Yet, despite ethnic tensions and separatist movements empires persisted in the long 19th century. And European empires did indeed struggle with separatist nationalism before 1914. Nation-states on the other hand were considered homogenous and progressive. Woodrow Wilson called multi-ethnic Empires anachronistic.
JÖRN LEONHARD (Freiburg) gave an elaborate keynote speech on the First World War with regard to nationalisms that challenged the old Empires. In the panel discussion it was asked whether national history has been rendered obsolete, and if history could replace myth. European memory cultures looked at the suffering of victims instead of the traditional ‘history of the winners’. Verbeeck stressed the role of the Holocaust in European identity that was founded on the negative narrative “Nie Wieder” (“never again”). GEORGI VERBEECK (Maastricht) then gave a talk on competing memories in the age of totalitarianism. Berger called this a cosmopolitan way of history-writing, although this only marks a modification of the national approach. Berger asked his audience to overcome national approaches to the history of war, and instead look at each other’s national history through the eyes of other states. The second panel on “Nation and Past” was introduced by STEFAN BERGER’s (Bochum) presentation on war and atrocities in National European historiographies. In the panel debate the participants discussed whether and how World Wars and small wars by individual warlords could effectively be compared. He compared the World Wars in Lithuania, demonstrating continuities of Lebensraum discourses, anti-semitism, methods of forced labor, and stereotypes of bandits in both wars. CHRISTOPH DIECKMANN (Keele) explored continuities of Lithuanian history throughout the World Wars. However, the German attempts to foster Islamic revolutions during World War I stranded due to their failure to understand local customs and traditions.
According to Mayer, German Oriental Politics 1914-1918 learnt from Islamic revolutions of the nineteenth century in order to implement Islamic insurrections in the Middle East. MICHAEL MAYER started the first panel on atrocity during the World Wars with a talk on “Jihads made in Germany”. Moreover, the conference hosts aimed at including methods and perspectives of cultural history, gender and colonial studies, as well as memory studies into the discussion of war and terror in twentieth-century Europe. How Europe went to War in 1914, London 2013. Benkert and Mayer referred to the immense public interest in new Great War historiographies.
and remembrance cultures of wars, with case studies ranging from Colonial Morocco to the representation of Nazi terror in German television. Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York 2010.
The conference focused especially on spatial approaches to violence See for example Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. The current centenary of the beginning of World War I and the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II served as initial motive to look at the contemporary history of war and atrocity with its transnational entanglements. Eighteen speakers and about 40 participants contributed to this summer school. The conference in Tutzing was convened by MICHAEL MAYER (Tutzing) and VOLKER BENKERT (Tempe), and addressed researchers and the interested public to spend four days of intense debate on “Terrortimes” and “Terrorscapes” with a longue durée perspective. In a joint conference of Arizona State University (Tempe, USA) and the Akademie für Politische Bildung Tutzing, Germany, historians from various sub-disciplines and countries discussed continuities of war and genocide in twentieth-century Europe. Terrortimes, Terrorscapes? Temporal, Spatial, and Memory Continuities of War and Genocide in 20th Century Europe
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