'My war is not your war': The Bulgarian debate on the Great War - 'The experienced war' and Bulgarian modernization in the inter-war years

This paper explores how the experience of the First World War was represented and instrumentalized in inter-war Bulgaria in debates about social and political modernization and national identity. The main focus is on the memoir writings of a group of middle-class intellectual reservist officers. These authors constructed a generic conventional picture of trench warfare as 'the war of the mud', which in fact reflected their own subjective experience far more than that of the mass of peasant conscripts. A key intention of these texts was to fathom the roots of Bulgaria's defeat int he war, which was largely attributed to the peasant's pre-modern local attachments to family and village that prevented him becoming truly 'national-minded', though politicians were also blamed for failing to pursue policies of social solidarity that would have kept the peasant conscript content. The reservist officers were keenly interested in the social and psychological impact of the war and sought to draw lessons from their own war experience that would facilitate the establishment post-war of sound political leadership, social solidarity and a unified nation of modern patriotic 'moral individuals'. Official memorializing practices also sought to enact a sense of national solidarity by stitching individual victims and survivors into the national body politic, but there were tensions between this project and the intentions of the reservist officers. Memoir writing was thus also an attempt to garner social and political capital for these individuals and their social groups, and to create a space outside official political and military memory. The reception of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front demonstrated the tensions between these competing memory discourses, but also the public's resistance to all these elite narratives and receptivity to Remarque's fundamentally more pessimistic message. The intent of all these memory projects, however, was fundamentally ideological and future oriented.