The Vanquished
Why the First World War Failed to End
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ISBN10: 0374537186
ISBN13: 9780374537180
Trade Paperback
464 Pages
$32.00
CA$43.50
For the Western Allies, November 11, 1918, has always been a solemn date—the end of fighting that had destroyed a generation, but also a vindication of a terrible sacrifice with the total collapse of the 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 The Vanquished, a highly original and gripping work of history, 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 that proved so ruinous to Europe’s future, but the devastating aftermath, as countries on both sides of the original conflict were savaged by revolutions, pogroms, mass expulsions, and further major military clashes. In the years immediately after the armistice, millions would die across central, eastern, and southeastern Europe before the Soviet Union and a series of rickety and exhausted small new states would come into being. It was here, in the ruins of Europe, that extreme ideologies such as fascism would take shape and ultimately emerge triumphant.
As absorbing in its drama as it is unsettling in its analysis, The Vanquished is destined to transform our understanding of not just the First World War but the twentieth century as a whole.
Reviews
Praise for The Vanquished
"Robert Gerwarth, a professor of modern history at University College Dublin, looks at the turbulent five-or-so years especially in the center of Europe, between 1918, when World War I ended, and 1923, when peace seemed to come to the Middle East. His account is both important and timely, and obliges us to reconsider a period and a battle front that has too often been neglected by historians . . . And, as Gerwarth’s well-researched and engrossing book makes clear, there was already plenty of flammable material lying about . . . There are other tantalizing questions as well. What if the United States as the new power on the international scene had joined the League of Nations and used its great economic and political influence to rebuild Europe, as it did after World War II? The Vanquished is an excellent guide to help us think again about such issues."—Margaret MacMillan, The New York Times Book Review
"The Vanquished is not a general history of Europe between 1917 and 1923. Rather, it is a mixture of fast-paced narrative and fluent analysis of the turmoil that unfolded in the lands of the four shattered empires, as well as Greece and Italy, either side of the November 1918 armistice on the western front. Gerwarth demonstrates with an impressive concentration of detail that in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe the carnage of the first world war by no means came to an end, as it did for the British and French, in late 1918 . . .[Gerwarth] book argues convincingly that 'the story of Europe in the years between 1917 and 1923 is crucial for understanding the cycles of violence that characterised the continent’s 20th century.'"—Tony Barber, Financial Times
“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 . . . Based on a staggering range of primary materials and secondary literature, The Vanquished fills a vast canvas . . . [A] path-breaking study.” —Brendan Simms, The Wall Street Journal
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BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
1
A Train Journey in Spring
On Easter Sunday 1917 the ‘triumphal march’ of Bolshevism began with a train journey. In the late afternoon of 9 April the Russian Bolshevik, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, his wife and fellow activist...
About the author
Robert Gerwarth
