Introduction: Modernity and Violence: Observations Concerning a Contradictory Relationship -- Violence and Modernity -- The Great War and the Persistence of Tradition: Languages of Grief, Bereavement and Mourning -- Starting from Scratch: Concepts of Order in No Man's Land -- The Therapeutic Response: Continuities from World War One to National Socialism -- From War Economy to "New Economy": World War I and the Conservative Debate about the 'other' Modernity in Germany -- Codes of War and Violence -- Some Lessons of the War: The Discourse on the Propaganda and Public Opinion in Germany in the 1920s -- Blitzkrieg: "God Stinnes" or the Depoliticization of the Sublime -- The fiftieth Anniversary of the Allied Air Raids on Dresden: A Half Century of Literature and History Writing -- Sexy Nazis and Daddy's Girls: Fascism and Sexuality in Film and Video since the 1970s -- Bodies, Souls and Modern Warfare -- Aesculap in the Trenches: Aspects of German Medicine in the First World War -- The Failure of Love: A Lesser Theory of the Great War -- Benn's Body. Masculine Aesthetics and Reproduction in Gottfried Benn's Essays -- Women in the Military and the Cult of Masculinity -- Artistic and Literary Representations of Modern Warfare -- "A Murderous Carnival": German Artists in the First World War -- Arnold Zweig's War Novellas of 1914 and their Versions: Literature, Modernity and the Demands of the Day -- War and Novel: Alfred Döblin's "Wallenstein" and "November 1918" -- Violent Orders in Robert Musil's "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften" and Thomas Bernhard's "Kalkwerk" -- "Les peuples meurent, pour que Dieu vive": Gertrud Kolmar's Consecration of the Protagonists in the Drama of the French Revolution -- Laws of War and Revolution: Violence in Heiner Müller's Work -- Bibliography -- Primary Sources (Literary, Historical, Philosophical) -- Secondary Sources.

List of Illustrations -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.