© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved.
German Society and Total War
Sheffield Hallam University
The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918. By Roger Chickering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. xiv + 628 pp. £55.00 (hardback).
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‘C’est la guerre. Everything is in short supply, but we don’t have the enemy in our land’ (p. 82). So wrote Engelbert Krebs, Catholic priest and theologian, in his diary on 30 October 1917. In so doing he summed up what Roger Chickering, in his new study, describes as the ‘pervasive impact’ of the First World War on Freiburg's citizens (p. 9). With 85,000 inhabitants in 1914, this urban locality was the principal administrative centre and ‘commercial hub’ of the southern region of the Grand Duchy of Baden, and came under the command of the 14th army corps. It was not occupied during the war—although ironically the original Schlieffen Plan envisaged temporarily abandoning it to the enemy as part of its ‘revolving-door’ strategy of a pre-emptive strike through Belgium and the Netherlands (p. 83). Yet while remaining just outside the zone of military operations, Freiburg was nonetheless constantly