“My Country Has Betrayed the Memory of the War”: How the War in Ukraine Has Reshaped Popular Attitudes Towards the Memory of the Second World War

Shrine: War Memorials and the Digital Age

Memory as a battlefield: letters by traumatized German veterans and contested memories of 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.

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.

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.

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

Reviewed by: The Great War in Russian Memory by Karen Petrone Sam Johnson (bio) Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 385 pp. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-253-35617-8. In November 2008, I happened to be in Paris for a conference that coincided with Armistice Day, which remains a national holiday in France. A number of friends and colleagues attending the conference were from St. Petersburg, one of whom stumbled upon a service at Notre Dame Cathedral. It was, he told me with some astonishment, a ceremony devoted to World War I. Of course, coming from the UK, where the dead of the Great War still have well-kept spaces of remembrance in every village, town, and city, these events were of no surprise to me. Walking around Paris’s hushed streets, the impression was poignant and evocative, as I inevitably recalled my own ancestors’ part in that terrible conflict. As well as memorials, everyone in Britain has their own family tales to tell, passed through several generations. That my Russian colleague was startled to find this war so publicly and officially commemorated in the twenty-first century spoke volumes [End Page 444] about our differing paths in negotiating national memories of the past century. Nevertheless, while World War I may be less remembered today in the states of the former Soviet Union, in her well-researched and argued The Great War in Russian Memory, Karen Petrone shows that it was far from totally forgotten in the twentieth century. It has often been a convention to imagine that 1914−1917/18 was officially wiped from public discourse in the Soviet Union, its effect and meaning overshadowed by more grievous wars, not least the bitter fratricidal conflict that initially ran concurrent with the final months of Russia’s Great War. But, as Petrone observes, this approach is somewhat simplistic, for World War I did not suddenly or totally disappear from the Russian imagination. It retained a place, albeit for varying reasons, especially in the first two decades that followed its end. Focusing on public representation, Petrone analyzes a number of “contested” World War I discourses: religion, gender, violence, and patriotism. Divided in two parts (though this is only made evident in the introduction; it is not indicated in the contents), the study first looks at how the above themes were manifest in the Russian account and, in the second part, explores how they changed over time. Chapter 1 focuses on the Great War in Russian memory, starting with an insightful account of the origins and later fate of the Moscow City Fraternal Cemetery, which originally held 17,500 of the war’s dead, as well as 10,000 from the Civil War. In the 1930s, its church and grave markers were demolished, leaving a single monument, to Sergei Shlikhter, who died during the 1916 Brusilov Offensive. Chapter 2 considers the extent to which religion and spirituality featured in interwar accounts, while Chapter 3 looks at the paradoxes of gender, considering how the war was viewed as an arena for contested masculinities. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the extent to which war and violence were normalized in Soviet narratives, and how this, in turn, fed into definitions of Russianness. The final three chapters are concerned with the longer view of the war’s influence and legacy. Chapter 8 brings the fate of the Shlikhter memorial up to date, as Petrone considers memorialization in the post-Soviet era. Petrone’s purpose is not simply to examine the Great War’s resonance in Russia, but also to consider “the Soviet Union’s relation to interwar Europe and […] the rhythm of transformations in all Soviet discourse in the interwar period” (P. 20). For this reason, comparative Western European totems occasionally appear, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Wilfred Owen’s posthumous Dulce et Decorum est. [End Page 445] Most of the sources Petrone uses are literary and, for scholars of East European history, several familiar names recur: Il’ia Erenburg and Mikhail Sholokhov are the most well-known. The former, who wrote of his own experiences as a war...

War memorials are amongst the oldest memorials in the world. This paper provides a brief history of the way their function has evolved, focusing in particular on European war memorials constructed after the First and Second World Wars. It argues that, generally speaking, war memorials before the First World War were celebratory in character and served to underpin the authority of victorious leaders or nations. After 1918, they functioned often as crystallization points for collective mourning and remembrance. But the political interest in constructing celebratory war memorials remained, not least after the Second World War, as the example of the many Soviet war memorials erected in Eastern European countries demonstrates. However, this paper warns against understanding war memorials as immutable statements. Many memorials have undergone rededication, alteration, removal and reconstruction, and relocation during their history. This makes them significant as markers of political and cultural change.

The proposed article examines the place of commemoration of the Second World War in the urban space of modern Kharkiv on the example of memorials and monuments. In the Soviet and post-Soviet period, the memory of the war was reflected in the names of streets, memorials, monuments and other "places of memory". In particular, they are devoted to the war as a whole, as well as to its various events. They are dedicated to the heroism of Soviet soldiers, the tragedy of Polish officers and other victims of Soviet totalitarianism, the tragedy of the Jewish people – the Holocaust, the Ukrainian liberation movement – the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, etc. The article analyzes the changes that took place in the commemoration of the war after Ukraine gained independence. It is assumed that the modern Russian war will also have an impact on the memory of the Second World War in Ukraine and Kharkiv, in particular.

Reviewed by Neil M. Cowan The War Complex: World War II in Our Time. By Marianna Torgovnick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 193. $25. Marianna Torgovnick examines our collective memories of World War II and the conflicts that followed. Because questions not easily answered are posed at the beginning, her book is an interesting read. But it has a number of flaws. Torgovnick should have separated the subject of warfare from quite distinct subjects: her personal experiences on September 11, her assessment of various novelists who write about war, Adolph Eichmann and the Holocaust. The War Complex would have been more compelling had she done more than focus on cultural memories of World War II and our "altered state of consciousness produced by large scale war [that] can last beyond the end of hostilities" (p. xxiii). I believe that she could have constructed a stronger narrative had she understood how cultural memories of World War I and how it was fought had a direct impact on World War II and how it was fought. [End Page 834] Torgovnick is correct in saying that our cultural memories of World War II played a major role in shaping our consciousness throughout the cold war. Politicians in democracies and dictatorships captured and distorted that event to suit their own aims, leaving some of their audiences delighted, others in rage. People in Hollywood found out that a carefully crafted story about World War II could make for a fine film while also making them a great deal of money. But such a film can also reinforce a cultural memory of the war that is critically distorted and historically inaccurate. Torgovnick devotes two chapters to Eichmann, the architect of the plan that moved millions to the death camps and the Holocaust, but she should have also considered the man behind the massive bombing of German cities, the Royal Air Force's General Arthur Harris. If she had devoted less attention to Eichmann—simply another German robot—and examined Harris's conscience, her argument could have been taken down some very interesting roads. Harris knew that his bombing campaign killed millions of innocents; it also left a cultural memory of the vast efficiency of air power that carried into the cold war, Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq, even posing a temptation to use nuclear weapons once again. How we identify with war depends on our cultural background and what we have learned in school and from the media. In shaping the cultural memory of World War II in the United States, the media have deliberately protected Americans from its realities. What sane person wants to see the actual effects of combat and aerial bombing? In her concluding chapter, "Towards an Ethics of Identification," Torgovnick writes that "World War I made polite fictions about death difficult to sustain, World War II made them even more so." Yet if "polite fictions" about death in both world wars are actually the case, why do American politicians so often travel to Normandy to give speeches extolling the sacrifice American soldiers made in June 1944? Why do they continue to ask us for more sacrifices in the name of what they consider to be America's world mission? Neil Cowan is an independent scholar who specializes in oral-history interviewing. Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.

<i>The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia. Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution</i>