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Almost a hundred years ago, Europe was at war.
The German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium,
then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France.
Following the race to the sea, both sides dug in along a meandering line of fortified trenches,
stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier with France.
This line, the Western front, remained essentially unchanged for most of the war.
One of the great battlefields of the Western front was the south-west of Flanders.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque,
a German veteran of World War I.
The book describes the soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war,
and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.
The literal translation of "Im Westen nichts Neues" is "Nothing New in the West,"
with "West" being the Western Front; the phrase refers to the content of an official communiqué at the end of the novel
and has become a colloquial expression meaning stagnation, or lack of visible change, in any context: "There was nothing new to report on the Western Front".
Almost a century later, in 2010, the idea came up to set up a project of cultural heritage
at the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Great War.
This project was called "All quiet on the western front",
referring to the meaning of the book, but also as a call to never be quiet about this part of our history.
The focus was set on youngsters with a more technical and practical background
who might not be so familiar with historical facts in their everyday life
we wanted to make the link between World War 1 and Europe, because after the war the first stones were laid for a united Europe
Our goal was to make youngsters curious about how democracy and peace grew in Europe over the last century.
But we also wanted to know how they think about peace nowadays, and how they see peace-development in the next decades.
2012, after a year of intense preparation the project took off: 30 youngsters from 3 countries were interested to participate.
All of them 17-18 year old, living in Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland; Dorsten, Germany and Ostend, Belgium.
Later, by the end of October 2012, they met each other during an exchange in Ypres.
The first 2 days, they visited the Flanders Fields region to learn about the Great War and to hold remembrance ceremonies.
The trenches of Death in Diksmuide, The Pool of Peace, Messines Peace Tower, In Flanders Fields museum, Last Post at the Menin Gate.
Living history became living future. After a short introduction into the working of EU-institutions,
participants were asked to have a discussion about several European issues: what about a unified European army,
migration, peace, democracy and solidarity?
These subjects brought interesting discussions, and the participants learned to use arguments for their opinions.
Finally, on the last day of the exchange, they visited the European institutions in Brussels.
During the meeting in the Borschette Centre with Jean-Luc Dehaene, member of the European Parliament, and former Prime Minister of Belgium,
the youngsters asked questions about the same issues they talked about the day before.
There are things we should pass on to each other
Many of you want to preserve the lessons of your parents. Because there are wounds in your countries.
They have known the pain of separation, and looked the death in the eyes only as a result of the enmity between European leaders.
We must overcome these prejudices. This is difficult, because we must overcome our history.
But if we do not, then a principle prevails: Nationalism is war.
War is not only the past, it also could be the future.
We are, you are, ladies and gentlemen, the guardians of our peace, of our security for the future
The final step in this project is the feedback the youngsters will bring to their own local communities.
Their fellow citizens will see this film as part of a presentation, that reflects the experiences of their children visiting Flanders Fields, a century later.
We wanted to show that the periods of war were a lesson for the Western European history, to evolve to peace between the countries in Europe.
Harry Patch fought in Passchendale when he was just nineteen years of age.
Three of his friends were killed by the explosion of a single shell.
He was severely wounded in the same blast.
It was only after his 100th birthday that he began to talk about his war experiences. Patch was the last surviving veteran of the trenches.
He died in 2009.
The poppies are a symbol of all the soldiers that died in the war, so we laid down some flowers made of poppies at the Menin Gate
‘Always remember the other side of the line’, Harry Patch said during the Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate in november 2008.
It’s the aim of the project, it’s our aim, to remember both sides and to see that nowadays and in the future we need no sides no more.