Cities into Battlefields is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection of essays on the impact of modern industrialized warfare on large urban centres. More specifically, the anthology is interested in the ‘metropolitan dimension of total war’. It asks about the ways in which the two world wars (but also, the Balkan wars of 1912/13) were anticipated, experienced and remembered by the residents of modern ‘metropolises’, that is, of ‘places of international stature, but not necessarily capital cities’ (p. 2). As the editors point out in the introduction, the goal is ‘to overcome disciplinary boundaries’ between urban history and military history, which, they argue, have tended to work alongside one another rather than engage in critical dialogue, either focusing on long-term structural change or treating the urban space as a mere backdrop against which to explore the repercussions of modern war (p. 2).

One may certainly question one of the underlying assumptions of the volume. I do not think that it is at all clear that the ‘modern metropolis’ stood ‘in the forefront’ of total war, i.e., that it was especially exposed and ‘must suffer most’, as some contemporaries believed and the editors contend – at least if the concept of ‘metropolis’ is to have any analytical meaning and not applied ex post facto to any town that did suffer exceptionally (pp. 1 and 8). While large urban centres were often considered attractive targets by the enemy, they were also especially well defended by their own side. Often, the places that suffered most were not the ‘great prizes’, but those that nobody cared about (except for the local residents, of course), and which have largely been overlooked by historians as well – towns such as Jülich, Kleve or Pforzheim in the case of the Allied bombing of Germany, thousands of villages and small settlements across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the case of Operation Barbarossa. One could go further and argue that sometimes the very qualities that made a large city into a metropolis, its distinctness, served as a safeguard against destruction, as was the case with Rome, Florence and also Paris, as Patrice Higonnet shows in his contribution.

One may also deplore the fact that the quality of the individual essays is quite heterogeneous and that the methodological pathways of the introduction, such as the concept of a ‘thirdspace’, are by and large ignored by the essays that follow.Footnote ¹

However, such criticism would unduly distract from the considerable merits of this volume. There is, first of all, the impressive geographical reach, spanning half the globe and three continents. Rarely does a collection of essays achieve to bring together, in one volume, articles on the impact of war on such diverse places as Tokyo, Adrianople, Leningrad, Warsaw, Vienna and Coventry, to name but a few. Reading them side by side accords an impression not only of how global ‘The Age of Catastrophe’ (Eric Hobsbawm) really was. It also offers fascinating insights into the often contrasting ways that quite similar challenges – of mobilization and exclusion, death and destruction, history and memory – were met by large urban communities when situated in vastly differing national contexts. For example, the experiences of Tokyo and Berlin in World War II were broadly similar, with both metropolises paying a heavy price for their role as capitals of revisionist nations that had embarked on aggressive war. Yet, at the centre of the contemporary memory culture of one stands a Shrine in which convicted war criminals are venerated as national ‘war heroes’, whereas in the other has been erected a huge memorial that remembers the victims rather than the perpetrators of the nation's murderous policies.

Secondly, the volume stands out for its thematic breadth, encompassing the pre-war imagination of urban destruction, the lived experience of total war itself, and the post-war memorialization. As Susan R. Grayzel shows in her insightful contribution, many of the cultural frames of reference within which city dwellers tried to make sense of the experience of airborne destruction, in particular, were in place well before the bombs started to fall in earnest. For some metropolises, such as London, lived experience, frightful as it was, turned out to be less apocalyptic than the pre-war scenarios had predicted. The ordeal of others, such as Leningrad or Hiroshima, however, was such that only the half-mythical stories of pre-modern times could serve as a cultural referent. At the same time, as Stefan Goebel makes clear in his piece on Coventry, there was no direct link between wartime suffering and post-war prominence in the emerging ‘transnational networks of remembrance’ (p. 162).

In sum, Cities into Battlefields is a valuable contribution at the intersection of urban history and the new military history that brings together the specialist scholarship from a broad range of fields and points the way towards future research – what more could be asked of an anthology of this kind?