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(Dr. Jesse Kauffman, Professor, Eastern Michigan University)
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(Dr. Christian Westerhoff, Director, Library for Contemporary History (Bibliothek fuer Zeitgeschichte) Landesbibliothek Baden-Wuerttemberg, Stuttgart)
Broken Ground captures Germany's tumultuous first year of the First World War, as it built an occupation administration from scratch between August 1914 and August 1915. Borderlands of the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires became battlegrounds. The German army, struggling to maintain order in a thin strip of war-ravaged, ethnically Polish territory seized from Russia, called for the aid of bureaucrats from the German Kingdom of Prussia to form the Civil Administration for Russian Poland. With few resources, the civilian administrators relied on independent Polish citizens committees and militias to maintain order and called upon the American Rockefeller Foundation to intervene philanthropically to provide food aid. Despite these immense challenges, the enterprising administrators built an enduring occupation administration. They created new offices and departments from finance to forestry, mining to medical. They hired wounded soldiers and aged university professors and self-funded their operation through taxes and tariffs. Their growth was not a directive of Berlin but a product of their own ambition. After the May 1915 Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive and capture of Warsaw, the Civil Administration was adopted into Germany's German General Government of Warsaw entirely. The broken ground of the first year of war guided the remainder of Germany's occupation of Poland in the First World War.
This book project was the Joint Winner of the 2020 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition for German Studies in America.
