In the eleven substantive essays that follow the editors' introduction, although there is sustained attention to only one city that was located in German central Europe (in an essay on conflicts among ethnic groups in Vienna, mainly during World War II), Germans (or Austrians) are present implicitly in all but an essay on the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars and the two essays that deal with developments in Japan. Inasmuch as the remaining eight essays concentrate on Europe just before, during, between, and after the wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, much of what they discuss can be seen as consequences of attacks carried out by Germans (or Austrians) against their neighbors. Belgrade during World War I and London, Coventry, Paris, Warsaw, Budapest, and Stalingrad during the later conflict all suffered—albeit in widely differing degrees—as a result of aggression that occurred in consequence of decisions taken either in Vienna or in Berlin. Although the volume unfortunately fails to provide detailed treatment of developments that occurred within central Europe itself (in addition to the essay on Vienna, there are two pages on Berlin in 1945 and several more on wartime and postwar events in Dresden, but that is all the attention to speak of received by any city in Germany), it has a lot to say about developments in which Germans were heavily implicated.

The “scenarios” referred to in the book's subtitle had to do with premonitions of urban disaster that pointed toward what turned out to be very real catastrophes that befell city dwellers—particularly after 1939. The scenarios summarized here were foretold preeminently by Britons: by H. G. Wells in his novels The War in the Air (1908) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), by other novelists, and by several authors who called for improved air defenses. Imaginative as well as analytic texts all forcefully expressed foreboding over the threats posed to inhabitants of densely populated areas by enemy bombers. (The discussion of authors in Britain is illuminating. It is usefully supplemented by discussion of the Italian military theorist Giulio Douhet and the American urbanist Louis Mumford. Readers of this journal will be left wondering about comparable scenarios in German writings.)

Wartime “experiences” come in for consideration in the great majority of the essays. Metropolises were places in which populations were mobilized via propaganda (much of which emerged from within civil society rather than as a result of initiatives undertaken by governments) and exhibitions, such as the displays of model trenches that were dug in central Berlin. Popular mobilization was largely intended to heighten popular animosity toward foreign enemies, but intensified hostility was also directed against “aliens” within combatant countries, many of whom resided in urban areas—in Vienna in World War I, Hungarians, Czechs, and Jews; in World War II, occupying Germans as well as Jews. Occupation occurred far more destructively and repressively in Belgrade, Warsaw, and Budapest, the latter two cities being places in which Jews were rounded up and placed in ghettoes before being shipped off to death camps. On the other hand, normal life persisted for many people in occupied Paris, where, for example, the telephone system never ceased to operate. But the quintessentially urban experience was one of being targeted for physical destruction, either by aerial bombardment or by soldiers backed up by heavy artillery. Even in World War I, well over 1,000 civilians lost their lives in London, and even in Paris during World War II a similar number of civilians were killed (by Allied bombs). Meanwhile, destruction occurred much more extensively in London, Coventry, Budapest, Warsaw, and Stalingrad and not only in Berlin but also in many other German cities. In Cologne, for example, more than seventy percent of the housing stock was destroyed, with the result that by 1945 a prewar population of 777,000 declined to about 40,000. (There has been a great deal of debate during the past decade about the impact of strategic bombing of German cities. One wishes that this theme had been dealt with explicitly somewhere in this volume.)

The editors place particular emphasis in their introduction on efforts to preserve and inculcate collective memories both of losses and of triumphs, which have been directed not only at local populations but also at city dwellers across national boundaries. Albeit not on as large a scale as was the case after 1918, war memorials sprang up in many cities after 1945. Some, such as the largely unreconstructed Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, stood out as reminders of the suffering that war makers had caused to be visited on fellow citizens. Also in Berlin, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe served to remind those who beheld it of what had been done by Germans to others. On the other hand, war monuments built in the Soviet Union celebrated the heroism displayed by the defenders of Leningrad and Stalingrad. In most of the essays, commemoration does not receive as much attention as is given to occupation and destruction. It does take center stage in “Commemorative Cosmopolis: Transnational Networks of Remembrance in Post-War Coventry,” in which we learn about links between custodians of memory both there and in Dresden, and also in essays on the Ottoman reconquest of Edirne and on postwar memory work in Hiroshima and Tokyo. But for fuller discussion of the theme of commemoration, readers should look at a recent volume by Jay Winter, who wrote the conclusion to this one. His Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century (2006) provides a good point of entry into memories of World War I and also touches on representations of the later conflict.

It is unfortunate that a volume that contains as many fine essays as the one under review here does did not receive more attention during the final stages of production. There are too many typographical errors, many of which leap out at the reader. Whereas “to some extend” (p. 4) might be excused as not having been caught by spell-check, there is no excuse for “commmorative” (p. 183) and other errors that should have been rectified before this volume was published. Ashgate's “Historical Urban Studies” series is a distinguished one, and all contributions to it should be held to a high standard not only with regard to content but also with regard to proofreading.