Erich Ludendorff in his Time

Erich Ludendorff (adapted from a photo provided by the Bundesarchiv)

With this post, I begin a series called ‘reviews of books written by my friends’. Some of these will serve as teasers, appreciations designed to encourage readers to read the work in question for themselves. Others, such as this one, provide multi-part summaries that, for reasons of language or cost, will be difficult for most readers to enjoy the old-fashioned way.

In 1996, the second edition of a biography of Erich Ludendorff rolled off a press in Germany.¹ Bearing the title of Erich Ludendorff in his Time (Erich Ludendorff in seiner Zeit), devoted the lion’s share of its pages to the service of this soldier in the First World War. Nonetheless, a good quarter of the content of the work deals with the five decades of Ludendorff’s life that passed between his birth and the fateful month of August 1914.