War and the Humanities : The Cultural Impact of the First World War

The battles of the First World War created a fundamentally new impression of war. Total warfare, the use of propaganda, chemical weapons, and every possible other measure to ensure victory defined the event that should later be known as the "Great War", because it caused so many deaths and much suffering. The catastrophe also had an impact on the humanities, which inevitably had to deal with the processing of an event that seemed to be too big to be clearly understood by the human mind. The present volume covers several interdisciplinary perspectives by dealing with the impact of the war on the humanities during and after the conflict that deeply influenced the mindset of the 20th century. The First World War was, of course, the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century, determining the future politics, redefining warfare, and creating its own mythology. However, it also had a tremendous cultural impact, which is to be analyzed in the present volume with a special focus on the humanities. The battles of the First World War created a fundamentally new impression of war. Total warfare, the use of propaganda, chemical weapons, and every possible other measure to ensure victory defined the event that should later be known as the "Great War", because it caused so many deaths and much suffering. The catastrophe also had an impact on the humanities, which inevitably had to deal with the processing of an event that seemed to be too big to be clearly understood by the human mind. The present volume covers several interdisciplinary perspectives by dealing with the impact of the war on the humanities during and after the conflict that deeply influenced the mindset of the 20th century War and the Humanities: The Cultural Impact of the First World War 3 Contents 5 Introduction 7 “Every Nation Fights in the Name of Its Own Spirit”: The Intellectuals’ Great War in the East 27 Foreign Language Studies at the University of Graz (Austria-Hungary) during the First World War: A Micro-Historical Exploration of Cultural War Responses 59 Switzerland and the Great War – 100 Years of Historiography 91 “Where the Tree Falls”: The National Cemetery System and the Post-WWI Construction of an International Nationalism 111 100 Percent Americanism in the Concert Hall: The Minneapolis Symphony in the Great War 153 Birth of a Nation: Theatrical Interventions in the Legacy of the Great War and Ideas of Canada’s National Identity 167 Contributors 195 Index 199