M. Giangiulio - E. Franchi - G. Proietti (eds.), Commemorating War and War Dead. Ancient and Modern, Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart 2019, ISBN 978-3-515-12175-0 (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Political Anthropology, 2015
Absract Norbert Elias has become a key inspiration for many of the most important researchers of collective memory and commemorative practices, broadly because his work points to a way beyond the reification of collective memory that is a feature of traditional Durkheimian approaches, and an overly static perspective in Bourdieuian approaches, which have the additional liability of a dominant-dominated class perspective. This paper seeks to indicate trends that have transformed the character of commemoration, which the social theory of Elias are very productive in explaining. Commemorations are marked by a trend from chauvinism and towards reconciliation, from naivety to strategy, from clear messages to abstraction and blandness, and trends towards increasing control by 'memory elites' and individualization. Elias' thought can provide a powerful account of the reasons for these trends, by relating them to the transformation in the nature of interdependencies over the course of a civilizing process. However, the paper concludes by noting the limitations of his thinking, and the need to supplement it with other models. Though the manner in which changes in social competition has driven changes in commemorative practices, commemorations as a practice that seeks explanations for suffering and anxiety cannot be explained well, nor can contingency. At the heart of the lacuna is the absence of a language to discuss in-betweenness, as commemorations are out-of-the-ordinary moments that reflect on, and summon to memory, extraordinary events.
Reflections on the “Commemoration of Conflict”.
Opticon1826, 2015
2014 marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, an event commemorated in ceremonies and events around the world. This comes as no surprise, considering the central place that both World Wars occupy in our collective memory. But conflict commemoration is not just a modern-day phenomenon, nor have all aspects of war been remembered in the same way. From Simonides’ commemorative epigrams after the Persian Wars and the foundation of Battle Abbey following William the Conqueror’s victory, to the establishment of Decoration Day in memory of American Civil War casualties, communities have memorialized the impact of war in a variety of ways. On the 27th of May, research students in the UCL Department of History organised a Postgraduate Conference titled “The Commemoration of Conflict” that considered how various conflicts from the ancient world to the present were remembered and commemorated.
"Introduction: ‘plinth and/or place’ In the four weeks leading to 11th November 1928 the now defunct illustrated newspaper Answers published a ‘magnificent series of plates celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Armistice’. Under the strapline ‘Ten years after, 1918 - 1928’ the plates were published as four pairs of pencil drawings by the former soldier-artist Adrian Hill. They depicted the principle buildings on the old Western Front in Belgium and France as they appeared in ruins in late 1918, and under restoration ten years later. Arras Cathedral, the Cloth Hall at Ypres, Albert Basilica, and the Menin Road had become icons across the British Empire as the immutable symbols of the trauma of the Great War. Indeed, in the months after the Armistice, Winston Churchill had strongly advocated ‘freezing’ the remains of Ypres and preserving it forever as an ossified commemoration of the war. Its pulverised medieval buildings, he argued, would be more articulate than any carved memorial or reverential monument. Churchill’s predilection for bombed ruins surfaced again during the Second World War when he argued that a portion of the blitzed House of Commons ought also to be preserved as a reminder of the bombing of the capital. (Hansard 25 January 1945) As with many grand commemorative schemes, Churchill’s vision was not to be realised. Indeed, after both wars many of the grander commemorative schemes floundered: a national war memorial garden in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral was abandoned as a project in the late 1940’s; ambitious plans to house the national war art collection in an imposing ‘Hall of Remembrance’ came to nothing twenty years earlier, as did a similar architectural scheme in Canada. Although, many ideas were realised, though few were achieved without some degree of argument. In this chapter I will examine how the desire to produce a common understanding of the past has resulted in material forms such as the plinth and the pedestal which have become the key visual components of ideological and rhetorical urban topography, I want to contrast them with the concept of ‘reified place’, in particular preserved or reconstructed battlefields which have become the focus of commemorative rites; the places where ‘one takes personal narratives’. Most of the examples used to illustrate this tension will be drawn from the northern European theatres of war, although reference will be made to certain far-flung conflicts – such as the Battle of Gettysburg – which became the template for historic conservation and the embellishment of military memory. In concentrating on idealised objects on the one hand, and recuperated landscapes on the other I will have to set aside consideration of other acts of commemoration: by these we might include ritual, song and poetry, but also the material culture of war such as artwork, paintings and sculpture which were commissioned by national governments as both propaganda and as evidence of cultural superiority. When considering how warfare might variously be commemorated it is clear that every act is highly contested. Even the granting of war trophies could stir dissent and disagreement. In 1919, when the small east Lancashire town of Haslingden was offered a tank as a gift from the government in recognition of its contribution to war savings, the local branch of the Discharged Soldiers and Sailors Association (DSSA) rejected it as an inappropriate emblem of commemoration. ‘This tank’, wrote their President, ‘will remind us of things we do not want to be reminded of, and one which would be an expense to the town.’ (Haslingden Gazette 1919) He asked instead that the government send an army-hut as a club-room for the veterans, and ensure them a fitting place in the coming Peace Day celebrations – the protocols for the latter proving to be as equally contested as the gift of a redundant military vehicle. (Turner 1999, 58) Of course, many of the tensions between ‘plinth’ and ‘place’ had been played out long before the Great War. The construction of monuments and memorials on sites of battle has a history reaching back to the classical periods of Greece and Rome (Borg, 1991; Carman and Carman, 2006). However, the demarcation of battlefield sites so as to accentuate the material remains of the past is a fairly recent phenomenon. In their analysis of twenty-three north European battle sites, covering nine centuries (from the Battle of Maldon in 991, to the Spanish battle of Sorauren in 1813) Carmen and Carmen note (2006, 184-86) that only five are marked by contemporary memorials, while all but three are furnished with modern memorials, of which all take monumental form. Six of these sites also host a museum or have heritage status, usually dating from the twentieth century, thus reflecting the idea that such places have only latterly been considered worthy of note and subject to demarcation, textual display and commodification. Such spaces are invariably politicized, dynamic and contested. As Bender notes, they are constantly open to negotiation. (Bender, 1983) They are also complex sites of social construction. As we shall see in our examination of twentieth century wars in northern Europe, it is best not to view such sites as the location of single events but as ‘a palimpsest of overlapping, multi-vocal landscapes’. (Saunders 2001, 37) "
War and Social Trauma: Soldiers’ Monuments and Graves. Student International Research Expedition
This expedition is part of the programme (implemented under a project in the framework of the Interdisciplinary Seminar “Politics of History in the 21st century”) for commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the First World War, a conflict that left an indelible mark on the Balkans in the 20th century. The ambition of our project is to approach this anniversary not as a time for solemn commemoration but as an occasion for adjusting the research focus on the phenomenon of the Great War, as it was called by the generation that experienced it, thought about it long and intensely, and had great difficulties in surmounting it. The efficacy of the educational project will be sought, among others, in the gradual engagement of students in the laboratory for interdisciplinary studies – the whole project will be soon at www.historyseminar.swu.bg One of the working hypotheses that the students will test in the course of the scientific expedition is to what extent historical memory is a result of the present and to what extent it reveals the work of trauma. The basic field work will be at places called, for the sake of convenience, sites of memory or sites of mourning, such as military graves (individual, dispersed, or gathered in official cemeteries) and the preserved (restored and unrestorable) army trenches (Doiran). So, in agreement with Proust (Time Regained) that war “is something human, is experienced as love or hate, may be related as a novel […] and that, assuming war is scientific, then we shall have at least to depict it as Elstir depicts the sea, in reverse, - starting from illusions and convictions that little by little are corrected, just as Dostoyevsky would relate a life“), we attempted to reveal the stakes involved in the other legacy of this war, the soldiers’ experience (at the same time, we remain well aware of the ethical consequences of this scientific intention). Retracing the lost past, the war as experience, our scientific expedition followed the route (that the students have covered in imagination through the available soldiers’ testimonies: diaries and letters, official documents, regimental journals, reports, and correspondence) of a small artillery battery (part of the Second Army), whose position at the Thessaloniki front and the everyday life of its soldiers is the main background of the students’ research.