About the Book
This book addresses the conflicts, myths, and memories that grew out of the Great War in Ottoman Turkey, and their legacies in society and politics. It is the third volume in a series dedicated to the combined analysis of the Ottoman Great War and the Armenian Genocide.
In Australia and New Zealand, and even more in the post-Ottoman Middle East, the memory of the First World War still has an immediacy that it has long lost in Europe. For the post-Ottoman regions, the first of the two World Wars, which ended Ottoman rule, was the formative experience. This volume analyses this complex configuration: why these entanglements became possible; how shared or even contradictory memories have been constructed over the past hundred years, and how differing historiographies have developed. Remembering the Great War in the Middle East reaches towards a new conceptualization of the “long last Ottoman decade” (1912-22), one that places this era and its actors more firmly at the center, instead of on the periphery, of a history of a Greater Europe, a history comprising – as contemporary maps did – Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman world.
Table of Contents:
Introduction (Hans-Lukas Kieser, University of Newcastle, Australia; Thomas Schmutz, University of Zurich, Switzerland)
I. The Politics of Commemoration
Chapter 1: Turkish History Writing of the Great War: Imperial Legacy, Mass Violence, Dissent (Alexandre Toumarkine, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), France)
Chapter 2: April 25. Anzac Day Commemoration and Construction of National Identity (Rowan Light, The University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Chapter 3: April 24. Formation, Development and Current State of the Armenian Genocide Victims Remembrance Day (Harutyun Marutyan, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, Armenia)
Chapter 4: Unremembering Gallipoli in Turkey (Erol Köroglu, Bogaziçi University, Turkey)
II. National Narratives in the former Ottoman World
Chapter 5: National Narratives Challenged. Ottoman Wartime Correspondence on Palestine (Yuval Ben Bassat, University of Haifa, Israel; and Dotan Halevy)
Chapter 6: Official and Individual Lenses of the Remembrance of the First World War: Turkish Official Military Histories and Personal War Narratives (Mesut Uyar, UNSW Canberra, Australia)
III. Australians' Embrace of Gallipoli
Chapter 7: Turkey, Australia, and the Noble enemy-turned-friend (Kate Ariotti, University of Newcastle, Australia)
Chapter 8: A Foundational Myth: Gallipoli and the Architecture of Memory in Canberra (Daniel Marc Segesser, Bern University, Switzerland)
Chapter 9: Gallipoli in Diasporic Memories of Sikhs and Turks (Burcu Cevik-Compiegne, Australian National University, Australia)
IV. Contested Memories: New Zealand, Turkey and Armenians
Chapter 10: “To have and to hold”: Chunuk Bair and New Zealand`s Gallipoli Imagining (Bruce Scates, Australian National University, Australia)
Chapter 11: New Zealand and the Armenian Genocide (Maria Armoudian, University of Auckland, New Zealand; James Robins, V.K.G. Woodman)
Chapter 12: Can the Survivor Speak? (Talin Suciyan, LMU, Germany)
Afterword (Peter Stanley, UNSW Canberra, Australia)
Index
About the Author :
Hans-Lukas Kieser is Professor of Modern History at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Thomas Schmutz is a scholar based at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Pearl Nunn is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has a Master of Arts in History from Swansea University, Wales (UK).
Review :
Focused on the entangled relation between the Battle of Gallipoli and the Armenian genocide, this excellent collection of studies offers a wealth of thought provoking insights into the legacies of the First World War in Turkey, Armenia, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. This is a timely contribution to our understanding of how the events of 1915 have been remembered, contested and actively forgotten in the service of nation-building, foreign diplomacy and domestic politics in countries seemingly far apart.
