University of Kent, Canterbury, Grimond Lecture Theatre 1
If the First World War divided Europe into “fronts” and “home fronts,” it also created a third space – that of the lands caught behind enemy lines. Some 40 million civilians across Europe lived through the war under military occupation, in a space that was neither front nor home front. They were not in the firing line, but they suffered violence and occasionally inflicted it; they could not sustain their “own” armies in munitions factories or hospitals, but many were made to work for an invading army, while others actively resisted. All in all, military occupation was a baffling experience, and so, at war’s end, “liberated” civilians cast about for a way to make sense of it. Some offered lucid appraisals. Many sought answers in fervent cults to executed resisters, or clamoured for harsh repression of those who had “behaved badly.” Some blamed minorities. In the West, national narratives offered guidelines (not all of them spurious) to interpret the occupation. In the East, the tangled memories of the vanished empires’ successor states proved harder to sort out, all the more so as state borders remained violently contested. Occupied civilians were not the only ones with conflicting memories. For the erstwhile occupiers, too, the memory of the occupation regimes set up behind fighting fronts, for all that they had mobilized vast efforts, was too muddled to address head-on, and before long this memory became engulfed in rancour and silence.
The history of how these occupations came to be forgotten tells us a great deal about interwar Europe, or, for that matter, about Europe’s twentieth century. Today, it is time to revisit them, because they stood at the heart of the Great War in more ways than we realize - and because those military occupations help us understand “enemy rule” in our own time.
Sophie De Schaepdrijver, professor of modern European history at the Pennsylvania State University (USA), is 2016-2017 Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Kent, where she works together with historians of the First World War and with the Gateways to the First World War initiative. This is the sixth and last lecture in her lecture series “Enemy Rule: Seeing the First World War through the Lens of Military Occupations.”
She has published widely on the social and cultural history of the First World War. One of her recent books is Gabrielle Petit: the Death and Life of a Female Spy in the First World War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). It is the story of a young woman who on behalf of British GHQ spied on the German army behind the Western Front and was executed in 1916; it is also the story of how Petit came to be defined as a heroine and of how her memory faded over the twentieth century. History Today praised the book’s “fascinating questions about why we should remember and how such commemoration serves us.” The Times Higher Education called it “a model of how the cultural history of the war should be written.” Sophie De Schaepdrijver’s latest book, An English Governess in the Great War: The Secret Brussels Diary of Mary Thorp, co-written with Tammy Proctor, is due out with Oxford University Press this term.
Next to her academic work, she is active as a public historian. She has curated the historical exhibition Bruges in the First World War, has written for The Guardian online, offered comments for BBC Radio Four, and co-wrote and presented the prize-winning television documentary Brave Little Belgium.
