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The article begins with a periodization of historical writing about the Great War. In the first decades after the end of the conflict, historiography in all its forms followed traditional patterns of historical narrative and was dominated by people who had direct or indirect experience of the events. The 1960’s saw a major historiographical shift with the introduction of social history in WWI studies. Some years later, at a time dominated by the international peace movement, a new generation of scholars turned decisively the focus on the human dimension, distancing themselves from traditional war narratives. In the very last decades, the transnational approach, thoroughly analyzed in the text, has become more and more widespread in WWI studies, as the only way to address the universal dimensions of that war and to understand some of its aspects that far exceed the national level of analysis.

The first is what I term imperial warfare. At the time of the First Hague Convention in 1899, war spanned the globe. This should hardly be surprising in this, the first phase of what we now term globalisation. War's victims were global too, spreading from those who suffered in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion in China, in the Spanish-American war in Cuba and the Philippines, in the Boer war in South Africa, in the suppression of the Herero revolt in South West Africa and so on. What image of peace emerged from this violent period? The one imagined in the great Paris World's Fair of 1900, the greatest of them all, in which what the French term la mission civilisatrice, brought bounty and modernity to the dependant populations of the earth.

By JAY WINTER The role of remembrance in public life has expanded radically over the past century. In part this is due to the democratization of war fare. Before 1914, the vast majority of those who served, were injured, or died in war were volun teers or mercenaries. After 1914, conscript armies fought wars and left bereaved parents, widows, and orphans behind in numbers that were never before registered. Inevitably, this meant that the history of warfare and family his tory came to be bound together. War memorials proliferated in villages and towns throughout Europe and beyond, largely to preserve the names of the fallen. The overwhelming majority of these sites list names alphabetically and not by rank. Maya Lin s Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D. C, consciously designed to fol low the First World War model, does it another way, by recording the names of the dead by the date they died. The result is the same: the sixty thousand American dead of the Vietnam War are

Resume Le « temoin moral » et les deux guerres mondialesCet article applique la categorie de « temoin moral » developpee dans la litterature philosophique a deux individus. Le premier est Jean Norton Cru, un ancien combattant de la Grande Guerre et auteur de deux etudes importantes consacrees a des recits de soldats. Le second est Leon Weliczker Wells, qui a survecu a la Shoah. Comme J. N. Cru, ses souvenirs furent rediges en tant qu’actes de temoignages moraux, entendus comme le recit de l’experience du mal absolu face aux temoins immoraux qui racontent ce passe en termes anodins ou euphemises.

This article suggests that ‘shell shock’ was a discourse both medical and metaphorical. Its iconic force in capturing key elements of the impact of the Great War on British society arises from the lesser significance, in comparison with France and Germany, of veterans' movements in British political life. ‘Shell shock’ was, therefore, a language of validation, of moral standing as well as entitlement to a pension. Given the highly charged nature of the category, it is at least arguable that the well-known division between symptoms attributable to officers and those attributable to men is suspect; this distinction probably described labels rather than conditions, the invasion of medical discourse by class-based notions of stoicism and courage.

Museums are the cathedrals of the twenty-first century, in that they have filled the void left by the conventional churches as a site in which mixed populations of different faiths or no faith at all, of different origins and beliefs, confront and meditate on sacred themes – sacrifice, death, mourning, evil, brotherhood, dignity, transcendence.1 War not only belongs in museums; war dominates museum space in much of the public representation of history and will continue to do so. That being so, it is the task of war museums to persuade visitors to pose the question: how can war be represented? While there is no adequate answer to this question, museum professionals must try to answer it anyway with a large dose of humility. By avoiding the didactic mode, that is, that they know the answer and will present it to the visitors, they can perform a major public service. By admitting the magnitude of the problems inherent in trying to represent war, and through it, trying to represent the pain of others, museum directors and designers fulfil a critical social task. Knowing about war is the business of an informed citizenship, and museums are those sites where moral questions are posed, questions inevitably raised about war, questions about sacrifice, suffering, brotherhood, courage, love, recovery, transcendence. Museums enable visitors to pose these enduring questions, by converting war time into museum space.

This article surveys the mortality of the elderly (60+) population in London, Paris, Berlin during the Great War. These three capitals all registered increased mortality rates at advanced ages in 1917-1918. The situation was particularly grave in Berlin, reflecting the general crisis facing the city at the end of the war. The increase in death rates in the Allied capitals reflected the marginalization of the aged during the war, their neglect in social policy, their relative isolation, material difficulties and stress at a time of mass mourning. Bourgeois districts were hardest hit by such war-related developments. Consequently there was a recordering of the relative position of different social groups with respect to mortality at advanced ages in the war and post-war period., Cet article étudie la mortalité des personnes âgées de plus de soixante ans à Londres, Paris et Berlin. Dans les trois capitales il apparaît en 1917-1918 une surmortalité sensible des vieux. Cette surmortalité est particulièrement grave à Berlin ; elle traduit une crise plus générale de la capitale de l'Allemagne. Mais la crise de Paris et Londres révèle la marginalisation des personnes âgées pendant la guerre, l'indifférence à leur égard des politiques sociales, les difficultés liées à leur isolement (plus grand problème d'accès au ravitaillement, stress devant le décès des enfants au front...). Cette crise a affecté plus nettement les quartiers bourgeois que les quartiers ouvriers, et un resserrement des taux de mortalité entre ces quartiers est sensible à la fin de la guerre., Robert Jean-Louis, Winter Jay.M. Un aspect ignoré de la démographie urbaine de la Grande Guerre : le drame des vieux à Berlin, Londres et Paris. In: Annales de démographie historique, 1993. pp. 303-328.

Table of Contents - 6[-]Preface - 8[-]Acknowledgements - 10[-]CH1. The performance of the past: memory, history, identity - 12[-]CH2. Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms of constructing the past - 36[-]CH3. Repetitive structures in language and history - 52[-]CH4. Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past - 68[-]CH5. Co-memorations. Performing the past - 106[-]CH6. 'Indelible memories': the tattooed body as theatre of memory - 120[-]CH7. Incongruous images. 'Before, during, and after' the Holocaust - 148[-]CH8. Radio Clandestina: from oral history to the theatre - 176[-]CH9. Music and memory in Mozart's Zauberfl te - 188[-]CH10. The many afterlives of Ivanhoe - 208[-]CH11. Novels and their readers, memories and their social frameworks - 236[-]CH12. Indigestible images. On the ethics and limits of representation - 258[-]CH13. 'In these days of convulsive political change'. Discourse and display in the revolutionary museum, 1793-1815 - 288[-]CH14. Restitution as a means of remembrance. Evocations of the recent past in the Czech Republic and Poland after 1989 - 306[-]CH15. European identity and the politics of remembrance - 336[-]About the Authors - 362[-]List of Illustrations - 368

17. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, London, 1790, pp. 105 and 145. 18. J. Voisine, J.-J Rousseau en Angleterre d l'epoque romantique, Paris, 1956, pp. 262 and 321. 19. Judith McDowell, La Nouvelle Heloise: Julie, or the New Eloise. Letters of Two Lovers, Inhabitants of a small Town at the Foot of the Alps, University Park and London, 1968, p. 21; Warner, 'Eighteenth-century English reactions to the Nouvelle HloYse', p. 808. 20. Quoted in 'On the different methods of translating' in Theories of Translation, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Chicago, 1992, p. 42. 21. 'On reading old books' in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, London and New York, 1903, vol. 7 p. 224.

Soldier-poets of the Great War: a new form of the sacred, Jay M. Winter. From Apollinaire to Wilfred Owen, through Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney, many soldier-poets tried to transcribe their war experience into the words and forms of poetry. But a study of a few cen- tral themes, such as the memory of the dead or Old Testament sacrifices, shows that at the beginning of the 20th century it was not always easy to express the fee-ling of the sacred in the language of modernity., Winter Jay M. Les poètes-combattants de la grande guerre une nouvelle forme du sacré. In: Vingtième Siècle, revue d'histoire, n°41, janvier-mars 1994. La guerre de 1914-1918. Essais d'histoire culturelle. pp. 67-73.

The social crisis of war, defeat and postwar instability in the period 1914–24 is reflected in the history of infant mortality in Berlin. The prewar trend of infant mortality decline was interrupted by the war, and resumed its course only a decade later. From 1917 to 1923 there was a crisis in illegitimate infant mortality in Berlin, at a time when over 20% of all births were illegitimate. Only by disaggregating infant mortality statistics into legitimate and illegitimate categories can we appreciate fully the impact of the war on the most vulnerable and the most deprived parts of Berlin's population.

This paper presents evidence for a moderately optimistic account of the impact of the First World War on infant survival rates in London. The full effects of the war were not exhausted in November 1918. By examining the period immediately before and after the war, we show firstly, that the 1914-1918 conflict was a time of slowly declining infant mortality in London, and secondly, that the rate of decline accelerated after 1918. Before the Armistice, infant mortality rates were the resultant of both positive and negative aspects of war-related conditions. After 1918, most of the war's deleterious effects faded, whereas the positive aspects of wartime developments in infant health in London continued to enhance survival chances in the postwar years., Cet article modère la vue optimiste de l'effet positif de la Grande Guerre sur le taux de mortalité infantile à Londres. L'effet positif ne joue pleinement qu'après novembre 1918. Pendant le conflit le taux de mortalité infantile à Londres ne décline que lentement, puis après 1918 la baisse s'accélère. Avant l'armistice le niveau de la mortalité infantile était la résultante des effets positifs et négatifs des conditions sociales de la guerre. Après l'armistice, beaucoup des effets négatifs de la guerre disparurent tandis que les effets positifs du progrès des politiques de protection de la maternité et de l'enfance à Londres continuèrent à favoriser les chances de survie des bébés., Winter Jay.M., Lawrence Jon, Ariouat Jackie. The impact of the Great War on Infant Mortality in London. In: Annales de démographie historique, 1993. pp. 329-353.

Jay Winter would not have signed any of the Historians petitions against the fourth article of the French colonization law. He thinks all the memory laws are absurd, but that it is quite legitimate and logical that the politicians want to use professors to diffuse their conception of national identity. He wishes professors and intellectuals to ignore such injunctions, but to take care of the sensibilities of communities whom they belong.

IN THE PRELIMINARY STAGES OF WORK on the construction of a museum of the history of World War I at Peronne on the river Somme, I asked a number of French veterans of the war what kind of films they wanted in the museum. Three of them responded directly to the question, and all said the same thing. The film they wanted to see in the museum was Jean Renoir's La grande illusion (1937). The choice made by soldiers who had seen combat, ceux de '14, of poetry to express a "truth" about the war, in this case filmic poetry in one of the great imaginative moments in cinema, raises central questions about our understanding of the status and character of films about war. Renoir's film does not show a single combat scene, and yet I am not alone in the view that it is an unmatched elegy, an illuminated poem throwing a flood of light on what war is. That is what these men were saying by choosing this one film to be shown in a museum about their war, the Great War. When it came out in 1937, Renoir's film puzzled everyone. Was it pacifist? Hardly, when the "Marseillaise" is sung in a rousing scene clearly stolen a few years later in Casablanca. Was it nationalist? Hardly; it was kind to the Germans; it showed actor Erich von Stroheim in a tragic light; his stereotypical national stiffness as a Prussian officer was explained by a steel brace and other metal "gifts" in his body from his war service. Was it formulated in terms of class consciousness? Yes and no. Renoir was a man of the Left, but in his film, Pierre Fresnay, playing the French aristocrat and counterpart of von Stroheim, gives his life for two commoners; in fact, one was a Jew. The world, Fresnay tells his social equal and captor von Stroheim, has no further need of them. What did the title mean? That war would return; that after the war, the commoner hero, played by Jean Gabin, would return to the German widow he came to love (Dita Parlo)? Sixty years later, we are still perplexed by this work of genius. The Grand Illusion is a unique work, in some respects unparalleled in the history of cinema. But its example does suggest the danger of treating any film directly and in an unmediated way as a text to be incorporated within discursive fields of different origins and character. To be sure, this is especially the case in works of artistic originality and power. Like poetry, film-film at the highest level-does not instruct or indicate or preach. It ministers, it challenges conventional categories of thought, it moves the viewer. Other films do so to a lesser degree, but no film is

A discussion of the causes, character and legacy of World War I, providing a framework for understanding the whole 20th century. The contributors show that World War I meant not only the dissolution of four defeated empires but also the collapse of the optimistic assumption of progress.