BOOK: Siegfried Sassoon, "The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston"

Siegried Sassoon: The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. [My copy is a later reprint, probably from the 1990s.] 0571099130. 656 pp.

I suppose it's inevitable that a war, being such a momentous event in the lives of people that get swept up in it, spawns a certain amount of ‘war literature’ in which these people try to grapple with their experiences; but even so, WW1 seems to have been more than usually abundant in this department. I'm not *terribly* keen to read this sort of thing, but I felt vaguely compelled to read some WW1 memoirs, mostly in the hope of understanding a bit better what it was like for the participants, and what made this war so different and more shocking than the previous ones. There seems to have been a widespread idea that this particular war represented some sort of break with the past, that wholesale changes must occur after it in pretty much every sphere of human activity, that nothing must go on like before, neither in the arts, nor in international relations, nor indeed in the very fabric of society. There have been plenty of wars before WW1 (and some since), but none seems to have shocked society in quite the same way.

Anyway, I can't say that I really understand anything about these questions any better after reading this book than before it, but then it wouldn't have been fair to the book to expect *that* from it. In any case, it was an interesting enough read, though I can't help noticing that the parts I found the most interesting were those that had the least to do with the war :) The book is a first-person narrative of the protagonist, George Sherston, presenting the story of his life from his childhood to the end of the WW1. From having a brief look at the biography of Sassoon on the wikipedia, it seems clear that Sherston's story has a great deal in common with Sassoon's own life, and it would be interesting to see which details in this book are fictional and which are autobiographical, but the present edition doesn't say anything about that; Sherston's story is presented simply as a work of fiction.

It initially appeared as three separate works — Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston's Progress (1936) — but the story continues seamlessly from one part to the next, and the boundary between the first and the second part in particular seems completely arbitrary, so it's really better to think of the whole thing as a single work, and I think it was a great idea to publish it in a single volume the way we see here. I think it was the title of the first part that did much to persuade me to read this book, as the mention of fox-hunting hinted at the vanishing world of the British pre-war rural upper class (see my post from last year about David Cannadine's extremely interesting book about the decline of that class). In this I was not disappointed; I knew pretty much absolutely nothing about fox-hunting and the fox hunters before, and the first 1/3 or so of this book is a very nice introduction to this subject (and was, for me, the most interesting part of the whole book).

*

The book starts somewhere at the very end of the 19th century (see the mention of 1896 on p. 24). George Sherston is a boy who lost his parents early and is being raised his aunt Evelyn, who lives somewhere deep in the English countryside. The world we see in the first few chapters strikes me as having probably more in common with Tolkien's Shire than with anything that exists there today. Aunt Evelyn is perhaps not extravagantly rich by the standards of the upper class of the time, and I think the house she lives in is really a house and not a palace (which seem to have often been called “houses” by the English upper classes), but she has an independent income large enough to employ some three maids, a groom, and a stable-boy. As George has inherited a similar income from his parents, he has little reason to care about getting an education or a career, and his aunt doesn't seem to particularly mind this (he ends up attending Cambridge for some time, but doesn't graduate).

His chief interest in life are country sports, especially fox-hunting, but also cricket and (later) golf. In this he is encouraged by his groom, Dixon, who realizes that his best bet to come closer to the hunting world himself is by encouraging George to take up hunting. It was quite interesting to follow George's gradual development as a hunter. At first he has little idea what he is supposed to be doing, and suffers considerably from a lack of self-confidence, but his zest for the sport never wavers, and gradually he becomes thoroughly familiar with it. He does not shy from expenses that his income can just barely support; he buys a horse, and then another better one, and later I think still another one; and if no good hunting is going on close to where he lives, he endures long bicycle trips and train rides if it helps him get to an area with a better hunt — the logistics of getting himself, his horse, and possibly his groom to the other side of the county are not exactly trivial.

*

Fox-hunting has always struck me as a perfectly ridiculous sport, and this hasn't really changed after my reading this book. It seems to consist mostly of riding around the countryside jumping over hedges and fences. Supposedly there are dogs involved somewhere, and there might even be a fox that they're chasing after, but the hunters, judging by what we see of George here, seem to often have only the most distant and tenuous connection with these animals. Their biggest foe is in fact not the fox, but the farmer who puts barbed wire into his hedge and who kills foxes by more practical means which do not involve a large body of bizarrely-attired gentry traipsing around the countryside on horseback (“that sanctimonious old vulpicide”, p. 120 :)))). Wilde surely had a point in describing fox-hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”.

And yet, I can't really bring myself to have anything against the practice. It may be a bit silly, but there's something charming about the very idea of something as silly as this going on. I vaguely remember, while visiting London more than twenty years ago, that I saw some people protesting against fox-hunting, and I read somewhere that they later successfully managed to get it outlawed. I suppose their excuse was that it's cruel to the fox; but I suspect that the real reason was that the activists disliked the fact that rich people were having fun. But surely the solution to that is to abolish the rich people, not to abolish fox-hunting. And they have only grown richer since then; what good will your prohibition of fox-hunting do when you tolerate the existence of a class of global bazillionaires who are rich and powerful enough to start personal space colonization projects? It would have been far better if they were hunting foxes instead.

George is not, admittedly, entirely wrapped up in fox-hunting. He also likes to read, and is particularly fond of fine 18th-century editions, but he goes about it in a scattershot way and it isn't exactly obvious from this that he would later become a prominent writer and poet (if we accept for the moment that Sherston is just a thinly-disguised Sassoon).

*

I suppose many people today would criticize George for leading such a narrow, unambitious life. His world is limited, not even to England, but pretty much to just one county of it. He goes rarely even to London, and when he does it's mostly to buy hunting clothes and gear. He has no interest whatever in the world abroad. “Europe was nothing but a name to me. I couldn't even bring myself to read about it in the daily paper.” (P. 176.) “Had there been no Great War I might quite conceivably have remained on English soil till I was buried in it. Others have done the same, so why not Sherston?” (P. 563.) As I said, many people would probably criticize him for this. Heck, in the book itself, his lawyer and trust fund guardian criticizes him heavily for not finishing his studies and taking up a career. For all I know, perhaps Sassoon himself, later in life, disapproved of the narrow horizons of his youth. (“It looks rather paltry”, p. 201.)

And yet, and yet — how wonderful this sort of life seems! How nice it would be to live like this, content and happy in a small and homely world, a familiar place filled with things and *people* that you are used to! Perhaps the biggest crime wrought by the WW1 was that it reached all the way in to people like Sherston, thickly cocooned deep in the heart of merrie old England though they were, and tore them mercilessly out of their cozy environment, flinging them into open, into the din and chaos and turmoil not only of the war, but of modernity, into a windy world of instability and change, in which the calm and tranquility of their pre-war lives would remain forever impossible. But perhaps it is unfair to blame all this on the WW1; these changes would have happened sooner or later anyway, due to technological progress, but WW1 came at a time when it could act as a catalyst to make them happen faster and therefore come across as even more shocking than they would otherwise have been.

*

Once the war breaks out, the book gets considerably less interesting. George joins the army early on, first as an ordinary soldier in the Yeomanry, a sort of reserve unit, but he then feels obliged to find a way to get to the front lines earlier, and gets himself commissioned as an officer in an infantry regiment of the regular army (pp. 228–31). A retired captain whom he got to know through fox-hunting puts in a good word for George with his old regiment, and between that and the fact that George is (by class) a gentleman, getting a commission was apparently a completely trivial matter (he became a second liutenant, which seems to be the lowest officer rank).

There are several fine passages illustrating the simple, trusting patriotism of the generation who volunteered for the army in such large numbers in 1914. “To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage [. . .] was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.” (P. 230.) “[H]e had arrived at manhood in the nick of time to serve his country in what he naturally assumed to be a just and glorious war. [. . .] he was a shining epitome his unembittered generation which gladly gave itself to the German shells and machine-guns” (p. 241).

Soon George is in France with his regiment. They are being rotated between periods in the trenches on the actual front line and much safer periods in the rear, billeted in houses and barns and the like in various French villages (p. 263). At one point George gets a safer job as a transport officer, but eventually turns it down (p. 274). By the time Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man ends, in early 1916, most of George's friends whom we got to know earlier in the book have been killed (including Dixon, his old groom, who had enlisted by pretending to be eight years below his real age; pp. 228, 267).

The narrative of George's war experience struck me as somewhat picaresque; one damn random thing after another — which, I suppose, is realistic enough. Even he himself says that “it could be tedious and repetitional for an ordinary Infantry Officer like myself” (p. 407). Occasionally their routine is interrupted by a bigger push or raid towards the enemy trenches, which generally doesn't accomplish anything much, exactly as you'd expect on the Western Front (p. 307). In July 1916 he is also involved in the Battle of the Somme. Eventually he falls sick with enteritis and is sent to England for a few months to recover (p. 367); he even manages to get some hunting done.

By the time he is back with his unit, in early 1917, he finds that most of his old comrades from 1916 are dead and gone, and in the ranks the enthusiastic volunteers of 1914 were by then mostly replaced by decidedly unenthusiastic recent draftees. He gets injured in the shoulder during the Battle of Arras (p. 445) and gets sent back to England again. By then he feels, like it seems many WW1 soldiers did, that the civilians back home don't and can't understand the war the way the soldiers did (pp. 421, 451, 464). He spends some time staying in the mansion of an elderly aristocratic couple who voluntarily take reconvalescing officers as guests (p. 460).

*

In mid-1917, there was much talk about “war aims”. I remember reading a little about this elsewhere before; were each country to publish its war aims, it could be a first step towards a negotiated peace. Many, however, were against committing to any definite war aims; the only aim, they would say, should be to win the war and then take what they could from the defeated enemy. George cannot help noticing that Britain had entered the war ostensibly to liberate “gallant little Belgium” but now they seem to be fighting mostly for things such as British control over the oil wells of Mesopotamia (p. 475). War, in short, is being unfairly prolonged because the original defensive war aims have been quietly replaced by aggresive ones (p. 496).

He establishes contact with peace activists, including a philosopher named Thornton Tyrrell who seems to be a very thinly disguised version of Bertrand Russell (pp. 477–8); and following their advice, he writes a defiant anti-war statement (p. 496) and sends it to his commanding officer. The hope seems to be that the resulting court-martial and the publicity surrounding it (pp. 505–7) could be used to draw attention to the cause of peace, and that such a statement would have much more weight coming from a wounded and decorated veteran than from random pacifist intellectuals who had spent the whole war safe in England (p. 483).

The army, however, proves to be a fairly cunning institution. The officers dealing with George's case are not at all keen to arrest him and let him turn himself into a martyr, and would rather treat his gesture as a medical issue, a nervous breakdown caused by shell-shock. Eventualy a friend persuades him that the army would simply shut him up in a lunatic asylum for the rest of the war if he remains obstinate (p. 512), and George finally gives in and is transferred to a hospital for soldiers suffering from shell-shock. He spends a good deal of time playing golf (p. 524) and thinking about his position; he decides that, since his original intention of pacifist activism has been thwarted, the only decent thing to do is to return into action and not accept a safe posting in Britain: “I would rather be killed than survive as one who had ‘wangled’ his way through by saying that the War ought to stop” (p. 549).

He spends some time in Ireland, where his Depot (“a place where recruits are assembled before being sent to active units”, says the wiktionary) has been moved due to the Troubles (p. 558). This at least gives him plenty of opportunities for hunting, and there is a very funny scene where the hunt is cancelled due to rain and they spend the whole day visiting an interminable succession of friends instead, getting more and more drunk with each visit :) (pp. 577–82).

Next (by now it's February 1918) Sherston is sent to Egypt and Palestine, but before he can get involved in any real fighting against the Turks he is transferred to France again, since the situation there has apparently deteriorated and needs reinforcements (pp. 597–600). By now, seeing little point in the war, the most Sherston can do is focus on taking good care of the men under his command (p. 618). Even then, in the summer of 1918, nobody has any idea that the war would be over in a few months (p. 633). Eventually George gets wounded again, by friendly fire (p. 649); he is sent to England again to recover, and that is where his war experience ends.

*

I found the ending of the book somewhat abrupt, and couldn't help wondering a little how Sherston's, or rather Sassoon's, story continues, how he ended up becoming a writer and poet, and how his opinions of the war and of pacifism developed in subsequent years. And of course, as always with anti-WW1 writings, I'm not quite sure what the author would have liked to have been done instead, and whether that would have actually been any better. Should Britain have let Germany overrun Belgium and have her way with France? Or gone to war for a couple of years to protect Belgium and help France, but then concluded a negotiated peace in 1916 or '17, which would presumably have meant a status quo ante in the west and a free hand for Germany in the east? Or is the alternative scenario that pacifists envisioned a still more counterfactual one in which anti-war sentiment prevails not only in Britain but also in Germany, and the war doesn't take place at all? All these things strike me as either too unrealistic or as worse than what ended up actually happening.

But anyway, I guess that any such counterfactual scenarios aren't really the point of a book like this. It is simply the record of the author's war experience and the development of his feelings on the subject; but the part that I liked best about it was the glimpse it provides into the vanished world of pre-war rural England, when Sherston was a happy young fox-hunter without the slightest care for what happens beyond the edges of his county. Being lured in by one topic and then ending up walking away happily having read about another — it's not a bad outcome from a book.

BOOK: Gordon Martel, "The Month that Changed the World"

Gordon Martel: The Month that Changed the World: July 1914 and WW1. Oxford University Press, 2017 (first ed. 2014). 9780199665396. xxv + 484 pp.

How could I resist another book about the July Crisis, the flurry of diplomatic activity between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of WW1 about a month later? I have read several such books already — Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer, McMeekin's July 1914: Countdown to War, Clark's Slepwalkers (shame on me, I was too lazy to write blog posts about the last two of these) — but this one, by Gordon Martel, is probably the best one yet.

What sets this book apart from the others I've read is that it very deliberately refrains from looking for any deeper explanations for the war. It starts with a provocative epigraph: “After the historian has ascertained the facts, there is no further process of inquiring into their causes. When he knows what happened, he already knows why it happened. — R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History.” I could practically see the author making a troll face when picking that quote :)

Like many such books, it starts with a bit of background, through it doesn't go into this as broadly and as far back as e.g. Sleepwalkers does. One notable thing about this introductory chapter is its focus on the idea that Europe had been at peace for a long time by then and that nobody saw much of a reason why this should change. There were no obvious reasons for Great Powers to go to war against one another and war was increasingly seen as an obsolete thing that was only happening in the colonies or in peripheral, backwards regions such as the Balkans (pp. 2–5). (As I vaguely remember it, many other books present the situation as much more tense, as if everyone was holding their breath waiting for a war to break out. Fromkin says (p. 39) that Europe was “in a mood [. . .] to smash things”.)

There is a chapter about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which goes into a reasonable but not excessive amount of detail. There is a bit more about the background of the various conspirators involved in the assassination (pp. 50–64) than I remember from some of the other books about this. One detail that was new to me from this chapter was how poor the security had been during Franz Ferdinand's visit — Martel contrasts it with the much tighter security during the visit of Emperor Franz Josef a few years earlier (p. 72). In other words, you can't help feeling that the assassination, and hence the outbreak of the WW1, the millions of casualties, etc., could have been prevented just with some additional security measures that should have been routine in such cases anyway — wow!

The book then goes into a fairly detailed week-by-week treatment of the developing crisis over the next three weeks, but its main focus, and what the author reserves the term ‘July Crisis’ for, is the one-week period between the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia and the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia. In this period each day gets a separate chapter to itself. There were many interesting details here that I hadn't heard of before or at least hadn't been really aware of them. I used to think of the war as being more or less the fault of Germany, though after reading Sleepwalkers I thought that some of the blame might also go to Russia for its mobilizing while pretending that it wasn't really doing so. But now after this book I couldn't help feeling that there is plenty of blame to go around for nearly everyone involved.

I was impressed by the extent of the concessions that the Serbs were prepared to make in response to the Austrian ultimatum (pp. 206–7, 304), and depressed by how relentlessly stubborn the Austrians were in their wish to go to war against Serbia (pp. 249, 305). The Serbian reply was seen by nearly everyone else as an excellent basis to solve the crisis peacefully with a bit more negotiation (pp. 243–5, 265, 271). Edward Grey, the British foreign minister, was proposing that a conference of ambassadors (British, German, French, Italian) should mediate between Austria and Russia (the latter being the chief protector of Serbia in this crisis); pp. 180, 195, 346. Others proposed direct discussions between Austria and Russia (pp. 223–4, 269). But the Austrians wanted to go to war against Serbia, they were convinced that their prestige and their status as a Great Power requires it, and the ultimatum had really been just an excuse and nothing more. I was in principle aware of this before, but it comes across more clearly in the more detailed exposition in this book.

I also couldn't help being annoyed by the British for not announcing clearly and early that they would stand by France and Russia. Perhaps if they had done so, Germany would have backed down, then Austria might have backed down and the war would not have happened at all. But sadly, Grey stubbornly refused to make any sort of commitments (and admittedly, most of the British cabinet, as well as the public, was strongly against any such involvement up until the German invason of Belgium; pp. 251, 280, 290, 367, 376–8, 384–8). On August 2: “No one was certain what the British would do. Especially not the British.” (P. 374.) :))

An interesting detail that I wasn't previously aware of concerns the involvement of Italy. Their alliance with Germany and Austria was defensive, so I thought that this was by itself enough of a reason for them not to enter the war. But in this book it turns out there was another issue: their alliance included the concept of ‘compensation’, in the sense that if one of Austria and Italy expanded its territory in southeastern Europe, the other one must get some territory as well, as a sort of compensation, to keep the balance of power between them I suppose. During the July crisis, Germany was constantly urging the Austrians to sort out the matter of compensation with Italy and thereby ensure that Italy would stand by them. Ideally Austria would have offered some of its own predominantly-Italian territories, which had been coveted for some time by Italian irredentists; or at least some bits of territory in the Balkans. But the Austrians pretty much offered nothing, and as a result Italy stayed neutral (pp. 185–6, 231–5, 276, 289, 339, 342).

But the overall impression of the way the crisis is presented in this book is one of chaos and madness. (“By evening [of July 30] there was confusion everywhere”, p. 328.) This is no doubt in large part because the author deliberately keeps the narrative at a fairly low level: the story proceeds chronologically, day by day, almost hour by hour, and the story is basically one long procession of meetings and telegrams being sent back and forth, often at the most unholy late-night hours. (“By Sunday [August 2] morning everyone involved in the crisis was utterly exhausted”, p. 374.) I didn't even try to keep all the details in my head as the story is too complex for that and the cast of characters too numerous. But these events probably felt just as confusing and chaotic to the participants themselves, and the good thing about the way this book presents the story is that it gives you an idea of what it must have felt like to them.

Perhaps my favourite part of the book is the concluding chapter, “Making Sense of the Madness”. First it tells the history of the history of the July Crisis, so to speak — i.e. how the crisis was seen by historians and politicians over the rest of the 20th century. Already during the war, the various countries involved published (more or less biased) selections of diplomatic correspondence in an attempt to justify their involvement in the war and blame their enemies for causing it (p. 402). The question of war guilt also attracted a great deal of interest just after the war; the Versailles Treaty famously included an article that blamed the war on Germany. More and more diplomatic papers were published by various governments in an effort to facilitate the study of the origins of the war (pp. 408–10).

By the 1930s, as most of the politicians directly involved in the outbreak of WW1 were dead or retired, the question of the origins of war became more of a topic for historians than politicians, and it began to be studied by a new generation of slightly less biased historians such as Sidney B. Fay and Bernadotte Schmitt (pp. 412–3). Accordingly attention focused away from the July Crisis and more towards various deeper causes of the war: nationalism, imperialism, capitalism, etc. (Martel makes an interesting argument that this had an unfortunate side effect in the 1930s: as people widely accepted the idea that the war had such deeper causes, this meant that they couldn't blame it primarily on Germany; but this, since the Versailles treaty was premised on the idea that Germany was guilty for the war, made it hard for them to object when Hitler started dismantling the treaty after he came to power. “When Hitler came to power and began his campaign to tear up the treaty of Versailles, there was no one left to speak up for it.” P. 415. See also pp. 421–2.)

Since then, countless books have been written about the origins of the WW1, and you can't help feeling that Martel is a bit jaded about the whole thing: you can pick one or more (or all) of the Great Powers (and/or your favourite -ism) and you can surely find, in the inexhaustible mass of diplomatic documents and other sources from the July crisis, something to blame the war on them in particular. I guess this is why his book very deliberately refuses to blame anyone (and indeed when I got to this point in the book I couldn't help admitting that it had never really pushed me into assigning blame to anyone in particular — any ideas about blame that I had had while reading it had come from my biases and my interpretations of the story as described in the book).

Considering that so many different ideas have been put forth as to the deeper causes of the war or which Great Power(s) should be blamed for it, you can hardly blame the author for not wanting to commit himself to any of these theories (or putting forth yet another one of his own). This is why he focuses on the July Crisis itself, and argues that ultimately the war was triggered by the decisions made by those specific people in those specific days, mostly that fateful week at the end of July 1914. “War was not inevitable. It was the choices that men made during those fateful days that plunged the world into a war. They did not walk in their sleep.” (I guess this must be a jab at Clark's Sleepwalkers? :]) “They knew what they were doing. They were not stupid. They were not ignorant. The choices they made were rational, carefully calculated, premised on the assumptions an attitudes, ideas and experience that they had accumulated over the years. Real people, actual flesh-and-blood human beings, were responsible for the tragedy of 1914 — not unseen, barely understood forces beyond their control.” (Pp. 420–1.) “Blind ‘historical forces’ did not devise ultimatums or mobilize millions: men of flesh and blood did.” (P. 425.)

Another epic sentence from p. 422: “Men do learn from their mistakes: they learn how to make new ones.” :)) The author demonstrates how some of the lessons learned from the outbreak of the WW1 led to new problems in the years leading up to the WW2 (pp. 422–3, 430).

What to say at the end? I really liked this book. Some of the middle parts while the crisis is in progress can be a bit dry at times, but the concluding chapter more than makes up for it. This book gave me a fresh perspective on the July Crisis and the outbreak of the war.

BOOK: V. G. Liulevicius, "War Land on the Eastern Front" (cont.)

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius: War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 0521661579. viii + 310 pp.

[Continued from last week.]

Comparison of the Eastern and Western front experience

There's an interesting discussion of difference in the soldiers' front experience between the west and the east front: in the West you have “men and machines battling in devastated trench landscapes. By contrast, the experience on the Eastern Front was quite different, its hallmarks the fight against invisible enemies of boredom and alienation, losing oneself in the landscape, going native. [. . .] a struggle for community and identity in vast expanses.” (P. 135.)

“A frontier thesis of the German East would be radically different from that of America's pioneer West. Instead of myths of individual independence and self-sufficiency, producing democratic views, the collective goal here was ordering, cleaning, and control.” (P. 162.)

Goals of the Ober Ost administration

“Verkehrspolitik's ultimate end was permanent possession of these lands through some form of settlement.” (P. 94.) Various societies and lobbying groups existed in Germany, calling for the annexation of these occupied areas in the East (some argued that such predominantly agricultural areas were needed in order to “ ‘balance’ gains of industrial areas in Belgium and northern France”, p. 95; see also p. 165). Ludendorff's assistant von Gayl wrote that “depopulated areas of the territory would be filled in with a ‘human wall’ of new German settlers, securing it for all time” (p. 95). “Settlers could not be bourgeois Germans, but rather soldiers turned into farmers on the model of medieval ‘fighting farmers’ (Wehrbauer), holding the land with ‘sword and plow.’ ” (P. 96.) Again I'm impressed by how similar these plans sound to those of the Nazis in the WW2 (see e.g. Burleigh, p. 447). [Incidentally, now I tried googling the phrase ‘sword and plough’, and the very first hit points out that they are “both traditional metaphors for the penis”. Uncle Sigmund would be delighted... :-))]

“From the start, nationalist and imperialist pressure groups formulated increasingly ambitious territorial wish lists. [. . .] As hopes for quick victory [in the first years of the war] dimmed, war aims demands perversely grew larger” (the claim was that the difficulty of winning the war shows that Germany needs more territory there so as to be able to win more easily in any future war); p. 164. As mentioned above, demands for territory in the east were also supported by claims that “industrial gains [of territories in Belgium and northern France] needed to be ‘balanced’ by expansion into agricultural territories in the East.” (P. 165.) Annexationist views were especially popular among the middle and upper classes, “for whom expansion and world power” promised to “preserve the status quo, while a compromise peace threatened revolutionary turmoil” and a revolt of the workers disappointed that nothing came of all the sacrifices they had made (p. 165).

“The most portentous outcome of Ober Ost was a far-ranging transformation of outlook, growing out of the eastern front-experience, marked by struggle with nature, filth, boredom, and inner dislocation in the difficult work of ruling the occupied territory. [. . .] The imperialist mindscape surveyed dirty lands and peoples, and saw itself imposing a new ordering through German Work” (pp. 171–2.) “[A]nnexationist propaganda, ‘War Geography’ and ‘Geopolitics’, and military schooling of the mind created a new and aggressive geographic consciousness.” (P. 172.) This affected the German attitudes towards the East in the interwar period and during the WW2. The Ober Ost “collapsed just when triumph seemed secured. This disappointment blinded many to this military state's contradictory nature. Instead, the occupiers drew from this failure lessons about the East.” (P. 219.) Similarly to the ‘stab in the back’ legend on the Western front, “a parallel legend arose, with the East as the treacherous party contaminating Germany” (p. 219). The German public felt that “Germany had in fact won the war in the East. Only later did incomprehensible events rob Germany of its eastern conquests. [. . .] As Golo Mann points out, ‘Brest-Litovsk has been called the forgotten peace, but the Germans have not forgotten it. [. . .]’ ” (Pp. 248–9.) But “one central lesson was learned from failed plans for structuring, framing, and ordering the East: instead of planning for cultural development of lands [. . .] the East was to be viewed more objectively and coldly, in terms of Raum, ‘space.’ ” (P. 252.)

The end of the Ober Ost

The beginning of the end of the Ober Ost came in 1917, when the “growing discontent in Germany expressed in the stirrings of parliamentarism and strikes, meant that the outright annexationism [. . .] needed to be replaced with more subtle, indirect forms of domination over a belt of buffer states at Germany's east.” (Pp. 177–8.) By then, the Ober Ost regime lost all its credibility with the natives; one of the last nails in the coffin was when it stopped trying to maintain order and protect the peasants from various robber bands operating in the countryside (p. 181). “The breaking point came when natives felt that German occupation was even worse than Russian rule.” (P. 181.) There was also increasing discontent among the German soldiers: “Orders against fraternization [with the natives] lapsed in the face of everyday reality. [. . .] Some, increasingly influenced by socialist ideas, [. . .] resented having to preserve the [Baltic] Barons' social dominants. [. . .] many could not see that Balten were ‘German to the core’ and thus had a right to support. As class lines reasserted themselves, the solidarity of a common ethnic German identity was breached.” (Pp. 187–8.)

Thus, the Germans tried to get various more or less representative assemblies in the Baltic countries to declare independence from Russia and also to agree to turn themselves into German satellites (see e.g. pp. 203–4). Some of them were intended to be in a personal union with Germany (i.e. they would get someone from the house of Hohenzollern to be their sovereign); p. 202. For Germany, they would primarily serve as buffer zones, as a first line of defense against Russia or Poland; they would have to let Germans station their troops there, Germany would control their transportation and communications, they would be economically connected to Germany “by common currency, standards, and a customs union” (p. 203). Being “ ‘considerably below Germany economically and culturally, [. . .] they needed firm, authoritarian leadership’ ” [von Gayl's words] for one lifetime; this would be provided by a German “governor who was also supreme commander of German occupation troops” (p. 203).

It didn't all go quite as people like Ludendorff and von Gayl planned. For example, the Lithuanian assembly, the Taryba, invited a Duke of Urach to become King Mindaugas II (named in honour of Mindaugas, the first king of Lithuania, who lived in the 13th century); but they set out conditions: “the state was to be a democratic constitutional monarchy, with a Lithuanian government, and the king and his family had to become Lithuanians, speaking the language at court. [. . .] the children were to be educated in Lithuania, becoming Lithuanian. Gentle, democratically minded Urach accepted, and spent the summer [of 1918] learning Lithuanian. [. . .] These insubordinate moves raised an uproar in Germany's press” (p. 210). The Lithuanians withdrew their invitation to Urach a few months later, when the war was over.

After the war was over, revolutionary uprisings broke out in Germany and in reaction to them, volunteer paramilitary units were sometimes formed, called the Freikorps, consisting partly of conservatively-minded war veterans and partly of “German students and other adolescents too young to have served in the army during the war” (p. 227). Some of these units also fought in the area of the former Ober Ost, ostensibly for such reasons as to help prevent these areas from falling under the control of the Bolsheviks, either the Russians or homegrown ones (pp. 228–30); in practice they often turned out to be “adventurers” and “freebooters” (p. 228) loyal to nobody except their immediate commanders (“little Wallensteins”, p. 230). They joined the adventure either out of disappointment over the confusion in post-WW1 Germany, or lured by promises of land grants (p. 230); they “arrived hoping to find an identity here [but] were thrown into confusion and madness instead, as the mission in the East turned into a rampage [. . .] They returned to Germany brutalized, scared by a failure they could not accept or explain, and filled with intense hate for the East which had transformed them” (p. 228). (Unsurprisingly, many later went on to notable roles in the Nazi regime; see the list in the Wikipedia page).

The Freikorps units in the Baltic “surrendered to pathological anger and lust for annihilation”, e.g. they “staged massive acts of arson, turning parks and orchards into enormous bonfires for recreation, pouring gasoline on trees and setting them alight” (p. 242).

Miscellaneous

The famous battle of Tannenberg in 1914 was so named by Ludendorff for propaganda reasons (this was a big German victory, so it seemed good to make it seem like a revenge for their big defeat in the other Battle of Tannenberg, in 1410); p. 15.

There's an interesting paragraph about the medieval Baltic Crusades, waged by the Teutonic knights against Lithuania (which was still pagan at the time). “In a brutal version of the ‘Grand Tour,’ crusaders from the West came to fight, including Chaucer's Knight. The Order of the Teutonic Knights' ‘Lithuanian Way Reports,’ essentially Baedeker guides for pillage and rapine, allowed crusaders to raid with accuracy from south and north.” But this pressure “backfired, actually forging anarchic Lithuanian tribes into a state.” (P. 36.)

In the 19th and early 20th century there were many debates about where the borders of Germany are (or should be); but “[t]he crowning horror to these questions was that Germans' word for border, Grenze, was not even German, but borrowed from Slavic, graniza.” (P. 166.) Frankly, I don't think this is quite so horrible as this passage makes it seem to be, and if any Germans lost much sleep over this it serves them right for making such a fuss over such an irrelevant bit of etymology. But anyway, it's interesting that they borrowed such a basic word as that. At any rate, I'm always glad to see that it wasn't always us borrowing their words — that sometimes they also borrowed words from us :)

Sven Hedin's book To the East! is a result of his visit to the Ober Ost (p. 117).

There are a few mentions of Gustav Noske, a German politician on the “right wing of the socialists” (from his Wikipedia page, which you should also visit for the sake of a priceless picture of Noske and Ebert in bathing costume :-))) noted for his suppression of the leftist revolutionary uprisings in Germany in 1919. I chiefly remember him because he is mentioned in David Clay Large's Where Ghosts Walked, who says that one slightly unhinged member of the short-lived Bavarian revolutionary regime wrote that “the hairy gorilla hands of Gustav Noske [. . .] are dripping in blood”. Now I see that this is quite appropriate (as an added bonus, he was a master butcher by trade, according to the Wikipedia); in his position as the minister of defense, he authorized the formation of the Freikorps units: “This fratricidal duty earned Noske his nickname — ‘Bloodhound.’ ” (P. 227.) “When a Lithuanian socialist appealed to SPD leaders to speak out against the army's abuses, for love of shared socialist ideals, Noske reportedly answered: ‘We are socialists only up to Eydtkuhnen’ on the East Prussian border.”

As is known, the Baltic States became independent after the WW1 but were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939; “native peoples at first congratulated themselves bitterly on at least having fallen to the Russians, not to the Germans. Remembering Ober Ost's regime, people contrasted Russian rule, brutal but unsystematic, with the comprehensive, efficient severity of German occupation. The following year of intensifying Stalinist terror and deportations, turned this cold comfort into a crueler joke.” (P. 266.)

An interesting observation on the new field of ‘geopolitics’: “Whereas geographers traditionally sought objective renderings of conditions on the ground, geopoliticans' maps, full of dynamic arrows, stark contrasts of blocks of color, and simplified symbols, were programs.” (P. 255.) “Geopolitical thinking took on enormous significance as a mode of thinking, providing concepts which became current in popular thought”, but that doesn't mean that the geopoliticians themselves were directly influential: “After providing crucial concepts, geopoliticians had little influence on policy built with those concepts.” (P. 264.)

Interestingly, the author consistently uses German names of the towns in the Ober Ost (e.g. Wilna, Kowno).

I feel compelled to record for posterity a truly disgusting instance of hyphenation: on p. 163, “Burgfrieden” has been split over two lines with “Bur-” in one line and “gfrieden” in the next line. Yuck.

There are also some typos, perhaps more than you'd expect in a book with a RRP of $75. There's “refered” on p. 185; and von Gayl “burned the original plans to present their capture” (p. 202).

Conclusion

This is a pleasant, interesting, readable book. Highly recommended if you want something to remind you that the WW1 was not just about the trenches of Flanders :-)

ToRead:

• Arnold Zweig: The Case of Sergeant Grischa. A “great realistic novel” of Ober Ost, “culminating in an indictment of the entire system of military rule” (p. 76).

• Victor Jungfer: The Face of the Occupied Territory. A “novel of life in the rear areas” (no, you sick fucks, NO!!!). Mentioned here on p. 156. However, it doesn't seem to have been translated into English. The original title is Das Gesicht der Etappe.

• Celia Applegate: A nation of provincials: the German idea of Heimat. Mentioned here on p. 174 (note 68).

BOOK: V. G. Liulevicius, "War Land on the Eastern Front"

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius: War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 0521661579. viii + 310 pp.

Introduction

During the First World War, Germany was quite successful on the Eastern front, and managed to occupy a considerable amount of territory that had formerly belonged to the Russian empire. Some of this territory, such as Poland, was governed by civilian occupation authorities, but some of it remained under military administration. This was known as the “Ober Ost’ and covered the area of the present-day Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and a bit of Belarus. War Land on the Eastern Front is a book about the Ober Ost, the German occupation policies there, and about how the German experiences in the Ober Ost during the WW1 affected their mental picture of the East during the Weimar and Nazi periods.

I first heard of this book in Richard Evans' Coming of the Third Reich. However, it's quite expensive; currently, the hardcover costs $75 at amazon and the paperback costs $40. So I set up a notification on eBay and waited; eventually, a copy of the hardcover in very good condition turned up for $25 and I bought it.

As the price suggests, this book is probably targeted mostly at the academic market rather than at the general public, which is another reason why I was somewhat hesitant whether I should buy and read it or not; but fortunately it turned out that most of it is actually fairly readable and accessible. There's no obvious reason why it shouldn't be of interest to the general public, except that the subject is perhaps too obscure and narrow to be of interest to many people. But I was very curious to learn more about what was going on in the areas gained by Germany in the East during the WW1 (see my posts about Wheeler-Bennett's Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace); in particular, I'm fascinated by the many parallels and similarities that exist between the German attitudes, policies, and territorial ambitions regarding the East during the WW1 and those during the WW2. One is always shocked by the immensity and horror of the Nazi plans regarding the East, but it turns out that in many ways they went just a couple of steps further than their predecessors during the WW1. Anyway, if you are also curious about this topic, this is definitely just the right book for you. I found it very interesting.

My favourite parts of this book were the first few chapters, which describe the German occupation policies in the Ober Ost during the WW1. In some of the last chapters things turn a little bit more nebulous and abstract, as they are more about the development of ideas, views, opinions (that the Germans had about the East) rather than about simple narrative history and statements of facts. I didn't enjoy this part of the book as much as the earlier chapters, but even so it was still fairly pleasant to read; and anyway, for many people, and probably for the author himself, it is probably this latter part of the book that is the most valuable and interesting. The style of these latter chapters sometimes reminded me a little of Modris Eksteins' Rites of Spring (which I read last year but haven't yet written about it here on this blog — alas, my draft about it is a hopeless, ridiculously overlong jumble, little more than a summary; I can only hope that I'll get around to sorting it out eventually): pleasant to read, almost exciting sometimes (although the style of War Land on the Eastern Front is never even remotely as excited and breathless as that of the Rites of Spring), but fairly abstract and after I've read a few pages I don't necessarily feel much wiser or have the impression that anything much of what I've just read will stick in my mind. [Interestingly, both authors are Balts — Eksteins is from Latvia, and Liulevicius I guess is probably of Lithuanian origin, given the large amount of Lithuanian sources cited in his book.]

German impressions of the East

The Baltic lands, when the German army entered them, were in a state of devastation; the Russian army observed a scorched-earth policy during its retreat. The Germans' “initial impressions were crucial, shaping the way they responded to the territory and its peoples [. . .] they took the abnormal conditions and effects of war to be characteristic of the place, part of its essential character.” (P. 30.)

It is known that the Baltic lands were some of the last parts of Europe to be converted from paganism, but it seems that the influence of paganism lasted even longer than I thought. “For all practical purposes, the [Lithuanian] countryside only truly accepted Roman Catholic Christianity in the eighteenth century. Even then, what evolved was a complex synthesis of older beliefs with new religion.” (P. 31.) See also p. 69: “farmers plow around large and small stones in their fields” rather than removing them, due to “their animistic sense that the stones [. . .] had spirits and a right to be where they were”. “Germans marveled at the prehistoric stick plows used by natives [. . .] Even local breeds of swine were closer to wild boars, it seemed, than to German varieties.” (P. 69.)

“Among its many disconcerting qualities was how much history [the ground] seemed to hold. Army engineers' spades, building fortifications, found burial sites and weapons from a dim past of Baltic–Indo-European tribalism. [. . .] The most startling element was that here the prehistoric level was so close to the surface.” (P. 37.)

The Germans were also disgusted by the filth and squalor they encountered in the occupied areas. “To officials' disgusted amazement, cleaning of one particularly filthy urban thoroughfare struck proper cobbled pavement underneath, buried for decades under trash and dirt. Natives were as surprised as the soldiers. In another case, cleaning exposed a human skeleton — it was unclear how or when it had ended up there.” (P. 44.) “In one archetypal moment, Germans claimed that in Wilna, retreating Russians had ‘dirtied and stunk up [the place] un the most unspeakable way. On the ground floor of City Hall, horse manure lay three-quarters of a meter high. On the upper floor, which horses could not reach, their riders took over the animal act. [. . .]’ ” (P. 154.) The Germans promptly forced sixty native women to spend the next two weeks cleaning the place up, and henceforth never ceased pointing to it as an example of how Germans are more civilized than the Russians (p. 160).

Before the war, most Germans knew little about the Russian empire and thought of it as a rather homogeneous, monolithic entity, but “now it dissolved into a chaotic, ragged patchwork of nationalities and cultures” (p. 22).

‘Elective ethnicity’

Among the many things that confused, and to some extent appalled, the German occupiers in the Ober Ost was the complicated nature of national identities there. A number of nationalities were present in that area, all hopelessly mixed with one another, and national identity wasn't correlated too well either with language or with religion; and many people were unsure of their identity anyway. “[E]thnicity seemed very much determined by choice. ‘Elective ethnicity’ ruled. [. . .] Newly arrived Germans, trying to discern order in the land, found this disconcerting. [. . .] ‘[. . .] There are “Lithuanians” who speak no word of Lithuanian, and vice versa there are committed “Poles,” in a religious or other tradition, who speak only Lithuanian. Often members of one family count themselvers to different nationalities. [. . .]’ ” (P. 34.)

This is illustrated by a splendid anecdote of the ‘three Smiths’ in a town in Lithuania: “Mr. Schmidt [. . .] professes himself an incarnate nationalist Pole, Mr. Kowalski as a thorough Russian and [. . .] Mr. Kusnjetzow as a genuine German.” (P. 34.) “This confusion bothered soldiers because their own national identity was a recent construct [. . .] It was disconcerting for them to see how much ethnicity depended on historical circumstance and (to them this seemed most obscene) on personal choice and commitment.” (P. 35.) “[L]anguage (so important a determinant to German concepts of national identity) did not completely define ethnicity, either” (p. 121).

See also p. 185 for more interesting discussion about the concept of nationhood among the Baltic peoples. The author explains this using the etymology of the Lithuanian word for a nation, tauta: “ ‘Nation’ locates identity in birth (‘natio’). Tauta, however, is different, originally meaning ‘troop,’ ‘crowd,’ or ‘a band of riders’ (Indo-European ‘teuta’). The unifying principle, here, in contrast to ‘nation,’ is from the outset voluntaristic, pointing to a common, shared project defining the group.” In other words, this was a concept of “ ‘elective ethnicity,’ nationality as a conscious choice” (p. 186); the “Ober Ost saw not merely the clash of German and native nationalisms, but [. . .] the collision of markedly different kinds of nationalisms” (p. 186).

German occupation policies

The German administration in the Ober Ost strictly excluded non-Germans from positions of influence: “Besides being exclusively military, it was also to be exclusively German. [. . .] the ‘Order of Rule’ decreed that official titles of all offices bore the prefix ‘German.’ [. . .] A general precept written into the ‘Order of Rule’ stated that no native could command or be set above any German. Natives could only be drawn in to work as helpers, and then received no pay for their services, could not refuse service or resign from assigned responsibilities.” (P. 58.)

I was really rather shocked by this paragraph — it seems that the only difference between their policies and those of the Nazis during the WW2 was that extermination and genocides were not on the menu in the WW1. Otherwise, we see here the concept of the Germans as a master race, strictly above and separated from the natives, with the natives being little more than slaves. It isn't surprising that the author consistently uses the word ‘natives’, which we otherwise usually encounter when talking about European colonies in Africa or some other such downtrodden part of the world.

“If the army took from the land what it needed, claiming everything as its property, the same lordly treatment was applied to natives. In the streets, natives were required to make way for German officials, saluting and bowing. Violence became increasingly routine, with reported public beatings. There were numerous complaints of German soldiers raping and mistreating native girls and women, while men trying to defend them were beaten and threatened with death. Brutality towards natives went unchecked from above, due to the imperative of presenting a unified front.” (P. 63.)

Again I am quite shocked by all this, but I must admit that one thing that I find even more disconcerting is that much the same things were going on at the same time throughout the European colonies in Africa and Asia, and *I was never shocked by that*. Of course this sort of treatment of the natives in the colonies is atrocious and unacceptable, but I never found it shocking — it always seemed somehow obvious and unsurprising that such things would be going on in the colonies. But here, when I read about such things having been practiced by the Germans in the Baltic lands, I found it shocking. And this is the disconcerting thing here. Being more shocked when the people being oppressed happen to share one's skin color than when they don't is perhaps natural, but it is hardly commendable.

“The administration became a curious mix of ambitious competence and even more ambitious incompetence.” (P. 58.)

The administrative confusion and the oppression of the natives even reached such levels that, “most intolerable to [the Ober Ost] officials, the distant Reichstag could be heard, periodically demanding civil administration (in both senses of the term) for the occupied territories” :-) (p. 64).

One of the big goals of the Ober Ost administration was to make the territory autarchic: it “would be run from its own resources, while providing for armies in the East, placing no demands on the Fatherland” (p. 64). This led to various policies intended to maximize the economic exploitation of the area: introduction of various new taxes; the state claimed a monopoly on the trade with cigarettes and certain other items; there were requisitions and confiscations of all sorts of things, livestock, and real estate; “[e]ach harvest was confiscated entire and had to be sold to the army at prices which it fixed itself” (pp. 65–6); farmers were also required to provide certain amounts of various other agricultural products (chickens, milk, etc.), and these requirements did not necessarily take into account how little their farms were actually able to produce (p. 66). The transport system (old roads, old carts) was unable to cope with the increased strain (p. 67). To prevent their horses from being requisitioned, farmers tried all sorts of desperate measures; eventually, the invisible hand stepped in: “tired, bad horses commanded higher prices than good ones, as they were less likely to be requisitioned” (p. 68). Many people were recruited to work on roads and construction projects, often in very bad conditions and with little or even no pay; “According to the ‘Order of Rule,’ natives had no right to refuse assigned duties” (p. 73). “When their workday ended at 4 p.m., natives were driven back to unheated barracks and locked in for the night, without warmth or light.” (P. 74.) The difference between this and the treatment of forced labourers in Nazi Germany seems smaller than I would have expected.

Another typically colonial phenomenon: legal discrimination. “Courts were independent of German legal norms at home. Russian law was administered ‘in German fashion,’ in German language which natives could not understand. [. ,. .] Ober Ost law was applicable only to natives, while Germans were to be judged by German law. [. . .] Punishments were brutal, with crippling fines for slight infractions and death sentences for a native's possession of a weapon.” (P. 76.)

The administration's efforts towards total control of the area resulted in a flood of orders and regulations. Of course all these were originally written in German, which few of the natives understood. When they provided translations into other languages, these were often spectacularly bad (another problem was that these other languages often lacked some of the more specialized legal and administrative terms). “[B]ecause of an orthographic mistake, one legendary announcement read in Lithuanian, instead of ‘The German court judged,’ ‘The German excrement shitted’ [. . .] The problem was finally ‘solved’ by fiat: when laws appeared in German, they went into effect regardless of whether they were understood. Thus, the problem was ‘happily resolved. It was specifically determined, that for all orders and regulations, the German language sufficed.’ ” (Pp. 77–8.)

The area of the Ober Ost was divided into administrative units of various levels, and crossing the borders of these units was difficult: “internal borders [were] guarded by police and stationed troops. Natives were not allowed to move over the official boundaries. [. . .] Natives sometimes could not cross boundaries to visit neighbors, relatives, even parish churches. Traveling Jewish merchants lost their livelihood entirely. Huge fines, crippling penalties, and confiscations were imposed by military courts or district captains for infractions of these borders. [. . .] In a typical peasant response, natives drew back into themselves and their households, frustrating German expectations of revitalized economic activity.” (P. 93.)

The German administration had a veritable obsession with something called ‘movement policy’ (Verkehrspolitik), i.e. with the aim of controlling all movement of both people and goods within the Ober Ost; see also p. 101: “ ‘[. . .] every person, in whatever place and for whatever purpose they might find themselves in the occupied territory, must be in possession of some identifying certification [. . .]’ ”; thus, personal identification documents were issued to all inhabitants over the age of ten (p. 101). Frequent inspections of these documents were carried out for no better reason than to get the people used to this and to the need for carrying the documents (p. 104).

Regulations were even “instructing natives precisely how to walk on the sidewalks”: all natives “ ‘[. . .] must politely greet the German officers of the German army [. . . and] must give the right of way in the street to German soldiers and if need be should step down from the boardwalk. Resistance will be sharply punished.’ ” (P. 104.) Compare this with the decree issued in 1941 by a Nazi administrator in occupied Poland: “I decree that Poles of both sexes must salute all military vehicles and vehicles bearing pennants. This decree is necessary for two reasons: (1) Because the Poles have become cheeky and presumptuous, (2) Because the reputation and standing of the German reich” requires it (cited in Burleigh's The Third Reich: A New History, ch. 6, sec. 3, p. 451).

At some point, the administration “carried out a ‘people and livestock count’ [. . .] the description speaks volumes about the occupiers' perspective” (p. 94).

The results of these policies are unsurprising: “The popular mood turned against the Germans, where before it had been tentative, expecting normalization and the return of order. [. . .] Ordinary peasants who had cared nothing for politics now were forced into political understanding in ethnic terms.” (P. 75.) See also p. 181: “Paradoxically, the administration inadvertently created objective conditions for the formation of independent native identities and political consciousness. [. . .] The clash of cultures with the occupiers compelled natives to articulate values earlier inchoate and implicit in their traditions and ways of life, as an alternative to intolerable present conditions.”

Of course, the German authorities also controlled the press. Most of the newspapers were in German, which few of the natives understood: “The only concession made to this reality was to print German text in Latin type rather than Gothic” (p. 116). “All press underwent double censorship, before and after being typeset, in a regime given to ridiculous excesses of caution” (p. 119).

Another tightly regulated area was education. “These programs' ultimate aim was to produce client nationalities within a German framework [. . .] distinct blocs of ethnic groups, accustomed to German manner and method, but requiring German supervision.” (P. 127.) The goal was not germanization; “Instead, authorities aimed at gaining a foothold in each pupil's consciousness through language lessons and inculcating German manner, a German way of doing things, and German method” (ibid.). Higher education was very limited, as natives would “have no need for an intelligentsia” in the envisioned future of the area (ibid.). The state didn't really accomplish much in the field of education, besides “shutting down schools and stoping out grassroots educational efforts” (p. 128); “natives fell back on a tradition of a clandestine schooling” (p. 127).

Here's another example of the ridiculously ham-fisted way in which the German authorities tried to promote the superior German culture among the poor benighted natives: theatre. “Reportedly, locals were crowded into these military temples of art, after being forced to pay to see dramas in a language they did not understand.” (Pp. 140–1.)

[To be continued in a few days.]