Introduction

Summary

The book opens with an exploration of the cultural violence of the First World War and sets this in wider historical and historiographical contexts. It explores three key themes which inform the monograph: cultural destruction, humanitarianism, and the role of the intellectual. While none of these themes began with the First World War, the conflict transformed them in significant ways. Cultural destruction was a key component in how the First World War was presented to belligerent and neutral populations and intellectual sites were particularly important in this process of cultural mobilization. The introduction argues that because cultural destruction was crucial to popular understandings of the war, its opposite, cultural and intellectual reconstruction, would in turn be an important part of the process of post-war stabilization.