Review of Gerwarth, The Vanquished, H-Nationalism

Robert Gerwarth. he Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016. 464 pp. $27.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-374-28245-5. Reviewed by John Deak (University of Notre Dame) Published on H-Nationalism (August, 2017) Commissioned by Cristian Cercel Robert Gerwarth’s he Vanquished presents a series of stark images in its opening pages. Gerwarth describes the moment when a Turkish cavalry unit entered Smyrna, a city on the coast of Anatolia that had belonged to the Otomans since the fourteenth century. he city was ancient and its population was cosmopolitan, consisting of Muslims, Jews, and Armenian and Greek Orthodox Christians. he Otoman Empire and subsequent Turkish Republic had been in a state of war with a variety of opponents for over ten years, dating back to Italy’s invasion of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in 1911. But, as Gerwarth tells us, this Turkish unit was not welcomed home like Homer’s Odysseus. hat is because the population did not consider the Turks as a friendly army coming home. he Greeks, with the encouragement of the British government, had invaded Anatolia in 1919, using Smyrna as their base of operations for a violent invasion in which Greek troops commited countless atrocities against Turkish Muslims, aided by Christians among the local population. By September 1922, ater three years of ighting, the Greek army had been beaten by the armies of Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk. hey withdrew from Anatolia, looting and murdering on their way. ish mob. Violence was the order of the day for two weeks as an estimated thirty thousand people were killed and “many more were robbed, beaten, or raped by Turkish soldiers, paramilitaries and local teenage gangs” (p. 3). Turks set ire to the Christian quarters, driving the Christians out of their hiding places. hey escaped to the quay along the waterfront where twenty-one Allied warships had a good view of things on the shore. Fire approached them from all sides as Turkish troops cordoned of the area and allowed no one to escape. he Allies refused to intervene. As the Allies watched, the citizens of Smyrna died among the lames or chose to drown in the water. Gerwarth does not present the events of Smyrna in September 1922 as some exotic episode on the edge of Europe or as a moment of violence and brutalization that comes merely at the end of the First World War. Rather, the deliberate murder of civilians as retribution and ethnic cleansing is central to a larger story that has been ignored by much history writing on the First World War and its atermath. In fact, the central point of this book is that the common narrative that the First World War ended on November 11, 1918, is a story that only makes sense to the Western Allies, especially the British and he Turkish cavalry unit exacted a retribution on the the French. For the rest of the belligerents of the First Christian citizens of the town, helped by an angry Turk- World War, the vanquished, the world war was trans1 H-Net Reviews formed into civil wars and border conlicts that were as violent and disruptive as the war itself. Moreover, it was these episodes of violence that had lasting inluence in the years following the oicial end of hostilities in 1918. mostly directed on the ield of batle. Violence itself became democratized. he end of the First World War in Europe and the Otoman Empire dissolved into violence that “was ininitely more ungovernable.” What motived this violence was a deeper understanding of the conlict as an existential one, “fought to annihilate the enemy, be they ethnic or class enemies.” States no longer had a irm hand on violence, and militias of various political persuasions assumed the role of the national army for themselves. In the meantime, “the lines between friends and foes, combatants and civilians, became terrifyingly unclear” (p. 13). Gerwarth’s story is woven together mostly from secondary sources, with some memoir material that adds texture to the narrative. And this is a book where narrative prose, pulling together episodes that stretch from Finland in the north to Palestine in the south, dominates. Gerwarth oten chooses to recount episodes of violence rather than ofer dense scholarly analyses of the larger meaning of the events themselves. his book is especially more show than tell. How violence became transformed in the First World War and how that transformed violence carried over into the interwar period frames the larger arc of the book’s 267 pages of prose. he book starts with the Russian Revolutions of 1917, which eventually resulted in Lenin pulling Soviet Russia out of the war. Germany and Austria-Hungary signed a punitive peace with Russia at Brest-Litovsk, stripping away large swathes of territory and creating new nation-states that would serve as satellites for the Central powers. Peace in the East held the promise of restoring the bodies of Central Europeans and reinforcing other active fronts in the war. In fact, in early 1918, the war actually looked winnable to Germany and its allies. All powers, from the Otoman Empire to Germany, prepared new ofensives to knock the Allied powers out of the war. Germany amassed its forces in preparation for an all-out assault in the West. Gerwarth says that the taste of victory iltered from the high commands and leadership into the general populace on the home front. Gerwarth’s story is one where peace was not absolute, but precarious and oten absent. he focus of the book is about the story of the “vanquished”; Gerwarth tells us that his book “aims to reconstruct the experiences of people living in those countries that were on the losing side in the Great War: the Habsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern and Otoman empires (and their successor states), as well as Bulgaria” (p. 6). Tellingly, he also includes in his story Greece and Italy, those countries that “lost the peace,” though they may have been victorious in the war itself. In doing so, Gerwarth hopes not only to show new connections but also to build on a historiography that has largely rehabilitated the prewar histories of the large land empires in the East. he implicit argument of those histories has been that these far-from-perfect empires were nonetheless less violent and more progressive than the nation-states that followed them. Gerwarth shows how violent the conclusion of the First World War really was, drawing our atention to the years 1917-23, which contained important moments for the forging of the interwar But such optimism quickly turned out to be an period and the twentieth century. illusion—one that came crashing down with an unstoppable force just a few months later. Ater routing the Gerwarth shows how the successor states to the em- Italian army at Caporeto, Austria-Hungary’s army dispires and their fellow defeated powers were forged in war solved with a horriically failed ofensive on the Piave. and violence. his violence continued to shape their poli- he Bulgarians, despite occupying large parts of southcies in the interwar period. Moreover, the conlicts “that ern Serbia and defeating Romania in Dobruja, were starverupted ater 1917-18” “occurred ater a century in which ing at home. he length of the war threatened to take European states had more or less successfully managed them out by 1917. he Ludendorf Ofensives stalled in to assert their monopoly on legitimate violence, in which the West. German troops started to blame their milinational armies had become the norm, and in which tary leadership. Against the backdrop of all this was the the fundamentally important distinction between com- promise and hope ofered by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourbatants and non-combatants had been codiied (even if teen Points, which ofered a peace without an outright frequently breached in practice)” (p. 13). Gerwarth says victory or annihilation on the batleield. Gerwarth does that the First World War failed to end, or more specif- not say so explicitly, but his treatment of these events ically, that violence begun in the war did not end, be- suggests that historians should keep in mind the imagicause it transformed into violence that was not exercised nation of both the military leadership and the people on exclusively by men in uniform, directed by states, and the home front in 1917-18. hey imagined victory, a lit2 H-Net Reviews ing of rations, and shipments of food. At worst, they imagined a new world according to Wilson’s Fourteen Points. he vanquished, however, would be deeply disappointed and faced hardships and a postwar setlement that they never could imagine. entirely from Petrograd’s rule; and peasant insurgencies, triggered by the Communists’ forced requisitions of desperately needed foodstufs” (p. 77). Add foreign intervention and we have a long, violent crisis. he Russian Civil War cost, at our best estimates, the lives of three million people. he Bolshevik Revolution provides the framing events for the second part of the book, consisting of ive central chapters. he Bolshevik Revolution produced more violence, both in the ways it generated class-based violence to take over the institutions of the state and in the ways that it generated violent responses from governments, partisans, and new states. When the armistice was declared in the West on November 11, 1918, war began anew in the East. he Russian Red Army—not yet the Soviet Union—went on a campaign to reconquer the western borderlands of the former tsarist empire. his was a stroke at rearranging, by military force, the borders agreed to at Brest-Litovsk in March. Emboldened by revolutions in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, the Red Army marched west. War continued as Germany was asked by the Allies to keep its troops in the East. Ethnic German minorities were cobbled together to form voluntary defense forces, which named themselves the Freikorps—recalling from the German volunteer forces that expelled Napoleon in 1813. Gerwarth points out that the new form of war that had emerged was diferent than the organized batles of the western front between 1914 and 1918. he form of war that emerged ater 1918 was a “conlict without clearly demarcated batle lines or readily identiiable combatants.” Uniforms were improvised and German troops ighting against the ragtag forces of the Bolsheviks perceived a guerrilla war, in which the “opponent had to be fought ruthlessly and killed without remorse.” Austro-Hungarian troops faced similar levels of confusion in their war in the Balkans and likewise responded with excesses of violence. But what was new here was the idea that “no one could be let alive” (p. 71). he Freikorps engaged in struggles where the enemies were everywhere and civilians were all, in some form or another, combatants. Retaliatory violence became part of the continuum of violence in the Russian Civil War. And the violence was extreme. General Roman, Baron von UngernSternberg, presided over horriic slaughter of Bolsheviks and their supporters. Antisemitic violence accompanied the Whites as they noted the number of Jews among the Bolshevik leadership. Bolsheviks became synonymous with Jews and used as a new excuse for violence against Jews. In other places, the existence of violence and the general lawlessness that appeared in the scorched earth that lay in an army’s path helped open up old antisemitic prejudices and the acceptability of violence against Jews. From Latvia to Poland and Ukraine, armies harassed and oten slaughtered Jewish civilians. In Lwów, once Polish troops expelled Ukrainian troops to claim the town for Poland, Polish troops cordoned of the city’s Jewish quarter and began massacring Jewish men of military age. Seventy-three Jews died in a three-day pogrom that laid waste to the Jewish quarter. Antisemitic violence served old hatreds and new ways of justifying such hatred. But much of the violence was also about claiming territory and giving the Allies deliberating the peace in Paris a series of faits accomplis that they had to accept as they redrew the map of Europe. Poland remained in a state of war, claiming and defending territory, from its founding through 1921. “he practice of land-grabbing with the aim of creating new realities before the Allies in Paris could make up their minds was by no means unique to the Polish.” Gerwarth tells us that this happened all over former Habsburg Central Europe as “all victorious successor states of the defunct Habsburg Empire tried to expand their borders through paramilitary action, in order to establish fresh ‘realities’ ” (p. 194). Within this use of force to draw the new boundaries of Europe, ethnic cleansing became a key feature to make the population conform and justify those borders, whether by expulsion or outright murder. Czech troops massacred Germans in the Sudetenland (itself a new invention of the interwar period) on March 4, 1919. Similar waves of violence occurred in the former Habsburg Crownland of Carthinia as it was contested by the newly formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (SCS) and the German-Austrian Republic. he Russian Civil War was also replete with such new categories of enemy. Gerwarth follows recent studies that also extend the First World War into a continuum of violence into the Russian Civil War. He writes that the Russian Civil War “was, in fact, a whole of overlapping and mutually reinforcing conlicts: a rapidly escalating struggle between the armed forces of Lenin’s Bolshevik government and its ‘counter-revolutionary’ opponents; the atempts by several regions on the western border of the former Russian Empire to break away 3 H-Net Reviews In the meantime, the vanquished established parliamentary democracies in the hopes that they were taking on forms to it into the postwar order. hey also imagined that the Allies would treat them as new friends at Paris. Instead, the delegations of Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Otoman Turkey, and Germany were treated as the enemy. hen they were presented with treaties that spelled out territorial losses, inancial punishment, and military emasculation. Gerwarth says that such treatment of the vanquished further destabilized the regimes and peace. For instance, most Germans condemned the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles as outright criminal. Reformers in Germany thought that the Allies had betrayed them and that their reforms had been in vain. Treaties, was signed with the sultan’s government under Damad Ferid. In this treaty, the Allies clearly intended not to secure the peace or secure the rights of selfdetermination of peoples, but rather to appease their own appetites for footholds in Anatolia and the Levant. Constantinople would rule over a severely reduced territory while Greece was allocated Smyrna and the surrounding area. he Armenians received vast areas of eastern Anatolia; Kurdistan was to become an autonomous region. he Bosporus was placed under international administration. But the Turks, now under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, never ratiied the treaty and instead fought its implementation, which brings us back to the episode in Smyrna, recounted at the beginning of the book. But Gerwarth goes beyond Germany. He says that historians have ignored the fact that the rest of the defeated powers had fared worse than Germany. Austria and Hungary, ater losing territory, were saddled with the empire’s entire war debt, while the new nationstates carved out of the old empire were treated as victors. Austro-Germans in Bohemia, in Italy, in the SCS, and other places in east central Europe were now subjects of new nation-states, where they were treated as untrustworthy aliens and deprived of their right of selfdetermination. Hungary lost two-thirds of its prewar territory, lost 73 percent of its population, and had collapsed economically. he Treaty of Neuilly forced Bulgaria to cede eleven thousand square kilometers of territory— including Western hrace, which was handed over to Greece, and four border areas to the SCS—and was required to pay a “staggering” reparations bill of 2250 million gold francs, over thirty-seven years. his was the highest reparations bill of all the Central powers. he ceding of territory led to Bulgarian refugees from those regions. Turkey likewise was treated severely. he Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, the last of the Paris Peace According to Gerwarth, resentment against the treaties fueled a sense of humiliation of defeat. “Worse still, the application of the principle of national selfdetermination to territories of mind-boggling ethnic complexity was at best naïve and, in practice, an invitation to transform the violence of the First World War into a multitude of border conlicts and civil wars” (p. 214). Gerwarth places such violence on par with, or even exceeding, the Paris Peace Treaties in their importance in shaping the postwar order. Gewarth’s he Vanquished stands out as an important, subtly provocative work that seeks to shit our narratives of the interwar period beyond the end of the War in the West, beyond Germany’s defeat, and beyond the Treaty of Versailles. It does this not through hard assertion but through anecdotes and solid evidence. It should be seen as a summation of decades of scholarship, one that puts stories once swept under the rug and forgoten in the center of the twentieth century’s violent and turbulent history. For this, we should be grateful. his book deserves a wide readership, both in the broader public and the undergraduate classroom. If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: htps://networks.h-net.org/h-nationalism Citation: John Deak. Review of Gerwarth, Robert, he Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End. HNationalism, H-Net Reviews. August, 2017. URL: htp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48277 his work is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 4