Durchhalten und Überleben an der Westfront. Raum und Körper im Ersten Weltkrieg by Christoph Nübel (review)

Over one hundred years have passed since the outbreak of World War I, a conflict that marked the beginning of “the short twentieth century” (Hobsbawm) and “the modern age” (Eksteins). Unprecedented in its scope and destructiveness, the Great War has occupied scholars for decades. Classic works have addressed a variety of topics, including the sequence of diplomatic exchanges, the motives of the protagonists, and the escalation of the arms race, while more recent scholarship has directed our attention to propaganda and public opinion, the experience of the home front, and the profound cultural impact of four years of war. New research continues to illuminate previously underappreciated dimensions of the conflict, demonstrating a lingering fascination with World War I while also telling us something about the historian’s craft. With the right sources and analytical framework, a skillful historian can still say something new about even the most well-trodden topics.

Christoph Nübel demonstrates exactly that with his new book about the German experience on the western front. In this rich and extensively researched monograph (featuring a bibliography of no less than 70 pages), Nübel demonstrates how the so-called spatial turn can shed new light on World War I. More specifically, he examines different manifestations and conceptions of space (Raum) along the western front in three separate essays that focus on environment, terrain, and landscape respectively. The author justifies this unique approach by emphasizing that the soldiers themselves thought in spatial terms as they dealt with a hostile environment, mapped and navigated unfamiliar terrain, and contemplated and invented landscapes. More importantly, Nübel argues that space reveals how soldiers made sense of the war, and in many cases, how they persevered and survived (25). Thus, “space” is not just a buzzword but rather the key to a better understanding of the experience of trench warfare. In order to substantiate this ambitious hypothesis, Nübel turns to a wide variety of sources, including official military documents, reports from soldiers, diaries, letters, photo albums, drawings, and maps. He also adopts an interdisciplinary approach, utilizing the insights of anthropologists, ethnologists, psychologists, philosophers, and other scholars to interpret this broad range of evidence.

The organization of the book is logical and the prose is direct, with each of the major sections concluding with a concise summary of Nübel’s conclusions. In his discussion of the environment of the western front, he emphasizes the omnipresent cold and wetness that defined the lives of many soldiers, leading him to convincingly claim that the greatest burdens of trench warfare were associated with environmental factors and not necessarily combat itself (97). Moreover, the dangerous conditions of life in the trenches compelled a host of civilian and military experts to develop tactics of survival and perseverance, while some claimed that the same conditions could transform soldiers, potentially reversing the degeneration that afflicted prewar society. On the subject of the terrain, Nübel describes how the land itself inevitably shaped both the experience of combat and military tactics, which changed drastically after the soldiers “dug in.” Especially useful is the short case study of a 1916 battle involving the 15th Bavarian Infantry Regiment at Neuville-Saint-Vaast. With this example, Nübel confirms that the military leadership went to great lengths to educate their troops on the topographical goals and obstacles of the battlefield. In practice, however, the individual soldiers only came into contact with a tiny portion of the terrain, reflecting, in the author’s words, “the industrial division of labor” (206). In the section on landscape, Nübel argues that carefully constructed images of the Heimat and Kriegslandschaft could alleviate and potentially rationalize the suffering of German soldiers. This is a logical argument, and the author does provide an interesting analysis of how soldiers comprehended the scenery of the western front itself, which was described alternately as a devastated landscape...