Winter Jay. Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century
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100 practices of remembrance
Russia, where the German army ruled between 1914 and 1918 and
where, in a terrifying recapitulation, another, very di√erent German
army would come again two decades later.
∞∏
Bardach’s photographs,
taken before the Holocaust, tell us of that first twentieth-century
encounter of west and east, of Jewish modernity and Jewish tradi-
tion, of occupier and occupied, of German and Slav, a multifaceted
encounter preserved in these photographs of lasting historical value.
It is tempting to think of Bardach, in his later years, opening this
scrapbook and reconstructing his recollections of military service
(fig. 14). No doubt millions of men who had served did so, and
thereby contributed to one of the most ubiquitous kinds of memory
work—the review and revision of the soldier’s memories of war.
‘‘The true picture of the past flits by,’’ wrote Walter Benjamin. ‘‘The
past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant
when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’’
∞π
We cannot help
seeing in these images today a view of a world on the brink of a
terrible precipice. Such was the landscape of Jewish life in eastern
Europe, soon to be hit by even worse pogroms in 1919 and 1920 and
by a terrible famine accompanying the Russian Civil War in 1921.
Following were the ravages of forced collectivization, the purges,
and then war again. What happened to the Jews whose paths crossed
that of Bardach we will never know. Their survival chances were, to
say the least, precarious.
This landscape, human and physical, was captured by a man
whose temperament and whose Jewishness gave him a special sen-
sitivity to the Jewish world he stumbled upon during his military
service. He did his duty as a physician in a cause which must be
distinguished from that of the Third Reich. One of his photographs
captured the graves of Jewish physicians, who perished while on
active duty on the Eastern Front; so much for the Jewish census and
its implicit message of hatred. These Jewish soldiers fought and died
alongside their fellow Christian soldiers, and Bardach was proud to
Photography and Remembrance 101
Fig. 14. Bardach photograph album. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New
York)
have been among them. His patriotism may have been troubled, but
it was not misplaced. To appreciate the meaning of the war to the
approximately half-million German and Austrian Jews who served
in the Great War, we must see it through their own eyes. These
photographs enable us to begin to do so. They were proud of being
Jews and proud of their country, and the dignity of that hard-won
and soon to be lost identity is unmistakable in the face of one Jewish
physician, Bernhard Bardach, who, while stationed at the Eastern
Front, paused for breath, as it were, and then breathed life into a
world which was soon to vanish forever. To get a sense of the Eastern
Front, its contours, and its confrontations, photography of the kind
Bernard Bardach took and preserved is an invaluable guide (fig. 15).
Images of the kind Bardach captured also triggered remem-
brance, albeit in selective and frequently nostalgic ways. But the
102 practices of remembrance
Fig. 15. All quiet on the Eastern Front, c. 1916. (Courtesy of the Leo Baeck
Institute, New York)
photographs reveal more than just the angle of vision of the man
who took them. The work of people like this one Austrian physician-
soldier captured encounters between men and women thrown to-
gether haphazardly by the fortunes of war, people who gaze at each
other with a host of emotions and gestures. The traces of these
chance meetings are all that remains of them. But they happened. A
man with a camera once decided to freeze time by capturing the
scene, and by doing so, he engaged in the di≈cult art of bringing
memory and history together. To be sure the photograph is an im-
age, full of distortions and misleading elements. But once located
within the life of the photographer, such images tell us much about
the visual world of remembrance in the twentieth century.
chapter 4
War Letters
Cultural Memory and the ‘‘Soldiers’ Tale’’
of the Great War
There has been a burst of interest in recent years in ‘‘war literature,’’
understood as a genre of writing in which soldiers display the au-
thority of direct experience in telling their ‘‘truth’’ about war and
combat. In the process, they o√er reflections on much else besides—
on comradeship and masculinity, on the image of the enemy, on
national sentiment, on the burden of survival when so many others
failed to come back, and on the ‘‘lies’’ that those who were not there
told about those who were.
Much of this discussion centers on memoirs written long after
the Armistice of 1918, but it also refers directly to a vast body of
evidence derived from soldiers’ letters—in particular those written
by men who died in the war—which were published during and after
the war. To Samuel Hynes, these letters were ‘‘war memoirs of the
dead.’’
∞
This massive body of correspondence is an essential but
relatively unexplored part of the cultural legacy of the Great War.
Never before did soldiers create such an avalanche of letters and
postcards. Estimates vary, but the number of items sent by soldiers
to their families in wartime must be calculated in the tens of million.
Most such items were ephemeral; indeed, the British army had a
standardized form for soldiers to tick o√ boxes corresponding to
their physical and mental well-being and so on.
≤
Censorship lay
behind this e√ort to restrict soldiers’ comments to the absolutely
104 practices of remembrance
anodyne; o≈cers were obliged to read handwritten missives and
eliminate any information potentially of value to the enemy.
Soldiers’ letters have rarely been examined systematically
≥
or in
comparative perspective.
∂
One way to begin this task is to consider
them in terms of the shaping of what Jan and Aleida Assmann have
termed ‘‘cultural memory.’’ To the Assmanns cultural memory is a
set of codes in which educated men and women place their personal
recollections of the past in a literary, aesthetic, and philosophical
framework. Those codes are frequently defined as national in char-
acter, with deep resonances in the literary and religious life of a
people. They therefore are intensely political, though in a very broad
sense.
∑
To uncover cultural memory we must explore the construction,
adaptation, and circulation of these codes which frequently take the
form of texts about significant historical events, initially produced
by those directly engaged in them, but codified in an archive of
words, sounds, and images accessible to later generations. Soldiers’
letters clearly form one such archive of cultural memory.
Here is a useful framework for the analysis of the publication of
soldiers’ letters. On the one hand, they commemorate the dead
through their own words. On the other hand, they use the language
of dead soldiers to fortify a view of the war as noble and uplifting.
Thus it is apparent from the outset that what soldiers wrote about
the war must be separated from what was done with their words.
The ‘‘soldiers’ memory’’ of the war is not at all the same as the
‘‘cultural memory’’ of the war.
The War Letters of Fallen German Soldiers
Let us consider this distinction in terms of one celebrated collection
of the letters of fallen German soldiers, edited by the literary scholar
Philipp Witkop and revised and published five times between 1916
Cultural Memory and the ‘‘Soldiers’ Tale’’ 105
and 1941.
∏
This book was one of the foundational texts of the myth of
‘‘war enthusiasm,’’ the Augusterlebnis, the experience of national ex-
hilaration during which all political parties rallied around the flag in
the first weeks of the Great War. Here was the essence of the German
people, revealed in a flood of light at the outset of the war.
This story about public opinion is both time-honored and false.
π
This popular mood was neither homogenous nor enduring. Panic,
anxiety, and stoicism matched patriotic fervor in Germany as it did
in all other combatant countries. Photos of student rallies or urban
crowds in the capital reinforce the myth, but they are misleading;
these orchestrated events, duly recorded in newsreel film, tended to
naturalize what was artfully and systematically constructed for polit-
ical purposes. And what was seen in Berlin tells us little about what
happened in other towns, with large working-class populations, or
in the countryside, where the harvest was under way. Exhilarated
patriotism in August 1914 as a collective phenomenon is a myth.
How did this story about German national identity in 1914 be-
come part of the archive of German cultural memory? One source
was the publication of soldiers’ letters. During the war, the German
army was favorably disposed to this kind of publication, and in the
Weimar Republic successive state Ministries of Education continued
to cultivate (and subsidize) such works.
∫
The Nazis too had their
reasons for disseminating this story, though their motives for doing
so were entirely di√erent.
Witkop, whose project we examine here, was professor of modern
literature at Freiburg, a friend of Thomas Mann, and an expert on
German lyric poetry.
Ω
He was a poet in his own right, a distinction
which did not find favor in the hearts of some of his Freiburg
colleagues of a more ‘‘scientific’’ disposition. Of direct relevance to
his later work, though, was his parallel interest in workers’ education,
on which subject he published his first book. As Wolfgang Natter has
shown, here in this early work are the seeds of Witkop’s anthologies,
106 practices of remembrance
which also took as their function the elevation of a reading public to a
higher cultural and spiritual level of existence.
∞≠
Nurturing Bildung is
one way to describe his lifetime mission. Another way of putting it is
to say that his business was the dissemination of texts disclosing
(while constructing) German cultural memory.
First in 1916, in a collection of German soldiers’ letters, of both
those who had died and those who were still alive, and in 1918 in a
collection of fallen soldiers’ letters, Witkop made selections which
constructed a highly idealized portrait of the German soldier. By
choosing student letters, he projected onto the mass of German
soldiers the taste for philosophical prose and poetry he spent his
own professional life exploring. He believed that soldiers in 1914
were reaching out for some spiritual guidance, and had found in the
Bible, in Goethe, and in Nietzsche—in particular in Thus spake
Zarathustra—the stu√ of which stoicism and sacrifice had been
made. Such a claim about soldiers’ sensibilities was not original, and
drew on celebrated cases of artists who volunteered early in the war,
like Otto Dix
∞∞
and Franz Marc, among others.
∞≤
The problem was
that Witkop’s project suggested that these unrepresentative soldiers
stood for the army as a whole. The fact that both Dix and Marc,
among others, shed their early idealism in the mud and detritus of
the trenches was never fully acknowledged.
Witkop’s Hegelian sleight of hand—taking elites as representative
of the nation as a whole—was an intrinsic part of the project of
constructing a specifically German cultural memory out of the up-
heaval of the Great War. If spiritually minded soldiers carried the
Geist—the spirit of the German Volk, or people—then an explora-
tion of their letters would take on the features of cultural anthropol-
ogy: Germany—the true Germany, the ideal Germany—was in es-
sence what these soldiers said and did. In other words, those who
expressed their Germanness in an idealistic form, either in writing
or in military deeds, were to Witkop and people like him ‘‘seers,’’
Cultural Memory and the ‘‘Soldiers’ Tale’’ 107
visionaries who could conjure up the outlines of the life and pulse of
a nation in a way no materialist could do. They pointed the way to a
better future, one worthy of the sacrifices of so many idealistic
young men.
Witkop worked to bring together these spiritual ‘‘leaders’’ of the
German nation and the rest of the army in two ways. The first was by
organizing courses in higher education within the army itself; sol-
diers were granted two weeks’ furlough to attend.
∞≥
The second was
by providing articles and commentary in one of the army’s o≈cial
newspapers, the Kriegzeitung der 7 Armee, which he helped edit. This
publication must be distinguished from trench journals, cyclostyled
or mimeographed by soldiers at the front, frequently using ‘‘bor-
rowed’’ equipment and whatever paper was not nailed down. The
cost of these newspapers was minimal, but it was paid by small
groups of men who knew each other and who shared the same sense
of humor and grievances. The life expectancy of the newspapers
was even shorter than that of the editors and readers. They came
and went and sometimes came again.
∞∂
In contrast glossy peri-
odicals were published at the army’s expense for separate army
groups. These bore no resemblance to the bottom-up journalism
produced not only in the German army but in other combatant
forces too. They were dirigiste in character, presenting to soldiers
what the army high command believed they should think about the
war.
∞∑
Witkop’s war service was within the cultural apparatus of the
German army. He was a patriot and a liberal intellectual. His com-
mitment to collecting soldiers’ letters in wartime was intended to
honor all those who had fought. But his goal was also to preserve
and perpetuate what he saw as the idealism of those who had volun-
teered for duty during the first days and weeks of the war, and to
show how deeply ingrained in the German nation as a whole were
the values of these young men, many of whom were students. These
108 practices of remembrance
young men were subject to conscription, but could come forward to
serve even before they had been called. About three hundred thou-
sand men did so.
∞∏
To understand fully the nobility of these men,
Witkop urged us to turn to their letters.
In 1916, Witkop brought out the first of his edited anthologies
under the title Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten (War letters of Ger-
man students). In 1918, he published a slightly longer edition—this
time 153 rather than the 114 pages in the 1916 collection—with the new
title Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten (War letters of fallen students).
Ten years later, at the tenth anniversary of the Armistice, Witkop
published a much-expanded collection of letters, from which an
English translation was made. This 1928 German edition was re-
printed and, after the Nazis came to power, weeded to remove some
Jewish and pacifist voices among the letter-writers anthologized in it.
Witkop never joined the Nazi Party and tried unsuccessfully to resist
these e√orts to ‘‘cleanse’’ his book. He died of natural causes in 1942.
Estimates of circulation of the war letters project are hard to pin
down, but the figure of two hundred thousand sales in the interwar
years appears to be approximately reliable.
∞π
CONSOLATION
Now that we have some idea as to why these volumes were produced,
and what political and cultural issues surrounded their initial and
later publication, we can turn to the question of their intended
audience. This project was clearly aimed at a population in mourn-
ing. Witkop got permission during the war from the army to write to
the families of men who had died on active service and to ask them
to contribute letters to a book. He received thousands of replies. We
can imagine the di≈culty parents or wives had in sifting through the
papers of a son or a husband, and making a gift of the letter to
Witkop and, through him, to the nation.
Cultural Memory and the ‘‘Soldiers’ Tale’’ 109
Here we reach the intersection of politics and bereavement. The
entries in the book resemble gravestones, in a general way. There is
the name and, instead of military rank, there is an academic a≈lia-
tion. Then follows the date and place of birth and death. So far the
parallel with a gravesite is clear and is similar to that used in other
similar ventures, for instance, Laurence Housman’s War letters of
fallen Englishmen.
∞∫
Housman’s identification also includes the ser-
vice arm and rank, which Witkop’s book avoids. Still, the similarity
to a cemetery stone is clear.
What both editions add, of course, is a letter or several letters.
∞Ω
This practice helps establish the individuality of the soldier who
died; without such special individuation, he would fade into an
army of the dead, and therefore into oblivion. Thus these books
o√er two services to bereaved families. For those whose sons or
husbands or brothers had no known grave, these pages provide a
kind of surrogate resting place his remains never had. And secondly,
the text of the letters does more than just list a name, date of birth,
and date of death. It is a kind of portrait, like those found in eastern
European cemeteries. The letters construct a snapshot of the mind
of the fallen soldier. The prose comes to stand for the man himself,
his nobility, his beliefs, his aspirations. It is as if he wrote his own
epitaph.
The parents of Friedrich Steinbrecher wrote to Witkop on pre-
cisely this point. They thanked him for having ‘‘erected a memorial’’
for their son. ‘‘We cannot have his grave decorated,’’ they noted,
‘‘since his last resting place is unknown.’’ As Natter has shown, Wit-
kop’s mission was to give his book the character of ‘‘a cemetery of
honor, a monument of honor that these young fallen have built for
themselves; a national book of edification, to which we, to which our
grandchildren, will return over and over again, touched, with re-
spect, love, and gratitude.’’
≤≠
The task of producing such a book as Witkop’s or Housman’s