Friday 1 August 2014

the first world war: triumph and pride ... or ... tragedy and sorrow?

How we see the First World War:
Jay Doubleyou: how is world war one seen in different countries
Jay Doubleyou: blackadder and world war one
Jay Doubleyou: propaganda, public relations and manufacturing consent

... depends on where you're from:

Here's a British journalist reporting for the German radio station Deutche Welle:
In Britain, a centenary and a war of words | World War I | DW.DE | 09.04.2014
AUDIO | DW.DE

This is from the Guardian:

The Germans resist a heroic view of war – if only we could

In Berlin the first world war centenary carries a warning about nationalism and conflict. Britain prefers to ignore the awkward issues
Martin Kettle The Guardian, Thursday 24 July 2014
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An image of a British munitions factory in 1915 at the Imperial War Museum's new first world war galleries in London. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

We need to keep a watch on the way the first world war is being commemorated, wrote Santanu Das in the Guardian this week. He is right. With the 4 August centenary of the outbreak less than two weeks away, that watchfulness is now very pressing. In Britain, at least, it is hard not to be apprehensive about the story we are about to be told.

The British government’s official website has recently started to describe the first world war with studied care as “a significant milestone in world history”. It was certainly that. But what kind of milestone? And with what lessons? In the past two weeks I have had the opportunity to visit two impressive and serious commemorations of the war: one in London, at the Imperial War Museum’s justly admired new first world war galleries; the other in Berlin, in a no less powerful special first world war exhibition in the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

In many respects the exhibitions are similar. In each visitors are offered a chronological story of the war; in each the exhibits and displays are thematically clustered. There are special sections about war in the trenches, at sea and in the air; about weaponry; about the home front; about women and the war; about the Russian revolution, medicine, the arts, and many others. In each there are plenty of interactive opportunities.

Strikingly, the two commemorations have also both produced catalogues with identical titles. On my desk are the IWM’s new hardback publication,A History of the First World War in 100 Objects. Next to it is the equally weighty Der Erste Welt Krieg in 100 Objekten, published by the DHM. Both formats are a tribute to the influence and success of the 100-objects approach to world history pioneered by the British Museum director,’s Neil MacGregor.

But there things begin to diverge. Looking at the first objects in the two catalogues, you might think the differences merely reflected different national audiences. The first object in the London catalogue is King George V’s imperial crown; the first in Berlin’s is a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The same point, perhaps, in different contexts.

But the second objects part narrative company. In London it’s the pen with which Protestants signed the Ulster covenant against Irish home rule in 1912, in Berlin, a German beer tankard commemorating the Paris congress of the Socialist International in 1889. The contrast is emblematic of what follows. For the two exhibitions, and the two books, offer very different treatments of the war. The 100 objects on which they focus are different. The conceptual approach is different. The stories they tell are different. And those differences matter, as do their larger implications for today.

In Britain the commemoration at the Imperial War Museum is fundamentally about Britain and British people. Step into the new galleries and you find yourself watching newsreel film about the people of Britain in 1914. In Berlin the commemoration is fundamentally about Europe and the wider world. Step into that gallery and you find yourself watching newsreel film from Berlin, Vienna, Paris and St Petersburg.

That’s not to say that the London galleries ignore the rest of the world. Likewise it would be absurd to pretend that the Berlin exhibition is not profoundly about Germans and Germany. Nor is it to ignore the fact that Germany’s wish to see the war in international terms – and the current popularity there of books such as Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, which has the European powers all contributing to the drift to war in 1914 – owes something to the wish not to see the conflict as the result of German aggression.

But it is to say that the German approach to commemorating the war – seeing it as an international event in a different Europe from the one we inhabit today – is different from the national continuity that still characterises the British narrative. It is also to say that this reflects a markedly less heroic approach to history. Both viewpoints have some validity. But the German approach, especially in the light of the Balkan wars of the 1990s and of today’s Ukraine crisis, is the more urgent one for an audience in 2014.

This goes to a much deeper point about the way we commemorate our history generally. In Britain our monuments are notably comfortable with the national past, even when that past is a troubling one. Even when they commemorate great loss – as with the first world war cemeteries – British monuments nevertheless manage at some level to venerate, and even to celebrate, the sacrifice. That’s not true in Germany, for reasons of more recent German history. More Germans than Britons lost their lives in the world wars of the 20th century. Yet in Britain every village has a lovingly tended war memorial, while Germany is a country with few war memorials indeed. The British 100 objects survey ends, appropriately in this context, with the comfort of the Cenotaph. The German, on the other hand, ends with the postwar street violence of the paramilitary nationalist Freikorps, in which many future Nazis took part.

In a recent lecture in which he previewed the British Museum’s upcoming autumn exhibition about Germany, MacGregor argued that Germany is one of the few countries in Europe whose national monuments, museums and commemorations refuse to allow any heroic vision to intrude at all. The refusal of the heroic runs through contemporary Germany, he argued. But in Britain, and even more so in the United States, the heroic is ever present, especially in relation to the commemoration of war. It is what unifies the way the British remember the first war as tragic-heroic and the second as idealist-heroic. Today even our soldiers in illegal wars are described as heroes.

While British monuments are mostly rooted in this heroic view of the past, modern German monuments cannot be. German ones are therefore always as much about the future as the past. That is certainly true of the Berlin first world war exhibition. The German word Mahnmal – a warning monument – has no direct equivalent in English, or in British culture. But the Berlin exhibition is in the end a warning exhibition about nationalism and war. The IWM’s is not. In the end, for all its efforts and care, it offers a subduedly heroic national view of the war.

In Britain our commemorations and memorials do not address the awkward chapters of our history. As a result they do not illuminate the awkward dilemmas of our future. In my view we are much the poorer for it.


The Germans resist a heroic view of war – if only we could | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian

It also depends on your politics.
This is from the Times:

How should we remember the First World War?

We have two contrary views of the First World War – one of triumph and pride, the other of tragedy and sorrow. But as we prepare for the centenary next year, we must be aware that the truth is never that simple, says Harry Mount



British and Commonwealth graves in Tyne Cot Cemetery, Ypres, Belgium. The Government is to spend £50 million on commemorative events Photo: ALAMY

By Harry Mount

10:23PM BST 09 Jun 2013

A decade after my great-grandfather was killed at Gallipoli, his widow and one of his daughters – my great-aunt – visited the site on a cruise ship. It came as a bit of a shock when my great-aunt told me what a wonderful time she had had – not least because Ian Hay, the amusing novelist, playwright and First World War veteran, was also on board.

How stupid of me to be shocked. I had felt – wrongly – that the default attitude to the First World War should be one of sombre melancholy. But what did it have to do with me, really? There is no correct default attitude and, even if there were, the only people who could justifiably have a claim on it – those who fought in the war – are all dead now. And so are nearly all of their children: my great-aunt died three years ago, at the age of 102.

So the rest of us are now groping in the dark when it comes to knowing exactly how to commemorate the awful slaughter that shaped, and still shapes, the map of Europe, its politics and society.

No one could argue with the desire – obligation, even – for modern generations to remember the war, especially not as its centenary approaches. It is only appropriate, despite the expense, that the Government will spend £50 million on commemorations of the outbreak of war, and of the anniversaries of Jutland, Gallipoli, the Somme, Passchendaele and the Armistice, along with Imperial War Museum events, educational initiatives and Lottery-funded commemorations at war memorials. And it is surely welcome, as Eric Pickles tells this newspaper today, that the Government will pay £5 million for every state secondary in Britain to send two children and one teacher to the First World War battlefields and lay remembrance wreaths. How wonderful, if unfeasible, it would be if every schoolchild in the country could go; wonderful if, while they were at it, they could also visit Hastings, Agincourt, Bosworth and the Crimea.

It’s hard to argue with all the other decent things that have been proposed by the Government, either – a service at Glasgow Cathedral and Westminster Abbey to commemorate the beginning of the war; flags at half-mast across the country; separate Scottish and Welsh memorial campaigns. The danger is, though, that while remembering the facts of the First World War, we forget what it was really like – and that, by overdoing the commemorations, war fatigue will set in.

Already, the books are rolling into the shops. Charles Emmerson’s 1913 – The World Before the Great War has been on the shelves for several weeks. Jeremy Paxman and Max Hastings are both bringing out new histories, too. As the tide and variety of publications shows, the First World War is really too big, complex and unclear in its effects to commemorate with one unified response. Over the weekend, Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, said the anniversary would be celebrated with both “sorrow and pride”. But is that really ever possible?

“Never the twain shall meet,” says Mark Bostridge, author of The Loss of Innocence, published next year, which looks at England shortly before the outbreak of war and the opening months of the conflict. “Military historians and literary historians have opposed views on the whole thing – you see them at conferences not talking to each other, glaring at each other. The military historians want to say that the German desire for European hegemony was so worrying that we had to go to war; that British generals weren’t so terrible. The literary historians have a perspective that’s much more influenced by the war poets – that the whole thing was a disaster.”

The opposing positions – triumph and disaster, and the pride and sorrow they brought – continue to vie with each other. It’s disaster, sorrow and the war poets’ view that prevail at the moment, but we forget that views of the First World War have shifted ever since the Armistice, and we infect our own modern opinions with the benefit of hindsight.

It’s true that Vera Brittain published her bleak memoir of the war – Testament of Youth, about to be made into a feature film – as early as 1933. It’s near impossible to read the book, which is about the death of Brittain’s brother, fiancĂ© and two closest male friends, and not cleave to the “futile disaster” theory of the First World War, particularly if you read the war poets, too.

But we didn’t always follow the lions-led-by-donkeys orthodoxy. In this country, Brittain’s take was very much a minority, middle-class view before the Second World War. Throughout the Twenties, there were regular celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the great victories; contrary as it sounds, lots of servicemen even enjoyed the war – often the first time they’d been outside their home town, let alone abroad. The war poets, too, only built up real popularity after the Second World War, not least Wilfred Owen, whose star didn’t really shine until the Sixties.

Since then, they have become the staple diet of classroom history; no wonder that we look back at the war with greater and greater gloom. The horrors of Vietnam and the messy, nebulous nature of modern warfare – not least in Iraq and Afghanistan – also add to the confusion. Modern generations have started to look at all wars through whatever the opposite of rose-tinted spectacles is. Only the Second World War – with the Nazis, the ultimate no-nonsense baddies, and their Holocaust, the ultimate in evil acts – is allowed the no-strings-attached status of a just war. All other conflicts, particularly the Second World War’s immediate predecessor, lose honour in the comparison.

Other conventions, too, have emerged in recent decades that will be recycled for the anniversary coverage, but which we should be careful before swallowing hook, line and sinker. The popular view of the outbreak of war is that our lads rushed down the street to the recruiting office, whistling as they ran, only to be engulfed by disillusionment as the realities of war hit home. In fact, it was a lot more complicated than that. There was an early surge in recruitment in the first fortnight of August 1914, it’s true, but then there was a sudden drop in the figures; and in certain areas, particularly Devon and Cornwall, recruiting numbers weren’t nearly as high as in London. It was only towards the end of the month, with the Amiens Dispatch in The Times on August 30 revealing terrible losses, that there was another surge.

It is the natural progress of history that it tends towards over-simplification the further you get from the time of the real events, until it reaches its ultimate, cryogenised 1066 and All That state – a date, a war, a straightforward division between goodies and baddies.

When it comes to the First World War, we should do our best to resist that tendency. We should resist, too, the temptation to group its commemoration with the Diamond Jubilee, the Royal Wedding and the Olympics, as one government source suggested we should. Certainly, we should emulate the magnificence and prominence of those occasions – but the war’s commemoration will need to draw on more complex, sometimes clashing emotions.

“The war to end all wars” proved to be a tragically misguided term for the First World War. Similar easy classifications won’t do it justice today, either.


How should we remember the First World War? - Telegraph

Interestingly, in the letters pages of a local newspaper in Devon, there is a letter from the president of the Royal British Legion:

‘A century on, let us not forget’

Royal British Legion Sidmouth branch president Kim Smith wrote in the Herald last week: “[We feel] strongly that this landmark in the history of the last century should not go unmarked and we should not forget. For some who served in World War Two, there is perhaps the memory of the fiercest fighting at Kohima, Monte Cassino, or in the invasion of France – but there is a special horror of World War One, with the obscenity and the squalor of the trench warfare...
“Let us not forget and meet at 9am on Monday, August 4, at the war memorial to show our respect for those who died in the service of our country all those years ago.”

‘A century on, let us not forget’ - News - Sidmouth Herald

The Royal British Legion was founded by veterans of the War:

Ww1centenary 715X195FIRST WORLD WAR CENTENARY


WW1 Centenary

The 4th of August 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the day Britain entered one of the costliest conflicts in history – the First World War – with fighting continuing until the 11th of November 1918, Armistice Day.
The Royal British Legion was founded by British veterans in the aftermath of the First World War and is at the forefront of Centenary commemorations. As we come together in Remembrance of events a century ago, we are reminded of the important welfare work the Legion continues to provide today and will need to provide in the future.
A century on from the First World War, those serving in the Armed Forces, veterans and their families still call on us for help with almost every aspect of daily life. The problems facing First World War veterans when they returned to the UK continue to affect serving personnel and veterans today: whether living with bereavement or disability, finding employment, or coping with financial stress.
WW1 Centenary bookletAs the UK’s Custodian of Remembrance, the Legion will be leading the nation in respecting the sacrifices of the First World War. As the UK’s largest Armed Forces charity, the Legion will be leading the nation in providing direct care and support to Armed Forces and veteran families in need.
The Legion is involved in a number of commemorative Centenary projects at national, county and branch level. A brief outline of some of these is including in our downloadable WW1 Centenary information booklet. Many are still in the planning stages so please revisit this section of our website for information as more projects are announced.
WW1 Centenary - The Royal British Legion.
The Royal British Legion Learning Pack - 2014/15 - The Royal British Legion.
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