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Sophie De Schaepdrijver: “The German Occupation of Belgium during the First World War”
Tuesday, November 17, 2015, 06:00pm - 07:00pm
About The Event
The First World War is commonly seen in terms of “front” and “home front,” but there was another dimension: that of military occupation. Vast swaths of Europe experienced the war under occupation. Their war was both total (because occupation cut deep into ordinary life) and marginal (because occupied populations could do little to influence the war’s outcome).
The German occupation of Belgium started with an explosion of violence against civilians, and then settled into more a routine regime of coercion, exploitation, and wary modus vivendi. Belgium offers a good vantage-point for the study of First World War occupation for several reasons. It was, at the time, the most densely populated country in the world; it was (and is) bilingual; the international symbolic stakes surrounding its conquest were enormous.
Occupied Belgium was the theatre of opposing efforts: even as the occupying regime sought legitimacy, occupied civilians saw their patriotic task as denying it legitimacy. This lecture will describe the resulting patriotic culture and its dissemination through underground channels. It will then go on to point out its paradoxes. Patriotic culture left hierarchies of class and gender largely intact. It was largely couched in the dominant language (French) only. And it was singularly inhospitable to one large group: the army-age men who had not been called up and found themselves marooned in the occupied country. For all that, during the war, civilian nonacceptance of the occupation regime remained resilient. Postwar disillusionments proved more corrosive.
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Category: Conferences, Shows & Panels
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