War Monuments Research Articles

A Tale of Two Cities : Monuments of the Great Patriotic War in St. Petersburg and Moscow

A Tale of Two Cities : Monuments of the Great Patriotic War in St. Petersburg and Moscow

Pomnik Wdzięczności Armii Radzieckiej w Lidzbarku Warmińskim

The article presents the history and morphological interpretation of the gratitude monument in Lidzbark Warmiński. The monument was built in 1949 in honour of the Soviet soldiers that were killed during the World War II. The project was made by WiktorTucewicz, and the new monument was located in a place where, until 1945, there stood a First World War monument. Initially the new monument took the form of a pyramid, and in 1972 sculptors Jan WiesławKaczmarek and Hubert Maciejczyk added to it a group of soldiers. In 2016, the Town Hall of LidzbarkWarmiński decided to dismantle the monument. The form of the monument consists of symbolic (pyramid) and narrative (soldiers) parts. The enlargement of the monument, its cubic form, the addition ofa new form (wings) – was all typical for Polish sculptural development after 1945

Remembering war, remaining Soviet: Digital commemoration of World War II in Putin’s Russia

World War II held and retains a unique place in Soviet and post-Soviet historical memory. Scholars have generally studied the legacy of the war from the perspective of political and cultural elites. This article uses Russian digital commemoration to assess contemporary memory of World War II from a social perspective. A macroanalysis of I Remember, an interview and social networking site, and Pomnite Nas!, a site with user-contributed listings of war monuments, shows how popular memory of the war reiterates and updates Soviet historical narratives. Supported but not initiated by Vladimir Putin’s government, these sites show how state and society are interacting in Russia to produce and reproduce memory of the war. The article contributes both to methodological discussion of the internet as a source for memory studies and the fate of the Second World War in Russia.

Second World War monuments in Yugoslavia as witnesses of the past and the future

ABSTRACTMemorializing the victims of the Second World War was an important part of the cultural and political propaganda in the socialist Yugoslavia. The heroes and the victims of war were remembered through numerous memorials, finding their place in the collective memory of the Yugoslav people. During the socialist period, many school excursions were arranged, but for more than 20 years these memorial sites were dropped from tourist and educational programmes. Today, after the passage of time, it is possible to discuss a complicated collective past. In this paper, the phenomenon of the Second World War memorials, their significance in the socialist Yugoslavia, their decline during the 1990s and increasing popularity at the beginning of the twenty-first century are considered. By analysing the way contemporary society experiences socialist memorials, it can be further considered how they can be represented as an important part of cultural heritage. The main purpose of this research is to point out the significance of memorial parks in Yugoslav socialist society, as well as to define their status today and finally to suggest ideas for their interpretation and presentation today.

Роль некоммерческих организаций и гражданских инициатив в сохранении исторической памяти о Великой Отечественной войне

The article is devoted to analysis of the role of non-profit organizations and civil initiatives in preserving historical memory of the war and protection of historical facts from falsification. The author provides examples of Russian social organizations with the primary purpose of perpetuating the memory of heroes and events of the war years, moral and patriotic education of the youth, and the education of citizens. Historical memory of the Great Patriotic War is one of few factors that unite the majority of the population of Russia, irrespective of religion, education and social status. Victory in the Great Patriotic War is a source of pride for all citizens of Russia, and an event uniting state and society. Active citizens, leaders of local authorities, representatives of trade unions and voluntary movements, religious leaders and just concerned citizens take part in activities to support veterans and to perpetuate the memory of the war. Among the most important social events, activities and events dedicated to the Victory Day celebration, the author highlights the Immortal Regiment and St. George Ribbon campaigns, activities for the conservation and protection of war monuments, moral and patriotic, and cultural and educational activities in numerous nonprofit organizations jointly with the state. In conclusion, an assessment is provided of the activities of the third sector to preserve and protect the historic memory of the war, as well as prospects for interaction between the state and civil society for the preservation of common historical memory.

North Carolina's Heritage Protection Act: Analyzing the Cementing of Confederate Monuments in North Carolina's Landscape

Even in 2015, the North Carolina landscape is densely populated with Confederate monuments, appearing in more than half of the state’s one hundred counties. The state has more monuments honoring the Civil War than any other event, with five Civil War monuments for every World War II monument. Most of these structures were erected between 1890 and 1930 and many are located on public property, commonly found in and around courthouses, town squares, graveyards, and University campuses. In July of 2015, North Carolina enacted the Heritage Protection Act (“HPA”). This law severely restricts the removal, relocation, or alteration of any monument located on public property. While neutral on its face, North Carolina’s Heritage Protection Act was enacted for the purpose of protecting Confederate monuments. This Recent Development argues that the North Carolina Heritage Protection Act creates a lack of accountability on behalf of the N.C. General Assembly, usurps powers of local governments, and is amorphously vague as to what objects it applies to. Clarification of the statutory language by the General Assembly as well as a provision allowing for the erection of plaques that contextualize these monuments within local history is needed. Analysis proceeds in three parts. Part I of this Recent Development briefly sketches the propagation of Heritage Protection Acts across the South, outlines the North Carolina Heritage Protection Act, and highlights ways the North Carolina statute differs from other states. Part II discusses the confusing nature of this statute and analyzes legislative history to offer insight as to: (1) what role the North Carolina Historical Commission plays, if any, in deciding to permanently remove or relocate monuments; (2) whether this statute applies to county or city owned monuments; and (3) what constitutes a “display of permanent character.” Finally, Part III argues that this statute is in need of clarification and a provision that provides for plaques that contextualize these monuments within their local history. A brief conclusion follows.

Cold War and Soviet Army Monuments in China and North Korea

중국 동북지방과 북한에는 다양한 유형의 소련군기념비들이 많이 존재한다. 이 기념비들의 대부분은 1945년부터 1957년까지 세워진 것이다. 이 연구는 이들을 둘러싸고 있는 역사적 시간과 기념의 시간의 질서를 검토하고, 이들의 의미의 변화를 밝히며, 나아가 소련군기념비가 중국과 북한의 기념문화에 미친 영향을 동아시아 냉전문화 연구의 맥락에서 질문하고 있다. 초기 소련군기념비는 ‘해방’과 ‘추모’를 표현하기 위한 것이지만, 1950년대 중반에는 ‘전승’과 ‘우의’를 나타내기 위하여 건립된 것으로, 이들은 한국전쟁 이후에 북한과 중국에 세워진 전쟁기념비들에 영향을 미쳤다. 냉전기에 발생한 소련과 중국의 갈등, 북한의 주체사상은 동북아시아에서의 소련군기념비들의 역사적 중요성을 약화시켰으나, 탈냉전과 함께 소련군기념비는 동유럽과는 달리 국가 간 우호와 협력을 확인하는 역사적 기억의 터로 재활성화되고 있다.

Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II by Annegret Fauser, and: The Musical Legacy of Wartime France by Leslie A. Sprout (review)

Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II. By Annegret Fauser. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xv, 366 p. ISBN 9780199948031 (hardcover), $39.95; (e-book), various.] Music examples, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France. By Leslie A. Sprout. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music, 16.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. [xxiii, 280 p. ISBN 9780520275300 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520955271 (e-book), $65.] Music examples, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. While the Second World War once loomed as hard caesura in twentieth-century musical life, two recent books reveal the wartime years as anything but silent. Annegret Fauser's Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II and Leslie Sprout's The Musical legacy of Wartime France expose the often-surprising continuities between musical life before, during, and after one of the most disruptive periods in human history. Despite significant disparity between the wartime experience in the United States and France, much can be gained by reading Fauser's and Sprout's books with an eye toward overlapping concerns and productive tensions. In treating an era recent enough that numerous survivors remain to enrich the historical record with their testimony, both books necessarily contend with the issue of selective memory. For Fauser, the iconic sounds of the American experience during the Second World War mainly derive from popular sources: Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrews Sisters. Yet classical music also played significant role in the war effort, and the context of the war defined the sounds of classical music in crucial ways that we have forgotten (sometimes intentionally). Fauser advocates defamiliarizing the soundscape of this (p. 9) to get past sonic representations in popular culture that distort the historical record. Sprout, too, excavates what are often intentionally suppressed memories about the soundscape of the war. She focuses on the fraught and at times perilous wartime experiences of France's most prestigious composers, including several whose wartime music became iconic in the postwar era. In Sprout's account, aesthetic choices, historical narratives, and critical debates typically understood as exclusive to the postwar period are recontextualized as echoes of musical politics during the war. Taken together, the work of Fauser and Sprout corresponds to the second phase of postwar critical trajectory theorized by Maja Zehfuss (Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011]). In the first phase, society memorializes the recent past in order to move on from (or remember) the finer details of pain and suffering experienced during the war. Constructing war monuments and consecrating battlefields, throwing ticker tape parades, and publicizing award ceremonies--these all involve what Zehfuss suggests is more about forgetting than remembering (p. 63). Eventually, however, the opposite is necessary: scholars like Fauser and Sprout find themselves in position of haring to forget or challenge layers of unreliable memory in order to remember the finer historical details of the war--including uncomfortable truths that contradict received narratives. For Fauser and Sprout, such truths include the politicized framework in which music was produced and consumed; the propaganda value that classical music held for the governments of the United States and France, just as it did in Nazi Germany; and the continuing influence of Depression-era institutions and policies on music making during the war. Fauser opens Sounds of War not in 1939 but in 2009, with the performances of Aaron Copland's wartime music that took place in Washington, D.C. around President Obama's first inauguration. The continued relevance of that music to listeners in 2009 (in the middle of another war) and its use as a political gesture rallying Americans . …

David, King of Israel, and Caleb in biblical memory

1. Slings and arrows - remembering King David 2. Flesh and stone - from war monuments to the David story 3. King of Judah - the earliest account of David's life 4. Tales of loyalty and betrayal - the cases of Keilah and Ziph 5. The bones of Saul - the loyalty of the Gileadites 6. Uriah the Hittite - a tale of royal modesty 7. Ittai the Gittite - mercenary allegiance versus national solidarity 8. David in exile - priests, statehood, and the Benjaminites 9. Territorial transitions - the Transjordan, Israel, and Judah 10. Chronicles - David as a catalyst of national unity 11. Caleb and the conquest - inventing a new hero 12. Caleb the warrior - the evolution of legends 13. Caleb the Judahite - an iconic figure 14. War-torn David - conclusions.

“The First of Our Hundred Battle Monuments”: Civil War Battlefield Monuments Built by Active-Duty Soldiers During the Civil War

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] New York Times was wrong in more than one respect when it heralded dedication of two monuments to Union fatalities at First and Second Manassas with its June 13, 1865 headline, The First of Our Hundred Battle Monuments. Those two memorials (see pp. 37-39) were predated by at least four, and possibly five or six, memorials that were erected on Civil War battlefields by active-duty soldiers during war to mark where their comrades fought and where some were buried. These wartime memorials represent earliest efforts to commemorate Civil War combat and combatants and earliest attempts to mark Civil War battlefields for posterity. Their history illuminates sentiments of soldiers who memorialized their very recently fallen comrades and heroic events of war on very ground where historic actions occurred. However, these monuments have received little attention from historians of war and collective memory it has spawned. soldiers' sentiments, and manner in which they expressed them, reveal much about veterans, about Civil War-era American culture, and about why Civil War battlefields have become sacred ground deserving preservation and interpretation. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Colonel Francis Bartow (1816-1861) was shot through chest while leading Seventh Georgia Volunteer Infantry regiment in first major battle of Civil War at Manassas, Virginia, on 21 July 1861. He died moments later and is generally recognized as first brigade commander to die in war. His wife was in Richmond and learned news from Mrs. Jefferson Davis. Bartow had been an avid secessionist, a member of Confederate Congress, Georgia House of Representatives and state Senate. fatherly Bartow was popular with his predominantly youthful troops, some of whom called themselves Beardless Boys. (1) Bartow's body lay in state in capitol at Richmond and later was buried in Savannah's Laurel Grove Cemetery. Soon his comrades initiated efforts to mark spot where he fell--activities that were covered by southern press, but not by New York Times. Southern newspapers reported that Eighth Georgia's officers ordered a plain, round marble column to mark spot where Bartow fell. (2) Melvin Dwinell, a second lieutenant in Rome Light Guards, Co. A, Eighth Georgia, and editor and proprietor of Rome Tri-Weekly Courier, said the Shaft is plain white marble, six feet long, four feet above ground and about eight inches in diameter at top. (3) [See Sidebar.] This print pictures monument as somewhat taller and broader than post Dwinell recorded, and about twice diameter of stone's base (p. 27), which remains on battlefield today near twentieth-century monuments to Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson, who earned his nickname at this spot. But roll of drum reminds us of our wandering ... According to Melvin Dwinell, a second lieutenant in Rome Light Guards, Co. A, Eighth Georgia, and editor and proprietor of Rom Tri-Weekly Courier, at about eight in morning of 4 September, Eighth Georgia left Camp Bartow at Manassas Junction and marched seven miles to battlefield, arriving before 11 AM. Dwinell says that on arrival, they stacked arms and were dismissed until necessary arrangements could be completed for raising shaft, or, perhaps, it would more properly be called a post. Dwinell was an excellent writer, and his ruminations as he ambled around battlefield while waiting for ceremonies to commence are a telling commentary of what must have been on minds of many soldiers who had first seen elephant, as Civil War soldiers referred to their first battle experience, just six weeks earlier. Consequently, they are worth quoting at length to illuminate soldiers' sentiments and to set stage for dedication ceremony for first Civil War monument: Only 7th and 8th Regiments of this Brigade were in battle . …

‘Our Russian Passport’: First World War Monuments, Transnational Commemoration, and the Russian Emigration in Europe, 1918–39

The existence of so many Russian war monuments outside Russia adds a new dimension to our understanding of the memorialization of the First World War, for such memorials were found not in Russia but in European countries where Russian emigres made lives for themselves after the 1917 Revolution. The construction of war monuments promised to be a good way to manage important aspects of the personal and public bereavement that Russian people faced in European diaspora in the interwar period. Emigres, moreover, also used war memorials as a means to signify their right to belong to a common European experience, and elites in countries like France, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia integrated Russia’s war, through the emigres, into national commemorative practices. This article shows that transnational values like international friendship, wartime alliance, and solidarity across national and ethnic boundaries could be important parts of the commemorative culture of the war in nation-states across interwar Europe, even in Germany. Without these transnational features of First World War remembrance, which both encouraged the emigres to build war monuments and to some degree impeded their appearance in the Soviet Union, there may not have been Russian monuments to the war anywhere at all.

Eugene Onegin the Cold War Monument: How Edmund Wilson Quarreled with Vladimir Nabokov

The tale of how Edmund Wilson quarreled with Vladimir Nabokov over the latter’s 1964 translation of Eugene Onegin can be instructively read as a politically charged event, specifically a “high culture” allegory of the Cold War. Dissemination of anti-Communist ideals (often in liberal and literary guises) was the mandate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose funding and editorial initiatives included the publication of both preRevolution Russian literature and, more notoriously, the journal Encounter (1953-1990), where Nabokov’s fiery “Reply” to Wilson appeared. This essay outlines the propaganda value of the Onegin debate within and to Cold War mythology.

Exile on the Commercial Strip: Vietnam War Memorials in Little Saigon and the Politics of Commemoration

Exile on the Commercial StripVietnam War Memorials in Little Saigon and the Politics of Commemoration Erica S. Allen-Kim (bio) In 1999 Consul General Phong Xuan Nguyen denounced the creation of a Vietnam War memorial in Orange County, California. Although dozens of memorials have been constructed since the dedication of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, the memorial in Westminster caused particular offense to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam because of its depiction of a South Vietnamese soldier. In a letter to Mayor Frank Fry, Nguyen argued that the project would “dredge up a bitter past … that both sides have decided to leave behind.”1 In a bid to take control from the Vietnamese refugees funding the project, he suggested replacing the proposed South Vietnamese soldier with a North Vietnamese, thereby transforming the project into a monument to reconciliation between the two nations. In an interview published in the Orange County Register, Nguyen argued, “We should have a statue that represents our relationship today.”2 At stake was not only the communist country’s recently acquired standing with the United States but also its tenuous relationship with Vietnamese refugees. The completion of a memorial by the largest Vietnamese community in the United States challenged the existing discourse on Vietnam War commemoration.3 As the first officially designated Little Saigon, a term that broadly refers to an overseas Vietnamese community but in this case specifies a tourist and redevelopment zone, Westminster’s Little Saigon is considered the capital of the South Vietnamese diaspora. Prominent members of the Little Saigon business and political community initially envisioned a memorial that contrasted sharply with American and Vietnamese narratives of the war that marginalized the contributions of South Vietnamese veterans (Figure 1).4 Dedicated in 2003, it is the product of nearly thirty years of predominantly suburban community formation by Vietnamese in the United States. Two years later, a second memorial funded by Vietnamese Americans was installed in a shopping center’s parking lot in southwestern Houston (Figure 2).5 Both of these projects appropriate suburban space to make claims about the war’s legacy for Vietnamese refugees within a transnational context. They do so by countering the absence of South Vietnamese veterans in American Vietnam veterans’ memorials and the bulldozing of South Vietnamese military monuments and cemeteries following the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. In response to the official histories produced by the United States and Vietnam, Vietnamese refugees imagine their collective identity as political exiles through explicit references to other Vietnam War monuments in the United States.6 The two memorials critique the invisibility of South Vietnamese veterans and their implied inferiority to the American military. They also participate in the resurgence of overtly didactic monument designs since architect Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was selected in 1981.7 Architectural historian Dell Upton notes that Lin’s black granite wall inscribed with the names of American casualties has spurred the recent period of “energetic commemoration,” in which monument builders negotiate between [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Westminster Vietnam War Memorial, Sid Goldstein Freedom Park, Westminster, California, dedicated 2003. Photograph by Erica S. Allen-Kim. Courtesy of Tuan Nguyen. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Houston Vietnam War Memorial, Universal Shopping Center, 11360 Bellaire Boulevard, Houston, Texas, dedicated 2005. Photograph by Erica S. Allen-Kim. Reproduced with permission from Thong Pham. [End Page 32] symbolic and literal truths by presenting what they claim are authoritative interpretations.8 In the case of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial, additions of an American flag and two figurative sculptural groups, Frederick Hart’s Three Soldiers (1982-84) and Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial (1984-93), illustrate this impulse toward didacticism. The memorials in Westminster, California, and Houston, Texas, also participate in this didactic commemorative impulse. More specifically, they express the anticommunist ideology that has dominated the Vietnamese refugee community and shaped its cultural landscapes.9 Their respective siting—in a civic center and in a shopping center parking lot—indicates the extent to which refugees have established a presence in suburbs, where the majority...

“Mississippi’s Greatest Hour”: The Mississippi Civil War Centennial and Southern Resistance

“Mississippi’s Greatest Hour”The Mississippi Civil War Centennial and Southern Resistance Alyssa D. Warrick (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution When Congress authorized the Civil War Centennial Commission to plan events and steer state and local organizations towards commemorating the war, Mississippi quickly organized a commission to encourage events within the state, due to its importance as the home state of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and as the site of one of the most important Confederate defeats, Vicksburg. Civil War monument, Vicksburg, Mississippi, courtesy of the Library of Congress. [End Page 95] On Tuesday, March 28, 1961, the overcast clouds above Jackson, Mississippi, parted just around ten o’clock in the morning. Shortly after, drummers took to their instruments to send off the color guard at the beginning of the parade. Behind them, stretching for six miles, were three thousand men dressed as Confederate soldiers, collectively known as the “Mississippi Greys.” Cheers rang out when the Jackson Central High School Junior rotc unfurled the largest Confederate battle flag in the world, owned by the University of Mississippi. After the two-hour parade, Governor Ross Barnett, clad as a Confederate officer, performed as his 1861 counterpart in a dramatized reenactment of Mississippi’s secession convention. As five thousand Mississippians watched in the halls of the Old Capitol, Mississippi symbolically left the Union once again. Mississippi’s official commemoration of the centennial of the Civil War had begun.1 The United States had been preparing for the Civil War centennial since 1957, when Congress authorized a commission, appropriately titled the Civil War Centennial Commission (cwcc) to plan events and steer state and local organizations towards commemorating the war and especially the men involved. Mississippi quickly organized a state commission to plan and encourage events within the state, due to its importance as the home state of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and as the site of one of the most important Confederate defeats, Vicksburg. From the outset, Mississippi’s commission had a clear goal, evinced by its name. The Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States (mcwbs) was unapologetically pro-Confederate, though willing to acknowledge, however begrudgingly, the Union victory. But the commissioners did not wish to fight the war again; rather, the commissioners urged Mississippians to “honor dedication and devotion, courage and honor, integrity and faith” of the men who fought in the previous century. The mcwbs focused on the fighting generation’s character as necessary lessons for children and adults alike. The Civil War centennial was more than just recognition of a central event in American history. It was more than simple nostalgia for an imagined Old South. The numerous parades, the pageants and balls, and the multitude of reenactments and commemorations around the state collectively reinforced ideas of a moral fiber that would save the South from a host of “-isms”: liberalism, communism, socialism, pacifism, and atheism. The story of the Civil War centennial commemoration has been a subject of recent inquiry by historians Robert J. Cook and David Blight. Cook studied the commemoration from a national standpoint in light of the Cold War; Blight examined the works of four prominent historians of the day. Jon Wiener analyzed the centennial events in the context of the Civil Rights Movement in addition to the Cold War. The national scope of these works causes them to miss a dominant theme from the Centennial that is best seen at the state and local level, particularly in Mississippi. The events from 1961 to 1963 in the Magnolia State shed light on [End Page 96] how one generation of men, born before 1920, and who benefited from the rabid white supremacist rhetoric and policies of men like Governor James K. Vardaman, used the anniversary to impart similar anti–Civil Rights (and, by their own extension, anti-communist) values onto the next generation of Mississippians.2 The Civil War Centennial did not create a new spirit of resistance for southerners, but it arrived at a critical moment. As returning veterans, often young, arrived home from Europe and the Pacific, they began making inroads in their communities as business leaders and politicians. Yet the four men who defined Mississippi’s Centennial period—Commission...

Speaking Monuments: Henry James, Walt Whitman, and the Civil War Statues of Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Although James's first published response to Whitman's poetry, an 1865 review of Drum-Taps, was dismissive, he expressed a profound affinity with the poet later in his career. This essay considers how his reading of two volumes of Whitman's correspondence in 1898, in particular The Wound Dresser letters, are crucial to James's reevaluation of Whitman and may be seen to be exerting pressure in The American Scene (1907). Through also examining a key event of the year previous, when James's Civil War memories were reignited by the dedication of the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston, I suggest reasons for his changed relation to Whitman's aesthetic project. My argument focusses on how Whitman's epistolary and poetic treatment of the wounded body reformulated vital representational and emotional issues for James, and made Whitman an active presence for him during his 1904–5 American sojourn. James makes no explicit comment about Whitman when he details his journey in The American Scene, yet the poet's influence can be felt in the way James writes about recently erected Civil War monuments by Saint-Gaudens, in New York and Boston, and Whitman is also acknowledged by the stylistic memorial, in this work, that James builds for him.

Online war memorials: YouTube as a democratic space of commemoration exemplified through video tributes to fallen Danish soldiers

In this article, we analyze 28 YouTube video tributes to fallen Danish soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq with two analytical goals. The goals are to first understand how the soldier as an object of communal grief is affectively and discursively established, discussed, and challenged in the videos and comments, and second to investigate what type of commemorative practices the specific media space of YouTube enables. Our first observation is that the videos’ attempts to construct the soldiers as national heroes and common objects of grief are repeatedly disputed and opposed by the people commenting on them. Our second point is that YouTube allows for a new type of commemorative practice, which, unlike the traditional war monuments of the nation-state, is marked by explicit differences of opinion concerning the status and legitimacy of the war. The analysis draws on theoretical insights from the fields of affect theory, participatory culture, DIY media, and memory studies.

Memorializations of a martyr and her mutilated bodies: Public monuments to Soviet war hero Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, 1942 to the present

This article analyses monuments to World War II martyr Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. The array of monuments to Kosmodemyanskaya stands apart from other sets of Soviet monuments to war heroes, both in terms of sheer number and in variety. An analysis of the most significant sites informs us about the multiple mythologies associated with this Soviet 'saint'. This article asks how the plurality of bodily representations in memorials of Kosmodemyanskaya gives insight into the confluence of collective memory, national myth-making and constructions of gender in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia. A study of Kosmodemyanskaya's monuments, situated in symbolic locations, shows how competing trends, Soviet political needs, private commemorations, and public responses shaped the representation of this war hero. The evolution of monuments to Kosmodemyanskaya illuminates both the tensions that arise when disparate groups commemorate one individual, and the political role of war monuments in a broader context.

Rediscovered and Additional Calligraphy, Letterings and Drawings by Jan van Krimpen

Abstract This contribution reveals the rediscovery of a large specimen of calligraphy by Jan van Krimpen and the discovery of until now unknown studies, designs and other materials made by Van Krimpen for the lettering of war monuments in The Netherlands, including the National Monument at the Dam in Amsterdam.

Visual discourses of the role of women in war commemoration

Discourses of war are disseminated and legitimised not only through speeches and written texts, but through visual semiotic resources. One important vehicle for this has been the war monument. Evidence shows that from WW1 in Europe and the US monuments have been used systematically by authorities to recontextualise the realities of war and soldiery, suppressing much of what comprises war, avoiding any critical stance, while fostering celebratory discourses of nation, protection and noble sacrifice. The representation of women on the war monument has been particularly important in this recontexualisation. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the discourses realised by British war monuments, this paper shows that while much of the way women participate in and experience war has been suppressed on war monuments. Their representation has been a key part of the legitimation of one particular discourse of war, a representation that has helped to sideline other possible discourse in British society and which is still used in the commemoration of the death of ‘our boys’ — such as the young men killed in Afghanistan.

The changing spaces of war commemoration: a multimodal analysis of the discourses of British monuments

This paper examines the way that war monuments infuse our public physical spaces, and therefore our internal mental spaces, with discourses that legitimise war, soldiery and militarism in different ways at different times creating different kinds of physical environments. In critical theory and cultural studies there has been a growing interest in the way that physical spaces have psychological roles and house human thoughts and feelings – that our social and cultural memories exist in a way that intertwined with our natural and constructed environments. Commentators have noted, however, that there is still need for more systematic methods to be developed for analysing the materiality of objects such as monuments and other buildings to show precisely how they communicate as physical entities that constitute spaces. Using multimodal discourse analysis this paper carries out such an analysis looking at case studies of British war monuments, from early in the twentieth century and later in the twenty-first century. In the tradition of social semiotics, the paper seeks to describe the available semiotic resources that allow us to communicate through objects in space.