Die verkehrte Welt des Krieges: Studien zu Geschlecht, Religion und Tod

Regina Schulte's collection of essays was one of the first examples of the debate in the German-speaking world that explores the network of relationships between military/war and gender images. It is becoming increasingly clear how much the ordering category of gender shapes, permeates, and structures the socially male-coded field of military and war. The author locates one reason for the increased scholarly interest in this in the "return of war" in Europe as a result of the military conflicts in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Her volume contains a total of five essays written in the course of ten years. She devotes two articles each to the Thirty Years' War and the First World War, while in a fifth she approaches the phenomenon of war across epochs via the figure of the returning warrior and the place of women in war, respectively. Regina Schulte is interested in the "experience of war beyond the military formation of battle". The element uniting her articles is the image of war as an "inverted world." She reads war as a social condition in which previously valid religious and national patterns of meaning and order are radically challenged.