Brutality and Desire | Dagmar Herzog

Tracing the arc of sexual violence coursing through Europe's twentieth century from the Armenian genocide through Auschwitz and Algeria to Bosnia, this pathbreaking volume expands military history to include the realm of sexuality for both soldiers and civilians, both during war and in its aftermath. Examining contrapuntal stories of consensual romance and accounts of grotesque violence and intimate brutality, it also contributes significant new insights to the history of sexuality in the twentieth century. The volume also breaks important conceptual ground precisely by broadening twentieth-century European history to include colonial and border areas (from the Ottoman Empire in the 1910s to Indochinese and Senegalese soldiers in WWI to Italy's war in Ethiopia in the 1930s to the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union in the 1940s to Algeria in the 1950s-1960s) to the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.