1st Edition
Visions and Ideas of Europe during the First World War
Given the destruction and suffering caused by more than four years of industrialised warfare and economic hardship, scholars have tended to focus on the nationalism and hatred in the belligerent countries, holding that it led to a fundamental rupture of any sense of European commonality and unity. It is the central aim of this volume to correct this view and to highlight that many observers saw the conflict as a ‘European civil war’, and to discuss what this meant for discourses about Europe. Bringing together a remarkable range of compelling and highly original topics, this collection explores notions, images, and ideas of Europe in the midst of catastrophe.
Introduction
Jan Vermeiren and Matthew D’Auria
Decadence, Messianism, and Redemption: Thinking Europe’s Apocalypse, 1914–1918
Matthew D’Auria
In Defence of Europe: Russia in German Intellectual Discourse, 1914-1918
Jan Vermeiren
Europe in the German Pacifists’ Discourse during the Great War
Landry Charrier
A New World? German and French Debates about America and Europe during the First World War
Egbert Klautke
Élie Faure, his Visions of War and his Image of Europe
Annamaria Ducci
Max Waechter, Anglo-German rapprochement and the European Unity League, 1906–1924
Ulrich Tiedau
‘La Jeune Europe’: Masses, Anti-militarism and Moral Reformation in the Banfi-Caffi Correspondence (1910-1919)
Marcello Gisondi
Eagle and Dwarf: Polish Concepts of East Central Europe, 1914–1921
Maciej Górny
Ideas of Europe in Neutral Spain (1914-1918)
Maximiliano Fuentes Codera
Europe under Threat: Visual Projections of Europe in Raemaekers’ First World War Cartoons
Richard Deswarte
The Tenacity of European Self-Esteem at the Time of the First World War: Examples from Architecture and the Visual Arts
Michael Wintle
The Legacy of War and the Idea of Europe in the 1920s
Mark Hewitson
Index
Biography
Jan Vermeiren and Matthew D’Auria teach History at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.
