Introduction
Under the brown fog of a winter
dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge,
so many,
I had not thought death had undone
so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were
exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before
his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King
William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept
the hour
With a dead sound on the final
stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped
him, crying: ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships
at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year
in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?[1]
T.S.
Eliot, The Wasteland (1922)
The
most famous words uttered on the outbreak of the First World War are probably
those attributed to Lord Grey, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we
shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
In many ways he was right. The
years from 1914 to 1945 form a modern Thirty-Years’ War, violent and destructive
in a way possible only in a technological age.
It was perceived as even more catastrophic, perhaps, because of the
preceding period of relative peace. No
one, not even the Germans, had planned this massive war. When war came, almost by accident it seemed,
everyone was surprised; many were jubilant.
When war refused to leave, remaining for four long and bloody years, the
jubilation turned to sorrow, the surprise to anger. That sorrow and that anger
were to dominate the interwar period and flare up again into war in the late
1930s; their effects have not disappeared even now, at the end of the
century. This thesis is a study in
sorrow and anger, an inquiry into the effects of the War on societies,
cultures, and individuals.
The
First World War and the interwar years that followed have been the subjects of
innumerable historical studies. Much of
the most stimulating recent work has focused on the issue of the social and
cultural effects of the War. Many
authors have approached this problem by addressing the role of the War in the
advent of modernity. Paul Fussell, in
his justly acclaimed work, The Great War
and Modern Memory (1975), argued that the War helped to induce a modernist
consciousness marked, above all, by irony.
Samuel Hynes, in his A War
Imagined (1991), followed along the same lines, tracing the way a certain myth
of the War became embedded in literary accounts of wartime experiences. Modris Eksteins, in his Rites of Spring (1989), has gone even further, showing the
possibility of reading the War itself as a modernist experience. There is much support available for these
interpretations. The interwar period,
after all, was the time of the masterpieces of modernism, of Ezra Pound, T.S.
Eliot, and James Joyce. Many authors
who served in the War, from Ernest Hemingway to Siegfried Sassoon, reflected a
similar consciousness of the distance between reality and representation that
is the basis of irony. In this account
of its effects, the War was most notable as a rupture, a breaking with
tradition.
Against
these approaches, a number of historians have pointed to the elements of
continuity that marked this period. Jay
Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites
of Mourning (1995), notes the persistence of tradition after the War,
especially in the commemorative practices and rituals of grieving. The bitterness of irony offered no
consolation for the millions grieving the loss of their sons and husbands. “The cutting edge of ‘modern memory’,” he
concludes, “its multi-faceted sense of dislocation, paradox, and the ironic,
could express anger and despair, and did so in enduring ways; it was
melancholic, but it could not heal.”[2] The masses, though perhaps not the literary
elite, dealt with their memories of loss and death by placing them within
traditional modes of remembrance and commemoration; through religion and community,
they were able to find the solace that irony did not offer. Adrian Gregory has argued that the orthodox
view, which holds that modern consciousness was a consequence of the War, is
incorrect. He claims that we need to
understand the context in which war memories occurred, suggesting that “the
memory of war was determined by existing predilections in the culture,
political, religious, and ‘communitarian’, rather than shaping them.”[3] Antoine Prost, who has studied the interwar
veterans’ movement in France, agrees, saying that “it seems clear that the
impact of war upon different societies depends on the social and cultural
condition of each society.”[4] In this model, people remembered the War in
the ways that they did because of their social and cultural contexts. They understood the War by comparing it to
previous events and incorporating it into existing systems of belief. Since existing circumstances and beliefs
varied from country to country (and from person to person), the War was
remembered in many different ways.
In this study, I wish to suggest a
different vision by looking at the particular events surrounding the
construction of the Menin Gate memorial (Fig. 1) in Ypres, Belgium, by the
British government, and the rhetorical function for German society of a small
battle near Langemarck, Belgium, in 1914.
In this close-up view, the broad division between those who see the War
as a modernist experience and those who see it as an episode in the continuance
of traditional modes of commemoration begins to dissolve, as does that between
those who see memories of the War as influential in producing interwar society
and those who see War memories primarily as a product of interwar society. These theories, I believe, are not wrong,
but have the effect of simplifying an endlessly complex phenomenon. The War, for all its undoubted importance
and significance, was not a unified event with a single effect. There was no common “war experience” that
can be extricated from the complex, individual lives of the combatants. Rather, experiences of the War varied widely
and were to be interpreted in a number of ways in the interwar period. These interpretations and memories of the
War, it will be seen, cannot be divorced from the particular surroundings in which
they occurred; at the same time, though, they referred to real events that
occurred during the War and these memories were to profoundly influence and
change the cultural condition of interwar Europe. The relationship between War memory and interwar society is a
complex, dual relationship.
In the first chapter, I will examine
the story of the Menin Gate memorial. I
wish to show why it was conceived and how its final form was shaped both by
psychological needs and by the intricacies of various political struggles and
social currents in Britain in the 1920s.
I will conclude with an analysis of the opening ceremonies in 1927. In turning to Germany, I will, in the second
chapter, explore the genesis of the very influential myth of Langemarck—a myth
that grew out of a report on a failed battle in 1914. I will offer some reasons for the surprising popularity of the
myth by examining the position that youth occupied in Germany and how the myth
of Langemarck evoked the emotions brought forth by the image of youth as
simultaneously rejuvenating and threatening.
Tying the connotations of the problem of youth to the military origin of
the myth, I will suggest what some of the consequences of the popularity of the
myth of Langemarck might be. In the
third chapter, I will examine the resurgence of interest in the War that marked
the late 1920s and early 1930s, both in Britain and Germany. In Britain, I approach this resurgence by
looking at the many trips taken to the Menin Gate, especially the British
Legion pilgrimage of 1928. I will also
look at the connection between memory and justification, as Britons sought to
justify the extreme losses they had suffered in the War by clinging to the idea
of the “War to End War.” In the fourth
and final chapter, I will look at the historical trajectory of the myth of
Langemarck, focusing on the ways in which the Nazis used this myth to further
their own agenda by establishing themselves as inheritors of the legacy of
Langemarck.
Through this examination of the
Menin Gate and the myth of Langemarck, I hope to elucidate some of the
complexities of memory in interwar Europe.
People remembered the War by visiting the Menin Gate or spreading the
story of the youth of Langemarck. At
the same time, the memorials and myths that were signally important in framing
memories of the War were themselves determined by a combination of factors,
ranging from a fiscal efficiency on the part of the British government after
the War to the meanings ascribed to the theme of youth even before the War
began. These memories were crucially
important during the interwar period because Europeans were acutely aware of
time, of the relationship between the past and the future without which the
present could not even be conceived.
These memories of the past were not dead; on the contrary, they, and the
War they recalled, remained alive. Time
itself was emphasized even as it was being confused. The dead soldiers could not be forgotten; their remembrance
imposed requirements on the present and the future. Those living in the interwar period had a sense of belatedness,
of coming after the War, but also a sense of resurrection, of witnessing the
return of the dead in novels, films, and séances. In the wasteland, corpses sprouted and bloomed, just as the
pressures of time weighed down the living with the cry, “Hurry up please its time.”[5] Marcel Proust, from 1914 until his death in
1922, wrote, rewrote, and revised his masterpiece. In this obsessive quest in search of lost time, he was not alone.
[1] T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” in The Wasteland and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), 31.
[2] Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5.
[3] Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919-1946 (Providence: Berg, 1994), 5.
[4] Antoine Prost, “The Impact of War on French and German Political Cultures,” The Historical Journal 37 (1994), 217.
[5] Eliot, 34.