Fighting for the fatherland

Fighting for the Fatherland traces and analyzes the development of the German soldier, and the army in which he served, during the 3 and a half turbulent centuries of international conflict that have so often found him on some of the most violent and testing battlegrounds encountered by the soldiers of any nation. It sets his inherent sense of patriotism and duty against his cultural background and the ever-changing national imperatives of the time. This evolving process was bound inextricably to the Fatherland's emerging awareness of its own identity, together with its steadily increasing military significance and capability, which eventually resulted in Prussian militarism and the German imperial aspirations that so dominated the 19th century. Thereafter, these led first to the catastrophe of the First World War and to Germany's defeat in 1918, then to the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, the Second World War, and the eventual collapse of the Third Reich and its Wehrmacht in 1945. During the Cold War that followed, two very different sorts of German army existed -- one on each side of the Iron Curtain -- until the country's reunification in 1990, which subsequently enabled the creation of the modern Bundeswehr, an army well prepared to meet the security challenges of the 21st century. - Jacket flap.