The Violence of War: Images and Experiences of Conflict

Wars have played a fundamental part in modern history. This project investigates their impact in a novel way. Its working hypothesis is that soldiers' and civilians' experiences of military conflict during an age of conscription and mass warfare created fears of and resistance to war that, though they were rarely acknowledged, altered the conditions under which wars were imagined, declared and waged. Nationalist imperatives of defence and taboos surrounding the realities of combat have obscured much of this opposition to war. My findings will have implications for other disciplines and fields such as historical sociology and international relations.
My own research on Germany (The People's Wars) argues that the Napoleonic wars, or 'wars of liberation', the wars of unification and the First World War decisively altered the distribution of power and relations between states on the Continent, and affected the construction and stability of a series of German regimes. The study explores how such conflicts were experienced by soldiers and civilians during wartime, and how they were subsequently represented and understood during peacetime. Without such an understanding, it is difficult to make sense of the dramatic shifts characterising the politics of Germany and Europe over the past two centuries. I argue that the ease - or reluctance - with which Germans went to war, and the far-reaching consequences of such wars on domestic politics, were related to long-term transformations in contemporaries' conceptualisation of conflict. My research reassesses the common view in the historiography of modern Germany that war in the age of the nation-state was seen as a glorious, necessary or inescapable collective endeavour, justified by Darwinian competition or the anarchy of great powers. It asks how such a view can be reconciled with soldiers' own horror and fear of war, their unwillingness to demonize the enemy and their readiness to question traditional reasons of state during a period of mass conscription.
Both the individual and collaborative components of the project investigate the tension between the persistent, supposedly heroic and increasingly indiscriminate use of violence abroad and the expanding regulation and prohibition of violent acts and killing at home. As cabinet warfare turned into national conflict during the first half of the nineteenth century, civilians-as-soldiers were asked to kill on behalf of their nations, yet as citizens they were expected to live peaceful, respectable and restrained lives. In wartime, nineteenth and twentieth-century supporters of progress, civilization or culture were confronted with death, immorality and the futility of existence. Technology, although distancing the killer from his victim, increased the extent, randomness, and destructiveness of killing and maiming. This research aims to shed new light on these disparities of experience and representation.
The collaborative component of the project will test these hypotheses about the impact of warfare and the public portrayal of military conflicts. Two workshops and an international conference, leading to the publication of an edited volume on experiences and representations of violence and combat (The Horrors of War), have been designed to facilitate an interdisciplinary agenda: the first workshop will concentrate on the approaches and findings of literary criticism, cultural studies and the history of art, together with relevant sub-disciplines of history; the second workshop will focus on history, historical sociology, international relations and war studies. The conference and edited volume will disseminate the results of this interdisciplinary collaboration.
The project's overall aim is to transform the study of soldiers' and civilians' experiences of warfare in relevant academic disciplines and to establish longer-term research networks and groupings that will continue beyond the period of the award.

The international conference of the collaborative project and the publication of my own study will take place in 2014, coinciding with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Heightened public and press interest in the Great War will make it easier to disseminate the findings of the research beyond academia. It is designed to have an impact in three respects:
1) Representations of warfare and the causes of the First World War
I plan to organize a series of five public lectures and a roundtable about the outbreak of war in 1914 in conjunction with the Institute for Historical Research and the German Historical Institute (both in London). Both institutes have a successful record of organizing events for wider, non-academic audiences and they both have extensive and regular contact with interested members of the general public. I have close connections to both institutions and I have already organized events there. Examining the disjunction between experiences and representations, they will be given by leading historians of Britain and Germany and will focus on militarism, war scares and the topos of an 'unavoidable war' in the United Kingdom and in Germany (lectures 1 and 2), German and British conceptions of the states' system in an era of empire and world powers (lectures 3 and 4), and decisions for war in July 1914 (lecture 5). The final lecture will be broad in scope, looking at decision-makers in the principal states. Its emphasis - and claim to originality - will be on continuing areas of uncertainty in the historical account of the outbreak of war: it will show how key decisions are still 'unexplained', allowing a variety of interpretations. The roundtable will be made up of two historians and two experts from the related disciplines of international relations and war studies, which - as disciplines - have tended to underline structural constraints on policy-makers' actions (the arms race or the alliance system, for example). By contrast, many historians have paid more attention than scholars of international relations to the 'unspoken assumptions' of statesmen and the relationship of such assumptions to discourses and representations in the public sphere. I have already published in this field (including a monograph on Germany and the Causes of the First World War) and I have extensive contacts with experts on international relations and the outbreak of war.
2) Soldiers' and civilians' experiences of warfare during the First World War
Public events in this field, which I shall coordinate, are of interest to a wide range of governmental institutions (for example, the German Embassy and the Imperial War Museum) and civic associations (the British Legion, the Western Front Association and the Bund Deutscher Veteranen). I am already in contact with these organizations and associations.I plan to organize three public lectures on soldiers' experiences of the First World War: two by leading British and German historians; one by close relatives of British and German veterans, arranged with the help of veterans' associations in both countries. An international symposium on combatants' and non-combatants' experiences of the First World War will also combine panels of specialist historians of the UK, Germany and Europe, and panels of carefully selected relatives of veterans, commenting on their relatives' correspondence and diaries. The respective veterans' associations have their own extensive programme of events and lists of contacts, including members who have already given public presentations, which makes organization of this type of symposium straightforward.
3) Memory and memorialization of wars
The study coincides with some of the themes addressed by the AHRC-funded collaborative research project at UCL on 'The Reverberations of War' and, consequently, it is well-placed to benefit from the links and instances of public engagement created by them.
The public events are planned for January and July 2014.