Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War (review)

If “total war” be defined by the erasing of distinctions between soldiers and civilians, the central urban dimensions of the phenomenon are evident. Civilians not only concentrated in cities, but also tended to perform essential services in support of the war effort there, the place where they most commonly found themselves exposed to military violence. Understood in these terms, what happened elsewhere happened, as Jay Winter puts it, “in cities too, only more so” (222). At all events, this volume of essays joins an expanding literature on the urban experience of war in the twentieth century (see for example Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919 [2 vols., Cambridge, 1997–2007]; Rainer Hudeman and François Walter, eds., Villes et guerres mondiales en Europe aux XXe siècle [Paris and Montreal, 1997]; Roger Chickering and Marcus Funck, eds., Endangered Cities: Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars [Boston, 2004]). Its focus is the impact of war on “metropolises,” which the editors define as “places of international stature,” which are “distinguished above others for some quality or characteristic” (3). Under three general rubrics—“heightened anticipation, dense experience, and concentrated commemoration of military conflict” (1)—the essays address the impact of total war in selected cities in Europe and Asia.

As is frequently the case in anthologies of this sort, the results are mixed. Some of the essays are products of original scholarship. Others reproduce scholarship that has been published before, while several read like after-dinner remarks. Despite a long editorial introduction, the essays do not display much thematic integration. The category of “metropolis” is neither sufficiently defined to be of much help, nor is it thematized in the essays. Edward Soja’s concept of “thirdspace,” which the editors invoke as a way in which to emphasize the interconnections between material and imagined urban space, likewise finds little resonance among the contributors. One issue, the place of the Twin Towers in the broader history of metropolitan war, surfaces in several of the essays, but would have rewarded much more reflection.

Because they do address the interplay of physical and imagined space, some of the more successful essays treat the memory of World War II. Stefan Goebel analyzes the way in which the city of Coventry became the “commemorative cosmopolis” of postwar Europe (163) via an international network of partnerships—a process that made the city into the very symbol of urban destruction in wartime. Because it involved issues of competitive victimization as well as the Cold War, the city’s most intriguing partnership was with Dresden. Lisa Yoneyama’s essay on memorialization in Hiroshima draws from a monograph that she published several years ago. It reveals the heated politics of commemoration, which in this city has focused on questions of context, the relationship between the bombing and Japan’s war in Asia, and the fact that the city’s annihilation came at the hands of the country’s postwar ally.

Several other noteworthy essays deal with central European themes. Maureen Healy analyzes the discourse of internal enemies in Vienna during the two world wars. The “civilian fixation” (121) on enemies was a function of wartime distress and frustration. It was directed during World War I primarily at Jews, Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles; during the second war, when the city was much less cosmopolitan, the enemy of choice became Austria’s German ally, whose local representatives were known pejoratively in local parlance as Piefkes. Jovana Knežević deals with a related problem in her essay on the social functions of rumor in Belgrade under Austrian occupation during the World War I. Tim Cole, who has previously written on Jews in Budapest during World War II, offers a comparison of ghettoization in Warsaw and Budapest during the same conflict. His account reveals differences in the two cases that are striking enough to...