Commemorating War

The Politics of Memory

Graham Dawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351527644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

War memory and commemoration have had increasingly high profiles in public and academic debates in recent years. This volume examines some of the social changes that have led to this development, among them the passing of the two world wars from survivor into cultural memory. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, the book illuminates the struggle to install particular memories at the center of a cultural world, and offers an extensive argument about how the politics of commemoration practices should be understood.

Commemorating War analyzes a range of forms of remembrance, from public commemorations orchestrated by nation-states to personal testimonies of war survivors; and from cultural memories of war represented in films, plays and novels to investigations of wartime atrocities in courts of human rights. It presents a wide range of international case studies, encompassing lesser-known national histories and wars beyond the well-trodden terrain of Vietnam and the two world wars in Europe.

Emerging from this book is an important critique of both "state-centered" approaches to war memory and those that regard commemoration primarily as a human response to loss and grief. Offering a wealth of empirical research material, this book will be important for cultural and oral historians, sociologists, researchers in international relations and human rights, and anybody with an interest in the cultural construction of memory in contemporary society.

Part I Framing the issues

1
The politics of war memory and commemoration: Contexts, structures and dynamics

Timothy G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper

1 The study of war memory and commemoration

1.1 The re-kindling of interest in war memory and commemoration since the 1980s

During the last two decades there has been a proliferation of public interest and concern throughout the world in the various cultural and political dimensions and phenomena of war memory, and in the forms and practices of war commemoration. While this complex general development has yet to be adequately explained, a number of its key features can be clearly discerned. First, its most powerful, transnational manifestation has been the emergence into public visibility of the Shoah, through a variety of projects ranging from the establishment of new museums and the production of documentary and fictional films, to the campaigns to trace and bring to justice Nazi war criminals, and to restore the so-called ‘Nazi gold’ and other stolen property to the Jewish victims and their families. The debates surrounding the necessary remembrance, commemoration and reparation of Nazi genocide have had the most intense impact in the USA, Israel and Germany, but their resonance has been felt to varying degrees in all those parts of Europe where Jews were exterminated, and in countries throughout the world in which Jewish refugees made their homes, or to which their persecutors sought to flee.¹

Second, social groups suffering injustice, injury or trauma that originates in war have become increasingly prepared to demand public recognition of their experience, testimony and current status as ‘victims’ or ‘survivors’. Shoah survivors are prominent amongst such groups, which also include organizations representing veterans of combat from the two World Wars and other conflicts, as well as civilians whose lives have been damaged by war. Frequently, the demand for recognition also involves claims for material compensation and reparation requiring some form of official investigation in the political or legal spheres, thus acting as a further stimulant to public debate. As public recognition of the traumatic experiences undergone by survivors of war has increased, so the ageing of those who lived through the wars of the early and mid-twentieth century has added an urgency and poignancy to the endeavour of collecting their testimony and reflecting on its significance. For example, a sense of the pressing need to record the memories of survivors now nearing the end of their lives has reinforced the continuing debate over how if at all the Shoah may be represented.² Similarly, as the First World War generation dies out, at the very end of the span of living memory (in Britain today, it is believed there are still some 4,000 surviving servicemen now aged about 100),³ there has been in recent years a resurgence of interest in that war and its meanings, and fresh imaginative responses from the grandchild generation, often explicitly addressing the question of cultural memory and the complexity of relations between past and present.⁴

A third factor is the increasing number and enhanced profile of anniversary commemorations to mark the beginning and ending of wars, and their key episodes. This is one component of a wider anniversary boom, fuelled and amplified by the public communications media, which seize upon forthcoming commemorative dates to stimulate cultural production of all kinds. Not only are commemorative ceremonies and other events reported in – and increasingly, staged for – the news media, but their contemporary meaning is scrutinized as well as celebrated in special publications, investigative reports and documentary features in which broader cultural and political significances are given a ‘human face’ by survivor testimony. In this way, war commemoration is transformed into a media event. This process is occurring world-wide, but the case of Britain, where the editors of this volume all live and work, can stand as an example. Here, a string of war anniversaries were propelled into high public visibility as media events during the 1980s and 1990s. A bonanza of fortieth- and fiftieth-anniversary dates commemorated the progress of the Second World War, from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz in 1980 and 1990 through to the official state ceremonies marking D-Day in 1984/1994 and VE- and VJ-Days in 1985 and 1995. Besides affording occasions for retelling the mythic national narrative of ‘our finest hour’ to those already familiar with it, and for extending its public reception to a younger generation, these anniversaries also focused a national debate about the trajectory of British history since 1945, including the relationship of the UK to its ‘European partners’.⁵ In 1993 and 1998, the seventy-fifth and eightieth anniversaries of the Armistice ending the First World War saw a resurgence of public interest evidenced in an increase in poppy-wearing among the young, a popular, media-orchestrated campaign to restore the long-discontinued minute’s silence on Armistice Day, and vast audiences both for a plethora of television documentaries, and for Sebastian Faulks’ and Pat Barker’s bestselling novels about the war and its memory.⁶ In 1999, the ending of the twentieth century provided the occasion for media remembrance of the hundredth anniversary of the Anglo-Boer War, while major television documentary series – War of the Century (recounting the Nazi-Soviet confrontation of 1941–45) and The History of the Twentieth Century – reaffirmed the central importance given to the two World Wars in the way ‘the story of the century’ can be told from a British perspective.⁷ The enhanced public visibility of these anniversary occasions has created opportunities for contesting as well as celebrating received memories. In 1995, for example, the national focus on VE-Day was challenged by British survivors of the Japanese labour camps for prisoners of war in the Far East, who were still seeking governmental support for the campaign to secure reparation for their ill-treatment from the Japanese government.⁸

Finally public concern with the memory of war has been stimulated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the so-called ‘Eastern bloc’ in Europe ( 1989— 91), the consequent ending of the Cold War and the realignment of power relations in what were once polarized spheres of influence throughout the world.⁹ A new pattern of warfare has emerged in the ‘post-communist’ world of the 1990s, linked to what Jeanne Vickers has termed ‘the explosion of ethnic strife’, fought between peoples in the name of linguistic, religious or cultural affiliations and differences.¹⁰ The disintegration of the Soviet Union itself generated an estimated 125 ethnic or minority disputes, and war broke out in Georgia, Moldova, Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and, later, Chechnya (in 1994— 96 and aeain in 1999–2000).¹¹ In Central Africa in 1994, the Rwandan genocide perpetrated by Hutu militias against the minority Tutsi tribe claimed an estimated 800,000 lives in 100 days, including a three-day massacre of 50,000 people in Murambi.¹² In the West, it has been the brutal ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia which have made the greatest public impact and brought home the character of the new warfare. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, as many as 279,000 people are thought to have been killed between 1992 and 1995, and 2.7 million people (the great majority being Muslims) driven from their homes as refugees.¹³ As the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ has entered popular discourse, so too has the possibility of recognizing the extent to which present-day enmities and antagonisms may feed off memories of past wars, and the cultural constructions of otherness encoded therein. In the case of the Serbo-Croatian War of 1991, the evident connections between current conflict and the unresolved legacy of the Nazi wars of national expansion and ethnic ‘purification’ have fed into renewed debate about the role of war commemoration and indeed war itself in the reproduction of national and ethnic identities.¹⁴

If these broad cultural and political developments provide a set of necessary contexts for a book on The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, a further context is the proliferation of academic research and critical enquiry -particularly by historians – which has accompanied these developments, reflected upon them and itself contributed to the widening public interest in the phenomena of war memory and commemoration. Reviewing a clutch of recent studies of the war memorial, for example, Catherine Moriarty suggests that their ‘simultaneous publication ... is evidence of a surge of activity in the last twenty years which replaces the previous absence of scholarly literature’.¹⁵ British art historians began serious investigation of war memorials ‘as socially as well as sculpturally significant’ during the 1980s; influenced on the one hand by Paul Fussell’s earlier work on war experience and the ‘literary means by which it has been remembered’, and on the other by French studies of the relation between iconography, collective identity and Hes lieux de memoir’ (sites of memory).¹⁶ This new kind of cultural history challenged conventional British military, political and economic history-writing on the First World War through its emphasis on memory and meaning. At the same time, it helped to open up wider access to ‘the space of remembrance’, which hitherto had been ‘the preserve of a few distinct groups’ – traditional historians, students of war literature, war veterans, and the collectors of memorabilia.¹⁷

The process described by Moriarty is not restricted to the First World War or to the war memorial as a form. As ‘memory studies’ has emerged across a wide disciplinary spectrum, and developed into a field of interdisciplinary investigation with an international range during the 1980s and 1990s, war has proved to be one of its most productive and compelling subjects. Vast scholarly literatures produced mainly in the USA now exist on, for example, remembrance of the Shoah and of the American war in Vietnam; and the study of war memory is becoming an established element in national historiographies including those of France, Italy, Germany, Britain and Australia.¹⁸ Increasingly, this work is beginning to push towards transnational, comparative studies, exemplified by Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995); in Britain, the mid-to-late 1990s has seen a proliferation of academic conferences and the first books on this theme.¹⁹

The present volume is offered as a contribution to these developing debates, both theoretical and historical, about the significance of war memory and commemoration at the start of the twenty-first century. In referring in our title to the ‘politics’ of war memory and commemoration, we mean to signal the importance of retaining a live connection between the intellectual debates developing within the academic world and the wider contexts and constituencies where these issues are salient. A distinguishing feature of the most compelling ‘academic’ research on the cultures of war memory has always been its willingness to step outside the academy so as to engage critical theory and analysis in a more self-conscious dialogue with ‘living memory’; that is, with cultural producers, political and civil rights activists, and those who have perpetrated military violence and been affected by it; for all of whom the remembering and forgetting of war is not an object of disinterested enquiry but a burning issue at the very core of present-day conflicts over forms of the state, social relations and subjectivity All of the essays collected here, in different ways, are responses to vital concerns, and are informed by – and enter into dialogue with – specific debates and practices in the cultural politics of their own location. Each makes a contribution, not only to cross-cultural intellectual debate about the general issues involved, but also to the ways in which the remembering and commemoration of war is being understood, organized and contested within its specific context.

There is a danger in the push for internationalization at the level of theory and method – linked as it is to the growing interest in war and memory within the global academy – that the local or national specificity of the kinds of work represented in this volume may be abstracted, decontextualized and robbed of its potent connection to the cultural and political conflicts which have underpinned and inspired it. In introducing the studies which follow, then, we have wanted to insist on the importance of recognizing the particular political contexts and local ‘applications’ of their analyses, whilst also reading these essays for their contributions to the more general and theoretical debates about the processes and agencies that shape the common phenomena of war memory and commemoration. In this endeavour, our conception of the politics of memory has furnished a framework in which their various and varied, as well as shared, concerns can be inter-related. However, this has entailed developing an expanded notion of what the ‘politics of memory’ might involve, of the different agencies in play and of the various arenas in which they operate, if the full complexity of these inter-relations is to be grasped. The task of constructing a theoretical framework of this kind has required a critical engagement with existing work in the field, taking issue both with those perspectives which eschew any conception of a ‘politics’ of memory, and with those which construe it too narrowly or in an insufficiently mediated fashion. We turn next, then, to critical analysis of existing approaches.

1.2 Politics or mourning? Current approaches to the study of war memory and commemoration

War memory and commemoration have tended to be studied within one of two main paradigms. On the one hand, there can be found arguments which construe its significance as fundamentally political; that is, as a practice bound up with rituals of national identification, and a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Framing the issues
• 1 The politics of war memory and commemoration: Contexts, structures and dynamics
• 2 Layers of memories: Twenty years after in Argentina
• 3 The South African War/Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 and political memory in South Africa
• 4 National narratives, war commemoration and racial exclusion in a settler society: The Australian case
• 5 ‘This is where they fought’: Finnish war landscapes as a national heritage
• 6 Remembered/replayed: The nation and male subjectivity in the Second World War films Ni Liv (Norway) and The Cruel Sea (Britain)
• 7 Postmemory cinema: Second-generation Israelis screen the Holocaust in Don’t Touch My Holocaust
• 8 Hauntings: Memory, fiction and the Portuguese colonial wars
• 9 Longing for war: Nostalgia and Australian returned soldiers after the First World War
• 10 Involuntary commemorations: Post-traumatic stress disorder and its relationship to war commemoration
• Part III Debates and reviews
• 11 War commemoration in Western Europe: Changing meanings, divisive loyalties, unheard voices
• Index