Germany after the First World War (Clarendon Paperbacks) - Softcover

Bessel, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198205864 ISBN 13: 9780198205869

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1995

Synopsis

A social history of Germany in the years following the First World War, Germany After the First World War explores Germany's defeat and the subsequent demobilization of its armies, events which had devastating social and psychological consequences for the nation. Richard Bessel examines the changes brought by the War to Germany, including those resulting from the return of soldiers to civilian life and the effects of demobilization on the economy. He demonstrates that the postwar transition was viewed as a moral crusade by Germans desperately concerned about challenges to traditional authority; and he assesses the ways in which the experience of the War, and memories of it, affected the politics of the Weimar Republic.
This original and scholarly book offers important insights into the sense of dislocation, both personal and national, experienced by Germany and Germans in the 1920s, and its damaging legacy for German democracy.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Bessel is author of Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism (Yale UP, 1984), editor of Life in the Third Reich (OPB, 1987), and co-editor of Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany.

Review:

"Well-researched and intelligently written."--Choice

"Bessel reminds us that the Germans never came to terms with the fact of German war guilt or with Germany's military defeat...useful in reminding us that history never repeats itself, and that historical parallels and comparisons between German democracy today and German democracy under Weimar are overdrawn."--New York Times Book Review"

"Bessel has done an excellent job of demonstrating how World War I continued to cast a very long shadow over the Weimar Republic, making the fight for Germany's first democracy a difficult, eventually impossible, struggle."--Journal of Economic History

"...the best treatment of its subject available in English....will prove indispensable to students of Weimer Germany and its chronic instabilities, as well as to anyone interested in learning about troubled waters from which Nazism would emerge."--David M. Luebke, Bennington College

"This book provides a richly detailed account of a crucial period in twentieth-century German history."--American Historical Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0198205864
• ISBN 13: 9780198205869
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344