WORLD WAR I: THE BIRTH OF A KILLING CULTURE
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
International Herald Tribune, France
Nov 2 2007
Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War
By Alan Kramer Illustrated.
434 pages. $34.95.
Oxford University Press.
‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Hitler supposedly said on Aug. 22, 1939, as he prepared his henchmen
for the savagery of race war and the slaughter of the Jews of Europe.
In many ways, this link between the genocide of the Armenians by the
Ottoman Empire in 1915 and the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis from
1941 to 1945 brings together the elements of Alan Kramer’s important
book, "Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First
World War." Kramer believes the two world wars may be regarded as
a single four-decade trauma, and he argues that World War I was
considerably more than simply a new industrial form of warfare that
brutalized the modern world.
Destruction, Kramer says, became a deliberate policy in many, perhaps
all, of the combatant countries. This made possible not only conscious
hooliganism against great cultural monuments (like churches) but also
the creation of an actual culture of violence.
Kramer, an associate professor of history at Trinity College, Dublin,
believes that as the fighting intensified, the combatants embraced
the annihilation of soldiers and civilians as a military and political
policy.
"The thesis," he writes, "is that there was a ‘dynamic of destruction’
which produced the most extensive cultural devastation and mass
killing in Europe since the Thirty Years War." An admirable work
of analysis and narrative, Kramer’s book shows that this killing
culture was hardly inevitable. Although there were many reasons for
the dynamic of destruction to be found in the peculiarities of the
different political cultures, ultimately, he declares, the orders
were given by men, mainly military men.
(This is an interesting difference with World War II, where civilians
– Stalin, Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt – were in real command.) These
generals did not have to give these orders. "The dynamic of destruction
was not a law of nature," Kramer argues. "It was man-made, capable
of infinite variation . . . capable of being stopped before ultimate
self-destruction."
"Dynamic of Destruction" opens with a series of deliberate acts of
cultural vandalism by Germany at the start of the war: over several
days in August 1914, German forces in Louvain, Belgium, not only
murdered 248 innocent civilians in cold blood, but burned the city’s
ancient library to the ground. It was the start of a new style of
warfare. Kramer goes on to survey a European culture fascinated with
the purifying possibilities of violence, a culture that extended across
not just Germany but also Italy, Serbia and Russia, and the Ottoman
and Austro-Hungarian empires. This is the finest part of the book
because, while we tend to be very familiar with Germany and Britain,
the other participants are hardly known to Western readers at all.
Most of the Great Powers, except Britain, had aggressive war aims
that included the annexation of other countries. Such aims were
destructive to begin with, but became more so once it was clear
there would be no quick victory. For instance, Germany’s aims in the
East – the creation of a military-colonial state known as Ober Ost –
and its occupation of great swaths of Eastern Europe and Russia were
brutal and ruthless, providing a foundation for racial stereotyping
and merciless depredation. (Still, as Kramer takes care to note,
these were not "a pilot program for the Third Reich.")
In many ways, Kramer underlines the exceptionalism of Germany, where
the leadership really did crave a preventive war against its enemies.
But in some fine analysis, he shows that Germany wasn’t as exceptional
as all that. Italy was surprisingly aggressive, hoping to annex
portions of the Austro-Hungarian empire, while the Austro-Hungarian
military, under General Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, was constantly
pushing for war. Their aim was "the total annihilation of Serbia." But
the Austrians needed Germany’s backing to launch their war, and Berlin,
as Kramer explains, did not have to give it.
It was understood by all the Great Powers that Russia would be unable
to stand by while its little Orthodox brother Serbia was threatened.
When the Russians mobilized, the Germans recognized it as a defensive
move. "I have the impression," the Prussian military attache in St.
Petersburg reported to Berlin, "that here one has mobilized for fear
of imminent events, without aggressive intentions." Kaiser Wilhelm
wrote on this: "Correct, exactly so."
In some ways, the war against Serbia had been fought already in
the two Balkan wars of 1912-13, caused by the nationalist goals of
the region’s new states in conflict with the tottering Ottoman and
Habsburg empires – and in conflict with one another. Kramer comments
that while the Western front of World War I at least had good medical
care and sanitation, the Balkan wars and, afterward, the fighting
on the Eastern fronts produced "endemic disease and mass fatalities
among civilians." The massacre of tens of thousands of civilians
in Macedonia and Thrace by the Bulgarians was "not merely . . . a
short-term by-product of war" but a "part of a longer-term project
of nation-state construction." Meanwhile, in crushing Serbia, Austria
and Germany killed 250,000 soldiers and 300,000 civilians out of 3.1
million. No combatant faced higher per capita losses.
War on the Eastern fronts was truly a war of annihilation, one with
racial overtones. Russia expelled 500,000 Jews and 743,000 Poles from
their homes near the front. And Kramer leaves us in no doubt that
the killing of a million Armenians was the deliberate policy of the
Ottoman Empire under Enver Pasha and the Young Turks.
The book’s survey of the Western front is less dramatic because we
know it so well. More gripping is the cultural material in the section
"War, Bodies and Minds," which contains truly jolting photographs and
excerpts from memoirs. I did not know that the British Army ran at
least two brothels in France. One memoir recounts the chilling sight
of French prostitutes plying their trade surrounded by the bodies of
dead men. An arresting photograph shows bare-breasted prostitutes at
a German brothel in Belgium, posing with German soldiers in spiked
Pickelhaube helmets. And there is no better illustration of the
self-mulitation that total war brings than the shocking photograph of a
"railwayman, mouth torn away and lower jaw gone." This destruction of
bodies and minds had two effects after World War I: the pacifism and
appeasement that were prominent in Britain and France between the wars,
and the worship of violence that gripped Russia, Italy and Germany.
The dynamic of destruction became a state religion through the savage
terror of Bolshevism in Russia, and the racial violence of nazism
in Germany.
Kramer is absolutely right to argue that Russian history should be
seen "in a continuum" from 1914 to 1921. World War I did brutalize
Russia, making revolution inevitable, but Kramer also points out
that the Russian civil war following the revolution was a disaster
that took 10 million lives (in battle, massacre, disease and famine),
many more than Russia’s losses in World War I.
During the civil war, the White terror was as bad as the Red terror.
I found in my own research into the letters and memoirs of Stalin and
his comrades that it was the experience of the civil war, not World
War I (in which few of the top Bolsheviks fought), that gave them their
taste for homicidal solutions. (Kramer might have added that Trotsky,
as a journalist reporting on the Balkan wars, was horrified by the
violence he witnessed – but then went on to mimic it when he was a
warlord in the Russian civil war.) 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. But,
half narrative, half analysis, it is densely written and sometimes
pedantic. It may be hard going at times for general readers.
Nonetheless, everyone can learn something from Kramer’s nuanced and
sensible conclusion: "Total war," he writes, "which tends towards
annihilation, bears within it the potential for genocide. Yet genocide
was not an inevitable consequence of total war."
Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of "Stalin: The Court of the
Red Tsar" and "Young Stalin."
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