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.

Robert Blobaum is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of History at West Virginia University. He is the author of Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907 and editor of Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, both from Cornell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scott Ury:

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.

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.

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

Michal J. Wilczewski, University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of 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.

Robert L. Nelson, University of Windsor, author of German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War:

In A Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum presents a powerful new narrative of the occupied East during 1914–1918. We know that the Eastern Front was horrific during World War II, and Blobaum's social history of life in Warsaw during wartime shows that conditions during World War I were not dissimilar. Blobaum has done an extraordinary job of teasing out ordinary people's experiences from between the lines of public proclamations and from the silences he has mined from extant sources.

Brian Porter-Szűcs, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History, University of Michigan, author of Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom:

A Minor Apocalypse is the first history of Warsaw in World War I to appear in decades and the first ever in English. Few people in Poland want to remember World War I except as the prelude to independence, and, as a result, the horrible suffering experienced in Warsaw during the war is never discussed. Until reading this book, I had no idea that the situation in the city was so bad, and many readers will be surprised to learn of the events Robert Blobaum describes so clearly. Blobaum's earlier work is mandatory reading in the history of Poland and Eastern Europe, and this meticulously researched, well-written, and persuasively argued book is sure to join that list.