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In a book that is at once a major contribution to modern European history and a cautionary tale for today, Isabel V. Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as the only guarantee of the nation's security. So deeply embedded were the assumptions and procedures of this distinctively German military culture that the Army, in its drive to annihilate the enemy military, did not shrink from the utter destruction of civilian property and lives. Carried to its extreme, the logic of \"military necessity\" found real security only in extremities of destruction, in the \"silence of the graveyard.\" Hull begins with a dramatic account, based on fresh archival work, of the German Army's slide from administrative murder to genocide in German Southwest Africa (1904-7). The author then moves back to 1870 and the war that inaugurated the Imperial era in German history, and analyzes the genesis and nature of this specifically German military culture and its operations in colonial warfare. In the First World War the routines perfected in the colonies were visited upon European populations. Hull focuses on one set of cases (Belgium and northern France) in which the transition to total destruction was checked (if barely) and on another (Armenia) in which \"military necessity\" caused Germany to accept its ally's genocidal policies even after these became militarily counterproductive. She then turns to theEndkampf(1918), the German General Staff's plan to achieve victory in the Great War even if the homeland were destroyed in the process-a seemingly insane campaign that completes the logic of this deeply institutionalized set of military routines and practices. Hull concludes by speculating on the role of this distinctive military culture in National Socialism's military and racial policies. Absolute Destructionhas serious implications for the nature of warmaking in any modern power. At its heart is a warning about the blindness of bureaucratic routines, especially when those bureaucracies command the instruments of mass death.

Hull argues that the routines and practices of the Imperial German Army, unchecked by effective civilian institutions, increasingly sought the absolute destruction of its enemies as the only guarantee of the nation's security.

A century after the outbreak of the Great War, we have forgotten the central role that international law and the dramatically different interpretations of it played in the conflict's origins and conduct. In A Scrap of Paper, Isabel V. Hull compares wartime decision making in Germany, Great Britain, and France, weighing the impact of legal considerations in each. Throughout, she emphasizes the profound tension between international law and military necessity in time of war, and demonstrates how differences in state structures and legal traditions shaped the way in which each of the three belligerents fought the war Hull focuses on seven cases in which each government's response was shaped by its understanding of and respect for the law: Belgian neutrality, the land war in the west, the occupation of enemy territory, the blockade, unrestricted submarine warfare, the introduction of new weaponry (including poison gas and the zeppelin), and reprisals. Drawing on voluminous research in German, British, and French archives, the author reconstructs the debates over military decision making and clarifies the role played by law-where it constrained action, where it was manipulated to serve military need, where it was simply ignored, and how it developed in the crucible of combat. She concludes that Germany did not speak the same legal language as the two liberal democracies, with disastrous and far-reaching consequences. The first book on international law and the Great War published since 1920, A Scrap of Paper is a passionate defense of the role that the law must play to govern interstate relations in both peace and war.

The purpose of this essay is not to provide a review of the extensive literature on women's history, gender history, or feminist scholarship, but to reflect on the implications that these three vantage points have for the practice of writing German history. The framework for these reflections is the charge of the conference at which an earlier version of this paper was presented, namely, to consider the interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological challenges to historiography raised by “postmodernism.” These challenges are roughly similar for all national historiographies, though Germany's historians, it could be argued, have distinguished themselves by their especially intense focus on state institutions, national events, aggregated socioeconomic structures, large organizations, and the theories and methods appropriate to these concerns. Such foci stand in particular danger of being dissolved by alternate historiographic interests, like feminist, women's, and gender history. When the center no longer holds, that is the “postmodern” condition; their part in dissolving the center is what links feminist, women's, and gender history to “postmodernism.” Rather than rehearsing specific examples of how, say, women's history has challenged the received picture of German history, and thereby implicitly to suggest methods of damage control, this essay instead attempts to discuss some of the broader theoretical and methodological issues that feminist scholarship poses to historians and to do so within the context of the “postmodern.” References to the specific German context are mostly in the footnotes.

The German monarchy ended on 9 November 1918 with a whimper, not a bang. As the royal train slipped over the Dutch border, the public and the new revolutionary government turned their attention to the more pressing matter of survival. At Third Army headquarters and doubtless elsewhere, high-ranking officers discussed counterrevolution, but nothing came of it. Wilhelm II's silent departure to Holland was preceded by years of declining authority. This chapter investigates how that decline actually occurred during the First World War, and examines the unconscious role that monarchists themselves played in undermining both the monarch and the monarchy.Historians see the decline of monarchical authority in three stages: the rise and fall of ‘personal regime’, the failure of Weltpolitik, and the eclipse of Wilhelm's governing power during the war. The historian this Festschrift honours, John Röhl, has contributed most to illuminating the first problematic, the question of personal regime. The picture that has emerged, and is still emerging in Röhl's monumental multi-volumed biography of the Kaiser, shows an activist but uneven and sporadic monarch, who sought to wield power personally, but in a modern-seeming way. Wilhelm II took advantage of the tremendous power invested in the monarch (especially in foreign policy and military command power) by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's peculiar constitution, on the one hand, and by the popular hunger for a national representative and embodiment of the modern Germany, on the other. Wilhelm successfully made himself an icon of German industrial and military might.