Eduard Frankl

he summer of 2019 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, signed between the victorious Allied governments and the defeated German Empire. Along with the related peace treaties signed with the other Central Powers, it marked the formal end of World War I.[1] The first great cataclysm of the twentieth century and the greatest shedding of human blood in history up to that point, World War I caused the deaths of an estimated ten million soldiers worldwide and an untold number of civilians.[2] As the victors worked to craft peace agreements and to reassemble a European continent and parts of Asia and Africa that had been torn asunder by the conflict, they grappled with myriad political, cultural, and economic problems. Vast multinational empires such as the Ottoman Empire had been broken up; new, ethnically based