First World War Film and the Face of Death

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Marcus
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Space Time ◽  
World War ◽  
War Injuries ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Over The Top ◽  
Battle Of The Somme ◽  
First World

Central to a number of films made during or about the First World War is a thinned relationship between the living and the dead. The Battle of the Somme (1916) depicts a moment in which, from a row of soldiers going over the top, two slip back, shot. Their dying, or death, occurs between frames, an aperture through which the viewer may glimpse another dimension. J’Accuse (1919, 1938) employs soon-to-die soldiers as extras in a sequence in which the dead return. The result is a fantastical crossing between living and dead. In Pour la Paix du Monde (1926), soldiers whose faces have been maimed by war injuries are seen first in close-up, their mutilations covered by silken masks. Then they tear the masks off, allowing the viewer to see the war in its ‘true colours’. Affording the viewer these glimpses of the after-life, all three films create imaginative warps in space-time.

Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. xii + 331 pp.

2020 ◽  
pp. 334-339
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
First World War ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
First World ◽  
Sense Of Obligation

It is common wisdom, both in scholarly historiography and in hagiography, that Ze’ev Jabotinsky was the founding father of the Israeli Right. In fact, as Colin Shindler’s excellent book proves, Jabotinsky adopted a right-wing world view only in the 1920s. Prior to the First World War, while undoubtedly a Zionist, he was also a man of cosmopolitan views. It was during a sojourn in Italy that he was caught up in the spirit of nationalism; Garibaldi’s influence was prior to Herzl’s. Moreover, whereas Jabotinsky’s heirs, Menachem Begin most prominently, paid lip service to his heritage, they were not entirely his disciples. Jabotinsky’s thinking largely lost its relevance in the face of the changing historical circumstances in which Begin and others operated. And so, with the passage of years following Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, there was an ever-lessened sense of obligation to the leader and his legacy....

scholarly journals An Archaeology of Remembering: Death, Bereavement and the First World War

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Tarlow
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Responses ◽  
First World War ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
World War ◽  
Emotional Factors ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Dead ◽  
First World ◽  
National Local

Archaeological approaches to death and commemoration which privilege the negotiation of power relationships can underestimate the importance of personal and emotional responses to bereavement and mortality. Remembrance of the dead of the First World War is often understood in terms of the promotion of nationalist ideologies, but emotional factors such as grief and shock were also involved in the shaping of commemorative responses. In this article, responses to the First World War at national, local, and individual levels are considered. I suggest that people select monuments, places and ways of remembering for their power to express intense and personal feelings.

Krise und Gemeinschaft

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Community Building ◽  
German Literature ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

Stefan George's "Der Stern des Bundes" is one of the most provocative and unusual works of poetry in the history of German literature. Here, on the eve of the First World War, George unfolds social, religious, poetic, personal, philosophical and even economic issues. Members of Georges´s famous "circle" as well as his contemporaries perceived of the "Stern des Bundes" as a prediction of coming catastrophes and a warning, as a stimulus for peaceful and intimate community building in the face of great crises and as a reaffirmation of a hopeful outlook towards a shared world. Krise und Gemeinschaft assembles introductory and survey articles, contributions to key words from the “Stern”, and interpretations of key poems. It is especially aimed at readers who are still unfamiliar with the "Stern".

‘They were the best of friends; they were the worst of friends’: A Tale of Two MPs

2013 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
David Dutton
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Land Taxation ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
To Receive ◽  
First World ◽  
Joint Authorship

Edward Hemmerde and Francis Neilson were both Liberal MPs at the outbreak of the First World War, bound together by a common commitment to the principle of land taxation. A shortage of money, at a time when MPs had only just started to receive salaries, led them into extra-parliamentary co-operation in the joint authorship of plays. But the two men fell out over the profits from their literary endeavours. One or other was clearly not telling the truth. Although he gave up his parliamentary career in opposition to British involvement in the war, Neilson later prospered greatly as a writer in the United States. Meanwhile, Hemmerde turned to his career as Recorder of Liverpool, but the wealth that he craved eluded him. This article reminds us that financial impropriety among MPs is no new phenomenon, while highlighting the difficulty of establishing certain historical truth in the face of conflicting documentary evidence.

Saving Europe in Spain: José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Quixote and the politics of self, nation and Europe

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-142
Author(s):  
Peter Gordon Mann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
European Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Ideal ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
First World

This article examines the Spanish and German contexts of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s Europeanizing cultural mission before the First World War, culminating in his first published book Meditations on Quixote (1914). Ortega saw in the genius of Cervantes’ Don Quixote both a source of latent European cultural ideals preserved in Spain’s past and an exemplar of tragicomic heroism fit to defend these ideals in the face of twentieth-century modernity. Using Georg Simmel’s concept of ‘the tragedy of culture’ as a way to give shape to the problem of decadence and the idea of cultural salvation in Spain and Europe in and around 1914, I show how Ortega seized on the German ideal of Bildung as the European cultural ideal to regenerate Spain, after which Spain would save Europe. Here the idea of Europe served as both the vehicle and the aim of cultural salvation. By analysing Ortega’s project of overcoming decadence and saving culture in the decade leading up to the war, I show how the discourse of European identity took shape in relation to the search for the authentic identities of self and nation.

Jewish War Cemeteries in Western Galicia

2001 ◽  
pp. 281-285
Author(s):  
Adam Bartosz
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Dead ◽  
First World

This chapter is an overview of the Jewish war graves in western Galicia. Jewish soldiers were part of the multinational Austrian army. They fought on all fronts of the First World War and were killed with their comrades in arms of other nationalities and religions, but if identified as Jews they were buried separately. In western Galicia, bloody battles between Austrian and Russian armies lasted until May 1915. There are hundreds of military cemeteries and military sections in parish cemeteries in this area. In spite of continuing war (there were battles in eastern Galicia and in Bukovina), a systematic burial of the dead at newly established cemeteries began. It was carried out by the War Graves Division (K. u. k. Kriegsgräber-Abteilung) established in the spring of 1915 and located in Kraków. Between summer 1915 and autumn 1918, the War Graves Division designed and constructed 365 cemeteries.

Josephine Balmer and Averill Curdy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Cox
Keyword(s):  
Family History ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Internet ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
First World ◽  
Present World

Ovid’s poems of exile have found new life not only through Darrieussecq’s translations, but also through the way in which they inform the poetry of Josephine Balmer whose volume The Word for Sorrow includes her ‘transgressions’ of Ovid that take us from the battlefields of the First World War (situated close to the site of Ovid’s exile) to the poet/translator’s present world, as she searches for Ovid in the recesses of the internet and links him to her own family history. On the other side of the Atlantic Averill Curdy, also, is thinking about the reception of Ovid in America, and what his experiences of loss and exile can teach us in the face of tragedies such as 9/11, the financial crisis, and the Iraq war.

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