A Minor Apocalypse: Warsaw during the First World War
In A Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's "forgotten war" of 1914–1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, Blobaum guides his readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian evacuation of 1915. Industrial collapse marked only the opening phase of Warsaw’s wartime economic crisis, which grew steadily worse during the German occupation. Requisitioning and strict control of supplies entering the city resulted in scarcity amid growing corruption, rapidly declining living standards, and major public health emergencies.
Blobaum shows how conflicts over distribution of and access to resources led to social divisions, a sharp deterioration in Polish-Jewish relations, and general distrust in public institutions. Women’s public visibility, demands for political representation, and perceived threats to the patriarchal order during the war years sustained one arena of cultural debate. New modes of popular entertainment, including cinema, cabaret, and variety shows, created another, particularly as they challenged elite notions of propriety. Blobaum presents these themes in comparative context, not only with other major European cities during the Great War but also with Warsaw under Nazi German occupation a generation later.
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A Minor Apocalypse: Warsaw during the First World War
In A Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's "forgotten war" of 1914–1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, Blobaum guides his readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian evacuation of 1915. Industrial collapse marked only the opening phase of Warsaw’s wartime economic crisis, which grew steadily worse during the German occupation. Requisitioning and strict control of supplies entering the city resulted in scarcity amid growing corruption, rapidly declining living standards, and major public health emergencies.
Blobaum shows how conflicts over distribution of and access to resources led to social divisions, a sharp deterioration in Polish-Jewish relations, and general distrust in public institutions. Women’s public visibility, demands for political representation, and perceived threats to the patriarchal order during the war years sustained one arena of cultural debate. New modes of popular entertainment, including cinema, cabaret, and variety shows, created another, particularly as they challenged elite notions of propriety. Blobaum presents these themes in comparative context, not only with other major European cities during the Great War but also with Warsaw under Nazi German occupation a generation later.
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A Minor Apocalypse: Warsaw during the First World War
In A Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's "forgotten war" of 1914–1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, Blobaum guides his readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian evacuation of 1915. Industrial collapse marked only the opening phase of Warsaw’s wartime economic crisis, which grew steadily worse during the German occupation. Requisitioning and strict control of supplies entering the city resulted in scarcity amid growing corruption, rapidly declining living standards, and major public health emergencies.
Blobaum shows how conflicts over distribution of and access to resources led to social divisions, a sharp deterioration in Polish-Jewish relations, and general distrust in public institutions. Women’s public visibility, demands for political representation, and perceived threats to the patriarchal order during the war years sustained one arena of cultural debate. New modes of popular entertainment, including cinema, cabaret, and variety shows, created another, particularly as they challenged elite notions of propriety. Blobaum presents these themes in comparative context, not only with other major European cities during the Great War but also with Warsaw under Nazi German occupation a generation later.
Robert Blobaum is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of History at West Virginia University. He is the author of Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907 and editor of Antisemitism andIts Opponents in Modern Poland, both from Cornell.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1. The Frontline City 2. Living on the Edge 3. Wartime Crisis Management and Its Failure 4. Poles and Jews 5. Women and the Warsaw Home Front 6. Warsaw's Wartime Culture Wars Conclusion: A Minor Apocalypse
What People are Saying About This
Brian Porter-Szűcs
A Minor Apocalypse is the first history of Warsaw in World War I to appear in decades and the first ever in English. Few people in Poland want to remember World War I except as the prelude to independence, and, as a result, the horrible suffering experienced in Warsaw during the war is never discussed. Until reading this book, I had no idea that the situation in the city was so bad, and many readers will be surprised to learn of the events Robert Blobaum describes so clearly. Blobaum's earlier work is mandatory reading in the history of Poland and Eastern Europe, and this meticulously researched, well-written, and persuasively argued book is sure to join that list.
Robert L. Nelson
In A Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum presents a powerful new narrative of the occupied East during 1914–1918. We know that the Eastern Front was horrific during World War II, and Blobaum's social history of life in Warsaw during wartime shows that conditions during World War I were not dissimilar. Blobaum has done an extraordinary job of teasing out ordinary people’s experiences from between the lines of public proclamations and from the silences he has mined from extant sources.
Brian Porter-Szucs
"A Minor Apocalypse is the first history of Warsaw in World War I to appear in decades and the first ever in English. Few people in Poland want to remember World War I except as the prelude to independence, and, as a result, the horrible suffering experienced in Warsaw during the war is never discussed. Until reading this book, I had no idea that the situation in the city was so bad, and many readers will be surprised to learn of the events Robert Blobaum describes so clearly. Blobaum's earlier work is mandatory reading in the history of Poland and Eastern Europe, and this meticulously researched, well-written, and persuasively argued book is sure to join that list."
