Everyone is in the memory business today. In this book, the word “memory” stands for history, commemoration, narratives, memoirs, representations, and (in the last essay) “post-mortem interpretations.” In short, it means how different people approach the past, in this case, how they think about the First World War and its aftermath.
This is both a welcome and a flawed volume. It is welcome in that it helps to shift the center of gravity of the 1914–18 war from Paris to Graz, or from Berlin to Bucharest. Such a move is long overdue, and entirely justifiable. And yet, the essays in this collection, initiated in 2008, and published nearly a decade later, show how difficult a task it is to write the history of the war east of Berlin and south of Vienna with the same precision and depth as do historians in the older west European dominated history of the war.
One obstacle is the immovable presence of WWII as a screen memory through which many central and eastern Europeans see WWI. In the not too distant past, this obstacle precluded deep historical research on 1914–18 in Germany; no one in the 1980s really wanted to touch “Hitler's first war,” since to do so risked entering into the Fritz Fischer debate on how different were German war aims in the two world wars. Spurred on by centenary commemorations, historians in Germany, especially on the local level, have removed that obstacle, slowly but surely.
It is much harder to do so east and south of the Elbe, and the editor and contributors to this volume are to be congratulated on taking the first steps toward a wider and deeper social and cultural history of central and southern Europe in the period of the Great War.
Yet there are problems in the ways these scholars appropriate and modify the already existing literature in this field. Lothar still deals with the phenomenon of “war enthusiasm” as if the work of Jeffrey Verhey, Anette Becker, and Adrian Gregory did not exist. He cites the book Lions Led by Donkeys, but mistakenly attributes it to the historian E.P. Thompson. He manages to mix up the BBC's 26-part series The Great War, which appeared in 1964 with Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a lovely war! which appeared in 1969. The worst instance of mangled uptake in the book is in Fabio Todero's article on Italy. He cites Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et decorum est on victims of a gas attack in a way that is hard to forget: “Dim through the misty panes of thick green light / As under a green sea, I saw him drawing” (123). “Drowning” is the correct last word, as befits a soldier suffocating in a cloud of green phosgene gas.
The linguistic problems of publishing a work in English on a war fought by men who spoke and wrote in two dozen languages other than English are evident. I cite them here simply to show how difficult it is for historians of western, eastern, and southern Europe to share the fruits of earlier scholarship and to move beyond an outmoded British-French-German imbalance in the history of the war. How many scholars in London or Paris can get Slovene or Bulgarian poetry right in translation? Language matters, and research in this field requires a rigorous standard in archival research and writing that scholars rarely attain. Still, we have no choice but to insist that that standard is the one we uphold.
The second problem this collection of essays reveals is eclecticism. By that I mean that each is interesting, but the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. To arrive at a synthesis, a lot of groundwork has to be done, and this the authors have indeed achieved. In particular, Violeta Kaurić's account of Zagreb's military hospitals, Katharina Wesener's study of internment camps in Styria, and Ignác Romsic's account of the upheaval of 1917–18 in rural Hungary are solid and suggestive building blocks out of which a future history of this region in wartime will be made.
But to get there, scholars will need to adopt a theoretical perspective or perspectives out of which hypotheses can arise informing comparisons between different parts of central and eastern Europe themselves, and between this region and western Europe. There are many such theoretical contributions, and they are available for exploitation. Jürgen Kocka's study of social class is one; Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker's deployment of the concept of “war culture” is another. Benjamin Ziemann's account of rural society is a third. In the field of commemoration, Antoine Prost and Ken Inglis have led the way. There are others, too: Jean-Louis Robert and I have set out some ideas open to comparative perspective on urban history in wartime. Adrian Gregory has written subtly on religion in wartime. There is a body of writing, much of it inspired by the work of John Horne and Robert Gerwarth about “the greater war,” extending the history of the conflict from 1912 until 1923, which is certainly justified in the history of the Balkans.
The challenges at hand are to use this already abundant literature to inform the next generation of scholarship on central and southeastern Europe, and to encourage young scholars to develop comparative perspectives enabling them to work towards a truly European history of the Great War. The contributors to this book are indeed pioneers, and their work needs to be acknowledged as such. What such people offer is a place from which to move on.
