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

Der Erste Weltkrieg war eine entscheidende Zasur zwischen dem langen 19. und kurzen 20. Jahrhundert. Als einer der zerstoererischsten Konflikte der Weltgeschichte hatte der Erste Weltkrieg jedoch auch einen massgeblichen Einfluss auf die Geisteswissenschaften. Eine Verbindung, welche im vorliegenden Sammelband eingehender betrachtet wird.

The First World War was, of course, the seminal catas-trophe of the 20th century, determining the future poli-tics, redefining warfare, and creating its own mythology. However, it also had a tremendous cultural impact, which is be analyzed in the present volume with a spe-cial focus on the humanities. The battles of the First World War created a fundamen-tally 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 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 per-spectives by dealing with the impact of the war on the humanities during and after the conflict that deeply in-fluenced the mindset of the 20th century.