Building Crisis in 1916 Behind the Eastern Front - Dr. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

This lecture was delivered at the National World War I Museum and Memorial's Symposium -- 1916 | Total War -- which was held in Kansas City, Mo. November 4-5, 2016.

For more information about the National WWI Museum and Memorial visit http://theworldwar.org

The year 1916 was marked by accelerating contradictions in German-occupied Eastern Europe. The military colony along the Baltic, called Ober Ost, rushed to realize an authoritarian model of modernity and forced development, outlined by the technocrat of total war, General Erich Ludendorff. Yet the occupation regime encountered growing ethnic tension and political demands. German attempts to coopt Polish nationalism with the promise of a new Kingdom of Poland failed. Under the pressure of total war's demands, economic exploitation increased and hit the occupied territories with severity. Behind the fighting front, 1916 stored up potential for the clash of radically different visions of the future in Eastern Europe.


Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius is the Director of the Center for the Study of War and Society and a professor of History at the University of Tennessee and Lindsay Young Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. He specializes in modern European history, with a focus on modern Germany and diplomatic history. A native of Chicago, Illinois, he earned his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at UT since 1995. He is the author of War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2000), which also appeared in German translation, and The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2009). He has published articles which have also appeared in translation (in Italian, French, and German, including in Germany’s main news magazine, Der Spiegel). He is vice-president of the Association for the Study of Nationalities and past president of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and twice won UT’s teaching award.He also has produced seven taped lecture courses with The Great Courses company, available on CD/DVD/download, on topics including the First World War, dictatorships, diplomacy, Eastern Europe, espionage, exploration, and turning points of modern history.