scholarly journals Heritage and memory of the First World War in Greece during the interwar period a historical perspective

Balcanica ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 221-236
Author(s):  
Elli Lemonidou

The memory of the First World War in Greece has suffered throughout the years a gradual decline, which is comparable to the case of many other countries, mostly in areas of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The Great War mattered somehow for politicians, the press and public opinion in Greece only in the interwar years. During that period, discourse about the First World War included the echo of traumatic events related to Greek involvement in the war(such as the surrender of Fort Roupel to Central Powers forces and the bloody clashes of December 1916 in Athens after the landing of Entente troops) and the efforts to erect war memorials as a tribute to the sacrifice of fallen soldiers, both Greeks and foreigners. At the same time, the Greek people had the opportunity to learn a lot about the international dimension of the war through news?papers, where translated memoirs of leading wartime figures (of both alliances) were published. After the outbreak of the Second World War, interest in the previous major conflict (including the Greek role in the hostilities) significantly diminished in the country. Taking into consideration the ongoing experience of the centenary manifestations, the author proposes a codification of the main types (existing or potential) of WWI memory in Greece and suggests new ways of approaching this major historical event. The final chapter addresses some possible causes of the troublesome relation of Greeks with the First World War, which is mainly due to the very particular circumstances of Greek involvement in the war and the determining role of later historical events that overshadowed memories of the earlier conflict.

New Sound ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Miloš Bralović

The First World War ended a hundred years ago. This historical event of colossal proportions significantly changed both European and world history. And it is very probable that in the following years (that is, the 1920s), this event influenced many 'calls to order', to paraphrase the title of Jean Cocteau's infamous 1923 essay. Therefore, in this paper, we first examined (in the most general terms) overall historical conditions which influenced the emergence of neoclassicism in Paris, before and shortly after The Great War. With this in mind, we also examined the overall conditions of the emergence of neoclassicism in Serbian music, which (acknowledging several modest attempts before The Second World War) appeared as a (sort of) dominant movement significantly later, compared to its French counterpart, that is, in the 1950s. At this point, the only correlation between the two neoclassicism is that they both appear after significant, primarily destructive, historical events. Therefore, having in mind that after two wars of vast proportions, contexts changed, we examined the ways by which the composers (that is Igor Stravinsky and Milan Ristić, as case studies) tried to find a stable way into mainstream art and, to some extent, redevelop their poietics.


Author(s):  
Marcin Pigulak

The paper aims to outline how video games Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Ubisoft Montpellier, 2014) and My Memory of Us (Juggler Games, 2018) use narrative and ludic structures to create commemorative stories about the First World War and the Second World War. The author refer to the concept of historical culture (among others, in Jörn Rüsen’s interpretation) and examine the connections between the two video games focusing on the issue of designers’ intentions (digital games as examples of the commemoration of the past), the genre similarity (2D platform games), the intermedial convergence and the press reception. He discusses the strategy of the cultural agreement between designers and users, analyzes historical narratives as a part of the gameplay, examines relations between the individual and collective’s perspective and characterizes immersion’s mechanisms which reinforce players’ identification with the victims of both wars.


HISTOREIN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Emilia Salvanou

The paper aims to trace the historiographical construction of the Great War in the Greek national narrative. Its main argument is that although the First World War was more or less a shared experience among its participants, the way it was constructed as an event is aligned not to the experience as such, but to the national discourse that subsequently prevailed. In the Greek case, its historiographical construction took place in three main stages: the first during the interwar period, when the temporal framework of the event were set (the war decade of 1912–1922) and the interest was mainly in the military and political aspects. The second stage developed after the Second World War, when there was a turn towards testimonies and the field of refugee studies was shaped. It was during this stage that the memory of the refugees found its place in the national narrative. The third stage began in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when a split developed in the way the event is constructed in public and lay history and in the way it is constructed in academic historiography, where the limits of national historiographies are critiqued.


Author(s):  
Saeko Yoshikawa

Chapter 5 reveals how the Great War of 1914–1918 produced a remarkable upturn in Wordsworth’s reputation, and how it had an inescapable impact on the cultural landscape of the Lake District. For obvious reasons, Wordsworth’s sonnets on liberty and independence had strong public appeal, and his sense of crisis during the war with Napoleonic France was shared by many who stood against Germany. Equally, Wordsworth’s poetry and the Lake scenery offered consolation and relief at a time of widespread tension, anxiety, and horror. When hostilities ended, Wordsworth’s association with the Lake scenery, combined with his patriotic revival during the war, produced the idea of the Lakeland mountains as a stronghold of national liberty. Twelve mountains were donated to the National Trust to be preserved as war memorials, and public free access to them were also secured.


2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1168-1170
Author(s):  
James Foreman-Peck

What difference did the First World War make to the international economy? Since “one thing leads to another,” avoiding this conflict might have prevented the Bolshevik revolution and the Second World War. The Soviet empire need not have collapsed because it would never have arisen. By the same token, the Fascist rulers of Europe and the militaristic government of Japan might never have come to power. On this reckoning, the impact of the “Great War” was to take the twentieth century on a long detour.


Balcanica ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Vlasis Vlasidis

During the First World War Serbian soldiers were encamped or fought in different parts of Greece. Many of them died there of diseases or exhaustion or were killed in battle. This paper looks at the issue of cemeteries of and memorials to the dead Serbian soldiers (primarily in the area of Corfu, Thessaloniki and Florina) in the context of post-war relations between Greece and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), at the attitude of post-Second World War Yugoslavia towards them, and the Serbs? revived interest in their First World War history. It also takes a look at the image of Serbs in the memory of local people.


Author(s):  
Norman Ingram

This chapter sets up three main arguments that are developed in the book: first, that the debate on war origins and war guilt in the First World War nearly destroyed the Ligue des droits de l’homme well before the Second World War; secondly, that this debate lay at the heart of a dissenting, new style of pacifism which emerged in France near the end of the 1920s; and thirdly, that both of these phenomena catalysed the emergence of pro-Vichy sentiments during the Second World War. This latter development was not the result of philo-fascism but rather of an overriding commitment to peace which had its origin in the belief that the Great War had been fought by France under false pretences.


Author(s):  
Daniele Pisani ◽  

This paper explores the way in which the fallen of the First World War were commemorated in Italy between 1918 and 1940. At the end of the war, numerous spontaneous local monuments were constructed. At the same time, the many small war cemeteries established near the former battlefield areas began to be perceived as a problem. Shortly before the Second World War, in order to bury all the exhumed bodies, the Fascist Regime constructed huge war memorials (ossari and sacrari). However, this was also a means of taking advantage of the fallen for ideological and political purposes. This paper focuses on the connection between the sacralisation of the battlefields by way of raising ossari and sacrari, on the one hand, and the spread of ‘fragments’ of these battlefields all around the country, on the other. The latter phenomenon has not yet attracted significant interest from researchers. Boulders from the battlefields began to appear in the middle of village, town, and city squares across the country. They were considered ‘sacred’ since they were where hundreds of thousands of soldiers had fallen, ensuring Italy’s victory. As the boulders themselves were imbued with the fallen’s sacred blood, they were not carved but rather displayed within the monuments in their ‘natural’ shape. They were not intended to represent anything or communicate a specific message regarding war and death; they simply had to present themselves. The stone of which they were made was their main feature: just like relics, they emanated a sacred aura. Through their physical dissemination, the whole national territory could therefore be sacralised. To take their cue from this rebirth of relics were the ossari and sacrari of the late Fascist Regime, which used them as a propaganda weapon.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Downing

This article considers the making of the BBC2 series, The Great War, and examines issues around the treatment and presentation of the First World War on television, the reception of the series in 1964 and its impact on the making of television history over the last fifty years. The Great War combined archive film with interviews from front-line soldiers, nurses and war workers, giving a totally new feel to the depiction of history on television. Many aspects of The Great War were controversial and raised intense debate at the time and have continued to do so ever since.


Author(s):  
Igor Lyubchyk

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR. Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics


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