Censorship and Propaganda in World War I: A Comprehensive History, by Eberhard DemmPropaganda and Conflict: War, Media and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Connelly

Abstract

The study of propaganda is now an established component of school and university courses about the history of modern warfare. Numerous doctoral theses and academic studies have continued to make propaganda and its twin, censorship, the central focus of their research, examining its various forms, including print, art and the moving image. However, most of these works have focused on the activities of single countries or certain modes of transmission, leaving Harold D. Laswell’s work from the 1920s, subsequently re-edited in 1938 and again in 1971, as a rare example of a truly comprehensive overview. Eberhard Demm’s book seeks to fill this lacuna. Where some distinguished historians have preferred to look at propaganda and censorship through the paradigm of ‘war culture’, and others have discussed propaganda in terms of coercion, Demm has produced a detailed analysis which considers a wide spectrum of responses to the war of 1914–18 to show that war propaganda was dominated neither by patriotic acceptance nor by violent refusal and dissent.