Unknown Warriors

Understanding The First World War

Memory and remembrance have played a key part in the way we interpret the First World War. But memory tends to be selective and we generally look back at the past through the lens of the present, projecting onto historical events our own modern concerns and preoccupations. Mark Connelly is a leading historian of society, culture and war, and his most recent co-authored work on the famous Belgian town of Ypres, and the way it became a holy site of memory in the years after the First World War, sheds a revealing light on how later generations used the conflict to reinforce a particular, usually national, interpretation, and in so doing created enduring myths and omissions of the truth. The British and Germans alike had their own post-war agendas in memorialising aspects of the Western Front , while the Russians and the Irish read into the war what suited their own national and ideological narratives. Listen to Mark talking on this subject at:
www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk.