CfP: The Ends of World War I and their Legacies

Call for Papers: Settlement and Unsettlement – The Ends of World War I and their Legacies

German Historical Institute, Washington, DC

Deadline: 31 March 2016

International Encyclopedia of WWI launched

Yesterday, 1914-1918-ONLINE, an English-language virtual reference work on the First World War, was launched. The multi-perspective, open-access knowledge base is the result of an international collaborative project involving more than 1,000 authors, editors, and partners from over fifty countries (incl. from FU Berlin, German Historical Institutes, Instituto de Historia Contemporanea Lisboa, Government of South Australia). More than 1,000 articles will be gradually published.

New Approaches to Weimar History

Two recent conferences in Germany have focused on new historical approaches to the study of the interwar years. At Neue landesgeschichtliche Ansätze zur Erforschung der Weimarer Republik in Munich, delegates discussed new approaches to the Weimar Republic informed by regional history. The conference Aktuelle Forschungen zur Nachkriegsgewalt 1918-1923 in Marburg broadened the focus to Central Europe, exploring new studies to the role of violence in postwar societies.

 

Weimar’s Republican War Veterans

Benjamin Ziemann’s new study Contested Commemorations. Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture adds to the growing literature on the strength of republican cultures of commemoration in Weimar that challenge the traditional view of the dominance of nationalist and anti-democratic political culture: ‘This innovative study of remembrance in Weimar Germany analyses how experiences and memories of the Great War were transformed along political lines after 1918.

Military magazines in the Weimar Republic

This new study investigates the role of military magazines in forming the memory  of the World War among their readers:

Haller, Christian: Militärzeitschriften in der Weimarer Republik und ihr soziokultureller Hintergrund. Kriegsverarbeitung und Milieubildung im Offizierskorps der Reichswehr in publizistischer Dimension.

>> review (in German)

Online Encyclopedia of the First World War

In 2014, the project “1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War” will go live. It promises to be an indispensable source for research on the Great War and its aftermath, but the website is already worth a look. Particularly the collection of WWI websites is a handy guide for anyone interested in the era.

CfP: The Great War and its Aftermath

Call for Papers 

The Great War and its Aftermath. The Alternatives to the Liberal Civilization Breakdown

07-08 May 2014, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Deadline for abstracts: 30 Sept. 2013

British obsession with German history

The financial crisis, and Germany’s subsequent role as a reluctant ‘saviour of the eurozone’, has  given rise to a renewed discussion of the country’s historical role in Europe. In the UK, this debate has borne especially strange fruit. At the beginning of the crisis, the supposed ‘national trauma’ of the Weimar hyperinflation has been used to explain Germany’s alleged reluctance to enter a more active role. Now the tone has changed to a fear of a too powerful Germany: the Daily Mail recently predicted another war started by Germany, while the cover of the current edition of the New Statesman talks of a ‘German problem’, depicting Angela Merkel and Helmut Kohl alongside Bismarck and Hitler. In the accompanying article, historian Brendan Simms describes the long way towards German democracy, all the way from the 15th century, but goes on to argue that  it only took the last five years to put it all in danger again.

Secret rearmament after 1918

The study Die bellizistische Republik. Wehrkonsens und “Wehrhaftmachung” in Deutschland 1918–1933 sheds new light on the secret rearmament of the Reichswehr during the Weimar Republic. The central argument is that the rearming was supported by republican forces and based in an intellectual tradition of ‘Wehrhaftigkeit‘, but led to the formation of a ‘state within a state’, outside of legal norms and democratic control.

>> review (in German)

New Study on 1918

A harbinger of the great flood of books on the First World War that will be published in 2014, David Stephenson study With Our Backs to the Wall. Victory and Defeat in 1918 takes an unusual look at the last year of the war. In his view, even after the US entered the conflict, its outcome was still undecided in 1918.

>> review (in English)

>> review (in German)