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.
About the Author
Alan Kramer is Professor of history at Trinity College, Dublin. He has published widely on German and Italian history in the twentieth century, including (with John Horne) German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial, which won the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History and the 2002 Western Front Association's Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Book Award for the best work in English on the Great War.
Reviews
Review from previous edition 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 *
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 *
A sobering book with a bleak message, but one that needs to be heard. * Malcolm Brown, BBC History Magazine. *
No serious student of the history of the twentieth century can afford to ignore this book. * Jay Winter, author of 'Remembering War' *
Book Information
ISBN 9780199543779
Author Alan Kramer
Format Paperback
Page Count 450
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 138mm * 24mm
About the Author
Alan Kramer is Professor of history at Trinity College, Dublin. He has published widely on German and Italian history in the twentieth century, including (with John Horne) German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial, which won the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History and the 2002 Western Front Association's Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Book Award for the best work in English on the Great War.
Reviews
Review from previous edition 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 *
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 *
A sobering book with a bleak message, but one that needs to be heard. * Malcolm Brown, BBC History Magazine. *
No serious student of the history of the twentieth century can afford to ignore this book. * Jay Winter, author of 'Remembering War' *
Book Information
ISBN 9780199543779
Author Alan Kramer
Format Paperback
Page Count 450
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 138mm * 24mm
