Conclusion
The upshot of these
observations, as bearing on the subject in hand, is that there is no likelihood
of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. In some happy corners of the earth, they
say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever people desire, there
flourish races whose lives go gently by, unknowing of aggression or
constraint. This I can hardly credit; I
would like further details about these happy folk.
--Sigmund Freud[1]
The Great War is no longer. What was once called by that name is now
known merely as the First World War, WWI, a name that underscores its status as
just a prelude to the greater devastation of the Second World War. Eighty years after the conclusion of the
War, it no longer provokes strong emotions.
The 1998 Armistice Day celebration at the Menin Gate, attended by the
Queen of England, was probably one of the last to include veterans of the
War. As they pass on, their complex
memories of the War also disappear. The
Great War is becoming just another of the many wars of the past, like the
Napoleonic wars or a larger Crimean War.
If the Great War is recalled at all, it is as an
example of immense loss and of the futility of war, of the fruitlessness of
trying to solve poorly defined diplomatic problems by military means. In the interwar period, though, memory of
the War was much less simple and straightforward; it was alive, threatening,
and often debilitating. Even a cursory
examination of interwar writings and speeches will immediately give a sense of
the strength of the emotions surrounding the War. Europe was a continent in shell shock. It dealt with its traumatic memories in a variety of complex ways
that are now largely overlooked.
It is easy to witness this process of change by
visiting the memorials of the War. I
visited the Menin Gate and the town of Langemarck while on a trip to Belgium in
the summer of 1998. The Menin Gate
today is a peaceful site, located a few hundred meters away from the bustling
town center of Ypres and its enormous Cloth Hall, destroyed during the War but
now completely rebuilt. The Menin Gate
is beautiful in its own brooding way, sitting as a solemn reminder of the high
cost of victory for the British. The
moat that runs in front and is home to a number of ducks provides splendid
reflections of the Menin Gate. The Last
Post is still played there every evening at eight o’clock; traffic is stopped
and the bugle cry echoes within the vault of the Gate (Fig 1). The evening I was there, the Gate was filled
with spectators, young and old. Most
were British children visiting on school trips; the others were much older,
perhaps remembering their fathers’ or uncles’ experiences of the War. There were very few people between the ages
of twenty and fifty; the War has become the province of the young, being
educated about the past, and the old, remembering their formative experiences. It is no longer important to the middle-aged
for whom the War has no useful application.
This ritual, once almost unbearably poignant, is becoming empty.
The cemetery at Langemarck is an equally peaceful
site. The oaks that fill the cemetery
block the ground from the sun, leaving the cemetery dark, gloomy, and
quiet. The grounds are immaculately
groomed; the grave markers are well-kept, lying at ground level in the German
fashion rather than standing upright as in British cemeteries. The guest book within the chapel is filled,
perhaps surprisingly, with British names, mostly those of school children. The comments in the guest book are generally
pacifist; “Never again!” appears repeatedly, as do “Why??” and “No more
war.” The German war graves commission,
the Volksbund Deutsche
Kriegsgräberfürsorge, has now adopted as its motto “Arbeit für den Frieden” (Work for peace). “The war graves of all nations must be preserved,” claims their
information brochure, “as a lasting memorial to peace, and as an appeal for
understanding and reconciliation they speak to all people.”[2]
War monuments were not always seen as they are
today, as memorials to peace. They,
like the War itself, were interpreted in a number of different ways. At the back of the Langemarck cemetery, even
today, sit three concrete bunkers preserved from the War, connected by a row of
granite blocks. It was here, in front
of these symbols of war, that Hitler chose to have himself photographed when
visiting Langemarck during the Second World War (Fig. 2). For him, the memorials were not an
encouragement to peace but rather an incitement to war, an incitement, in fact,
to try to undo the German failure of the past War by beginning a new one. The cemetery itself, until the end of the
Second World War, bore the militarist inscription “Germany must live, even if
we must die.”[3]
We like to believe we can see the totality of the
War in hindsight: its causes, its character, and its effects. For us, it is just another event in the
course of history. For millions of
interwar Germans and Britons, however, the War was not a remote episode in
history. It still enveloped and defined
their lives; it was their past, their present, and, for some, their future. The dominant characteristic of the memory of
the War in the interwar period was undoubtedly its ubiquity. Memory of the War was everywhere, in Germany
and in Britain.
At the same time, though, there were systemic
differences in the memory of the War in the two countries. As I have argued, war memory affected, and
was affected by, interwar society in a complex dynamic of accident and
determinism. There are three ways of
understanding this relationship. First,
and most obviously, memory of the War was affected by the actual experience of
the War and by its final outcome.
Second, memory of the War was affected by the details of interwar
experience—social, political, and cultural.
Third, memory of the War was affected by the cultural traditions within
which the memory occurred. Of course,
these formulations are not mutually exclusive, nor was the relationship between
the War and society one-sided. On the
contrary, interwar experience and cultural traditions were themselves altered
and influenced by the memory of the War.
It must first be noted that the physical experiences
of the War were not vastly dissimilar for the British and the Germans. Soldiers of both nations spent years in the
mud of the trenches, were sacrificed foolishly by nearsighted military leaders,
and experienced loss on comparable scales.
Explanations for the differences in war memory between Britain and
Germany must therefore be largely sought elsewhere. The crucial, and perhaps obvious, difference, which in turn
determined most other factors, was the outcome of the War. Britain won (if wars can be won) and Germany
lost. This did not mean simply that
Britons recalled the War fondly and that Germans recalled it bitterly, but it
meant that the experience of the War was placed in different narratives. For Britons, the narrative would end in
military success; for Germans, it would end in shameful defeat. In Britain, the War was perhaps not
remembered as a spectacular, glorious victory, but it was nonetheless not a
defeat. Germans could not escape the
fact that, for whatever reason, be it military failure or civilian betrayal,
Germany had not won the War. The German
desire for a rightful “place in the sun” was not satisfied; after the War, it
was further away from being fulfilled than ever. In short, due to its defeat in the War and the fall of the
Wilhelmine Empire, Germany faced a number of difficult questions of identity
that Britain did not.
As a further consequence of its victory, Britain had
a stable government. The German
government of Weimar was much weaker, struggling to establish its legitimacy in
times of economic and social disturbance.
Commemoration of the War in Britain was influenced by the government to
an extent that did not occur in Germany.
In Britain, the government funded many monuments and sponsored memorial
ceremonies. These monuments and
ceremonies, often the result of governmental decisions, shaped the discourse of
commemoration in Britain. The Menin
Gate became a site of memory because the government decided to make it
one. It combined the vocabularies of
loss and victory into a unified design because the government decided that it
should. When, in subsequent years, the
Menin Gate was visited by thousands of mourners, its form affected the way in
which they remembered the War. The
government, of course, was committed, either consciously or unconsciously, to
propagating an account of the War in which the courage and steadfastness of the
British nation (and, by extension, its leadership) were emphasized.
In Germany, the government was so weak that it could
not play an active role in the process of memorialization. Saddled by its association with defeat, the
government was in no position to design and fund monuments and ceremonies. While British memory of the War was affected
from above, German memory was generated from below. Stories and myths that captured the imagination of portions of
the population were as important to Germany as the establishment version of the
War was to Britain. The popularity of
the myth of Langemarck in the interwar period had nothing to do with the
support of the government; on the contrary, the myth of Langemarck was used
increasingly against the government.
The comparison between the Menin Gate and the myth of Langemarck is, of
course, a difficult one, for it is a comparison of two completely different
kinds of objects. At the same time,
though, it is an appropriate comparison, for the physical monument of the Menin
Gate and the memorial myth of Langemarck occupied similar locations in national
memory of the War. Just as British
memory of the War was shaped by the form of such monuments as the Menin Gate,
German memory of the War was shaped by the form and content of such myths as
the myth of Langemarck.
The myth of Langemarck drew its strength from the
peculiar position that youth occupied in German culture. Youth was a symbol of rejuvenation and
radical rebirth, and the myth of Langemarck mobilized these values into a
memory of the War as a time of pure expression of Germany’s vigorous völkisch spirit. The Menin Gate, likewise, was shaped by a
cultural need, that of naming. It was a
part of an almost obsessive project of identification and description: the
names of all those who died in the War were given physical resting places, either
on gravestones or in lists on monuments such as the Menin Gate. In this British practice was different from
German practice. Many Germans, in fact,
preferred mass graves to individual ones.
By grouping the dead soldiers together, the ideas of comradeship and
group sacrifice were emphasized. The
“Youth of Langemarck” was an abstraction, a fictitious grouping that was used
to highlight communal patriotism in the service of the idealized nation.
This account of the myth of Langemarck and the Menin
Gate sheds some light on broader issues of memory. The primary observation is perhaps an obvious one: memory is
shaped and structured by social forces.
I have not argued that societal pressures produce new or false memories
(although that position is not without support), but rather that the socially-influenced
forms within which memories are placed affect the interpretations they are
given. Experiences, especially those as
complex as the experience of war, can be remembered in a variety of different
ways, equally accurate but necessarily partial records of the past. It is often the context of the memories that
determines the range of possible interpretations. The manipulation of memory in the interwar years was not necessarily
a manipulation of the events themselves, but rather a manipulation of the
context within which those events were remembered. By changing the way memories were ordered, by putting them into
larger narratives through ideology or even carefully constructed physical
sites, memories were given different valences.
The underlying principle here, of course, is that memory is always being
interpreted and applied. The actions of
men and women are powerfully influenced by the interpretations that they place
on their past experiences. Memory is
not an impotent and inconsequential outgrowth of nostalgia, but rather a
pervasive determinant of the present and the future. George Santayana once claimed that those who forget the past are
doomed to repeat it, but history shows that the past repeats itself, over and
over again, in the minds of those who remember.