The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg 1914–1918 (review)

This ambitious book, the product of almost twenty years of labor, aspires to be a "total history" of a single city during World War I. By "total history," the author, following Lamprecht, means the past in all of its dimensions—" political, economic, social, [and] cultural" (2).¹ Apart from the immense work of gathering the data (from the admirably complete local archives, the private writings of about twenty-four contemporaries, newspaper accounts, eight oral interviews, and a survey of the inhabitants of 1,740 addresses throughout the war), Chickering identified the major conceptual problem as "aesthetic"—how to devise "an organizational framework that is at once coherent and capacious enough to accommodate, in principle at least, the entire spectacle" (4). The resulting book is therefore not primarily an analysis of civilian life in war so much as a broad, fascinating, and gracefully written description of how Freiburg's citizens interpreted, adapted to, and tried to manage the impact of war, and how their civil society disintegrated under its weight.

Nonetheless, analysis is built into the study, and it comes from three sources. The first is the material impact of modern industrial warfare. Chickering provides a thorough account of the financial, economic, demographic, and minutely material ravages of war, including the relentless requisitions which by 1918 had commandeered even "postage stamps, newspapers, books, corks, cigarette stubs, bottles, electric-light bulbs, oil, and celluloid" (193). He rightly understands that systematic deprivation was the greatest effect of the war on civilians and the basis of their ultimate sociopolitical response to it. But understanding both the distribution of hardship and its political consequences demands a second level of analysis, which Chickering, following Rohe, finds in "milieus" (33 n. 69).² Milieus define social collectivities as they form in the life world. Freiburg had three—a Roman Catholic, a Socialist, and a (largely male, Protestant, educated bourgeois) "Liberal" one (33, 45–46). These milieus mediated the experience of war and provided the basis for (conflicting) interpretations of it.

But because the war's stresses cut across the traditional milieus, Chickering must supplement them with two other determining rubrics, gender and age.Women and pre- and post-draft age males experienced a different war and were mobilized (or forgotten) in different ways. The third level of analysis is a modern, cultural one that focuses on shifting contemporary narratives of the war, or interpretive frameworks within which people justified events, tried to understand their predicament, or found blame. The axis of sacrifice and entitlement, in particular, ordered people's lives. The city's inability to uphold the social bargain at the basis of this interpretation of equity and morality led to its utter loss of authority and to the revolution of 1918.

Chickering's study of Freiburg does not revise the conclusions of recent social research, but its thoroughness and insight provide a much more exact understanding of how war actually works on the homefront: requisition, distribution, censorship, taxation, charity, etc. A chapter about the assault on sensory experience (smells, taste, color, and the sense of time and distance) is new and fascinating, as is Chickering's account of the disintegration of organizational life. One can literally feel the war tear Freiburg apart.