1033387

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JES0010.1177/00472441211033387Journal of European StudiesBullock et al.

Journal of European Studies

Introduction: The First World 2021, Vol. 51(3–4) 184­–191

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00472441211033387

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Philip Ross Bullock

Wadham College, University of Oxford

Sofia Permiakova
Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Gesa Stedman
Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Abstract
This introduction offers a survey of some important critical approaches to the ways in which
the First World War and its aftermath have been studied, conceptualized, represented and
commemorated. In particular, it notes recent scholarly interest in issues of gender, as well as a
focus on widening the geographical range of the conflict beyond a dominant European paradigm.
A recurrent theme is the emergence of new types of modernity in the post-war era, and the
ways in which literature and the arts do not merely reflect that modernity, but actively shape
and constitute it.

Keywords
cultural memory, Empire, Europe, First World War, networks, translation

Inspired by the centenary of the First World War, scholars of history, literature and cul-
ture have revisited not only the war itself, but the ways in which it has been studied,
conceptualized, represented and commemorated. For understandable reasons, a good

Corresponding author:
Philip Ross Bullock, Wadham College, University of Oxford, Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3PN, UK.
Email: philip.bullock@wadham.ox.ac.uk
Bullock et al. 185

deal of attention has been paid to the origins of the conflict itself (Clark, 2012; MacMillan,
2013; McMeekin, 2011; Mombauer, 2013; Mulligan, 2017). The conduct of the war has
been analysed in detail, not least because of the increasing availability of documentary
sources (Leonhard, 2014). Likewise, historians have been attentive to the ways in which
the end of hostilities radically transformed the societies and polities that emerged from
it, focusing in particular on the immediate post-war moment and the impact of the Paris
Peace Conference (MacMillan, 2001; Wolff, 2020).
Another strand in recent historical writing has been an emphasis on the unfinished
nature of the war. Here, scholars have extended the endpoint of the war itself, suggesting
that the armistice on the Western Front masked ongoing and often unresolved conflicts
elsewhere (Gerwarth, 2012–).1 Diplomatic historians have been particularly assiduous in
examining both the longer-term fallout of the war, and the emergence of new institutions
that were designed to oversee the operation of a new world order (Steiner, 2005, 2013).
An important aspect of this temporal extension of the war has been an expansion in its
geographical reach, with greater attention paid to continuing violence in colonial territo-
ries. It is with developments such as these that the essays in this collection are most obvi-
ously and productively aligned. Rather than focusing on the literary and artistic
representation of the conflict itself, they map a complex series of stories that reveal how
individual writers and creative figures responded to the consequences of the end of the
war, sometimes with a considerable delay, and sought to contribute to the creation of new
forms of identity and society. Here, the ‘post-war’ is seen not so much as a stable and
coherent historical period and set of social structures, but rather as a fluid and mutable
configuration of often contradictory impulses. Accordingly, the interwar period emerges
less as an interstitial moment between two great conflicts, which together made up what
Charles de Gaulle described as a second ‘Thirty Years War’ (Gerwarth, 2007: 1), than as
a series of diverse and contingent snapshots from radically different milieux.
Here, Antonio Gramsci’s often-quoted dictum about crisis and change comes readily
to mind. Writing from prison in 1930, he suggested that ‘La crisi consiste appunto nel
fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano
i fenomeni morbosi più svariati’ (‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is
dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symp-
toms appear’) (1975: I, 311; 1971: 276). It is precisely this notion of crisis that emerges
throughout many of the essays in this collection, whether the crisis is perceived as some-
thing destabilizing and destructive, or as something promising regeneration and even
revolution. It is, moreover, the simultaneous coexistence of elements of both old and new
which means that the interwar period cannot simply be seen as proleptic of the Second
World War (Bell, 2007; Taylor, 1961). However, the notion of the interwar period as
somehow decadent or ‘morbid’ (to use Gramsci’s term) is something that the essays here
would wish to question. To be sure, from the perspective of 1930, Gramsci had reason
enough to be anxious about the fragility of the present and society’s inability to withstand
the rise of right-wing populism, yet one should not be too quick to write off the optimism
and belief in progress that characterized the interwar years, especially in the 1920s. It is,
instead, Gramsci’s notion of ‘interregnum’ – something holding both renewal and decay
in creative tension – that emerges as a guiding theme in this collection, where notions of
contingency, liminality, complexity and uncertainty prevail.
186 Journal of European Studies 51(3–4)

Much of the most important work on the First World War and its varied legacies has
been carried out by social and diplomatic historians interested in examining the wider
impact of military conflict on the world which emerged after 1918. But what of litera-
ture, culture and the arts? How are scholars to account for their role, both during the war
itself and in the ensuing decades? Here, it is tempting to see literature primarily as a
means of representation – or, perhaps more powerfully – as a form of witness. Yet as
Samuel Hynes evocatively suggests,

the First World War was the great military and political event of its time; but it was also the
great imaginative event. It altered the ways in which men and women thought not only about
the war but about the world, and about culture and its expressions. (1990: ix)

Within English-language scholarship, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory
(1975) serves as a touchstone of such imaginative approaches to the conflict and its
immediate legacy. Fussell’s study focuses solely on the British experience of the Western
Front and on how it was ‘remembered, conventionalized, and memorialized’ (Fussell,
2013: xv). Fussell’s approach to literature is subtle and complex, and rightly emphasizes
the mutual relationship that exists between reality and its artistic representation, focusing
on ‘the simultaneous and reciprocal process by which life feeds materials to literature
while literature returns the favor by conferring forms upon life’ (2013: xv). Such an
approach to cultural production has certainly been profound and influential, as suggested
by the continued emphasis in First World War studies on questions of representation and
memorialization (as is the case, for instance, in the canonization of the ‘War Poets’ in
both scholarship and the school curriculum in the United Kingdom). Yet the purview of
Fussell’s study is – by his own admission – limited. He concentrates on ‘the British
infantry, largely disregarding events in Mesopotamia, Turkey, Africa, and Ireland, and
largely ignoring air and naval warfare’ (2013: xvi). And, as Jay Winter notes in his intro-
duction to the re-publication of The Great War and Modern Memory, ‘it is Anglo-centric’,
and ‘Fussell’s writers are almost all officers; they came from London, the home counties,
the public schools and Oxbridge colleges serving their social class’ (Fussell, 2013: xii).
For some time, scholars of the First World War have been seeking to expand the geo-
graphical range of the conflict, as well as to give voice to a wide range of participants and
observers. Winter’s own work – especially Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The
Great War in European Cultural Memory – has advocated ‘a comparative perspective’ as
a means of counteracting ‘the distorting effects of a narrowly national approach’ (1995:
11). Much of Winter’s work has addressed precisely this comparative approach, although
primarily from a Eurocentric point of view (Winter and Robert, 1997). More recently,
this European focus has been challenged by scholars keen to assert the importance of
empire (Das, 2011, 2018). Within Europe itself, emphasis is often placed on the role
played by the war in the collapse of empires (Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian),
yet it remains the case that for the victorious powers – not least France and Great Britain
– the war represented an opportunity to consolidate their colonial territories and reassert
their imperial self-image. This emphasis on the subaltern perspective has been matched
by interest in women’s experience of the war. Whether it comes to domestic life on the
home front, social transformations due to the absence of men, moves towards suffrage or
Bullock et al. 187

women’s literary responses to the conflict, the First World War and its consequences
have increasingly been seen through the prism of gender (Adie, 2013; Brockington,
2010; Fell, 2018; Grayzel, 2002; Higonnet, 1999, 2001; Potter, 2005; Siebrecht, 2013;
Tylee, 1990).
The vast – and still growing – body of critical literature on the First World War clearly
exceeds this brief survey, which is offered as an outline not just of some of the most
important and productive contemporary scholarship on the topic, but also of the
approaches taken in the articles included in this special edition of the Journal of European
Studies. While drawing on much of the most important recent scholarship on history and
society, this edition focuses primarily on literature and the arts. It comprises studies of
the capital cities of some of the combatant nations (Berlin, London, Paris, Rome), even
if their spaces are often viewed through curious and critical eyes. While recognizing the
bleak realities of the First World War, including the experience of the trenches, certain
essays in this collection also emphasize hopeful, cosmopolitan creativity rather than vio-
lent, nationalist bloodshed. Other contributions acknowledge the importance of key his-
torical events (the Paris Peace Conference) and new institutions (the League of Nations),
while framing these in the context of very personal biographies and experience. Its geo-
graphical ambit is inclusive too, with consideration of Ireland and Alsace, Norway and
the Balkans, the Dardanelles and the Caribbean. Its linguistic range is extensive (articles
cite texts in the original French, German, Russian and Turkish, for instance), and many
contributions emphasize the importance of translation, whether as a vehicle for the facili-
tation of cross-cultural encounter, as a marker of cultural difference or a mode of com-
parison which sheds light on patterns of international relations, mobility and cultural
exchange. This spatial and linguistic range is mapped by the volume’s temporal limits,
which reach from the fin de siècle right through to the dawn of a new conflict in the late
1930s. Throughout, there is an emphasis on how the First World War gave rise to new
forms of cultural modernity (Das and McLoughlin, 2018), yet there is an equally impor-
tant focus on how, for many writers and artists, their primary task entailed the reconstitu-
tion of networks, communities and identities that had been shattered by the conflict. In
both cases, however, literature and culture do not merely represent wider social pro-
cesses, but participate actively in the process of creation and re-creation. Accordingly,
the authors employ a wide range of material in their analyses: poetry, prose, plays, jour-
nalism, periodicals, memoirs, diaries, journals and letters vividly convey the heterogene-
ity of responses to the war.
At the same time, a number of common themes and topoi emerge, or – rather – the
chapters are arranged to highlight those themes. The collection opens with Sofia
Permiakova’s account of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem, in which the French capital
emerges not so much as the ‘Greenwich Meridian of Literature’ (to quote Pascale
Casanova’s memorable description), but as a chaotic assembly of impressions that cap-
ture the uncertain atmosphere between the Armistice and the signing of the Treaty of
Versailles in June 1919. Stefano Evangelista examines a passionate exchange of letters
which unfolded on the pages of the Revue de Genève, in which Daniel Halévy and Vernon
Lee debated both the consequences of the peace and the nature of nationalism and cos-
mopolitanism in the post-war context. The next two articles focus on London, and in
particular on the Bloomsbury Group. Claudia Olk traces the fluctuating reactions of
188 Journal of European Studies 51(3–4)

Virginia Woolf and other members of the group both to the end of the war and to the
coming of peace, as well as examining the enduring impact of the conflict on Woolf’s
creativity. Naomi Toth examines Woolf’s specific response to the question of how war
might be represented and what the balance between subjectivity and objectivity might be
in this regard. The gendered perspective which structures these first four chapters, as
well as its predominant emphasis on urban experience, is extended in Gesa Stedman’s
analysis of three British women’s perception of post-war Berlin as it emerged from war
and revolution and took its first steps into the modernity of the 1920s.
In Christian Luckscheiter’s article, Alsace figures as a crucible of European, rather
than national, identity; caught between France and Germany, the region – both before
and after the war – offers a powerful counter-narrative to the cultural, linguistic and
political tensions that many felt had led to the conflict in the first place, while also intro-
ducing a crucial regional, rather than national perspective on the pre- and post-war eras.
If the Treaty of Versailles was meant to limit the defeated Germany’s room for economic
and military manoeuvre, German culture still possessed a powerful valance for many,
and Tore Rem’s consideration of the Norwegian novelist, Knut Hamsun, illustrates the
potency of the soil as an alternative and energetic form of modernity in the interwar
years. The widening geographical perspective of these two articles is pursued in the three
that follow. Richard Hibbitt and Berkan Ulu compare English- and Turkish-language
poetic responses to the Gallipoli campaign (known in Turkish as the Çanakkale War),
examining how various earlier myths and narratives, whether of the Crusades or the
Homeric epics, were subjected to very different intertextual revisions and rewritings
depending on the vantage point of the author. The longer-term fallout of the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire is traced in Catherine Toal’s analysis of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb
and Grey Falcon. Dating from 1941, West’s Jugoslav travelogue teases out crucial paral-
lels between the Great War and the Second World War through the prism of one of the
new nations to have emerged from the settlement of 1919 (and which evoked compari-
sons with West’s own native Ireland). Empire figures in a rather different guise in Jana
Gohrisch’s discussion of the Trinidadian historian, journalist and political activist
C. L. R. James. Reminding us of the crucial contribution to the war effort of Afro-
Caribbean soldiers (and, by implication, of other subjects of the British Empire),
Gohrisch also assesses the impact of the war on the emergence of left-wing, anti-colonial
and anti-racist politics.
After the widening temporal and spatial scope as delineated in the arrangement of the
articles so far, the final two contributions introduce a non-literary perspective on the war,
its representation and its legacy. Ana Parejo Vadillo examines the stage designs of
Charles Ricketts, tracing the impact of war on his cosmopolitan, symbolist aesthetics,
and focusing in particular on a series of Shakespeare plays staged for soldiers at the front.
Vadillo also observes that Ricketts’ rejection of realism made him susceptible to the rise
of Italian fascism, not so much as an ideology, than as an aesthetic. Italy forms the back-
drop to Philip Ross Bullock’s chapter, which explores the musical settings that Aleksandr
Grechaninov made in 1939 of five of Viacheslav Ivanov’s Roman Sonnets (1924).
Although written by artists who had suffered displacement in the wake of the October
Revolution, the words and music of these songs evoke Rome’s potential to serve as a
symbol of the continuity and resilience of European culture, even at a time of crisis.
Bullock et al. 189

Acknowledgements
Most of the articles here were first delivered at the ‘Writing Europe 1918–2018’ conference, held at
the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in September 2018, and funded by
a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. We are grateful to all of the authors included
here for their willingness to engage in several rounds of discussion and revision, and to our peer
reviewers for their suggestions, especially during the challenging conditions of the global pan-
demic. Catherine Smith and the student assistants at the Centre for British Studies, David Bell and
Kira-Lena Scharold, were essential to the copy-editing process, and Corinna Radke’s superb project
management skills ensured that we were able to submit everything on time. Finally, we would like
to thank John Flower of the Journal of European Studies for responding so positively to our sugges-
tion for a themed issue on the cultural legacy of the First World War and for guiding us through the
submission and publication process with such tact.

Note
1 See also the series The Greater War (Gerwarth, 2012–), which seeks to test the fixity of the
chronological boundaries of the war and to foreground a greater geographical range than has
typically been the case.

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Author biographies
Philip Ross Bullock is professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and
Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College. He has research interests in Russian culture from
the eighteenth century to the present day, interdisciplinary approaches to music and literature, the
study of translation, reception and cultural exchange, and theories of gender and sexuality. His
most recent publications include Song Beyond the Nation: Translation, Transnationalism,
Performance (co-edited with Laura Tunbridge, 2021), and Music’s Nordic Breakthrough:
Aesthetics, Modernity, and Cultural Exchange, 1890–1930 (co-edited with Daniel M. Grimley,
2021).
Sofia Permiakova is lecturer and researcher in British Literature and Culture at the Centre for
British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is currently in the final year of her doctoral
project entitled ‘Women on War, War on Women: British Women’s Poetry of the First and the
Second World Wars in the Context of Contemporary Commemorative Culture’. Her research
focuses on literary representations of the urban, women’s poetry, and intermediality in film and
literature. Her most recent publication is ‘From the 1920s to the 2020s: the myth of Weimar Berlin
in contemporary British art, music, and literature’, in Stefano Evangelista and Gesa Stedman (eds)
Happy in Berlin? English Writers in the City, the 1920s and Beyond (2021).
Bullock et al. 191

Gesa Stedman holds the chair for British Culture and Literature at the Centre for British Studies,
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her main interests include the history of emotions discourse,
cultural exchange studies – in particular between England/Britain and France – gender history,
cultural history, the current state of the literary field in the UK, and early twentieth-century Anglo-
German literary relations. She co-edits the blog The Literary Field Kaleidoscope (www.literary-
field.org). Her most recent cultural-historical publication is the bilingual catalogue Happy in
Berlin? English Writers in the City, The 1920s and Beyond, co-edited with Stefano Evangelista
(2021).