War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I

Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare

by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius presents a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of this encounter. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, he reveals how German views of the East changed during total war, and how these views affected the return of German armies under the Nazis. This persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.

Genres: History, World War I, Nonfiction, Cultural

320 pages, Paperback

First published May 24, 1996

About the author

Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences
Biography
Professor Liulevicius specializes in modern German history, with a particular focus on German relations with Eastern Europe. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Peace, and Revolution from 1994-95. He has taught at the University of Tennessee since 1995. From 2008 to 2021, he served as the director of the Center for the Study of War and Society.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent monograph, both military, social, cultural and political history, situating itself in both the context of the historiography of the First World War (see introduction), and its significance and importance in German, and ultimately, European history in the 20th century. The legacy of the Great War continues...and this book reveals a lesser-known and less understood aspect of this legacy...suggesting that the Nazi ideology had many roots and predecessors, harnassed strategically in the late Weimar Republic.

[victor harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a sleeper that never gained a wider public audience. Nevertheless the author is a first-rate scholar and shows how the German experience in the East during World War One shaped their attitudes toward the people of that region. The German contempt and condescension that developed for the various ethnic groups on the Eastern Front would translate into atrocities in the forthcoming war.
As Hitler and the Nazi war machine often overshadow many other topics, research like this is often neglected. Liulevicius fills this gap and shows how Hitler was able to play to the sentiments internalized by Germans during their WWI interaction in the East.In effect, this book shows "why" Germans were so receptive to his message. Once Slavs were reduced to a sub-human status, there was no moral quandary in mistreating and annihilating them.
Unfortunately, because this book has remained in relative obscurity, it has been hard to obtain. Only a rare copy is available via the usual online purchase outlets, and it is not a standard in library holdings. If you have access to a nearby university collection or interlibrary loan system that can obtain it, I recommend it. It opens another window in worthwhile line of inquiry.

[Chloe Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

emphasis on the CULTURE. Read it in undergrad but can appreciate it even more now.

[Jim]

Exceptional book that covers both the gap on knowledge of the Eastern Front and on the linkage between Germany's World War One and World War Two eastern policies. Rather than argue that Germany's behavior in World War Two mirrored that of World War One (though it has some similarities), Liulevicius argues that the traumatic experiences of losing World War One fostered a dangerous attitude exploited by the Nazis later on. Whereas in the first war Germans wanted to remake the peoples of the east to be Germans, in the second war they instead decided to remake the land as German without the peoples.

Not primarily a military history, but a "social military" history of the German occupation and Ober Ost governing policies. Provides very useful information in understanding German attitudes towards the lands and peoples of "west Russia." Excellent final chapter on the creation of German Freikorps and how they provided an outlet for German frustration among military men who came to both despise and to covet the East.