1st Edition

Military Occupations in First World War Europe

Edited By Sophie De Schaepdrijver Copyright 2015
    138 Pages
    by Routledge

    138 Pages
    by Routledge

    Our view of the First World War is dominated by the twin images of the fronts and the home fronts, yet the war also generated a third type of ‘front’, that of military occupation. Vast areas of Europe experienced the war under a military regime and this book deals with the occupations by the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Their conquests ranged from Lille in the West to the Don River in the East, and from Courland in the north to Friuli and Montenegro in the south. They encompassed capital cities such as Brussels, Warsaw, Belgrade and Bukarest, as well as areas of crucial economic importance. Millions of people experienced military occupation and, even though they were civilians, the war had a deep impact on their lives. Conversely, occupied territories influenced the states that had conquered them and the way these states waged war.

    The chapters in this book analyze military occupation in 1914-1918 both from the point of view of the occupied and from the point of view of the occupier. They study counter-insurgency warfare, forced labour, food regimes, underground patriotism, and cultural policies. They demonstrate that military occupation was an essential dimension of the Great War.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of First World War Studies.

    1. Military occupation, political imaginations, and the First World War Sophie De Schaepdrijver  2. Mauvaise conduite: complicity and respectability in the occupied Nord, 1914 – 1918 James E. Connolly  3. Sursum Corda: the underground press in occupied Belgium, 1914 – 1918 Sophie De Schaepdrijver and Emmanuel Debruyne  4. Between recruitment and forced labour: the radicalization of German labour policy in occupied Belgium and northern France Jens Thiel  5. ‘A kind of Siberia’: German labour and occupation policies in Poland and Lithuania during the First World War Christian Westerhoff  6. Warsaw University under German occupation: state building and nation Bildung in Poland during the Great War Jesse Kauffman  7. The fruits of occupation: food and Germany’s occupation of Romania in the First World War David Hamlin  8. Norms of war and the Austro-Hungarian encounter with Serbia, 1914 – 1918 Jonathan E. Gumz  9. Misconceived realpolitik in a failing state: the political and economical fiasco of the Central Powers in the Ukraine, 1918 Wolfram Dornik and Peter Lieb

    Biography

    Sophie De Schaepdrijver teaches Modern European History at Penn State University, USA. She has published on military occupations in the First World War in general, and on the German occupation of Belgium in particular. She is interested in how military occupation and individual ambition intersect.