Aufa100 book publication

The commission intends to celebrate its first lustrum (March 19th, 2025) with a book publication. This bilingual anthology will be published with an academically renowned house. 

Preface (concept)

Triggered by the appearance of a historic parallel at the end of the past century, I founded Forum2019 in Amsterdam. This parallel was to be drawn between military events or developments in defiance of a weakened Russia's legitimate security interests and the controversial history of Weimar, Paris and Versailles 1919. My thesis on Britain's colonization of the Paris conference during the 1918 Armistice's second prolongation was accepted at an unusual one-to-one session with the Netherlands' leading history professor. In anticipation of the First World War anniversaries (2014–2019), the name of this self-supported peace research and security policy initiative spoke volumes. I argued that forgotten chapters and commensurate lessons needed to be added to world-war-era curricula.

When the surprise of an all-American party on June 28, 1919, in Paris and Versailles revealed that the Europeans collectively failed to follow-up on the inclusive Armistice commemoration in the French capital, November 2018, I was flabbergasted. On this concluding day of the five-year anniversaries, Versailles was supposed the place to be. This experience of Europe's ignorance and historical amnesia culminated in the foundation of Aufa100. The old world's historians should prepare for a Felix Mendelssohn moment and this composer's rediscovery of Johann Bach's Matthew Passion after more than a hundred years.

On the occasion of this Transnational Commission for Reappraisal and Commemorative Culture's fifth anniversary (2025), we produced this bilingual anthology that is made up of two different parts. In their original form on our website, each of the elaborated 25 blogposts and essays marked a centenary event or development from the first post-war period (1921–1925). The 2021‒2025 kaleidoscopic series is preceded and completed by a couple of leading articles. In the English-language follow-up on the 2020 founding manifesto, the applicability of the appropriate thesis on the second thirty-years' war (1919–1945) is investigated. Given the ongoing controversy over the end of the First World War, we aspired to live up to all aspects of historical critique, last but not least the linguistic one, in alignment with Goethe's principle, 'Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.' In the concluding German-language article, the director's Forum2019 backstory shines through after almost thirty years of engagement in the Weimar/Russia debate.

Several Aufa100 members rely on a postgraduate degree in security policy. Time and again, the reader is invited to bridge the gap between history and politics. Without this interdisciplinary approach, it seems hardly conceivable to apprehend any contemporary occurrences in the realm of war and peace, East and West.