In this examination of German texts written about the First World War, Wolfgang Natter offers a new understanding of the relationship between culture and warfare. He focuses not only on the literary voices of German authors whose works are found in a library today but also on the wartime agencies, institutions, and individuals that produced and distributed an enormous body of books and printed materials during the First World War, the Weimar period, and the years preceding the Second World War.

Natter argues that the militarization of literature that occurred between 1914 and 1918 and the ways war events reconfigured literary institutions, aesthetics, and cultural politics help to explain how a military ethos could remain vibrant in a defeated Germany and lay the groundwork for another world war.