Die Heimatfront halten! Die schwierigen Aufgaben der Städte im Krieg

Abstract

The paper asks, how smaller German cities in the South West of Germany (Freiburg i.B. and Darmstadt) coped with the challenges faced by German cities in World War One. It starts with an exploration on the dimension of ‚experiencing the war‘ in European cities more generally and comes to the conclusion, that war brought about a cultural regression, that cities had to reintroduce more rural elements. In the second part the focus is on demonstrating the multitude of ways how cities attempted to mobilise for the war effort and how they tried, often not totally successful, to cope with shortages and problems in terms of provisioning their population. The paper finally contends, that the cities were overcharged by the complexities of administrative confusion and a lack of actual executive powers and thus suffered an erosion of legitimacy due to their lack of performance.