Review Essay: Memory Cultures at the Great War Centenary

Afterlives of War: A Descendants’ History. By Michael Roper. Manchester University Press, 2023. xvi + 351.

Curating the Great War. Edited by Paul Cornish and Nicholas J. Saunders. Routledge, 2022. xxiii + 341.

Taken together, these books pose two key questions. First, what can we learn about memory formation and transmission from the rich histories of public exhibition and personal recollection gathered across the last hundred years? Second, how have the practices and politics of First World War remembering been changed by the hundredth anniversary?

The answers provide an engaging divergence. In Roper's account, there is a continual circulation between the personal, family and local, communal memory, and wider commemorative practices. In contrast, Cornish and Saunders stress the importance of the public realm, and the revealing intersection of historical research, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and politics. Curating the Great War is particularly engaged with the practices of museology, the materialities of conflict understood through remnants and sites, with the engagement of publics, audiences, and heritage authorities in making relevant versions of the past. Roper's study, Afterlives of War, is a more intimate affair. It is an ethnographic, sociological, and psychological inquiry into the nature of past making as it is experienced by descendants living with the long-term consequences of war. Roper deftly handles these personal aspects of engagement with the past. Afterlives of War is an absorbing, original, and persuasive meditation on ‘memory in the aftermath’.

Cornish and Saunders organise their edited collection, Curating the War, around three central themes. ‘Museums, Identities and the Politics of Memory’ covers First World War museology from the cessation of hostilities to the centenary. This is not a comprehensive account, but it covers a range of institutions, including some of the major nation state remembrance sites such as the Berlin Zeughaus, and the more recent Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne. Smaller local institutions also feature, such as the Priest's House Museum and Gardens in Wimborne, Dorset. Two chapters in the collection cover the history of the Imperial War Museum, during the Second World War, and during the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of 1964–8. A second section on ‘Museums and Materialities’ explores varied locations and approaches to archaeological and remembrance sites, for example, the extensively preserved heritage and traces of the Soča/Isonzo Front of 1915–17. A reflection on the confrontation fought out between Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces across an unusually high, rocky landscape that today is mostly in Slovenia. A later chapter by Boštjan Kravanja also gives an update on the material culture of commemoration during the hundredth anniversary of the Isonzo Front. Finally, an excellent section on ‘Audiences and Engagement’ looks at the dilemmas and achievements of the hundredth anniversary commemorations through a discussion of innovative exhibition practices, peace memorials, and collaborative projects, including the dilemmas of exhibiting the Great War in intensely divided communities, such as at the Ulster Museum in Belfast. [Correction added on 11 October 2024, after first online publication: The third paragraph has been updated in this version.]

Roper's study pursues its themes in four linked sections, sometimes looping back to expand on passing details. An early mention of interviewing his maternal grandfather in 1980 returns much later, for example, when Roper discusses the same grandfather's life after the First World War. This 1980 interview reappears also in the final section of Afterlives of War when the author considers how successive generations remember differently in the historical circumstances in each ‘here and now’. In combination, these sections turn out to be a subtle, extended reflection on what traumatic memory might mean expressed in the body as well as in the mind. Part One, ‘Afterlives’, considers the kinds of evidence that might help constitute a social history of memory as well as the nature of ‘family transmissions’. Part Two, ‘Observer,’ provides a more transnational comparison across varied national narratives and through a comparative discussion of descendant remembering in Britain and Germany. Part Three, ‘Historian,’ focusses on local and family histories with chapters on domestic fatherhood, recollections of childhood play, and the roles of daughters within household ‘economies of care’. Part Four revisits Roper's family history, the recollections, and forgettings of the Anzac legend, for example, in the ‘legacies of dysentery’.

Both accounts take a notably comparative approach, as the short summaries above suggest. In Curating the Great War, the comparisons extend beyond Europe to the former dominion territories of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The collection also includes articles on the recent archaeology of the Arab Revolt, a Prisoner of War camp in Czersk, Poland, the Macedonia campaign, as well as neglected or contested sights of memory such as the Federal State of Tyrol, Austria. Afterlives of War is narrower, but no less effective as it compares the experiences of British, German, and Australian descendants. Roper also positions himself more visibly within the field of research, experience, and knowledge he assembles. Family and public history outside the borders of state and public institutions are most often his starting point. Additionally, Cornish and Saunders describe more the nature of curatorship, material culture, and the social lives of artefacts. Taken together, these two accounts survey the gap between academic discourse, commemorative and museum practice, and family histories. Both are concerned with stories, objects, and the imaginative possibilities of remembering in the early twenty-first century.

Many of the chapters in Curating the Great War take this inquiry further to show how communication and collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners are changing. This is not only a trend in First World War studies. Stephen N. Norris's excellent 2020 edited collection Museums of Communism, for example, also displays the uses and benefits of cross-disciplinary and comparative methodologies. Norris's account is justifiably critical of state-oriented campaigns of memorialisation and the slippery politics of contested histories. But First World War museums and commemorations are an altogether more personal matter for English-speaking audiences. Great War memory is entangled and sensitive exactly because family and community are very often still strongly implicated. Cornish and Saunders set out to show the range of thinking and the practical realities of curation given the ever-present constraints of time and money. Equally, the contributors to Curating the Great War document the creative and varied ways in which Great War exhibitions and public representations have come into being. Two themes stand out in the collection: first, how each succeeding generation of curators responds to earlier interpretive traditions; second, the ways in which memory practices are formed and played out in the present.

Roper is also closely attentive to the question of what remembering the Great War might mean in the context of the transition towards post-memory. And implicit in both accounts is the question of whether post-memory – remembrance and family history when former participants are no longer alive – is a generative space for new understandings relevant to the present, or merely the work of politicised, diluted, and sentimentalised public imagination. Roper answers this question by attending to the complex connections and separations between those who participated, and those family members whose lives were later indirectly shaped by conflict. One important aspect here is the impact of public commemoration practices and state agendas on family routines and modes of recollection. The implications of this approach are far reaching. Roper argues that private and public memories are much more porous than they might at first appear. This theme is developed towards the end of Afterlives of War.

Both Curating the Great War and Afterlives of War also give explanations of how and why national narratives of the 1914–18 conflict differ by place. Roper describes in detail a 2016 meeting between twenty-three German and British subjects with a First World War family history. These sessions used family objects as prompts to explore how war memories passed across generations and between family members. The resulting typology of twenty-first century war remembering includes the need to bear and make memories, to learn from the past, to break silences, and the need to restore humanity. Such grass roots insights give a sense of family members as active rememberers and interpreters of relatives’ lives, of community, and of national pasts. Cornish and Saunders concentrate on a different aspect of state narratives, namely, the struggle for control of memory between governing authorities who, past and present, have claimed the conflict to strengthen patriotic sentiment and identity. The editors also identify some notable exceptions to this nationalist agenda including the Gallipoli: The scale of war exhibition at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, discussed further below. One mature student I taught in 2024 told me, in class – referring to UK commemorative campaigns at the hundredth anniversary, ‘I had to live through that shit for four years. You couldn't escape it even if you wanted to’. Nevertheless, the United Kingdom also effectively challenged its own sense of the past, at least sometimes, and in some places, as Stephen Dixon notes in his excellent chapter on collaborative memorial-making.

While Cornish and Saunders note the range of commemorative and remembrance practices across institutions, Roper links national narratives to family and communal remembering. The author notes for instance that the death of Erich Kästner (1900–2008), believed to be the last surviving German or Austrian veteran of the First World War, was all but absent from the public sphere, not only because Germany did not maintain active records. Equally, no German 1914–18 national memorial was constructed. German interest in the First World War was substantial, but highly ambivalent. Above all, Nazi manipulation of the ‘front fighter’ image contributed to the decision for no central commemoration at the hundredth anniversary. As Roper notes too, state funding reflects differences of attitudes towards the conflict, and towards the role of remembrance. Anxieties at the revival of extremist nationalism, and reluctance to fuel anti-European feeling around the time of the Brexit referendum, led Germany to spend three and a half million Euro. Britain's Conservative government, stressing remembrance and citizenship duties of service, sacrifice, and unity, allocated fifty million pounds. Australia, where national identity remains deeply invested in the Anzac legend, devoted five hundred and sixty-two million dollars. More than all other nation states put together. Many historians felt ambivalent about their role in such commemorations. In Australia, there was noticeable criticism of a trend also present elsewhere: sentimentalization, parochialism, pity and mourning to match the twenty-first century ‘age of trauma’, all of which amounted in some eyes to a regrettable ‘memory orgy’.

Yet, as both the accounts under review show, descendants in Britain, Australia, and in many other states did not necessarily agree with or accept state-funded campaigns. In the same way, some artists, curators, and historians sought to complicate and rethink the meanings of the First World War. Images of the conflict evolved between 2014 and 2018. The early ‘memory orgies’ failed because sensibility and values shifted across successive generations. In Roper's argument, the presence and engagement of descendants became increasingly important over the four years of the hundredth anniversary. Descendant stories disrupted long-held interpretations. The Anzac myth, for example, was challenged by descendants’ accounts of established German communities detained and deported from Australia. Several chapters in Curating the Great War also describe exhibitions that strongly challenged existing interpretation. Two exhibitions are worth describing in more detail also as examples of imaginative curatorial and artistic reinvention in the twenty-first century. The form and content of both exhibitions support Roper's argument for reciprocal interaction between private and public memory.

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa's Gallipoli: the scale of our war, for example, incorporated into its opening a pōwhiri (Māori welcome) and blessing. Small groups were then invited to explore the eight hyper-real sculptures, each two and a half times larger than life, that were the interpretive core of the exhibition. The remainder of the show incorporated five thematic galleries, presented for the most part from a New Zealand perspective. Opening on 18 April 2015, the exhibition has to date run for almost ten years. Over three million visited the exhibition by February 2020. The familiarity of Anzac Day and the Anzac legend, and the fresh approach to the subject taken by the museum, partly accounts for this popularity. Kirstie Ross, Papa Te employee and curatorial lead on the exhibition, reports in her essay that the ‘pervasive mnemonic culture’ of New Zealand helped give the exhibition its mass appeal. Ross gives us an absorbing account of the exhibition that also fulfils the editors’ intention to show how exhibition making happens in the twenty-first century. In this case by a radical humanization and naming of the figures rather than the more usual anonymisation of the conflict and concentration on material objects. Hence the careful choice of eight individuals who were the subjects of the sculptures, and the close collaboration with living relatives. This approach also echoes Roper's claim that descendants helped inform and shape public commemoration. The question of who should be included in the exhibition, a point of disagreement between the curators, led to the inclusion of two Māori, one Australian, and five Pakeha (New Zealanders of European descent). Again, such inclusive approaches are not new to the recollection of the 1914–18 conflict, but they do suggest how curatorial practice and present-day concerns continually reframe understandings of the past. Gallipoli is a characteristically immersive and visitor-centric example of the ‘new museology’. Ross helpfully names the qualities that contemporary museum visitors find most engaging: connection, emotion, authenticity, multi-sensory engagement, and space for reflection. Such exhibitions show too what can be achieved when these attributes are matched with strong historical research and technical skill.

The Sensory War, 1914–2014 (Manchester Art Gallery, Oct 2014 – Feb 2015), is a second exhibition that was both challenging and successful in the eyes of its twenty-first century audiences. Here too, all of Ross's key qualities are present. The exhibition also noticeably avoided the more partisan tone taken by some political and media commentators in Britain. There was also a conspicuous inclusiveness in its vision of the conflict. As Ana Carden-Coyne's key chapter on the exhibition points out, curators, historians, and public questioned a return to the triumphalist renditions of the war that drew on the memory politics of the interwar era, and that tended to reproduce the nationalist agendas seen in Australia and elsewhere. Rather, The Sensory War was a conscious attempt to push against previous generational understandings, seeking instead a new relevance beyond what Roper refers to as the time-bound codes and cultures of earlier generations. Roper's key example here – visible in displays and commentaries on the conflict and audible in his interviews – is the value participants and their children placed on dampening down and limiting expression of emotions as a necessity in everyday coping. By contrast, later descendants place greater value on open expression and emotional engagement. Stephen Dixon in his essay on collaborative memorial making names some of the high-profile examples that matched their moment, including War Rooms (2015) by Cornelia Parker and Danny Boyle's Pages of the Sea (2018). For Carden-Coyne, the incorporation of creative artistic practice into museum exhibition was essential because artists can engage audiences ‘as conduits for communities to shape meaning, heal trauma and foster deep contemplation through creativity and imagination’. The value of creative engagements and practices is obvious when addressing emotive, living themes so deeply embedded in family and communal experience as well as in living memory. In the case of The Sensory War, a group of ten themes guided the exhibition: Militarising Bodies, Manufacturing War; Female Factories; Aerial Warfare and the Sensation of Flight; Pain and Succour; Rupture and Rehabilitation; Embodied Ruins; Shocking the Senses; Bombing, Burning and Distant War; Chemical War and the Toxic Imaginary; and Ghostlands: Loss, Memory, and Resilience. Across the five months the exhibition was open, it attracted 203,000 visitors.

Finally, Curating the Great War and Afterlives of War allow us space for more direct reflection on commemorative practices at the 100th Anniversary within civil society, as well as in the more intimate setting of personal and family memory. Dominiek Dendooven of the In Flanders Field Museum, Ypres, like Kirstie Ross and Ana Carden-Coyne, stresses the necessity of commemoration meaningful to the present, as well as the need for ‘cosmopolitan’ or ethical forms of remembrance. One example is the Museum's decision to reflect on the humanitarian emergency of 2015–16, when hundreds of thousands of refugees crossing the Mediterranean, through a comparison with Belgian refugees at the start of the First World War. Despite the criticism and abuse aimed at the In Flanders Field Museum as a result, such cosmopolitan and contemplative approaches remain more persuasive than, for example, military battle reenactments. Dendooven argues such events are pretentious, deceitful, and by nature antagonistic.

Ethical and contemplative commemoration here seems much closer to the everyday life remembering explored in Afterlives of War. Roper notes the widespread use of ‘proximate stories’ that may not strictly match known events within the history of a family, but that nevertheless convey descendants’ constructed understandings. When parents refuse to speak or explain, descendants are still compelled to find compensation for the puzzlement of not knowing. They use proximate stories to fill in the blanks of the past. The diagnostic category ‘PTSD’ is likewise widely deployed since, as Roper puts it, ‘Trauma discourse made intuitive sense to the members of a “post” generation’. Descendants, in other words, make the histories that life experience forces upon them. Roper's wider point, supported by many of the examples in Curating the Great War, is that ‘professional’ or public histories are not apart from personal and family pasts. Nor do civic, family, and personal memory cultures simply flow from sender to receiver. Rather, memory formations continually reshape each other through both public commemorations and the lived experience of descendants.