An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality, and German Soldiers in the First World War [Paperback]

This eye-opening study gives a nuanced, provocative account of how German soldiers in the Great War experienced and enacted masculinity. Drawing on an array of relevant narratives and media, it explores the ways that both heterosexual and homosexual soldiers expressed emotion, understood romantic ideals, and approached intimacy and sexuality.Acknowledgements Introduction  1. The Ideal Man Goes to War 2. Masculinity in Crisis: Sexual Crime, Dislocation and Deprivation 3. 'Don't Think I'm Soft': The Masculine Image Presented to the Home Front in Soldiers' Letters 4. 'I Wish I Were a Girl!': Escaping the Masculine Ideal in Front Newspapers 5. 'We Need Real Men': The Impact of the Front Experience on Homosexual Front Soldiers  6. Coming Home: Postwar Sexual Chaos, Disillusionment, and Battles over Masculinity Conclusion Bibliography

Crouthamels fine work contributes to understandings of modern masculinity, European sexualities, the history of emotions, and World War I. The passionate stories it contains and its accessible and lively style would make it a good fit for an undergraduate or graduate seminar on World War I or European masculinities. (Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, American Historical Review, Vol. 121 (4), October, 2016)

One of the remarkable exceptions in the most recent wave of publication at the centenary of the war is the monograph Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality and Ordinary German Soldiers in the First World War, published in 2014 by the American Jason Crouthamel, who works on German and European history & . Crouthamels book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the First World War from a gender perspective. (Karen Hagemann, German History, June, 2016)

Crouthamel provides a valuable contribution to the scholarship of both history and genderstudies by investigating the spectrum of masculinity expressed by German soldlÓ@