ABSTRACT
Much less attention has been devoted to the question of how Europeans processed the experience of the World War I psychologically. This chapter focuses on the remembrance of massive death, and examines the phenomenon that George L. Mosse defined as the cult of the fallen soldier, also regarded as a civic religion. The European (and overseas) remembrance of the World War I seems to be relatively homogeneous, which proves the universality of the new commemorative culture. According to the obvious explanation, it was the impact of the “cultural demobilisation” following the war that contributed to the fact that not even the remembrance of military sacrifice took place in the spirit of heroism. Both the experience and the memory of the Great War had a long-lasting and deep influence on Hungary’s history, which took a fundamentally new path as a result of the eclipse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and the Peace Treaty of Paris of 1920.
