The BMW Center for German and European Studies, in conjunction with the Department of German, held an event entitled, “Ottoman Perspectives on the First World War” on March 20. The goal of the talk was to shift the perspective of World War I from the dominant European-centered view to a more global perspective.

Mustafa Aksakal, a professor of Ottoman, Turkish and Middle Eastern history at Georgetown, delivered a lecture at the event. Aksakal’s most recent publication, “The Ottoman Empire,” appeared in the “Cambridge History of the First World War,” and he is currently at work on a new book, “The Ottoman First World War.”

Although not as widely acknowledged, the Ottoman Empire played a significant role in the war as a Central Power alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary. 2.5 million Ottomans died in the conflict, amounting to half of the total Middle Eastern casualties in the war. Aksakal claimed in his talk that although both the military and civilian losses of life were great, perhaps greater still was the loss of the Ottoman Empire’s social underpinnings.

“It is clear that the mayhem and suffering unleashed by the war incinerated the empire’s social fabric, assuring that it would take a long time, perhaps a century or more, before an integrated history could be written, a history that is not told exclusively as the story of a particular ethnic or religious group or of a particular region or battle, but one that ties together the many different threads of the war,” Aksakal said. However, compiling sources to accurately tell the Ottoman Empire’s World War I story has been a difficult task for historians.

“The limitation to the availability of primary sources has been an impediment. Access to the region’s military archives has been restricted, and as the literate segment of the Ottoman population remained in the single percentage points throughout the world, personal narratives by civilians and soldiers in letters and diaries are not sufficient to make up the gap in the record,” Aksakal said.

World War I has proven to be a defining historical event in shaping the modern Middle East.

“I would say that the war was central to several important formation processes in the region, in the shaping of Middle Eastern ethnic identity, in the reshaping of religious identities, the construction of state identity in the context of the Ottoman state’s disintegration and the artificiality of the state system that replaced it.” Aksakal said.

Attendee Peter Pfeiffer, professor in the German department, appreciated the event’s emphasis on uncovering the global aftermath of World War I.

“Recently there was a commentary in a German newspaper that made the point that the world really hasn’t come to terms with the First World War. It has more or less come to terms with the Second World War, but not really with the first. So these different perspectives I think are essential to try to think about this, and this was a perfect time for that,” Pfeiffer said.

The event was a part of the BMW Center’s “The War to end all Wars” 2014 lecture series, organized by BMW Center professors Anna von der Goltz and Peter Pfeiffer.

Von der Goltz explained that the lecture series is meant to explore World War I from literary and historical perspectives that give a more comprehensive view of the conflict.

“All [of] these events throughout the semester will look at many different angles of the war’s impact on the world,” von der Goltz said.