Comparative urban history: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914-1919

In August 1914, the German artist Max Beckmann drew a series of sketches of the crowds gathered in Berlin during the first days of the war. Among them is a drypoint print entitled Declaration of War 1914. It shows a group of people trying to get a glimpse of a newspaper with the latest war news. Their faces show a range of reactions, from shock to concern to apparent detachment. This book is about what happened to them, and to people like them living in Paris and London between the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 and demobilization in 1919.

Nation, city, and community

The history of the Great War has been told time and again within a national framework. Almost all students of the period have been imprisoned, to a greater or lesser degree, within this framework of analysis. Its main drawback is that it tends to conflate into aggregates quite different and frequently contradictory experiences. The best way to penetrate behind the illusory veil of a unitary ‘national experience’ is to describe the character of community life in wartime.