This book provides the first thorough examination of the peace movement in pre-World War I Germany, concentrating on the factors in German politics and society that account for the movement's weakness. The author draws on a wide range of documents to survey the history, organization, and ideologies of the peace groups, placing them in their social and political context. Working through schools, churches, the press, political parties, and other opinion-forming groups, the German peace movement attempted systematically to promote the idea that the world's nations composed a harmonious community in which law was the proper means for resolving disputes. Except for small pockets of support, however, the movement met only resistance—resistance greater, the author contends, than elsewhere in the West. Evaluating the reasons for hostility to the peace movement in Germany, he concludes that dominant features of German political culture emphasized the inevitability of international conflict, in the final analysis because Imperial Germany's ruling elites feared the domestic as well as the international implications of the movement's program. Originally published in 1976. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book represents the most comprehensive history of Germany during the First World War.

In a book that is at once a major contribution to modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, Isabel V. Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as the only guarantee of the nation's security. So deeply embedded were the assumptions and procedures of this distinctively German military culture that the Army, in its drive to annihilate the enemy military, did not shrink from the utter destruction of civilian property and lives. Carried to its extreme, the logic of "military necessity" found real security only in extremities of destruction, in the "silence of the graveyard."Hull begins with a dramatic account, based on fresh archival work, of the German Army's slide from administrative murder to genocide in German Southwest Africa (1904–7). The author then moves back to 1870 and the war that inaugurated the Imperial era in German history, and analyzes the genesis and nature of this specifically German military culture and its operations in colonial warfare. In the First World War the routines perfected in the colonies were visited upon European populations. Hull focuses on one set of cases (Belgium and northern France) in which the transition to total destruction was checked (if barely) and on another (Armenia) in which "military necessity" caused Germany to accept its ally's genocidal policies even after these became militarily counterproductive. She then turns to the Endkampf (1918), the German General Staff's plan to achieve victory in the Great War even if the homeland were destroyed in the process—a seemingly insane campaign that completes the logic of this deeply institutionalized set of military routines and practices. Hull concludes by speculating on the role of this distinctive military culture in National Socialism's military and racial policies.Absolute Destruction has serious implications for the nature of warmaking in any modern power. At its heart is a warning about the blindness of bureaucratic routines, especially when those bureaucracies command the instruments of mass death.

This important contribution to the successful textbook series New Approaches to European History explores the comprehensive impact of the First World War on Imperial Germany. It examines military aspects of the conflict, as well as the diplomacy, government, politics, and industrial mobilization of wartime Germany. Unlike other existing surveys, however, Roger Chickering also offers a rich portrait of life on the home front: the pervasive effects of 'total war' on wealthy and poor, men and women, young and old, farmers and city-dwellers, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. This excellent, well-illustrated study of the military, political and socio-economic effects of the First World War is essential reading for all students of German and European history, as well as for those interested in the history of war and society. Now appearing in a second edition, first published in 2004, this accessible book reflects important scholarship in the field and boasts an expanded and revised bibliography.

An in-depth, finely detailed portrait of the German Army from its greatest victory in 1871 to its final collapse in 1918, this volume offers the most comprehensive account ever given of one of the critical pillars of the German Empire—and a chief architect of the military and political realities of late nineteenth-century Europe. Written by two of the world’s leading authorities on the subject, Imperial Germany and War, 1871–1918 examines the most essential components of the imperial German military system, with an emphasis on such foundational areas as theory, doctrine, institutional structures, training, and the officer corps. In the period between 1871 and 1918, rapid technological development demanded considerable adaptation and change in military doctrine and planning. Consequently, the authors focus on theory and practice leading up to World War I and upon the variety of adaptations that became necessary as the war progressed—with unique insights into military theorists from Clausewitz to Moltke the Elder, Moltke the Younger, Schlichting, and Schlieffen. Ranging over the entire history of the German Empire, Imperial Germany and War, 1871–1918 presents a picture of unprecedented scope and depth of one of the most widely studied, criticized, and imitated organizations in the modern world. The book will prove indispensable to an understanding of the Imperial German Army.