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 - 'Holocaust at Louvain' proclaimed the Daily Mail - and the behaviour 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. Yet the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a wider wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept Europe in the era of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and eye-witness accounts from across Europe at this time, award-winning historian Alan Kramer paints 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #422147 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Jay Winter, author of 'Remembering War'
No serious student of the history of the twentieth century can afford to ignore this book.

Review
This stimulating, scholarly and shrewd book is as rich in original ideas as it is energetic in its revisionism. (Simon Sebag-Montefiore, New York Times Review of Books )

[Kramer's] material is as fascinating as it is depressing. (Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs )

A sobering book with a bleak message, but one that needs to be heard. (Malcolm Brown, BBC History Magazine. d )

No serious student of the history of the twentieth century can afford to ignore this book. (Jay Winter, author of 'Remembering War' )

Simon Sebag-Montefiore, New York Times Review of Books, October 4, 2007
'This stimulating, scholarly and shrewd book is as rich in original ideas as it is energetic in its revisionism.'

Customer Reviews

Read this book and and think again.
This is quite simply a cracking book that expands perceptions and challenges the popular shibboleths of the origins and conduct of the First World War. Of course many of the arguments and much of the evidence is not new but Kramer has succeeded in bringing the strands together in a coherent and relevant way. His main service is to move the examination away from the Western Front and bring insights into the conduct of Austria-Hungary. That places such as Theresienstadt and Mauthausen during WW1 were functioning in way that was to become better known during WW2 comes at first as a surprise but on reflection this is the point of the book: That the social conditions that were conducive to the abominations under Hitler and Stalin were very much part of the practice of modern warfare in WW1. Further that morality was put on the back burner as the scale of the war overcame civilised behaviour in almost all aspects of its conduct.
This book is a `must read' for the serious study of the Great War.


Mike McCarthy
Editor, "The Battle Guide"
Guild of Battlefield Guides