The Great War continues to play a prominent role in contemporary consciousness. With commemorative activities involving seventy-two countries, its centenary is a titanic undertaking: not only the centenary to end all centenaries but the first truly global period of remembrance. In this innovative volume, the authors examine First World War commemoration in an international, multidisciplinary and comparative context. The contributions draw on history, politics, geography, cultural studies and sociology to interrogate the continuities and tensions that have shaped national commemoration and the social and political forces that condition this unique international event. New studies of Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific address the relationship between increasingly fractured grand narratives of history and the renewed role of the state in mediating between individual and collective memories. Released to coincide with the beginning of the 2014-2018 centenary period, this collection illuminates the fluid and often contested relationships amongst nation, history and memory in Great War commemoration.

Contents: Andrew Mycock/Shanti Sumartojo/Ben Wellings: ‘The centenary to end all centenaries’: The Great War, Nation and Commemoration – John Hutchinson: National Commemoration after the ‘Second Thirty Years’ War’ – Ben Wellings: Lest You Forget: Memory and Australian Nationalism in a Global Era – Roger Hillman: From No Man’s Land to Transnational Spaces: The Representation of Great War Memory in Film – Frank Bongiorno: Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion – Andrew Mycock: The Politics of the Great War Centenary in the United Kingdom – James W. McAuley: Divergent Memories: Remembering and Forgetting the Great War in Loyalist and Nationalist Ireland – Laurence van Ypersele: The Great War in Belgian Memories: From Unanimity to Divergence – Mark McKenna: Keeping in Step: The Anzac ‘Resurgence’ and ‘Military Heritage’ in Australia and New Zealand – Matthew Graves: Memorial Diplomacy in Franco-Australian Relations – Elizabeth Rechniewski: Contested Sites of Memory: Commemorating Wars and Warriors in New Caledonia – Matthew Stibbe: Remembering, Commemorating and (Re)fighting the Great War in Germany from 1919 to the Present Day – Sarah Christie: The Sinking of the : Gender, Nationalism and New Zealand’s Great War Remembrance – Guy Hansen: Museums and the Great War: A Curator’s Perspective on the History of Anzac – Christine Cadot: Wars Afterwards: The Repression of the Great War in European Collective Memory – Romain Fathi: ‘A Piece of Australia in France’: Australian Authorities and the Commemoration of Anzac Day at Villers-Bretonneux in the Last Decade – Shanti Sumartojo: Anzac Kinship and National Identity on the Australian Remembrance Trail.