Germans who survived the First World War interpreted the experience through various prisms, creating social imaginaries that explained the trauma of the past and shaped their conceptions of the future. The political repercussions of contrasting imaginaries expressed themselves in the Spartacist uprising, Freikorps brutality, right-wing coup attempts, and the struggle for power associated with Hitler’s Beer Hall putsch. But the struggle to define Germany as a collective shaped by a common past and agreed upon set of norms had dimensions that went beyond the political. The experience of war, of violence, and of starvation shaped conceptions of health, of military law, and of community and mobilization. This panel will explore three dimensions of interpreting and learning from the Great War, focusing on its impact on nutritional science, military law, and conceptions of a people at war.

Heather Perry will examine how the wartime nation's chronic food insecurity provided nutritional scientists the opportunity to re-evaluate the daily diet of the average German and the impact of food shortages on national health. Drawing on a broad array of German wartime and post-war primary sources -- including scientific journals, public lectures, government reports, newspaper articles, and health exhibits -- Perry contends that Weimar era understandings of national belonging and citizenship were infused with wartime ideas about one’s duty to maintain nutrition, fitness, and bodily health.

Douglas Peifer explores how a particular collective – military jurists – interpreted their role in the First World War. He argues that military jurists, influential veterans, and the Weimar military establishment concluded that the military judicial system had failed in the First World War. They embraced the “stab in the back” narrative, connecting military unrest at the front and naval mutiny in Germany’s homeports with the machinations of the Independent Socialists. This assessment of the past resulted a collective determination to reshape how the German military would apply the law in future conflicts, setting the stage for the execution of thousands of German soldiers in the Second World War in order to avoid another 1918.

Jay Lockenour adds a third dimension to German imaginaries during the Weimar era. Focusing on Erich Ludendorff, Lockenour unpacks the development of “the big lie” that poisoned German political culture in the 1920s and 1930s—that Germany had not been defeated in 1918 but had been “stabbed in the back” by revolutionary Jewish and Socialist groups on the home front. Lockenour explores how Ludendorff fostered and spread the “big lie,” contributing to an imagined past at odds with the reality of 1918 and opposed to the Weimar Republic.

The three papers underline how interpretations of the past shaped Germany in the 1920s and 30s, generating not one social imaginary but overlapping, communal, and contesting imaginaries. From food policies to military justice to calls for national mobilization, the present was shaped by contested interpretations of the past.