This chapter tells the tragic tale of the Weimar Republic. It begins with a description of the political violence that was typical of its early years, based on the half-forgotten book by the socialist statistician Emil Julius Gumbel. It then moves on to observe the double message of the new republic to the Jews. As everyone was suffering the consequences of one economic or political crisis after another, and the endless social strife and political disagreements, Jews had to confront antisemitism too, and that just as they learned to enjoy their final and complete equality. From the tale of the “stab in the back” till the rise of the Nazi Party, Jews were targets of hate and repeated public attacks. Three women represent here three generations of Jews living under these conditions: the social activist Bertha Pappenheim, the socialist physician Käte Frankenthal, and the young Hannah Arendt. Their life-stories allow us to glimpse the social-work efforts of the older Jewish community, the attraction of the socialist vision for Jewish men and women of the middle generation, and the creative intellectual work of some members of the younger generation.

In Germany the years of the First World War saw an overwhelming outpouring of verse, fired for the most part by intense patriotic enthusiasm around 1914. The lyric form provided both an immediate outlet for ordinary Germans to record their experiences and feelings, but also ready-made traditional models to shape those experiences. Alongside chauvinistic hymns by poets who remain, to all intents and purposes, ‘lost voices’, were soldier-poets, writing from the front – some of them prolific and enormously popular at the time, yet now almost completely forgotten, others still read today. But there were also worker poets, other critical voices, expressly anti-war poets and women poets who focused often on the victims left behind. Later too came the satiricalor epic voices. German poetry of the period is inevitably mixed up also with Expressionism, which made for a more radical formal experimentation than in many other national literatures at the time.

George Sand’s novels did much to shape the sensibilities of the young people who welcomed the February Revolution. During March and April, she helped prepare the election of a Constituent Assembly by writing “Bulletins” published by the Interior Minister Ledru-Rollin. Her voluminous correspondence illustrates vividly the enthusiasm of many romantic writers during the first weeks of the revolution. Her rejection of the proposal by feminist journalists that she stand for election opens a window on divisions among feminists in 1848. But for our purposes, Sand’s primary importance lies in the way her correspondence illustrates both the flowering of the cult of “the people” in the spring of 1848 and the causes of the disillusionment that set in early. After May 15 Sand ceased to believe that the people were capable of governing themselves. Her relations with the worker-poet Charles Poncy are considered at length because they can stand as an epitome of both the success and the failure of Sand’s attempts to get close to “the people.” While much of the scholarly literature stresses Sand’s lifelong adherence to “the principles of 1848,” I argue that there was little left after 1848 of the ideals that she had brought to the February Revolution.

The First World War led to the largest boom in published American war books since the Civil War. War memoirs were popular with both publishers and readers alike. Hundreds of returning doughboys took to their pens and published accounts of fighting in France. Joining them were books by nurses and canteen workers who also told stories of their experiences at the front supporting the Allied war effort. This chapter examines war memoirs published both during and after the war. It considers trends in martial publishing and argues that the wealth of war-relating writing created a cultural footprint of American war books that rested somewhat uneasily as feelings about the First World War changed in the 1920s. Moreover, the variety of war memoirs released further complicates notions of a uniform American experience in print. Rather, there is tension between books celebrating American and Allied victory with those that emphasize the hard-fought realities of combat on the western front.

This chapter surveys novels and short stories that illustrate Americans’ complex response to the First World War from 1914 through the 1930s. Registering conflicting views, ultimately this fiction presents a war that resists easy categorization. Fiction by military veterans, medical professionals, and home-front eyewitnesses is represented – including canonical authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and Katherine Anne Porter; lesser-known writers such as Thomas Boyd, Victor Daly, and Mary Borden whose work has recently been republished; and authors of now out-of-print fiction such as James Stevens, Mary Lee, and Elliot White Springs who deserve greater recognition. A summary of recent literary criticism denotes trends in critical approaches and demonstrates that scholars are re-examining canonical novels and taking an increasing interest in short stories meant for both literary and popular audiences.

American poetry of the First World War is best known through a very small number of poems by the modernists Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. But the war provided the occasion for a huge amount of poetry. This poetry was written in a variety of forms and expressed a wide range of opinions about the war. Open and closed forms, dialect and formal verse provided media through which the war was imagined for and explained to the reading public. Just as the range of forms is wide, so too is the range of poets: early modernists (Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay) and established popular writers (Everard Jack Appleton, Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews) as well as obscure amateurs (Lindley Grant Long, Walter E. Seward). And while American poetry did not produce a Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, it did produce a number of solder-poets such as Alan Seeger, Byron H. Comstock, and John Allan Wyeth whose work ranges as widely in kind and outlook as does the broader corpus.

Divided into five sections, the introduction surveys American involvement in the First World War and provides a guide to the collection itself. The first section, “War Guilt, Disillusionment, and Beyond,” charts broadly the way the war was seen during wartime and in the postwar era up to the present. Section two, “Why the First World War Was Fought and the United States Joined,” examines briefly why the war occurred and why the United States, distant from the center of the conflict, became involved. One important aspect contributing to that involvement—the debate among American intellectuals that came largely to embrace the Allies--is the subject of section three, “The Great War and the Intellectuals.” Section four, “How the United States Built an Army, Won the War, and Lost the Peace,” considers how the US fought the war, its role in the outcome, and the ultimate defeat of Wilson’s vision of a US-led postwar world order. The final section, “How to Read This Book,” highlights its three overall aims: canvassing the diverse forms of war literature and culture; analyzing the many settings and perspectives that occasioned responses to the war, and describing the depth and durability of the war’s impact.