The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939 (review)

Disabled veterans have received considerable attention from historians but few if any recent volumes by a single author take up the subject so adeptly as this work. Based on an impressive range of research undertaken in Britain and Germany, The War Come Home engages the works of Charles Maier and Keith Middlemas ¹ to offer “a different, if in some sense complementary, interpretation of stability in the Great War’s aftermath.” (p. 3) Cohen’s interpretation locates civil society—defined as “the dense network of voluntary, and especially philanthropic, organizations that mediated between the individual and the state”—not at the periphery but rather at the very center of stability traditionally understood as shaped by states and special interest groups. “The peace this book will describe,” Cohen explains eloquently in her introduction, “was forged not in back rooms and ministerial chambers but in arenas of broad public participation, in soup kitchens and makeshift local pension offices, homes for orphaned children and villas turned lazarets.” (p. 4)

Cohen skillfully and convincingly compares the British and German cases, and the specific brands of veterans’ politics that emerged in each state. In Britain, despite public pressure to meet veterans’ demands, the state failed to fulfill its obligations, leaving a voluntarist system to care for disabled veterans and, at the same time, veterans’ organizations to demand less from their state. The outcome of these circumstances was complex. While voluntarism reflected the state’s failure to provide adequately for the men who for fought for “King and Country,” it served to convey both the public’s appreciation of and veteran’s pride in the gratitude of their fellow citizens. Moreover, as voluntarism shielded the British state from the consequences of its unpopular policies, indeed ensuring the moderation of British veterans, voluntarism’s good intentions failed to prevent British disabled ex-servicemen from living “literally, as well as figuratively, on the edges of their society.” (p. 12)

Different circumstances and outcomes characterized the German case. Here, efforts to gain the loyalty of war victims informed both the extension of state control (Verstaatlichung), indeed its monopoly, over war victims’ care, and the elimination of philanthropic competition and even distribution of benefits. This regulation of charity yielded the Weimar state shouldering the full burden of the Fatherland’s thanks. (p. 11) Over time, however, with German philanthropy shunted to the margins and the state increasingly unable to fulfill its commitments despite reintegrating many men into the postwar economy, German veterans began to complain bitterly that the public was doing little if anything to assist them. Cohen’s conclusion: “The National Socialists gave veterans everything they believed Weimar had taken away: honor, gratitude, and respect. The Thousand Year Reich’s munificence would not long be theirs to enjoy alone.” (p. 97)

Cohen’s interpretation of the British public as the British ex-servicemen’s best ally deserves special attention for the way in which this relationship rightly “forces some reappraisal of the myth of the war generation.” (p. 47) Cohen’s narrative reveals that the rift defined by literary modernism simply did not play out in the lives of disabled men themselves, indeed this rift reveals little about the actual lives of British ex-servicemen. “Ex-servicemen were angry at the state, that is indisputable,” Cohen claims, “they despised generals in plush chairs behind the lines, Whitehall bureaucrats, profiteers—but their attitudes toward the general public were benign when not sympathetic. It was true that the war has resulted in an undefinable cleft of experience separating soldiers from those who had stayed at home, but that did not mean the public’s benevolence was worth any less.” British ex-servicemen’s favorable views of British philanthropic efforts, Cohen argues effectively, help us to see vital nuances in the experiential “gap” that inhabits so many histories of the Great War, its combatants, and those who remained at home.

Brilliantly written and immediately accessible, The War Come...