Dynamic of destruction: culture and mass killing in the First World War
Kramer, Alan
On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international communityreacted 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 upto 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.
- ISBN: 978-0-19-954377-9
- Editorial: Oxford University
- Encuadernacion: Rústica
- Páginas: 448
- Fecha Publicación: 01/11/2008
- Nº Volúmenes: 1
- Idioma: Inglés