The Great War and Cultural Memory

Memory of WW1 The origin of ‘modern memory’ Shell-shock, trauma: individual and collective 9 million casualties Britain: (Spanish flu) H.H. Asquith (PM); Kipling; A. A. Milne, Hugh Lofting

Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

Thiepval (Sir Edwin Lutyens, )

Tyne Cot cemetery

Menin Gate (Ypres)

Menin Gate

Menin Gate (inside of the earch)

Will Longstaff: Menin Gate at Midnight (1927)

War memorial (Aldeburgh, Suffolk)

Sir Edwin Lutyens: Cenotaph, London „Curiously symptomatic – that thing. Monument to the dread of swank – most characteristic” (20). Post-war aversion to „the fine, the large, the florid [...] No far-sighted views, no big schemes, no great principles” (Sir Lawrence Monk in John Galsworthy: The White Monkey, 1924

The Cenotaph in Whitehall

Remembrance poppies

Myths of the Great War trench warfare art vs historiography ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ (Stephen Dedalus) ‘literary war’ 1920s-1930s: 400 ‘war novels’ the very idea of ‘English literature’ memory and canon: John Oxenham - Wilfred Owen (1960: Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem)

Memory and literature Difficulties of commemoration/remembering Memory, countermemory, repression WW1: premonition of ‘modern life’ absurdity, anxiety Walter Benjamin: ‘end of storytelling’ ‘at the end of the war,...men returned from the battlefield grown silent; not richer, but poorer in communivable experience’ Poetry: difficulty of speaking ‘on behalf’ of the dead

the ‘war boom’ ( ) R. C. Sherriff: Journey’s End (1928) „to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war” (Paul Bäumer in E.-M. Remarque’s All Quieton the Western Front, 1929)

‘total war’ 1916: compulsory army service Unrestricted submarine war (1915: the sinking of the Lusitania) British fair play, ‘playing the game’ – German barbarity gas attacks tanks Lord Kitchener: ‘I don’t know what to be done; this isn’t war.’

Eric Kennington: Gassed and Wounded

Richard Nevinson: La patrie

Richard Nevinson: Paths of Glory

John Singer Sargent. Gassed

Eric Kennington: Making Soldiers (The Gas Mask)

Percy Smith: Men in Gas Masks

Nevinson:Column on March

Nevinson: Returning to the Trenches

Richard Nevinson: Night Arrivals

Paul Nash: Ypres Salient at Night

Wyndham Lewis: A Battery Shelled

Wyndham Lewis: Cover of the war issue of Blast

Paul Nash: Menin Road

Richard Nevinson: After a Push

William Orpen: Zonnebeke

Paul Nash: We Are Making a New World

From Abel Gance: J’accuse

J’accuse

Percy Smith: Death Awed

Otto Dix: Der Krieg tryptich ( )