The German lands – a nation-state came into being only in 1871 – were a major world region for outmigration until the middle of the nineteenth century. This chapter tells the story of emigration from Germany, highlighting parallels between how German immigrants were treated abroad and how immigrants in Germany were, and indeed are, being treated. It begins by showing how migration had always been a reality for Germans. After that it turns to the United States and Russia, the two main destinations of emigration, especially during the mass migration in the 1800s, making Germans the United States’ largest ethnic group. With poverty and religious and political persecution as main push factors, Germans on the move were subjected to discrimination, even racism, physical violence, and pogroms. They reacted by hyper-assimilation or retreat into ethnic communities, particularly from the early 1900s onwards when hybrid identities – German and American/Russian – came under threat from homogenizing nationalism. This history needs to be remembered so that Germans realize how quickly history can turn around: once a liability, a German passport today is coveted by many, but this may change.

Churchill is often ranked as one of the most hated figures in Irish history but he was also one of the most influential politicians in shaping relations both within and between Britain and Ireland. Churchill played a formative role in the ‘Irish Question’. At the beginning of his career he was a Unionist, inheriting his father’s sympathy for Ulster, but converted to Home Rule. The chapter contrasts the impact of social reforms in helping Irish pensioners with the role of Irish suffragettes in defeating Churchill at Manchester in 1908. It looks at how he tried to navigate between the Unionists and nationalists in the Edwardian era, before showing how the war (including Irish losses at Gallipoli) led to rebellion. Thereafter, Churchill pursued a dual strategy of repression and negotiation and played a key role in the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the subsequent events surrounding partition. His belligerence has tended to overshadow the multi-faceted ways he dealt with and thought about the Irish.

The chapter looks at Clementine Churchill’s often neglected position as her husband’s closest advisor and greatest influence. It begins by recounting the attributes she brought to the role, including championing the role of women in wartime and offering personal ‘protection’ to Winston at times of great stress, such as the eve of the D-Day landings. Her role as a British ‘First Lady’ is explored; attending key wartime conferences, editing and rehearsing Churchill’s speeches, and managing high-level international diplomacy with de Gaulle, Roosevelt and Stalin. However, her most important role was in managing Winston, monitoring her husband’s behaviour and restraining him when the need arose. It was a role that absorbed almost all of her energy and time, leaving her little of either for herself or her family.

This chapter deals with the history of the French poetry of the First Wold War. Although, like in other belligerent countries, the production of war poetry was massive between 1914 and 1918, it remains hitherto neglected by literature scholars and historians. The genre suffered from its bad reputation. Apart from a few avant-gardists like Guillaume Apollinaire, the scholarly consensus outlined the French war poetry as a chauvinistic old-fashioned flood of words with no literary or even documentary relevance in contrast with the prose written by soldier-writers. This chapter does not try to rehabilitate the French war poetry but to sketch a typology of a significative cultural phenomenon. It shows the variety of the genre between patriotism, eulogy, irony and humour, testimony, protest, and formal research.

In Germany the years of the First World War saw an overwhelming outpouring of verse, fired for the most part by intense patriotic enthusiasm around 1914. The lyric form provided both an immediate outlet for ordinary Germans to record their experiences and feelings, but also ready-made traditional models to shape those experiences. Alongside chauvinistic hymns by poets who remain, to all intents and purposes, ‘lost voices’, were soldier-poets, writing from the front – some of them prolific and enormously popular at the time, yet now almost completely forgotten, others still read today. But there were also worker poets, other critical voices, expressly anti-war poets and women poets who focused often on the victims left behind. Later too came the satirical or epic voices. German poetry of the period is inevitably mixed up also with Expressionism, which made for a more radical formal experimentation than in many other national literatures at the time.

This chapter considers the importance of royal heirs in the process of militarising the monarchies of nineteenth-century Europe. It gauges the significance of the crowns’ military performance for their attempts to generate loyalty and popular endorsement. Royal heirs, and crown princes in particular, had a significant part to play within this context – if only as military actors, but even more so if they could demonstrate real military achievements. The chapter culminates in an assessment of the experiences and contributions of three royal heirs who assumed military roles during the First World War.

What constitutes Czech First World War poetry? Rejection of the romantic cult; an emphasis on collective participation in life; a turning towards reality and civilisation; the search for a new aesthetic ideal and for new means of expression, especially for a poetic vocabulary and rhythm that would correspond to a dynamic conception of the world. In the Czech cultural context, the four years of the First World War were not identical. The first two years massively affected the development of Czech culture, many magazines were forced to stop publishing and many writers were sent to the front. In the last two years of the war, censorship declined, a series of new literary magazines emerged, and, in exile, negotiations for an independent Czech and Slovak state took place. This chapter deals with a significant attempt to present the new artistic generation Almanac for the Year 1914 and Manifesto of Czech Writers (1917), Dyk’s War Tetralogy and the poetry of exile and of the Czechoslovak Legion.

Chapter 1 examines the construction of large-scale national systems for rehabilitating the war disabled, which began in the final months of 1914, with the establishment of the first wartime institutions for vocational re-education, and grew, over the course of the conflict, to include administrative bodies, organisational structures, and legal frameworks for the provisioning of care. They were constantly retooled and restructured in order to make them more efficient and more responsive to the needs of nations at war. By 1918, they had become remarkably sophisticated and, moreover, strikingly similar to one another – the result of a dedicated transnational movement of people and ideas and of a shared aim. This unity of purpose, however, did not exclude revisionist interpretations of rehabilitation programmes that overstressed their dissimilarities and imagined such systems – and the men they served – as nationally or ethnically particular nor did it resolve tensions between competing ideas about care, philanthropy, and the state.

Bodies of Work examines the transnational development of large-scale national systems, international organizations, technologies, and cultural materials aimed at rehabilitating Allied ex-servicemen, disabled in the First World War. It considers the ways in which rehabilitation was shaped by both durable and discrete influences, including social reformism, paternalist philanthropy, the movement for workers’ rights, patriotism, class tensions, cultural ideas about manliness and disability, nationalism, and internationalism. In recognising rehabilitation systems as complex and multi-faceted sociocultural constructions, it sheds light on the ways in which they became sites for the contestation and maintenance of boundaries of belonging. Internal to such systems, the book argues, were the limits of expansion of services to the industrially disabled. In interrogating the post-war quest to extend rehabilitation rights to civilians, the book provides insight into the development of social rights and statist welfarism and the evolution of ideas about the means, ends, and objects of humanitarianism.

Chapter 5 describes the transformation of a section of Arnavutluk into the modern Albanian state. The new independent Albania was proclaimed by the predominantly Sunni elite when Ottoman rule collapsed in the First Balkan War in 1912 and Albanian settlement areas seemed on the verge of being divided between Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. With the onset of the First World War, the fledgling state was faced with foreign occupation, and threats to its territorial integrity and to its very existence. The chapter examines how in the immediate aftermath of the war, Albanian leaders, meeting at the Congress of Lushnjë, struggled to create a functioning state apparatus but were quickly faced with political conflict which led to coups, assassinations and general instability. In this chaos, power was dominated by those with independent access to armed forces, resulting in the rise of the tribal leader Ahmet Zogu. Fearing his increasing authoritarianism, opposing forced mounted a revolution which ousted Zogu and allowed the construction of a short-lived generally progressive regime. Within six months, however, a counter-revolution brought Zogu back to power.

Starting with popular memories of the civilian gas masks of the Second World War, this chapter argues that the emergence of this singular, material object signals the arrival of the civil defense state and its accompanying militarization of civilian life. It reveals the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of The Age of the Gas Mask, and shows how the gas mask connects the histories of both world wars, of combatants and civilians, of men and women, of metropole and colony, of the state and the individual, thus shedding new light on total war.

The civilian gas mask made total war seem normal. As an object that could remind wearers of an existential threat to their lives and families and livelihoods while being carried on the body, the gas mask could encapsulate both the warfare state and the welfare state of the twentieth century. A government that freely distributed civilian gas masks made it acceptable to factor its noncombatant population fully into the waging of modern war.

Chapter 2 shows how the arrival of lethal chemical warfare at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915 led to the invention of anti-gas protection. It traces the crucial role played by women in this initial process and how the prospect of gas masks for civilians slowly emerged during the First World War and then continued in the war’s aftermath. The prospect of a future war of aero-chemical annihilation motivated feminist antimilitarists and others demanding the curtailment of chemical arms. Nonetheless Britain continued in both the metropole and empire to develop both such weapons and equipment to protect individuals from poison gas. Chemical weapons also had defenders, and the debate over their legitimacy played out in public even as government officials, who were inventing civil defense in secret in the 1920s, incorporated individual anti-gas protection into their calculations.