Dynamic of Destruction : Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War

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OUP Oxford, 2007 M07 12 - 448 páginas
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.

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Contenido

Introduction
1
1 The Burning of Louvain
6
2 The Radicalization of Warfare
31
3 The Warriors
69
4 German Singularity?
114
5 Culture and War
159
6 Trench Warfare and its Consequences
211
7 War Bodies and Minds
230
Conclusion
328
Historiographical Note
339
Hague Convention IV Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land 1907
347
Notes
349
Bibliography
394
Sources and Acknowledgements for Illustrations
416
Index
419
Derechos de autor

8 Victory Trauma and PostWar Disorder
268

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