The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (review)

As a contribution to Cambridge’s “Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare,” Stefan Goebel’s work examines the remembrance of the World War I dead in literature, popular culture, and, above all, in war memorials. This “empirical comparative history” based on extensive archival research in Britain and Germany deftly compares how the two countries used the Middle Ages in honoring the dead (p. 6). Goebel calls this “medievalism,” a nineteenth century construction defined by others as “the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages” (p. 14).

Goebel’s central argument and title challenges Paul Fussell’s seminal 1975 work, The Great War and Modern Memory, which argued that the convulsion of World War I helped usher in “modernity” by seeming to place its participants outside the historical timeline in a way that previous wars had not. On the contrary, Goebel argues, the peoples of Britain and Germany grappled with the Great War’s horrors by arranging them along a historical continuum stretching back to and emphasizing the Middle Ages. In Britain, for example, one war memorial depicted British soldiers from the Hundred Years War, and the days of Wellington, and the Tommy of World War I to show that the latest war was merely one more where British soldiers “did their bit” (pp. 39–40).

Goebel’s comparative approach offers too many threads to explore here, so one must suffice. Unsurprisingly both countries employed the knight as symbol, yet each country’s use reflected unique national attitudes towards military service and war. The British often portrayed knights as crusaders, an image enhanced by Britain’s “liberation” of Palestine in 1917, but ironic because this was a small backwater compared to the Western Front. Britons identified gentlemanly conduct in war as chivalrous, hence tied to the Middle Ages, and this frequently informed their war memorials. By contrast, German writing and memorials commonly invoked the same symbol but as an “Iron Knight,” a disciplined yet defiant, supremely courageous Everyman. Chivalric notions about the war were far less evident in German memorials. Goebel accounts for these differences by stressing the fact that Britain had no deep-rooted military tradition, partially because the British army was a small, volunteer one up until January 1916, composed of aristocratic officers and enlisted men typically from the underemployed of the lower classes. In Germany, where peacetime conscription of males from all classes was a rite of passage, war memorials reflected a faceless but shared sense of sacrifice and discipline for the fatherland.

Goebel believes that World War II displaced medievalism in commemorating the dead. The blurring of combatant and non-combatant, mass civilian death and genocide could not be understood by reference to the remote past (pp. 291–293). Therefore, war memorials in England and Germany ceased employing the medieval past as a subject, instead switching to pacifistic themes or postulating a future when war would cease to exist. In sum, Goebel offers us a compelling look at how two societies went through the same recent experience, used similar symbols from a long-past historical period, but remembered both quite differently.