World War I

World War I, called interchangeably the First World War and the Great War, is in City of God less a discrete historical event than a persistent origin-point that the novel keeps returning to across generations. It is the war of the fathers — of Ben Doctorow, the impetuous ensign who would leap fences and shout orders in Yiddish — and its memory shadows the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the contemporary lives of the novel's characters. The novel treats the Great War as the first rupture in a chain of twentieth-century catastrophe, its dead literally impressed into the earth, its survivors carrying wounds that their children and grandchildren inherit without ever having seen a trench.

The War of the Fathers: Ben Doctorow's Yiddish Ruse

The novel's most vivid account of the Great War centers on Ben Doctorow, the father of the narrator, who served as a young naval officer. Ben's defining act of the war was surviving one awful night by shouting out orders in Yiddish, a language created in the teeth of European history. This ruse — a desperate improvisation that turned a despised minority language into a tool of survival — becomes a family legend, a story of how wit and linguistic resourcefulness could outlast the machinery of war. The Yiddish ruse is presented as both absurd and heroic, a moment when the marginalized language of the Jews proved more effective than the official commands of the military. It is the kind of story that a son tells to explain his father, and it anchors Ben's identity as a man who could think his way out of mortal danger.

From Ensign to Armchair: The War's Long Aftermath

Ben's war did not end with the armistice. By 1943, the young ensign of World War One had become the narrator's worried portly father, sitting in an armchair by the radio listening to the news of World War Two. The transformation is stark: the impetuous youth who risked death in the wrong white uniform, breaking into the army canteen where his future wife was serving coffee and doughnuts to the doughboys, had finally gone under and become a salesman working for other people. The war that once defined him recedes into the background of a diminished middle age, yet it never fully disappears. The narrator remembers his father's generation as skeletal warriors hastily shoveled under as the Great War moved on, their sacrifices buried almost as quickly as they were made. The image of the worried portly father by the radio suggests a man who carries the Great War inside him while the world prepares for an even greater one.

The Bones of Europe: The War as Geological Memory

The novel extends the Great War's presence beyond individual memory into the very substance of the continent. The narrator reflects that the bones of the First World War are impressed in the continent's tectonic plates under the weight of the bones buried over them, that Europe's beaches are adrift with sanded bone, that her farmers in their fields plow up loops of chained vertebrae, and that her rivers at night are luminous with the risen free radicals of calcification. This is the war as geology, as a permanent physical layer in the earth that no amount of time can erase. The dead are not merely remembered; they are literally part of the ground on which subsequent generations walk, farm, and fight. The image of farmers plowing up vertebrae turns agriculture itself into an act of exhumation, and the luminous rivers suggest that even the water carries the chemical trace of the war's dead. The Great War, in this account, is not history but sediment.

The Viennese Architect and the Fin de Siècle Despair

The war also reaches into the novel through the testimony of a Viennese architect whose memory of the grand staircase in the palatial home in the Alleegasse produces in him a generalized despair of the fin de siècle culture of his youth. His parents gave over their lives to the climbing of such stairs, and their grandparents were Jews who had converted to Catholicism. At the technical school he was sent to, Adolf Hitler was a student two grades below him. When he came home from the Great War, he immediately signed over to his siblings the immense wealth of his inheritance, designed on the principle of the cube a severely simple, unadorned, unembellished, unornamented home in the Kundmanngasse for his sister for whose soul he feared, and went off to live poor and work with his hands in the country, teaching elementary school arithmetic to the children of peasants. The war here is the catalyst for a total renunciation: the architect rejects the ornate culture of his youth, the climbing of stairs that symbolized social aspiration, and chooses instead a life of radical simplicity. His despair is not merely personal but civilizational — the fin de siècle culture that produced him and Hitler is, in his eyes, bankrupt. The war exposed the hollowness of the world he inherited, and his response was to strip everything away.

The War's Echo in the Holocaust and the Present

The Great War's deepest resonance in the novel is its connection to the Holocaust. The narrator's account of the war's dead — most of them having died obedient, young, dumbfounded, and in the enlisted ranks — prefigures the mass death of the ghettos and camps. The American general Pershing kept his fresh armies intact under his own command until 1917, when things got worse for the Allies, whose total dead, British and French, by then numbered something over four million men. This arithmetic of mass death becomes a template for understanding later catastrophe. The novel's present-day characters, particularly Sarah Blumenthal, inherit this history through their parents. Sarah's father, who was a runner in the Kovno Ghetto, is described by Sarah as having been a little fellow who could dart about, and the novel draws an implicit parallel between the boy runners of the ghetto and the young soldiers of the Great War — both children pressed into service by forces beyond their control. When Sarah examines the forbidden photographs from the ghetto, including one of seven little boys in military-school caps standing at attention on the steps of a wood cabin, she is looking at a generation shaped by the same machinery of war that her father's generation endured. The Great War, the Holocaust, and the present are thus linked in the novel's imagination as successive chapters of the same story of European violence, each generation's trauma transmitted to the next through memory, story, and the very bones of the earth.