Who fought for national freedom? On the significance of the Great War in interwar Lithuania

What is it about?

Even though the First World War was caused by tension in the east of Europe, not so long ago, quite a number of historians, as if repeating the words of Winston Churchill, tended to portray the Eastern Front in Europe as an “unknown war”. Not only was the war in the east little known, but the remembrance of the war in Eastern Europe remains little investigated. Lithuania is one of the countries in the region where for a long time nothing was known about the remembrance of the Great War. Many historians argued that this kind of remembrance simply did not exist. The article invites us to reconsider this statement by paying attention to the question of how the merits of different actors in the struggle for national freedom were interpreted and represented in interwar Lithuania. Instead of painting a monolithic picture of Lithuania, the article proposes to look at its society as a fragmented construct, whose different parts offered a rather ambiguous answer to the question.

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