This comprehensive volume analyzes the radical change in the nature of armed conflicts and in the way they are narrated and represented. Ever since the First World War has changed war itself, rendering meaningless the very vocabulary of war in terms such as "battle", "front", "non-combatant", "open city" and "hero", new words, new approaches, new theories and new texts had to be invented. The enemy became invisible: Submarines, tanks, mines, gas, long-range artillery, and airplanes made this war different from all the other that came before. A hundred years after the beginning of this terrible war, it is now time to recall different representations of the armed conflicts of the 20th century. The articles in this collection analyze representations of the Canudos Civil War in Brazil, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the colonial wars in Africa, and the war in Afghanistan, aiming to understand how war and the telling of war have changed during the most murderous hundred years in the history of mankind.

The collection at hand is a subjective, but representative selection of articles in German and English on the representation of bellicose acts in modern times. The wide range of wars treated in these essays begins with the Canudos Civil War in the Brazilian state of Bahia in 1896-97. The various articles include new perceptions and interpretations of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, the Holocaust, the Second World War, the Korean War, the wars in the former Portuguese colonies of Africa, and the Balkan Wars of the last decade of the 20th century, and close with the current war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001. The wars discussed, although having different origins, such as national pride, territorial expansion, fanatic religiousness, ethnic and racial conflicts, great social differences, the process of decolonization, and terrorism, have one thing in common: their significant and constant repercussion in the print and broadcast media over a long period of time. These modern wars have therefore often been the object of new readings and reinterpretations until today. The history of these wars could not have been written without the development of journalism, the mass media, and new technologies of war reporting in the 20th century.