Introduction
One looks at objects in order to gain information about the people who made them, the people who used them, and the cultures in which these people existed. The study of material culture, therefore, provides a valuable way of approaching the unstated beliefs and attitudes of individuals and cultures.
One of the most fundamental relationships that individuals and cultures have is that with nature. Each civilization may define nature differently, but none are without an understanding of it. Civilizations are erected as defenses against the dangers and difficulties which nature poses. Individuals within civilizations find it easier to eat, to rest, and life in general more pleasurable. Survival in a town is more likely than survival in the wilds. Thomas Hobbes was not entirely off the mark when he described the situation of man in a state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
At the same time, though, man's relationship with nature is not a purely adversarial one. Man is, of course, a part of nature, and cannot separate himself from it. Civilization, in addition to defending against nature, learns to cooperate with and use nature.
Further, many look to nature to invigorate life with its beauty and excitement. Shakespeare placed many of his comedies in the forest, where everything was possible and the spirit of excitement and disruption reigned. The Romantic movement of the 19th century embraced nature, in all its wildness, as a corrective to the constraints of the all-mighty Reason enthroned during the Enlightenment. Likewise, in the 20th century many have looked to nature as a cure for the dullness of modern technological and industrial existence. Compared to endless days of mindless labor in factories, the free existence represented by nature is quite attractive.
The First World War, relentlessly modern and technological, produced a reaction that fostered the cult of nature. The poppies blew in Flanders' Fields even for the enlisted men. In the trenches, men dreamed of nature and wrote pastoral poetry. Nature was abstracted against the filth and 'lousiness' of manmade trenches. Much of nature was being destroyed by the barrage of artillery which left the whole landscape muddied and foreign (see the painting by Paul Nash on the
main page), but this only increased the cult of nature, for one often values that which one sees being destroyed.The attitudes toward nature, especially with regards to modern warfare, can be seen in the cemeteries built after the War. Both British and German cemeteries very self-consciously appeared "natural," but they embodied different conceptions of what was valuable in nature and how civilization should relate to it. For Britons, nature was controlled, placed within geometric forms. They wished to recreate in the cemeteries the spirit of country gardens or country churchyards. Nature was associated with a pre-industrial Britain: a simpler, purer time. In Germany, this conservative tendency was taken even further. Germans wished to get beyond civilization, back to a Germanic 'culture' in touch with nature
. Hermann Löns had written approvingly in 1910, "What meaning does civilization have? A thin veneer underneath which nature courses, waiting until a crack appears and it can burst into the open." Their natural models were not gardens but rather woods; they used trees, not flowers to adorn their cemeteries. One architect claimed that "the Germans do not disguise the tragic and heroic death of the fallen by planting colorful flowers. They confront it instead, for to affirm the tragic is a sign of culture, while mere civilization seeks to ignore it." Nature was seen as a source of raw power, regenerative and redemptive. Death, a return to nature, was a return to the home of the German spirit.In conclusion, one thinks of the two basic visions of nature: nature as provider, nature as killer. Though a clear split is undoubtedly reductive, it is none the less interesting to pursue the idea that Germans had one vision, Britons the other. Perhaps fearing the disruptive and dangerous elements of nature, England sought to domesticate it. It would not deny nature, but it would put it in rows. Quite naturally, as the greatest world power before the War, England wished to sustain the status quo. Germany, on the other hand, was dissatisfied, longing for its "place in the sun." For those who believed in the power of the German Volk, nature was a source of encouragement and vitality.
This, at least, is one account that might be read from the war cemeteries. There are likely other, better accounts of the cultural assumptions revealed by these material objects. One possible use of the cemeteries would be to explicitly examine attitudes about death in the two countries, a related but slightly different inquiry. Material objects are often overlooked as sources of information not because of their paucity of meanings, but rather because of their complexity: they can, and do, mean many things at the same time.