1st Edition

Narratives of War Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe

Edited By Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle Copyright 2019
240 Pages 17 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

240 Pages 17 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

240 Pages 17 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century. The book reflects on how narratives are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The contributions address such issues as the tension and discrepancy... Read more

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Contributors

Part I: Narrative and the Story of War

1. ‘Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century: an Introduction’

Michael Wintle, Nanci Adler and Remco Ensel (the editors)

2. ‘A Tale of Two Battles: Narrating Verdun and the Somme, 1916’

John Horne (Trinity College Dublin)

Part II: Constructing War Narratives

3. ‘The Stories the First World War Inherited: Adaptations of Napoleonic Veterans’ Memoirs, 1814-1914

Matilda Greig (European University Institute Florence)

4. ‘The Archive as Narrator? Narratives of German "Enemy Citizens" in the Netherlands after 1945’

Marieke Oprel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

5. ‘Of Triumph and Defeat: World War II and its Historians in Post-war Germany’

Christina Morina (Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam)

6. ‘The Imagery of War: Screening the Battlefield in the Twentieth Century’

Frank van Vree (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies/University of Amsterdam)

Part III: The Development and Deployment of War Narratives

7. ‘The War Books Controversy Revisited: First World War Novels and Veteran Memory’

Dunja Dušanić (University of Belgrade)

8. ‘War and Peace as a "Paradoxical Coherence": How the European Union Uses the Remembrance of the Great War to Construct European Identities’

Peter Pichler (Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz)

9. ‘History Wars in School Textbooks? The Massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in Polish History Textbooks since 1989’

Sylwia Bobryk (University of Portsmouth)

10. ‘"I was Hurt and you were Hurt too": the Role of Religion and Competing Narratives in the Reconciliation Process in Bosnia and Herzegovina'

Marieke Zoodsma (University of Tilburg)

Part IV: Testimonies and Survivalist Narratives

11. ‘Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma: Trauma and Narrative Structure in Interviews with Dutch and English International Brigade Volunteers of the Spanish Civil War’

Tim Scheffe (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

12. ‘Digital Survival? Online Interview Portals and the Re-Contextualization of Holocaust Testimonies’

Susan Hogervorst (Open University of the Netherlands/Erasmus University Rotterdam)

13. ‘Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen: Anecdotes, Humour and Poetry as Survival Strategies’

Evelien Gans (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam)

Part V: Conclusion

14. ‘Twentieth-Century Narratives of War: Conclusions’

Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle, Nanci Adler (the editors)

Index

Biography

Nanci Adler is Professor of Memory, History and Transitional Justice at the University of Amsterdam and Programme Director of Genocide Studies at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). She is the author of numerous titles, including Keeping Faith with the Party (2012) and The Gulag Survivor (2002), and editor of, among others, Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice (2018). 

Remco Ensel teaches cultural history at Radboud University in Nijmegen (the Netherlands). His current interests include visual nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s, Holocaust studies and antisemitism. He co-edited with Evelien Gans The Holocaust, Israel and ‘the Jew’: Histories of Antisemitism in Post-war Dutch Society (2017).

Michael Wintle is the Professor of Modern European History at the University of Amsterdam, where he is head of the department of European Studies. He has published widely on Dutch and European history, including The Image of Europe (2009), European Identity and the Second World War (ed. with M. Spiering, 2011) and The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries (ed. with H. Dunthorne, 2013).