The Non-overshadowed experiences of the Great War and their manifestations in Lithuania, 1914-1926

ENAlthough the First World War was caused by tensions in Eastern Europe, quite a few historians, as if reaf-firming the words of Winston Churchill (1874-1965), have until recently portrayed Europe’s Eastern Frontas an ‘unknown war’. The remembrance of that war in the region remains particularly under-examinedand little investigated. For a long time, researchers knew next to nothing about how the Great War was remembered in the countries of East-Central Europein particular, Lithuania included, and many historians have argued that this remembrance simply did not exist. In a presentation given as early as 1998, Darius Staliūnas stated that in inter-war Lithuania‘ the focus was on those who perished in the fights for Independence, but not in the First World War’. Ten years later, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius claimed essentially the same thing: Lithuanians, he wrote, perceived the period of the Great War as a ‘passive experience’, which ‘was followed by the active engagement of the Wars of Liberation from 1918-1920’. Rasa Antanavičiūtė argued in a similar vein that Lithuanian' memories of the Great War were totally eclipsed by memories of the Wars of Independence’ and that Lithuania‘ represents a radical example of the almost complete oblivion of the Great War in public memory and commemoration’. Meanwhile, Tomas Balkelis pointed out several years ago that the oblivion surrounding the Great War was due not to the Wars of Independence, but to the conflict between Lithuania and Poland over Vilnius in the 1920s and 1930s, which became a major impediment to, or acompetitor of, the remembrance of the Great War.There is little question that the conscious emphasis placed on the Wars of Independence (1919-1920) in Lithuania overshadowed the importance of the Great War, at least for a part of Lithuanian society. This assessment, however, is based on the entire 22-year period of Lithuanian independence. I argue in the present paper that in the first decade, and especially before the coup of 1926, there was more room for manifestations of Great War experiences that were completely unrelated to the Wars of Independence. [Extract, p. 367]