Memory Of Great War Research Articles

HISTORICAL MEMORY ABOUT THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN UKRAINE: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

The aim of the work is to investigate the state and development of the historical memory of the First World War in Ukraine, to find out the reasons that led to the forgetting one of the bloodiest pages of Ukrainian history. The methodology of the investigation is based on using application of the principles of historicism and objectivity, which are important in the characterization of historical events related to the state policy and memory. The historical-genetic method allows to find out the path of the Great War memory in Ukraine. The historical-systemic method provides consideration of the socio-political processes in their interrelationship and cause-to-effect dependence. The scientific novelty consists in systematization of the processed literature and sources regarding commemoration of the First World War, its origin and evolution. The indicated archival documents were introduced into scientific circulation by the author for the first time. Conclusions: The First World War marked the end of the long XIX century and brought drastic changes in the political, social and economic systems of the world. It was a fratricidal war for Ukraine that had extremely important long-term consequences. This is a forgotten war despite more than 4 million Ukrainian participants and about 1,5 million dead people in modern Ukraine. Commemoration in the different countries differs. Though there are certain common trends. Most of participating countries, except for Eastern European countries, actively supported the memory of the dead from the very first years. However, on the territory of the former Russian Empire, revolutionary events and the memory of it displaced memories of the “imperialist” war. The end of the XX century becomes a turning point in the historical policy of individual countries and since 2014, interest in studying the history of the First World War in Ukraine has been actively growing.

Conflict and the Australian commemorative landscape

Australian war memorials have changed over time to reflect community sentiments and altered expectations for how a memorial should look and what it should commemorate. The monolith or cenotaph popular after the Great War has given way to other forms of contemporary memorialisation including civic, counter or anti-memorials or monuments. Contemporary memorials and monuments now also attempt to capture the voices of marginalised groups affected by trauma or conflict. In contrast, Great War memorials were often exclusionary, sexist and driven by a nation building agenda. Both the visibility and contestability of how a country such as Australia pursues public commemoration offers rich insights into the increasingly widespread efforts to construct an inclusive identity which moves beyond the cult of the warrior and the positioning of war as central to the life of the nation.

If these stones could speak: War memorials and contested memory

This article explores how war memorials engage with the contested nature of public sculpture and commemoration across historical, political, aesthetic and social contexts. It opens with an analysis of the Australian commemorative landscape and the proliferation of Great War Memorials constructed after 1918 and their ‘war imagining’ that positioned it as a national coming of age. The impact of foundational memorial design is explored through a number of memorials and monuments which have used traditional symbolism synonymous with the conservative ideological and aesthetic framework adopted during the inter-war years. The authors then analyse international developments over the same period, including Great War memorials in Europe, to determine the extent of their impact on Australian memorial and monument design. This analysis is juxtaposed with contemporary memorial design which gradually echoed increasing disillusionment with war and the adoption of abstract designs which moved away from a didactic presentation of information to memorials and monuments which encouraged the viewer’s interpretation. The increase of anti- or counter-war memorials is then examined in the context of voices which were often excluded in mainstream historical documentation and engage with the concept of absence. The selection of memorials also provides an important contribution in relation to the ideological and aesthetic contribution of war memorials and monuments and the extent of their relevance in contemporary society.

The Competition of Memories: The Commemorative Landscape of Polish Central Pomerania after 1945

This article answers the question how the situation of incorporation of Central Pomerania, formerly a German region, into Poland in 1945 affected the formation of its commemorative landscape. The author discusses how this affected the erection of new monuments after 1945, and if the example of German Great War memorials, erected here after 1918, had an influence on new Polish commemorative practices. A “competition of memories” is used here as the analytical tool. It is understood as a phenomenon that occurs in areas where two cultures are superimposed on one another, so primary commemorations are copied, employing the structures of the existing memorials, to produce secondary commemorations. Through an analysis of archival and fieldwork materials, the author examines the social practices of memory. The case studies are memorials recycled for commemorations connected to the Pomeranian Line and mythology of “recovery,” legitimising the incorporation of Central Pomerania into Poland.

Notre-Dame du Raincy and the Great War

In Notre-Dame du Raincy and the Great War, Etien Santiago explores how the 1923 church of Notre-Dame du Raincy, designed by Auguste and Gustave Perret, resonated with other French buildings erected during or soon after World War I. Officially designated a monument to a significant battle and the soldiers who died there, the church contains only two overt commemorative symbols, both of which are relatively discreet. Yet original sources reveal that the Perrets' contemporaries saw additional allusions to the war in the building's exposed concrete and bell tower, the latter of which evoked the “lanterns of the dead” typical of contemporaneous French Great War memorials. Moreover, to build Notre-Dame du Raincy, the Perrets drew direct inspiration from utilitarian wartime constructions. Contextualizing the church amid these related structures allows us to chart some of the multiple and often contradictory ways in which French citizens and designers grappled with the war and its legacy.

« Ceux qui pieusement sont morts pour la patrie… » : la poésie des monuments aux morts

On the Great War memorials are sometimes engraved some verses, which are generally poor and aesthetically backward-looking: these monuments obey to a democratic and civic logic, that implies the neutralization of any originality or modernism. But this poetry is also a means to include the recent conflict in the national history, with the quotation of French poets who have sung the wars of the 19th century. Victor Hugo’s “Hymn” is by far the most frequently quoted poem, particularly because of its ability to symbolically unify, in the name of patriotism, the revolutionary uprising and the defence of the territory.

Restoring Victory: Naval Heritage, Identity, and Memory in Interwar Britain.

In the decade following 1918, HMS Victory was restored as a memorial to the nation, empire, the Navy, and all the sailors who had lost their lives in the Great War. This piece of Britain's naval heritage became a focal point for Great War memory and a resource for narrating the Navy's place in post-war Britain. This article analyses the restoration campaign, focusing on its appeal work and the materials it produced, discourses surrounding the restoration and the use of Victory's oak to recover this ship's importance at the intersection between Britain and its Navy in the aftermath of the Great War, and the function that the Navy played in the construction of post-war memory and identity.

Acts of Remembrance: Canadian Great War Memory and the Public Funerals of Sir Arthur Currie and Canon F.G. Scott

Canadian public memory of the Great War was initially fragmented, centered around specific locations and events, before becoming more nationalistic in the 1930s. After the outbreak of the Second World War the public memory became more distant still from the experience of 1914-1918 although specific commemorations of the war remained most meaningful to those who had been directly affected. This paper looks briefly at Armistice/Remembrance Day rituals and uses the public funerals of two Great War heroes, General Sir Arthur Currie (1933) and Canon F.G. Scott (1944), to illustrate the changes in Canadian public memory after 1918.

Благоустройство и сохранение мест памяти первой мировой войны на территории Западной Беларуси 1921-1939 гг.

This article describes the process of preservation and beautification of military cemeteries and memorials of World War I on the territory of Western Belarus in 1921-1939. Aspects of cooperation between state bodies and public organizations are discussed. The author relies on the legislative acts and periodicals of that period, as well as modern literature and Web-sites of specialized public organizations. The article considers the main legislative acts that manage activities for protection and arrangement of sites of memory of World War I. The questions of the relation of the different people to memory of the victims of Great World are raised; examples of particular actions for its preservation on the territory of the Western Belarus in 1921-1939 are given.
 The author determines the role of World War I in the history of Belarus and its heritage. The article contains information about key battles on Eastern front, and also about features of burial of soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army. The special attention is paid to joint military burials where Russian and German soldiers were buried and which are symbols of posthumous reconciliation of hostile sides. 
 Various ways integration of sites of memory of Great War´s to modern military patriotic routes, which are urged to inform new generations about this grandiose conflict of the XX century, are considered.

Lay of a Last Survivor: Beowulf, Great War Memorials, and M.R. James's 'A Warning to the Curious'

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), legendary medievalist and author of some of the most highly-regarded ghost stories of all time, has received considerable praise and critical attention both for his academic work and his imaginative fiction, though scholars have only recently begun to investigate the deep connection between the two sides of his remarkable career. This article examines the long-overlooked connection between Beowulf (as well as its reception history) and one of James’s most well-known tales. Close attention to James’s medievalizing art not only reveals a narrative, thematic, and philological source of inspiration, but it more importantly allows for a reappraisal of the story’s uncertain and underappreciated relationship to the trauma of the Great War. It is argued in fact that ‘A Warning to the Curious’ is not a cautionary tale, despite its title and critical reception, but rather an elegiac ‘lay of a last survivor’: a story that reflects the painful position of one who served as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge in 1913-1915, who witnessed the destruction of a generation of men he had personally mentored and who, in the wake of the war, became a prime author in his nation’s effort to memorialize the fallen. This ghost story, much anthologized and admired for its atmospheric thrills, is in its own way both a war memorial and one of the last century’s most haunting acts of creative medievalism.

Complexity and Contradiction in Canadian Public Sculpture: The Case of Walter Allward

[The Great War] was a war of mass death in which massed men were fed for 1500 days to massed fire power so that more than 6000 corpses could be processed each day without letup. When it was over, 10,000,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed and mass death had become an acceptable part of the experience and values of European civilization. (Rubenstein 1983, 161) I feel that the unveiling of that monument [at Vimy] and all that was connected with it was really something more than the simple display of a great memorial. It has a tremendous bearing on our whole national development. (Scott 1936) The idea that is running in my mind is that it is through sacrifice that we achieve the spiritual things which your [word illegible] figures represent. (Col. H. C. Osborne to Walter Allward, December 12, 1928) Richard Rubenstein, quoted in the first epigraph above, was not writing inscriptions for Great War memorials. His expression of modern memory could never comfort the numbed, grieving nations attempting to reestablish themselves and their moral order after that War. The buried cries of those mourners are typically displayed in the remarks of Canon Scott and Colonel Osborne. War memorials--especially the Vimy Memorial that they are talking about--sought to voice the unspeakable within the discourse of comfort. (2) An array of elegant evasions enables this exercise. For vulnerable flesh, substitute bronze and granite. Upon the earthbound killing ground, raise a monumental elevation. To an audience wracked by grief, chant a hymn of sacrifice. Walter S. Allward's (1876-1955) memorial at Vimy, France, to Canada's Great War dead performs these functions on a gigantic scale. (3) Hundreds of tons of granite and reinforced concrete weighted with twenty allegorical figures (each of them, double-lifesize), flanked by two soaring pylons towering ten stories above a magnificent hilltop setting, ought to have a lot to say about what they commemorate. (4) The recent (April 9, 2007) TV coverage of the ceremonies marking the 90th anniversary of the Canadian Corps' assault upon Vimy Ridge threw images of the newly renovated and repaired Memorial into millions of Canadian living rooms. The background grandeur that the sight lent to the speeches, ceremonials, and color commentary reinforced the assumption that the statuary convincingly embodied a nation's grief and remembrance. Unnoticed went the possibility that the Memorial's proclamation of comfort amid tribulation remains in fact severely qualified and compromised. A lengthy series of monumentally inscribed statements--11,285 of them, in fact--insinuate a message at once starker and emotionally distant, a laconic registry of heartache and loss. Allward's forced inclusion on his memorial of 11,285 names of the Missing--properly read--undermines his allegorical grande machine of consolation, fostering contradiction rather than complexity in his statement. What we can term the failure of the allegorical is not confined to Allward's masterwork, but extends onward to his final public commission. The opacity of the chief allegorical figure that dominates the William Lyon Mackenzie Memorial at Queen's Park in Toronto (unveiled in 1940) conveys that failure in another fashion. Both pieces demonstrate that Allward's habit of allegorized discourse had reached the limits of its intelligibility. This exhaustion of attributed meaning helps account for the implosion of Allward's career as a public sculptor, an implosion that would haunt him for the decade and a half that he had left to live. His frequent applications to various potential patrons resulted in failure, itself a result of the passing of a symbolic discourse that had engaged him too fully. I A friend of Walter Allward's at Toronto's Arts and Letters Club wrote that Allward's 1898 visit to Paris involved more than romance: [T]hey honeymooned in Paris so that Walter could more closely examine the Rodin sculptures (Hopkins). …

Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (review)

Reviewed by: Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain Lisa M. Budreau Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain. By Janet S. K. Watson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83153-9. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 333. $70.00. Another book on Britain and Great War memory? No, not quite. This revisionist work represents the latest in the Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series under the editorial leadership of memory historian Jay Winter. In her somewhat provocative study, Janet Watson uses an exhaustive supply of published and unpublished texts (diaries, letters, poetry, public and private narratives) to challenge numerous claims concerning the war experience. Most significantly, she suggests that the disillusionment connected with the First World War was a postwar phenomenon, one gradually produced through the publication and popularity of memoirs and novels after the Armistice. "The war itself was overwhelmingly popular, and the nation came together to a remarkable degree [End Page 584] despite critical differences that reflected the nature of divisions in English society," she suggests (p. 2). This controversial stance is supported by an innovative two-part approach in which the author considers her evidence of wartime accounts as a lived experience separately in the first section, then examines retrospective accounts and postwar writings in the second half. Though primarily a study of gender and class dynamics, the analysis is comparative in several key ways. Watson looks at both women and men side by side, with special attention paid to families where both brothers and sisters were active in the war effort. Then, she examines two groups who brought different attitudes to wartime efforts: those who viewed participation as work and those who saw it as service. People brought a wide variety of attitudes to their efforts during wartime as the meaning of patriotism was constantly redefined. For example, professional soldiers and trained nurses, while patriotic, saw their efforts as work with a view toward career advancement. Munitions workers, by contrast, saw an opportunity for better wages and working conditions. For some, theirs was a job that had to be done while others believed king, honor, and glory were their supreme duty. Perceptions of class position played a crucial role in the way different types of war work were viewed, according to Watson. These views, in turn, were grounded in convictions about the preservation of social order in Britain's wartime class society. Interestingly, Watson concludes that people who had seen their wartime participation in terms of service were most likely to remember it as a story of disillusionment. Some aspects of Watson's argument are bound to provoke. She states, for example, "Without diminishing the terrors of trench bombardment or the total horrifics of mass advance into direct machine gun fire (though this was not fortunately, a frequent occurrence), we must acknowledge and give credence to other portrayals of the war experience which are not uniformly negative" (p. 50). Granted, most conventional histories begin with idealistic volunteers and end with shattered veterans and names on memorials. But, what about perspectives during the war? The author asks us to consider where the shift occurred from valuable contribution of soldiers during the war years toward the attitude of useless sacrifice? Without minimizing the considerable effort that has gone into this study, perhaps the book's greatest contribution to First World War scholarship is its ability to bring such questions of memory to the forefront of traditional military history enquiry. All credit to a work that is freshly researched and can genuinely be said to contribute so significantly to the field. Similarly, I applaud the Journal for its range and diversity by eliciting this new and distinctive historiographical genre for review. Lisa M. Budreau St. Antony’s College, Oxford University Oxford, United Kingdom Copyright © 2005 Society for Military History

Mark Connelly. The Great War Memory and Ritual: Commemoration in the City and East London, 1916–1939. (Royal Historical Society Studies in History.) Rochester, N. Y.: Boydell and Brewer for the Royal Historical Society. 2002. Pp. xii, 259. $75.00. ISBN 0-86193-253-6.

Mark Connelly. The Great War Memory and Ritual: Commemoration in the City and East London, 1916–1939. (Royal Historical Society Studies in History.) Rochester, N. Y.: Boydell and Brewer for the Royal Historical Society. 2002. Pp. xii, 259. $75.00. ISBN 0-86193-253-6. - Volume 35 Issue 2

Memories Carved in Granite: Great War Memorials and Everyday Life

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