Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Isabel V. Hull (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. xi + 384, cloth 45.00, pbk. 24.95
Isabel V. Hull has written a book that, if it does not re-ignite the old controversy over a German Sonderweg, still will force scholars to think carefully about her thesis. In focusing on military culture—the deeply ingrained set of routines, habits of thinking, and practices in war—Hull tracks Germ...
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2006
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| In: |
Holocaust and genocide studies
Year: 2006, Volume: 20, Issue: 3, Pages: 512-515 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Isabel V. Hull has written a book that, if it does not re-ignite the old controversy over a German Sonderweg, still will force scholars to think carefully about her thesis. In focusing on military culture—the deeply ingrained set of routines, habits of thinking, and practices in war—Hull tracks German actions from the Franco-Prussian War through various colonial wars to the brutal stalemate of World War I in order to find a unifying theme: that the dogma of military necessity, a distillate of military culture, led the means to overwhelm the ends. The tendency toward extreme violence thus resulted not from ideology but from an institutionalized military culture allowed to run to its logical extreme because of a lack of civilian constraints. |
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| ISSN: | 1476-7937 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Holocaust and genocide studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/hgs/dcl028 |