Introduction: The Great War in cultural memory

The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War has prompted a wave of academic reflection, but also popular and at times frankly nationalistic commemoration of events. The war, it is conventionally believed, put an end to the long nineteenth century and ushered in the age of extremes, to borrow from Eric Hobsbawm (1995). The reality is that, as Jay Winter so cogently argues, both memory and culture are far messier and less linear processes (1995: 5). Nevertheless the potent symbolism of the war remains, particularly in Europe. It was no coincidence, for example, that the heads of the member states of the European Union (EU) chose to meet in Ieper (Ypres), Belgium on 26 June 2014. What became the EU was born of the Second World War, but it was also the product of the memory of broader conflicts: principally that between France and Germany but also of other, longer-standing European rivalries. One of the major contributing factors to the First World War was the rivalry between France and Germany and the disputes over the regions of Alsace and Lorraine. Arguably, then, the greatest single achievement of the European Economic Community and then the EU was to put an end to the types of nationalistic and imperialist competition that had prompted the First World War – hence the Nobel committee’s decision to award its annual Peace Prize to the EU in 2012. It was also in part the memory of the consequences of the disastrous Versailles Treaty that prompted France and Germany to pursue peaceful economic cooperation in the 1950s. Versailles splintered the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, redrawing the map of Europe, but in so doing inadvertently lay the ground for future national rivalries and the rise of the radical right while failing to end the rivalry between the principal European powers (France, Germany, Britain and Italy).

The world that emerged from the First World War was a highly fragmented and unstable one. As well as the age of extremes, it was also the age of great uncertainties. This sense of uncertainty was often fuelled by the rapid acceleration of social and cultural trends discernible in Europe before the war. For example, the war had begun to challenge certain assumptions as to what a woman could and could not do, particularly, as was the case in France and Britain, when women had contributed so visibly to the nation’s war efforts through industry, agriculture and clerical work. Feminism, which had largely been confined to the educated middle classes, could point now to the example of millions of women across Europe and draw upon the debt owed to them. Attempts by male veterans to reassert themselves in post-war society can be read as an implicit recognition of this fact. The hypermasculinity of the former combatant was thus called upon to halt the tide of change that threatened to sweep away the pre-war gender order (Darrow, 2000: 8; Hurcombe, 2008).

Just as feminism was not invented by the war, so too avant-garde art predated it, but gained a broader appeal as a result of the war. The conflict allowed modernism to begin to enter the cultural mainstream, challenging a rational, realist order which, in the light of the mass slaughter of trench warfare, seemed increasingly inappropriate. Many could no longer believe in the principle of progress (the idea that civilization would inevitably progress towards a point of perfection); the war, as Freud argued (1985 [1915]), had revealed a darker, more primitive side to the Western mind. This led the French poet Paul Valéry to argue, in his 1919 lecture La Crise de l’esprit, that civilizations were mortal, and Oswald Spengler to argue that the West was in a period of terminal decline. This questioning of the power of reason promoted in turn an artistic interest in primitivism, but also the subconscious allowing for the development of surrealism, for example.

The essays in this issue of the Journal of European Studies trace some of the ways in which culture has measured and recorded, and also served as a way to articulate, the manifold ways in which Europeans continued to experience the war beyond its outbreak. In ‘“We have nothing better than testimony”: History and memory in French war narratives’, Nathalie Aubert draws upon the thought of the philosopher Paul Ricœur in order to elucidate the ways in which the immediacy of first-hand accounts of the war’s outbreak already reveals that experience is being translated into memory. By considering both combatant and non-combatant perspectives, both mainstream and marginalized voices begin to emerge, revealing a wealth of memory and experiences that have often been overlooked by privileging those who fought on the Western Front.

Angela Smith, Kerrie Holloway and Lucy Noakes offer three different perspectives on the ways in which the war was remembered in inter-war Britain. Smith’s ‘How to remember: War, Armistice and memory in post-1918 British fiction’ focuses primarily on women writers, including Irene Rathbone, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L. Sayers and Winifred Holtby, who speak of the aftermath of war and its effects upon the men and women who survived it. These writers, Smith argues, were able to provide alternative modes of remembrance that we risk forgetting by focusing exclusively on the war as a moment of combat limited only to the Western Front. Holloway’s ‘The Bright Young People of the late 1920s: How the Great War’s Armistice influenced those too young to fight’ considers how this group of young aristocrats responded to the memory of war and the heroic status of veterans in inter-war society. Their antics, Holloway concludes, can be seen as a form of attention-grabbing compensation that sought to break with the silence and solemnity of a nation engaged, in their eyes, in protracted mourning.

Responding to silence is also the theme of Noakes’s article, ‘A broken silence? Mass Observation, Armistice Day and “everyday life” in Britain, 1937–1941’. Here Noakes reveals, through the analysis of Mass Observation material in the form of anonymized diary entries, how, as the Second World War approached, Britons were unsure how to respond to the two-minute silence commemorating the end of the Great War. Far from offering a single, unified moment of national reflection, Armistice Day awakened a range of old memories and new fears as well as prompting indifference in many. In this way, Noakes exposes the complicated and often conflictual relationship between state commemoration and personal memory. The evolution of memory and its relationship to national modes of commemoration is also the theme of Richard Smith’s ‘The multicultural First World War: Memories of the West Indian contribution in contemporary Britain’. Here Smith traces the ways in which West Indian volunteers have been remembered since the war and how this memory has been mobilized to serve a range of ends: from West Indian self-government in the inter-war years to contemporary claims to equal citizenship and a shared past in British centenary commemorations via twentieth-century pan-Africanism. The result, Smith argues, is a complicated and problematic process of appropriation, which tells us much about attempts to co-opt memories of past conflicts for present-day political agendas. All the essays in this issue suggest the wealth of memories surrounding the First World War and hint at its complexity. They reveal how culture has participated in what is at times the simplification of memory through commemoration, but, for the most part, they expose culture’s resistance to this process through a pluralizing and complicating effect.