Winter Jay. Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century

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150 practices of remembrance

My argument should not be construed as a set of comments on

the truism that ‘‘small is beautiful.’’ Local politics can be as divisive

and disturbing as national politics. I simply want to urge that when

we speak of collective remembrance, we return to the original notion

of Halbwachs, and recognize that di√erent collectives, within the

same state, socially frame their memories in very di√erent ways. The

nation is not the place where collective remembrance begins, though

the local, the particular, and the national frequently intersect.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have tried to illustrate the need to approach the

history of collective remembrance from the angle of small-scale,

locally rooted social action. Many of these phenomena were family-

based, but others occurred among people whose ties were based on

experience rather than marriage or ﬁliation. I have used the term

ﬁctive kinship to characterize these associations. All these groups

were agents of remembrance. Their activity antedated public com-

memoration and continued long after the ceremonies were over. Yes,

on 11 November, these groups joined the nation, the wider collective.

But that was not their origin, nor their center of gravity.

I have insisted that remembrance is an activity of agents who

congregate on the borderline between the private and the public,

between families, civil society, and the state.

≤≠

This form of small-

scale collective memory—the thought-process of kinship, both ﬁc-

tive and ﬁlial—was both powerful and brittle. At the time, it gave

men and women a way to live on after the horrors of war. But as

those agents of remembrance grew tired or old, developed other

lives, moved away, or died, then the activity—the glue—which held

together these cells of remembrance, atrophied and lost its hold on

them. What has remained to this day are the traces of their work and

the envelope in which they operated: the national framework which

War Memorials 151

was but a thin cover over a host of associative forms arduously

constructed over years by thousands of people, mostly obscure. To-

day we see the collective memory in national ceremonies; but in the

decades after the Armistice of 1918, there were other, locally based

collectives engaged in remembrance. They have vanished, but it

would be foolish to merge these activities in some state-bounded

space of hegemony or domination. What these people did was much

smaller and much greater than that.

A ﬁnal word about the relevance of these instances of commem-

oration, bounded by the tragedy of the First World War, for our

consideration of monuments in the later twentieth century. After

the Second World War, the same ﬂaring up of older languages ap-

propriate to a period of mass mourning did not take place. In gen-

eral, commemoration was muted, a hardly surprising development

in France or in Germany. In Britain, the names of those who died in

the war of 1939–45 were simply added to those of the Great War. In

part, this was a reﬂection of failure. The warning inscribed in war

memorials—never again—was not heeded. In addition, there was a

clear preference on the local level for utilitarian war memorials,

useful donations or projects, ﬁtting at a time when national recon-

struction was the order of the day. The same body of opinion re-

ﬂected in the Labour Party electoral victory of 1945 is to be found in

the widespread discussion of commemoration in hospitals, schools,

scholarships, and in the Land Fund. Statues, as one survey of 1944

disclosed, were not wanted.

There was a change too in artistic opinion as to forms of public

statuary. Henry Moore stuck to the human ﬁgure, but many other

artists turned to abstraction. Their work was thus both more liber-

ated from speciﬁc cultural and political reference and less accessible

to a mass audience. Whether or not these abstract images have the

same power to heal as did older symbolic forms is a di≈cult ques-

tion; my answer is probably not.

≤∞

152 practices of remembrance

The forms of commemoration may have changed, but in many

places the impulse to create them has endured. And so have the

controversies surrounding such projects. One of Käthe Kollwitz’s

sculptures, a pietà, was placed, amid much argument, in the Neue

Wache in Berlin. It asks us to remember ‘‘the victims of war and

dictatorship,’’ thereby conﬂating those who perished during the two

wars, the Holocaust, and under the East German dictatorship. Then

there is the long, drawn-out saga of the e√ort to create a National

Holocaust Memorial in the German capital. Perhaps the case of

Berlin is exceptional, but it does reinforce my claim that, on the

whole, the smaller the scale and the more modest the monumental

project, the more likely it is that it will express the cares and senti-

ments of those who need to remember.

All I want to suggest in conclusion is that the same multivocality

in the commemorative project persists now as was so evident a

century ago. Here too we can see that however much we dwell on the

Second World War and the Holocaust, the patterns which emerged

during the Great War simply do not fade away. The history of com-

memorative projects launched in the period of the 1914–18 conﬂict

and after show that remembrance is a process with multiple voices.

They are rarely harmonious and never identical; they do not simply

add up to a vague or ill-deﬁned entity known as collective memory

or national memory. Remembrance is always deﬁned by its speciﬁc-

ity—who, why, and where. The answers to these questions remain

critical, and many of them can be answered only on the local level,

by investigating the work of ‘‘memory activists.’’

Further di≈culties have arisen when art is mobilized in the

search for symbols appropriate for national monuments. Who can

miss the underlying message of such projects? In Berlin, the message

is hard to avoid: out of the ashes, the city and the nation have risen.

Can such uses of the notion of aesthetic redemption be defended? I

wonder. To reﬂect on these matters is still important, for the search

War Memorials 153

for meaning in this the most violent of centuries, goes on. It persists,

despite the urging of some postmodernists, like Jacques Derrida,

that we give up the e√ort entirely.

≤≤

I suspect that the activity of

remembrance, and the creation of the topoi of collective experience

which it entails, are irrepressible. They express some fundamental

truths about the tendency of ordinary people, of many faiths and of

none, to face the emptiness, the nothingness of loss in war, together.

chapter 7

War, Migration, and Remembrance

Britain and Her Dominions

One of the central premises of the work of Maurice Halbwachs is

that social groups frame the memories they share. That is, when

collectives come together to recall signiﬁcant events, events which

tell them who they are as a group, then they create something he

termed ‘‘collective memory.’’ And when they no longer form a

group, or when other life events intervene, and people age or move

away or simply ﬁnd other things to do, then the collective changes or

disintegrates, and with it goes ‘‘collective memory.’’ This sense of the

socially constructed nature of ‘‘collective memory’’ is vital to histor-

ical study, since it precludes talking about memory as if it exists

independently of the people who share it.

∞

One case which illustrates the way in which acts of remembrance

bind together far-ﬂung collectives is the way in which both British

and Dominion populations came to mourn the ‘‘Lost Generation’’

of the Great War. At the same time as Australia, New Zealand, and

Canada found during and after the war new meaning in a political

and cultural life largely independent of Britain, the ties which bound

these di√erent populations together were reinforced by the social

practices of remembering the dead of the 1914–18 conﬂict. It was an

Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission which

gathered together the remains of those who had died and who built

cemeteries to honor them.

Britain and Her Dominions 155

After the Second World War, this sense of shared experience

changed, not in any way to diminish the signiﬁcance of the immense

loss of life during the two wars, but to separate national practices

and symbols into discrete parts. In 2006 Australians still make the

pilgrimage to Gallipoli. The death of the last veterans of the Great

War in Canada is front-page news, and poppy sales in Britain each

November are robust. What changed was not the subject of remem-

brance, but in each country the composition of the population

doing the remembering. After 1945, migration between Britain and

the ‘‘Old Dominions’’ diminished just as migration from the ‘‘New

Dominions’’ increased sharply. These black and brown Britons did

not share the same ‘‘collective memories,’’ in Halbwachs’s sense of

the term, and neither did new immigrants to Australia or Canada

from Asia. It was inevitable that as cultural life became more plu-

ralistic and less Anglocentric, even in England, acts of remembrance

would reﬂect this new demographic proﬁle. And so it has, not by

diminishing the signiﬁcance of the 1914–18 war, but perhaps surpris-

ingly, by increasing it.

The key point here is that migration matters in the formation of

collective remembrance, since migratory waves create diasporas

with strong ties to the mother country. When migration patterns

shift, so does the social base of ‘‘collective memory.’’ The result is not

necessarily forgetting, but more frequently the recasting of acts of

remembrance into more discrete, distinctive national forms. It is no

accident, therefore, that in 1993 the Australian government decided

to bury in Canberra its own unknown warrior. They were no longer

satisﬁed with the ‘‘collective memory’’ attached to the British un-

known soldier buried in Westminster Abbey, who might well have

been Australian; no one knows.

In this chapter, I ﬁrst describe the ties which bound together the

British Empire and Dominions in the twentieth century demo-

graphically. Then, by placing imperial demography and imperial

156 practices of remembrance

commemorations together, we can see ways in which ‘‘collective

memories’’ emerge and mutate over time. My fundamental claim

is that demography created the British Empire, and now, by the

twenty-ﬁrst century, demography has laid it to rest. The project of

peopling, in the euphemism of the time, ‘‘areas of white settlement’’

with British people was a remarkable one, with clear and visible out-

lines in the architecture and ambiance of Toronto, Melbourne, and

Capetown. But deeper than the thoroughfares, the public schools, or

the botanical gardens, what made the empire, the Dominions, and

the Commonwealth a reality were the family ties which bound core

and periphery together.

The demography of the British diaspora created the late-

nineteenth-century British Empire and Dominions. But since the

Second World War, the demography of migratory patterns has

changed, and with it the ethnic and racial composition both of

Britain and of her former dependencies have been transformed. In

1994, the city of Sydney won the right to host the summer Olympic

games in the year 2000. The head of the Sydney committee, in a

jubilant mood, announced, ‘‘We beat the Chinese,’’ the other major

contender as host for the games. His broad Australian accent did not

hide the fact that he, himself, was of Chinese extraction; his family

had come to Sydney thirty years earlier. He spoke for a new Australia,

one with an Asian and Paciﬁc character and consciousness very

di√erent from that dominant a century before. Migration matters.

This point leads me to my second argument: against the back-

drop of this demographic history, distinctive cultural forms braided

the Empire together. These forms have had a life history; some have

withered away, others have endured. There is still today a common

language, a shared sporting heritage, some facets of bureaucratic

forms in general and educational systems in particular, all legacies of

imperial administration. But other remnants of the imperial past

have more speciﬁc referents, and have shown a surprising vitality

Britain and Her Dominions 157

despite shifts in ethnic and racial composition in both Britain and

the former empire.

Some of these lasting cultural forms relate to the two world wars.

In a way, remembering the terrible carnage of 1914–18 and 1939–45

has created a space in which imperial history could be written and

rewritten every 11 November. Here is a moment during which the

bonds which tied together communities at the ends of the earth

could be (and still are) made manifest, respected, and honored. This

is why the imperial monuments to the dead of the Great War still

draw pilgrims by the tens of thousands today.

Many of them come to the ﬂatlands of the River Somme, where

the British army launched a massive and futile campaign on 1 July

1916. On those ﬁelds today are thousands of war cemeteries. Adja-

cent to them are national monuments. At Longueval, there is a

South African monument; at Beaumont Hamel, the Newfoundland

monument; at Villers-Bretonneux, the Australian monument; and

at Thiepval, the monument to the 73,000 missing soldiers of the

British Empire who died on the Somme but whose bodies were

never interred. Their graves, the monument’s central plaque a≈rms,

are known but to God. These are all sites where remembering em-

pire has been ﬁxed in stone.

Even more powerful in its evocative and semisacred character is

Gallipoli. Both there and in Australia, a dawn service is held com-

memorating the landing on the shores of Turkey on 25 April 1915.

The public that attends these ceremonies is large and growing. And

young. The date 25 April is at one and the same time Australia’s day

of mourning and her independence day. It is a moment when his-

tory matters.

The commemoration of the two world wars, and of the sacriﬁces

made in them, is the most visceral and living form in which the

‘‘collective memory,’’ in Halbwachs’s sense of the term, the sense of a

common history, is expressed. But it is important to register the

158 practices of remembrance

mixed message of these occasions. The men who died in the two

world wars stood on the middle ground between their countries and

the British Empire. They died in an imperial e√ort; but they contrib-

uted not only to the survival of the Empire, but also to its superses-

sion. The day Australians landed at Gallipoli is the day they mark the

emergence of their separate and distinctive national identity. The

Canadians whose deaths are commemorated at Vimy, near Arras,

helped create a di√erent kind of Canada, one with a more tenuous

tie to the mother country. To remember the wars is to remember at

one and the same time the apogee of imperial solidarity and the

inexorable features of its demise.

Migration and Empire

The history of empire is an integral part of the history of population

movements from and to the British Isles. This dual feature of demo-

graphic history is often underestimated. The demographic history

of empire is marked by powerful centrifugal and centripetal forces.

Only by measuring this two-way tra≈c can we appreciate fully the

way British and imperial history have overlapped.

Out-migration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was

relatively modest: in those two hundred years, perhaps one million

people left Britain for a new life abroad. That very rough average

of ﬁve thousand departures a year was dwarfed by later surges of

out-migration. Between 1815 and 1850, perhaps seven hundred ﬁfty

thousand people left the British Isles permanently. This outﬂow of

roughly twenty thousand a year is almost certainly an underesti-

mate. Migration statistics are a resultant of inﬂows and outﬂows.

Many people chose to leave Britain for a better life, but ﬁrst tried out

nearby towns and then more distant cities. Internal migration pre-

pared the way for more distant travel. Millions of people moved in a

stepwise manner from country to town to city to an overseas desti-

Britain and Her Dominions 159

nation. But then, sometimes years after arrival abroad, when things

got hard, they came home again, only to restart the cycle. That is, by

1900 international passenger tra≈c was directed both ways and was

repeated. Given the sharp decline in the later nineteenth century in

the costs of transportation, overseas voyages became a normal part

of the life cycle of a surprisingly large part of the population. How

large a part it is di≈cult to say, but one passenger manifest from the

turn of the twentieth century had it that a majority of the people on

board had made the Atlantic journey at least twice in the preceding

decade.

Thus the major period of out-migration from Britain in the

nineteenth century, which helped people the Empire and Domin-

ions, was also a period of return tra≈c from those who could not

stand living abroad. That is why all migration statistics must be

understood as registering multiple movements; double-counting in

unavoidable. That is another reason why we should attend to trends

rather than to absolute totals of immigrants whenever we address

the subject of movement to and from the Empire.

One additional problem makes all British migration statistics

nebulous. To this day, the movement of Irishmen and women into

and out of Britain is both substantial and impossible to estimate

with any precision. Migration to the United States or the Empire

from Ireland took place both directly and through British ports.

Those who embarked on return journeys to the British Isles landed

in Ireland and in England, whatever their ﬁnal destination. This is

hardly surprising before the Irish Free State came into being in 1922,

but it is still true today. British migration bound Britain and Ireland

together even when people were trying to escape from one or the

other or both.

Another major headache in handling these data is that they con-

sist of information on people who went to imperial or Dominion

territories, and those moving to the United States as well. Given the