Chickering's unfailingly observant, detailed, and comprehensive study of civilian life in Freiburg in Breisgau during World War I is a marvel of nuance and insight. Two examples must suffice. The neighborhood Fischerau appeared even before World War I as “little Venice” in tourist guidebooks, but in fact was a poor neighborhood, squeezed in-between the center of town, the site of secular and religious power, and a well-to-do, bourgeois district populated by well-heeled retirees. The intertwinement of rich and poor, the proximity of distant social groups, is one of the characteristics of Freiburg. I know because my maternal grandparents lived in the Fischerau, which has been the lieu de memoire for the privations in war for this reviewer. I now also understand that the death of the oldest child of Josefine Kempf and Heinrich Herr, a master bricklayer, fits the historical record of a startling sixty-percent rise in mortality rates among civilians between 1914 and 1917 (p. 319) and that the stories of the, shall we say, wild childhood of another one of their children reflects a more general trend of youthful hooliganism (pp. 505–8). I was truly stunned, though, when Chickering decoded the social meaning of a fourth-floor walk-up such as the one in Moltkestraße where the family moved long after the war. Chickering's study is based on the exhaustive use of quantitative and qualitative sources and demonstrates an exceptional analytic and judicious command of the material. It is not always easy to navigate, and a cumulative reading is advised despite the overall length of the book because social scenes and localities change their hue as the analysis moves across the social territory of Freiburg.

Chickering understands “the war” as a single, if dynamic moment in time that he peels analytically. He bookends his analysis with the briefest of narrative frames, which capture astutely the beginning and especially the end of the war. In the main body of his study, he works first through the material aspects of the war—proximity of the war, war economy, mobilization and collecting, administration of scarcity (chapters three through six)—and their impact on the residents of Freiburg, mainly due to the disorganization and, indeed, “breakdown” of the efforts to manage scarcity (although he leaves no doubt that scarcity was “real”). Chickering then moves to a wonderfully evocative, thick description of individual and collective experience (chapters seven through nine), starting with the “feel” of the war's scarcities, the color of war, and to emotions in a time of destruction (death, sickness, love) and moving on to the conflicting attempts to articulate the war's meaning and the place of Freiburg as a home town in the war effort. The chapters show, most clearly in a discussion of the language of obligation (chapter nine), how threadbare the sense of community became. In pulling people together, the social fissures in society became glaringly obvious, and the language of bourgeois righteousness only enhanced actual grievances. The final three chapters (ten through twelve) reconstruct society's cross sections—such as class, gender, belief (pp. 11–12)—with an outstanding discussion of the gendered nature of the war effort and an empirically pathbreaking discussion of the effect of war on gender relations.

Chickering's well-known wager is that a total war needs a total history; for although historians may not be able to agree what a total war is, he argues, they can agree that national wars of mass mobilization affect all aspects of life. Society's imbrication in war is both direct (recruitment, bombing) and indirect (privations). “The war” has a distinct (and, indeed, heightened) materiality for the home front (p. 9). Wars of mass mobilization exploit (and, as in the case of bombing, seek to destroy) the interconnectedness and the mobility of people, goods, and ideas in modern society. The experience of war is shared and articulated experience, part of a culture of war. But this shared experience had lost traction by 1917 and, much like the administration of scarcity, ended in the chaos of clashing claims. In any case, Chickering's main point is that because World War I was fought with and against entire societies, it necessitates an encompassing, material, and perceptual history of the nation at war.

But why Freiburg and what does Freiburg tell us? Chickering is surprisingly reluctant to make the case for Freiburg as a total-war city. Perhaps, it is too sweet a town to be so intimately linked to war. And yet, the fact that Freiburg was repeatedly bombed, that it saw more than a million soldiers pass through during the war, that it was a preeminent Lazarettstadt (p. 333) points to one of the essential “pretextual materialities” of Freiburg. Like Mainz, Koblenz, and Cologne, it was one of the gateways—toward the end of the war it even became army rear-area—to the Western Front, although a relatively quiet, if uncomfortably close front. That is, Freiburg did not simply share the common calamities of the war, but it was an, albeit minor, nodal point in the war complex.

Of course, Freiburg is also a quintessential German “home town” (Mack Walker). Chickering might well have chosen to locate the war experience in the longue durée of such home towns, but chooses to speak of community instead. The hometown horizon might have sharpened the focus on the deep effect of the war (and the Wilhelmine boom years) on such towns—and their remarkable resiliency. Again, the material Chickering presents is as rich as it is tantalizing. The accelerated demographic change, the flow of residents in and out of town much as the immensely heightened—and altogether still puzzling—death rates, in addition to the tidal wave of soldiers that passed through Freiburg, put enormous pressure on the connective tissue of local society. The latter was further punctured by enduring and intensifying scarcities. The cumulative effect of this turmoil is astutely demonstrated in the culture of grief that permeated the city, but it is equally evident in a host of social and emotional developments that amount to a perceptible decline of civility and authority, the dissolution of the connective tissues that held the many neighborhoods with their distinct social profiles in place.

The extent of Germany's “total” defeat becomes obvious, not so much in the breakdown of the administration of scarcity or the devaluation of an authoritative bourgeois culture (although these issues are captured well), but in what for me was the most striking observation in the welter of material—the rise of marital violence, divorce, and the dissolution of families and the unraveling of entire family networks (which hides behind the city-country split). Chickering's study of my lovely hometown of Freiburg suggests that, by 1917–18, not only civic institutions of togetherness, but the very civil institutions of society were fissuring, and there is every indication that this process only accelerated in the aftermath of war. It has proven exceedingly difficult to demonstrate this process empirically. Chickering's total history, working off a, by now, quite dense historiography, shows the extent to which a carefully laid-out analytic frame can capture this elusive situation. As a community, Freiburg was run ragged in 1918.