Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
No Man's Land
By James Joll
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
by Modris Eksteins
Houghton Mifflin, 396 pp., $24.95
The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights
edited by Tim Cross
Bloomsbury, 406 pp., £14.95 (paper)
Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage
edited by Stephen Eric Bronner, edited by Douglas Kellner
Columbia University Press, 468 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Frieden für Europa: Die Politik der Deutschen Reichstagsmehrheit 1917-18
by Wilhelm Ribhegge
Reimar Hobbing, 414 pp., DM48
German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918-1933
by Larry Eugene Jones
University of North Carolina Press, 660 pp., $42.50
Each of the two World Wars not only changed the political, social, economic, and ideological structure of the world in a very practical way; they also left behind symbols that have continued to haunt us. These may be place names—Verdun, Gallipoli, Auschwitz, Hiroshima; they may be types—the Unknown Soldier, poilu or Tommy, the Aviator, the War Profiteer ('hard-faced men who looked as if they have done very well out of the war'), the Collaborator or 'Quisling,' the Resistance Hero. The wars also seemed to represent symbolic values, both positive and negative—national solidarity ('the Spirit of 1914'), courage, comradeship, sacrifice, but also mass destruction, often for futile ends.
Review, 4696 words
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