This volume presents a series of chapters about the Great War and memory in Central and South-Eastern Europe which will widen the insufficient and spotty representations of the Great War in that region. The contributors deliver an important addition to present-day scholarship on the more or less unknown war in the Balkans and at the Italian fronts. Although it might not completely fill the striking gap in the historical representations of the situation between the Slovene-Italian Soča-Isonzo river in the North-West and the Greek-Macedonian border mountains around Mount Kajmakčalan in the South-East, it will add significantly to the scholarship on the Balkan theatre of war and provide a much-needed account of the suffering of civilians, ideas, loyalties and cultural hegemonies, as well as memories and the post-war memorial landscape. The contributors are Vera Gudac Dodić, Silviu Hariton, Vijoleta Herman Kaurić, Oto Luthar, Olga Manojlović Pintar, Ahmed Pašić, Ignác Romsics, Daniela Schanes, Fabio Todero, Nikolai Vukov and Katharina Wesener.

In the English language World War I has largely been analysed and understood through the lens of the Western Front. This book addresses this imbalance by examining the war in Eastern and Central Europe. The historiography of the war in the West has increasingly focused on the experience of ordinary soldiers and civilians, the relationships between them and the impact of war at the time and subsequently. This book takes up these themes and, engaging with the approaches and conclusions of historians of the Western front, examines wartime experiences and the memory of war in the East. Analysing soldiers' letters and diaries to discover the nature and impact of displacement and refugee status on memory, this volume offers a basis for comparison between experiences in these two areas. It also provides material for intra-regional comparisons that are still missing from the current research. Was the war in the East wholly 'other'? Were soldiers in this region as alienated as those in the West? Did they see themselves as citizens and was there continuity between their pre-war or civilian and military identities? And if, in the Eastern context, these identities were fundamentally challenged, was it the experience of war itself or its consequences (in the shape of imprisonment and displacement, and changing borders) that mattered most? How did soldiers and citizens in this region experience and react to the traumas and upheavals of war and with what consequences for the post-war era? In seeking to answer these questions and others, this volume significantly adds to our understanding of World War I as experienced in Central and Eastern Europe.

The volume considers the period starting with the Bolshevik revolution and the final stages of the First World War up to the year 1923. This critical period saw the end of hyperinflation and the creation of a "New Europe," ensuring a degree of c

After the Second World War, millions of people across Eastern Europe, displaced as a result of wartime destruction, deportations and redrawing of state boundaries, found themselves living in cities that were filled with the traces of the foreign cultures of the former inhabitants. In the immediate post-war period these traces were not acknowledged, the new inhabitants going along with official policies of oblivion, the national narratives of new post-war regimes, and the memorialising of the victors. In time, however, and increasingly over recent decades, the former "other pasts" have been embraced and taken on board as part of local cultural memory. This book explores this interesting and increasingly important phenomenon. It examines official ideologies, popular memory, literature, film, memorialisation and tourism to show how other pasts are being incorporated into local cultural memory. It relates these developments to cultural theory; and argues that the relationship between urban space, cultural memory and identity in Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming a question not only of cultural politics, but also of consumption and choice, alongside a tendency towards the cosmopolitanisation of memory. al memory and identity in Eastern Europe is increasingly becoming a question not only of cultural politics, but also of consumption and choice, alongside a tendency towards the cosmopolitanisation of memory.

From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India’s struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.

Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny set out to salvage the historical memory of the experience of war in the lands between Riga and Skopje, beginning with the two Balkan conflicts of 1912-1913 and ending with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916. The First World War in the East and South-East of Europe was fought by people from a multitude of different nationalities, most of them dressed in the uniforms of three imperial armies: Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian. In this first volume of Forgotten Wars, the authors chart the origins and outbreak of the First World War, the early battles, and the war's impact on ordinary soldiers and civilians through to the end of the Romanian campaign in December 1916, by which point the Central Powers controlled all of the Balkans except for the Peloponnese. Combining military and social history, the authors make extensive use of eyewitness accounts to describe the traumatic experience that established a region stretching between the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Seas.

This is a rich yet succinct account of an underexplored story: the consequences of the Great War for the region which ignited it. It offers a fascinating tapestry: the collapse of Empires, the birth of Turkey and Yugoslavia, Greece as both victor and loser, Bulgaria's humiliating defeat; bitter memories, forced migrations, territorial implications and collective national amnesias. The legacies live on. The contributions in this volume significantly enhance the debate about how the Great War is remembered in South East Europe, and why it still evokes such strong emotions and reactions, more than a century after its beginnings.