Measuring the present by the past and the past by the present is how modern societies use historical time to understand the world they live in. Historians make it their professional business to study the past for its own sake, to reconstruct an episode like the Great War as contemporaries lived and perceived it, even though they apply ideas and concepts coined with hindsight in order to do so. From the start, the Great War had commemorative power owing to its perceived status as a turning point in history. The lingering shadow of the culture of defeat helps explain the converse marginalisation of the war in contemporary Germany. The cultural history that has driven much of the scholarly interest in the Great War over the past twenty-five years has emphasised the local and the particular, the individual, the couple and the small group, as well as larger patterns of experience.