christopher clark the sleepwalkers summary

Here the book is different from Holger Herwig’s earlier work on the Central Powers, which has a more traditional focus on armies, high-level decision-making and military operations. The focus is on the lived experience of the war – by the soldiers, the civilians, the officials – though the main frontline battles are also covered in some depth. Third is the social fragmentation caused by the war. Second is the escalating violence throughout the war and its effects, both on war aims and general mentality. First is consent for the war, how it was obtained, how it functioned, how it ebbed away. Three themes underpin the book, all concerning ‘the people’ (rather than ‘elites’ or ‘the military’). Like Banffy, there is a strong sense from Watson’s book of an end to an old world and the birth of a new, terrible era. 1) Similarly, in summing up the book, Watson writes that: ‘he First World War was a catastrophe for central and eastern Europe … War had rent the fabric of the multi-ethnic societies and disastrously exacerbated racial divisions, bequeathing lasting antagonisms above all against older Jewish and new German minorities’ (pp. In the introduction Watson asserts that ‘he key to the tragic course of the continent’s modern history lies in this region, and in the extraordinary exertion, unredeemed sacrifices and physical and moral displacement undergone by its people in 1914–18’.

(1) This massive ancestral castle of the Banffy family in Transylvania was gutted and largely destroyed by Nazi troops shortly after Banffy wrote those words.Īlexander Watson’s compelling synthesis of the Central Powers in the First World War locates itself in the flux of Central and Eastern European history, in particular highlighting the links to later traumatic events such as the Holocaust, population displacement and official repression. The novel ends with the telling words ‘Bonczhida, May 20 th, 1940’. It is a personal and private farewell to his childhood home and to a whole generation of Hungarian nobles, of which Balint/Banffy was highly critical.

At the end of Miklos Banffy’s entertaining panoramic novel of pre-WWI Hungary, the protagonist Count Balint takes a final tour of Transylvania before joining his regiment.

Christopher clark the sleepwalkers summary