This chapter demonstrates that French official employment and vocational policies were a product of the specific interplay between various economic considerations and cultural influences, from nineteenth century socialist utopias and the French ‘civilizing mission’ to the ideology of the National Revolution and the post-1945 rhetoric of production. It illuminates how employment conditions crucially depended on where DPs lived, for whom they worked and their nationality and gender. Significant efforts were made to help a number of DPs acquire the means to learn a trade, but employment discourses often reaffirmed a hierarchical taxonomy in which productivity and desirability were explicitly linked to ethnic and gender differences. This chapter thereby contends that employment policies were deeply implicated in the mixed record of the zone: the emphasis on DP employment at times made possible the development of DPs’ own initiatives and their sense of responsibility, in enabling them to run independent workshops and giving them the opportunity to live in private accommodation. In this sense, it contributed to normalizing DPs’ living conditions. At the same time, actual implementation of employment policies often revealed disturbing indications of brutality, unjustifiable in their cruelty and arbitrariness, as a number of DP strikes testifies.

A visitor wandering the streets of Vienna, Belgrade, Berlin, or Bucharest in the penultimate year of the Great War would have witnessed more or less the same scene in each of those cities: men in oversized suits or uniforms and women in dresses that had fitted them perfectly a few years earlier. The same visitor would have also noticed a proliferation of fruit and vegetable gardens, even in front of the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna. The difference between the hinterland and occupied territories was simple: in the former these miniature garden-plots were owned by local residents, whereas on the boulevards of Belgrade or Bucharest they were owned partly by the residents and partly by the occupier’s military units stationed nearby. Life during wartime was hardly better in one’s ‘own’ hinterland than it was in occupied territories.

This chapter analyzes the forces pulling Germany into war in 1914 and how both the international republic of letters and the integrated world economy were shattered by it and the crippling blockade imposed by Britain. It also explores the work done by Hermann Schumacher, Max Sering, and Gustav Schmoller to rationalize wartime raw materials and the food supply, as well as their activity advocating for unrestricted submarine warfare. Despite strong prewar ties between Germany and the United States and active efforts to court American public opinion by Bernhard Dernburg in New York, the “war of words” was won easily by the Entente. The decision for unrestricted submarine warfare is set in the context of the failure of dreadnought deterrence and the tightening blockade, which had rendered much of the High Seas Fleet impotent and led to the loss of Germany's overseas colonies and bases.A growing rift emerged by 1916 between populist forces unleashed by Alfred Tirpitz and the “submarine professors,” on the one hand, and the Kaiser and government of Bethmann Hollweg, on the other, which now also included Karl Helfferich as Treasury Secretary.