This volume emerged from a 2012 conference on World War I in Eastern Europe convened by Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, one of the foremost German institutes for the study of the region's history. The editors and contributors are to be congratulated for producing such a fine work. Unlike many such conference volumes, the individual essays all cohere into a whole that is greater than its parts. In addition, the chapters range in quality from good to exceptional. In sum, Legacies of Violence constitutes a valuable addition to the scholarship on the war in the East, which, despite the recent turn toward a “transnational” approach to the study of the war, remains neglected.
All scholars of the war, whatever their methodological or regional specialty, would profit from reading the introductory essay and the concluding “Commentary” that bookend the individual contributions. In the elegantly written introduction, editors Böhler, Borodziej, and von Puttkamer convincingly argue that there were several characteristics of the war in the East that made it unique. Perhaps most importantly, the war and its aftermath brought on the disintegration of four great empires. This process of violent disintegration is directly linked to another particularity of the Eastern war—namely the way in which it accelerated and transformed preexisting tensions, bequeathing a volatile legacy to the region after 1918. The editors further point out that the war in the East even requires its own chronology. Rather than 1914–1918, the editors suggest that World War I in Eastern Europe really began in 1912, with the outbreak of the First Balkan Wars, and concluded in 1921 (though they do not explain why they chose 1921). Jörn Leonhard returns to these themes in a short but powerfully argued reflection at the conclusion of the book, where he issues a methodological clarion call. All historians of the war, Leonhard writes, must realize that the wars in Western and Eastern Europe were inextricably linked together. At the same time, he notes that distinct inflections and variations on general processes also marked the war and its aftermath in the East. For example, Leonhard notes that the war challenged and effectively destroyed traditional prewar political elites, ideas, and structures in Europe. But whereas in the West it tended to bring to power new kinds of civilian politicians, like the Welsh lawyer David Lloyd George, in the East it brought the rise of warrior-politicians (one thinks immediately of the postwar path of Józef Piłsudski and the veterans of the formerly Austrian Polish Legions).
The articles themselves are divided into four sections: “A World in Transition,” “Occupation,” “Radicalization,” and “Aftermath.” The essays in “A World in Transition” focus primarily on politics and violence in the region and engage with the question of whether the war accelerated historical continuities in the region or, rather, marked a profound rupture and introduced new forces. The debate over the war as a caesura or accelerant is a somewhat belabored one, and the authors of this section conclude, convincingly and inevitably, that it was both. In the following section, “Occupations,” only two authors really address the putative theme: Jonathan Gumz explores the way the war changed both the realities and norms of what was, in many ways, a new and unexpected phenomenon; and Stephan Lehnstaedt examines economic policies in occupied Central Europe. Robert Nelson's examination of the way the war radicalized preexisting German “fantasies” of expelling eastern Europeans and settling the East with Germans, which Nelson links with colonialism as well as Nazism, would probably have fit better in one of the other sections. Section III, “Radicalization,” deals with topics ranging from the spread of biological-racial concepts of human difference throughout Europe during the war, to the rise in violence directed against the Jews during and after the fighting, to the mobilization of right-wing paramilitaries in the states that suffered defeat. Section IV, “Aftermath,” contains an essay on the persistence (and, finally, ebbing) of violence as a motor of Soviet history, another on how the war was interpreted in postwar Poland, and another illustrating the centrality of state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, linking the war to what came before and after.
As in any edited collection, there are a few standout pieces. In addition to the excellent introductory and concluding essays noted above, Joachim von Puttkamer's contribution, “Collapse and Restoration: Politics and the Strains of War in Eastern Europe,” reinforces the crucially important point that the prewar political order in Central Europe not only collapsed during the war, but the process of rebuilding had to begin in less-than-auspicious circumstances. In the section on occupations, both Gumz and Lehnstaedt have written excellent essays that complement each other well, with both illustrating the way that the pressures of total war fueled a process of adaptation in military occupations at both a theoretical and the practical level. Above all, however, it is Philipp Ther's “Pre-negotiated Violence: Ethnic Cleansing in the ‘Long’ First World War” that most richly fulfills the promise laid out in the book's introduction. Ther's work skillfully traces the history of state-sponsored population transfers and ethnic cleansing from the eve of the war through the postwar years, showing that it was a thoroughly transnational European phenomenon. Ther's essay most conclusively demonstrates what the book as a whole makes clear: that the integration of Eastern and Central Europe into the broader study of World War I will produce new insights into what that conflict meant for the course of European—and world—history.
