Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War

Benjamin Ziemann is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is the author of many books and articles on twentieth-century German and European history and a renowned expert in the comparative military and cultural history of the First World War. His books include Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (2013), War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914-1923 (2007), and as co-editor, Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought and Nuclear Conflict, 1945-90 (2016).

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsList of Abbreviations1. The First World War as a Laboratory of Violence: IntroductionPart I: Practices of Violence 2. Soldiers of the First World War: Killing, Surviving, Discourses of Violence3. German Soldiers and their Conduct of War in 19144. Ernst Jünger: Practitioner and Observer of KillingII. Refusal of Violence 5. Desertion in the German Army 1914–19186. Disillusionment and Collective Exhaustion among German Soldiers on the Western Front: The Path to Revolution in 19187. The German Army in Autumn 1918: A Hidden Strike?III. Processing Violence 8. The Weimar Republic: A Brutalized Society?9. The Delayed Rejection of Violence: Hermann Schützinger’s Conversion to Pacifism10. ‘Rear Area Militarism’: Discussing the War in Anti-military Bestsellers in the Weimar RepublicSelect BibliographyIndex

Violence and the German Soldier is an important, salutary, and perceptive study that complicates our understanding of the German veteran's responses to the carnage of war ... the book is essential reading for all serious students of the effects of violence on the veterans of the First World War.