The First World War, according to the philosopher and writer Ludwig Marcuse, suspended everyday life and capped the roots of existence. It transformed settled citizens into vagabonding recipients of orders. These realms of experience at the front and on the home front demonstrate the subjective history of each, and reveal the big picture in the detail and the general in the specific. The sources that have been passed down report on the state of emergency as a permanent state and tell of attempts to remove the horror of the incomprehensible by constructing an everyday life.