Read on Twitter
Hello everyone @oliviasmithhist here and I will be taking over this weeks #FWWandPopCulture. I’m going to be talking about commemorative projects during the Centenary in the U.K and how they reflect on the wider popular memory of the First World War
I want to start with this tweet posted by @ProfGSheffield the other day. Over this week I will be looking at why the centenary was a missed opportunity. But before diving straight into that rabbit hole, today I want to paint the scene of FWW memory & culture 1914-2014
"The British response to the war at the time was multi-vocal: over time, some voices have disappeared & others have grown stronger. The tune we now hear uses the same notes, but it sounds very different to 1918. A single melody has emerged & all the voices now audible sing to it"
This is a brilliant quote by @daniel_todman. His book was my bible at uni.
How is it that during the war the British public knew it was necessary to mobilise against Germany's aggression, to the now accepted belief that it is a muddy, bloody, futile affair narrated by poets?
How is it that during the war the British public knew it was necessary to mobilise against Germany's aggression, to the now accepted belief that it is a muddy, bloody, futile affair narrated by poets?
September 1914 Laurence Binyon wrote the poem, For the Fallen which includes the line 'at the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them’. This set an instructive tone of remembrance, it emphasises the focus on those who gave & were going to give their lives
The post war world sought to make sense of the war, memorials & traditional forms of remembrance started to take shape. The early 1930s saw the 'war books boom' a period where novels and memoirs of the war, written by soldiers, nurses, & civilians came into popular culture…
Erich Maria Remarque’s book All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and the film (1930) which presented the war as a monumental waste, transformed the popular First World War narrative from victorious and heroic, to a pity of war narrative
If you compared Testament of Youth (1933) with Vera Brittain's war-time diary Chronicle of Youth (1981) you would see a stark contrast in the two accounts. Now a pacifist Vera saw her personal recollection of the war as intended to persuade others of the horror that war can bring
The war books boom continues to frame our FWW memory today. The real kick in the teeth was the SWW being perceived in popular culture as the 'good war' fighting Nazism & as veterans were dying off who could argue against the war being a muddy, bloody, futile affair?
The first new influence on FWW memory was Alan Clark’s The Donkeys (1961). The book reflected on the war during 1915 with a primary focus on the ‘stupidity with which the war was fought’. This book saw the entry of the phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’ into popular culture.
The Great War (1964): 40x26 series used 'disturbing images, plangent music and sombre narration’ in the series. 8 million people watched each episode, evoking responses as such "the appalling and needless slaughter of innocent people"...
Jay Winter argued that what made the series a major cultural even was the families of survivors and of those who did not come back, integrated these war stories into their own family narratives.
Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) & The Monocled Mutineer (1986) both had anti-establishment themes, reiterating the 'donkeys' myth. Personally, one of the most defining moments in FWW popular culture was Blackadder Goes Forth (1989)...
The series used its comedic theme to enhance the futile and tragic perception as summarised by Blackadder: ‘we’ve been sitting here since Christmas 1914, during which time millions of men have died, and we’ve moved no further than an asthmatic ant with heavy shopping’.
Blackadder (1989) represents how reducing the First World War memory down to a couple of popular perceptions (Donkeys, Futility and Death) provides an easier method to comprehend the war.
Further cultural methods communicated stories of the war throughout the 21st century: Timewatch (2008), Who Do You Think You Are (2004-2008), Radiohead's 2009 song Harry Patch (In Memory) which featured the lyric: ‘I’ve seen hell upon this earth’
House of Lords debated how the centenary should be commemorated in 2013. Here are some quotes: "It is a war which came to epitomise carnage & human sacrifice".
"What Wilfred Owen meant when he talked about the pity of war, that war was largely pointless, meaningless & avoidable"
"What Wilfred Owen meant when he talked about the pity of war, that war was largely pointless, meaningless & avoidable"
Also in 2013 the No Glory campaign against the British govt presenting the war as glorious in our national heritage, when they believed it to be 'a total disaster that was unnecessary and destroyed a generation' https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/08/anti-war-activists-ww1-centenary
We can see by the centenary how far the idea of a victorious war has changed to a pity of war narrative over a century. Throughout the rest of the week, I will look at how these dominant myths shaped centenary commemorations on a national, community and individual level
