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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2012
‘Geography costs – why does the map of Europe never stay put?’ The American poet Carl Sandburg posed that question in 1940 as the European continent was engulfed by another great conflict, the second in a generation. The course and conduct of the two world wars continue to dominate publishers’ lists but several recent volumes offer stimulating interpretations of Europe's international history during the intervening twenty years. They shed a sobering light on the cost of geography and on the challenges of statecraft, because what moved the map were not only the tectonic forces of socio-economic change but also the decision-making of political leaders.
1 ‘Turn of the Wheel’, in Carl Sandburg, Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1950), 645.
2 Makers of the Modern World: The Peace Conferences of 1919–1923 and their Aftermath, series editor Alan Sharp (32 vols, London: Haus Publishing, 2008–10).
3 See Mosse, George L., Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. Ch. 8Google Scholar; Ziemann, Benjamin, ‘Germany after the First World War – A Violent Society? Results and Implications of Recent Research on Weimar Germany’, Journal of Modern European History, 1, 1 (2003), 80–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This essay was part of the inaugural issue of the Journal devoted to ‘Violence and Society after the First World War’ which contained wide-ranging discussions of this theme across Europe as a whole.
4 Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, translated by Manheim, Ralph (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 152, 186–7Google Scholar.
5 Weber, Hitler's First War, 250, 269.
6 For similar arguments about veterans from rural Bavaria see Ziemann, Benjamin, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923, trans. Skinner, Alex (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 274–5Google Scholar. Also more generally Ulrich, Bernd and Ziemann, Benjamin, eds, Krieg im Frieden: Die umkämpfte Erinnerung an den Ersten Weltkrieg 1918–1935 (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1997)Google Scholar and the still valuable study by Bessel, Richard, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)Google Scholar, esp. Ch. 9.
7 See p. 115 in this issue.
8 Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010)Google Scholar, quoting xix. Also described as ‘shatter zones’ in recent literature – see Eichenberg, Julia and Newman, John Paul, ‘Introduction: Aftershocks: Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War’, Contemporary European History, 19, 3 (2010), 183 n. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Prusin, Lands Between, 4. For the argument that this also remained a theme after 1914 and indeed for much of the twentieth century, see the stimulating essay by Zahra, Tara, ‘Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis’, Slavic Review, 69, 1 (2010), 93–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Quoted in Cornwall, Mark, ‘“National Reparation”?: The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans, 1918–38’, Slavonic and East European Review, 75, 2 (1997), 280Google Scholar.
11 Prusin, Lands Between, 174.
12 Prusin, Lands Between, 114.
13 Boyce, Great Inter-war Crisis, 5, 439.
14 Kindleberger, Charles P., The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 292Google Scholar.
15 Boyce, Great Inter-war Crisis, 13.
16 Ibid., 299.
17 See the synoptic articles by Jacobson, Jon, ‘Strategies of French Foreign Policy after World War I’, Journal of Modern History, 55, 1 (1983), 78–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Is There a New International History of the 1920s?’ American Historical Review, 88, 3 (1983), 617–45.
18 Boyce, Great Inter-war Crisis, 423, 451 n. 4; Steiner, Zara, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, e.g., 594–6, 813–14.
19 Steiner, Triumph of the Dark, 10, 1043, 1047, 1051.
20 Maiolo, Cry Havoc, 2, 3, 5; Tooze, Adam, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006)Google Scholar.
21 Maiolo, Cry Havoc, 5, 273, 348; Watt, Donald Cameron, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1989), 610Google Scholar; Steiner, Triumph of the Dark, 1057.
22 The importance of the imperial dimension in Britain's strategy has recently been underlined by Edgerton, David, Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011)Google Scholar.
23 May, Ernest R., Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000)Google Scholar – an incisive study that has been strangely neglected.
24 Steiner, Triumph of the Dark, 648–51; see also the discussion of Chamberlain's summitry in Reynolds, David, Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 37–95Google Scholar.
25 Reynolds, David, ‘1940: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century?’ International Affairs, 66, 2 (1990), 325–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Reynolds, David, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 23–48Google Scholar.
26 Fiore, Anglo-Italian Relations, 88.
27 Boyce, Great Inter-war Crisis, 139.
28 Stevenson, David, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 541–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.