Overview

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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9780199543779

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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<br> A sobering book with a bleak message, but one that needs to be heard. --Malcolm Brown, BBC History Magazine.<br> No serious student of the history of the twentieth century can afford to ignore this book. --Jay Winter, author of Remembering War<br>

Kramer's careful weighing of the available evidence, and his insistence on taking seriously the way that events were understood at the time rather than perpetuating historical myth, provides an instructive methodology for future historians. In its centennial year, our understanding of the First World War is still incomplete. Alan Kramer shows us why it is so important to continue to investigate its events and interpretations. --Library of Social Science Book Reviews This stimulating, scholarly and shrewd book is as rich in original ideas and accounts of unfamiliar aspects of World War I as it is energetic in its revisionism. --New York Times Book Review An invaluable contribution in Great War historiography and pedagogy. --World History Bulletin An ambitious book in a class by itself, deserving of careful reading by any WWI scholar. -- Camaraderie: The Journal of the Western Front Association

This stimulating, scholarly and shrewd book is as rich in original ideas and accounts of unfamiliar aspects of World War I as it is energetic in its revisionism. --New York Times Book Review An invaluable contribution in Great War historiography and pedagogy. --World History Bulletin An ambitious book in a class by itself, deserving of careful reading by any WWI scholar. -- Camaraderie: The Journal of the Western Front Association

Author Information

Alan Kramer is Professor of History and fellow of Trinity College Dublin.

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