The Long End of the First World War von Katrin Bromber/Katharina Lange/Heike Liebau et al

Eigene und Fremde Welten Herausgegeben von Jörg Baberowski, Stefan Rinke und Michael Wildt Mit dem Gedenken an den Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs hat sich die Art der Erinnerung an dieses welthistorische Ereignis verändert. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes zielen darauf ab, Verknüpfungen zwischen individuellen Kriegserfahrungen, Geschichtsschreibung und Erinnerung herzustellen und so den Begriff eines statischen, klar definierten "Endes" des Ersten Weltkrieges zu hinterfragen, eines Konstrukts, das hauptsächlich auf europäischen Entwicklungen beruht.

Katrin Bromber, Dr. phil., Katharina Lange, Dr. phil., und Heike Liebau, Dr. phil., sind wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterinnen am Leibniz- Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. Anorthe Wetzel ist stellvertretende Leiterin des Veranstaltungsreferats der VolkswagenStiftung in Hannover.

About the Book Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Heike Liebau, Anorthe Wetzel The present book is based on the Herrenhausen Symposium "The Long End of the First World War: Ruptures, Continuities and Memories" which took place at Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover, Germany, in May 2017. It follows on from the preceding conference "The World during the First World War-Perceptions, Experiences, and Consequences" in October 2013. One of the most significant results of the first symposium was that shifting the perspective away from Europe, especially Western Europe, means-among other things-shifting the focus from the beginning of the War to its end and to its long-term consequences. This inspired us to take "The Long End" as the central focus for the 2017 symposium and to look more closely at the multi-layered endings of the First World War in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Unsettling the notion of a static and clearly defined "end" of the War, the conference discussed links between experience, historiography, and commemoration. The aims of this volume are threefold. Firstly, it challenges a static, mainly Eurocentric periodization of the First World War not only by globalizing the picture geographically but also by foregrounding questions of social or environmental history. Secondly, it considers the critical incorporation of new sources to be very important in defining new research approaches. Sources other than official textual documents stored in state archives continuously come to the fore, such as photographs, folksongs, sound recordings and material objects. Thirdly, the editors are convinced that it is a present-day imperative to explore how historiography and politics of memory influence one another and to discuss the implications of these processes for research. The chapters compiled in this volume are revised versions of papers discussed in Hanover in May 2017 and reflect the symposium's conceptual and structural approach, which brought together established researchers and doctoral students from different disciplinary backgrounds with representatives from museums, art and media. Accordingly, this book presents results of long-term historical research conducted by experienced scholars, early findings by young colleagues, studies on newly emerging research topics, thoughts on historiography and commemoration as well as practical and methodological observations on disseminating knowledge and research results to the public. The contributions to this book and the new research in the wake of the Centennial focus on a more global perspective, on political ideas, raw materials, economic and ecological impacts and on social structures. They contribute to a changed understanding of the War's temporal structure and also of the ways in which scholars engage with these temporalities' diverse chronologies. Thinking about the medium- and long-term consequences of the First World War forces us to reconsider historical meta-narratives. What happens if we regard events linked to the War as part of much larger processes: colonial expansion, environmental transformations, the history of racism, the emancipation of women, the actualization of socialist ideas, the rise of internationalist movements and humanitarian interventions, or particular conjunctions of the political economy? What was the role of the War within these developments-did it act as an accelerator, a turning point or something else? Are such expanded chronological horizons accompanied by restrictions of some sort and, if so, by which ones? While the present volume cannot discuss these longer-term processes exhaustively, the contributions allow us to revisit older questions, asking e.g. to what extent the First World War can be perceived as the end of the "age of empire". The multiplication of perspectives that is brought about by global history prompts us to search for more differentiated answers. In some ways, (transformed) empires emerged from the War utilizing new instruments-the "soft" powers of humanitarian efforts, the informal empires of economic connections, new paths established by economic links with new states, thereby securing the supply chains for much-needed resources. At the same time, these very instruments were also able to serve and bolster anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggles. Yet, as John Horne emphasized during the symposium's final discussion, we must not only investigate the First World War in terms of its significance for long-term historical processes, but should continue to think of the consequences of those processes for the way in which the War unfolded. Rather than making an analytical distinction between these two perspectives, a number of contributions in this volume (e.g., the chapters by Gratien, Iqbal, Rominger) suggest how to consider them jointly. The chapters by Desai and Hager as well as that by Bromber, Lange and Liebau show how non-European perspectives may help to expand the conventional (Western) chronology of 1914-1918 and to explore the War as a part of more long-term conflicts and crises. The book's first section addresses new approaches and themes related to the War from a global socio-historical perspective. Taking a long-term view of "The First World War as a Crisis of the Imperial Order", Radhika Desai argues that the contemporary multi-polar world is essentially a long-term effect of the First World War. Drawing on a wide range of published analyses from a Marxist perspective, spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, she makes the case for renewed attention to political economy in order to understand fully the War's global effects. Questions about class and inequality were already asked in First World War research during the 1970s and 1980s. Such questions have returned in the context of the Centennial - but they have taken on a new guise: inequality and class are now discussed within global social history, i.e. a social history beyond national frames. Such a global social history of the First World War encourages both the study of entanglements and systematic comparison. Recent contributions to environmental history show that the study of inequality must include the ecological perspective, as environmental injustices often incorporate long-term (inequality) effects. This has inspired a new strand of World War research. In his essay on the "The First World War and the Global Environment: A View from South Asia", Ifthekar Iqbal discusses the ways in which the First World War shaped new patterns in the use of global ecological resources. Taking the entangled histories of jute, the water hyacinth and timber as examples, he shows how the War altered not only economic relations between what were then colonies and imperial powers, but also led to long-lasting environmental transformations that are still felt in the region today. Ecological changes induced or accelerated by war affected not only economic relations, but impacted the circulation of deadly pathogens, parasites and diseases. In a discussion of the emergence and spreading of "Malaria and the Legacy of the First World War in the Ottoman Empire", Chris Gratien argues that "the First World War began as a political conflict, but [] ended in ecological disaster". His analysis of published sources and archival material about "war malaria" shows that the war continued to affect the health of combatants and civilians alike years after the official end of hostilities. Another aspect of studying the war in terms of producing or intensifying structures of inequality is the investigation of gender and generational relations. This is demonstrated, perhaps unexpectedly, by Felix Brahm's systematic scrutiny of the arms trade and post-war global arms control in East Africa. In his contribution on "East Africa and the Post-War Question of Global Arms Control", he demonstrates that the arms trade not only affected the fighting capacities of local communities as well as internation...