Prof. Dr. Jay Winter

To attend this online lecture, please register here:

https://eu02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Eqdeqoqz0oH9LINBOF9CXsj3ZOg5UyVrOa

The Day the Great War ended: 24 July 1923

Prof. Dr. Jay Winter

Yale University

Charles J. Stille Professor of History emeritus

Historians have now agreed that 11 November 1918 was not the end of the Great War.  War continued to rage for four more years throughout Eastern Europe and Asia Minor.  The day the Great War finally came to an end was 24 July 1923.  On the shores of Lake Geneva, Turkey and her former enemies signed the Treaty of Lausanne, ending the state of hostilities that had continued since 1914.

This lecture frames that story in terms of a new and disturbing phenomenon – the civilianization of war.  During the Great War and in its aftermath, war mutated.  The distinction between military and civilian targets was erased progressively, and non-combatants became the chief victims of war.  Until then, wars ended with an exchange of prisoners of war.  Lausanne was the first peace treaty which required a compulsory exchange of civilian populations.  Over one million Greek-Orthodox men and women lost their right to live in Turkey, and half that number of Muslims were deported forcibly from Greece.  In the Treaty of Lausanne, the right to citizenship was defined by religion, and religion alone.  There, on the shores of Lake Geneva, ethnic cleansing entered into international law.

Jay Winter is an historian of the First World War.  After many years teaching at Cambridge, he came to Yale where he is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History emeritus.  He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995), War beyond words: Languages of remembrance from the Great War to the present (2017), and The Cultural history of war in the twentieth century and after (2022), all published by Cambridge University Press.  He is the editor of the Cambridge History of the First World War (2014), and won an Emmy award as producer of The Great War and the shaping of the twentieth century (BBC/PBS).  He is a founder of the Historial de la grande guerre, a museum of the First World War in Péronne, France, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Graz, the Katholik University of Leuven, and the University of Paris.  In 2017 received the Victor Adler award from the Austrian state for a lifetime’s work in history.