German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (review)

Propaganda can often tell us as much about the target audience and its expectations as about the producer. This idea is the leitmotif of Robert L. Nelson’s readable new study of German soldier newspapers during the First World War, which examines journals written for the troops on all fronts, and especially those stationed or fighting in occupied territories in western, eastern, and southeastern Europe between 1914 and 1918. A welcome comparative element is also introduced through repeated reference to equivalent trench journals for French, British, Canadian, and Australian servicemen.

Nelson admits that the hand of the German military censor was often “more obvious” (71) than in the British, French, and Dominion cases, especially when it came to protecting the social standing and dignity of officers. But he also argues—against what he believes to be the overarching interpretation offered by previous authors, such as Anne Lipp (Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung 1914–1918 [Göttingen, 2003])—that soldier newspapers were more than just a means of manipulating opinion “from above.” Rather, their “sheer number and popularity” (238) indicated that trench journals were catering to a diverse market and could not simply reproduce the dominant “bourgeois-military” narrative of the war. Their task was made all the more difficult by the fact that, in Germany, there was no commonly accepted reason for fighting. Whereas the French had sent their young men into battle to defend their own national territory against “barbaric” invaders, and the British to preserve a “national way of life” (as represented in popular culture, such as sports and music-hall jokes), Germans lacked a “shared national vocabulary” (86–87). The idea of a defensive war, as emphasized by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in his Reichstag speeches of August 4 and December 2, 1914, also needed some tweaking if it was going to make sense to frontline troops risking their lives each day to remain on occupied foreign soil.

The solution was to meet the soldiers halfway by creating a “vague . . . discourse of comradeship” (44) as a form of “manly justification” for the war (153). This was symbolized, for instance, in tales of daring rescue attempts in no-man’s-land, in exhortations to “hold out” in order to protect women and children at home, and in complaints about “shirkers” who did not act in a brave or “comradely” fashion (107–12). “Comradeship” in this sense was an abstract ideal that embraced the notion of heroic self-sacrifice, order, and discipline, and also transcended differences of class, region, and religion. It thus went beyond the Remarqueian idea of “fighting for your buddies,” and, for Nelson, illustrated the fact that German troops were “active perpetrators” (5) in the war and not just passive recipients of orders.

Admittedly this flies in the face of the even more compelling argument made by Benjamin Ziemann (War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923 [Oxford, 2007, orig. 1997]), based on a reading of Bavarian soldiers’ letters, that the troops disliked the war and military life, and wished to return home. Where Nelson seems to concur with Ziemann is his claim that enemy soldiers were not objects of hatred, and could even be regarded as comrades, without necessarily threatening the fighting spirit of the troops. This was true as well of women and men on the home front, as long as they seemed to be working hard and making sacrifices. Indeed, Nelson finds little evidence in German soldier newspapers of any sense of alienation between the home front and the war front—until the mass industrial strike of January-February 1918, which was widely condemned in the trenches.

Before 1918, a greater threat to home-front relations, according to Nelson, was that so many soldiers had French or Belgian girlfriends. Indeed, there was a potentially awkward double standard here. German soldiers expected their wives and sweethearts at home to practice sexual abstinence, especially if they...