Dan Todman: How We Remember Them: The 1914-18 War Today
[Dan Todman is senior lecturer in history at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the author of The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon, 2005).]
The annual commemoration of the fallen in the world wars and small wars Britain has been involved in takes place on the nearest Sunday to "Remembrance Day", 11 November. On that day in 1918, at 11 o'clock in the morning, the guns fell silent on the western front for the first time since August 1914. The fact that this year is the ninetieth anniversary of that event means that it is being marked with especial intensity. But in Britain at least, there is also something of the routine about the way that the first world war has become the principal focus of the "festival of remembrance". It can seem even that the British are obsessed by this conflict above all others.
Dan Todman is senior lecturer in history at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the author of The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon, 2005) The remembering of major national events is bound to change over time. What makes the current British memorialising of the 1914-18 war fascinating is the way it combines fairly fixed concerns and narratives with novel voices and forms of inquiry. That makes it too an interesting case of how societies in the process of exploring their past can resist as well as embrace a deeper encounter with it.
Two discourses: fluid and fixed
The interest starts with the disjuncture between public and academic discourses about the 1914-18 war. The public image of what the war was like (bloody and muddy) and meant (pointless) has remained strikingly constant over the last four decades. Yet for a large part of this period - since the late 1980s - there has also been a remarkable boom in scholarship about the war which has introduced new methods. The increasing expectation that work will cross disciplinary and national boundaries has produced new understandings....
Read entire article at openDemocracy
The annual commemoration of the fallen in the world wars and small wars Britain has been involved in takes place on the nearest Sunday to "Remembrance Day", 11 November. On that day in 1918, at 11 o'clock in the morning, the guns fell silent on the western front for the first time since August 1914. The fact that this year is the ninetieth anniversary of that event means that it is being marked with especial intensity. But in Britain at least, there is also something of the routine about the way that the first world war has become the principal focus of the "festival of remembrance". It can seem even that the British are obsessed by this conflict above all others.
Dan Todman is senior lecturer in history at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is the author of The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon, 2005) The remembering of major national events is bound to change over time. What makes the current British memorialising of the 1914-18 war fascinating is the way it combines fairly fixed concerns and narratives with novel voices and forms of inquiry. That makes it too an interesting case of how societies in the process of exploring their past can resist as well as embrace a deeper encounter with it.
Two discourses: fluid and fixed
The interest starts with the disjuncture between public and academic discourses about the 1914-18 war. The public image of what the war was like (bloody and muddy) and meant (pointless) has remained strikingly constant over the last four decades. Yet for a large part of this period - since the late 1980s - there has also been a remarkable boom in scholarship about the war which has introduced new methods. The increasing expectation that work will cross disciplinary and national boundaries has produced new understandings....