Capital Cities at War: London, Paris, Berlin, 1914-1919.

Fritzsche, Peter

Capital Cities at War: London, Paris, Berlin, 1914-1919 edited by Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997. xvii, 622 pp. $90.00 U.S.

"On the last Saturday in January 1918 the Metropolitan Police counted another half million people queuing in the streets of London" (p. 330). A few months earlier, The Times had reported from New Broad Street where one thousand people waited in front of a shop and also from Walworth Road, where at least two thousand consumers were turned back unsupplied. These are marvelous views of hardpressed civilians in wartime and they well illustrate the perspective of this comprehensive social history of London, Paris, and Berlin in World War 1. Tangled queues on New Broad Street and Walworth Road suggested the enormous problems metropolitans in all three cities encountered when they sought sufficient foods, tried to heat their homes during this war's unusually cold winters, warded off illness, and cared for sick family members. This adds up to "the other war" on which the more familiar war on the battlefronts also rested. At the same time, the daily prospect of queuing up only to leave the shop empty-handed raised fundamental questions of fairness. The invisible lottery that provided for consumers on New Broad Street but did not on Walworth Road deeply divided city people, generated suspicion about municipal corruption, and thus imperiled homefront morale. Indeed, one of the great merits of this ambitious investigation is to track material indices of well-being (and, increasingly, ill-being) against subjective conceptions of equity and entitlement. Moreover, it is significant that The Times' stories are dated relatively late in the war, for it was only in the years 1917 and 1918 and not before that Londoners began to stand in the food lines that Berliners had already formed in 1915. By virtue of its comparative focus on Paris and Berlin as well as London, this history is able to make sense of local experience in terms of national fate in France, Germany, and Great Britain. And finally, the reports come from New Broad Street and Walworth Road; they get close enough to neighbours to disaggregate civilian populations into component parts -- the elderly, consumers, munitions workers, landlords -- and thus to distinguish new social divisions and new social hierarchies that otherwise have been obscured by a national framework. These specifically capital cities themselves generated sufficient statistical data to allow historians to ask standard questions, probe beyond summary series, and make reliable comparisons.

This is an extremely valuable history because of its close metropolitan focus and wide comparative range. It is also an extremely difficult history to assemble, and the editors are to be commended for putting together what must have appeared to be an initially risky undertaking in collective research and joint authorship. A total of thirteen historians contributed to the final product, which is remarkably consistent in voice and clear in conclusion. However, this exemplary editorial achievement comes with a price: individual authors do not pursue their own stylistic innovations and thus do not introduce readers to specific individuals and particular fates or linger amidst closely read literary or popular cultural illustrations. This volume lacks vignettes, and without them it is much more difficult to hear the voices of the people in the streets, an intimacy which is the avowed goal of the enterprise.

But if we do not hear the conversations along the queues on New Broad Street or Walworth Road, we do learn a great deal. The authors deftly combine an analysis of how civilians coped during the difficult war years with an inquiry into the sense of national community for which they made sacrifices and endured hardships. The guide here is the economist Amartya Sen, who argues that standards of well-off must include an analysis of well-being and an evaluation of abilities and opportunities. This means that the government's ability to deliver basic goods and services and to create a sense of equity are critical elements in any individual understanding of misfortune. For the most part, the British, French, and even German governments attempted to distribute goods and services with some sense of fairness. The crucial divide in this "other war" is not so much the distinction between more democratic regimes in London and Pans and a distinctly less democratic one in Berlin than the impaired ability of the Germans to manage ever scarcer resources after 1916. The harsh winter of 1916/17 shredded the security of German civilians and revealed the shortcomings of their administration. Unfortunately, the authors do not closely analyse how shortages of food and fuel undermined the ability of the Germans to wage the war or persuasively argue how it doomed the empire. Indeed, the tribulations of Berliners are so bitter in the recounting that I am inclined to agree with Armin Triebel: "what is remarkable is not the ultimate demise of the German war effort but the fact that Berliners, and millions of other civilians, carried on as long as they did" (p. 356). The meanings of citizenship were apparently not hollow even in the Wilhelmine Retch. Indeed, the experienced community under siege may have prepared as much as it poisoned the democratic politics of the Weimar Republic. In any case, it expanded the meanings of citizenship in all three countries, which is the volume's general conclusion.

The war created new affinities and new divisions, stressing and enabling the imagined citizenship of civilians. Entitlement rights and transfer payments levelled certain class distinctions, while shortages of food and fuel pulled together the great curbside republic of consumers. At the same time, however, the needs of war industries generated a privileged class of munitions workers who did not share the perils of the front. There was more opportunity for women to seek paid work, but they carried the double burden of labouring for the nation and for their families and suffered more HI health, as did marginalized groups such as the elderly and illegitimate children, whose life chances decreased precipitously. The efforts on the part of all governments to fashion a patriotic community of endurance led also to the marked politicization of market relations, for which the middle classes paid the biggest price. Wartime economies of scale hurt small businesses; rationing burdened retailers; government spending deflated investments; and extensive rent control enraged property owners.

The war ensured that every imaginable resentment would find an advocacy group, leading to embittered, Hobbesian politics in the postwar period. But this mobilization of interest did not simply sharpen prewar divisions for it occurred against a vastly changed landscape in which constituents also acted as citizens and came to expect vastly improved services from their governments and a measure of public virtue from themselves. At the same time, the metropolis itself was transformed by the war. Newly built industrial centres fueled the movement of work and manufacture into the suburbs. Huge numbers of people were on the move, as workers and women followed the supply for work in cities and suburbs; refugees fled combat zones, which for a time abutted Paris itself; mobilization mustered millions of men, who swept back into the cities periodically during leave. This ceaseless recombination of people and autobiographies heightened the subjunctive tense. The "sense of the possible is perhaps the characteristic most clearly shared in these three cities," writes Jean-Louis Robert: "Millions were exposed to a regime of rapid change, of a range of experience and impression, of a sense of grandeur and cosmopolitan life" (p. 53). Millions of city people did not return to their prewar homes and those that did returned as very different individuals. It is a distinctly metropolitan perspective on mobility and possibility and debasement in the war years that this splendid study brings into focus.