Introduction

Summary

The history of the Great War is a subject of perennial fascination. In some ways the end of the twentieth century appears disturbingly close to its beginnings. We have witnessed recently the collapse of elements of the European state system and the ideological and geo-political divide which grew out of the 1914–18 conflict. The end of the ‘Cold War’ has brought us back not to 1939 or 1945, but in a sense to 1914. Ethnic and nationalist splits that seemed past history are painfully present today.

In other ways the chequered recent history of European integration makes even clearer the need to recall the bloody history of European disintegration. If we want to understand and ultimately to put behind us the cataclysmic record of European history in this century, we must revisit the war that set in motion these enduring centrifugal and centripetal forces, propelling us away from and towards a unified Europe.

In some respects, this historical terrain is very familiar. Whole libraries exist on the military, economic, and diplomatic history of the period. Less attention has been paid, though, to the process whereby Europeans tried to find ways to comprehend and then to transcend the catastrophes of the war. The many sites of memory and sites of mourning, both public and private, created in the wake of the conflict have never been analysed in a comparative framework. It is to these sites that we turn in this book.