Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War : Killing, Dying, Surviving

Abstract

Winner of the Geisteswissenschaften International Translation Prize for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2015 During the Great War, mass killing took place on an unprecedented scale. Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War explores the practice of violence in the German army and demonstrates how the killing of enemy troops, the deaths of German soldiers and their survival were entwined. As the war reached its climax in 1918, German soldiers refused to continue killing in their droves, and thus made an active contribution to the German defeat and ensuing revolution. Examining the post-war period, the chapters of this book also discuss the contested issue of a ‘brutalization’ of German society as a prerequisite of the Nazi mass movement. Biographical case studies on key figures such as Ernst Jünger demonstrate how the killing of enemy troops by German soldiers followed a complex set of rules. Benjamin