In addition to texts, pictures and material culture testimonies are important sources for the historian, which can help him to communicate historical facts to a broad audience. They represent windows to the past, that must be interpreted and processed like written sources. This requires historical expertise.
As part of the Landing History on the reel project, students and researchers of the Institute for History at the University of Luxembourg have the opportunity to process texts, images and film extracts into film clips.
This is done with the support of the Mediacentre of the University of Luxembourg.
The air raid of June 18th, 1916
Luxembourg City was bombed several times during World War I. One of the Allies’ key targets was the railway station. As bombs were, at the beginning of the war, still dropped by hand, they often missed their target, repeatedly hitting residential buildings and shops in the station district. Places where those bombs hit, and the damage they caused, were fascinating to the city’s inhabitants. Picture postcards were a popular means of communication in the early 20th century. During the war, postcards showed pictures of destroyed homes, often with people posing in front of them. Using contemporary postcards and a press article, the filmclip documents the air raid of June 18th, 1916.