from the point of view of Germans and the resulting " Mindscape of the East" it produced that was to have catastrophic consequences 20 years later. The opening chapter delineates the physical experience of occupation of the German soldiers in the aftermath of a Russian "scorched Earth" retreat and as to how this experience was internalized by the German soldiers. Liulevicius argues that the German troops and officers sought to remedy the mix of 'chaos, disease and barbarism' that they saw by the ideas of order, hygiene and Kulturarbeit ('cultural work'). The next four chapters amplify and discuss the mechanics of the occupation including the streamlining and standardizing the various languages and identities of the new subjects and the process of ethno cultural modernization this entailed. He also explores how this program of Law and Order and the reconciling of the region's several nationalities to benevolent German paternalism, led instead to rebellious hatred. Chapter 6 titled `Crisis' explores the huge inflation in the German controlled area in the wake of the October Revolution in Russia and the failure of the initial negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in December 1917 and its affect on the policies of Ober Ost. By the time the Bolsheviks were forced to return to the table in February 1918, the German army had occupied Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine as well. With the signing of the armistice, the Bolsheviks further ceded territories and the Ober Ost's rule extended up to the Kursk-Pskov-Narva line. Yet within a few months all of these territories were lost due to the defeat in the West. Liulevicius vividly details the consequences of this loss and the resulting disillusionment and bitterness among the veterans of the Ober Ost and the degeneration of the occupation into pillaging and massacre of the Freikorps in 1918-19. (To a general reader like me, the recounting of the jarring transformation that freebooters like Rudolf Hoss, later the commandant of Auschwitz, underwent in the East during this period is an eye opener). It was here, the author concludes that the cultural and ideological foundations were laid for German policy of extermination and enslavement in Eastern Europe in World War 2. The final chapter, "The Triumph of Raum" traces how the categories, perceptions and practices of Ober Ost were radicalized under the Nazis and translated into geopolitical concepts of Volk and Raum and the ideology of racial utopia. To support his thesis, the author has drawn on a vast array of primary German source material that became available after the end of the cold war as well as on Lithuanian sources. These include government documents, letters, diaries and memoirs. Liulevicius chosen method to organize this source material is of piling up empirical evidence to the point of repetition. Granted that the high noon of theory is over, using a collage technique to layout evidence however is no substitute. No analytical schema is used to under gird this plethora of primary evidence. At best one can discern a diluted Foucauldian grid to analyze Ober Ost's policies in terms of bureaucratic surveillance. No attempt is made to use the extensive scholarship that exists on the experience, mechanics and politics of Imperialism or to compare the similarities and differences that existed between the Ober Ost rule in the East with the contemporaneous 4 year German occupation of Belgium with its attendant plundering and the en masse deportations. The `big picture' argument of the book is to understand how the events and experiences of 1914-19 Ober Ost occupation laid the groundwork of and informed the policies and atrocities of the later Nazi occupation. Yet no direct evidence is provided to substantiate such a claim. Whatever evidence is provided is on a very general level and this is in fact a major weakness of this text. To take one instance, it is well known that delousing became routine for soldiers and civilians during the First World War in general and on the eastern front in particular following the recent discovery that the louse carried typhus germs. However, based on the evidence presented in this book, one cannot answer the question: how did typhus come to be viewed by the Nazis as a "Jewish disease", except in very general terms. Similarly, very little attention is also devoted to the genesis of new disciplines like "geopolitics" or Ostforschung-"Science of the East" in the 1920's and how these provided the Nazis with the conceptual terminology for the ideology of Raum ohne Volk in the East (except a brief about Karl Haushofer, the prophet of geopolitics and his influence on the Nazis via his disciples, Rudolf Hess and Walter Darre). The book would have been far more valuable if the Ober Ost program was analyzed instead in terms of the past German policies in the East. It is indeed possible to argue that Ober Ost practices and categories were just a continuation of the pre-existing traditions of Kulturarbeit in the East beginning from Frederick II's programs in Poland and continuing in the Bismarkian policies. In conclusion, although this book is to be welcomed as a pioneer in opening up the experiences and mechanics of German occupation in the East during WW1 to discussion, it is seriously flawed in attempting to assess the events through the lens of the future rather than on their own terms or in terms of the German collective past. In this, the book firmly belongs to what Michael André Bernstein called the genre of Apocalyptic History or the practice of analyzing history of a time period not on its own terms but from the perspective and knowledge of what was to come in the future. It is strongly recommended that this book be supplemented by reading it in light of Larry Wolff's outstanding, Inventing Eastern Europe (1994) and Paul Weindling's important work, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890-1945.
Very impressive work As someone who has a MA in Modern European History and with a concentration in early 20th century German cultural history, I found Liulevicius's work to be not just thought-provoking, but very easy to read. It is sad that the Eastern Front has been neglected as a whole, as the experiences of Lands and Spaces played such a key role in the development of German postwar attitudes toward the East. It is no accident that the first shots of World War II were fired there and that most of the fighting and killing occurred there. In reading this book, the reader can get a sense of why these later events occurred the way that they did. The concept of German Kultur as a driving force intrigues me. Until recently, most military histories did not discuss the mindsets of the average soldier, instead focusing on the leaders. Well, I could say a lot more about this work, but I think brevity is the key and that the above comments just only illustrate a few of the many fine points that Liulevicius makes in his book.
Classic Scholarship A magnificent scholarly work on the (unfortunately) often ignored Eastern Front of World War I. Liulevicius paints a compelling, yet chilling picture of the experiences of the German army of occupation. He skillfully reconstructs the occupiers' mindscape and masterfully examines how the collective experinces in the East played a role in the constructiion of Nazi ideology. Liulevicius' work in this neglected field is a welcome contribution to the academic world. Not only is this work insightful, but it is wonderfully written. Avoiding a common pitfall of most academic writing, Liulevicus's skillful prose and well constructed narrative keep the reader engaged and unwilling to part with the text.

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