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Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa by Michelle R. Moyd (review)

Throughout the book, Nübel emphasizes that spatial understandings of the Great War promoted notions of transformation, metamorphosis, and rebirth that survived into the postwar period. With a short conclusion, he goes into more detail about some of the war’s aftereffects, but he fails to substantiate those earlier claims. Furthermore, while the three sections of the book do work well on their own, the compartmentalized discussion of environment, terrain, and landscape does not allow the author to adequately consider how these categories might overlap in the minds of soldiers. For example, how did adverse weather conditions shape perceptions of the landscape? Nübel hints at a connection at one point, but he does not go far with it (273). Admittedly, this is not the only question left unanswered by an ambitious book that sometimes struggles with the immensity of the topic. Still, Nübel does successfully identify space as a useful category of analysis for a conflict that continues to fascinate and, in some ways, defy explanation. Adam T. Rosenbaum, Colorado Mesa University