Shadows of War

How did World War I affect the course of German history in the 1920s and early 1930s? As the historian Karl Alexander von Müller put it, the 'storm' of transformation did not end in 1918, leaving contemporaries uncertain where the changes already wrought by the First World War would lead. Shadows of War: Histories and Memories of Violence in the German Republic, 1918-1933 investigates what happened when the soldiers returned to Germany. It examines the lives of those born as children of the German Empire in the late 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, who became adults around the turn of the century, only to be marched off to a different world during the Great War. The German Republic itself was a product of the war: because of the Treaty of Versailles, the republic's leaders could not put it forward as a harbinger of 'peace'. Once the guns had fallen silent on 11 November 1918, two days after Philipp Scheidemann's unexpected declaration of the republic, German troops started to leave their barracks in the Reich and stream out of the rear areas and from the Western Front, often having discharged themselves. Millions more followed behind in their units until they reached the German border, when many decided to make their own way home. They were preceded by sailors, making their way south from the Baltic and North Sea ports. By December, thousands of troops had arrived in cities across Germany, providing military support for workers' and soldiers' councils, state governments and local authorities. It was in these circumstances that the boundary between military and political violence became blurred - and that modern German history was remade.