My dissertation research into Wilhelm Groener was initially a social and cultural history of the Imperial German officer corps on the eve of World War One. The more I learned about Groener’s work, though, the more important military culture and expertise became in their own right. Thus, my dissertation deals with officering and war-planning in two distinct sections.
A powerful need to earn a living keeps coming between me and the further inquiry needed to bring these two levels of analysis together, but I continue to be interested in questions of culture, expertise, and war, on the one hand, and the complicated social operations of cognition, on the other. Meanwhile, I have made my dissertation available on the open web, starting with the Internet Archive and then adding it to Humanities Commons.
Thesis and Publications
- “Wilhelm Groener, Officering, and the Schlieffen Plan” (PhD diss, Georgetown University, 2006).
- “Bürgerliche und adlige Krieger: Zum Verhältnis zwischen sozialer Herkunft und Berufskultur im wilhelminischen Offizierkorps,” in Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland II: Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Reif (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 25–63.
- “Particularistic Traditions in a National Profession: Reflections on the Wilhelmine Army Officer Corps,” in Newsletter des Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte e.V. 11 (2/2000): 16–18.
Blog Posts
- “Preparing to Fight the Last War? Maybe Not,” December 17, 2016
- “A Few Notes on the History of Knowledge,” July 8, 2016
- “Who Should Groener’s Schlieffen Plan Matter To?,” March 18, 2016
- “Terence Zuber, Military History, and Culture,” December 7, 2014.
- “Not a Military Historian,” November 21, 2014.
- “Command Culture by Jörg Muth,” April 28, 2012.
- “Terence Zuber’s Image of War and the Schlieffen Plan Debate,” February 11, 2012.
- “Stumbling Upon a Dissertation Topic,” September 9, 2007.
- “Wilhelm Groener (1867–1939),” August 25, 20007.
- “Paradoxes,” July 21, 2007.
