The Armistice which ended the fighting between the Central Powers and the Entente Cordiale on the Western Trenches was signed on November Eleven, 1918 by Commander in Chief Ferdinand Foch of the Entente and Mattias Erzburger for Germany. By 1923, when the fighting had died down, over 140 million people had died of disease, persecution, famine, and war all tied together in a world of two billion people, the scale as if over 500 million people were killed by the same things today.
It is also coincidentally Conrad Von Hoetzendorf’s Birthday. Seriously.
Canada remembers it a lot like Britain does, with the additional change that it is seen as an element of developing the nation of Canada as separate from the British Empire and when Canada got the right to sit independently in the peace negotiations.
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I ride down a street named after Conrad von Hoetzendorf daily, so there’s that, I guess.
Let us say that it is a very complex situation. The traditional narrative sees it as the completion of the unification of Italy, with the annexation of Trento and Trieste; but in fact, it was clear from the outset that the war had left deep scars.
That immense carnage had, in fact, led to the social and economic collapse of the country, with widespread violence resulting in an authoritarian turn of the state represented by fascism. So nowadays there is a growing tendency to see it as a huge tragedy, an unnecessary massacre.
Not a thing at all, as we sat it out. Now completely forgotten, even though [the largest monument of our country](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgenmonument_(Amersfoort)#/media/Bestand:NIMH_-_2011_-_0013_-_Aerial_photograph_of_Belgenmonument_Amersfoort,_The_Netherlands_-_1920_-_1940.jpg) commemorates the internment of Belgian troops during world war 1.
Norway wasn’t particularly involved in it, thus we barely hear about it here.
The Second World War on the other hand.
We have armistice | remembrance day, which is literally today. I just bought my poppy
It’s a really big thing every year, it’s themed around the poppies that grew on the WW1 fields in France.
Old Soldiers with there medals on, cadets and volunteers all turn up in town and supermarkets and sell poppies and wristbands etc to for the royal British legion which is a army charity.
We do a 2 minute silence for the lost, and they lay wreaths at the war memorials, which every town or city has.
There’s probably a monument or two, but it’s largely forgotten, overshadowed by the revolution.
We sat ww1 out, so we don’t have anything to commemorate it or really think about it. It’s also one of the parts of history that tends to be rushed through in history class to get to ww2 and the cold war. The TLDR of it in history class is: that the Arch-Duke was shot which kicked off the war by a domino of alliances, we traded with everyone and made a lot of money (also the background of the term Goulash Barons), way too many died in trenches, Russian revolution, Germany gave up, the end.
The biggest thing we remember is the aftermath, because we got to reunify with parts of our lost lands in 1920 as a result of Germany’s defeat. The day of reunification (15th of June) is marked as an official flag day, and every year there are articles about the area and the historical context of reunification and what led up to it. But there aren’t any big nationwide celebrations or commemorations
(I’m being a bit overdramatic, but nothing too extreme)
From Polish perspective WWI is usually remembered as some kind of karmic semi-divine punishment for all our oppressors. The story is often retold as if God himself simultaneously destroyed all three empires that occupied us to save his chosen people. So the takeaway is that yes the war was awful, but they deserved every bit of that and then the result was this awesome thing (Polish independence) that happened. Basically it’s Exodus all over again.
Most of us don’t usually dwell on that though, if anything we just focus on celebrating the independence itself and honouring Polish partisants and soldiers. Some far right weirdoes will probably set something on fire in Warsaw again to spite Angela Merkel, but that’s just a loud minority.
Well, first of all we don’t call it “the Great War”, only WW1. And maybe surprisingly it basically doesn’t play any role in the German cultural memory at all, simply because WW2 overshadows everything.
The end of the war was the foundation of the first German republic (Weimarer Republik). The emperor abdicated, the Germans got a new and modern constitution and a democracy.
Unfortunately, the contract of Versailles also put so much strain on the German economy that it was a relevant factor for the first German democracy to fail, too.
But aside from it being a history lesson, it’s not relevant in general nowadays.
If you are talking about Armistice Day, we ignore that and have St. Martin’s Day instead. Especially in Styria and other wine regions, it is celebrated as the day when must turns to wine. So people get drunk, eat goose or chicken, etc.
Before ww1, Slovenia was not really on the map. Slovenes were citizens of the Austrian Empire. We lost the war, lost territories to Italy, got annexed by the kingdom that was behind the assassination of the heir to the throne and then even tho we just had a war, thousands of displaced civilians, disease and famine everywhere.. we attacked Austria with the Yugoslavs. We battled in Carinthia till 1920, which is still a very bitter memory for many Carinthians. Thousand years of living together and then it suddenly mattered which language you speak at home.. Families were torn apart, and it got much worse when the nazis came.
The Isonzo front happened in Slovenia as well and there are many trenches, bunkers, etc. still standing. There was a famous battle that we call the miracle of Kobarid, but the Italians supposedly call it the catastrophe of Caporetto. It was a terrible war, nothing great about it.
What matters is that we are friends today with all neighbours.
Ireland has a weird relationship with it. Some are proud of their communities who served (mostly Unionist tradition, but not always). Some see it as traitorous for Irish people to serve the British empire (a republican tradition). Others see it as folly (those fond of military neutrality).
It’s quite muted these days, but everyone is unified in the distress at how the UK goes crazy over poppies recently. Let it go, lads. Performative nationalism is gross.
It’s very present in France. The 11th of November is a bank holiday, there’s plenty of military parade on this day and the medias always talk about it. Then there’s also a lot of books, movies, tv coverage, memorials about how horrible this war was.
We didn’t take part as we weren’t a country for most of it.
Finland, then Grand Duchy of Finland under Russia had autonomy so we didn’t get conscripted. The Russians did however famously f*ck it up big time, so it was economically a hard time. Paired with Czar Nicholas II trying to take away Finland’s rights, people were pissed.
Our biggest contribution to the actual war was the Jaegers, who were Finnish men who went to get military training in Germany, they went on to fight the Russians on the eastern front.
Then the Russian revolution began, Finland declared independence and like 5 seconds later Civil war broke out in Finland between anticommunists and communists.
The war was quite short and relatively bloodless in the actual war, but thousands of people were executed on both sides. The ”whites” executed leading members and rebels seemingly by random, and every Russian who fought on the side of the reds was immediately executed. The red terror was smaller in scale and more random, but point being it was a messy affair.
The whites won with the help of Germany, and then declared a Kingdom with Kaiser Wilhelm’s brother-in-law as Finland’s king. And then the Germans lost the war, and having a German king in a time like that wasn’t a good look so the whole thing got scrapped and a republic was declared.
It was an incredibly messy affair and it greated deep division that lasted until the 1940’s. Nowadays the standard practice is to refrain from talking about it, and when talking about it, not to take sides.