Hundreds of soldiers' newspapers circulated within the British, French, and German armies during World War I. They were published in great variety at every level of command, from the hectographed broadsheets that circulated in the trenches to the slick, professionally produced papers that were published in thousands of copies at the corps-level and above. In the early 1990s these newspapers provided the foundation for two systematic analyses of troop morale—J. G. Fuller's study of the British army and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau's of the French. The premise of this scholarship was, as Fuller argued, that these newspapers were “themselves an expression of the collective culture” of the British army or, as Audoin-Rouzeau put it more cautiously, that they were “despite certain imperfections,” “a reflection of the combatants' attitudes and way of thinking.” The “imperfections” of which he wrote had to do with the problem of censorship in its many forms, which his study addressed in passing (Fuller's hardly addressed it at all), only to insist that “the editors were living in the midst of their readers and could not ignore their state of mind.” French trench journalism was in any case, he added, less regimented than its German counterpart.

Anne Lipp's dissertation, which appeared in 2003, confirmed Audoin-Rouzeau's judgment of German military newspapers. She argued that the company-level press of the German trenches contained more authentic representations of soldiers' views than the papers that were produced at the higher administrative levels. On the basis of the army's own documents, however, she also showed that after March 1916 the German High Command imposed a comprehensive censorship regime, which quickly extended to all levels of military journalism. What appeared in the soldiers' newspapers thus represented at best the processing of “Deutungsangebote” handed down from above. The broader problem was that Lipp's scholarship also challenged the premise of the earlier studies by Fuller and Audoin-Rouzeau, the proposition that soldiers' newspapers offered a guide to something more than censorship policy. It is significant in this connection that Alexander Watson's fine recent study of combat morale in the British and German armies made no use of soldiers' newspapers as sources.

These are the problems with which Robert Nelson's new monograph German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War must contend. To his credit, he confronts them head-on. He accepts Lipp's findings about the German army's pervasive censorship of soldiers' newspapers, but he argues nonetheless, like Audoin-Rouzeau, for the “supreme usefulness of soldier newspapers as a source for the negotiated beliefs often shared by officers and their troops” (p. 18). Soldiers would not, he insists, have subscribed to these papers but for significant consonance between what they read and what they believed. This proposition parries both the role of censor and the fact that the soldiers who produced the newspapers tended to be older and better educated than the recruits who read them. Subject to these caveats, Nelson then pursues “broader currents of opinion” (p. 6) in the German army. These currents related to the war, Germany, and its antagonists; life in the army; and the occupied territories in the west and east. The result of Nelson's research is a rich compendium of material drawn across the spectrum of newspapers. It addresses a wide range of interesting subjects—humor and sports in the army, technology and comradeship, loyalty, national identity, women, language, and perceptions of the home front. This exercise rests on a prodigious reading not only in the German newspapers (more than a hundred), but also in papers from France and Britain, which provide the basis for comparative generalizations. To control for the censor's interventions, Nelson also draws selectively from the published letters of German soldiers from the front.

From all this material he ventures a number of provocative conclusions. In the German papers he finds more a self-conscious fixation on national identity and a shared national culture; more reflections on loyalty, comradeship, and duty; less humor and irony; and a greater need to justify the war effort. He traces these differences to a less secure German sense of national sentiment and the absence of a unified popular culture in prewar Germany—a German analogue to the British music hall. He argues, however, the most significant reason for the contrasts lay in the geostrategic positions of the contending armies. The Germans were fighting an aggressive war on foreign soil, so the effort to legitimize the conflict as a just cause, a struggle in defense of the homeland, came less naturally than to the French and British armies.

There is much to ponder in this book. In the end, however, the author is too honest to slight the difficulties that the issue of censorship continues to pose. These difficulties pervade the account, lending a speculative, impressionistic, tentative aura to the whole enterprise. Flags such as “perhaps,” “could be,” “I believe,” “may have been,” and “we must be cautious here” point the way through a methodological minefield; at the end the reader finds confirmed what she suspected all along, that “Much of what was written and sketched [in the soldiers' newspapers] found resonance with the readership. How much is impossible to say” (p. 239). Nelson's book thus provides a valuable catalog of what was written and sketched in these newspapers, but its great service is to demonstrate self-consciously the problems that daunt the use of these sources.