This ambitious book is an attempt to understand why the First World War was so destructive, in two senses: destructive of culture and destructive of life, both combatant and non-combatant. It is not primarily an archival study, though the author's previous archival research on Germany's “Belgian atrocities” furnishes some primary source material. Instead, it uses recent historiography to correct misperceptions of the war, it criticizes some historians' previous interpretations, and it seeks to provide a comparative description of aspects of the war that bear on the theme of destruction.

Those elements make up an interesting, but necessarily incomplete, review of the war. The work's most valuable contribution lies in refocusing our attention on important but neglected factors. Kramer's account of Italy's war is particularly rich and suggests stimulating comparisons to war conduct on both the western and eastern fronts. The shocking violence of the German-Austrian invasion of Italy in autumn 1917 and the criminal treatment of Italian soldiers by their commander General Luigi Cadorna are generally ignored. Similarly, Kramer's focus on the purposive destruction of culture (for example, of cathedrals and libraries), especially by the Central Powers, is a welcome corrective because contemporaries recognized it as central and, as he writes, “Cultural destruction was not merely an incidental phenomenon of the Great War, but intrinsic to it” (p. 159). This insight is one reason that Kramer rightly takes violations of international law (which protected cultural sites) so seriously, and begins his book with the burning of the university library of Louvain by German troops in August 1914—for how the war began, through German violations of Belgian neutrality and of the Hague Rules of Land Warfare, was crucial to how the war was understood by belligerents and how they then fought it. Kramer also makes an effort to restore the gender component of warfare to his narrative, especially by focusing on sexual violence against women. And his handling of the horrendous suffering of prisoners of war is another very valuable feature of his account. As he points out, much more research on this topic is required, but the enormously different death rates for prisoners of different nationalities held in the same country suggests political and even racial policies working at an earlier stage than many have thought.

Kramer takes particular issue with three historians: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (for his theory of Germany's peculiar path and the role that traditional elites played in it), George L. Mosse (for his interpretation of the brutalization of postwar politics), and Isabel V. Hull (for her analysis of the dysfunctional destruction produced by Imperial German military-organizational culture, which Kramer interprets as an argument for German singularity). Kramer is intent on avoiding Germanocentrism; his focus on Italy and the Balkan Wars of 1912/13 are good antidotes to this. But his book, for all its helpful individual criticisms, does not amount to a cogent alternative for several reasons. It lacks the analytical structure necessary to effective comparative history. For example, Kramer points out that “nations involved in the First World War differed greatly in their methods of waging war and in their war policies. Mortality rates would suggest that the deliberate neglect of civilian welfare was at least as pronounced in Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary as in Germany” (p. 158). Here we have a situation in which differences produced a similar destructive effect—which means that the causes, significance, and meaning of these practices must have been radically different in each state. Yet Kramer's argument begins and ends with the similarity of their destructiveness. He provides no analytical template that would help us interpret causes and effects in an integrated, comparative way. The (often good or suggestive) criticisms that he makes tend therefore to remain isolated arguments.

The lack of analytic structure is also visible in definitional problems. Despite his laudable focus on the destruction of culture, Kramer never defines culture. His account in practice focuses primarily on high culture, indeed, on avant-garde artists. Their relation to their national (or international) milieus, the operations of commercialized, popular culture (so visible in the propaganda campaigns), and the discursive structures of national mobilization (which differed strongly in political valence in the different countries) remain unclear. This is a pity, because Kramer cannot then, for example, explain why the right wing in Germany and Italy could so successfully annex the symbolic “meaning” of the war. Similarly, Kramer's use of terms such as “massacre” and “mass killing” differs from that of most social scientists working on these problems. He uses “massacre” to mean simply large numbers of soldiers killed in regular, lawful battle (p. 51), and “mass killing” to refer to the deaths of both civilians and soldiers (p. 2). Both terms are normally used to refer to one-sided killing (by a state) of masses of unarmed people, usually civilians. Using the same terms to describe the deaths of combatants in battle and the purposive killings of non-combatants is not analytically helpful. If the point is that these two phenomena were related, then it ought to be made in a different way.

In the end, the “dynamic of destruction” remains unclear. (Given the many points of difference that Kramer describes, surely it should be “dynamics.”) The details of difference remain intractibly separate in this account. When at several points Kramer sums up the dynamic, he writes that the German conception and practice of the war of annihilation “propelled Allied warfare into the same logic of annihilation” (pp. 39, 227, 335). Britain and France were thus pulled into using the enormous destructive force of modern, industrialized weaponry that willy-nilly (and sometimes purposively) destroyed cultural goods and non-combatants as well as combatants. But such a summary still leaves Germany as the prime motor of destruction, and it does not integrate the dynamics at work inside and among Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, or the United States (absent from the book) as Kramer's title would seem to promise. We are left with more questions than answers.