The Distant Fronts

This book investigates how a war remembered through one continental lens became a network of connected crises across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Balkans. It asks what changes when the map of conflict expands beyond familiar trench narratives and the war must be read as an imperial system rather than a single front. It examines three mechanisms: colonial logistics that moved troops, information, and coercion across long distances; strategic communication networks that made radio stations, ports, railways, and waterways military targets; and occupation regimes that turned food supply, labor, and local authority into instruments of control. Togo, Gallipoli, German South West Africa, the Caucasus, and the Eastern Front reveal different forms of warfare, each shaped by empire, terrain, and uneven industrial capacity. The result is a clearer view of how memory selects certain battlefields while obscuring others, and how those omissions still shape public history in German and European markets.