The German Octopus: The British Metal Corporation and the Next War, 1914–1939

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Ball
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Nonferrous Metals ◽  
The State ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
British State ◽  
The Great War

After World War I, the nonferrous metals trade played a critical role in Britain's preparations for a future European war. Yet it has attracted little attention. The British Metal Corporation (BMC) was formed at the end of the Great War as a state-sponsored corporation to conduct the development of the nonferrous metals industry on behalf of the British state. This article uses the papers of the BMC to explore the politics of a strategically vital trade, the functioning of the British state's institutional memory, and the role of business in appeasement and rearmament. It concludes that the state-sponsored corporation was, on balance, an effective strategic instrument. Although politics, trade, and strategy proved difficult to reconcile with one another, the pursuit of profit did not dictate business attitudes toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

The Great War of the Postcards

2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-568
Author(s):  
Johann Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Book Illustrations ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

This article examines the functions and the significance of picture postcards during World War I, with particular reference to the war in the Ottoman Lands and the Balkans, or involving the Turkish Army in Galicia. After the principal types of Kriegspostkarten – sentimental, humorous, propaganda, and artistic postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) – have been presented, the different theatres of war (Balkans, Galicia, Middle East) and their characteristic features as they are reflected on postcards are dealt with. The piece also includes aspects such as the influence of Orientalism, the problem of fake views, and the significance and the impact of photographic postcards, portraits, and photo cards. The role of postcards in book illustrations is demonstrated using a typical example (F. C. Endres, Die Türkei (1916)). The specific features of a collection of postcards left by a German soldier who served in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq during World War I will be presented at the end of this article.

scholarly journals Ženske v vojni in o véliki vojni

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-70
Author(s):  
Marta Verginella
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Market Access ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Women In War ◽  
The Great War

WOMEN IN WAR AND THEIR OUTLOOK ON THE GREAT WARThe article focuses on the impacts of World War I on the gender relations. Did the war bring more freedom, easier labour market access and greater role of women in the society, as the duties and obligations of women increased along with men’s general mobilisation? The panoramic overview of the most referential existing studies comes to a conclusion that there is no unequivocal explanation. The Great War indeed offered new opportunities for women’s activities in many places around Europe, including the Slovenian lands, whereas political and administrative powers often tried to prevent the more radical changes of gender roles in the society.

scholarly journals SERBIA, ITALY’S ENTRANCE INTO WORLD WAR I, AND THE LONDON AGREEMENT: A NEW INTERPRETATION

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-196
Author(s):  
MIROSLAV RADIVOJEVIĆ
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Great War

This paper follows the Entente Powers negotiations with Italy from the beginning of World War I up to the signing of the London Agreement. Simultaneously, this paper follows Serbian relations towards the negotiations and Italy entering the conflict from the standpoint of its national pretensions. Due to the important role of Russia, as Serbia’s closest ally and the traditional protector of Slavic interests, special attention has been dedicated to its position and reasons for relenting in diplomatic initiative for Italy entering the war. This paper contains an analysis and a new interpretation of the London Agreement. In addition to this, the paper sheds light on the beginning of deteriorating relations between the governments in Rome and Belgrade/Niš, which used to be friendly before the Great War, as well as the circumstances which influenced the situation.

scholarly journals The Politics of Russian Memory: The Great War in the European Context

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-235
Author(s):  
Olga S. Porshneva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Great War

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.

From the Great War to White Christmas

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-114
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Magee
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Great War

Irving Berlin’s all-soldier World War I revue, Yip Yip Yaphank, made a unique impact on Broadway in 1918 and in Berlin’s work for decades to come. The show forged a compelling and comic connection between theatrical conventions and military protocols, using elements from minstrelsy, the Ziegfeld Follies, and Berlin’s distinctive songs. Featuring such Berlin standards as “Sterling Silver Moon” (later revised as “Mandy”) and “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” it was revised for World War II as This Is the Army, and scenes from it reappear, transformed, in Berlin’s films Alexander’s Ragtime Band and White Christmas.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Identity ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.

Remarque, Erich Maria (1898–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Gammel
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Wide Readership ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Quiet Day

Born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück, Germany, Erich Maria Remarque is best known for his influential anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues (1929, All Quiet on the Western Front). First serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in 1928, All Quiet was launched with an unprecedented advertising campaign. Hailed as ‘the great war novel’, the book spawned a world-wide readership with translations into over twenty-five languages, and a film (directed by Lewis Milestone) in 1930. Written within just a few months in 1927, All Quiet on the Western Front toys with autobiographical references. The protagonist Paul Bäumer is a nineteen-year old war veteran whose seemingly non-consequential death in October 1918, on a ‘quiet’ day on the Western front, stands for the shared fate of millions of soldiers obscured by the unprecedented violence and horror of World War I. Remarque changed his name after the war, dropping his middle name Paul, and adopting his mother’s name, Maria, while also Gallicizing the spelling of his last name, thereby blurring national boundaries.

Stimmungen, Spannungen, Visionen

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-371
Author(s):  
Max Graff
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Military Surgeon ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Poetic Visions

Wilhelm Klemm, Expressionist poet and military surgeon on the Western front during World War I, published approximately 60 war poems, both in his collection Gloria! (1915) and in several literary magazines such as Franz Pfemfert’s Aktion. Some of them were soon hailed as eminently critical of common, glorifying poetic visions of war. This is certainly adequate; a closer scrutiny of the entire corpus of Klemm’s war poems, however, reveals a peculiar diversity which requires an awareness for their ambivalences. The article therefore considers three fields of inquiry: the poems’ depiction of the human body, their relation to lyrical paradigms focussed on nature and Stimmung, and ways of transcending both these paradigms and naturalistic representations of war and its effects. It thus identifies Klemm’s different modes of perceiving, interpreting and processing the experience of the Great War.

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