Suchergebnisse

In the case of Russia, the existence of a relationship between lost war, revolution, and Civil War is obvious. Unlike the German case, however, it has not been investigated in any detail. The Great War is often seen as the 'forgotten war' in the shadow of the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918–21. Inspired by George Mosse's work on Germany, this article investigates the connections between these conflicts. It argues that it is not easy to reconstruct the direct linkages between the fronts of an industrialized war to the violence of revolution and civil war. Rather, enduring traditions were transferred, transformed, and radicalized: the style of rule, the result of an absent political and patriotic consensus between the heterogeneous communities of communication, and dispositions to violence among the decisive sectors of the population, not only the soldiers and the revolutionaries, but also the peasants and workers longing for an egalitarian and just economy. The main role of the war was that it destroyed the old state and set these pre-existing violent tendencies free, which began to feed on themselves.

In the historiography and in collective memory of the East-Central and East European peoples, the First World War and wartime experiences are overshadowed by the founding of states and the Bolshevik Revolution. Unlike the Western Front, the Eastern Front did not form a transnational space of remembrance. The empty spaces of political remembrance in Russia and Eastern Europe are being filled only gradually. The wartime experiences of soldiers and officers represent an important contribution to this. They provide information about life and survival on the front and in the rear, about the violent conditions in the army, as well as the consequences when tradition and modernity clash - bayonets and sabres against machine-guns and gas shells. Adapted from the source document.

To this day, the Eastern Front of the First World War has stood in the shadows of research on the Western Front. The anthology 'Jenseits des Schutzengrabens' [Beyond the trenches] expands our knowledge about the experiences and memories of soldiers who served in the armed forces of the Central Powers and were deployed on the Eastern Front. It is a start. Systematic and synthesizing studies are awaited. Adapted from the source document.