Stories and letters from the Great War are disappearing as bad as the people that fought in it have. There have been a number of recent initiatives at stopping the loss, starting with the Great War Archive that began in 2008 by Oxford University in the UK. Their main interest at first was the poetry that came from the war, but has morphed into a call for donations of memorabilia in a digital form that would be in turn be freely available on the web. It is a far reaching attempt at education, remembrance, and a way to stop the loss of artifacts still in people's attics.
This program has reached Germany. Europeana, Europe's digital archive, has talked the German National Library into helping roll out the same scheme in Germany. So far thousands of documents, stories and pictures have been donated and are online now. It is a picture into a time that our grandparents and great-grandparents lived through, and it is sobering at the same time. Well worth a look.
