Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture by Benjamin Ziemann (review)

Soon it will be twenty years since Cambridge University Press launched the series Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare with the publication of Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995). Focusing on the efforts of the bereaved to come to terms with the experience of loss, Winter’s monograph was essentially a study of the emotional legacy of World War I—with the politics left out. Yet in this latest addition to the burgeoning series, Benjamin Ziemann foregrounds the agency of war veterans and the political dimension of their commemorative practices in the aftermath of World War I, which suggests that the pendulum of interpretation might be swinging the other way.

If this is indeed the case, it is not made explicit in Ziemann’s excellent new book, for the author has a different agenda. Contested Commemorations takes issue principally with another seminal work, Fallen Soldiers by George Mosse (1990), which argues that the war’s legacy of “brutalization” had played into the hands of extremist forces that thus managed to instrumentalize the memory of the world war. A congenial discourse to rightwing politics, war commemoration eventually became subsumed in rehearsals for fascism in Germany. Ziemann effectively demolishes the idea of a German special path in commemorative affairs. Stressing the multivocal and highly contested nature of war remembrance in the Weimar Republic, he argues that historians of the Weimar Republic have exaggerated the prevalence of nationalist veterans, on the one hand, and the weakness of the republican settlement, on the other. Ziemann draws our attention to one of Weimar’s “eminent organisational success stories” (67): the much neglected republican veterans’ associations, above all the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold and, to a lesser extent, the Reichsbund of disabled war veterans. Numerically much stronger than the rightwing veterans’ leagues, these officially nonpartisan but de facto Social Democratic organizations represented a powerful alternative voice that campaigned for peace, international reconciliation (notably with French veterans), and the defense of the republic.

The bulk of the literature on war commemorations has focused on the building and ritualistic use of war memorials. While Ziemann discusses the aborted project of a national memorial (Reichsehrenmal), he also considers a vast range of other media and modes of memory such as personal testimony, official histories, visual images, military insignia, and signifying practices. Ziemann attaches particular importance to the performance of memory—although he takes a less radical performative turn in the substantive chapters than the introduction implies. Successful though the Reichsbanner was in recruiting members (some 2.75 million in 1925) and in establishing local branches (5,618 within just months after its establishment in 1924), the veterans’ performative celebration of republican citizenship was ultimately marred by several “systematic ambivalences” (270). Even though they were moderate pacifists who aimed for international reconciliation, members of the Reichsbanner cultivated a distinct military style, something that their French counterparts found off-putting. Moreover, there was no place for women in this exclusively male league, apart from occasional guest appearances of Ehrenjungfrauen during flag consecrations. In addition, the Reichsbanner’s socialist rhetoric of class alienated a vast army of potential supporters, especially Catholic workers. The organization’s underlying problems were thus of its own making.

There is a further inherent ambivalence in the Reichsbanner commemorations that deserved more emphasis in this study. Republican veterans devised their own language and practices of war commemoration, yet without involving the bereaved: they remembered the war, yet had little to say about death. The slogan “no more war” and calls for reconciliation with the former enemies must have been little consolation for those who were in mourning. Republican veterans regarded the war as futile and interpreted the military defeat as a moment of political liberation from a corrupt and oppressive regime of Etappenschweine. In essence, they remembered the war in order to learn the lessons of the past. These were activists in the heat of...