Contested Commemorations - Ziemann, Benjamin

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Résumé :
An innovative study of remembrance in Weimar Germany and how war experiences and memories were transformed along political lines.

Biographie:
Benjamin Ziemann is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield. An expert on the social, political and cultural history of modern Germany, his previous publications include War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914?1923 (2007) and The German Soldiers of the Great War. Letters and Eyewitness Accounts (co-edited with Bernd Ulrich, 2010).

Sommaire:
This innovative study of remembrance in Weimar Germany analyses how experiences and memories of the Great War were transformed along political lines after 1918. Examining the symbolism, language and performative power of public commemoration, Benjamin Ziemann reveals how individual recollections fed into the public narrative of the experience of war. Challenging conventional wisdom that nationalist narratives dominated commemoration, this book demonstrates that Social Democrat war veterans participated in the commemoration of the war at all levels: supporting the 'no more war' movement, mourning the fallen at war memorials and demanding a politics of international solidarity. It describes how the moderate Socialist Left related the legitimacy of the Republic to their experiences in the Imperial army and acknowledged the military defeat of 1918 as a moment of liberation. This is the first comprehensive analysis of war remembrances in post-war Germany and a radical reassessment of the democratic potential of the Weimar Republic....

'Benjamin Ziemann's book, filled with surprising new material, vigorous new characters and above all, strikingly new perspectives, will significantly alter several generations' understandings of what happened during Weimar ... compellingly written, exhaustively researched and rigorously argued, [it] is a powerful contribution to the continuing effort to comprehend the multiple meanings of the Great War.' German History