Abstract
Recent Historiography of the First World War
Locating recent international historiography on the First World War within the long-term context, this article discusses above all the internationalisation of the topic and the trend towards transnational history. It asks why the war is almost entirely unknown in the history and memory of some states, while it has powerful symbolic value in others. Was the war a kind of «laboratory» for later radicalised practices, or was there even a continuity of total war from the First to the Second World War? Is the debate in historiography between «coercion» and «consent» now resolved? How we should understand the «culture of war» – as the product of totalising tendencies driven by ever more militarised states, or of a process of popular self-mobilisation from below? Is the cultural history of war now the new orthodoxy?