"Look closely at British memorials for World War I and you will often see the dates 1914-19. This range of years puzzles those who believe that the fighting ended with Germany’s defeat in November 1918, but the inscriptions are a testament to the fact that the victorious Allied troops continued to fight and die in the conflicts that followed the war, especially in the intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia. For many of the Great War’s defeated nations and peoples, as Robert Gerwarth shows brilliantly in “The Vanquished,” the full course of strife and bloodshed ended only in late 1923, when the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Europe and the Russian successor states finally settled down, at least for the time being." WSJ Reviev
Mavi Boncuk |
The Vanquished by Robert Gerwarth[1] | why the first world war failed to end
"A history of Europe between 1917 and 1923 looks at the dark side of national self-determination"Austria-Hungary was one of four empires to break up as a result of the first world war, the others being Hohenzollern Germany, tsarist Russia and the Ottoman empire. Across the territories of all four fallen empires, the immediate postwar years were times of extraordinary upheaval and danger. “As civil wars overlapped with revolutions, counter-revolutions and border conflicts between emerging states without clearly defined borders or internationally recognised governments, ‘postwar’ Europe between the official end of the Great War in 1918 and the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923 was the most violent place on the planet,”
![]()
Running for their lives: an illustration of Greeks fleeing Turkey, 1922
For the Western allies 11 November 1918 has always been a solemn date - the end of fighting which had destroyed a generation, and also a vindication of a terrible sacrifice with the total collapse of their principal enemies: the German Empire, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. But for much of the rest of Europe this was a day with no meaning, as a continuing, nightmarish series of conflicts engulfed country after country.
In this highly original, gripping book Robert Gerwarth asks us to think again about the true legacy of the First World War. In large part it was not the fighting on the Western front which proved so ruinous to Europe's future, but the devastating aftermath, as countries on both sides of the original conflict were wrecked by revolution, pogroms, mass expulsions and further major military clashes. If the War itself had in most places been a struggle purely between state-backed soldiers, these new conflicts were mainly about civilians and paramilitaries, and millions of people died across central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe before the USSR and a series of rickety and exhausted small new states came into being.
Everywhere there were vengeful people, their lives racked by a murderous sense of injustice, and looking for the opportunity to take retribution against enemies real and imaginary. Only a decade later, the rise of the Third Reich and other totalitarian states provided them with the opportunity they had been looking for.
[1] Robert Gerwarth is Professor of modern history at University College Dublin and Director of its Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Bismarck Myth and Hitler’s Hangman, a biography of Reinhard Heydrich. He has studied and taught in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.
![]()
UK Edition
Allen Lane
Published 25th August 2016
464 Pages
![]()
US Edition
Hardcover: 464 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 15, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374282455
ISBN-13: 978-0374282455
Mavi Boncuk |
The Vanquished by Robert Gerwarth[1] | why the first world war failed to end
"A history of Europe between 1917 and 1923 looks at the dark side of national self-determination"Austria-Hungary was one of four empires to break up as a result of the first world war, the others being Hohenzollern Germany, tsarist Russia and the Ottoman empire. Across the territories of all four fallen empires, the immediate postwar years were times of extraordinary upheaval and danger. “As civil wars overlapped with revolutions, counter-revolutions and border conflicts between emerging states without clearly defined borders or internationally recognised governments, ‘postwar’ Europe between the official end of the Great War in 1918 and the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923 was the most violent place on the planet,”
Running for their lives: an illustration of Greeks fleeing Turkey, 1922For the Western allies 11 November 1918 has always been a solemn date - the end of fighting which had destroyed a generation, and also a vindication of a terrible sacrifice with the total collapse of their principal enemies: the German Empire, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. But for much of the rest of Europe this was a day with no meaning, as a continuing, nightmarish series of conflicts engulfed country after country.
In this highly original, gripping book Robert Gerwarth asks us to think again about the true legacy of the First World War. In large part it was not the fighting on the Western front which proved so ruinous to Europe's future, but the devastating aftermath, as countries on both sides of the original conflict were wrecked by revolution, pogroms, mass expulsions and further major military clashes. If the War itself had in most places been a struggle purely between state-backed soldiers, these new conflicts were mainly about civilians and paramilitaries, and millions of people died across central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe before the USSR and a series of rickety and exhausted small new states came into being.
Everywhere there were vengeful people, their lives racked by a murderous sense of injustice, and looking for the opportunity to take retribution against enemies real and imaginary. Only a decade later, the rise of the Third Reich and other totalitarian states provided them with the opportunity they had been looking for.
[1] Robert Gerwarth is Professor of modern history at University College Dublin and Director of its Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Bismarck Myth and Hitler’s Hangman, a biography of Reinhard Heydrich. He has studied and taught in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.
UK EditionAllen Lane
Published 25th August 2016
464 Pages
Hardcover: 464 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 15, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374282455
ISBN-13: 978-0374282455