About the Book
Due to its unprecedented violence and unexpected duration, the First World War generated many complex and tragic experiences, which over time have been reinterpreted. Connecting past experiences with current memories of the war – in order to revisit in an interdisciplinary way Belgium’s archival and literary, as well as material and monumental war heritage – is the goal of this book which presents the outcomes of the research project Experiences and Memories of the Great War in Belgium (MEMEX WW1).
The following topics as part of the historical, psychological and memory studies are addressed: emotions and writing strategies in a war context and attitudes towards the Germans based on the diaries of Belgian soldiers and scholars; the memory of the war in the two fort cities of Antwerp and Liege during the Interbellum; the literary reception of Tom Lanoye’s No Man’s Land and the impact of the reading of some poems to current Flemish students. Another issue concerning the social representations of the war investigates the representations of soldiers as heroes or as victims among young Europeans. As for the impact of war centenary commemoration events, they are analyzed firstly through the iconology of the First World War illustrated on stamps and secondly through the effects of exhibitions and documentaries on young Belgians.
About the Author :
Geneviève Warland is Reader in History at UCLouvain and Research Assistant in the project Recognition and resentment: experiences and memories of the Great War in Belgium. Her PhD (2011) dealt with the public role of history and the conceptions of nation and Europe as interpreted by the contemporary philosophers J.-M. Ferry and J. Rüsen, on the one side, and by the historians P. J. Blok, Karl Lamprecht, Ernest Lavisse and Henri Pirenne on the other. She has worked as guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt/Main and at the University of Paderborn. Her research interests focus on the history of historiography in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially on the role of historians as scientific mediators and on the expression of emotions in their writings. Pierre Bouchat is Doctor in psychology from Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and currently university lecturer and researcher at UCLouvain. He is interested in the social representations of history and focuses especially on the links between collective memories of the Great War and current pacifist attitudes among young Europeans. Elke Brems is Professor of Literature and Translation at KU Leuven – Brussels. She is interested in cultural transfer, literary translation and 20th century Dutch literature. Her area of expertise is a. o. Reception Studies, focusing on how literary texts are received by readers and cultures. She is the head of the Research Unit of Translation Studies at the University of Leuven. Chantal Kesteloot is Doctor in contemporary history. She obtained her PhD in 2001 at ULB with a thesis on the Walloon movement and Brussels from 1912 to 1965. In 1992 she joined the permanent team of the Center for Historical Research and Documentation on War and contemporary Society (CegeSoma). She is currently in charge of the Public History sector. Her main areas of interest are the legacies of the wars and Belgian history as well as issues of nationalism and national identities. Olivier Klein is Professor of Social Psychology at ULB. He is interested in social influences bearing upon memory, in the use of historical analogies in social judgment and in social representations of historical events. He has especially studied colonial memory in Belgium and the representations of World War I in Europe. He has been an active member of the European research network COST titled Social Representations of History in the European Union, in which he led a working group on cognitive approaches to appraisals of History. He also recently co-edited a special issue of Memory Studies titled Recent Advances in Historical Cognition. Olivier Luminet is Professor of Psychology at UCLouvain and ULB and Research Director at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S-FNRS). One aspect of his research examines moderating impact of emotional expression/inhibition on emotional processing and health. Another aspect is related to the effects of emotions on individual and collective memories, including flashbulb memories. Recently, he focused his work on events related to Belgian history such as the splitting of the University of Louvain, intergenerational memories of WWII and honour and shame among Belgian soldiers during WWI. In 2012 he edited a special issue of Memory Studies titled The Interplay between Collective Memory and the Erosion of Nation States. The Paradigmatic Case of Belgium. Reine Meylaerts is Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at KU Leuven where she teaches courses on European Literature, Comparative Literature and Plurilingualism in literature. Her current research interests concern translation policy, intercultural mediation and transfer in multilingual cultures, past and present. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters on these topics. She is also review editor of Target. International Journal of Translation Studies. She was coordinator of 2011–2014: FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN: TIME: Translation Research Training: An integrated and intersectoral model for Europe. She is former Secretary General (2004–2007) of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and Chair of the Doctoral Studies Committee of EST. Bernard Rimé is Emeritus Professor in Psychology at UCLouvain. His main research field is on emotions, where he has published widely. One of his main publications is Le partage social des émotions (Presses universitaires de France, 2009). Valérie Rosoux is Senior Research Fellow at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS). She teaches International Negotiation, and Conflict Transformation at UCLouvain. In 2010–2011, she was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (Washington DC). As a post-doctoral researcher, she worked at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in 2002, the Center for International Studies and Research (CERI), Institut d’Études Politiques of Paris (2001) and the University Laval, Canada (2000). Valérie Rosoux has a master degree in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in International Relations. Her research interests focus on the uses of memory in international relations, especially in the Franco-German, Franco-Algerian, Rwandan and South African cases. Rose Spijkerman is PhD candidate in History at Ghent University. In her research she focuses on the study of emotions in history, particularly the ones linked to honor and shame in the Belgian army during the First World War. Myrthel Van Etterbeeck is PhD candidate in Literature at KU Leuven – Brussels. Her research deals with the memory of the Great War in the Belgian Dutch and French literature during the interwar period. Karla Vanraepenbusch studied history at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Museum Studies at the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland. She is currently preparing a PhD thesis at CegeSoma and UCLouvain. Her research concerns the material memory traces of the First World War in Antwerp and Liège. Laurence van Ypersele is Professor at UCLouvain. She teaches Contemporary History and works on World War I and its memory. Member of the board of the Historial de la Grande Guerre of Péronne (France), she wrote several books: Le roi Albert, Histoire d’un mythe (Quorum, 1995; Labor, 2006), Question d’histoire contemporaine: Conflits, mémoires et identités (PUF, 2006), Je serai fusillé demain. Les dernières lettres des patriotes belges et français fusillés par l’occupant, 1914–1918 (Racine, 2011), and Brussels, War and Memory, 1914–2014 (La Renaissance du livre, 2014). Antoon Vrints is Assistant Professor at the Department of History (Research Unit Social History after 1750) of Ghent University. He is specialized in the history of conflict regulation and the social history of the First World War. He published on these topics following monographs: Bezette stad. Vlaams-nationalistische collaboratie in Antwerpen tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Brussels, 2002), Het theater van de straat. Publiek geweld in Antwerpen tijdens de eerste helft van de twintigste eeuw (Amsterdam, 2011). Moreover, he recently coedited the first counterfactual history of Belgium. Antoon Vrints is member of the editorial board of Stadsgeschiedenis and Wetenschappelijke Tijdingen. Geneviève Warland is Reader in History at UCLouvain and Research Assistant in the project Recognition and resentment: experiences and memories of the Great War in Belgium. Her PhD (2011) dealt with the public role of history and the conceptions of nation and Europe as interpreted by the contemporary philosophers J.-M. Ferry and J. Rüsen, on the one side, and by the historians P. J. Blok, Karl Lamprecht, Ernest Lavisse and Henri Pirenne on the other. She has worked as guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt/Main and at the University of Paderborn. Her research interests focus on the history of historiography in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially on the role of historians as scientific mediators and on the expression of emotions in their writings.
Review :
By fully embracing the inter-disciplinary potential of studying the First World War and its memory, this volume offers a welcome break from historians talking primarily to and writing primarily for other historians. [...] Not only do the chapters underscore the kinds of exciting work that can come out of cross-disciplinary research but they also help us to reconsider the importance of the historical study of the First World War. Above all, they show how inherently flexible history as a discipline can be. [...] Altogether, this collection is much more than a book on Belgium in, at and after the First World War, although it is a highly welcome addition to the growing body of work in English on the subject. It is well worth the attention of anyone who works on the history and memory of warfare, be it the 1914-1918 cataclysm or any modern conflict.
Angesichts der großartigen Erkenntnisse nach der Lektüre [...] bleibt als Antwort auf die von Herausgeberin Geneviève Warland formulierte Frage „Yet another book on the First World War?“ als Antwort ein klares: ja – mit dem Wissen, dass interdisziplinäre Wege immer etwas steiniger sind als die vertrauten.
Experience and Memory is a thought-provoking and timely volume that reflects the varied backgrounds of its authors. […] This is perhaps the collection’s most exciting revelation: there is still plenty to say about the First World War and its consequences one hundred years after the fact and Experience and Memory sketches out a number of ways future researchers might build on its findings.
