History: Rediscovering the Great War’s Christmas Truce

The course will begin with a discussion of the Christmas Truce or truces of 1914, and we shall attempt to reconstruct the events from the diaries and letters of soldiers and military reports. We will place the event in the context of the early months of the war and questions of morale on all sides. We will also assess how the truce was perceived, not always positively by the officer-class. Having established the veracity of the Christmas Truces, we will begin to trace how those truces are shaped by the popular imagination, art and literature in the postwar years.

This will then lead us to consider the need for mythic constructions of events, and why such popularly evolved myths possess the power, which they invariably do. In this analysis we will evaluate the morality of myth-making and its ability to speak truth, how in essence we as narrator-forming individuals seek out stories to explain and to understand the human condition. The course will be supported by selected text-extracts, photographs, illustrations and other mixed media, all of which will provide a vivid recreation and understanding of the event of the Christmas Truces. Ample opportunity for your participation in discussions of the subject will exist to enrich your exploration of this fascinating hiatus in the carnage of the Western Front.