Three eras and possible futures: a long-term view on the Franco-German relationship a century after the First World War

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
ULRICH KROTZ
Author(s):  
Sarah Dixon Smith ◽  
David Henson ◽  
George Hay ◽  
Andrew S.C. Rice

LAY SUMMARY The First World War created the largest group of amputees in history. There were over 41,000 amputee Veterans in the UK alone. Recent studies estimate that over two thirds of amputees will suffer long-term pain because of their injuries. Medical files for the First World War have recently been released to the public. Despite the century between the First World War and the recent Afghanistan conflict, treatments for injured soldiers and the most common types of injuries have not changed much. A team of historians, doctors, and amputee Veterans have collaborated to investigate what happened next for soldiers injured in the war and how their wounds affected their postwar lives, and hope that looking back at the First World War and seeing which treatments worked and what happened to the amputees as they got older (e.g., if having an amputation put them at risk of other illnesses or injuries) can assist today’s Veterans and medical teams in planning for their future care.


Author(s):  
Craig Tibbitts

This chapter highlights the long-term influence of Scottish military traditions and identity in Australia, dating back to the arrival of a battalion of the 73rd Highland Regiment in New South Wales in 1810. From the 1860s, several home-grown ‘Scottish’ volunteer militia units were established in the Australian colonies. This coincided with a peak period of Scottish emigration to Australia with some 265,000 settling between 1850 and 1914. With the outbreak of the First World War, Australia quickly raised a contingent to assist the Empire. Several Scottish-Australian militia regiments sought incorporation into the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) but with limited success. This chapter highlights how the existence of Scottish military identities conflicted with the desire of the AIF that its identity be entirely Australian as means of forging the identity of the new Commonwealth of Australia. At the same time, a small number of AIF units managed to maintain some small degree of Scottish flavour about them. Those such as the 4th, 5th and 56th Battalions which had many join en- masse from the pre-war ‘Scottish’ militia regiments, provide examples of how this identity survived and was influenced by some key officers and NCOs of Scots heritage.


2017 ◽  
Vol 109 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-212
Author(s):  
Brook Durham

Speedwell Military Hospital was a hospital for veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force located in the newly-built Ontario Reformatory in Guelph. Speedwell was part of a nation-wide program administered by the Department of Soldiers’ Civil Re-Establishment (DSCR) during the First World War intended to neutralize some of the social dangers associated with demobilization. As the health of individual veterans at Speedwell became closely associated with the nation’s economic strength, the ultimate goal of hospitals like Speedwell was the transformation of sick and wounded veterans into healthy and productive workers. However, as the needs of patients changed after the war, the initial promise of Speedwell as a site of rehabilitative labour made it clearly unsuitable for veterans in need of long-term convalescence care.


Author(s):  
Vanda Wilcox

Italy fought the Great War in pursuit of a Greater Italy; to that end, all the resources of nation and empire were mobilised. The end of the First World War saw the demise of the liberal emigrant model in Italy, in which diaspora communities were still colonies, in favour of a more conventional vision based solely on direct territorial control. Tracing the growth of Italian colonial ambitions from 1911 through to 1923 as against the objective decline and weakening of its real empire highlights the extent to which it was an empire of fantasy as much as reality. Nonetheless, though in many ways insubstantial, empire and above all the idea of empire exerted enormous influence on Italian attitudes, policies, and priorities in the era of the First World War, with devastating long-term consequences.


Author(s):  
Christiane Tietz

From the beginning of his career, Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) was often in conflict with the spirit of his times. While during the First World War German poets and philosophers became intoxicated by the experience of community and transcendence, Barth fought against all attempts to locate the divine in culture or individual sentiment. This freed him for a deep worldly engagement: he was known as “the red pastor,” was the primary author of the founding document of the Confessing Church, the Barmen Theological Declaration, and after 1945 protested the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany. Christiane Tietz compellingly explores the interactions between Barth's personal and political biography and his theology. Numerous newly-available documents offer insight into the lesser-known sides of Barth such as his long-term three-way relationship with his wife Nelly and his colleague Charlotte von Kirschbaum. This is an evocative portrait of a theologian who described himself as “God's cheerful partisan,” who was honored as a prophet and a genial spirit, was feared as a critic, and shaped the theology of an entire century as no other thinker.


2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 915-933 ◽  
Author(s):  
VICTOR MADEIRA

The celebrated ‘Cambridge five’ have hitherto been believed to be the first long-term communist penetration agents in HM government, beginning with Donald Maclean in 1935. However, new research indicates that by 1919 another Cambridge man – like four of the ‘five’, a Trinity graduate – had already begun working for Moscow. This article is the first to examine how William Norman Ewer, known as ‘Trilby’ to his co-conspirators, organized networks in Great Britain and France to target the governments of those two powers. Under close Soviet supervision, Ewer's subordinates infiltrated half-a-dozen Whitehall departments, foremost among them Scotland Yard. Operating under the aegis of the home office, the Yard was a vital cog in the machinery of government set up to combat the ‘red menace’ in this country immediately after the First World War. By compromising the lead agency tasked with fighting them, the Bolsheviks thus created the requisite conditions for the metastasis in Great Britain of Soviet espionage in the 1920s.


2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIET CLEMENT

This article examines the Nazi government's external debt policy, with particular regard to the service of the Dawes and Young Loans, the two most important international loans Germany concluded during the interwar period. The goal of this policy was to end once and for all the obligations resulting from the First World War reparations settlement, and at the same time to economise drastically on Germany's scarce foreign exchange reserves. These aims were achieved by imposing a partial default on external debts and by bilateralising trade and financial negotiations, thus dismantling the 1930 Young Plan. In many respects, the Nazi government continued policies in place since 1931, except that it went further and was more ruthless in their execution. However, the negative long-term effects of this policy were beginning to take their toll as Germany's economy was cut off from the international financial markets and increasingly burdened by complex foreign exchange regulations. It was left to the German Federal Republic to deal with the financial legacy of this policy after the war.


2018 ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Anthony Rimmington

There is substantive evidence of the long-term integration of veterinary microbiological facilities within the USSR’s biological warfare programs. The initial impetus to this process were the concerns of the early Soviet regime over BW sabotage attacks by Germany in the First World War. In December 1918, the Red Army created its own military veterinary facility which was eventually transferred to Zagorsk. BW research also appears to have been pursued at a civil laboratory on Lisii Island close to the town of Vyshny Volochek.


2010 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani

AbstractThe notion of the “second serfdom” has to be revisited. I claim that the introduction, the evolution, and the abolition of serfdom in Russia should be seen as a long-term process, beginning no later than the late sixteenth century and ending at the eve of the First World War. In particular, I show that serfdom was never officially institutionalized in Russia and that the rules usually evoked to justify this argument actually were not meant to “bind” the peasantry but to distinguish noble estate owners from state-service nobles and “bourgeois.” Contrary to what has been argued by Witold Kula and Immanuel Wallerstein, the rise of capitalism in the West did not exploit the rise of serfdom in the East, but both East and West were part of the same global wave of commercialization, protoindustrialization, and industrialization.


Author(s):  
I. E. Magadeev

The central question of the article - how the long-term consequences of the First World War influenced the French foreign policy in relation to Germany in the 1920s. Basing on the archival and published French diplomatic sources the author analyses the French political course after 1918 and after 1945 in the comparative way with the attention to the elements of continuity and change in the Paris' conception relating to the over-Rhine neighbor.


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