scholarly journals Split Memory: World War I Memorialisation Practices in the Weimar Republic

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 22-35
Author(s):  
Nikolay N. Baranov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Central Place ◽  
World War ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Places Of Memory ◽  
Formation And Evolution ◽  
National Significance ◽  
East Prussia

The problem of historical memory and the politics of memory, the formation and evolution of memorial culture has become relevant in the context of the “mnemonic turn” in historiography, which began in the 1980s and continues until now. The events of World War I and its consequences in the interwar period occupied a central place in the communicative memory of the Germans and were the main object of historical politics in the Weimar Republic. For obvious reasons, there could be no place for triumphal memory in Germany. The memory of heroes acquired a special emotional meaning and pushed the grief memory version into the background, which was a natural compensation for the catastrophic defeat. Attempts by the official authorities and parties of the Weimar coalition to create a common memorial space of the last war for national consolidation and their own legitimisation ended in failure. In the conditions of a deep socio-political split in society on the brink of civil war, the opposing groups created and spread their own versions of the memory of war, not only competing, but also directly hostile to each other. At the same time, its main carriers were veteran organisations of various party affiliations. They were characterised by a specific memorial culture of admiration for the idealised image of the front-line soldier and disdain for the ones in the rear. As a result, the most significant places of memory, i.e. the Tannenberg Memorial in East Prussia and the Neue Wache building in Berlin never acquired national significance. In the confrontation between conflicting versions of memory, the advantage remained on the side of the conservative, nationalist, and anti-republican forces.

scholarly journals The Politics of Russian Memory: The Great War in the European Context

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-235
Author(s):  
Olga S. Porshneva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Great War

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.

scholarly journals Behind the Facades of Anniversaries

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 792-797
Author(s):  
A. V. Antoshin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
World War ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

The article is devoted to the collective monograph “War, Politics, Memory: The Napoleonic Wars and World War I in the Space of Anniversaries”. Prepared by a large team of academics under the leadership of Olga Porshneva, Nikolai Baranov, and Vladimir Zemtsov (professors at Ural Federal University), it is the first generalizing work dedicated to historical memory and the politics of memory surrounding these wars. The monograph uses a large complex of documents from archives in Russia, France, Great Britain and Germany. This book is distinguished by its high theoretical level, which is supported by concepts from leading specialists on historical memory. The authors characterise the specifics of commemorative practices connected with events that were major milestones in the history of the ‘long’ nineteenth century. The monograph shows the evolution of these practices, which was conditioned by changes in the attitudes of society and the authorities towards the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. The authors characterise the role of the institutions of civil society in the formation and development of cultural practices connected with the anniversaries of these military conflicts. Most attention is paid to the specifics of commemorative practices related to ‘victory memories’ and ‘defeat memories’ in various European countries. This book helps us to understand the contradictory character of state policies towards historical memory, a relevant issue in modern Russia.

Prisoners’ fantasies in Weimar film

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ofer Ashkenazi
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern City ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Weimar Cinema ◽  
Public Criticism

Prison cells constituted a unique sphere in post-World War I German films. Unlike most of the modern city spheres, it was a realm in which the private and the public often merged, and in which reality and fantasy incessantly intertwined. This article analyses the ways in which filmmakers of the Weimar Republic envisaged the experience within the prison, focusing on its frequent association with fantasies and hallucinations. Through the analysis of often-neglected films from the period, I argue that this portrayal of the prison enabled Weimar filmmakers to engage in public criticism against the conservative, inefficient and prejudiced institutions of law and order in Germany. Since German laws forbade direct defamation of these institutions, filmmakers such as Joe May, Wilhelm Dietherle and Georg C. Klaren employed the symbolism of the prisoner’s fantasy to propagate the urgent need for thorough reform. Thus this article suggests that Weimar cinema, contrary to common notions, was not dominated by either escapism or extremist, anti-liberal worldviews. Instead, the prison films examined in this article are in fact structured as a warning against the decline of liberal bourgeois society in the German urban centres of the late 1920s.

Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

2019 ◽  
pp. 22-35
Author(s):  
Elliot Neaman
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter discusses the life and work of Ernst Jünger, who was part of a strain in modern German conservatism that tested the limits of modernity and Enlightenment rationality. He catapulted to fame as a young man on the basis of his World War I memoirs, In Storms of Steel, which made him part of the antidemocratic forces of the Weimar Republic, but he retreated into the inner emigration during the Third Reich. After 1950 he lived a reclusive life but published a stream of essays and books and an impressive diary that chronicled almost four decades of life with sharp observations on a wide range of topics. He was a cultural pessimist who thought that the rise of a unifying planetary technology and the loss of local culture meant that we were entering into a posthistorical world of fragmentation, and new forms of cultural and political tyranny.

German Jews in Paris: Traversing Modernity

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
World War ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Central European ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
Border Crossers ◽  
European Jewish

The article traces Central European Jewish visitors of Paris during the Weimar Republic and the 1930s and analyzes the shifting meaning of travel, exile, and the figure of the flaneur. Their travelogues articulated their affection for Paris in the aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, marking them as border crossers in multiple ways. Writing about modern capitals such as Paris became a way to temporarily belong to them, to reimagine modernity.

scholarly journals Emotion, Medizin und Volksbelehrung: die Entstehung des «deutschen Kulturfilms»

Gesnerus ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-102
Author(s):  
Philipp Osten
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
German Empire ◽  
German Film ◽  
Government Institutions

This article describes the process of professionalisation of medical films in Germany between 1910 and 1920. At the beginning of this decade, government institutions showed a growing interest in hygiene campaigns and started to cooperate with medical experts as well as with professional advertisers. When the German film industry was nationalised at the end of World War I, these informal structures were strengthened. New theories described the film as a most powerful tool for propaganda purposes. This profoundly changed the expectations towards medical films. Now their content had to be bedded into the dramatised form of a photoplay. After 1918, in anticipation of the reprivatisation of the German film industry, government officials of the Weimar Republic developed complex measures to obtain and keep control over a new genre of documentary film which was now called “Deutscher Kulturfilm”. Some of the political expectations linked to the Kulturfilm can be exemplified in the first documentary of feature length released by the Berlinbased Universal Film Corporation in 1920. It contained elements of medical films that had been shot during the last decade of the German Empire, and it was newly composed in 1919 to meet the presumable needs of a broader public in an uncertain democratic future.

scholarly journals Global Conflict of the Past in Contemporary Media Space: Historical Memory in a Discursive Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-50
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Y. Aleshina ◽  
Mark Y. Blokh ◽  
Tatiana A. Razuvaeva ◽  
Hedwig Wagner ◽  
Anton V. Kompleev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
World War ◽  
Specific Data ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Media Space ◽  
Wide Circle ◽  
The Media

The article is devoted to an overview of studies on the discursive embodiment of historical memory, particularly, in the media. The research is aimed at the overview and systematization of, predominantly, international and Russian concepts of historical memory in academic literature. The scientific significance of research results is determined by the possibility of clarifying the definitions of historical memory in the process of systematizing the existing overseas and domestic studies. With that, the “starting point” of historical memory in this research are global political conflicts, particularly, World War I and World War II. The focus of research interest is the memory of the world wars which is discursively expressed in modern media space with various pragmatic tasks. Analysis of media materials allows for revealing the mechanisms of using historical memory as a tool for creating assessment and images while covering World War I and World War II. The research makes it possible to obtain a general discursive picture of the mass consciousness and, what is especially, important, to get specific data on the linguistic “content” of historical memory reflected in online media. The article is addressed to researchers in various fields of the Humanities, journalists and a wide circle of readers who are interested in the problem.

scholarly journals A few remarks on East Prussia goldsmith heritage in Lithuania

Menotyra ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalia Vasiliūnienė
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
World War ◽  
German Scientist ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
East Prussia ◽  
Second World

The newly identified goldsmiths’ works of East Prussia are presented in the article: a chalice from Kaunas St. Cross Church forged by Otto Schwerdfeger, a master in Königsberg, in 1704 (?), a ciborium from Vilnius St. Apostles Peter and Paul Church made by goldsmith Johann Kownatzky in Tilsit in the 1760–80s, and a monstrance from Valakbūdis Church made by Michael Greiffenhagen II, a master from Tilsit, in 1795 (?). After the World War II, East Prussia was annexed by the Soviet Union. Destruction of the region and its historical memory and enormous losses of the cultural heritage partly resulted in knowledge gaps in Lithuania about the goldsmithing in this region. For the knowledge of goldsmith history in East Prussia, works by Eugen von Czihak, a German scientist, based on the information collected before the First and Second World Wars are very important. The goldsmithing of Eastern Prussia is pretty seldom mentioned in the Lithuanian historiography. Only sparsely survived works by Königsberg, Tilsit and Klaipėda (Memel) masters from the 17th – 19th century have been published. On the contrary, the context of Lithuanian goldsmith history is described based on data provided by the German writings. According to our knowledge, the goldsmith heritage from Königsberg predominates in Lithuania. Not a few goldsmith works from Tilsit were also identified in Lithuania. The works of Eastern Prussian goldsmiths are of particular value. Because of the dramatic fate of Königsberg region, the survived number of goldsmith works throughout Europe is relatively low.

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