In late January 1945, Hungarian teenager Bart Stern hid in a pile of bodies to avoid being killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz. He survived, but not one of his friends escaped. Soon afterwards, the Red Army…
A military covenant sounds noble, but it opens up many pitfalls in the relationship between the Australian Defence Force and public.
Andrew Mercer/Flickr
The ANZAC centenary will be full of symbols. After all, commemoration is cheaper than defence. ANZAC symbols, in particular, have an uncanny way of dismissing any doubts about defence policy and spending…
World War I Christmas Truce Commemoration match – but it’s debated whether the original ever happened.
Mike Egerton/PA Wire
The Christmas Truce is no stranger to popular entertainment – this year more than any other as its 100th anniversary is marked. The famous moment when British and German soldiers climbed out of the trenches…
Crowd in Downing Street during the war.
Library of Congress
The audio drama evangelist and bloodhound in me has caught scent of the fragrant odour of a renaissance. The immense popularity of Serial, with its style of journalistic storytelling and dramatic sensation…
One of the first WW1 films. Yes, really.
Breve Storia del Cinema
Most people probably have an image of World War I derived as much from popular culture as from school textbooks, especially in this centenary year. It is the image of hopelessly naïve soldier-victims marching…
Triggers don’t only come on guns.
Soldier by Shutterstock
During World War I, severe post-traumatic reactions reached an epidemic scale that surpassed anything known from previous armed conflicts. The centenary of the Great War has reminded us of the tremendous…
The German-Jewish painter and writer Paul Cohen-Portheim had spent a peaceful summer in 1914 visiting friends in Devon and enjoying the beautiful south-west coast. But his idyllic holiday came to an abrupt…
On Remembrance Sunday, while in my native Germany a wall of white balloons dissolved into the air to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, I joined thousands at the Tower of London…
Each of the 888,246 ceramic poppies in the Tower of London’s moat represent a British or Commonwealth first-world-war casualty.
EPA/Andy Rain
Tom Gregory, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Every year on Remembrance Day, we pause to look back on old wars and recount the tallies of the dead, including 16 million killed in the first world war and 60 million in the second world war. And every…
The shocking brutality of the first world war has had ongoing consequences.
Archives New Zealand
US philosopher William H.F. Altman will deliver the keynote address at Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 years of European Thought Since 1914, a conference hosted by the European Philosophy and the History…
When I received the tsunami of promotional gumph on BBC Radio 4’s cultural and technological blitzkrieg on the Great War, I have to confess I groaned. Tommies is one element of this package, a dramatisation…
The idea of a war hero is still strong in the UK and in the other Allied countries. War memorials are a central feature of the regular commemoration services, Churchill is regularly rolled out in biographical…
The government is unveiling commemorative paving stones laid in the birth places of those members of the British Empire forces in World War I who received the Victoria Cross for their bravery. The government’s…
Since the end of the Cold War, politicians have had recourse to air power on a number of occasions. The conflicts have varied in scale, duration and intensity. Air power played a huge role in the two Gulf…
One of the most famous anthems of the First World War is 100 years old. Keep the Home Fires Burning was originally published on October 8 1914 under its original title, Till the Boys Come Home. Few songs…
Journalists and photographers from various news agencies are shown a machine gun post in 1918.
PA/PA Archive
Taken immediately after the ceasefire that ended the first Gulf War in 1991, Kenneth Jarecke’s photograph of the charred corpse of an Iraqi soldier in his burned-out jeep is one of the few memorable images…
What the conflict would mean for British art was much debated in World War I – the question was already being asked in journals and newspaper reviews in the latter part of 1914. At the beginning debate…
The German army prepares arms for the Kurds in August.
Jan Woitas/EPA
An “initial gifting package”: the opaque label is wrapped around £1.6m worth of heavy machine guns and half a million rounds of ammunition, which has now reached the Iraqi town of Arbil courtesy of the…
Yes…but is it war? Inspecting weapons seized in east Ukraine.
EPA/Tatyana Zenkovich
Is the conflict in Ukraine a war? This question has been raised in recent reports about a Russian invasion in Ukraine on the Caspian Sea. The USA and other NATO powers call it an “incursion”; the Baltic…
August 1914: London volunteers await their pay at St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
On the first day of the war in 1914, British newspapers published appeals for young men to join the colours, and to fight against Germany. Following the advice of the new Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener…