scholarly journals When war came home: air-raid shock in World War I

2021 ◽  
pp. 0957154X2199821
Author(s):  
Stefanie Caroline Linden

During World War I, civilians became a target of the war machine. Air raids transformed the lives of those not involved in active combat and blurred the lines between the home front and the war front. This paper argues that the experience of air raids in World War I was comparable to the combat stress at the Western Front. The author bases her argument on contemporary publications in medical journals, measures taken by British authorities to prevent air-raid shock, and contemporary case records. The narratives of air-raid shock – similarly to those of shell-shocked soldiers – reflect the feelings of terror and loss of control, and demonstrate the profound effect these experiences could have on individuals’ mental health.

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Fantauzzo

Over 450,000 British soldiers fought as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Between 1915-1918, they fought their way across the Sinai Peninsula, into southern Palestine, captured Jerusalem, and overran the Turkish Army, leading to the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in October 1918. Despite being the war’s most successful sideshow, the Egypt and Palestine campaign struggled to gain popular attention and has largely been excluded from First World War scholarship. This article argues that returning soldiers used war books to rehabilitate the campaign’s public profile and to renegotiate the meaning of wartime service in interwar Britain. The result of sporadic press attention and censorship during the war, the British public’s understanding of the campaign was poor. Periodic access to home front news meant that most soldiers likely learnt of their absence from Britain’s war narrative during the war years. Confronting the belief that the campaign, prior to the capture of Jerusalem, was an inactive theatre of war, British soldiers refashioned themselves as military labourers, paving the road to Jerusalem and building the British war machine. As offensive action intensified, soldiers could look to the past to provide meaning to the present. Allusions to the campaign as a crusade were frequently made and used to compete with the moral righteousness of the liberation of Belgium.


Author(s):  
Adam Paulsen

This article compares representations of war in Walter Flex’ The Wanderer between Two Worlds (1916), Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920), and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). It shows the extent to which these representations are shaped by political and ideological convictions. The difference between the romantic idealism of Flex and Jünger’s “soldierly nationalism”,which he proposed as a model for the time to come, reflects a major shift during World War I itself. By contrast, neither past nor future seem to be of any use in Remarque’s famous antiwar novel, in which the war generation surprisingly is described as having nothing else to live for beyond the present, i.e. beyond war. Finally, the article suggests how these different representations of war each, in their own way, contributed to the aesthetics and ideology of fascism.


Author(s):  
Irene Gammel

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-371
Author(s):  
Max Graff

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1771-1781
Author(s):  
Santanu Das

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 388-405
Author(s):  
Maria Medvedeva ◽  

This paper considers materials of the Bukovina expedition organized for the examination of the state of preservation of architectural monuments and museum collections in the zone of military activities on the Russian western front during World War I. The expedition took place in 1916–1917 under the direction of the Academician of Architecture P. P. Pokryshkin. More than 100 years have passed but the results of the activities of the expedition remain little known. A considerable assemblage of scientific documents from this trip, i.e. a report, letters, diaries, photographs, is kept in the Scientific Archives of IIMK RAS needing a comprehensive scientific publication.


2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 239
Author(s):  
Peter Hoar

Book review of: The great adventure ends: New Zealand and France on the Western Front, edited by Nathalie Phillippe, Chris Puglsey, John Crawford & Matthias Strohn, Christchurch: John Douglas Publishing, 2013. 424 pp. ISBN 9780987666581This volume is another shot in the bombardment of books about the Great War that marks the 2014 centenary of the start of the ‘war to end all wars’. This literary big push includes novels, graphic novels, histories, biographies, memoirs and diaries written for specialists and the general public. An early publication to pop over the parapet, this collection offers a diverse set of articles that highlight some not so well-known aspects of New Zealand’s involvement on the Western Front during the 1914-18 war. The varied articles in The Great Adventure Ends reflect both the book’s origins in a conference and the variety of ways in which World War I is written about.


Author(s):  
Ian C. D. Moffat

The Great War was the world event that began the evolution of Canada from a self-governing British colony to a great independent country. However, one of Canada’s failings is its self-deprecation and modesty. Canada has produced a number of historic works documenting and analyzing Canada’s accomplishments and the individuals who made them happen. Although much was written by actual participants in the interwar years, the majority of the objective and analytical works have only slowly emerged after the Second World War when history became a respected academic discipline. This annotated bibliography gives a cross section of the Canadian Great War historiography with the majority of the work having been produced after 1980. The Canadian Army and the role of Canadians serving in the British Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service have good coverage in Canadian monographs. The one area of study that has a dearth of work is on the Royal Canadian Navy since it had a very small role in the Great War and did not come into its own until after 1939. Nonetheless, there are a number of works included that show the Navy’s fledgling accomplishments between 1914 and 1918, as well as the efforts of the British Admiralty to restrict the Royal Canadian Navy’s actions in defense of its own area of operations. This bibliography also contains works on prisoners of war, the psychological effects of trench warfare on Canadians serving at the front, the internment of enemy aliens in Canada, and effects of the war on the home front, including one French work analyzing French Quebec’s changing attitude to World War I over the length of the 20th century.


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