Writing the Great War
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Writing the Great War This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. WRITING THE GREAT WAR The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present Edited by Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cornelissen, Christoph, editor. | Weinrich, Arndt, 1979- editor. Title: Writing the Great War : the historiography of World War I from 1918 to the present / edited by Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich. Other titles: Historiography of World War I from 1918 to present Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2020020284 (print) | LCCN 2020020285 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789204544 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789204575 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1914–1918—Historiography. | World War, 1914–1918— Infl uence. | World War, 1914–1918—Centennial celebrations, etc. | Collective memory. Classifi cation: LCC D522.42 .W75 2021 (print) | LCC D522.42 (ebook) | DDC 940.3072—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020284 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020285 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license. The terms of the license can be found at https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. For uses beyond those covered in the license, contact Berghahn Books. Supported by the Max Weber Foundation. ISBN 978-1-78920-454-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-469-8 open access ebook This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Understanding World War I: One Hundred Years of Historiographical Debate and Worldwide Commemoration 1 Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich Chapter 1. (Hi)stories and Memories of the Great War in France: 1914–2018 11 Nicolas Offenstadt Chapter 2. Histories and Memories: Recounting the Great War in Belgium, 1914–2018 50 Bruno Benvindo and Benoît Majerus Chapter 3. British and Commonwealth Historiography of World War I: 1914–2018 95 Jay Winter Chapter 4. Of Expectations and Aspirations: South Asian Perspectives on World War I, the World, and the Subcontinent, 1918–2018 114 Margret Frenz Chapter 5. German Historiography on World War I, 1914–2019 147 Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich Chapter 6. Austrian Historiography and Perspectives on World War I: The Long Shadow of the “Just War,” 1914–2018 192 Oliver Rathkolb Chapter 7. Russia and World War I: The Politics of Memory and Historiography, 1914–2018 223 Boris Kolonitskii This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. vi • Contents Chapter 8. The Invention of Yugoslav Identity: Serbian and South Slav Historiographies on World War I, 1918–2018 263 Stanislav Sretenovic´ Chapter 9. A Seminal “Anti-Catastrophe”? Historiography on World War I in Poland, 1914–2019 302 Piotr Szlanta Chapter 10. A Historiographical Turn: Evolving Interpretations of Japan during World War I, 1914–2019 338 Jan Schmidt and Naoko Shimazu Chapter 11. Coming to Terms with the Imperial Legacy and the Violence of War: Turkish Historiography of World War I between Autarchy and a Plurality of Voices, 1914–2018 368 Alexandre Toumarkine Chapter 12. Italian Memory, Historiography, and World War I: 1914–2019 409 Angelo Ventrone Chapter 13. Finding a Place for World War I in American History: 1914–2018 449 Jennifer D. Keene Index 488 This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book goes back to a meeting held at the German Historical Institute in Paris in December 2012, organized in order to discuss and eventually coordinate the centenary-related activities that were being projected at the time by the Max Weber Foundation’s research institutes across the globe. Among the potential projects floated that day figured a compre- hensive overview over one hundred years of World War I historiography, to which each participating institute would provide a chapter. It is this project that comes into being with the present volume. We express our gratitude to several institutes of the Max Weber Foun- dation for their generous support during different stages of the publication process: German Historical Institute London German Historical Institute Moscow German Historical Institute Paris German Historical Institute Rome German Historical Institute Warsaw Orient Institute Istanbul In particular, we are indebted to Martin Baumeister, Katja Bruisch, An- dreas Gestrich, Nikolaus Katzer, Lutz Klinkhammer, Ruth Leiserowitz, Thomas Maissen, Stefan Martens, Benedikt Stuchtey, and Richard Witt- mann for their long-lasting commitment to the project. In line with its well-established open-access policy, the Max Weber Foundation advocated for OA support right from the beginning and pro- vided the necessary funding. We are extremely grateful for that opportu- nity and wish to thank Harald Rosenbach and Joachim Kaiser for seeing the project through to the end. We wish to extend our gratitude to the translators and copyeditors, who worked so hard on the manuscript, as well as to our peer-reviewers, whose input was most valuable. We would also like to thank Laurence This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. van Ypersele and Alexandre Sumpf for reading and commenting on parts of the manuscript. Last but not least, we thank our authors for their patience and willing- ness to update parts of their chapters time and again. We hope readers will find the result to their entire satisfaction. This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. Introduction UNDERSTANDING WORLD WAR I One Hundred Years of Historiographical Debate and Worldwide Commemoration Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich Y•Z Even one hundred years after it broke out, World War I still interests and energizes public attention. That is true not just of the global com- munity of historians but also of broad segments of a public that is no longer limited solely to just those countries that once waged the war. In fact, the events in and around World War I are now the focus of a broad and worldwide historical-political reflection that seeks to grasp the global manifestations of this totalizing war. It seems as though more recently, with the end of the Cold War and subsequent developments, the percep- tion has sharpened yet again that the world in the years between 1914 and 1918 may have much more to do with our present day than many observers have been used to believing. Take just the current geopolitical situation of Europe and the resurgence not only of nationalism but, in some cases, also of an undisguised chauvinism and one might come to consider that it is always worth the effort to investigate the causes and implications of the historical crises that led to World War I in 1914. The same is true for the circumstances in which the war was waged, and which fundamentally changed the face of Europe as well as of many areas beyond its borders. The desire to understand World War I ultimately represents an This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. 2 • Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich attempt to grasp the twentieth century in its worldwide dimensions. It is consequently anything but a coincidence that the truly global impact of the World War between 1914 and 1918 is currently attracting historians’ attention more so than has long been the case. The history of World War I–related research faithfully mirrors all the twists and turns that have been a part of this dynamic. Hardly ever have there been so many books and articles published as in recent years, not to mention the overabundance of fi lms and other media productions, among which are numerous internet portals about the history of World War I. As elegant witness to this, just take the breathtaking number of works published worldwide in the context of the centenary and the on- going publication of research contributions. While countless monographs and edited volumes seek to examine individual aspects of the war, its or- igins, and its aftermath, the authors of the many comprehensive histories (whose scholarly quality is distributed somewhat unevenly) have dared to take on the diffi cult task of doing justice to the total phenomenon. More often than not, this has been done from within a national history point of view, but there have been quite a few attempts to adopt a global history perspective. Yet there is obviously a limit as to how far any given individual author can go in his/her effort to embrace World War I’s com- plexities with all its far-reaching global, national, and subnational im- plications and ramifi cations. So the most credible claim to providing an overview is best found in international collaborative projects, such as The Cambridge History of the First World War,1 published by Jay Winter and translated into several languages, or the Berlin-based online encyclopedia 1914-1918-online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War,2 which is directed by a group of leading World War I historians united by Oliver Janz.