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Dynamic of Destruction: Culture And Mass Killing In The First World War (Making Of The Modern World) - Softcover

Book 4 of 7: Making of the Modern World

Kramer, Alan

 
9780199543779: Dynamic of Destruction: Culture And Mass Killing In The First World War (Making Of The Modern World)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0199543771 ISBN 13: 9780199543779
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

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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About the Author

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


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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Publication date
2009
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0199543771
ISBN 13 
9780199543779
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
434