Bücher der Reihe Historische Belgienforschung

Due to its unprecedented violence and unexpected duration, the First World War generated many complex and tragic experiences, which over time have been reinterpreted. Connecting past experiences with current memories of the war - in order to revisit in an interdisciplinary way Belgium's archival and literary, as well as material and monumental war heritage - is the goal of this book which presents the outcomes of the research project Experiences and Memories of the Great War in Belgium (MEMEX WW1).The following topics as part of the historical, psychological and memory studies are addressed: emotions and writing strategies in a war context and attitudes towards the Germans based on the diaries of Belgian soldiers and scholars; the memory of the war in the two fort cities of Antwerp and Liege during the Interbellum; the literary reception of Tom Lanoye's No Man's Land and the impact of the reading of some poems to current Flemish students. Another issue concerning the social representations of the war investigates the representations of soldiers as heroes or as victims among young Europeans. As for the impact of war centenary commemoration events, they are analyzed firstly through the iconology of the First World War illustrated on stamps and secondly through the effects of exhibitions and documentaries on young Belgians.

Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies offers a new comprehension of colonial history from below by taking remnants of individual agencies from a whiteness studies perspective. It highlights the experiences and perceptions of colonisers and how they portrayed and re-interpreted their identities in Africa. The transcolonial approach is based on egodocuments from Belgian, German and Swedish men and women who migrated to Central Africa for reasons like a love for adventure, social betterment, new gender roles, or the conviction that colonising was their patriotic duty.The author presents how colonisers constructed their whiteness in relation to the subalterns in everyday situations connected to friendship, animals, gender and food. White culture was often practiced to maintain the idea(l) of European supremacy, for example by upholding white dining cultures. The welcoming notion of "breaking bread" was replaced by a dining culture that reinforced white identity and segregated white from non-white people.By combining colonial history with whiteness studies in an African setting the author provides a different understanding of imperial realities as they were experienced by colonisers in situ.

Anlässlich der Debatte um die neue Bezeichnung Ostbelgien für die Deutschsprachige Gemeinschaft Belgiens wurde 2017 in der Tagespresse eine Einwohnerin der ostbelgischen Stadt Eupen mit dem Stoßseufzer zitiert, dass es mit Belgien "so eine Sache" sei. In dieser komplizierten "Sache" wurde vor gut einhundert Jahren, nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, ein neues Kapitel der deutsch-belgischen Geschichte aufgeschlagen und die VorausSetzungen für die Entstehung der heutigen Deutschsprachigen Gemeinschaft in Belgien geschaffen. Die Geschichte Ostbelgiens sowie die Besonderheiten der Beneluxforschung bilden einen Schwerpunkt dieses Bandes, der die Beiträge einer Tagung des Arbeitskreises Historische Belgienforschung in Eupen 2019 der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich macht. Daneben wird das Zeitalter der Weltkriege intensiv und aus verschiedenen Perspektiven behandelt, doch auch das 19. und das 21. Jahrhundert sind vertreten.Mit Beiträgen von Sebastian Bischoff, Max Bloch, Christoph Brüll, Andrea Ilona Debes, Klaas de Boer, Ulrich Dibelius, Winfried Dolderer, Andrea Hurton, Christoph Jahr, Carlo Lejeune, Bernd Liemann, Tatjana Mrowka, Jakob Müller, Peter Quadflieg, Christina Reimann, Ilona Riek, Christoph Roolf, Moritz Sorg, Adrian Stellmacher, Jens Thiel und Änneke Winckel.