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This paper explores one of the most powerful ways in which contemporaries made sense of their experiences: through metaphors drawn from Christian rhetoric. For most people, the war was either distant but threatening or immediate and overwhelming in its destructive force. One heard about horrors elsewhere or one saw the death of kin and neighbors and the disruptions of everyday life firsthand. In either case, peoples' experience was shaped by the local perspective of the particular region where they lived.[7] But the magnitude of the war's effects made it clear that local experience was bound up with something much larger. Religious imagery provided a tool for connecting local experiences to the broader calamity. In doing so, it reinforced the contemporary sense that the war was an unprecedented catastrophe for the people of Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]