Commemorative Spaces of the First World War

Historical Geographies at the Centenary

James Wallis, David C. Harvey, James Wallis, David C. Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138121188
• eBook ISBN: 9781317309246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This is the first book to bring together an interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged and global perspective on the First World War through the lens of historical and cultural geography. Reflecting the centennial interest in the conflict, the collection explores the relationships between warfare and space, and pays particular attention to how commemoration is connected to spatial elements of national identity, and processes of heritage and belonging. Venturing beyond military history and memory studies, contributors explore conceptual contributions of geography to analyse the First World War, as well as reflecting upon the imperative for an academic discussion on the War's centenary.

This book explores the War's impact in more unexpected theatres, blurring the boundary between home and fighting fronts, investigating the experiences of the war amongst civilians and often overlooked combatants. It also critically examines the politics of hindsight in the post-war period, and offers an historical geographical account of how the First World War has been memorialised within 'official' spaces, in addition to those overlooked and often undervalued 'alternative spaces' of commemoration.

This innovative and timely text will be key reading for students and scholars of the First World War, and more broadly in historical and cultural geography, social and cultural history, European history, Heritage Studies, military history and memory studies.

1
Introduction

Conflicting spaces – geographies of the First World War

James Wallis and David C. Harvey

The remembering and forgetting of war is not an object of disinterested enquiry but a burning issue at the very core of present day conflicts over forms of the state, social relations and subjectivity.

(Ashplant et al. 2000: 6)

In recent years, numerous historical and cultural geographers have focused upon the spatial elements of identity, belonging and control within the context of the First World War.¹ As well as forming a distinctive intervention within First World War studies, much of this work has also been influential within broader fields of enquiry into, for instance, iconography, landscape representation and memorialisation. Alongside this work by geographers, and similarly responding to the cultural turn within the academy, a number of First World War scholars have drawn upon geographical approaches to make critical interventions, for instance, towards our understanding of national representation and imperial identities. Thus articles by Gough (2004) and Foster (2004) both analysed First World War battlefield sites and their role in producing cultural memory within national and imperial contexts. Furthermore, there is a geography to the range and focus of this scholarly activity, particularly concerning the examination of collective memory and remembrance activity. While different sites of the Western Front have tended to be central in much scholarly output, the analysis of how the mythologised landscapes of Gallipoli have been mobilised has formed a central plank of the examination of Australian collective memory.² There has also been distinctive focus upon Ireland in articulating the past and present roles of landscape and memory within that contextual setting.³ Drawing upon examples from the Second World War, it is evident that countries remain entangled in representing an imagined nation, both spatially and temporally, with narratives ‘elevating and naturalizing certain elite memories whilst marginalizing others’ (Muzaini and Yeoh 2007: 1289). Authors have revealed war memorials as dynamic inscriptions of memory onto space – setting dominant socio-spatial relations in stone, as they recall and represent selective histories that hide as much as they reveal. Indeed, within a 1914–1918 context the legacy of war memorials has provided much inspiration for an interdisciplinary group of academics.⁴ Moreover, the commemorative practices that emerged out of this global event ‘have endured throughout the twentieth century … the motif of individual sacrifice for the national cause has remained central to the act of national commemoration’ (King 2010: 7). In essence, the crossover between different scales and interactions between the global through to the local, are increasingly being reassessed via the use of spatial frameworks.

Historical geographies of the First World War, therefore, can provide a way in which to rethink the spaces of the conflict, and in particular, the palimpsest-like nature of battlefield sites (principally the former Western Front, located in France and Belgium) and the relation between so-called battle-fronts and home-fronts. The potential for innovative ways to re-engage – even re-interpret – our broader understanding of these landscapes is something that historical geography has the epistemological tool kit to undertake. Similarly, a major strength of the sub-discipline’s practitioners lies in their desire to undertake critical scholarship that questions the past in relation to its meaning in the present, and to dissect the inter-locking relationships between time and space. Within the context of a post ‘living-memory’ landscape, now is the time to promote such a message – advocated in the knowledge that it has, thus far, largely been those scholars based within heritage studies and history, who have provided critical commentary on the contemporary resonance of the centenary.

Reflecting on the centennial moment, Ziino (2015: 1) recognised that this event ‘has naturally been a source of considerable debate and stimulus – at least among academics and politicians, and in cultural institutions – for a long time before its realization in 2014 and beyond’. As commemorations progress towards an inevitable climax, new academic research from an array of disciplines continues to illuminate diverse aspects of this global conflict, alongside its ensuing legacies (Sumartojo and Wellings 2014; Ziino 2015; Drozdzewski et al. 2016). Specifically within the UK context, the government’s ongoing commemorative programme continues to develop connections, and sustain new interactions, between the academy and public engagement projects.⁵ The timing is, therefore, opportune to reflect upon this imperative for collaboration, to take stock of what has been garnered from these activities in time to contemplate what might lie ahead for the remaining anniversary period and particularly its legacy in the twenty-first century.⁶ The confines of this volume subsequently build upon the understanding set out by Gegner and Ziino (2012: 4) that the physical sites and spaces of the First World War have acquired greater claims to authenticity in light of the passing of living memory of the conflict. Accordingly, we wish to account for the ways in which this burden of commemoration has been enacted in practice, whilst additionally assessing its reception and affective agency amongst audiences. In this way, the volume reacts to the broad, interdisciplinary and immanent conversation that is currently reconsidering the practices, processes and poetics of remembrance, situated amidst an ongoing critical appraisal of historical conflict studies.

Gegner and Ziino (2012: 1) have observed, ‘If heritage can be understood as the selective use of the past as cultural and political resources in the present, then there are few fields more productive for understanding that process than the heritage of war’. To break this down further, one must gauge the core interlinking strands that formulate conflict heritage; notions of memory and the construction or maintenance of identity narratives stand inherent within such debates. Drozdzewski et al. (2016: 3) have already referred to the undoubted ‘centrality of championing a nation’s collective identity’ amidst the centennial commemorations, whilst Mycock et al. have documented an intertwining of the personal and public, ‘subject to both family and state rituals that link the individual to the nation’ (2014: 2). Arnold-de Simine (2016) and Wallis (2015) have examined how the influence of digital media is changing the ways in which commemorative practices are enacted, and in the process made familiar, to an array of public users. So if, as Drozdzewski et al. attest, memory is ‘part of a tripartite relationship with identity and place’ (2016: xiii), then we must consider the importance of paying attention to how different scales of experience work in practice. This is especially relevant in an age of social media, but moreover amid an era of existential crises – both for European identity and for the United Kingdom and its constituent parts. Indeed, it has been interesting that the centenary period has also witnessed referenda on Scottish independence and the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, as well as ongoing crises concerning refugees, migration and growing national populist movements across Europe. Questions about how commemoration of the First World War inflects questions of belonging within the national, continental, or even global context (see, for instance, Mycock et al. 2014: 3) require a response from geographers. Indeed, thus far geographers have not commented extensively on the First World War Centenary, despite the conflict’s extraordinary hold upon the British collective imagination (though see Harvey 2017).

The conflict was undoubtedly emblematic, in terms of both its industrial nature and the sheer number of casualties, beyond constituting an unprecedented experience for people and governments alike. This explains the unparalleled levels of popular and academic interest that have followed, but particularly in the build-up to, and during its centenary.⁷ Academic attention has also reviewed the contemporary remembrance role of the conflict within a British context (Andrews 2011; Pennell 2012b; Jones 2014). This literature has tended to focus on debates around the politics of commemoration, and the challenges to ‘establishing “national” narratives and memory cultures to mark the First World War Centenary that are inclusive and yet recognise diversity in how the conflict is remembered across Britain and across its former empire’ (Mycock 2014a: 153, 161). From this, we see war commemoration enduring as

primarily a political project whereby the state and its institutions mediate and order formal and informal collective memories and histories. The promotion of a homogenous national identity that references important conflicts is seen to establish symbolic continuity between the past, present and future of a nation-state.

(Mycock 2014a: 154)

Amidst a desire to scrutinize these channels of commemoration, we tasked our authors with an agenda to account for the ways in which political decisions have informed both the production and renewed attention upon these commemorative sites and spaces. It is worth labouring the point that

the struggles over war memory remind us that the narratives attached to the First World War are not static, or agreed, but are subject to constant contestation, and change over time. This is in the nature of cultural memory, and in recognizing this, we can see the life histories of remembering, at a series of levels – public, private, institutional – and the cultures of remembrance that those processes have bequeathed to the present.

(Ziino 2015: 1)

We are consequently inclined to view the current devotion to commemoration as something more than a sense of anniversary-driven responsibility. An appropriate framework to add weight to this conviction is outlined within Sørensen and Viejo-Rose’s (2015) work, which connects discussions around memorialisation to specific locales, in tracing processual shifts in their meaning over time. In particular, it demonstrates their notion that ‘places are not just “the heritage of war” but actively participate in the recovery and remaking of communities’ (Sørensen and Viejo-Rose 2015: 1). By utilising their geographically informed concept of a ‘biography of place’, their edited volume offers a number of case studies that delve into how a meaning of place, positioned within particular locales, is continually remoulded in the present and by whom. Emphasis is assigned towards illuminating these practices and mechanisms; ‘Heritage sites have particular agency for they are effective means of creating narrative links between people, their pasts and their surroundings’ (Sørensen and Viejo-Rose 2015: 8). Additionally, therefore, the present volume offers a response through its collective empirical findings to those ideas about memory, place and identity raised by Drozdzewski et al. (2016). In stressing the importance of paying attention to the encounters between, Drozdzewski et al. (2016, emphasis in the original) prompt us to explore how memories of war and conflict manifest physically, spatially and temporally in place. This volume therefore, seeks to offer insight into questions around spatial dimensions of belonging and memory – showing these as unfixed, ever-changing and seemingly contradictory entities. It both considers the issue of whose duty it is to remember and provides critical nuance to the question of what is remembered and why. In so doing, the volume perceives the terrain of First World War commemoration as an inherently active space. Testifying to the production, management and politics of these commemorative spaces, therefore, its chapters collectively sketch the interplay between agents of memory and heritage, exploring the processes and implications of transmission, as well as documenting pockets of resistance. The sum of its individual parts therefore, offers a dynamic yet novel investigation into the function and guises of commemorative spaces of the First World War (as located within a specific temporal context), thereby widening our existing understanding.

The First World War often seems to be about (static, stable and indelible) lines, of trenches, barbed wire, western and eastern fronts, of a well-known chronology, from an event in Sarajevo in July 1914, to a precise moment in the late morning of the 11 November 1918. This linear chronology has become ritualised through ceremony ever since, now further cemented through centennial public reflection. This volume provides the space to rethink what we know about these lines, challenging some of these linear aspects of First World War understanding...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword by the series editors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: conflicting spaces – geographies of the First World War
• PART 1 Rethinking, and looking beyond the front line
• PART 2 Commemorative spaces
• Index