A Minor Apocalypse

In A Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's forgotten war of 1914-1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, Blobaum guides his readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian evacuation of 1915. Industrial collapse marked only the opening phase of Warsaw's wartime economic crisis, which grew steadily worse during the German occupation. Requisitioning and strict control of supplies entering the city resulted in scarcity amid growing corruption, rapidly declining living standards, and major public health emergencies.

Blobaum shows how conflicts over distribution of and access to resources led to social divisions, a sharp deterioration in Polish-Jewish relations, and general distrust in public institutions. Women's public visibility, demands for political representation, and perceived threats to the patriarchal order during the war years sustained one arena of cultural debate. New modes of popular entertainment, including cinema, cabaret, and variety shows, created another, particularly as they challenged elite notions of propriety. Blobaum presents these themes in comparative context, not only with other major European cities during the Great War but also with Warsaw under Nazi German occupation a generation later.

In A Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's forgotten war of 1914-1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, Blobaum guides his readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian evacuation of 1915.

Blobaum's book has to be considered essential reading for Anglophone historians of the First World War and can be recommended as an intriguing introduction into the history of Warsaw and Poland well beyond the war.

-- "Journal of Social History"

Overshadowed by Flanders Fields, sealed trains, stabs in the back, lost generations, Feikorps, and Bolsheviks, Poland does not normally figure prominently into the grand narratives of Great War history. Yet, with this highly readable and urgent narrative, Blobaum makes a strong case that it should, for it was Warsaw that re-emerged as a bastion along that less-than quiet eastern front.

-- "Canadian-American Slavic Studies"

By uncovering quotidian stories about unrest, suffering, and hardship in wartime Warsaw and then contextualizing them within current historiographical discussions about gender, politics, and antisemitism, Robert Blobaum has written an outstanding book that will be required reading for Polish historians and scholars for years to come.

-- "The Polish Review"

This is a finely crafted book that is superbly researched, well written, and full of all kinds of telling details. Readers will also appreciate the many interesting parallels drawn by the author with other major European cities, such as Berlin, Paris, and London.

-- "Canadian Journal of History"

An engaging and learned study based on a wide range of historical sources in German, Polish, and Russian that are woven into a convincing account of a critical chapter in Polish and European histories. ... Historians of everyday life and scholars of the home front in times of war will be fascinated by Blobaum's detailed discussion of Polish society under Russian and, after August 1915, German occupation. ... [C]arefully researched, clearly written, and academically grounded... Blobaum's invaluable study... will both serve as a model of research and scholarship for future students and scholars as well as provide an opportunity for contemplation and reflection among a variety of politicians and pundits.

--Scott Ury "American Historical Review"

Blobaum provides the first full-length English-language account of the city's experience of World War I.

-- "Foreign Affairs"

Blobaum's finely balanced study, embedded in the recent scholarship on Central Europe during the First World War, reveals the successes of Polish wartime self-governance without laying the ensuing failures at the feet of the Great Powers.

-- "Journal of Modern History"

Robert Blobaum's excellent and captivating new monograph, A Minor Apocalypse: Warsaw during the First World War, is a welcome and necessary contribution to the otherwise scant historiography of the Polish experience during World War I. The first history of Warsaw during the Great War to appear in decades, and the first ever of its kind in English, A Minor Apocalypse demonstrates the precariousness of life, the difficulty of wartime privation, and the hardships ordinary Varsovians experienced during the war... [It] is a remarkably rich study that is sure to become, like Blobaum's other scholarship, mandatory reading for scholars and students of Poland, the First World War, and the history of everyday life.

--Michal J. Wilczewski, University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of History "REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia"