Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

The series in which this valuable book appears aims, in its editors' words, to advance the "colonization of military history by cultural historians." In this enterprise, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius steams into one of World War I's hearts of darkness and discovers its legacy to the Nazi future. His terrain is a seldom-contemplated corner of Eastern Europe encompassing western Latvia, modern Lithuania, and northeastern Poland, which from 1915 to 1918 (with later incorporation of nearby Baltic lands), the invading German army ruled as "Ober Ost." This name derived from Paul von Hindenburg's title as Oberbefehlshaber or Supreme Commander in the East and signaled the occupation zone's character as a "military utopia," conceived and championed above all by Hindenburg's ambitious, visionary nationalist partner General Erich Ludendorff.	1
Central among Liulevicius's aims is to convey the German soldiers' eastern "front-experience" (Fronterlebnis), still largely unexplored even in German historiography. He wants also "to reveal the assumptions and ideas" that Ober Ost veterans derived from that experience. "Above all," Liulevicius "seeks to understand the psychological outlines of this experience and the outlook on the East it produced" (p. 1). His conclusion is that, although they aimed at law and order and reconciling the region's several nationalities to benevolent German paternalism, Ober Ost's military administrators unleashed chaos and rebellious hatred instead. Yet they chose to believe that "if the cause of failure was not some fatal flaw in Ober Ost, then the fault must lie with the material it worked with: the lands and peoples." Following military defeat and anti-German uprisings, Ober Ost's planners rejected what they saw as "a dangerous, uniform, hulking, dirty East of dirty populations." "The East," a holistic concept into which Liulevicius recklessly inflates the idiosyncratic Ober Ost region, now "appeared as an area of races and spaces"—his translation of the Nazi-favored geopolitical concepts of Volk and Raum—"which could not be manipulated, but could only be cleared and cleaned" (pp. 219–N20).	2
Liulevicius concedes that the Nazis' Eastern European racial utopia was far deadlier than anything Ober Ost conceived. Yet "Nazi ends evolved in part from [Ober Ost's] means, its categories of perception and practice," while "the line of continuity between the military utopia and Nazi plans can be traced in the way in which Ober Ost's practices and assumptions were radicalized and then put into action in renewed war in the East" (p. 272).	3
These, for Liulevicius, are the "lessons" Germany's World War I eastern front teaches. They offer new underpinning to the continuity thesis ("from Bismarck to Hitler") that Fritz Fischer and like-minded historians launched in the 1950s and which, as keystone of the theory of the German "special path" (Sonderweg) to modernity, still today shapes influential interpretations of German history. In Liulevicius's reckoning, as in countless others', the Nazi experience is the malevolent lodestar pulling everything in the preceding historical field toward it. But there is hermeneutic risk in assessing any historical era by its future consequences. Only one of Liulevicius's eight chapters marshals evidence in depth for the Nazi debt to Ober Ost. It cannot make a definitive case for such sweeping interpretive claims concerning National Socialism as those just cited. Meanwhile, the future-oriented reading offered in his seven other chapters raises doubt whether a satisfactory understanding of Ludendorff's and his subordinates' actions in the light of their own collective past has been achieved.	. . .