Marcus Funck, Roger Chickering, eds. Endangered Cities: Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars. Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2004. 198 pp. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-391-04196-7.

Reviewed by Jeffry Diefendorf (Department of History, University of New Hampshire)
Published on H-German (March, 2005)

European Cities and the Challenges of Modern Warfare

Marcus Funck and Roger Chickering, the editors of this interesting collection of essays, note that recent wars and acts of terrorism have made people acutely conscious of "the fragility of the urban environment," both "lived and built" (p. 1). This remark was written after September 11, but before the American assault on Iraq. While cities and their populations have been targets in warfare for millennia, in the modern era cities have become even more vulnerable because of the concentration of population, industry, and government functions. In a time of total war, the distinction between soldiers and civilians, military and non-military targets has become murky. Rightly or wrongly, military strategists have believed that destroying or seizing enemy cities, disrupting industrial production, and de-housing (to use the British phrase from World War II) and demoralizing the population would contribute to, if not guarantee, victory. Endangered Cities complements well other recent books that deal with cities and war both during and after the onset of warfare. Here one thinks of Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert's massive Capital Cities at War and several volumes co-edited by Chickering on total war.[1] This book contains eleven chapters plus an introduction by the editors. Two authors are American, the rest European. As the editors note, most of the essays were initially presented as papers at the Sixth International Conference on Urban History, which met in Edinburgh in 2002.

There are four thematic parts in the book: War and the Vulnerability of Urban Centers, the Burdens of Urban Occupation, Urban Rituals of War, and War and Urban Reconstruction. The editors took the book's title seriously but did not apply it too strictly. Not every city was equally endangered. Thus Guy Thewes's essay shows that Nazi plans to transform Luxembourg never got very close to realization because of war. Martin Baumeister's study of popular theater in Berlin in World War I does not really show that city as endangered. Benoît Majerus's essay on Brussels under German occupation during that same war suggests that the very high level of cooperation between German and Belgian authorities kept that city from being endangered by a complete German takeover.

Otherwise, the unifying idea works very well. There are essays on protecting vulnerable cities and their population and infrastructure through camouflage, decentralization of industry, and evacuation of the civilian population; essays on the vulnerability of urban populations during occupation and sieges; essays on the response of people to the growing number of deaths due to combat or bombing and the use of black market trading in the face of scarcities; and essays on the actual rebuilding of a city very badly damaged in wartime. In these instances cities truly were endangered in a physical, demographic, economic, or cultural sense.

The book opens with Davide Deriu's essay "Between Veiling and Unveiling: Modern Camouflage and the City as a Theater of War." As the title hints, Deriu, with a degree in architecture, is interested in theory and visual culture. He considers camouflage as "an organized discursive field" and writes of the "aerial gaze" and "the hegemony of vision in modern western societies" (pp. 16-17). "By analogy with the natural realm, it might also be argued that the art of organizing and displaying objects according to their photogenic qualities represented a form of teleplasty exercised by the aerial gaze on account of its panoptical power" (p. 19). Some urban and military historians may or may not be put off by such sentences, but Deriu does demonstrate the growing realization of the importance to armies of aerial photography and the expanding efforts to find ways of concealing targets. The examples Deriu offers are interesting indeed. In response to German bombing attacks, a Frenchman drew up a plan in 1918 for a "full-size replica of Paris" to fool German pilots (p. 20). During World War II, the Germans tried several forms of camouflage to change the appearance of cities like Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg, including using paint and netting and changing Hamburg's topography by draining the lakes formed by the Alster. However, as Deriu notes, the contest between aerial surveillance and camouflage was consistently won by the former. Cities were simply too large and distinctive to hide from cameras and the sophisticated analysis of photographs.

Recognizing that the concentration of war-related industries endangered French security, French military and urban planners between the wars considered ways of moving and decentralizing industrial production. This is the theme of Efi Markou's essay "Military Thinking and the Urban Question: Industrial Decentralization in France Between the Wars." While French military authorities were worried about the threat to industry located closest to Germany, they were mostly concerned with the Paris region, where most crucial industry was concentrated. Decentralization of Parisian industry served other purposes as well. Presumably moving industry would mean moving workers, and a less concentrated working class might lessen the opportunities for leftist political activities. Furthermore, for decades city planners had been calling for decentralization as one means of reducing urban population densities and thereby helping heal the unhealthy industrial city, plagued as it was both by disease and criminality. When industrialists resisted relocating factories south of the Loire, government decentralization policies under the Popular Front government in the mid-1930s reinforced efforts to nationalize key industries.

In fact, however, not much progress on decentralization was made before the start of war in 1939. Thereafter things changed dramatically. Here Julia Torrie's essay, "Preservation by Dispersion: Civilian Evacuations and the City in Germany and France, 1939-1945," is particularly interesting. She argues that initially the French favored evacuating the urban populations to the countryside to protect it from bombardment, whereas the Germans preferred to protect the city population by building air raid shelters. The Germans felt that evacuations of civilians would disrupt urban life, undercut morale, and create new problems in the countryside. In the end, nine million French and twelve million German civilians were evacuated. In the case of France, the Germans ordered the evacuation of French civilians from coastal cities in order to prepare their defense against possible invasion from Britain. In France, the evacuations were mostly to the hinterland of the cities and were of shorter duration. Imposed by the Germans and ameliorated by the French government, there were fewer difficulties in the countryside than was the case in Germany. There rural inhabitants resented the city dwellers, who were not prepared for rural labor. Moreover, the Germans were right in fearing that evacuations would compound the disruption of city life created by bombing while lowering morale in both towns and the countryside, in the latter case because of worsening conditions and because the evacuees reported on the catastrophic destruction from the bombing. Unhappy civilians also returned illegally to their cities to salvage what they could of their property and livelihoods. Torrie concludes that "civilian evacuations ... [were] a deeply ambiguous venture" (p. 61). Lives were saved (though hundreds of thousands of civilians still perished), but evacuations also contributed to worsening morale.

"Controlling Urban Society during World War I: Cooperation between Belgian Authorities and the Forces of Military Occupation" by Benoît Majerus demonstrates that order during the German occupation of Greater Brussels resulted from the decision of most local officials and police to stay at their posts and work with the German military authorities. 780 to 1,000 German soldiers formed a military police unit for Brussels, with another 700 guarding rail lines, but basically the Germans sought to control things with as few of their own resources as possible. To help monitor the population, the Germans required everyone to carry a new identity card. They also insisted on the regulation of prostitution (to protect the health of their troops). Belgian authorities made sure that "the population of the city was never a destabilizing factor in the German war effort" (p. 78). Criminality seems to have been relatively stable, and Brussels was better provisioned with food than Berlin. In exchange for this cooperation, Belgian officialdom was able to protect its own positions. This essay deals more with the occupation as a phenomenon of administration, and it neither delves deeply into details about how exactly the city was provided with food and fuel nor how conflicts between Brussels's citizens and the German rank and file were resolved. Nor does Majerus ask whether there were any recriminations after the war ended for collaboration.

When one thinks of Polish cities under German occupation, what immediately springs to mind are the brutal events of World War II. This makes Andreas Hofmann's essay, "Reweaving the Urban Fabric: Multiethnicity and Occupation in Lódz, 1914-1918," all the more interesting. Hofmann notes that Lódz's population of 477,762 made it "the second-largest town in Russian Poland" (p. 82), and it was an industrial city made up of three ethnic groups: Poles (48.8 percent), Germans (26 percent) and Jews (23.1 percent). The owners of the textile factories were Germans and Jews, the "middle sectors of the population" German, and the majority of factory workers Poles (p. 82). Hofmann suggests that social and ethnic conflict, heightened by the occupation, did not destroy the community, but the experiences of Lódz's citizens during World War I set the stage for what happened during World War II.

On the one hand, German occupation in 1914 completely disrupted the city's economy. Access to industrial raw materials, fuel, and traditional Russian markets was severed. Food shortages produced inflation and a black market. The city's population plummeted, with men drafted into the Russian army, then large numbers of Polish and Jewish workers deported for forced labor in Germany, then ethnic Germans moving to Germany. The decline in the German population was most dramatic, but also dramatic was the increase in the number of Jews (to 40.1 percent) due to incorporation of a largely Jewish suburb. The remaining population suffered from increased rates of disease and malnutrition. When the Russian government officials fled in 1914, a "Citizens' Main Committee" (GKO) was formed to take its place, and the GKO then worked with German occupation authorities to try to solve basic problems and help keep the peace. In 1915 the Germans appointed a new town administration; in 1917 elections produced still another. None of the local governments were able to reverse the economic decline, as the Germans confiscated goods and dismantled equipment for their own uses. The long-term consequences were serious. The economy never recovered. After the war, while Polish and German replaced Russian as the official languages, Poles and ethnic Germans mistrusted each other, and both engaged in anti-Semitism. Lódz's multiethnic community collapsed in World War II.

The long siege of Leningrad, which threatened the very survival of the city's buildings and population, is the subject of Eva-Maria Stolberg's "The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: Life in the Fortress of the Rear." Around a million people lost their lives to bombardment, starvation, disease, and the cold. Horrible conditions threatened the social order, in spite of the repressive efforts of Communist Party officials. Orphaned children formed gangs to steal food. Acts of cannibalism were reported. The presence of 600,000 provincial Jewish refugees sparked anti-Semitism. Remarkably, the city obtained enough food, fuel, and industrial goods from across Lake Ladoga and later by rail to survive, and the city's struggle was raised by Soviet propagandists to the level of heroic myth. That said, this is a case where more detail would be helpful. What sorts of foodstuffs were brought in, and how were they distributed? Which industries managed to keep going, and from where did they get raw materials? Stolberg notes that "Soviet authorities controlled every facet of life" (p. 107), and thus the city was besieged by the Nazis and the Communist Party. However, the NKVD is not known for civic administration. What happened to local officials and police? Did the same people stay in office and keep working, or were they replaced?

Martin Baumeister's "War Enacted: Popular Theater and Collective Identities in Berlin, 1914-1918," chronicles the ways in which commercial theater, jeopardized by the mobilization of theater personnel and members of the audience, and by the perceived irrelevance of traditional stage themes, put itself at the service of the war effort. "To resist their own marginalization, theater artists stressed their competence to define and depict the nation'" (p. 115). This meant staging plays with patriotic themes or telling the stories of families during wartime. Some musicals offered idyllic escapism, while a few plays addressed the growing tensions resulting from shortages as the war dragged on. The real point, however, is the survival of theatrical entertainment, not the survival of the city of Berlin.

Roger Chickering's "Death in Freiburg, 1914-1918," studies both the city's growing mortality rates and the ritual responses to wartime deaths. He notes that "the black-framed obituary notices of soldiers" in newspapers sometimes "lent these pages the look of a cemetery in print" (p. 137), a striking image that suggests the magnitude of the problem. Most of the deaths that directly resulted from the war occurred in fighting, but thirty-five civilians died in air raids. Shipments of bodies from the front caused problems for overcrowded cemeteries and encouraged cremation of remains. The city council sought to impose a measure of order, conformity, and a sense of community sacrifice in the layout of the section of the cemetery set aside for the war dead. "The civic rites of death were choreographed in the first instance to demonstrate resolve and solidarity" (p. 135). Death notices combined, in varying degrees, expressions of patriotic sacrifice and religious redemption, but, as Chickering suggests, the tone of the obituaries became more subdued as the war dragged on and as domestic tensions rose. It would be very interesting to know to what extent Chickering's observations hold for other German cities and in what ways "the civic management of death" varied from region to region (p. 143).

As Malte Zierenberg observes in "The Trading City: Black Markets in Berlin during World War II," everyone associates black markets with the postwar period, not wartime Berlin. The virtue of this essay is that Zierenberg not only demonstrates that black market activity quickly appeared in response to shortages and rationing but also suggests forms that black marketeering took. In particular, this activity ranged from "encounter-public" exchanges, where individuals quietly and in small numbers traded face to face, often in restaurants, to "meeting publics," where numerous exchanges took place in crowds such as might be found on the Alexanderplatz (p. 147). Neither police proclamations nor active police intervention shut down black market trading, though it was seen as an affront to order and discipline and, toward the end, a symbol of looming collapse and defeat. Since Berlin was declared "Jew-free," the regime blamed "foreigners" for illegal trading.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, seized by the Germans in May 1940, was to be Germanized both in administration and in physical form. The Nazis wanted to rid the capital of any French influences. Guy Thewes, in "City Planning as an Instrument of National Socialist 'Germanization' Policy: Hubert Ritter's Development Plan for Luxembourg," discusses how the assignment for transforming Luxembourg fell to Ritter, a Leipzig architect who had already been involved in planning the rebuilding of Crakow as a "German" city. His plans for Luxembourg followed the models that dominated Nazi city planning. Ritter proposed a huge cultural forum, an enormous domed festival hall, large axes, and a parade ground. However, instead of simply demolishing the old central city (except for offensive modern buildings), he wanted to create the new forum on the eastern edge of the city. Ritter also wanted to build small garden suburbs for a new population of Germans. Extensive green areas would provide for recreation and small-scale agriculture. Thewes notes that none of Ritter's plans were realized during the war, but some local planners and architects who worked under and with Ritter held important posts after 1945. The eastern edge of the city was indeed developed, and the Place de l'Europe of the European Community was built on the site of Ritter's proposed forum, but Thewes states that the precise connections between wartime Nazi plans and postwar developments "remains to be addressed" (p. 176).[2]

The final essay in the volume, "Whose History is 'Our' History? The Influence of Naval Power in Sevastopol's Reconstruction, 1944-1953," by Karl Qualls, focuses on the ability of the Soviet navy to command scarce resources and give a predominant role to the memorialization of the military during the city's reconstruction. Sevastopol was attacked and largely destroyed by the Germans in 1941 and 1942 and occupied by them until May 1944. Already during the war, Soviet propagandists linked the city's current ordeal with its heroic struggle in the Crimean War. The defense of the city and its liberation became part of the celebration of the complex merger of Russian and Soviet history. After the war, the restoration of the layout of the city center and of many buildings and the return of some pre-revolutionary street names was evidence of how local reconstruction planners, backed by the navy, "used the city's infrastructure to trigger memory and create myth" (p. 185). Here planner/architects dispatched by Moscow failed to impose their models. Monuments were erected to naval heroes, but, as Qualls notes, "Stalin never had his likeness raised above Sevastopol" (p. 190).

Notes

[1]. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War 1914-1919 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and, for example, Roger Chickering and Stig Foerster, eds., The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919-1939 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); see H-German review at < http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=292431099495320>.

[2]. Continuities between wartime and postwar planning have been explored by Werner Durth and Niels Gutschow, Träume in Trümmern. Planungen zum Wiederaufbau zerstörter Städte im Westen Deutschlands 1940-1950 (Braunschweig and Wiesbaden: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, 1988); and Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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Citation: Jeffry Diefendorf. Review of Funck, Marcus; Chickering, Roger, eds., Endangered Cities: Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10361

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