Études dans l'Histoire Sociale et Culturelle de la Guerre Moderne Séries

This compelling study examines the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front in World War I.

Focusing on German soldier newspapers from the First World War, this study explores how these publications reflected the daily life and beliefs of frontline soldiers. Read by millions, they illustrated a strong sense of comradeship and duty, portraying the war as a noble effort to civilize perceived backward populations. The analysis also compares these German perspectives with those from French, British, Australian, and Canadian newspapers, providing a broader understanding of the combatants' views on both sides of the conflict.

Exploring the decline of the Habsburg Empire, this book presents a vivid portrayal of daily life in the capital city during a time of upheaval. It delves into the experiences and struggles of ordinary citizens, highlighting how political and social changes affected their routines, relationships, and communities. Through personal stories and historical context, the narrative captures the resilience and adaptability of people navigating the complexities of a crumbling empire, offering a unique lens on a pivotal moment in history.

This groundbreaking study reveals how British psychoanalysis shaped democracy, childhood and the family during and after the Second World War. It follows the work of psychoanalysts in war nurseries, juvenile courts, state committees and children's hospitals, showing how experts informed broad social questions in an age of mass violence.

Exploring the concept of national defense, the book delves into the French republican myth that emphasizes the necessity of citizens actively participating in the protection of their nation. It examines the implications of this belief on identity, citizenship, and the collective responsibility of individuals in safeguarding their homeland. Through historical and contemporary analysis, it highlights how this ideology shapes societal views on patriotism and civic duty.

This innovative study of remembrance in Weimar Germany analyses how experiences and memories of the Great War were transformed along political lines after 1918. Examining the symbolism, language and performative power of public commemoration, Benjamin Ziemann reveals how individual recollections fed into the public narrative of the experience of war. Challenging conventional wisdom that nationalist narratives dominated commemoration, this book demonstrates that Social Democrat war veterans participated in the commemoration of the war at all supporting the 'no more war' movement, mourning the fallen at war memorials and demanding a politics of international solidarity. It describes how the moderate Socialist Left related the legitimacy of the Republic to their experiences in the Imperial army and acknowledged the military defeat of 1918 as a moment of liberation. This is the first comprehensive analysis of war remembrances in post-war Germany and a radical reassessment of the democratic potential of the Weimar Republic.

The cultural legacy of the air war on Germany is explored in this comparative study of two bombed cities from different sides of the subsequently divided nation. Contrary to what is often assumed, Allied bombing left a lasting imprint on German society, spawning vibrant memory cultures that can be traced from the 1940s to the present. While the death of half a million civilians and the destruction of much of Germany's urban landscape provided 'usable' rallying points in the great political confrontations of the day, the cataclysms were above all remembered on a local level, in the very spaces that had been hit by the bombs and transformed beyond recognition. The author investigates how lived experience in the shadow of Nazism and war was translated into cultural memory by local communities in Kassel and Magdeburg struggling to find ways of coming to terms with catastrophic events unprecedented in living memory.

Focusing on the collective memory of the Vietnam War, this book delves into how popular culture interprets and represents the haunting presence of war ghosts. It examines the interplay between history and imagination, revealing how these spectral figures shape our understanding of trauma and loss associated with the conflict. Through various narratives, the book highlights the enduring impact of the Vietnam War on collective consciousness and the ways in which it continues to resonate in contemporary culture.

National Cleansing examines the prosecution of more than one-hundred thousand suspected war criminals and collaborators by Czech courts and tribunals after the Second World War. As the first comprehensive history of postwar Czech retribution, this book provides a new perspective on Czechoslovakia's transition from Nazi occupation to Stalinist rule in the turbulent decade from the Munich Pact of September 1938 to the Communist coup d'état of February 1948. Based on archival sources that remained inaccessible during the Cold War, National Cleansing demonstrates retribution's central role in the postwar power struggle and the contemporary expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.

This is the first systematic analysis of German public opinion at the outbreak of the Great War. Jeffrey Verhey's powerful study demonstrates that the myth of war enthusiasm was historically inaccurate. He also examines the development of the myth in newspapers, politics and propaganda, and the propagation and appropriation of this myth after the war. His innovative analysis sheds new light on German experience of the Great War and on the role of political myths in modern German political culture.

This book analyses how France, Belgium and the Netherlands emerged from the Second World War.