What happens when you need tires but lack the rubber with which to make them? Here’s a look at how life changed in Germany during World War I when the country was prevented from importing “black gold.”

Rubber, wrote Marcel Chausson in his doctoral thesis in 1912, is one of the “essential cogs of modern life.” Were it to suddenly disappear, “we would have to give up air brakes, bicycles and automobiles which, deprived of their tires, would be condemned to die on the spot. …

Given the lack of audio recordings from the battlefield, we can’t really know. But in correspondence from the front, German soldiers did their best to transcribe the “hellish music” of war for their families at home.

A popular journalistic genre during World War I in Germany was that of the “Feldpostbrief” or “letter from the field.” Soldiers either wrote directly to the newspapers or to their families and friends, who then offered the letters to the papers for publication. For the most part, these men were not professional journalists or writers. Some of them veered into purple prose; others had…

During World War I, knitters from Allied nations produced millions of socks, caps, scarves, and sweaters for military use. American Red Cross volunteers knitted nearly 24 million garments; Australian knitters sent 1.3 million pairs of socks overseas. These efforts are often described as “knitting for victory.”

German (and Austrian) women also knitted for their soldiers. Given the course of history, one cannot say that their work served the cause of victory. Perhaps for this reason, their woolly contributions to the war are less well-known. Yet already on 8 August 1914 — less than a week after German soldiers marched into…

This is Part VI in a series about the Great War as seen from through the prism of death notices in German newspapers. Part I — Part II — Part III — Part IV — Part V.

With hindsight, a cruel though accurate answer to the titular question is “for nothing.” After all, Germany lost the war. At the time that many of these soldiers died, however, Germany’s ultimate defeat was far from obvious. Yet even if victory seemed assured at times, families still struggled to rationalise and ascribe meaning to the deaths of their sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers…

This is Part V in a series about the Great War as seen through the prism of death notices in German newspapers. Part I — Part II — Part III— Part IV — Part VI.

When reading death notices from 1914–1918, one notices that the time of death is often mentioned in civilian notices. By contrast, soldiers’ times of death appear only rarely — likely owing to the nature of war. Yet even in the heat of battle, it was occasionally possible to record accurate times. Karl Justus Siegfried died “on 17 December around 9 o’clock in the morning in…

This is Part IV in a series about the Great War as seen from through the prism of death notices in German newspapers. Part I — Part II — Part III — Part V — Part VI.

The Hessian death notices are a litany of destruction of the human body as well as a chronicle of developments in the technology of war. New weapons meant new ways to die, and medical technology hadn’t quite caught up yet. …

This is Part III in a series about the Great War as seen from through the prism of death notices in German newspapers. Part I — Part II — Part IV — Part V— Part VI.

In soldiers’ letters to their families, they often expressed relief that the war was not being waged on German soil. Consequently, most of their deaths occurred abroad and it is therefore not surprising that the phrase “fern von der Heimat” — “far from his homeland” — appears in death notices throughout the war. For example, in November 1914, Heinrich Ernst died in northern France…

This is Part II in a series about the Great War as seen from through the prism of death notices in German newspapers. For Part I, see here; Part III — Part IV — Part V — Part VI.

Who were the Germans of the Great War? “Hard people to beat,” observed the American surgeon Harvey Cushing in his journal from the Western Front; “big, strong, cheerful, and well-fed” too. Though he noted the names of seemingly all the Allied soldiers with whom he crossed paths, he never mentions the name of a single German, instead referring to them with…