1. The Great War and Cultural Memory

2. 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, Tolkien

3. Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

4. Thiepval
(Sir Edwin Lutyens, )

5. Tyne Cot cemetery

6. Menin Gate (Ypres)

7. Menin Gate

8. Menin Gate (inside of the earch)

9. Will Longstaff: Menin Gate at Midnight (1927)

10. War memorial (Aldeburgh, Suffolk)

11. 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

12. The Cenotaph in Whitehall

13. Remembrance poppies

14. 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)

15. 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)

16. 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

17. 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)

19. ‘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.’

21. Eric Kennington: Gassed and Wounded

22. Richard Nevinson: La patrie

23. Richard Nevinson: Paths of Glory

24. John Singer Sargent. Gassed

25. Eric Kennington:
Making Soldiers (The Gas Mask)

26. Percy Smith: Men in Gas Masks

27. Nevinson:Column on March

28. Nevinson: Returning to the Trenches

29. Richard Nevinson: Night Arrivals

30. Paul Nash: Ypres Salient at Night

31. Wyndham Lewis: A Battery Shelled

32. Wyndham Lewis:
Cover of the war issue of Blast

33. Paul Nash: Menin Road

34. Richard Nevinson: After a Push

35. William Orpen: Zonnebeke

36. Paul Nash: We Are Making a New World

37. From Abel Gance: J’accuse

38. J’accuse

39. Percy Smith: Death Awed

40. Otto Dix: Der Krieg tryptich (1929-32)