Shrine: War Memorials and the Digital Age

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

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its "plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth" (Semmler) and "extremely powerful description of Gallipoli" (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an "Enduring Classic." Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey's "extraordinary memory" and "ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision" ("NBC" 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press's ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey's success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey's manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book's production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer's PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey's life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser).

1918 was a seminal year in the history of 20 th -century Poland – the country which, together with other Central and Eastern European states, gained independence as the Great War drew to an end. At the same time, the Great War does not appear to occupy a special and privileged place in Polish cultural memory. As a matter of fact, overshadowed by the trauma of World War II it is anything but an important site of memory. In the field of visual arts and literature the period 1914-1918 did not bring works which would be either formally ‘modern’ or would account for the tragedy of the war. It might well be stated that the eruption of modern means of expressions which were used by artists and writers to narrate the experience of the Great War – the phenomenon that can be observed in art and literature of many post-World War I European states – did not leave any substantial traces in Polish culture. On the contrary, if the Great War was represented in Polish art, it was done so in a highly traditional and academic fashion. What one may find surprising is not only a special conservatism of formal means applied to textual and visual narratives about World War I. What also calls one’s attention to is the semantic operation conducted in Polish post-World War I culture: the substitution of the Great War memory with the memory of 1914-1920. This extension of the conflict by two more years made it possible for the new Polish state to divert the social attention and concern from World War I to the on-going fights for Poland’s eastern border. It was the latter that became a climax – not only in Polish public discourse but also in war art and literature. While the rest of Europe was, at that time, erecting the tombs of the unknown soldiers that died in the Great War, Poland was erecting the tomb of the unknown soldier that died in the Polish-Ukrainian war. The present article wishes to investigate some selected works of literature, art and architecture from the period 1916-1926 so as to illustrate the above-mentioned processes of the use and abuse of the meaning and memory of the Great War – all in order to create a new culture of memory for a new state.

Пам’ять про Першу світову війну у монументальному мистецтві Польщі

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

This article examines differences of emphasis in Australia and New Zealand in the rituals of Anzac Day, the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915. Whereas Anzac Day in New Zealand is solemn, with a focus on the laying of wreaths and services at war memorials and churches, in Australia the day is distinguished more by marches of returned servicemen, cheered by large crowds. By exploring the emphasis on different components of what are shared rituals, on the march of the veterans and the laying of wreaths, the article aims to outline and explain how and why Anzac Day is more funereal in New Zealand. It proceeds to highlight the ‘NZ’ in Anzac through a study of myth, ritual, memorialisation, heroes, and reinvention, and finds that, contrary to accepted views, the conscription debate in Australia is insufficient to account for this divergence of emphasis in Anzac formalities from 1916. Rather the article suggests that the coincidence of the South African War and Australian Federation at the dawn of the twentieth century, different nationalisms, and political, social, and cultural disparities between the dominions provided the context for divergent scripts of remembrance and meaning enacted in Anzac Day rituals since the First World 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.

An empirical analysis of attendance at a commemorative event: Anzac Day at Gallipoli

This thesis examines the portrayal of the army nurse in commemorative stained glass windows commissioned between 1919 and 1951. In doing so, it contests the prevailing understanding of war memorialisation in Australia by examining the agency of Australia’s churches and their members – whether clergy or parishioner – in the years following World Wars I and II. Iconography privileging the nurse was omitted from most civic war memorials following World War I when many communities used the idealised form of an infantryman to assuage their collective grief and recognise the service of returned menfolk to King and Country. Australia’s religious spaces were also deployed as commemorative spaces and the site of the nurse’s remembrance as the more democratic processes of parishes and dioceses that lost a member of the nursing services gave sanctuary to her memory, alongside a range of other service personnel, in their windows. The nurse’s depiction in stained glass was influenced by architectural relationships and socio-political dynamics occurring in the period following World War I. This thesis argues that her portrayal was also nuanced by those who created these lights. Politically, whether patron or artist, those personally involved in the prosecution of war generally facilitated equality in remembrance while citizens who had not frequently exploited memory for individual or financial gain. Regardless of motivation, and unlike the Digger – who evolved from a tradition of using soldier saints to allegorise death during battle – the nurse’s portrayal in stained glass occurred without precedent following World War I. Hers reflected prevailing social and cultural attitudes towards women at war while simultaneously contesting the ascendant masculinity developing around civic remembrance. This thesis also challenges the belief that the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, is a secular space. Analysis of a complex series of symbolic relationships in its stained glass reveals that artist M. Napier Waller allegorised Devotion – the nurse in the South Window – as the Virgin Mary. Subverting his patron’s brief for realism, he equated the nation’s sacrifice with that of Christ’s and created a religious scheme of glass. Drawing on a commitment to tradition, architectural relationships and his own philosophical beliefs and life experiences, Waller also embedded other aspects of sacrifice and loss in the form of the nurse. In doing so, he covertly contested prevailing societal attitudes about women and war to rectify a significant omission from the Australian commemorative landscape. Her experiences during World War II endowed the nurse with a greater commemorative presence than her World War I forbear. Elevated from a position of passive femininity a generation earlier, a greater public awareness of her experiences and the increased agency of women in Australian society also contributed to a more central and prominent position in commemorative windows commissioned in the first five years after the war. Artisans of trade firms created windows that reflected a community’s desire to recognise the active sacrifice of the nurse in its memorial but used existing expressions of remembrance or the work of others to do so. However, artists – men with an academy education – drew upon the philosophical as well as the applied underpinnings of their art and designed windows in which the nurse became an active participant in war alongside the Australian serviceman. For M. Napier Waller, combat was not an experience to be valourised but an opportunity for atonement and enlightenment. Drawing again on the medieval foundations of his art and using the nurse as a powerful symbol for man’s resurrection and redemption, Waller cemented her status as Australia’s Martial Madonna – allegorical Virgin Mary and mother of the nation – in stained glass.

Few could have predicted that an ill‐fated landing of Allied troops in modern‐day Turkey in April 1915 would become the founding moment of the Australian nation. Australians were amongst several nations represented and did not suffer the most casualties, while the battle itself and the campaign of which it was a part was a military failure. Yet the notion that this battle constituted a “coming of age” for a nascent nation, and that Australian soldiers had exhibited the defining characteristics of a national type, has become a powerful — even hegemonic — story of Australian identity. Many analysts have pointed to the militaristic, masculine and mono‐cultural dimensions of a myth that weds the nation to a colonial past and in the process imposes limits on the ways in which we can imagine the nation and its role in the world. Yet as the Australian government geared up for the 2015 centenary of that landing — Anzac Day — with an unprecedented commitment of resources for commemorative activities, the shadow cast by the broader Anzac myth over Australian society and politics triggered surprisingly little public debate. This paper explores the key contours of the Anzac myth, examining the politics of Anzac memory and memorialisation in the context of the centenary of the Great War and the landing of Australian troops at Gallipoli.

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.

88 Health & History, 2015. 17/2 Exhibition Reviews Tracing the Wounded: A Reflection on Six First World War Exhibitions in Australian Museums Australia in the Great War Australian War Memorial Treloar Crescent, Campbell ACT, Australia Permanent exhibition on display in the First World War Galleries from 1 December 2014. Open 10am–5pm daily. https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/first-world-war-galleries/ Compassion and Courage: Doctors and Dentists at War Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne Level 2, Brownless Biomedical Library Grattan Street, Parkville VIC, Australia 24 April 2015 – 30 April 2016. Open Monday to Friday 10am–5pm, Saturday 1pm–5pm. http://medicalhistorymuseum.md hs.unimelb.edu.au/exhibitions Anzac Surgeons of Gallipoli College of Surgeons’Gardens, RoyalAustralasian College of Surgeons 250–290 Spring Street, East Melbourne VIC, Australia From 24th April 2015. Open 9am–5pm Monday–Thursday. http://www.surgeons.org/news/anzac-surgeons-of-gallipoli/ The Home Front: Australia During the First World War National Museum of Australia Lawson Crescent, Acton Peninsula, Canberra ACT, Australia 3 April – 11 October 2015. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/the_home_front All that Fall: Sacrifice, Life and Loss in the First World War National Portrait Gallery King Edward Terrace, Parkes ACT, Australia 27 March – 26 July 2015. http://www.portrait.gov.au/exhibitions/all-that-fall-2015 WWI: Love and Sorrow Melbourne Museum Nicholson Street, Carlton Gardens VIC, Australia 30 August 2014 for four years. http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/whatson/wwi-loveand -sorrow/; http://loveandsorrow.com/ Health & History ● 17/2 ● 2015 89 In the case of the First World War, the emphasis on those who lost their lives—on the dead not the wounded—derives not only from the sheer scale of the slaughter but also from the enduring landscape of memorialisation and commemoration. When John McCrae’s elegiac poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ is recited every Remembrance Day ... it is all too easy to forget that he wrote those lines not only to commemorate the death of a close friend but that he did so at Essex Farm Advanced Dressing Station. – Derek Gregory, ‘Divisions of Life’, 2015 How have the medical aspects of World War I (WWI) been acknowledged in commemorative exhibitions? This is the quest I created for myself as I set out to visit a number ofAustralian museums where exhibitions have been developed especially for the 2015–2018 centenary. As I went from museum to museum over a period of some weeks in mid-2015 I found both convergences and divergences in the way medical history was presented, and I also came to realise that the exhibitions I saw were cumulatively mapping out a geography of the wounded. One hundred years on, as historians challenge themselves to find new perspectives from which to interpret the Great War and its aftermath, increasing attention is being given to its damaged survivors. Scholars are addressing the ‘strange disappearance’ of the wounded from the field of battle once they are struck down, and their absence from remembrance rituals.1 They are unpicking the selfedited memories of veterans who aligned their personal stories to the dominant public narrative, and are questioning family mythologies that obfuscate the suffering, not only of veterans themselves, but of their loved ones as well.2 To a greater or lesser degree the museums I visited are embracing these new narratives and while only some of them specifically address personal trauma, the presence of the wounded and damaged is signalled indirectly in other exhibitions through the display of medical paraphernalia used to transport and treat them. In fact it is apparent that heritage collections acrossAustralia quietly represent the sick and wounded in many tangible ways, and that these artefacts of suffering are a match for the more conspicuous memorialising edifices built to represent the dead. If you read the small print on exhibition labels, as I did, you will find that material from different collections has been swapped backwards and forwards as curators borrow artefacts to suit their particular themes. Large government institutions—like the 90 EXHIBITION REVIEWS Australian War Memorial—have lent objects and images to university museums; volunteer-managed collections—like the Society for the Preservation of Artefacts of Surgery and Medicine (SPASM)—have lent to state...

We remember the past in order not to repeat it, but does remembrance of war in fact shape support for military or diplomatic approaches to international conflict? In seven samples from five countries (collected online, total N = 2,493), we examined support for military and diplomatic approaches to conflict during war commemorations (e.g., Veterans Day). During war commemorations in the United States, support for diplomacy increased, whereas support for military approaches did not change. We found similar results in the United Kingdom and Australia on Remembrance Day, but not in Germany, or France, nor in Australia on Anzac Day. Furthermore, support for diplomacy was predicted by concern about loss of ingroup military lives during war, independently of concern about harm to outgroup civilians. These studies expand our understanding of how collective memories of war may be leveraged to promote diplomatic approaches to contemporary geopolitical conflict.

Reviewed by: Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief Amy Shaw (bio) Suzanne Evans. Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief. McGill-Queen’s University Press. xii, 212. $29.95 The willingness of soldiers to put themselves in harm’s way for an intangible good, freedom and democracy, for example, or some more religious [End Page 362] goal, is and has been a key aspect of wartime rhetoric. The soldier’s altruism, however, is not the only form of selflessness that communities lionize. The soldier, a young man for most of history and this study, was somebody’s child, sent off by someone in the name of that higher cause. Suzanne Evans’s Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief takes a broad geographical and temporal focus to examine the way that societies have used maternal love and sacrifice as ultimate evidence of the righteousness of their cause. Evan’s introduction explains her motivations for this study. While a young mother herself, she was struck by an image of the ‘Intifada smile’: the serene pride of a mother who had just lost her child to martyrdom. Such a response seemed to go against all natural instincts, yet ‘the stories of women who publicly rejoice in the death of a child in support of their community have been told for centuries in the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Sikh traditions.’ She also shows that it has, once upon a time, had a very clear place in Canadian society. This study is a useful, provocative effort to trace these connections. Evans examines the social construction of the mothers of Canadian soldiers during the First World War and compares it to those of martyrs from religious traditions. She looks especially at the socially appropriate response of the mother of a soldier who had been killed. The image she finds is of one not broken and bereaved, but serene, tearless, and proud, the sacrifice of her son in a higher cause testament to the fact that she had raised him well, and testament as well to her own selflessness. It is a disturbing image, but, as she shows, also widespread enough to be iconographic. Evans discusses the importance ascribed to the maternal bond and shows how this response has been used politically to rouse other members of a society to stronger efforts in pursuit of a common cause. The major focus of the book is on the Canadian experience, specifically during the First World War. Evans examines the widespread recognition of it as a ‘holy war’ fought in the name of Christian, democratic, and pacifist ideals. She shows how mothers were encouraged to serve as recruiting agents for their own families, and how their stoic responses to their children’s deaths were publicized to shame others into their own, albeit lesser, sacrifices. She discusses the way that the limited franchise granted to women in 1917 was based not on war service, as is popularly thought, but on the notion of maternal sacrifice, and the subsequent sense that these new voters would support conscription and Borden’s Union Government. Evans goes on to discuss how notions of maternal sacrifice and bereavement have shaped both war memorials and Remembrance Day ceremonies after the wars. The generalized, cross-cultural focus has weaknesses as well as strengths. There is a sense of incompleteness at times; the emphasis on [End Page 363] showing linkages across time means that images have been marked out for inclusion at the risk of a certain loss of context. It is not a long monograph, and carrying a theme forward from the Maccabees to Canadian peacekeepers will result in some overgeneralizations. The effort to include a vast chronological and cultural spread also leads, at times, to some jarring transitions. The discussion of the efforts of the War Graves Committee to shape and control bereavement and the memory of the First World War, for example, slides rather suddenly to peacekeeping and Canada’s self-identity as a peacekeeping nation. But this is perhaps a historian’s quibble, less significant for scholars in religious studies, where...

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