H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (September, 2007)
Jeffrey R. Smith. _A People's War: Germany's Political Revolution, 1913-1918_. Lanham: University Press of America, 2007. 213 pp. Bibliography, index. $32.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7618-3642-1.
Reviewed for H-German by Jason Crouthamel, Department of History, Grand Valley State University
Locating a Vernacular Revolution in German History
Germany's defeat in 1918 is often seen as a political rupture that resulted from social, cultural, and economic crisis that fragmented a traumatized society, making it more susceptible to the rise of National Socialism. Jeffrey Smith's new book argues that historians need to revise their perception of November 1918 as a moment of "disunity" in response to a lost war. Instead, he sees 1918 as a culmination of a growing "nationalist vernacular sphere," a movement of popular activism that unified Germans across social and political lines, shattering the monarchy. The term "revolution," Smith argues, should be applied to the 1913-18 period as a whole, with the war as a catalyst, rather than a rupture, in facilitating the expansion of this "vernacular public sphere." Ultimately, he suggests, the mobilization of popular activism in a struggle to wrestle sovereignty from the kaiser constitutes an underlying continuity between the _Kaiserreich_ and the Third Reich (p. 21). Relying on police records from Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg, as well as newspaper accounts of imperial authorities' clashes with citizens, Smith claims to avoid the rather narrow focus on nationalist pressure groups and elite political leaders found in the enormous historiography ranging from Fritz Fischer and Hans Ulrich Wehler to David Blackbourn and Geoffrey Eley (p. 8). In a thorough overview of this scholarship, Smith boldly claims to "overcome the inherent shortcomings of the revisionist historiography" by demonstrating that new links between the state and society were being forged since 1914, with citizens seizing political initiative in ways that replaced Wilhelm II's authority with that of "a newly enfranchized German _Volk_" (pp. 8-9). However, the significance of Smith's own argument needs to be further developed, as his goal to provide a "third view" of this watershed period, distinct from the scholarship of the 1960s and 1980s, could be more fully realized. Though Smith makes an interesting attempt to write a history of German politics without becoming engrossed in the machinations of "the state," his conception of the "vernacular public sphere" needs to be defined with more nuanced argumentation and more effective use of primary sources ...
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