Alexander Watson is professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, which won the Wolfson History Prize and the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, and Enduring the Great War, winner of the Fraenkel Prize.
"The Fortress is based on extraordinarily impressive research, yet
is also vivid, imaginative, and humane. It recaptures one of the
most terrible episodes in a terrible war, which -- as Watson
rightly argues -- presaged even greater horrors to come."--David
Stevenson, London School of Economics and Political Science
"The Fortress takes us into the tense, claustrophobic atmosphere of
the front-line in a crucial few months of the war...Watson's book
is an impressive telling of a story almost entirely unknown, and it
makes clear how much we have yet to learn about the first world war
away from the western front."--Mark Mazower, Financial Times
"[The Fortress] is excellent history, a marvelously readable,
though tragic, story of its time and of how the clock can be made
to turn backwards under siege conditions; and in its account of the
Habsburg commanders' unshakable vanity, philandering and cockiness
it has plenty of modern resonances as a parable of arrogant
exceptionalism, imperial conceit and perilous isolationism."--The
Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Przemysl is best known for its challenges to orthography and
pronunciation. But Watson contextualizes the history of this remote
Habsburg fortress-city from its beginnings as a strategic pivot to
its development as a focal point for overlapping imperial and
nationalist aspirations. The defining event was the great siege of
1914, whose everyday routines and long term consequences Watson
presents with a verve and clarity making this a must read for
students of the Great War in the east."--Dennis Showalter,
professor emeritus, Colorado College
"Przemysl, Habsburg Austria's easternmost fortress, lay in Galicia,
a flat borderland between the turbulent German, Austrian, and
Russian empires. Watson reconstructs the Russian siege in
engrossing detail, and also proves that the eastern 'bloodlands'
later ravaged by the Nazis and Soviets had already been desolated
once before -- during World War I and its chaotic aftermath, when
the Russians and Austro-Hungarians, desperate to hold Galicia,
taught Hitler and Stalin how to weaken and destroy unwanted peoples
like the Jews or Ukrainians."--Geoffrey Wawro, author of A Mad
Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the
Habsburg Empire
"There is a great deal more to this book than an account of the
longest siege of the Great War, one that stalled the Russian
advance and saved the Central Powers from defeat in 1914. It
reveals, in microcosm, everything that was mad, bad and dangerous
about the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its final stages... This is a
hugely enjoyable book that anyone seeking to make sense of the dark
side of 20th century Europe would do well to read."--Adam Zamoyski,
Literary Review
"Watson's account of these men's experience of battle is a
brilliant distillation of their letters, diaries and memories. The
voices of the siege convey its horror and the terror of men who had
to endure it and suppress their fear of death... The vividly
written and well-researched The Fortress is a masterpiece. It
deserves to become a classic of military history."--The Times
(UK)
"Watson's splendid book combines great evocative power (and flashes
of sharp humour) with the ethical authority of the best history
writing. The story it tells is unsettling, because it resists any
attempt to encompass the death and violence of war within a
narrative of redemption. It recalls instead a war that never really
ended, but rather spilled out into cascades of further violence
whose toxic effects are still with us today."--Guardian (UK)
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