The Great War: From Memory to History

The Great War: From Memory to History offers a new look at the multiple ways the Great War has been remembered and commemorated through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Drawing on contributions from history, cultural studies, film, and literary studies this collection offers fresh perspectives on the Great War and its legacy at the local, national, and international levels. More importantly, it showcases exciting new research on the experiences and memories of “forgotten” participants who have often been ignored in dominant narratives or national histories.

Contributors to this international study highlight the transnational character of memory-making in the Great War’s aftermath. No single memory of the war has prevailed, but many symbols, rituals, and expressions of memory connect seemingly disparate communities and wartime experiences. With groundbreaking new research on the role of Aboriginal peoples, ethnic minorities, women, artists, historians, and writers in shaping these expressions of memory, this book will be of great interest to readers from a variety of national and academic backgrounds.

1.1

"Canon Fodder: The Re-invention of Canadian Cultural Identity and the Erasure of Great War Narratives"

Zachary Abram

Zachary Abram’s chapter argues that veterans’ memoirs and novels were relegated to the margins of the Canadian literary canon due to the politicization and renegotiation of Canada’s war memory during the 1950s and 1960s. Abram suggests that a post-1960s critical prejudice towards war literature was enabled by post-modernist and post-structuralist scholars, whose approach and desire to reinvent the Canadian literary tradition led to a marginalization of the war’s authors.

1.2

"Too Close to History: Major Charles G.D. Roberts, the Canada in Flanders Series, and the Writing of War-time Documentary"

Thomas Hodd

Thomas Hodd introduces noted Canadian author Charles G.D. Roberts to the current scholarly narrative of the Great War, examining the ways in which Roberts’s often conflicted role as writer-historian manifested itself within the pages of his contribution to the Canada in Flanders series. The volume exemplified the fluid tension between fact and reimagination, and Hodd argues Roberts’s contributions to the series represent an early form of the modern documentary that captures in narrative form Canada’s transformation from colony to nation.

1.3

"State Great War Histories: An Atom of Interest in an Ocean of Apathy"

Kimberly J. Lamay

Kimberly J. Lamay examines three states—New York, Virginia, and Kansas—and the public struggle to negotiate preservation and commemoration among state officials, veterans, and citizens, reminding us that state archival preservation and official histories of the First World War are a reflection of broader societal needs. Lamay suggests that in the U.S., the memory of the war—or its absence—was indelibly shaped by state failures to adequately promote, preserve, and commemorate the war in the immediate postwar years.

1.4

“The Great War in Popular Detective Fiction”

Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz

Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz examines how popular detective fiction by such noted authors as Ben Elton, Anne Perry, and Rennie Airth has contributed to the popularization of the Great War in the contemporary literary community and the broader public. She highlights the Great War’s rhetorical nuance and educational utility as the backdrop for stories of crime, arguing that embedding the war narrative within the crime format conveys historical knowledge in a veiled form, which enables an author to raise fundamental questions about the nature of war through the lens of crime and criminality.

1.5

"From 'Backstabbing Arabs' to 'Shirking Kurds': History, Nationalism and Turkish Memory of World War I"

Veysel Simsek

Veysel Simsek explains the problematic relationship between modern Turkish nationalism and Ottoman history. He argues that most Turkish narratives, often written from a nationalist perspective or in a selective fashion, have distorted the Ottoman experience of the war. As Simsek demonstrates, the common narratives omit or overlook the fact that the Ottoman army was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious force, stressing its “Turkishness” throughout the war effort, blurring the difference between the “Ottoman soldier” and the “Turkish soldier.”

1.6

"Men of Suvla: Empire, Masculinities, and Gallipoli’s Legacy in Ireland and Newfoundland"

Jane McGaughey

Jane McGaughey examines the shared experiences of popular heroism and warrior masculinity between the 10th (Irish) Division and the Newfoundland Regiment through the lens of Irish ethnic identity and imperial military service at Gallipoli. Her chapter uncovers the “missing monuments” to the Irish and Newfoundlanders at Gallipoli, in the process demonstrating that the central experience to the formation of national identity in Australia and New Zealand was not the same for other colonial troops fighting the Turks. Indeed, for Irish and Newfoundlanders, battles on the Western Front gained superior place in the national imagination at the expense of the memory of those who had fought at Suvla in 1915.

1.7

“History Trumps Memory: The Strange Case of Sir Richard Turner”

William Stewart

William Stewart highlights how popular attitudes towards wartime leadership and decades of historical scholarship can skew the reputation of a military commander. Stewart suggests that to his men, General Turner was highly regarded for his competence, courage, approachability, and leadership, and he argues that Turner has become a casualty of broader cultural and historical discourse on the war’s memory that emphasizes the ineptness of senior commanders and the nobility of the fighting ranks.

2.1

“‘Kitchener’s Tourists’: Voices of Medical Personnel from First World War Hospital Ships”

Carol Acton

Carol Acton’s chapter offers a new look into the medical experience and memory of the war through an analysis of writings by nurses and physicians aboard hospital ships. She considers the ambiguous position held by these personnel who inhabited no front or all fronts of the conflict simultaneously and, contrary to popular memory, were often put in harm’s way.

2.2

"‘Loyal until Death’: African Veterans’ Memory of German War Service: 1919-1943"

Dan Bullard

In this chapter, Dan Bullard examines how veterans of the brutal war in Africa used their collective memory to gain power and a distinct voice in interwar Germany, while simultaneously revealing how German society framed the experience of the African campaign in as it contended with increasing ideological and racial polarization.

2.3

“Remembered Soldiers and Forgotten Enemies: Memorializing the Great War and Canada’s First Internment Operations"

Mary Chaktsiris

Mary Chaktsiris’ chapter explores the difficulty of reconciling the popular nationalist myth of the First World War with the historical reality of wartime internment in Canada. Using internment and the treatment of enemy aliens in Toronto as her case study, Chaktsiris adds nuance to the history of Canadian minorities in wartime by exploring the fluid nature of the status of “enemy alien”.

2.4

“The Forgotten Few: French Canadian Memory of the First World War”

Geoff Keelan

Using Quebec’s 22e Battalion, Henri Bourassa’s wartime writings, and the letters and diaries of Talbot Mercier Papineau as case studies, Geoff Keelan exposes how Canadian historians have oversimplified the attitudes of French Canada towards the Great War. His findings suggest that a more nuanced and multivalent interpretation is required if we are to understand the complex trajectory of French-Canadian memory.

2.5

“The Names of the Dead: Shot at Dawn and the Politics of Memory”

Bette London

In this chapter Bette London examines the recent phenomena of posthumously pardoning British soldiers shot for cowardice in the First World War. In it she illustrates how these soldiers were originally excluded from Britain’s collective memory due to both the nature of their crimes and the postwar cult of sacrifice. It was only with the passing of the war’s last veterans that the stories of these men were incorporated into public commemoration.

3.1

“The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927) and the Struggle for the Cinematic Image of the Great War”

Mark Connelly

Mark Connelly’s chapter explores how this film reflected British anxiety over the possibility of American films dominating the memory of the Great War. Connelly contends that the film was also illustrative of a process of Britain’s changing international and economic relations during the 1920s.

2.6

“‘Loyal and Civilized’: Aboriginal Soldiers, the Department of Indian Affairs, and the Production of a Collective Memory, 1916-1930”

Brian MacDowall

Brian MacDowall’s chapter examines how Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) constructed a popular narrative that extolled the “loyal service” of Aboriginals in the First World War. He argues that this process of memory-making was part of a broader colonial project of assimilation that has continued to obscure the complex motivations behind First Nations’ service in the war to this day.

3.2

“‘Can one grow used to death? It is unsafe to think of this…’: Deathbed Scenes in Great War Nurses’ Narratives”

Alice Kelly

Alice Kelly examines how the nurses wrote about death in their letters, diaries, and memoirs. Kelly argues that unlike civilians at home who were separated from loved ones by the physical distance of the battlefields, nurses were forced to contend with the emotional burden of being the feminine, even motherly figure present when soldiers died.

3.3

“Kitsch, Commemoration, and Mourning in the Aftermath of the Great War”

Mark A. R. Facknitz

Mark Facknitz uses the concept of Kitsch to explore the paradox of public memorials to the First World War as both art and materialism. The integrity of memorials is questioned as Facknitz explores the duality of their function as a public expression of both mourning and military triumphalism.

3.4

“‘Ask Him if He’ll Drink a Toast to the Dead:’ The Cinematic Flyer-Hero and British Memories of the Great War in the Air, 1927-1939”

Robert Morley

In this chapter, Robert Morley explores how the popular memory of the Great War’s fighter aces was shaped in film. In a war of trenches, mud, and mass armies, postwar filmmakers saw the fighter pilot as a symbol of individual heroism that fused traditional ideals of chivalry and honour with the challenges of modern age combat.

3.5

“Otto Dix and the Great War: Reality, Memory and the Construction of Identity in The Trench, 1923 and the Portfolio, The War, 1924”

Michelle Wijegoonaratna

Michele Wijegoonaratna examines Otto Dix’s most famous portfolio, Der Krieg, arguing that Dix manipulated memory to establish his post-war identity as an arbiter and interpreter memory. By juxtaposing Dix’s wartime artistic creations to his 1924 portfolio, Wijegoonaratna shows how the Der Krieg was a fusion of lived experiences and popular memory.

3.6

“(Re)Shaping the Picture of the ‘East’?: The Photo as Discursive Tool on the War in Eastern Europe in Austria-Hungary, 1914-18”

Wolfram Dornik

Wolfram Dornik’s chapter examines the experience of soldiers on the Eastern Front through letters, diaries, notes, and photographs. This broad approach allows Dornik to assess Austro-Hungarian soldiers’ motivations and the nature of warfare as it shaped popular memory of war in the East.