The Invasion Handbook opens with the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, which excluded Germany from the community of nations, and with the answering but ill-fated attempt of the Locarno Treaties of 1925 to restore the torn fabric of Europe. It evokes Weimar culture, Hitler's rise to power, and the beginnings of the persecution of the Jews, and affirms the struggle and the recollections of a generation upon whom the doors of living memory are now closing even as it extends concerns that have long haunted Torn Paulin's poetry: the relation of art to war and to questions of national identity, the search for peace and for a shared civic culture.