scholarly journals Forêt de Guerre: Natural remembrances of the Great War

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-34
Author(s):  
Orlando Prestidge ◽  
Orlando Prestidge
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Historic Sites ◽  
Region I ◽  
French Culture ◽  
Physical Effects ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Landscape Trees

I will discuss the effect that the Great War had on the medieval woodland landscape of France, and how the cataclysmic destruction of the conflict is now represented, remembered and sometimes even preserved by the presence of post-war woodland. The unparalleled quantities of munitions that tore apart the landscape from 1914-1918 had both physical effects at the time, as well as longer-lasting manifestations that we see today. The first use of chemical weapons, along with the problems posed by their disbursement and disposal, also still affect the soil of the Western Front, as well as the trees and plants that traditionally grew in the region. I will also analyse the deeper and far more ancient significance of forests and trees within French culture, and how this has affected the way that people have interacted with the ‘Forêt de guerre’ landscape that grew up to replace that lost during the hostilities.  World War I; 1914-18; Archaeology; Anthropology; Folklore; Landscape; Trees; Forests; Zone Rouge; Historic Sites - France

The Expatriate Idyll

2018 ◽  
pp. 98-125
Author(s):  
William Cloonan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
War Literature ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
American Expatriates ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War

A critique of American expatriates, mostly veterans of World War I, who turn Europe into a vast American playground. The alleged justification of their behaviour is their traumatic experiences of the Great War which has been over for ten years at the start of the novel. Robert Cohn’s character contrasts with that of his fellow expatriates and sheds light on their affections and sterility. He also represents the condition of post-war literature, severely tried by the realities of the war, but slowly re-establishing its strength and ability to comment meaningfully on the contemporary world.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomas Balkelis
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
General Question ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Social Disaster ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

The introduction sets a thematic and historiographical framework for the study of the continuous military violence in Lithuania from 1914 to 1923, its offshoots social disaster, state failure, revolution, mass mobilizations, paramilitarism, and their impact on nation-making and identity formation during the post-World War I period. It posits a general question: what is the relationship between nation-making and war violence? It provides a brief overview of key events and historical developments in the Lithuanian–Polish borderland from the Great War to the end of the Polish–Lithuanian War and explains the roots of the post-war conflict. It also discusses major historiographical debates on the impact of the Russian revolution and the Great War on the post-World War I order in Eastern Europe and different types of violence that were common to the region.

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 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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