Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War
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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Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War
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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Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War

Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War

Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War

Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War

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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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780191580116
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Publication date: 11/06/2008
Series: Making of the Modern World
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 5 MB

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

  • 1: The Burning of Louvain
  • 2: The Radicalization of Warfare
  • 3: The Warriors
  • 4: German Singularity?
  • 5: Culture and War
  • 6: Trench Warfare and its Consequences
  • 7: War, bodies, and minds
  • 8: Victory or trauma?
  • Conclusion
  • Historiographical Note
  • Bibliography
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