The struggle to achieve lasting peace and fulfill the ambitious promise of making the Great War of 1914-1918 the war to end all wars has been retrospectively disregarded as the product of naive idealism, doomed to failure. This teleological understanding of interwar efforts at reconciliation leads one to the misconception that resentment was not only universal but insurmountable, and furthermore, that those voices which emphasized the common fraternity of European man were fringe utopians.

While it is certainly true that the peace treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain and Trianon solidified resentments and hampered the process of reconciliation, grassroots and inter-state attempts to view the humanity of their wartime enemies can provide valuable insights into the complex challenges of modern warfare, specifically the challenge it presents to the individual to suppress empathy and embrace the dehumanization of his fellow man. This panel session addresses the wartime lived experience of everyday combatants, subsequent interwar cultures of memory, and attempts which sought to undo the polarizing legacy of the Great War.

Over the course of three papers, speakers will look at how the advent of industrialized technological warfare led to fears of a self-destruction of European Civilization, and how these concerns necessitated a reappraisal of recent bitterness, in many cases leading to a repudiation bellicose Prussianism, facilitated a new impulse to seek reconciliation and rediscover this seemingly lost common fraternity of ages past.

The presentations are divided by thematic and chronological categorization. The first paper will address Anglo-German trench perspectives on how individuals sought to understand their role in the clash of civilisations both during and immediately after the conclusion of the Great War. The Second paper will concentrate on intersections of concurrent interwar Franco-German secular and religious efforts to achieve a workable internationalism that would eliminate the possibility of such a calamity as the Great War of 1914-1918 from ever reoccurring. The third and final paper focuses on the pivotal role which Austria, at the crossroads of Europe, played in the assimilation and propagation of reactionary narratives attempting to revive a nostalgic and idealized traditional European unity designed to ward off the rise of Bolshevism from the East and later National Socialism from the North.

The common tread permeating all three papers of the panel session is that of the human impact of total war, specifically the brutalization of man, desensitizing him to the humanity of those who occupied the opposing trenches across no man’s land. Studying the legacies of this process of brutalization, and interwar efforts to counteract it, is paramount in gaining an understanding of the interwar politics that would lead to further calamities two decades later. The panel session hopes to present the complex, often contradictory, views held by common soldiers vis-à-vis their enemy counterparts and how these tangled views shaped the worldview of the next generation of European political and cultural leaders.