The War in Writing

How did we hear about the First World War in written words ? And why is it so necessary for us to know about it ? In an exhibition that looks like the cosy reading corner of the better bookstore or public library, the In Flanders Fields Museum invites you to find out.

No medium gives us better insight into the feelings and motivations. the expectations and disappointments, the propaganda and myths, the manipulation and awareness, the resistance and the opposition, the resignation  and the protest, and the destiny and perseverance of the generation from 1914 to 1918 better than the written word. Records, reports, historiography, press and trench newspapers, intimate diaries and correspondence, memoirs, poetry, novels, writers' pamphelets of writers, some famous and others just discovered, but just as often of seemingly anonymous soldiers and citizens are represented.

The War in Writing comprises hundreds of unique testimonies of four years of war on the front in Flanders, points out the enduring relationship between the texts of the past and the contemporary landscape of the front and warns, in the words of the generation of the First World War, against every instance of new threat of war. Never before have more texts from that period been brought together for reasons of their current and universal value.