The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body by Laura Wittman (review)

This is a study of the staggering effects of the Great War on our search for ways of understanding the ‘meaning’ of the loss of life on the grand scale occasioned by the 1914–18 conflict. By focusing on the Unknown Soldier, Wittman is able to cut across previously intractable divisions in the literature of this branch of cultural history – the sacred versus the profane, the political versus the personal, the ancient versus the modern. In addition, her focus on the Italian case, alongside others, is particularly fruitful. She offers a clear alternative to a major interpretation of the impact of the war on Italy, derived from the work of George Mosse on the liturgy of the Fascist movement. Wittman shows the multifaceted nature of ceremonies surrounding Italy’s Unknown Soldier and describes deep contradictions with the practice of remembrance which moved in entirely opposite directions, toward and away from militarism, toward and away from glorifying war, toward and away from what Mosse termed ‘the myth of the war experience.’

What Wittman deftly terms ‘improvised mourning’ came out of the fact that the Great War was not only the most efficient killing machine to date, but was also a vanishing act. Half of those ten million men who died in the war have no known graves. Anonymity was the fate of millions of corpses, or fragments of corpses, and as Wittman shows, the very fact of namelessness to one chosen body in one chosen coffin gave that individual what she terms a ‘mystical body.’ Touching the coffin or engaging in acts of symbolic exchange with it/him/Him, by leaving words or flowers or objects, mattered, in ways Freud described nearly a century ago during the war itself. Touching this one known Unknown enabled mourners without graves to avoid melancholy and measure what was lost against what was not lost. But, as against Mosse, touching the Unknown Soldier’s coffin did not lead to a trivialization or sanitization of the ugliness of war for many, nor did it lead to a desire to go to war again. Others, d’Annunzio included, made the sacred political, but his voice was not the only one. The great achievement of this book is to put multi-vocality back into the cultural history of Italy and other countries in the period of the Great War and Fascism. Wittman wisely observes that ‘grief repeatedly fissures the myths of unity both of the nation and of histories written from the top down.’ We know what those in power wanted the Unknown Soldier to do for them, but we know less of what ordinary people felt or said about it. Wittman has provided a way to bridge that gap, one that we can see in present-day attempts of the US government to ‘abstract mourning’ and thereby to ‘normalize violence.’

There was nothing normal about the massacres of the Great War, as anyone who visits the terrain of the Isonzo or the Trento will know. This was an appalling landscape of battle, at least the equal of Verdun and the Somme in ensuring that combat turned into massacre on a scale the world had not seen before. But just as in the cases of France and Britain, mourning in Italy for those who died by the thousands was not and could not be only a private matter. It had a public dimension, a search for the meaning of this mountain of corpses. And that search led in many directions, not only toward Fascism. Wittman shows too how that search led back to the private realm and, in the hands of many men and many women, away from transcendence. Alda Merini’s poetry published as recently as 2009 shows the enduring force of this complex challenge to simple readings of the Unknown Soldier, by feminizing him/her. This ‘inwardness’ protects the Unknown from ideological appropriation. Perhaps, Wittman...