Cultural Memory and the Great War: Medievalism and Classicism in British and German War Memorials

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEFAN GOEBEL
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Great War ◽  
War Memorials ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter investigates the overlaps between the ‘cultural memory’ of the distant past and the memory of the Great War in Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1939, looking in particular at the use of medieval(ist) images in war memorials. There was a certain tension between advocates of medievalism and supporters of classicist images, but often, they reached a compromise. The chapter combines a discussion of the concept of ‘cultural memory’ with case studies on the reception of antiquity and the Middle Ages in the era of the Great War.

scholarly journals Medieval motives in memorialization of the Great War

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-71
Author(s):  
Sergei A. Mankov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Medieval Architecture ◽  
War Memorials ◽  
European Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Middle Ages

The article examines the European experience of creating war memorials dedicated to the World War I, using the motives of medieval architecture. The fascination with the Middle Ages, spread through the art and literature of the Neo-Gothic and national Romanism period, was emotionally rethought by the generation that survived the catastrophe of the global conflict of 1914–1918. At the new stage, the symbolic harsh images of the Middle Ages turned out to be more consonant with the social creation of former front-line soldiers than the classical antique forms used in the memorialization of wars in the 18th–19th centuries. This process was reflected in the commemoration of the Great War in Great Britain, France, Germany and other countries, where the monuments to the fallen began to give the appearance characteristic of the towers, fortresses and castles of the long-gone Middle Ages, giving them a new interpretative meaning.

The Causes of the Great War

1915 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Raymond Turner
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Great War ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Strength ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Middle Ages

In 1806 Prussia engaged in war with Napoleon. The swiftest of his triumphs followed. In two months the Prussians had surrendered their fortresses, and seen annihilated the greatness which Europe had failed to crush in the time of Frederick the Great. A period of humiliation followed, and for some years the people lived under the conqueror's yoke.Deliverance came when Napoleon, stretching too far his power, and arousing the spirit of peoples, was defeated by Europe in arms. The liberation which alone Prussia could not have accomplished, was yet wrought partly by herself, for deliverance was preceded by regeneration in which her military system was fundamentally reformed. But it may be that what remained after all as the principal heritage from these years was the abiding sense that Prussia had suffered from being weak, and that only through military strength could there be safety in the future.The expansion and greatness of Prussia left unfulfilled the old idea of a united Germany. Through the middle ages and down to this time Germany had remained disunited, and weak and despised because of it. The smallest states had now disappeared, but still there were larger ones, grouped under Austria in vague and shadowy empire. And the history of Germany in the half century which followed the downfall of Napoleon is a record of yearning and striving on the part of people filled with distant memories, and noble aspiration after that strength and union which had come to their neighbors and yet been denied to themselves.

Freedom from Violence: Sectarian Nonresistance from the Middle Ages to the Great War.

1993 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 140
Author(s):  
Berenice Carroll ◽  
Peter Brock
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Middle Ages

World Medievalism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise D'Arcens
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Indigenous Australia ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
To Come ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Textual Culture ◽  
The Middle Ages

World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture explores the ways in which a range of modern textual cultures have continued to engage creatively with the medieval past in order to come to terms with the global present. Building its argument through four case studies—from the Middle East, France, Southeast Asia, and Indigenous Australia–it shows that to understand medievalism as a cultural idiom with global reach, we need to develop a more nuanced grasp of the different ways ‘the Middle Ages’ have come to signify beyond Europe as well as within a Europe that has been transformed by multiculturalism and the global economy. The book’s case studies are explored within a conceptual framework in which medievalism itself is formulated as ‘world-disclosing’—a transhistorical encounter that enables the modern subject to apprehend the past ‘world’ opened up in medieval and medievalist texts and objects. The book analyses the cultural and material conditions under which its texts are produced, disseminated, and received and examines literature alongside films, television programs, newspapers and journals, political tracts, as well as such material and artefactual texts as photographs, paintings, statues, buildings, rock art, and fossils. While the case studies feature distinctive localized forms of medievalism, taken together they reveal how imperial and global legacies have ensured that the medieval period continues to be perceived as a commonly held past that can be retrieved, reclaimed, or revived in response to the accelerated changes and uncertainties of global modernity.

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