Capital Cities at War

Abstract

This ambitious volume marks a huge step in our understanding of the social history of the Great War. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert have gathered a group of scholars of London, Paris and Berlin, who collectively have drawn a coherent and original study of cities at war. The contributors explore notions of well-being in wartime cities - relating to the economy and the question of whether the state of the capitals contributed to victory or defeat. Expert contributors in fields stretching from history, demography, anthropology, economics, and sociology to the history of medicine, bring an interdisciplinary approach to the book, as well as representing the best of recent research in their own fields. Capital Cities at War, one of the few truly comparative works on the Great War, will transform studies of the conflict, and is likely to become a paradigm for research on other wars.

Berlin: An Overview

“…Berlin suffered intense food shortages and upheavals in the First World War (Winter and Robert 1997). After Kaiser Wilhelm fled the Empire for the Netherlands on November 9, 1918, the Empire was formally replaced in 1919 by the Weimar Republic, so called because the constituent assembly for its founding took place there and because it looked back to the days of Goethe's humanism; and that was replaced by the Third Reich.…”

Feeding the City, Feeding the Fortress: Cracow’s Food Supply in World War I

“…4 This traditional approach is even more risky when dealing with a wartime economy, which is far from free market. 5 Price regulation, food rationing, inflation and nationalization of many food products as well as other changeable circumstances additionally hamper proper quantitative analysis of the standard of living. Hence, there is a strong need here to consider the standard of living in a broader context, as proposed by Amartya Sen. 6 Our concept of the standard of living encompasses three complementary areas: opulence, capabilities, and functionings.…”

Going Barefoot in Warsaw during the First World War

“…3 However, some guidance to my efforts was found in studies of the wartime cultural histories of Paris, London, and Berlin contained in the second volume of the major collaborative project Capital Cities at War edited by Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert. 4 Particularly useful is Winter's general observation that "the first fully industrialized war in history precipitated a deluge of traditional forms of language, perception and signifying practices." 5 This "nostalgic turn" was one vector of metropolitan cultural life, according to Winter, while the other moved in the opposite direction-that is, in anticipation of the future.…”