Memorialising La Petite Guerre: remembering and forgetting World War I in Luxembourg

Zenner, Laura (2024) Memorialising La Petite Guerre: remembering and forgetting World War I in Luxembourg. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

War memorials constitute insightful resources and tools for historians and other scholars to provoke and answer questions in relation to war memorialisation, commemoration, and collective memory. Constructed with the intention to last, war memorials are visible and tangible artefacts within the rural and urban landscape that can illuminate the past, or at least one version thereof, as well as the present. This concept of viewing war memorials as objects to be studied, evaluated and critically analysed is applied in this PhD thesis in an attempt to assess Luxembourg’s memorialisation of WWI; a war that has for a long time been overshadowed by WWII to the point that it has been described as ‘la petite guerre’.

This thesis employs a phenomenological and biographical approach to examine war memorials, concentrating on specific case studies to construct their biographies from moment of inception to their present condition by synthesising results from conventional desk-based assessments and experiential fieldwork. Rather than only evaluating what is present and visible, and who or what is being remembered through these war memorials, attention is also given to how and to what extent WWI has been memorialised in Luxembourg since the interwar period, thereby also concentrating on what has been omitted and consequently forgotten. This allows to analyse and discuss how the post-war narrative is not only mirrored in the war memorials but how these memorials facilitated the propagation of said narrative, remaining uncontested for decades. Further, the biographies enable to highlight any alterations to the memorials and their surroundings over time, and to comment on their most recent chapter through observations gained during a phenomenological survey that is anchored in the here and now to assess their importance and meaning from a contemporary perspective. Apart from the biographies of selected WWI memorials, the main products of this PhD research are a comprehensive inventory of all identified WWI memorials in Luxembourg with corresponding location maps which will – hopefully – set the base for future in-depth studies in this hitherto neglected field.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: D History General and Old World > D History (General); D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D501 World War I
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities > History
• Supervisor's Name: Banks, Dr. Iain and Brophy, Dr. Kenny
• Date of Award: 2024
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2024-84700
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 11 Nov 2024 14:50
• Last Modified: 11 Nov 2024 14:57
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.84700
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/84700