1914.org Global commemoration of WW I in 2014- 2018

The 1914.org website has a marvelous calendar of events taking place and starting this year and I'd like to issue a challenge to every forum member to attend at least one and post your impressions.

One word of warning the site has a serious problem with dead/problem links to some of the participating organisations that indicates a lack of quality control. However it is worth persevering by doing your own search with the details provided.

There seems to be a real effort to dramatise how the conflict affected communities large and small across the globe. I am taking advantage of the fact that I am in London, England next month to try to attend at least two events, one by City Lit is a two hour free session on "Women of London and World War I" presented by the IWM. The other is a piece of performance art , very reasonably priced and put together by LIFT at the Battersea Arts Centre.

 

We will be going to the Tank Museum Warhorse to Horsepower exhibition as my English grandfather and great uncle were in the Artillery Regiments, and coincidentally my husband served in the Royal Tank Regiment. In our area there are many commemorative events happening which my husband and I are intending to go to.

I am just going to make one small observation which was brought home to me this week while taking to my elderly mother. We were casually chatting about the war, especially as many newspapers are publishing articles not only about WW1 but the D Day landings, when she simply said how upsetting it is for her. How insensitive of me to not understand that, as a German, this is all quite difficult. As a nation the Germans have had to be careful how they handle this, and even though she had nothing to do with the first world war it has, like countless British people, dredged up memories of her experiences as a child in WW2. There were some stand out frightening experiences that she has told me of, and for an instant, while enthusing about the various war books and photos I was looking at, I momentarily forgot. I forgot there were terrible casualties on all sides, innocent and maybe not so innocent. I do feel this is all being handled sensitively by the media so far, but how could I forget when my own mother is German? The guilt most Germans feel as a nation is compounded even more by this sad centenary. I have always had to be as neutral as I can, (and can you even imagine what it is like watching an England verses Germany football match as my father is football mad?), and so this has reminded me to go and look for some books about the German perspective and I did find an article is the Daily Mail written last year which has some interesting photographs.