New Books In German Studies

There has been historiographical revolution in the literature of the war on the Western Front in the past thirty years. In Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front (Oxford University Press, 2018), Jonathan Boff, Senior Lecturer in History and War Studies at the University of Birmingham, brings that revolution further along by presenting to an anglophone audience the figure of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Rupprecht, who was for the entirety of the war the British army’s most consistent military opponent on the Western Front, is presented in a new light by Boff. Using primary source materials that have rarely if ever been used previously, Boff shows to the reader how the war from its beginning in August 1914 to the German defeat in November 1918, appeared to Rupprecht himself. Along the way, Boff deals with some of the unresolved issues that historians are still dealing with as per the war on the Western Front, such as ‘was the Battle of the Somme a Bri