Our Journal: First World War Studies

A Captivated Audience studies the organization, regulation and consumption of culture in occupied Belgium during the First World War. Through a case-study of the founding and day-to-day operations of Cinema Zoologie, the film theatre located at the Antwerp Zoo, it is demonstrated how tensions between organizers, audiences and the occupying force are played out in the leisure sphere. The film theatre is presented as an arena of conflicting interests where politics, business and patriotism clash. Cinema Zoologie was operated by the Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp (owner of the Antwerp Zoo), a bourgeois society with an international membership and ties with the German community in Antwerp. As a movie theatre located in this thoroughly bourgeois environment, Cinema Zoologie is also an ideal microcosm to study wartime reactions to filmed entertainment and information as well as bourgeois cinema-going experiences. The research presented here is largely based on primary sources from the extensive archives of the Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp kept at the Antwerp City Archive (Felixarchief).

Key Words: First World War, leisure, occupation, film, cinema culture, zoological garden

The end of the First World War and the long transformation from the Great War to the consequent borderland conflicts came into the centre of academic interest in the last few years. Many studies have been expanding the horizon of the research to the Central and Eastern European states and their borderland struggles of 1918–1920. One of these ‘pygmies’ wars was the so called Kärntner Abwehrkampf, fought between the South Slavic and Austrian forces for the southern parts of Carinthia. Although the hostilities played a pivotal role in the German and Austrian right-wing paramilitary mythologies in the interwar period, the history of the war is still relatively underresearched. This article investigates one particular aspect of the conflict, namely the way how Austrian soldiers were remobilized in the province during the first phase of the struggle. The study aims to challenge the existing, often oversimplified explanations about the servicemen’s social background and their motivation to serve in the army. In order to provide a complex picture about the recruitment, the paper presents the three most important narrative traditions on the war and contrasts their claims with the statistical analyses of the soldiers’ enlistment records. The study intends to prove that the political explanations of the memoire literature(s) about the people motivation to fight are largely – although not entirely – misleading. Moreover, the analyses provide a new understanding about the recruitment through pointing out the unique characteristics how people were mobilized during the conflict.

Key Words: Carinthia, Austria, Volkswehr, military mobilization, borderland war

On 28 April 1936, two weeks before his death, Field Marshal Lord Allenby delivered his last public address as the newly elected rector of Edinburgh University. ‘The glory of conquest is departing’, he urged Edinburgh’s students, ‘its gains are Dead Sea fruit.’ Allenby called for an international police force and a policy of collective security and international cooperation to prevent a second great war. This article argues that Allenby, a war hero who was popularly celebrated as the ‘conqueror of Palestine’ and ‘liberator of Jerusalem’, was changed irrevocably by the death of his only son on the Western Front in 1917 and the unstable world political situation in the inter-war period. His personal loss and world politics put him on a path towards a pacific and internationalist worldview, which was most clearly expressed from the unveiling of Belfast’s war memorial in 1929 onwards. Allenby’s political transformation came at a time when British society was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the war, and when his retirement and involvement with ex-servicemen groups made it impossible to dissociate himself from the memory of his only son’s death and the fear that another worldwide conflict would devastate Britain’s youth.

Key Words: Edmund Allenby, First World War, internationalism, League of Nations, mourning

Towards and into the Second World War, New Zealand society exhibited a habit of relating contemporary circumstances to aspects of the Great War. Indicating diverging interwar assessments of 1914–1918, this recurring commentary broadly divided over whether the last war should be understood as an exemplary model, a warning against war or as a lesson for a new war effort to learn from. This article outlines New Zealand’s major interwar interpretations, investigates their relation to outlooks on the Second World War and offers some preliminary thoughts on how the conceptual shifts of this period have informed more recent comprehensions of 1914–1918.

Key Words: New Zealand, memory, The Second World War, Anzac, interwar period