The Vanquished

This narrative of continent-wide chaos makes it easier to understand why order came to seem a supremely desirable objective in 1930s Europe, trumping freedom … it helps us understand why few wars reach tidy conclusions: once a society has suspended its instinctive, social and legal prejudice against killing, it often proves hard to restore. – Max Hastings * The Sunday Times *
Pulls together a complex narrative about the uneasy peace of the late Twenties and shine a piercing light into darkened corners of history … an unnerving reminder of how stubbornly some geopolitical fault-lines endure – Sinclair McKay * The Telegraph *
A mixture of fast-paced narrative and fluent analysis … Gerwarth demonstrates with an impressive concentration of detail that in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe the carnage of the first world war by no means came to an end, as it did for the British and French, in late 1918. – Tony Barber * Financial Times *
Combining a big-picture overview with close-up detail - we hear the voices of soldiers, politicians, civilians - Gerwarth has written a vivid if disturbing account – Matthew Price * National *
Searing and vivid … a timely reminder that the roots of century-long violence can be traced back to the cataclysmic end of the Great War – Richard Overy * Literary Review *
A thorough explanation for the rise of the nationalist and fascist groups who set the stage for World War II. * Kirkus Reviews *
Gerwarth’s fascinating and finely crafted book is a rich combination of military, political, cultural and social history. He makes good use of literary sources and witness testimony to bring the events he narrates to life … an impressive work of highly accessible scholarship – Geoffrey Roberts * Irish Times *
This is an important and compelling book with a fascinating and chilling narrative … Gerwarth reveals how the forgotten postwar violence comprised a key step on Europe’s descent into darkness. – Alexander Watson * BBC History Magazine *
While Gerwarth’s warfare theories are cogent and convincing, he never loses sight of the human dimension. He skillfully avoids the danger of getting bogged down in a mass of detail, livening up his narrative by using contemporary quotes from politicians, soldiers and writers. One mark of a good history book is that it allows the reader to see familiar events from a new perspective. In this respect, The Vanquished is an exceptional history book. – Andrew Lynch * Sunday Post Business Magazine *
[Gerwarth] shines a light on what is, from a western European point of view, a somewhat obscure and relatively short period of time … from the layman’s vantage point, it is so well written that it reads like a novel. Tragically, for the people killed, wounded and forced to flee from their homes, it is not. This book is well worth the read. – Frank MacGabhann * Irish Independent *

Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin and Director of its Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Bismarck Myth and a biography of Reinhard Heydrich. He has studied and taught in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France.

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