The Mediatization of War and Peace

The Role of the Media in Political Communication, Narratives, and Public Memory (1914-1939)

Christoph Cornelissen, Marco Mondini

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110707397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

During the First World War, mass media achieved an enormous and continuously growing importance in all belligerent countries. Newspaper, illustrated magazines, comics, pamphlets, and instant books, fi ctional works, photography, and the new-born "theater of imagery", the cinema, were crucial in order to create a heroic vision of the events, to mobilize and maintain the consensus on the war. But their role was pivotal also in creating the image of the war's end and fi nally, together with a widespread, new literary genre, the war memoirs, to shape the collective memory of the confl ict for the next generations. Even before November 1918, the media raised high expectations for a multifaceted peace: a new global order, the beginning of a peaceful era, the occasion for a regenerating apocalypse. Likewise, in the following decades, particularly war literature and cinema were pivotal to reverse the icon of the Great War as an epic crusade and a glorious chapter of the national history and to create the hegemonic image of a senseless carnage. The Mediatization of War and Peace focalizes on the central role played by mass media in the tortuous transition to the post-war period as well as on the profound disenchantment generated by their prophesies.

IV. The Memory of Peace and the Media – National and Regional Contexts

Visions of Stability and Anxiety

The Mediatic Building of Nations and Border Regions, 1918–1930

Peter Haslinger

Note: I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the Trento conference for their feedback as well as my colleagues from the Collaborative Research Center/Transregion 138 “Dynamics of security. Types of Securitization from a Historical Perspective”, for helping to develop my conceptual argument.

1 Introduction

In the Czech case, the cohesiveness of the two main state building factors, the territory and the nation, is implemented with such force that this nation has survived all disturbances of the past. Because the morphology of the land and the boundaries of the national territory are visible in an indisputable way, they are evident to everyone who wants to see them¹.

These observations were published in 1918 in a book written by a young Czech geographer, Viktor Dvorský (1882–1960), including a series of maps like the one reproduced here. In 1910, Dvorský had finished his habilitation with an anthropogeographic study of the border region between Montenegro and the Ottoman Empire.

Fig. 1: The future state territory of Czechoslovakia defined by vegetation zones, in V. Dvorský, Území českého národa (The territory of the Czech nation), Praha 1918, map attached to the volume.

Now, under wartime conditions, he engaged in the production of a persuasive geography that focused on the inclusion of Slovakia in a future state – a concept that had been popularized by the Czecho-Slovak exile since 1915 but still had little political salience within Czech society². Even if Dvorský’s attempt to create a binding interpretation of a national space by text and image might not seem too convincing today due to its rather unprofessional appearance (fig. 1), it represents a rhetoric that was widely adopted by both scholars and politicians during the last months of the war and following years.

One year later Dvorský was appointed as a leading geography expert at the peace negotiations in Paris. Before, he had been the main figure behind the territorial program that was presented and adopted in a meeting of the newly created office for the preparation of a peace conference (Uřád pro připravu mírové conference), 29 December 1918³.

Fig. 2: The borders of the Czechoslovak state from a statistical point of view: map presented by the Czechoslovak delegation at Saint Germain, 1919, in H. Gordon, Die Beneš-Denkschriften. Die Tschechoslowakei und das Deutsche Reich 1918/19. Kommentar und Kritik, Berg 1990, pp. 212 f.

At the time of the peace conference he was Professor of Geography at Charles University in Prague with a busy schedule working on 41 studies regarding different geographic topics while giving three to four presentations every day⁴. He was also responsible for the conceptual basis of maps that were produced by a team of 11 cartographers by April 1919⁵ and, at least some of them, became part of the memoranda submitted by the Czechoslovak delegation to visually promote their territorial claims (fig. 2 shows the borders that were deemed necessary to guarantee the security of the country against potential enemies).

This uneasy perspective was strategically motivated by the context of the ongoing peace negotiations and also designed to correspond with the French concept of the containment of post-war Germany. In July 1920 – when he was about to act as the Czechoslovak member of the international commission for the delimitation of the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia – Dvorský wrote a lengthy secret report for the Czechoslovak Ministry of National Defence on the risk of military invasions in the future. None of Czechoslovakia’s new neighbors except for Romania, Dvorský assumed, had an interest in the continued existence of the state. If conflict occurred, Slovakia would almost certainly become the theater for fierce military clashes. It was therefore necessary to maintain military control over the Danube between its confluences with the rivers Morava and Ipeľ, and to expand the railway network between Moravia and Slovakia as quickly as possible to speed up the transport of troops if necessary⁶.

As can be seen from Dvorský’s example, geographers dedicated special attention to borders and border regions. One of the reasons for this was that in post-1918 Central Europe, the multiethnic composition of the population almost naturally created zones of conflicting interests between emerging states and the pre-war political regimes. Projected ideas of national territory⁷ were cherished on all sides and a symbolic geography can be seen emerging during the last months of World War I, with ethnolinguistic fault-lines and minorities appearing to constitute a risk for the national security of the newly created states.

2 Maps as instruments of reification and propaganda

Since much of this is already known, the focus of this article will be on the function of maps as important media for delineating political discussions and disseminating political messages⁸. As is known, spatial concepts assume material form in maps, producing binding interpretations that in turn create inter-personal meaning. Maps are not copy-and-paste representations of the world, they are knowledge media that create “augmented realities”. As knowledge media they are inherently rhetorical and represent a “chosen reality”⁹. They also share a common grammar to fulfil basic communicative functions. The first function is to provide information about locations, distances, and spatial relations. Maps (and therefore also map makers) achieve this in a manner that generates multiple implications, due to the fact that maps are based on a set of active decisions that map producers are required to make.

The most important choice is what to show and what to disregard. Due to the international cartographic language, we see similar motifs if we look at representations of spaces. Streets, towns, buildings, state borders, and the distribution of linguistic groups are not portrayed individually, but reduced to standardized representations. Professional map-making therefore encourages categorization of the world in order to reduce its complexity. Based on measurements and statistical data, maps can also determine the visualization of space through choice of colour, contrast (warm-cold or light-dark), clustering and shading, and labelling language (like place and region names). In this way maps impose a lot of streamlining and even obliteration. Through the data they reference and confirm, disagree with, or contradict, they disseminate ideological elements and political claims.

The arbitrary nature of the cartographic visualization of certain regions becomes clear in the case of seemingly “innocent” or “exact” depictions, for example ethnographic maps. Even physical maps, which would appear to be neutral due to the lack of political borders and their conventional cartographic language, can make political statements deriving from the choice of the areas that attention is drawn to. In the post-1918 context, cartographic production was focused on regions of conflicting interpretation, or disputed borders, on the basis of competing territorial programs. The result could almost be referred to as parallel cartographic realities that were dynamically and negatively entangled. The maps and their producers communicated and interacted with each other, while cartographers helped disseminate political visions by authorizing competing spatial ideations based on their standing as experts. In order to make their arguments as persuasive and salient as possible, they typically combined professional design and scientific language with elements drawn from political belief systems.

3 Border regions as symbolic spaces in Central and Eastern European cartography

If ethnographic or juridical arguments did not match up with their territorial programs, experts and politicians were ready to diverge from them. In the representation of regions in maps, brochures, and memoranda, the argument for the self-determination of peoples was thus often combined with references to important natural resources, communications and infrastructure, as well as the need to defend the state territory. Especially during the first three decades of the twentieth century, there was widespread adoption of motifs of historical precedence, the decisive long-term imprint of early state or empire building by national predecessors as key factors in claims over certain regions of Central and Eastern Europe. As Alexandra Schweiger said regarding the Polish example, the vision according to which “...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• On the Mediatization of War and Peace since 1918/19
• I. Visualization of War – Narratives of War
• II. Peace Illusions – The Media as Postwar Prophets
• III. From Hope to Disenchantment
• IV. The Memory of Peace and the Media – National and Regional Contexts
• Contributors
• Index