research topic!

For the historian of the Twentieth Century, all roads lead back to August, 1914. If the French Revolution represented the best of our origins as the Modern West, The First World War is certainly emblematic of our worst beginnings, when the nineteenth century narrative of progress took a horribly, irreparably wrong turn.

The First World War was a transformative moment in history, a catalyst essential to the understanding of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, it contrasts so sharply with the nineteenth century, that one forgets the slow trauma it must have involved for those who lived through it. In its naïve beginnings, the irreversible change brought on by WWI appeared rather as a continuation of nineteenth century trends. “Triggered by a nationalist assassination, World War I began as a war of nationalities, igniting the collective passions that had filled the preceding century.” Empires doomed their native sons to battle, and nationalism compelled them to go. Particularly for those on the home front, the horrors of war, and the fundamental break with the past, unfolded as a series of broken expectations, and not as a sudden blow.

The War transformed every part of society in Western Europe, ravaging the home front as dramatically (if by different means) as the wasteland. This conflict left deep psychological scars, and a profound feeling of disorientation in the generations that waged it. The narrative of progress so championed by nineteenth century thought was utterly demolished, leaving empty battle scars in its place. Adding to the chaos, the demographic composition in Europe, which experienced a drop in birthrate even before the war, was intensified by the conflict. According to Eric Hobsbawm’s calculations, “not much more than one in three French soldiers came through the war without harm…The British lost a generation.”

By the end, the full extent of the senselessness and brutality of the war was well known to all involved. “Military servitude had never appeared less noble than it did to the millions of transplanted men, so recently snatched from the moral world of citizenship.” (Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 49) In the face of such futile violence, on such a scale, one would expect feelings of disillusionment about the Great War to permeate cultural production. While still paying homage to the patriots that volunteered to fight and die, or return home maimed, without diminishing their sacrifice, one would expect the war not to be remembered fondly, to take on a new image than that which dominated the propaganda in the warring countries during the conflict. Oddly, this is not always the case.


François Furet rightly notes that, by virtue of the eschatological properties of twentieth century ideologies, a critical sense of contingency (that element that makes history interesting to begin with) has been absent from histories of this short century. Neither religion, nor historical law drive history—action, and ultimately responsibility, rests on the shoulders of human actors in their milieu. Nothing is preordained.

In many ways, the idea of “historical necessity” (another tally on the list of things that are Marx's fault) has obscured the historian’s view of the people who lived through the Great War as people, parents, spouses, instead of as political actors, or potential political actors, or victims of the killing fields in France. Espoused ideology aside, the generation of 1914 had to find ways to return to normalcy after the war, and those with children had to teach them what normalcy was. Narratives of this generation tend to emphasize ideology, or disorientation, themes that rightly dominate post-war studies. Yet, ideology and disorientation are not the dominant themes that were transmitted to the children of this generation about 14-18, the period of upheaval, in France and England, in their literature.

Societal changes wrought by the War have been well studied by historians, but they have largely ignored the children that grew up and came of age in this period, and importantly, the way these massive societal changes were represented to a generation that had never directly known what came before (but would go on to fight the second world war). The Great War was disorienting for adults, but as parents, they were still faced with orienting their children to a world that they themselves didn’t fully understand.

I propose to survey children’s literature produced in France and England in the interwar period in order to better understand the adult worldview as communicated to a younger generation, with specific attention to any commentary on the war, and positionings of self versus other. In Germany, “the private sector” and the media became matters of state interest and, shall we say, influence, especially after 1933;the same can be said of Bolshevik Russia from its inception in 1917. in France and Britain, publishing and "family life" in general remained out of reach of the state. Thus, by nature of the relative freedom of expression granted for more of the interwar period in France and England, I will review books for children produced in those countries. Moreover, while a survey of children’s literature produced in fascist/totalitarian states might make for interesting contrasts, they tend to illuminate more of what one would expect of state interests, and less about what the public at large held as a value. For example, a brief search quickly turned up a book called “The Tale of Red-haired Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah and Commissar Bloch,” by Yosif Utkin, written in the USSR in 1933. It is a story of Motele, a Jewish tailor who renounces Judaism to become a Soviet commissar. This book is a striking example of the reaches of Soviet Propaganda, and nothing more.

The scope of my work will be limited to the ways in which adults positioned children in the context of a changing world; in other words, I will focus on the act of narration, which can be factually ascertained by virtue of the books themselves, and not on how children might have interpreted the materials. Though the latter would make for the most interesting study, there are simply no sources readily available for how children understood what they were told. In many ways, researching the child’s worldview is much like reconstructing the mentalitésof the subaltern of a distant past—not something my experience to date has prepared me to do.

In the private sector (contrasted from schooling, with its obvious focus on generating young patriots), children’s stories produced in this period are more akin to those written before the war than with any sort of propaganda, or any reflection of the guilt and resentment that filled adult literature about the war in the same period, in France and Britain. War is mentioned, to be sure, but in a context of a noble fight, and a fresh start after it ended. Are we to assume that the generation of 1914 wished to impart none of the wisdom it had garnered through the long, bloody war, or that literature was an inappropriate place to discuss these lessons, or was didacticism to the young not a component of “never again,” as they saw it?


The facts and meaning of this paradox will be the topic of my first research paper.