Dynamic of Destruction

Taking the burning of Louvain library by German troops in 1914 as his starting point, award-winning historian Alan Kramer offers a vivid new account of the wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept across Europe in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. -;On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international community reacted in horror - 'Holocaust at Louvain'...
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Taking the burning of Louvain library by German troops in 1914 as his starting point, award-winning historian Alan Kramer offers a vivid new account of the wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept across Europe in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. -;On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international community reacted in horror - 'Holocaust at Louvain' proclaimed the Daily Mail - and the behaviour of the Germans at Louvain came to be seen as the beginning of a different style of war, without the rules that had governed military conflict up to that point - a more total war, in which enemy civilians and their entire culture were now'legitimate' targets.Yet the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a wider wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept Europe in the era of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and eye-witness accounts from across Europe at this time, award-winning historian Alan Kramer paints a picture of an entire continent plunging into a chilling new world of mass mobilization, total warfare, and the celebration of nationalist or ethnic violence - often directed expressly at theenemy's civilian population. -;This stimulating, scholarly and shrewd book is as rich in original ideas as it is energetic in its revisionism. - Simon Sebag-Montefiore, New York Times Review of Books;[Kramer's] material is as fascinating as it is depressing. - Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs;A sobering book with a bleak message, but one that needs to be heard. - Malcolm Brown, BBC History Magazine. d;No serious student of the history of the twentieth century can afford to ignore this book. - Jay Winter, author of 'Remembering War'