The role of the WW1 commemorations in the national mythmaking

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The aim of the proposed research is to access the ways in which the commemoration of the WWI was used by forming, strengthening or transformingthe national myths for political aims and can be traced in the late 20th and early 21st-centuries Europe. WWI was a dramatic and politically definingevent in the history of the continent that still provides a springboard for the commemoration of later conflicts and shaping of national identities. The events of the centenary moved crowds in Western Europe, while the moderated celebration in Eastern Europe is also meaningful. The dissertation aims to reveal the differences of the national mythmaking derived from the WWI heritage in the traditional Western European democracies and the post-socialist countries. While the commemorations are integrated into existing national myths, they can also develop and transform these myths, since the traumatic experience of a war intensifies the nationalist feelings, which in turn encourages mythmaking. Therefore, the seemingly harmless, mournful or majestic practices of war commemorations carry the possibility of a misuse by the groups with extremist viewpoints. The examples of the comparison would come from the United Kingdom, France, the Czech Republic and Hungary, since they represent four different angles of the same war. The research will apply an interdisciplinary methodology on the heritage sites: discourse and content analyses, visual methods, geoinformatics and ethnographic research.