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Book Review: Islam and Nazi Germany’s War, by David Motadel

Romanian, Polish and Czech units either deserted or surrendered en masse. Jeffery argues that the fluid Eastern front, which saw Russian, German and Habsburg forces move back and forth over vast territory, inhabited largely by minority populations within the three eastern empires, shattered the legitimacy of these empires and encouraged claims to national self-determination. Second, Jeffery shows the myriad ways in which the belligerents fought economic war. The British blockade of Germany and German submarine warfare have long been staples of histories of the First World War and receive due attention here. In addition Jeffery points out that a quarter of Allied shipping losses during the war took place in the Mediterranean by the submarines of the Central Powers operating from Pola and Cattaro. Attacks in the Mediterranean also avoided – from the German perspective – alienating the United States. As the Central Powers invaded Romania in autumn 1916, Allied engineers engaged in the systematic destruction of oil fields, an important though not decisive attempt to deprive Germany of access to oil reserves. Third, Jeffery considers the opportunities for peace in 1916. The end of the year witnessed initiatives by the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, and the re-elected American president, Wilson. These attempts foundered, argues Jeffery, for several reasons. Wilson’s claim that both sides shared similar principles alienated Allied governments, who conceived of the war as an ideological as well as geopolitical clash. A negotiated peace with a militaristic Germany would be unstable, only a postponement of the final reckoning. The ascent of Lloyd George to the prime ministership in late 1916 represented a hardening of Britain’s commitment to the war. In Jeffery’s view, this hardening resulted from the intensification of war. The scale of losses could only be made good through victory. The apparent paradox of visions of peace was that they could only be achieved through an intensification of violence. Although global in scale, Jeffery pays close attention throughout the book to individual experiences. He recovers what he calls the ‘human (and, happily, sometimes humane) dimension of the war experience’ (p.8). At the end he concludes with a story by Emilio Lussu, an Italian writer, who recounted how he refrained from shooting a Habsburg officer quietly smoking a cigarette. Lussu distinguished between murder and killing. In pondering the ethics of violence in wartime, Lussu, Jeffery suggests, pointed ‘away from war as a whole’ (p.376). Although the belligerents could not achieve peace in 1916, the wartime experiences could be reworked into symbols of reconciliation. Gallipoli, Verdun, the Isonzo, Messines and other battlefields are now employed in the service of constructing and maintaining peace. Just as shared experiences of nationalists and unionists in the First World War have served the peace process in Northern Ireland, Jeffery shows how this is part of a wider global process in how we rethink the legacies of the war a century later.