Week 3 summary

So far in this course, you have traced issues of trauma and memory from the very early days of the First World War right up to the present day. But there is a further trauma to explore in the final week: the question of the origins of the war. This is a long-standing contentious issue, which is relevant to our topic not least because some of the arguments put forward allege that the war was futile or fought for the wrong reasons.

The suffering you’ve encountered in your studies of war would no doubt have been all the harder to bear if the reasons for it were unclear, if perhaps one’s own country had been to blame for starting the war, or if there was any doubt that it had been a war worth fighting in the first place.

In the final week of our course, we’ll turn to these contested views.