In his original and informative study of the inner life of German soldiers in the First World War, Jason Crouthamel both complicates and deconstructs clichés such as these, throwing an important new light on questions of gender and sexuality in the German military. Using a rich variety of sources, from soldiers’ private diaries and letters home to trench newspapers and military court records, Crouthamel’s sensitive analysis aims ‘to illuminate the world of German men in the Great War, how front soldiers perceived ideals of masculinity, expressed love and other emotions, found intimacy, and experienced sex’ (p. In particular, he is interested in recording their struggles to live up to the pressures of what he terms the ‘hegemonic masculine ideal’ of the ‘steel-nerved ordinary front soldier’, which not only formed a staple of wartime propaganda, but also contributed to forging the postwar myth of a ‘New Man’, fired in the horrific crucible of the trenches.īroadly speaking, Crouthamel defines this prevalent masculine ideal as a dominant paradigm constructed by elites, which did not necessarily resonate with ordinary soldiers’ experiences and expectations. Instead, he believes that we should portray these men’s inner world in terms of a diverse, nuanced model of ‘multiple masculinities’ (p.
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