Narratives of War

Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe

Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle, Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429015533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century.

The book reflects on how narratives are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The contributions address such issues as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, the relationship between various individuals' versions of war narratives and the ways in which events are brought together to serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Drawing upon the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yugoslav wars, and considering narrative genres that include film, schoolbooks, novels, oral history, archives, official documents, personal testimony and memoirs, readers are introduced to a range of narrative forms and examples that highlight the complexity of narrative in relation to war.

Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and taken together, analysis of these narratives contributes to our understanding of the causes, experience, dynamics and consequences of war, making it the ideal book for those interested in twentieth-century war history and the history of memory and narrative.

Part I

Narrative and the Story of War

1 Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century

An Introduction

Michael Wintle, Nanci Adler and Remco Ensel

Narrative as an Object of Study

This book is about the narratives of European wars in the twentieth century. It reflects on how they are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The research draws on the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yugoslav wars at the end of the century. The unifying theme is the narrative itself, which lies at the core of this collection of essays. To this end, each chapter contributes towards conceptualizing narrative and its relation to war. The authors address such fundamental questions as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, memory wars within and between states, the relationship between individuals’ versions of war narratives and those of others (or the collective) and the ways in which events are brought together – or ‘emplotted’ – into themed stories that serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and taken together, these narratives contribute to our understanding of the causes, experience, dynamics and consequences of war. This volume’s discussions are both relevant and timely – arguably even urgent – because of the recurrence and persistence of war, battle, mass atrocities and genocide right up to the present day. This is despite the frequent ‘never again’ responses that have followed most wars, especially the Second World War. Narratives of war are always contested, and competition between them can lead to further divisions and potential conflict; therefore we undertake to analyse those war narratives across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century.

The concept of the collection stems from an international symposium with more than 60 contributors from all over Europe which was held under the auspices of the Huizinga Institute for Cultural History (of which Michael Wintle was then the academic director) at the University of Amsterdam in February 2016. Led by the three editors, it drew together established authorities of international reputation as well as younger, aspiring researchers beginning to make their mark. While most of the participants were historians, the gathering also included experts in other fields: it was an interdisciplinary exchange, designed to foster collaborative work. Just 12 of the 60-plus contributions were selected (and some newly commissioned), and were revised and rewritten in the light of the collective commentary to form the integrated volume before you.

Studying war narratives is not entirely new; many people, including academics, have been interested in war stories for as long as there have been wars. Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995)¹ is one of the classic studies of the treatment of World War I in cultural history, and his 2006 study, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century,² remains inspirational for students of war narratives. On World War II, the collection edited by Margaret Atack and Christopher Lloyd on Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France is most useful in dealing with fictional narratives;³ Robert Moeller’s War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past handles narratives of the war in West Germany.⁴ There are fine studies of the cultural history of war, of historical narrative and culture,⁵ but very little on narrative and war across Europe in the twentieth century; we aim modestly to help fill that gap.

Defining Narrative

‘Narrative’ can take many forms: as a story, a myth, a way of organizing documentary and other evidence, an explanation of the inexplicable, a truth-seeking mission, a political manifesto or even a means of oppression. But for the purposes of this book, we move towards a set of common premises, particularly with regard to where narrative is located in relation to other concepts. The constellation of those concepts adjacent to narrative, such as myth, values, civilization and identity, is not thoroughly defined or universally agreed in the academy. A narrative is in the simplest terms a story, and narration is storytelling: Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps call it ‘an over-arching storyline that ties events together in a seamless explanatory framework’.⁶ The ‘narrative style’ in historiography emphasizes the storyline in what happened in the past, as opposed to a theory-driven social-science approach. But a narrative can mean much more than that: especially in literary theory many volumes have been filled with treatises on ‘narrativity’ and ‘narratology’.⁷ Applying the concept of narrative to the historical past, as well as to fiction and other literary forms, ‘narrative’ centres on a notion of ‘making sense’ of the past, whether it is the past of an individual (autobiography, life-stories, individual narratives)⁸ or that of families, groups, communities, nations, states or even ethnic groups and continents.

Our approach to and understanding of narratives, particularly those of individuals, takes as given that they are essentially perceptions, or constructs. For example, autobiographical accounts are not necessarily what happened, but rather perceptions of what happened. They allow us to reconstruct a story, but no matter how much truth it may contain, each story is an edited version of the personal truth. Therefore, the narrator must be placed in the proper socio-historical context because war is always more chaotic than the stories we construct to make sense of it. It is thus critical in researching war stories, life stories and narratives of war to recognize the narrative’s constitutional incapacity to be really accurate, as philosopher Louis Mink has eloquently observed:

stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, end […] [they belong to] the story we tell ourselves later. There are hopes, plans, battles, and ideas, but only in retrospective stories are hopes unfulfilled, plans miscarried, battles decisive, and ideas seminal.⁹

In that sense it is important to examine the relationship between individual accounts and the collective storylines and emplotments: how do the various versions interact, or clash?

So ‘narrative’ or ‘emplotment’ becomes a deliberate way of stringing events – more or less accepted as factual – into some sort of order that makes sense, and indeed can be used, for example, for easing psychological distress, for identity-building, for political goals, for moral instruction, for philosophical assertion and for meaning-making. Chronology is usually essential or, as Chris Flood puts it, the ‘time dimension is crucial’, and the conclusion is regularly drawn that ‘sequences of events are endowed with significance’ by a narrative.¹⁰ Narrative gives events cultural meaning, can function as a political intervention, and allows the past to have a purpose, by framing it in a particular way. Whether the narrative is official or personal, essentially it tells us, ‘this is what happened’, ‘this is what it meant’ and ‘this is how we (I) deal with it’.¹¹ Narratives reconstruct reality by selecting what to attend to, what is important and unimportant, what is good and bad, and how events are causally linked to each other.¹²

Arguably it is one of the essential functions of the discipline of history to ask questions, to make sense of the past and to create causal links between events. Narrative can be seen as a way in which a unit like a state or a nation can bring together various aspirations and beliefs of its people and make historical sense of an archipelago of different dreams and hopes. Storytelling was very much a part of European nationalism, for in the words of Stefan Berger, ‘nation is narration’.¹³ As Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes have put it, ‘narrative is a form of explanation that works by relating actions to the beliefs and desires that produce them’.¹⁴ It can ‘impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and […] create continuity between past, present and imagined futures’.¹⁵ Historical narrative in particular ‘primarily fulfils the function of structuring the unstructured’,¹⁶ and that process of structuring or ‘emplotment’ has been developed by Hayden White and others into a subset of philosophical historiography.¹⁷ Events from the past, moulded by the historical imagination into a narrative, can be used in all manner of genres related to past events – from history paintings to history textbooks and from diaries to monuments – for political ends and intervention in the present, ranging from nationalist projects to party political plans.¹⁸ The link to identity is a strong one too: narratives can be ‘vehicles for self-definition […] [of] uncanny power’,¹⁹ and the ‘collective identity is therefore the expression of a narrative shaping and forming of the group.’²⁰

In this sense, the concept of the narrative is not so far from that of ‘myth’. Like narrative, there is a great literature on myth, some of it very specific in its definitions, but in many accounts, the concepts of myth and narrative can seem virtually interchangeable. Chris Flood is not unusual in arguing, for instance, that myth is ‘an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of a set of past, present or predicted political events, and which is accepted as valid in its essentials by a social group’.²¹ Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand refer to political myth as ‘the continual process of work on a common narrative by which members of a social group can provide significance to their political conditions and experience’. They explain that a myth is more than ‘a simple narrative’, but depending on which author is defining the concepts, both myths and narratives are involved in making sense of events for a group in a way that can be politically useful.²² It is that ‘making sense’ and ‘providing significance’ which seems central to both concepts. The notion of a foundational myth or narrative – like Romulus and Remus for Rome – is in a category of its own. Modern myths are mainly political, legitimizing foundation moments, but they are ‘also about the values that a community must live by’ and they ‘express transhistorical values that provide orientation to a given community’.²³ In some accounts myth is less concerned with chronological order, and a truth claim is less relevant.

Reviewing these various theoretical approaches to ‘the narrative’, it is clear that this form of ‘meaning-making’ or emplotment of events can impart significance to an existence, be it individual or collective. It is not necessary in our context to declare allegiance to any particular grand theoretical conception; here we shall adopt a common-sense definition. For the purposes of this book a narrative is a self-image, a story told, a sequence of experienced events, an explanation and framing of how something came into being, and where it is going. It is most often self-reflexive, and a justification of one’s own position, whether as an individual or as part of a group. It is often contested, but additionally intended and constructed. It concerns the rationale or the raison d’être for something. It implies the origin, and – depending on its focus – the recipe for success or at least survival. It also often defines the characteristics that are positively valued and which are the basis of a collective self-portrayal.²⁴ Narratives of war are a means to empowerment and control of experiences during which the narrators were often powerless.

The focus of this collection is on those narratives related to warfare; primarily to war in Europe in the twentieth century. However, there are many precedents. The narratives of large-scale human conflict and war have been set down, recorded and narrated for thousands of years, from Thucydides to Tolstoy, in fiction, non-fiction, museums and in the private sphere of the family. War narratives, too, form a key component in historiography, from classic historicism to post-modern narrativism. War is often ‘a good story’, sometimes even a source of tall stories, told through a wide range of classic and modern media. In addition, the stories can ‘travel’ in whole or in part: there ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Part I Narrative and the Story of War
• Part II Constructing War Narratives
• Part III The Development and Deployment of War Narratives
• Part IV Testimonies and Survivalist Narratives
• Part V Conclusion
• Index