Ep.377 – Administration of Death

In this episode of the Western Front Association’s Mentioned in Dispatches, Kelsey Moriarty examines the bureaucratic and cultural processes that reshaped grief during and after the First World War.

Her thesis Kafka in the Trenches: Death, Bureaucracy, and the Written Record in Britain 1914–1920 explores how official letters, forms and memorials affected the experience of mourning. From government notices of death to the rise of street shrines, her research highlights how state systems collided with private grief and altered the citizen–state relationship.