Isn’t it a lucky coincidence that one of the pivotal yearly events on my blog (the AtoZ Challenge Theme Reveal) falls this year on my 7th blogversary?
I hardly believe it, but it’s been seven years since I started my blog. Seven years since that March 8 2014, when I finally talked myself into creating my own blog, no matter how crazy that idea sounded to me. 
I’ve come a long way, I can see it, and nobody is more surprised than myself!
The AtoZ Challnge has become a tradition of this blog. In April, the challenge takes over, a theme is chosen, and every day is dedicated to that theme. 

If you are unfamiliar with it, the AtoZ Challenge is a blogging challenge created by Arlee Bird in 2009, when he challenged bloggers worldwide to post every day except Sundays throughout April, following the alphabet’s letters. So, on April 1, a post devoted to a subject starting with A would go up. On April 2, it’s the turn of a post dedicated to a topic starting with B. And so on. 
In the beginning, that was it, but soon bloggers started to choose a theme that linked all their posts. Today most bloggers taking part in the challenge choose a theme that will inspire all of their posts. 
So, after a few years, a tradition started to announce one’s theme on a specific day. 

That’s what we are doing today. 

We are announcing that we are taking part in the AtoZ Challenge and what theme will inspire us through the month. 

Go here to see a complete list of the Theme Reveals. 

I have chosen a theme ever since the first time I took part in the challenge. 

Here are my themes from past years:

2015 – The Roaring Twenties
2016 – Jazz Age Jazz (1920s Jazz as a Social Phenomenon)
2017 – Film Noir
2018 – Weimar Germany
2019 – Berliner Cabaret
2020 – Living the Twenties (1920s Global Change)

And here’s my theme for 2021. It’s a subject I’ve contemplated covering for the past couple of years and always set aside, feeling I wasn’t ready to write about it. But this year, the time has come!

The Great War

Honestly, I never imagined becoming fascinated with war. 

I love history. This doesn’t mean that I love learning the pivotal events and their dates. What I love about history is its social side. How people lived and what they thought and felt. The way they behaved and why. The manners in which people from the past are unlike us, and especially why and how they are like us. 
I never thought this would apply with a war, which I saw mostly as a sequence of dates and events. Quite naively, I thought there must be very little to say about the social side of a war. 

When I wrote my Film Noir challenge, though, I had a first taste that war is actually a very social-relevant event. Many of that challenge’s entries were about how people reacted to the war (WWII in that case) and the change it brought about. 
Then, in 2018, after researching the American Roaring 1920s for some seven years, I moved my interest to Europe and fell in love with the history of the Weimar Republic. 
Now, it is perfectly possible to research the American Roaring Twenties and keep WWI out of it. Sure, the Great War did influence a few aspects of American life (for example, it had a bearing on the passing of the Prohibition laws), but it was something on the margins of all the change happening on that continent. The dramatic social changes that wash over American society in the 1920s mostly came from a different direction.
But when I came to 1920s Europe – man, it was impossible to ignore the Great War. I soon realised there was no way to research and understand 1920s European society without first understanding the Great War because everything was permeated with it. Every change, every aspect of life, every feeling and every thought in the inter-war years (a term I had never come across while researching 1920s America) where closely bonded to the Great War. 
So I finally cave in and acknowledge I should at least have a look at the major aspects of the war. 

I never expected to fall in love with it. 

But the fact, as I research it, I discovered the Great War was, above all, a social event. Far from being just dates of battles and movements of armies, it was an event that caused social earthquakes across Europe (and beyond) and changes that still influence our lives today. 

The more I dived into it, the more I understood the importance of this five-years event in the history and life of people across the globe, and especially of my continent, Europe. 

The Great War as a Social Event

It was called The Great War because no war had ever been so totally involving on a global scale. It could have been a local war. Everyone expected it to be. A war to settle local (although on a European scale) matters that would be over in a few months. 

It was not destined to be. 

The war gradually engulfed nations from inside and outside Europe and resources from all sectors of a nation’s society and economy. In terms of production and manpower involved, the war effort soon escalated to the point of changing everything that had been normal before. As the battlefields situation staled, all nations put more energy into producing the new armament. They thought this would positively turn the war for them – but eventually, it only transformed the conflict in the first ‘industrial war’. The Great War was the first where death and wounds and destruction happened not on a human but on an industrial level. People became just cogs in the wheels of a conflict that dehumanised everyone involved. 

Statistics differ, but they are always on a scale of millions of people affected by the war. 
Some of these statistics tell of 16 nations directly involved that mobilised 65 million soldiers. Of these, 8.5 million were killed, another 21,2 million were wounded, and 7,75 were captured or missing. To this, about 6 million civilian casualties have to be added.

It was a massive slaughter. No wonder the generation who fought it thought that must be the war that would put an end to all wars. Who would ever want to see another thing like that? 

The Great War (#AtoZChallenge 2021) Theme RevealThe Great War was a social upheaval that changed life as people in Europe and worldwide had known it for a century. That's where the 1900s start #WWI #history Click To Tweet

The war started in July 1914 and ended in November 1918. During this period, it caused changes that affected the conflict but also spilt into peacetime life once the war was over. Social changes that the long peace of the 19th century had kept at bay suddenly took over. Men and women’s social roles were forever changed, no matter how hard all societies tried to bring it back to before the war. The changes produced by the industrial revolution – both positive and negative – that the Victorian society had kept under control were established after the war.

The Lost Generation, who had come of age in the years of the war and had been educated for a Victorian life, found themselves to face a world they knew nothing about and they barely recognised. 

Everything had to be rethought and reconstructed. People had to figure out what the future would look like, and very few had any idea. In the inter-war years, the young generation experimented wildly the unnumbered possibilities the war had opened up while trying to come to terms with the disillusionment brought about by the horrible, inexpressible experience of war. 

Some historians think that such epochal earthquake only found its closure with WWII.
They consider WWI and WWII as one 30-years long war that started in 1914 and ended in 1946. A long civil war that whipped away the 19th century and everything associated with it. 

When the war was over in 1946, the world had an entirely new face that no Victorian person would have recognised. 

A – Anti-Semitism
B – Battlefield Medicine
C – Civil War
D – Desertion
E – Environment
F – Field Nurses
G – Gas
H – Homoeroticism
I – Influenza
J – Journalism
K – Kaiser
L – Lost Generation
M – Masks
N – Neutrality
O – Occultism
P – Psychology
Q – Quest
R – Radio
S – Shell Shock
T – Trenches
U – Unexpected
V – Veterans
W – Women
X – X Hour
Y – Youth
Z – Zone