The Great War and Cultural Memory

Memory of WW1 The origin of ‘modern memory’ Shell-shock, trauma: individual and collective 9 million casualties Britain: 750.000 + 230.000 (Spanish flu) H.H. Asquith (PM); Kipling; A. A. Milne, Hugh Lofting, Tolkien

Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

Thiepval (Sir Edwin Lutyens, 1928-32)

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 trench life: premonition of ‘modern life’ the modern antihero boredom, absurdity, anxiety, terror (Paul Fussell: The Great War and Modern Memory)

difficulties of speaking Walter Benjamin: ‘the 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’ (1929-30) R. C. Sherriff: Journey’s End (1928) E.-M. Remarque’s All Quieton the Western Front (1929): „to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war” (Paul Bäumer) Memoirs (Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain) Fiction (Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington, Frederick Manning, R. H. Mottram)

‘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, sniping 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 (1929-32)