‘Images from our orthopaedic hospital’: photography in the rehabilitation of disabled war veterans in Croatia during the First World War

This article reconsiders traditional assumptions about the connection between the First World War and the rise of National Socialism in Germany, according to which politically radicalised war veterans joined the Freikorps after the war and formed the backbone of the Nazi membership and electorate. In questioning this view, the article first traces the political paths of actual veterans’ organisations. Whereas the largest veterans’ organisations were not politically active, the most distinctive ones – Reichsbanner and Stahlhelm – were not primarily responsible for a ‘brutalisation’ or radicalisation of Weimar political culture. Their definitions of ‘veteran’ and ‘front experience’ implicitly excluded the so-called ‘war youth generation’ from their narrative. Secondly, it is shown how representatives of this younger generation, lacking actual combat experience but moulded by war propaganda, determined the collective imagination of the First World War. The direct connection between the First World War and National Socialism can therefore primarily be found in the continuity of public and cultural imagination of war and of ‘war veterans’, and much less so in actual membership overlaps between veterans’ and Nazi movements.

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Croatian Interwar Cultural Memory and Disabled War Veterans

Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University History ◽

10.21638/11701/spbu02.2021.112 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 66 (1) ◽

pp. 193-211

Author(s):

Sandra Cvikić ◽

◽

Ljiljana Dobrovšak ◽

Keyword(s):

Cultural Memory ◽

First World War ◽

Research Field ◽

Sociological Research ◽

Discursive Practices ◽

World War ◽

War Veterans ◽

The First World War ◽

Post War ◽

First World

In the contemporary international scholarly community cultural memory related to the First World War as a research field and subject area is extensively problematized and studied by social sciences and humanities. Based on the available surveyed scholarly production, it is evident that Croatian cultural memory of the First World War is an under-researched subject. This paper therefore presents preliminary findings of conducted qualitative sociological research into the development of the post-First World War cultural memory in Croatia in the interwar period. The research provides an insight into how Croatian disabled war veterans (de)constructed post-war cultural memory inside a newly formed multiethnic state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and to which extent it was connected to national and ethnic. The discourse and discursive practices developed by Croatian disabled war veterans are analyzed in selected newspapers (Nezavisnost, Hrvatski invalid, Ratni invalid, Vojni invalid) published in the period 1920–1924. The article uses post-modernist sociological fallibilistic Foucauldian methodology of discourse analysis and Foucault’s understanding of modernist societies, which is based on the research into how the language appropriates specific discourses developed by certain groups in addition to the prevalent discursive practices. Both methodology and theory are used to explain the findings in the framework of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls ‘culture of defeat’. The research concludes that difficult post-war political, social and economic circumstances profoundly shaped the way in which the collective memory of the First World War was (de)constructed by post-war disabled veterans in Croatia and subsequently induced collective amnesia thus helping to create the culture of forgetting.

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Volunteer Veterans and Entangled Cultures of Victory in Interwar Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia

Journal of Contemporary History ◽

10.1177/0022009419838034 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 54 (4) ◽

pp. 716-736

Author(s):

John Paul Newman

Keyword(s):

Interwar Period ◽

First World War ◽

World War ◽

War Veterans ◽

The First World War ◽

The Common ◽

First World ◽

Respective State

Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were two successor states of the Austro-Hungarian empire at great pains in the interwar period to portray themselves, both domestically and internationally, as ‘victor states’ of the First World War, even though both states inherited societies that were deeply fractured by the experience of war. The symbol of the pro-Entente war volunteer was an important part of both states’ interwar cultures of victory. Such volunteers represented just a fraction of war veterans in both countries, but they were given great prominence in their respective state-forming cultures. This article is a study of the origins and the nature of this important entanglement. It begins by defining the problematic nature of the ‘culture of victory’ in the region, before going on to explore the common origins of the volunteer movements in the wartime pro-Entente émigré groups. It then moves on to a discussion of consequences of the privileging of volunteer veterans in the institutional, political, and commemorative cultures of the two states.

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Three War Veterans Who Don’t Tell War Stories

The First World War ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197266267.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Kate McLoughlin

Keyword(s):

Walter Benjamin ◽

First World War ◽

World War ◽

War Veterans ◽

The First World War ◽

War Stories ◽

First World ◽

Traditional Storytelling

Veterancy is a natural figure for the kind of wisdom-through-experience that is purveyed, as Walter Benjamin noted in ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), through traditional storytelling. But these three veterans have been stupefied by their experiences in mass, industrial, globalized war – William Wordsworth’s ‘Discharged Soldier’ in the French Revolutionary Wars, Rebecca West’s Chris Baldry (The Return of the Soldier (1918)) and Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Warren Smith (Mrs Dalloway (1925)) in the First World War. Consequently, they are unable to process their experiences into communicable wisdom – a different thing from being able to describe them. Those who encounter these veterans (and this includes the texts’ readers) may feel sadness or anger at their plight. But, though there is affect, there is no empathy, whether through body or mind. All that remains is to look upon these unfathoming, unfathomable characters with consternation.

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