The Ring of Steel

Resumen del libro

"For the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary the Great War - which had begun with such high hopes for a fast, dramatic outcome - rapidly degenerated as invasions of both France and Serbia ended in catastrophe. For four years the fighting now turned into a siege on a quite monstrous scale. Europe became the focus of fighting of a kind previously unimagined. Despite local successes - and an apparent triumph in Russia - Germany and Austria-Hungary were never able to break out of the the Allies' ring of steel. In Alexander Watson's compelling new history of the Great War, all the major events of the war are seen from the perspective of Berlin and Vienna. It is fundamentally a history of ordinary people. In 1914 both empires were flooded by genuine mass enthusiasm and their troubled elites were at one with most of the population. But the course of the war put this faith under impossible strain, with a fatal rupture between an ever more extreme and unrealistic leadership and an exhausted and embittered people. In the end their rulers failed and were overwhelmed by defeat and revolution."

Biografía del autor

Alexander Watson es profesor de Historia en Goldsmiths, University of London. Especialista en los conflictos europeos de comienzos del siglo XX, especialmente en Europa central y oriental, ha profundizado en los aspectos sociales, culturales y militares de la guerra total , así como en la historia de la violencia, el surgimiento de las conciencias nacionales y las limpiezas étnicas previas al Holocausto. Es autor de Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, galardonado con los premios Wolfson de Historia y Guggenheim-Lehrman de Historia Militar, y Enduring the Great War, ganador del Premio Fraenkel.