Grand Illusions and the Great War: World War I Narratives

This chapter is about war drama and period drama focusing on the period 1900–1918, a time of great expectations that would turn out to be illusions. The chapter analyzes and compares period dramas, often family narratives, with a broader time perspective, and documentary and fictional war dramas seen from the perspective of soldiers at the front, their families on the home front or the political, strategic game behind the war. The two main examples analyzed are the German docudrama Tagebücher des Ersten Weltkrieges/Great War Diaries (2014), based on letters and diaries and mixing factual documentary elements with dramatized individual stories, and the British fictional period drama Parade’s End (2013), where war and modernity meets tradition and heritage.