M8D2: Remembering the War at 100 This discussion addresses the following outcomes: · Assess the lasting effects and legacy of World War I in the 20th century and today It has been more than on

“We shall not sleep, though poppies grow”
                -Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, In Flanders Fields

As people around the world mark the centennial anniversary of World War I, they attempt to come to terms with the enormous loss of life generated by the conflict. Each participating nation is still struggling to find meaning in the sacrifices their ancestors made one hundred years ago. In many ways, this reflects the efforts to make sense of the conflict by those who lived through it, the so-called “Lost Generation.” 

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As you read about in the New York Times’ The Great War: A 100-Year Legacy of World War I (Links to an external site.), participating nations are currently attempting both to commemorate and comprehend the actions of their ancestors during the First World War. In Northern France and Belgium, the horrible technology of war is an ever-present danger, as civilians continue to accidentally uncover unexploded shells and pockets of weaponized gas. In Southeastern Europe, the ethnic and religious divisions that led to the assassination of a crown prince have only partially healed. Participating in the war shaped the founding narrative for soon-to-be created nation-states such as Turkey and Australia. Just as people around the world today attempt to make sense of the terrible death toll and radical redrawing of national boundaries, so too did a group of writers and intellectuals who came of age during the war.

The young writer Ernest Hemingway (Links to an external site.), a veteran of the war, popularized the term “Lost Generation” to describe the generation who experienced the war in their youth and were forever changed (Hemingway attributes the phrase to writer Gertrude Stein (Links to an external site.)). Hemingway, along with other young artists who came of age during the war, like T.S. Eliot (Links to an external site.), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Links to an external site.), James Joyce (Links to an external site.), and George Gershwin (Links to an external site.) exemplified the feelings of an entire generation through their works of art. These individuals were not lost in the sense that they were gone; they were lost because their experiences left them confused and directionless in the war’s immediate aftermath.
In the United States, the “Lost Generation” specifically refers to these writers and artists who expatriated to Europe after the war, primarily to Paris, France. While there, they produced much of the antiwar literature that has come to shape our modern perceptions of the Great War.
It was very difficult for the soldiers who witnessed the carnage of Europe to return home and reintegrate successfully into civilian life. These men had been raised with the values of the old order, the late 19th century. Now, however, they felt out of place and saw their childhood values as irrelevant, naïve, or foolish. As such, much of the writing of this period, particularly from Americans, speaks to the futility of war and its horrors and critiques the opulence and waste of America’s Roaring Twenties.
Together with works by French, British, and German authors, the Lost Generation painted a portrait of warfare devoid of honor, duty, or meaning. In works such as Hemingway’s 1929 A Farewell to Arms (Links to an external site.), Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front (Links to an external site.)), Vera Brittain’s 1933 Testament of Youth (Links to an external site.), and William March’s 1933 Company K, the tremendous sacrifices and lost treasure are juxtaposed against the futility and indiscriminate cruelty of modern warfare.