AT THE CROSSROADS OF MEMORIES

Memory as a battlefield: letters by traumatized German veterans and contested memories of the Great War

IntroductionThey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.Recited at many Anzac and Remembrance Day services, ‘The Ode’, an excerpt from a poem by Laurence Binyon, speaks of a timelessness within the inexorable march of time. When we memorialise those for whom time no longer matters, time stands still. Whether those who died in service of their country have finally “beaten time” or been forced to acknowledge that “their time on earth was up”, depends on your preference for clichés. Time and death are natural bedfellows. War memorials, be they physical or digital, declare a commitment to “remember them”. This article will compare and contrast the purpose of, and community response to, virtual and physical war memorials. It will examine whether virtual war memorials are a sign of the times – a natural response to the internet era. If, as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message, what experiences do we gain and lose through online war memorials?Physical War MemorialsDuring and immediately after the First World War, physical war memorials were built in almost every city, town and village of the Allied countries involved in the war. They served many purposes. One of the roles of physical war memorials was to keep the impact of war at the centre of a town’s consciousness. In a regional centre like Bathurst, in New South Wales, the town appears to be built around the memorial – the court, council chambers, library, churches and pubs gather around the war memorials.Similarly, in small towns such as Bega, Picton and Kiama, war memorial arches form a gateway to the town centre. It is an architectural signal that you are entering a community that has known pain, death and immense loss. Time has passed, but the names of the men and women who served remain etched in stone: “lest we forget”.The names are listed in a democratic fashion: usually in alphabetical order without their rank. However, including all those who offered their service to “God, King and Country” (not just those who died) also had a more sinister and divisive effect. It reminded communities of those “eligibles” in their midst whom some regarded as “shirkers”, even if they were conscientious objectors or needed to stay and continue vital industries, like farming (Inglis & Phillips 186).Ken Inglis (97) estimated that every second Australian family was in mourning after the Great War. Jay Winter (Sites 2) goes further arguing that “almost every family” in the British Commonwealth was grieving, either for a relative; or for a friend, work colleague, neighbour or lover. Nations were traumatised. Physical war memorials provided a focal point for that universal grief. They signalled, through their prominence in the landscape or dominance of a hilltop, that it was acceptable to grieve. Mourners were encouraged to gather around the memorial in a public place, particularly on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day each year. Grief was seen, observed, respected.Such was the industrial carnage of the Western Front, that about one third of Australia and New Zealand’s fatal casualties were not brought home. Families lost a family member, body and soul, in the Great War. For those people who subscribed to a Victorian view of death, who needed a body to grieve over, the war memorial took on the role of a gravesite and became a place where people would place a sprig of wattle, poke a poppy into the crevice beside a name, or simply touch the letters etched or embossed in the stone (Winter, Experience 206). As Ken Inglis states: “the statue on its pedestal does stand for each dead man whose body, identified or missing, intact or dispersed, had not been returned” to his home town (11).Physical war memorials were also a place where women could forge new identities over time. Women accepted, or claimed their status as war widows, grieving mothers or bereft fiancés, while at the same time coming to terms with their loss. As Joy Damousi writes: “mourning of wartime loss involved a process of sustaining both a continuity with, and a detachment from, a lost soldier” (1). Thus, physical war memorials were transitional, liminal spaces.Jay Winter (Sites 85) believes that physical war memorials were places to both honour and mourn the dead, wounded, missing and shell-shocked. These dual functions of both esteeming and grieving those who served was reinforced at ceremonies, such as Anzac or Remembrance Day.As Joy Damousi (156) and Ken Inglis (457, 463) point out, war memorials in Australia are rarely sites of protest, either for war widows or veterans campaigning for a better pension, or peace activists who opposed militarism. When they are used in this way, it makes headlines in the news (Legge). They are seldom used to highlight the tragedy, inhumanity or futility of war. The exception to this, were the protests against the Vietnam War.The physical war memorials which mushroomed in Australian country towns and cities after the First World War captured and claimed those cataclysmic four years for the families and communities who were devastated by the war. They provided a place to both honour and mourn those who served, not just once, but for as long as the memorial remained. They were also a place of pilgrimage, particularly for families who did not have a grave to visit and a focal point for the annual rituals of remembrance.However, over the past 100 years, some unmaintained physical war memorials are beginning to look like untended graves. They have become obstacles rather than sentinels in the landscape. Laurence Aberhart’s haunting photographs show that memorials in places like Dorrigo in rural New South Wales “go largely unnoticed year-round, encroached on by street signage and suburbia” (Lakin 49). Have physical war memorials largely fulfilled their purpose and are they becoming obsolete? Perhaps they have been supplanted by the gathering space of the 21st century: the Internet.Digital War MemorialsThe centenary of the Great War heralded a mushrooming of virtual war memorials. Online First World War memorials focus on collecting and amassing information that commemorates individuals. They are able to include far more information than will fit on a physical war memorial. They encourage users to search the digitised records that are available on the site and create profiles of people who served. While they deal in records from the past, they are very much about the present: the user experience and their connection to their ancestors who served.The Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War asks users to “help us build the permanent digital memorial to all who contributed during the First World War”. This request deserves scrutiny. Firstly, “permanent” – is this possible in the digital age? When the head of Google, Vint Cerf, disclosed in 2015 that software programming wizards were still grappling with how to create digital formats that can be accessed in 10, 100 or a 1000 years’ time; and recommended that we print out our precious digital data and store it in hard copy or risk losing it forever; then it appears that online permanency is a mirage.Secondly, “all who contributed” – the website administrators informed me that “all” currently includes people who served with Canada and Britain but the intention is to include other Commonwealth nations. It seems that the former British Empire “owns” the First World War – non-allied, non-Commonwealth nations that contributed to the First World War will not be included. One hundred years on, have we really made peace with Germany and Turkey? The armistice has not yet spread to the digital war memorial. The Lives of the First world War website missed an opportunity to be leaders in online trans-national memorialisation.Discovering Anzacs, a website built by the National Archives of Australia and Archives New Zealand, is a little more subdued and honest, as visitors are invited to “enhance a profile dedicated to the wartime journey of someone who served”.Physical and online war memorials can work in tandem. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Victoria created a website that provides background information on the military service of the 159 members of the legal profession who are named on their Memorial board. This is an excellent example of a digital medium expanding on and reinvigorating a physical memorial.It is noteworthy that all of these online memorial websites commemorate those who served in the First World War, and sometimes the Boer or South African War. There is no space for remembering those who served or died in more recent wars like Afghanistan or Iraq. James Brown and others discuss how the cult of Anzac is overshadowing the service and sacrifices of the men and women who have been to more recent wars. The proximity of their service mitigates against its recognition – it is too close for comfortable, detached remembrance.Complementary But Not ExclusiveA comparison of their functions indicates that online memorials which focus on the First World War complement, but will never replace the role of physical war memorials. As discussed, physical war memorials were sites for grieving, pilgrimage and collectively honouring the men and women who served and died. Online websites which allow users to upload scanned documents and photographs; transcribe diary entries or letters; post tribute poems, songs or video clips; and provide links to other relevant records online are neither places of pilgrimage nor sites for grieving. They are about remembrance, not memory (Scates, “Finding” 221).Ken Inglis describes physical war memorials as “bearers of collective memory” (7). In a sense, online war memorials are keepers of individual, user-enhanced archival records. It can be argued that online memorials to the First World War tap into the desire for hero-worship, the boom in family history re

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War

Статья посвящена общественно значимой роли памяти о Великой Отечественной войне и Победе в ней для многонационального культурного сообщества Северного Кавказа. Ее целью является рассмотреть состояние и эволюцию культурного пространства Северного Кавказа, в котором сложилось достаточно емкое отражение памяти о Великой Отечественной войне. В качестве культурного нарратива память о войне расценивается как инструмент преодоления постсоветских проблем региона и консолидации северокавказских народов на основе привлечения исторической науки, достижений художественной культуры, новейших технических средств коммуникации и гражданских инициатив. При опоре на концепцию исторической памяти, использовании хронологического и историко-сравнительного методов рассматриваются общие и специфические региональные практики, опыт развития методов и форм закрепления памяти о Великой Отечественной войне средствами монументального искусства в общественном сознании. Привлечены источники, свидетельствующие о неразрывности связи памяти поколений на примерах возведения в регионе общих мемориальных комплексов, посвященных участникам Великой Отечественной войны, воинам-интернационалистам и защитникам родной земли от международного терроризма. Историко-культурный ландшафт Северного Кавказа формируется также из материалов, связанных с деятельностью региональных архивов, музеев и библиотек. Благодаря их усилиям получили распространение новейшие методы информационного обеспечения персональных и массовых форм запросов о событиях и участниках Великой Отечественной войны. Новые решения в ходе увековечения памяти о войне в культурном пространстве региона коррелируются с социально-правовыми новациями федерального значения, в результате которых в настоящее время существует движение «Бессмертный полк», создан Национальный центр исторической памяти и принят Федеральный закон «Об увековечении памяти жертв геноцида советского народа в период Великой Отечественной войны 1941-1945 годов». The article is devoted to the socially significant role of the memory of the Great Patriotic War and the Victory in it for the multinational cultural community of the North Caucasus. Its purpose is to consider the state and evolution of the cultural space of the North Caucasus, which has developed a fairly capacious reflection of the memory of the Great Patriotic War. As a cultural narrative, the memory of the war is regarded as a tool for overcoming the post-Soviet problems of the region and consolidating the North Caucasian peoples based on the involvement of historical science, achievements of artistic culture, the latest technical means of communication and civil initiatives. General and specific regional practices, the experience of developing methods and forms of consolidating the memory of the Great Patriotic War by means of monumental art in the public consciousness are considered based on the concept of historical memory, chronological and historical-comparative methods. Documentary sources are involved that testify to the inseparability of the memory of generations using examples of the construction of common memorial complexes in the region dedicated to participants in the Great Patriotic War, internationalist soldiers and defenders of their native land from international terrorism. The historical and cultural landscape of the North Caucasus is also formed from materials related to the activities of regional archives, museums and libraries. Thanks to the efforts of cultural figures, the latest methods of information support for personal and mass forms of requests about the events and participants of the Great Patriotic War have become widespread. New decisions in the course of perpetuating the memory of the war in the cultural space of the region correlate with social and legal innovations of federal significance, as a result of which the Immortal Regiment movement currently exists, the National Center for Historical Memory was created and the Federal Law "On the Perpetuation of the Memory of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945" was adopted.

Мета дослідження – проаналізувати основні підходи до інтерпретацій поняття «історична травма», й окреслити основні виміри історичних колективних травм і підходів до їх подолання. Наукова новизна. Визначені основні інтерпретації поняття «історична травма» та спорідненого поняття «історична пам’ять»; окреслені міждисциплінарні підходи до вивчення історичних колективних травм; проведено порівняльну характеристику основних наративів, пов’язаних з історичними колективними травмами в європейському та російському суспільствах. Висновки. Виявлено, що дослідження «історичних травм» є відносно новим для істориків і має міждисциплінарний характер. Це поняття має численні варіації («культурна травма», «колективна травма», «міжгенераційна травма», «колоніальна травма»). З одного боку, це ускладнює його чітке визначення, а з іншого – дозволяє усвідомити важливі нюанси та певну спеціалізацію досліджень колективної травми в рамках власних підходів соціології, психології, філософії, культурології, історії та навіть біології. Визначено, що існують різні стратегії подолання історичних колективних травм. Виявлено, що європейські країни демонструють конструктивний (історична колективна травма перетворюється на історичний наратив) підхід, а Росія – деструктивний (формування агресивної ідеології). В європейських країнах здійснюються спроби подолати історичні колективні травми через створення відповідного історичного наративу без уникнення «незручних» тем. Виявлено, що російське суспільство, замість конструктивного опрацювання історичних колективних травм, пов’язаних з Другою світовою та Холодною війнами – націлено на формування образу нового/старого зовнішнього ворога (США, колективний Захід, НАТО, а тепер і Україна), що не тільки не сприяє компенсації старих травм, а й формує нові. Запропоновані приклади подолання історичних колективних травм в європейському та російському суспільствах ілюструють не стільки різноманіття підходів і стратегій «роботи над травмою», скільки специфіку цих суспільств. Фінансування. Статтю підготовлено в рамках проекту Європейського Союзу за програмою Еразмус+, напрям Жана Моне 620386-EPP-1-2020-1-UA-EPPJMO-MODULE TEMPUS (“Tailoring European Memory Politics for Peacemaking in Ukrainian Society”).

How the First World War has come to be remembered has, over the past two decades, become a major concern for British historians, eclipsing earlier scholarly preoccupations with war guilt and its political consequences, the impact of the war on social structure and the status of women, and the conflict's role in the rise of the modernist aesthetic. This article surveys both scholarship on the cultural legacy of the First World War in Britain and the debates about how the memory of this war – the ‘Great War’ – has either retarded its consideration ‘as history’ or spurred new, if not always entirely successful, modes of inquiry into the relationships among war, society, and culture. The article argues that memory of the Great War must itself be treated as history; that the meaning of that memory should be placed within the context of the changing events, ideas, and identities of the entire twentieth century; and that more scholarly attention needs to be directed at the popular reception of representations of the Great War by the population at large, and at the power of the various forms of media by which those representations have been conveyed to their audience and have thereby shaped memory of the conflict.

This chapter outlines the German memory of the First World War. It discusses collective memory, political culture and historical scholarship in the period 1918 to 1939, the Second World War, and since 1945. The memory of the war was increasingly a battleground in the final years of the Weimar Republic. The obsessive campaign waged against the ‘war guilt lie’ and reparations payments stood for nationalist Germany’s refusal to accept the consequences of defeat. Hitler and the German army learned the lessons of offensive warfare from the First World War and succeeded in combined, all-arms, mechanized, motorized operations (Poland, the West 1940, Barbarossa) which overcame the stagnation of trench warfare: ‘lightning warfare’ spearheaded by tanks and aircraft to ensure mobility. The memory of 1914 strongly influenced German warfare at the start of the Second World War. Keywords: First World War; German memory; lightning warfare; Weimar Republic

Part I. Framing the Issues 1. The politics of war memory and commemoration: contexts, structures and dynamics T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper Part II. Case Studies 2. Layers of memory: twenty years after in Argentina Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman 3. The South African War/Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902 and political memory in South Africa Bill Nasson 4. National narratives, war commemoration, and racial exclusion in a settler society: the Australian case Ann Curthoys 5. 'This is where they fought': Finnish war landscapes as a national heritage Petri J. Raivo 6. Remembered/Replayed: the nation and male subjectivity in the Second World War films, Ni Liv (Norway) and The Cruel Sea (Britain) Peter Sjolyst-Jackson 7. Postmemory cinema: second-generation Israelis screen the Holocaust in Don't Touch My Holocaust Yosefa Loshitzky 8. Hauntings: memory, fiction, and the Portuguese Colonial Wars Paulo de Medeiros 9. Longing for war: nostalgia and Australian returned soldiers after the First World War Stephen Garton 10. Involuntary commemorations: post-traumatic stress disorder and its relationship to war commemoration Jo Stanley Part III. Debates and Reviews 11. War commemoration in Western Europe: changing meanings, divisive loyalties, unheard voices T.G. Ashplant

The Great War generated the construction of many narratives and memories of the war, including a contested interpretation of the performance of French railways during the conflict. The French railways played a key role in the history of the First World War; French trains delivered ammunition, food, letters and a myriad of other items to the troops to ensure the functioning and morale of the troops. At the same time, the French artistic elite had transformed the images of trains departing to the battlefields into the symbols of the merciless war that had taken the youth to be sacrificed. Georges Duhamel's Civilization, 1914-1917 with its story of sixty trains running over the body of a soldier embodied the devastating effect of technology on humanity. In addition, some military historians presented their critique over the performance of French railways during the first days of the war and suggested that French railway companies could not abide to timetables to deliver troops to destinations. To counter this negative perception, the highly placed officials in the French railway companies, such as Paul-Émile Javary, A. Marchand, and Marcel Peschaud, published the detailed accounts on the contribution of French railways to the victory. They emphasized how many railway workers had lost their lives in the war and how essential the efforts of these companies were for the cause of victory. Moreover, railway companies organized train tours to former battlefields to educate the French about the scope of devastation in areas affected by the war. In conclusion, the article shows that French railway companies needed to take an active role in the construction of the memory of the Great War to avoid the false accusations of being among the perpetrators of the war.

In Belgium, memories of the World War I have contributed to the production and the perpetuation of a fractured national narrative. While the official narration emphasizes the unity of the Belgian state and glorifies the heroism of Belgian soldiers acting as a unified force against the German invader, a counter-narrative presents the Flemish soldiers as victims who were used as cannon fodder by the French-speaking commanding elite. In the immediate postwar period, newsreels largely reinforced the image of a national unity during the Great War. Ten years later, however, cinema took an active part in the production of a counter-memory. Met onze jogens aan den IJzer/With Our Troops on the Yser (Clemens De Landtsheer, 1928), a Flemish film, is a key work in this regard. This article first examines the narratives and formal strategies the film resorts to in order to forcefully deconstruct the patriotic narrative and to forge a ‘Flamingant,’ Flemish activist collective memory. It subsequently analyzes more recent French-speaking documentary film projects aiming to commemorate the memory of the Great War. Lacking any overt problematization of their relationship to the Flemish separatist narrative, the documentaries are still shaped by it. Indeed, they either attempt to overcome it by reinforcing Belgium's sense of national identity or to counterbalance it by putting forward a regional narrative that specifically revives the French-speaking Belgians' memory of the War.

Historians of Russia have not analyzed the roles that the memory of World War I played in Russian life, and Russia remains largely absent from comparative studies of the war and its legacy. Russian people did have “sites of memory” where they expressed myths, displayed symbols, and mobilized public opinion around the memory of World War I. Outside the Soviet Union, a non-Soviet Russian memory of the Great War flourished in the interwar years, and the war became an important memory that military émigrés used to overcome the rupture from the past (imperial Russia) and the present (Russian territory) caused by revolution and life in emigration. The war had a different expression in Soviet Russia, where journalists and publicists evoked its image, but not its historical content, to break the USSR from the Russian past and separate the first socialist society from its enemies in the present.

In Portugal, the development of a memorial project commemorating the First World War, from the treatment of physical bodies to their more or less symbolic (or more or less doctrinal) representations, did not achieve its intended results, in the sense that it did not succeed in consecrating Portugal as a participant of recognized standing and a victorious Allied nation. The memory of the war was clearly shaped by a dimension of tragedy and not by victory. This article will provide, via the dialectics between official and public memory, an in-depth analysis of the politics of memory as it manifests in official commemorative projects. It will examine the forms, pace of implantation and rituals carried out to renew the meaning of memory, as well as the underlying play of forces it is subject to, along with the way in which it establishes cultural and even political rupture or continuity. Through the observation of elements that constitute a war culture – images, language and practices – which emerged during and after the conflict, this study seeks to clarify the First Republic’s successes and failures in delineating and consolidating an official memory of the First World War in Portugal.

The topic of the Great Patriotic War remains relevant today and, to a certain extent, has a sacred character. The interest of scholars and researchers in studying the events of 1941-45 is particularly heightened during the anniversary years of the Great Victory Day celebrations. This article examines the historical memory of students regarding the Great Patriotic War. The subject of the analysis is the content of historical memory of the events of 1941-45 among different generations of students (using the example of students in the Altai Territory). Special attention is given to the justification for distinguishing students and school graduates as different generations of students. The article, using a survey method in the form of a questionnaire, as well as the method of comparative analysis and a generational approach, reveals the dynamics of the content of historical memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 among different generations of students. A sociological analysis revealed that young students maintain continuity in both the content of their historical memory of the Great Patriotic War and their assessments of the factors that contributed to its victory. A trend toward declining interest in the history of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 and the knowledge component of historical memory across different generations of young students was also identified. Unlike university students, high school graduates are less interested in the events of 1941-45 and possess less knowledge about the Great Patriotic War. The article describes the role of social institutions involved in preserving the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War. In particular, it notes a declining role for the family in preserving the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War due to a decline in the role of social practices in youth communication with their parents and grandparents. At the same time, it has been established that schools retain their position as a leading social institution in defining the substantive dominant of the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War for all generations of students. The article devotes special attention to recommendations aimed at minimizing the risks associated with preserving the historical memory of students.

On the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, memories of wartime pollution resurfaced. This study examines Ōkunoshima, a former Japanese chemical warfare site, through memory studies and tourism. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted over a decade including in-depth interviews, observations, research dialogues, symposia, and analyses of visitors’ comments and historical documents. Three pairs of dualities emerge from our analysis: the blending of dark history and contemporary tourism, ambivalent roles of victim and perpetrator, and the blurring of authenticity and (com)modification. We argue that the spatial and temporal transformation of the historical site into a tourist destination risks severing the site’s violent past from its commemorative function, encouraging willed amnesia and complicating Japan’s war memory, particularly the victim-perpetrator binary. Recasting the former military chemical factories on Ōkunoshima as a haven for cute rabbits aligns with a Japanese reactionary ecology mindset, which carries remnants of imperial wartime ideology. These dynamics continue to sustain Japan’s century-long silence regarding the environmental consequences of chemical warfare. Derived from ethnographic fieldwork, the researchers elaborate the concept of memory seduction to explain how constructed authenticity – shaped by tourism narratives – replaces direct historical experience at war sites.

The article offers a brief introduction to memory studies and the concept of collective memory with emphasis on the significance of this phenomenon, which coincided with discoveries in the humanities and deepened and expanded the spectrum of national cultures. The radical ideas of the Age of Enlightenment sparked self-reflection of nations and creation of imagined communities that eventually turned people into nations. New concepts of political coexistence, equality, freedom, and the distinctiveness and historical value of the national language and literature were published and made known to Lithuanians. The article dwells on the tsarist and Soviet Russian occupation policies on memory and national identity, modes of rewriting memory, the consequences of nearly two centuries of memory wars, the emigration situation, and the coexistence of the imagined communities. These imagined communities played a crucial role in constructing the nations and preparing them for independence. There were two imagined communities in the nineteenth century – the Lithuanian-speaking Lithuanians and the Polish-speaking Lithuanians who considered themselves Lithuanians, and two such communities in the twentieth century – the Lithuanians living in exile and the imaginary community remaining in Soviet Lithuania. It is such recurring patterns of society and recurring plots of events in memory preservation and memory wars that are discussed in the article. Upon the return of freedom of the press and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lithuanians discovered numerous unknown lands in the form of their culture that had been banned before. However, memory studies show that long-standing propaganda, press bans, and the rewriting of memory have not gone without consequences. The Great War and the struggles for independence that resulted in independence in 1918 remained in the margins of remembrance, although those events enabled the surge of national culture during the interwar period. The historical context of Central and Eastern Europe helps to see a broader panorama of common and relevant processes and to highlight the specifics of the Lithuanian situation, concluding that memory wars continue and deliberating whether memory culture can influence future prospects.