Narratives of War: Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe 2019004591, 2019010671, 9780429506840, 9781138581203, 9781138581210

Citation preview

Narratives of War

Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and ­narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century. The book reflects on how narratives are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The contributions address such issues as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, the relationship between various individuals’ versions of war narratives and the ways in which events are brought together to serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Drawing upon the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yugoslav wars, and considering narrative genres that include film, schoolbooks, novels, oral history, archives, official documents, personal testimony and memoirs, readers are introduced to a range of narrative forms and examples that highlight the complexity of narrative in relation to war. Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and taken together, analysis of these narratives contributes to our understanding of the causes, experience, dynamics and consequences of war, making it an ideal book for those interested in twentieth-century war history and the history of memory and narrative. Nanci Adler is Professor of Memory, History and Transitional Justice at the University of Amsterdam and Programme Director of Genocide Studies at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). She is the author of numerous titles, including Keeping Faith with the Party (2012) and The Gulag Survivor (2002), and editor of, among others, Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice (2018). Remco Ensel teaches cultural history at Radboud University in Nijmegen (the Netherlands). His current interests include visual nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s, Holocaust studies and antisemitism. He co-edited with Evelien Gans The Holocaust, Israel and ‘the Jew’: Histories of Antisemitism in Post-war Dutch Society (2017). Michael Wintle is the Professor of Modern European History at the University of Amsterdam, where he is head of the department of European Studies. He has published widely on Dutch and European history, including The Image of Europe (2009), European Identity and the Second World War (ed. with M. Spiering, 2011) and The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries (ed. with H. Dunthorne, 2013).

Memory and Narrative Series editors:

Selma Leydesdorff, Nanci Adler, Albert Lichtblau, Yifat Gutman, Mark Cave and Anna Sheftel Please send any book proposals for this series to Anna Sheftel (asheftel@gmail. com) for consideration.

Memories of Mass Repression Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity Edited by Nanci Adler, Selma Leydesdorff, Mary Chamberlain and Leyla Neyzi Witnessing Australian Stories History, Testimony, and Memory in Contemporary Culture Kelly Jean Butler Tapestry of Memory Evidence and Testimony in Life-Story Narratives Edited by Nanci Adler and Selma Leydesdorff Double Exposure Memory and Photography Edited by Olga Shevchenko Negotiating Normality Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions Edited by Daniela Koleva Sasha Pechersky Holocaust Hero, Sobibor Resistance Leader, and Hostage of History Selma Leydesdorff Narratives of War Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe Edited by Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel and Michael Wintle

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Narratives of War Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe

Edited by Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel and Michael Wintle

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel and Michael Wintle to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Adler, Nanci, editor. | Ensel, Remco, editor. | Wintle, Michael J., editor. Title: Narratives of war : remembering and chronicling battle in twentieth-century Europe / edited by Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel and Michael Wintle. Description: London ; New York, NY : Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. | Series: Memory and narrative | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019004591 (print) | LCCN 2019010671 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429506840 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781138581203 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138581210 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429506840 (ebk.) Subjects: LCSH: Europe—History, Military—20th century. | Memory—Social aspects—Europe—History—20th century. | War and society—Europe—History—20th century. | Collective memory— Europe. | Europe—History—20th century—Historiography. Classification: LCC D424 (ebook) | LCC D424 .N37 2019 (print) | DDC 355.02094/0904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004591 ISBN: 978-1-138-58120-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-58121-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-50684-0 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Contributors

viii ix x

Part I

Narrative and the Story of War

1

1 Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction

3

M ichael W intle , Nanci A dler and R emco E nsel

2 A Tale of Two Battles: Narrating Verdun and the Somme, 1916

18

John Horne

Part II

Constructing War Narratives

35

3 The Stories the First World War Inherited: Adaptations of Peninsular War Veterans’ Memoirs, 1814–1914

37

M atilda Greig

4 The Archive as Narrator? Narratives of German ‘Enemy Citizens’ in the Netherlands after 1945

51

M arie k e Oprel

5 Of Triumph and Defeat: World War II and its Historians in Post-war Germany

64

C hristina Morina

6 The Imagery of War: Screening the Battlefield in the Twentieth Century F ran k van V ree

81

vi Contents Part III

The Development and Deployment of War Narratives

99

7 The War Books Controversy Revisited: First World War Novels and Veteran Memory

101

D unja D ušanić

8 War and Peace as a ‘Paradoxical Coherence’: How the European Union Uses the Remembrance of the Great War to Construct European Identities

116

Peter Pichler

9 History Wars in School Textbooks? The Massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in Polish History Textbooks since 1989

127

S ylwia B obry k

10 ‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’: The Role of Religion and Competing Narratives in the Reconciliation Process in Bosnia and Herzegovina

145

M arie k e Zoodsma

Part IV

Testimonies and Survivalist Narratives

163

11 Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma: Trauma and Narrative Structure in Interviews with Dutch and English International Brigade Volunteers of the Spanish Civil War

165

T im S cheffe

12 Digital Survival? Online Interview Portals and the Re-Contextualization of Holocaust Testimonies

180

S usan Hogervorst

13 Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen: Anecdotes, Humour and Poetry as Survival Strategies E velien Gans

190

Contents  vii PART V

Conclusion

205

14 Twentieth-Century Narratives of War: Conclusions

207

R emco E nsel , M ichael W intle and Nanci A dler

Index

221

Figures

2.1 ‘The might of the British artillery: a big Howitzer in action during the great advance’, Illustrated London News, 29 July 1916 22 2.2 ‘Roses for heroes: London’s welcome to soldiers wounded in the British offensive’, Illustrated London News, 15 July 1916 23 2.3 ‘Surrendering German soldiers’ (drawing, A.F. Dreetier), Illustrated London News, 22 July 1916 24 2.4 ‘The Surreys play the game’ (detail, drawing, R. Caton Woodville), Illustrated London News, 29 July 1916 25 2.5 ‘Those returning [to the front]’ (drawing, Louis Sabattier), L’Illustration, 24 June 1916 26 2.6 ‘Those who retook [the fort of] Douaumont’, L’Illustration, 11 November 1916 27 2.7 ‘In Picardy, Tommy victor over the “Huns”’ (drawing, Jules Simont), L’Illustration, 29 July 1916 27 2.8 ‘The Italian infantry crossing the Isonzo’ (drawing, Jules Simont), L’Illustration, 19 August 1916 28 4.1 A blank index-card 55 4.2 ‘Grensboer’ or ‘border farmer’ 59 6.1 All Quiet on the Western Front, poster of the rerelease by Realart, 1950 84 6.2 Jacques Callot, The Hanging. Scene from the series of etchings, Grandes misères de la guerre, 1633 85 6.3 Confederate soldiers dead, at Rose Woods in Gettysburg, PA 86 6.4 ‘The Battle of the Somme’, from The Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand), 12 October 1916 87 6.5 Soldiers going over the top and through the barbed wire to attack the Germans during the first day of battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. Still from the film Battle of the Somme (1916) 88 6.6 Famous last scene from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 91 6.7 The eye of God: stills from the most cited parts of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 92

Acknowledgements

This volume was inspired by a number of rich contributions to a 2016 ­international conference on ‘Narratives of War’, organized by the Huizinga Institute for Culture and History, with the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the University of Amsterdam, at the instigation of Remco Ensel and Michael Wintle. The editors selected those presentations that stood out for their originality and recruited additional submissions from leading colleagues in the field. The editorial process has been extensive and rigorous, and in the course of work on this volume, we sadly lost a dear colleague, Evelien Gans. We are very proud to be able to publish her important research in this collection. We thank the authors for their diligence, willingness to engage with our critical comments, patience and conscientiousness, but mostly for the high quality of their work. We hope the questions they pose which arise from the narratives emerging from the war-fraught twentieth century will be just the beginning of further discussion. The team at Routledge, especially Eve Setch and Zoe Thomson, has been exceptional – engaged and highly supportive of this project from early on. Our thanks also go to the Memory and Narrative series editors for their confidence in our work. Lastly, we would like to express our gratitude to the external referees for their careful scrutiny, enthusiasm and very helpful comments and suggestions. Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel and Michael Wintle.

Contributors

Biographical Notes on the Editors Nanci Adler  is Professor of Memory, History and Transitional Justice at the University of Amsterdam and Program Director of Genocide Studies at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Royal ­Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). She has authored Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag (2012), The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (2002) and Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement (1993), edited Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling (2018) and published numerous scholarly articles and other edited volumes on political rehabilitations, the memory of mass repression and the consequences of Stalinism. Her current research focuses on transitional justice and the legacy of Communism. Remco Ensel  teaches cultural history at Radboud University in Nijmegen (Netherlands). His current interests include Holocaust studies and the historical culture of World War II, ethnicity, antisemitism and nationalism. His publications include a study into the cultural foundations of social inequality in Moroccan society (Saints and Servants in Southern Morocco, 1999), various articles on visual nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s (e.g., ‘Dutch face-ism: Portrait photography and völkisch nationalism in the Netherlands’, Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 2013, vol. 2(1), 18–40) and (in collaboration with Evelien Gans) articles on history-writing and the Holocaust (e.g. ‘The Dutch bystander as non-Jew and implicated subject’, in C. Morina and K. Thijs (eds.), The Bystander in Holocaust History, in press). Most recently he co-wrote and co-edited (with Evelien Gans) The Holocaust, Israel and ‘the Jew’: Histories of Antisemitism in Post-war Dutch Society (2017) and (with M. Derks, M. Eickhoff and F. Meens), What’s Left Behind: The Lieux de Mémoire of Europe beyond Europe (2015). Michael Wintle studied at Cambridge, Ghent and Hull Universities, and since 2002 has held the chair of Modern European History at the University of Amsterdam, where he is head of the department of European Studies.

Contributors  xi Prior to 2002, he was Professor of European History at the University of Hull, UK, where he had taught since 1980. He has published widely on Dutch and European history, including the following recent books: The Image of Europe (2009); European Identity and the Second World War (ed. with M.  ­Spiering, 2011); and The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­Century Britain and the Low Countries (ed. with H. Dunthorne, 2013). He is currently working on a book on Eurocentrism.

Biographical Notes on the Contributors Sylwia Bobryk  has recently completed a PhD at the University of Portsmouth, UK. In her research project entitled The Second World War in Polish History Textbooks: Narratives and Networks from 1989 until 2015, she links the study of narratives with the analysis of networks of dominant domestic and transnational institutions and individuals who influence the content of history textbooks. In doing so, she shows how domestic actors, and their networks, compete for their stories about the past to be embodied in history textbooks. She holds an international Master’s degree in European Studies (IMPREST) and was awarded Master’s degrees from the University of Portsmouth and from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Dunja Dušanić is an Assistant Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Belgrade. Recently she has published a book on the relationship between fiction and testimony in Serbian Modernist narratives of the Great War, Fikcija kao svedočantsvo: iskustvo Prvog svetskog rata u prozi srpskih modernista (2017); and a collection of World War I diaries, Smilje i sumpor: dnevnici đaka-narednika 1916–1919 (with Danilo Šarenac, 2016). Her research deals with questions of genre, fiction and narrative from an interdisciplinary perspective, which usually involves a dialogue between cultural history and literary theory. She is currently working on a book on the theoretical and interpretative implications of testimonial poetry. Evelien Gans held the chair of Modern Jewish History at the University of Amsterdam. Until her death in 2018, she was affiliated with the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies as an emeritus researcher. Her 1999 PhD was on Jewish ideologies and changing Jewish identities (De kleine verschillen die het leven uitmaken/The Small Differences that Make up Life), and on Jewish family history, including the first part of a double biography of father and son Jaap en Ischa Meijer. Een joodse geschiedenis/A Jewish History 1912–1956 (2008). She published regularly on (anti-)Jewish stereotypes and on historical and contemporary antisemitism (starting in 1994 with Gojse nijd & joods narcisme/Goyish Envy & Jewish Narcissism). In 2016 she edited the volume The Holocaust, Israel and ‘the Jew’: Histories of Antisemitism in Post-war Dutch Society with Remco Ensel.

xii Contributors Matilda Greig  is a Teaching Fellow at Sciences Po Paris-Reims, where she teaches modern European history and interdisciplinary approaches to war. She obtained her PhD in 2018 from the European University Institute in Florence, with a thesis entitled ‘War for Sale: Peninsular War Veterans’ Memoirs in the Long Nineteenth Century (1808–1914)’. Previously she graduated cum laude from Leiden University in 2014 and holds a BA Hons from the University of Cambridge. She has published recently on the idea of ‘accidental authorship’ in military autobiographies, in History Workshop Journal, vol. 86, as well as in the Sorbonne doctoral journal Hypothèses. Susan Hogervorst is an assistant professor in historical culture and history didactics at the Open Universiteit Nederland and a research associate at the Center for Historical Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her current research focuses on the use of video testimonies in education, heritage sites and online. She obtained a PhD in history in 2010, with a thesis on memory cultures of the concentration camp at Ravensbrück in Western and Eastern Europe. Her fields of interest and expertise are cultural memory, oral history, digital humanities, didactics, historiography, public history and history of the Second World War. She has published and lectured about cultural memory, Ravensbrück concentration camp and the Rotterdam bombing raids, for example ‘Transmitting memory between and beyond generations: the Rotterdam bombardment in local memory culture and heritage education, 1980–2015’ in the Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society. John Horne is emeritus Professor of Modern European History and Director of the Centre for War Studies, at Trinity College Dublin, and was ­Oliver Smithies Visiting Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford in 2015–16. He is a member of the Executive Board of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne and of the scientific council of the French Mission du Centenaire de la Première Guerre Mondiale. He is also a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has written extensively on modern France and the transnational history of the Great War. Among his recent books are: with Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (2001), translated into German (2003) and French (2005); (ed.) A Companion to World War One (2010); (ed.) Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914–1915 (2010); and with Robert Gerwarth, War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (2012). Christina Morina is DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the German Studies Institute Amsterdam; previously she worked as lecturer at the University of Jena in Germany. In 2007, she received a PhD from the University of Maryland. Her dissertation was published in 2011 as Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front War in Germany since 1945. In 2017, she published her second monograph (Habilitation), a biographical study of the first generation of European Marxists entitled Die Erfindung des Marxismus (Siedler Verlag). The findings she presents in her chapter are linked

Contributors  xiii to a collaborative project on the nexus between individual experiences and historical writing in post-war Germany, the results of which were published in 2016 in Das 20. Jahrhundert erzählen. Zeiterfahrung und Zeiterforschung im geteilten Deutschland (co-edited with Franka Maubach). Marieke Oprel  is a PhD candidate and lecturer in political history at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) and the Institute for German Studies (DIA) in ­Amsterdam. She holds a MPhil in political and cultural history (2014). Her PhD research, funded by the Dutch national research council (NWO, 2015–2019), focuses on Dutch post-war policies towards German nationals in the aftermath of the Second World War. She is Sprecher (representative) at the Arbeitskreis Deutsch-Niederländische Geschichte (ADNG) and a reporter for historici.nl. Since June 2016, she has also been chairman of Jong KNHG, the Young Royal Netherlands Historical Society (KNHG). Peter Pichler  holds a PhD in contemporary history from Karl-FranzensUniversität Graz, Austria. After studies in history, philosophy and media and doctoral studies in history, he worked as a Research Assistant for the Institut für Geschichte and Institut für Österreichische Rechtsgeschichte und ­Europäische Rechtsentwicklung at Graz University. His research interests focus on the cultural history of European integration, the theory and philosophy of history and the cultural history of heavy metal (www.peterpichler-stahl.at). His publications include three monographs on the cultural history of European integration: Acht Geschichten über die Integrationsgeschichte (2011); Leben und Tod in der Europäischen Union (2014); and EUropa. Was die Europäische Union ist, was sie nicht ist und was sie einmal werden könnte (2016); and a monograph on the theory of contemporary history: Zeitgeschichte als Lebensgeschichte. Überlegungen zu einer emanzipativen und aktuellen Zeithistoriographie (2017). Tim Scheffe graduated cum laude from the Research Master Literature programme at the Vrije Universteit in Amsterdam. In his research, he compared the stories of Dutch and English veterans of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War with regard to narrative structure and trauma development. He is involved with the Dutch International Brigade community and helps in the organization of lectures in conjuncture with the annual commemoration. He is currently editing a memoir on the Spanish Civil War. Frank van Vree  is Director of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and also holds the chair of History of War, Conflict and Memory at the University of Amsterdam. Previously he was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Professor of Media Studies. He has published a large number of books and articles in academic and popular journals, in the fields of memory studies and historical culture, media history and journalism culture. He has co-edited a number of volumes, including History of

xiv Contributors Concepts – Comparative Perspectives (1998) and Performing the Past: Memory, History and Identity in modern Europe (2010). Marieke Zoodsma is a doctoral candidate at Tilburg University, participating in a ERC-funded research project on Political Apologies across Cultures. Within this wider project, she focuses on the cross-cultural differences and similarities in how political apologies are expressed and received. She holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology, specializing in conflict studies, and a MA in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from the University of Amsterdam. During her studies, she focused on the effects that mass violence and genocide have on society and culture, and specialized in religion and reconciliation. For her Master’s thesis, nominated for the University of Amsterdam thesis prize 2014–15, she conducted fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina to ascertain the role of religious initiatives in the reconciliation process.

Part I

Narrative and the Story of War

1 Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century An Introduction Michael Wintle, Nanci Adler and Remco Ensel

Narrative as an Object of Study This book is about the narratives of European wars in the twentieth century. It reflects on how they are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The research draws on the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yugoslav wars at the end of the century. The unifying theme is the narrative itself, which lies at the core of this collection of essays. To this end, each chapter contributes towards conceptualizing narrative and its relation to war. The authors address such fundamental questions as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, memory wars within and between states, the relationship between individuals’ versions of war narratives and those of others (or the collective) and the ways in which events are brought together – or ‘emplotted’ – into themed stories that serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and taken together, these narratives contribute to our understanding of the causes, experience, dynamics and consequences of war. This volume’s discussions are both relevant and timely – arguably even urgent – because of the recurrence and persistence of war, battle, mass atrocities and genocide right up to the present day. This is despite the frequent ‘never again’ responses that have followed most wars, especially the Second World War. Narratives of war are always contested, and competition between them can lead to further divisions and potential conflict; therefore we undertake to analyse those war narratives across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century. The concept of the collection stems from an international symposium with more than 60 contributors from all over Europe which was held under the auspices of the Huizinga Institute for Cultural History (of which Michael Wintle was then the academic director) at the University of Amsterdam in February 2016. Led by the three editors, it drew together established authorities of international reputation as well as younger, aspiring researchers beginning to make their mark. While most of the participants were historians, the gathering also included experts in other fields: it was an interdisciplinary exchange, designed to foster collaborative work. Just 12 of the 60-plus contributions were selected

4  Wintle, Adler and Ensel (and some newly commissioned), and were revised and rewritten in the light of the collective commentary to form the integrated volume before you. Studying war narratives is not entirely new; many people, including academics, have been interested in war stories for as long as there have been wars. Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995)1 is one of the classic studies of the treatment of World War I in cultural history, and his 2006 study, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century,2 remains inspirational for students of war narratives. On World War II, the collection edited by Margaret Atack and Christopher Lloyd on Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France is most useful in dealing with fictional narratives;3 Robert Moeller’s War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past handles narratives of the war in West Germany.4 There are fine studies of the cultural history of war, of historical narrative and culture,5 but very little on narrative and war across Europe in the twentieth century; we aim modestly to help fill that gap.

Defining Narrative ‘Narrative’ can take many forms: as a story, a myth, a way of organizing documentary and other evidence, an explanation of the inexplicable, a truth-­ seeking mission, a political manifesto or even a means of oppression. But for the purposes of this book, we move towards a set of common premises, particularly with regard to where narrative is located in relation to other concepts. The constellation of those concepts adjacent to narrative, such as myth, values, civilization and identity, is not thoroughly defined or universally agreed in the academy. A narrative is in the simplest terms a story, and narration is storytelling: Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps call it ‘an over-arching storyline that ties events together in a seamless explanatory framework’.6 The ‘narrative style’ in historiography emphasizes the storyline in what happened in the past, as opposed to a theory-driven social-science approach. But a narrative can mean much more than that: especially in literary theory many volumes have been filled with treatises on ‘narrativity’ and ‘narratology’.7 Applying the concept of narrative to the historical past, as well as to fiction and other literary forms, ‘narrative’ centres on a notion of ‘making sense’ of the past, whether it is the past of an individual (autobiography, life-stories, individual narratives)8 or that of families, groups, communities, nations, states or even ethnic groups and continents. Our approach to and understanding of narratives, particularly those of individuals, takes as given that they are essentially perceptions, or constructs. For example, autobiographical accounts are not necessarily what happened, but rather perceptions of what happened. They allow us to reconstruct a story, but no matter how much truth it may contain, each story is an edited version of the personal truth. Therefore, the narrator must be placed in the proper socio-historical context because war is always more chaotic than the stories we construct to make sense of it. It is thus critical in researching war stories,

Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century  5 life stories and narratives of war to recognize the narrative’s constitutional incapacity to be really accurate, as philosopher Louis Mink has eloquently observed: stories are not lived but told. Life has no beginnings, middles, end […] [they belong to] the story we tell ourselves later. There are hopes, plans, battles, and ideas, but only in retrospective stories are hopes unfulfilled, plans miscarried, battles decisive, and ideas seminal.9 In that sense it is important to examine the relationship between individual accounts and the collective storylines and emplotments: how do the various versions interact, or clash? So ‘narrative’ or ‘emplotment’ becomes a deliberate way of stringing events – more or less accepted as factual – into some sort of order that makes sense, and indeed can be used, for example, for easing psychological distress, for identity-­ building, for political goals, for moral instruction, for philosophical assertion and for meaning-making. Chronology is usually essential or, as Chris Flood puts it, the ‘time dimension is crucial’, and the conclusion is regularly drawn that ‘sequences of events are endowed with significance’ by a narrative.10 Narrative gives events cultural meaning, can function as a political intervention, and allows the past to have a purpose, by framing it in a particular way. Whether the narrative is official or personal, essentially it tells us, ‘this is what happened’, ‘this is what it meant’ and ‘this is how we (I) deal with it’.11 Narratives reconstruct reality by selecting what to attend to, what is important and unimportant, what is good and bad, and how events are causally linked to each other.12 Arguably it is one of the essential functions of the discipline of history to ask questions, to make sense of the past and to create causal links between events. Narrative can be seen as a way in which a unit like a state or a nation can bring together various aspirations and beliefs of its people and make historical sense of an archipelago of different dreams and hopes. Storytelling was very much a part of European nationalism, for in the words of Stefan Berger, ‘nation is narration’.13 As Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes have put it, ‘narrative is a form of explanation that works by relating actions to the beliefs and desires that produce them’.14 It can ‘impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and […] create continuity between past, present and imagined futures’.15 Historical narrative in particular ‘primarily fulfils the function of structuring the unstructured’,16 and that process of structuring or ‘emplotment’ has been developed by Hayden White and others into a subset of philosophical historiography.17 Events from the past, moulded by the historical imagination into a narrative, can be used in all manner of genres related to past events – from history paintings to history textbooks and from diaries to monuments – for political ends and intervention in the present, ranging from nationalist projects to party political plans.18 The link to identity is a strong one too: narratives can be ‘vehicles for self-­ definition […] [of] uncanny power’,19 and the ‘collective identity is therefore the expression of a narrative shaping and forming of the group.’20

6  Wintle, Adler and Ensel In this sense, the concept of the narrative is not so far from that of ‘myth’. Like narrative, there is a great literature on myth, some of it very specific in its definitions, but in many accounts, the concepts of myth and narrative can seem virtually interchangeable. Chris Flood is not unusual in arguing, for instance, that myth is ‘an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of a set of past, present or predicted political events, and which is accepted as valid in its essentials by a social group’.21 Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand refer to political myth as ‘the continual process of work on a common narrative by which members of a social group can provide significance to their political conditions and experience’. They explain that a myth is more than ‘a simple narrative’, but depending on which author is defining the concepts, both myths and narratives are involved in making sense of events for a group in a way that can be politically useful.22 It is that ‘making sense’ and ‘providing significance’ which seems central to both concepts. The notion of a foundational myth or narrative – like Romulus and Remus for Rome – is in a category of its own. Modern myths are mainly political, legitimizing foundation moments, but they are ‘also about the values that a community must live by’ and they ‘express transhistorical values that provide orientation to a given community’.23 In some accounts myth is less concerned with chronological order, and a truth claim is less relevant. Reviewing these various theoretical approaches to ‘the narrative’, it is clear that this form of ‘meaning-making’ or emplotment of events can impart significance to an existence, be it individual or collective. It is not necessary in our context to declare allegiance to any particular grand theoretical conception; here we shall adopt a common-sense definition. For the purposes of this book a narrative is a self-image, a story told, a sequence of experienced events, an explanation and framing of how something came into being, and where it is going. It is most often self-reflexive, and a justification of one’s own position, whether as an individual or as part of a group. It is often contested, but additionally intended and constructed. It concerns the rationale or the raison d’être for something. It implies the origin, and – depending on its focus – the recipe for success or at least survival. It also often defines the characteristics that are positively valued and which are the basis of a collective self-portrayal.24 Narratives of war are a means to empowerment and control of experiences during which the narrators were often powerless. The focus of this collection is on those narratives related to warfare; primarily to war in Europe in the twentieth century. However, there are many precedents. The narratives of large-scale human conflict and war have been set down, recorded and narrated for thousands of years, from Thucydides to Tolstoy, in fiction, non-fiction, museums and in the private sphere of the family. War narratives, too, form a key component in historiography, from classic historicism to post-modern narrativism. War is often ‘a good story’, sometimes even a source of tall stories, told through a wide range of classic and modern media. In addition, the stories can ‘travel’ in whole or in part: there is an intermedial aspect to narrative formation, which can work through cultural

Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century  7 transfer and adoption of other emplotments. Indeed, narratives of one war can be adapted to give meaning to another, often long afterwards (see Chapter 3 in this volume by Matilda Greig). Victims of traumatic war memories can find relief in telling their stories to an audience, but tales of war have also long been a source of regular entertainment. Narratives fulfil a function in processes of regime change, and have become part of trajectories of transitional justice, where testimony can become transformed into evidence. War narratives can help to identify and/or deny notions of victimhood and agency; competing versions of events often contain themed stories that may facilitate the recycling of actual repression, or the repression of memories. They can, as we have seen, provide foundational narratives for nations and states, and can become part of processes of mnemonic socialization. Such stories are often articulated, in the language of Michael Rothberg, in a multidirectional exchange between memory traditions,25 but this by no means excludes competition and disagreement about the storylines themselves. War narratives rarely remain unchallenged. Narratives, then, can have important societal and personal usefulness and function, and war narratives can have real meaning and importance for an individual’s self-image and identity, although not necessarily in a positive or harmonious way. In examining the subject of war narratives, we pose the following questions: we ask whether the war story has a special narrative structure, and whether there are overarching themes; which narrative strategies can be identified, and what is the influence of performance, and of different media on the representation of war? Second, every war has its own post-war framing, representation, interpretation and a regularly shifting politics of memory and forgetting. War narratives can be ‘vectors of memory’.26 Issues of guilt and responsibility can lead to denial and Schuldabwehr. The urge to normalize the situation can lead to a desire to put aside or repress memories of war, and to effect closure on the past as a sealed and finished period. Third, what is the role of the war story and of the witness in processing the past and in legal restitution? What is the function of the search for shared narratives in post-conflict societies? Is such a shared narrative necessary or feasible, and if so, how might it be achieved? Can any patterns be identified in the stories of perpetrators and of victims? And how can we reconcile in this context the tension between the desire to remember in order to achieve closure, and the desire not to remember so as not to open old wounds? And further, how does the personal story interact with collective forms of storytelling, whether by the state or by other interest groups? And how should we evaluate the substantial influence of war veterans’ stories, or those of collaborators?

Overview of the Book The studies in this volume range across a wide spectrum of narrative genres: film, schoolbooks, novels, oral history, archives, official documents and personal testimony and memoirs, including those found on the internet.27 War narrative excites considerable demand, and the supply is forthcoming in any

8  Wintle, Adler and Ensel number of forms. But all the contributions here, despite their diversity of source material, share an interest in problematizing ‘narrative’, and its relation to war in these various methods of expression. This introductory section is intended to frame the study of war narrative, and in that vein presents John Horne’s study of narrative in the First World War. Then we have three further groupings of the essays, namely: the way in which narratives are initially constructed at the time of war or immediately thereafter; the further development and deployment of narratives; and those kinds of narratives that form personal testimonies and strategies of survival. Finally, the concluding chapter will attempt to draw all the threads together and address the contribution of these essays to the study at large of narrative and war. The opening empirical study in Chapter 2, by the acclaimed World War I specialist John Horne, sets the scene by looking at narration of arguably the most immediate aspect of war: the battlefield itself. Battle narrative is among the oldest forms of storytelling. Through the epic, it has defined heroism and martial masculinity and told the tale of social groups from tribes to empires and nations; it has also figured prominently in painting, sculpture and many other genres. Yet the Great War confronted those fighting it with several shifts in perspective and cognition, showing that, despite the long pedigree, war narration also changed over time. In a democratic age, the hero of World War I was less the commanding general (who rarely fought) than the collective common soldier. Moreover, the kind of war he confronted defied prior understandings of combat since it involved the stalemate of trench warfare and unprecedented levels of death and destruction. Horne’s chapter explores how, and how much, the verbal and visual languages of battle changed during the Great War, with particular reference to the great encounters of 1916 in the west, Verdun and the Somme. In Part II, ‘Constructing War Narratives’, four authors examine how the narratives came into being in the first place. In Chapter 3, ‘The Stories the First World War Inherited’, Matilda Greig takes quite a different example of how war narratives are constructed, by examining how memoirs of the N ­ apoleonic Wars from Spain, Britain and France came to influence war narratives in World War I, a century later. The colourful and chaotic Peninsular War (1808–14) was a profoundly influential event in the national memory of its major participating countries, and a subject of continuing reinterpretation and shifting politics for well over a century after its end. As an unexpected and traumatic defeat for the French Napoleonic armies, a triumphant victory for the British troops and the climax of a long and bitter struggle for Spanish liberation which involved large numbers of civilians as well as soldiers, the war quickly unleashed a whole wave of art, poetry and literature that tried desperately to make sense of the events. Among these works were the autobiographical narratives of more than 300 veterans from all three sides of the war  – varied and complex memoirs which formed a popular and commercially very successful genre, continuing to be published even when the Peninsular War itself had moved out of living memory. Greig explores the question of how war narratives develop, focusing on the ways that stories from one war could and did travel – here, not

Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century  9 only over a long period of time, but also over language barriers and through other people, from publishers to translators, illustrators, schoolteachers and frustrated military men. Reprinted, edited and resold, veterans’ memoirs from the Peninsular War were used many decades later to drum up military pride, encourage recruitment and educate children. From the Carlist civil wars that divided Spain during the 1830s, 1840s and 1870s to the F­ ranco-Prussian War that humiliated the French army in 1870–71, right up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, stories and narratives of the Peninsula were adapted to give meaning to new conflicts, the veteran’s memoir becoming not just a record of past wars but a weapon of future ones. Thus the narratives that were constructed around twentieth-century wars were able to draw on the legacy of a rich nineteenth-century narrative landscape. In Chapter 4, entitled ‘The Archive as Narrator?’, Marieke Oprel considers whether an archive, fragmented and incomplete as it may be, can act as a narrator and generate or embody a narrative. She argues that the archive of the Dutch Custody Institute (NBI), one of the most complex war archives held in the Netherlands, narrates multiple stories of war, on different levels. On 20 October 1944, the Dutch government-in-exile promulgated the Decree on Enemy Property. Tens of thousands of German and other nationals related in some way to the Axis powers were declared enemy citizens. Regardless of their place of residence or political allegiance, and without any Dutch compensation, their property was expropriated. Work and residence permits were no longer allowed. The Decree was followed by an act to expel all Germans from the Netherlands, known as Operation Black Tulip, and by plans to annex German territory. One of the only sources that can provide insight into the experiences of German enemy citizens is the extensive but scantily researched archive of the NBI, with its reports, minutes and policy documents reflecting how the Dutch administration of justice took shape. Research in its archive helps to illustrate the construction of war narratives, on both the institutional and the individual levels. But Oprel shows how, if we read not only with, but also against the archival grain, another narrative takes shape. The notes in the margins of the record cards show how the employees of the NBI tried to establish or restore order, to draft legislation, and to formulate categories and criteria. The archive appears to act as a narrator of uncertainty, of transition. So Oprel argues that the archive must not only be studied as a store for documents to construct war narratives, but also as an object in itself, with its own narrative of war. Chapter 5 tackles the genre of historiography, with Christina Morina’s ‘Of Triumph and Defeat: World War II and its Historians in Post-war Germany’. Most of the historians who wrote the history of World War II in post-war Germany had fought in it as soldiers or witnessed it as children, generating an intimate connection between biography and historiography, between their lived experiences and the narratives they crafted as professional historians after the war. Morina analyses the genesis and texture of these narratives by focusing on the biographies of their individual authors, and their perception

10  Wintle, Adler and Ensel in a highly politicized academic and wider public. It relates the war experiences of five prominent World War II historians – Karl-Dietrich Erdmann, Andreas Hillgruber, Manfred Messerschmidt, Stefan Doernberg and Olaf Groehler – to the narratives of war they published after 1945. All of them were of seminal importance for their respective academic fields and memorial cultures. Their scholarly works can also be read as autobiographical documents: often they contain references to individual war experiences, revealing the complex legacy of the violence that tormented Germans on both sides of the wall in diverse yet also comparable ways. In these narratives, the personal coping was often intertwined with a Manichaean interpretation of World War II – as a narrative of costly triumph in the East and of humiliating defeat in the West. Personal experiences are invoked to lend legitimacy to the proposed narrative. In Chapter 6, Frank van Vree turns to narrative in the genre of film, in ‘The Imagery of War: Screening the Battlefield in the Twentieth Century’. That century witnessed episodes of unprecedented barbarism. At the same time cruelty, warfare, destruction and violence have never in history been portrayed so vividly, so stunningly and in such detail, in photographs, documentaries and feature films. Although somewhat understudied in the academy, films on warfare – particularly of the battlefield itself – have been and still are a key to self-understanding, be it for social groups, nations or even a civilization. These visual representations, like other narrative forms, play a crucial role in society, and have not only a ritual but also a mythical meaning. Van Vree explores various aspects of the complex relationship between history, memory and visual media, by tracing some major or even genealogical patterns in the narration and representation of war, from the British propaganda documentary Battle of the Somme (1916) to recent Hollywood blockbusters, making particular reference to Lewis Milestone’s seminal work in this genre, All Quiet on the Western Front, released in 1930. The power of this form of war narration is amply demonstrated. In Part III, four authors move to examine the way in which war narratives evolve over time, and the uses to which they can be put in their deployment. In Chapter 7, Dunja Dušanić’s subject is the proliferation of war novels in the late 1920s and early 1930s, considered today as a part of the ‘war boom’ in Europe, which divided readers and caused significant controversy. Motivated by the desire to determine the ‘correct’ way of writing the First World War, the many discussions on war novels revealed the existence of a deeper crisis of memory that culminated around the first ten-year anniversary of the Armistice. The debates surrounding Remarque’s All Quiet on the ­Western Front (1929) and Jean Norton Cru’s study Witnesses (Témoins, 1929) are well documented, but the War Books Controversy was, in many respects, a pan-­European phenomenon. The protesters against these war novels, the majority of whom were First World War veterans, tended to agree on at least three issues: determining the qualities of a reliable witness, the ethical limits of representation, and the qualities of ‘good’ war writing. Dušanić conducts a comparison of the arguments used in the debates that followed the publication

Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century  11 of All Quiet on The Western Front in Germany and of Witnesses in France. Reference is also made to the controversy in Britain at the begining of the 1930s, and to a later debate, stirred by veterans’ testimonies on Stevan Jakovljević’s Serbian Trilogy (Srpska trilogija), a Serbian war novel of the 1930s. The objections voiced by war veterans, particularly their repeated denunciations of the factual inaccuracy of war novels, were valid in the sense that First World War novels often were, in terms of genre, highly ambiguous texts, somewhere between fiction and non-fiction. The War Books Controversy can be seen as the first evidence of a major reconfiguration of the boundaries between fictional and factual narration, whose consequences are keenly felt today in a literary market progressively dominated by ‘faction’. Then in Chapter 8, Peter Pichler takes an ambitious look at how the current European Union has tried to use remembrance of the Great War to construct a European identity. In 2014, the European Union was one of the major players in political and cultural discourses commemorating the outbreak of World War I. In 1973, the European Community had drafted a ‘Document on European Identity’, which was the starting point of a political discourse on identity. Since then, the integration process has attempted to establish a master narrative of its own history and identity. It emplots the history of the World Wars as the historical antecedents of its own history of peace since 1945. Hence, the history of the twentieth century before that point is the narratological basis of this discourse. The Great War is part of the scope of this narrative, and so must be related and told by the EU. Pichler examines the specific form of historical narrative which the EU uses to tell the history of World War I as an integral part of its self-representation of peace-as-identity. He sets forth the thesis that the EU uses a specific form of narrative structure which can be circumscribed as a ‘paradoxical coherence’: the era of wars before 1945 is narrated as the contradictory opposite to post-1945 peace in an integrating ­Europe. Paradoxes, ambiguities and contradictions are presented as coherent in a European form of ‘storytelling’, in remembrance of the Great War. War and peace are thus integrated into one cohesive account of history. Ambivalence becomes coherence by historical storytelling. The narrative has the cultural capacity to solve (or at least make bearable) cultural trauma and paradox, by relating them as a coherent emplotment of past events. Next in this section on the deployment of narrative, Sylwia Bobryk turns in Chapter 9 to the genre of school history textbooks in Poland since the end of the Cold War. It was 1989 when Polish history textbooks were freed from the official control of the Communist state. It was also the time when the Pandora’s Box was opened and diverse but often difficult memories and narratives of the past were released into the public sphere. Bobryk asks how the narratives of the Second World War have been transformed in Polish history textbooks since then, and compares and analyses representations of controversial events of the war: the Jedwabne massacre and the expulsions of Germans. This study sheds light on how ‘black and white visions’ of that history in the textbooks of the early 1990s were transformed into today’s complex narratives about heroes,

12  Wintle, Adler and Ensel victims, perpetrators, bystanders and witnesses. There is no single new version of the past, but rather a multiplicity of textbook narratives about the war. They range from heroic visions of the nation to narratives that include Polish perpetrators of war atrocities. These differences are explained by situating the narratives within the national and transnational politics of history. Bobryk poses the question of how far textbooks conformed to a wider European trend of remembrance and teaching about the Holocaust as fostered by international organizations. Textbook narratives, like any other narratives, are anchored in the present, and in coming to terms with the past. Precisely because they are used in schools, they have enormous potential to reconstruct reality. Finally in this section, Marieke Zoodsma moves in Chapter 10 to examine narratives of war in her study, ‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’, concentrating on narratives and the role of religion in the reconciliation process in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which for more than 20 years has been recovering from the devastating war that ravaged the country in the 1990s. The process of reconciliation has been particularly slow and fragile, with a heavily divided political regime, harsh economic conditions and previously mixed towns largely homogenized. Three mutually exclusive ethno-nationalist narratives of the root causes and dynamics of the conflict – those of the Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) – have been perpetuated by politicians and public figures from each ethnic community. Reconciliation, however, is a complex process of the rebuilding of relationships and restoring of trust, involving all previously warring sides and all levels of society. The poor political and economic conditions, coupled with a post-war situation of severe segregation and mistrust, have created serious obstacles. Among the various reasons for the war, including ethnic, economic, social, religious and political factors, Zoodsma asks how religion in particular might help to lead the way from confrontation to a path of coexistence, and focuses on the role of religious initiatives in the reconciliation process. Religion is one of the key cultural components of each nation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most Bosniaks are affiliated with Islam, most Bosnian Croats with Catholicism and most Bosnian Serbs with Serbian Orthodoxy. Although many Bosnians have a negative image of religion and religious communities, Zoodsma argues that religious initiatives have powerful potential for reconciliation between the different communities and their narratives. She indicates that it is within informal local initiatives, through interreligious dialogue, that genuine reconciliation between the coexisting narratives happens ‘on the ground’, between people of different faiths. In a society that is divided, unstable and traumatized, she also reflects on those who wish to look beyond ethnic divisions and work on a shared future. In the final Part IV, the emphasis shifts to personal testimonies and survivalist narratives, beginning with Tim Scheffe’s study in Chapter 11 of trauma and narrative structure in some revealing interviews with Dutch and English volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. It, too, deals with veterans’ stories, and in particular with how their differing narratives interacted with the prevailing

Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century  13 public culture or narrative in their respective countries. The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War consisted of volunteers from many different nations. While they encountered similar situations during the war itself, their recollections of the conflict varied across cultures, which suggests that cultural differences and societal reception altered the way the veterans reflected on their past. In interviews with English and Dutch veterans of the International Brigades, it becomes clear how important such differences can be in shaping individual and collective narratives. The generally positive reception the English volunteers received allowed them to talk about their experiences freely. The Dutch volunteers on the other hand experienced a more negative reception upon their return, including legal repercussions, loss of citizenship and general ostracization. When a person tells his personal life story over and over, it begins to form not only a more structured narrative, but it also begins to make sense to that person. For the English volunteers this meant that over time their narratives started to resemble accepted war tropes and narrative stories. This was much less the case for the Dutch brigadistas, whose narratives remained more fragmented. Additionally, while their personal accounts fed the collective and cultural memory surrounding the Spanish Civil War, they were themselves influenced by it. The English volunteers spoke about their comrades and commanders in heroic terms, and depicted themselves as liberators. For the Dutch, war remained an atrocity, and in order to be more in line with Dutch sentiments, these volunteers steered their narratives towards a story about proto-resistance movements. These differences between the narratives of the British and Dutch volunteer veterans show that societies’ reaction had differential effects on the processing of trauma. The elements that contribute towards the difference in narrative formation – the ability to speak freely about their experiences and the cultural values attached to war – contributed to this process, which helps explain why the interviews with the Dutch volunteers display more evidence of trauma than those of their British counterparts. In Chapter 12, Susan Hogervorst pays attention to the genre of online testimonies of war and their interactions with public memory. Since the 1980s, many initiatives have been undertaken to preserve eyewitness memories of World War II, anticipating their forthcoming ‘disappearance’. One of the largest examples is the Visual History Archive (VHA, also known as the ‘Spielberg project’), containing video-interviews with more than 53,000 eyewitnesses of the Shoah and other genocides, from 64 countries. In the Netherlands, hundreds of war-related oral history interviews are filed at the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS). The transition from memory to history is accompanied, or perhaps expressed, by a shift from collecting and preserving to disclosing digitized eyewitness interviews for wider audiences. For example, more and more museums have integrated video testimonies into their permanent exhibitions. This is the case in a number of contemporary history museums in Europe, and especially so in museums related to the Holocaust and World War II. Over the past 15 years, displaying video testimonies has become

14  Wintle, Adler and Ensel common practice in memorial museums at former concentration camp sites in Germany and elsewhere. Simultaneously, many educational projects have been developed around video testimonies. More recently, many oral history collections have become available online, and can be watched, searched and compared across institutional and national borders. Hogervorst explores the use of video testimonies and narratives in the context of cultural memory, and shows how the interplay between collections, users and technology works ambiguously. On the one hand, technology enables an encounter with war experiences, narrations, and perspectives previously unknown to users, and so can challenge dominant narratives. At the same time, however, it also facilitates customized use of interviews and collections, which can serve to confirm existing views on the past and its meaning. The final chapter in the section on testimony, and in the book as a whole, is from Evelien Gans; sadly this was her last academic publication project. She looks at some very individual narrative forms, using the work of two survivors of the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen, and reviews their use of anecdote, humour, magic and poetry as survival strategies. The Sternlager was a section of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen where, from the beginning of 1944, some 4,000 Jews from the Netherlands were gathered, not in order to be murdered but to be exchanged for Germans being held in neutral or Allied countries. There were no gas chambers, but from the winter of 1944–45, when evacuation transports led to overcrowding and relentless epidemics, it was nonetheless a camp of death. Using oral history techniques, Gans focuses on the spoken observations of textile worker Abraham (Appie) van Linda (1915– 2012), the son of a cigar maker and matzo baker and a mother who sold fruit at the market. The historian Jaap Meijer (1912–93) figures as an additional voice, focusing on the poetry which he started to write in 1967. Meijer and Van Linda knew each other, both before and in the camp. Like Van Linda, Meijer also came from a very poor background; neither of them kept a diary. But in contrast to Van Linda, Meijer was trained as a teacher of Jewish religion and studied history at the University of Amsterdam. He became an intellectual. Gans focuses on the narratives of these two Jewish survivors, and on the function of these narratives, and on how each of them tried, in his own genre, to make sense of his experiences during the German occupation. She also examines how both Appie van Linda and Jaap Meijer tried to create some sort of order out of the unspeakable, a key function of narrative. In his many publications as a historian Jaap Meijer hardly wrote about the Shoah; he sometimes told anecdotes in the classroom, as a history teacher. But later on, he would find an outlet in poetry. Appie van Linda did not write at all. The narratives of Bergen-Belsen by Van Linda and Meijer show some similarities. The anecdotes of Meijer seem to have been quite factual, implying a ‘lesson’ for his students. Van Linda, on the other hand, represented the voice of the Jewish marketplace, of trade: a succulent and spicy language, laced with laconic reflection, of light ridicule and self-mockery. It is a language that renders the terrible events it describes (seemingly) bearable. He appears to have mastered

Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century  15 the genres of drama, humour and magic. In their distinct forms of narrative, both survivors chose their own version of what to remember aloud and what to leave unspoken. The book ends with a conclusion by the editors, led by Remco Ensel, who was the principal initiator behind the conference that generated most of the chapters in this collection. Taking examples from the diversity of material and arguments presented in the various essays, a number of major themes are selected and illuminated, including ‘master narratives’, institutional (or archival) war narratives and individual quasi-narratives that are not (yet) archived or institutionalized. The changing, ‘meandering’ nature of narratives of war is made clear, as are the importance of technological changes, the influence on war narratives of nationalism and the huge range of genres in which narrative can be carried, from novels to bureaucratic record cards. Armed conflict was all but constant in twentieth-century Europe, and the narratives of war generated by that recurrent conflict flowed back and forth, forever being revised and reformulated, challenged and replotted, sometimes provoking further conflict, but more often providing meaning and comfort. As Karen Blixen (author of the 1937 novel Out of Africa) wrote: ‘All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.’28 In this volume we document and examine a number of case studies which are telling, representative but also surprising examples of how such stories were communicated, challenged, institutionalized and challenged again. It is clear how vitally important these narratives of war are to our societies, and indeed to all of us, irrespective of whether or not we personally were involved in the wars. We are all of us involved in the narratives.

Notes 1 J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 2 J. Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 3 M. Atack and C. Lloyd (eds.), Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France, 1939–2009: New Readings, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. 4 R.G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 5 For example, M. van Creveld, The Culture of War, New York: Random House, 2008; A. Roshwald and R. Stites (eds.), European Culture in the Great War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; J. Brockmeier and D. Carbaugh (eds.), Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2001. Other studies on war narratives (but not Europe-wide in the twentieth century) include C. Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 11–32; Y.N. Harari, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; M. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

16  Wintle, Adler and Ensel There is a very large field of narrative in literature, led perhaps (among others) by Mieke Bal (see below, note 17). 6 E. Ochs and Lisa Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 2–4. 7 Following Gerald Prince and others, narratology is the study of the form and functioning of narrative, whereas narrativity is the degree of narration. See G. Prince, Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative, Berlin: Mouton, 1982. 8 For example, D.P. McAdams, Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story: Personological Inquiries into Identity, New York: Guilford, 1988 [originally published 1985], ­chapters 2 and 4, pp. 31–68 and 105–32. 9 L.O. Mink, ‘History and fiction as modes of comprehension’, New Literary History, 1969, vol. 1, 557–8. 10 C. Flood, Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 115–20. 11 N. Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012, pp. 70–1. 12 G. Gerbner, ‘Cultural indicators: the third voice’, in G. Gerbner, L. Gross and W.H. Melody (eds.), Communications Technology and Public Policy, New York: ­Wiley, 1973, pp. 555–73. 13 S. Berger, ‘Introduction: narrating the nation, historiography and other genres’, in S. Berger, L. Eriksonas and A. Mycock (eds.), Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts, Oxford: Berghahn, 2008, p. 1. 14 M. Bevir and R.A.W. Rhodes, The State as Cultural Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 78. 15 R. Mallola, ‘Myth in EU Identity: Representation and Meaning in the Discourses on the Common Foreign and Security Policy’, unpublished PhD dissertation, draft, University of Amsterdam, 2018. 16 Brockmeier and Carbaugh (eds.), Narrative and Identity, p. 14. 17 In, for example, H. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, and many subsequent publications; the study of narrative in literary theory by Mieke Bal and many others is even more extensive. See, for example, M. Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. 18 See M.J. Wintle, ‘Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands and the historical imagination in the nineteenth century: an introduction’, in H. Dunthorne and M.J. Wintle (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Low Countries, Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 1–18; and M. Beyen, ‘Who is the nation and what does it do? The discursive construction of the nation in Belgian and Dutch national histories of the romantic period’, in Dunthorne and Wintle (eds.), The Historical Imagination, pp. 67–85. 19 Brockmeier and Carbaugh (eds.), Narrative and Identity, p. 15, and quote from pp. 141–2. 20 Mallola, ‘Myth in EU Identity’, discussing A. de Fina, Identity in Narrative: A Study of Immigrant Discourse, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2003, p. 7. 21 Flood, Political Myth, p. 44. See also the classic, E. Cassirer, The Myth of the State, London: Oxford University Press, 1946, written during the Second World War in reaction to Nazi myth-making. I am grateful to my colleague Roger Mallola, PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, for several of these references on narrative and myth. 22 C. Bottici and B. Challand, ‘Rethinking political myth: the clash of civilizations as a self-fulfilling prophecy’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2006, vol. 9(3), 315–36, p. 320. See also B. Challand and C. Bottici, Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Their explanation of the

Narratives of War in the Twentieth Century  17 difference between narrative and myth is covered there, as well as in C. ­Bottici, A  Philosophy of Political Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, ­chapters 1 and 4. 23 J. Ifversen, ‘Myth and history in European post-war history writing’, in M.E. ­Spiering and M.J. Wintle (eds.), European Identity and the Second World War, London: Macmillan/Palgrave, 2011, pp. 75–91, p. 76; see also M.J. Wintle, ‘Ideals, identity and war: the idea of Europe, 1939–70’, in Spiering and Wintle (eds.), European Identity, pp. 1–20. 24 Ifversen, ‘Myth and history’, pp. 75–6. 25 M. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 26 Atack and Lloyd (eds.), Framing Narratives, p. 242. 27 Narratives of war in museums might be included in this list, and indeed, ­Chapter 12 by Susan Hogervorst takes account of their importance. Other chapters on museums might have been included, and several papers dealt with that subject in the conference which inspired this collection. However, the editors felt that the subject was already well covered in the literature; for example, in W.  Muchitsch (ed.), Does War Belong in Museums? The Representation of Violence in Exhibitions, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013, especially the essay by J. ­Winter, ‘Museums and the representation of war’, in Muchitsch (ed.), Does War Belong in Museums?, pp. 21–37. 28 As quoted by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 175.

2 A Tale of Two Battles1 Narrating Verdun and the Somme, 1916 John Horne

Narrating Battle How were the Great War and especially the mega-battles of Verdun and the Somme narrated? The theme of this chapter is the recounting of battles both as they happened and shortly afterwards, during the war and as part of the timeframe of war – as a tale of the present and the immediate past. How did both the soldiers and civilian society understand what was going on at the time, as it was happening? The deeper question is the relationship between experience (what we undergo) and storytelling, or how we narrate what happens both to others and to ourselves. This was a question not just for the soldiers but also for civilians who followed the fate of their loved ones as the conflict engulfed them. First of all, we need to consider the status of battle narratives. These count as foundational stories in many societies. Embedded in divine legend, they emerged with a human face to define heroism, encode masculinity and provide founding myths for tribes, empires and countries. No one needs reminding that the oldest literary epic in the Western world relates the last part of a tenyear siege at Troy. The Indian religious epic, the Bhagavad Gita, is set on a battlefield where heroism is a key virtue. One of the roles of battle narrative has been to recount the story of human groups and to show how they should face their destiny. This is the myth of war – and by myth is meant not something that is false but something that is a simplifying truth. In the nineteenth century, however, writers such as Tolstoy in War and Peace and Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage added a new ­perspective  – the individual faced with the chaos of battle.2 The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the conflicts of national unification and the American Civil War saw the birth of the soldier as witness and actor of war – ‘the man who was there,’ to quote Samuel Hynes in his seminal study, The Soldiers’ Tale.3 The ‘soldier’s tale’ is published, so it is a public genre. But whatever form its takes – diary, memoir or fiction – its subject is the individual. It tells the tale of someone who goes through war (sometimes in a small group), surviving battle or succumbing to it. Something similar occurred in battle painting, which in the nineteenth century focused on the group or individual, marking it out from the military panoramas that had

A Tale of Two Battles  19 dominated the genre in earlier periods. Painters like Lady Elizabeth Butler in Britain or Alphonse de Neuville in France did not abandon the heroic. But they recast it as otherwise ordinary individuals engaged in celebrated actions, such as Neuville’s painting, ‘Last Bullets’, his portrait of an incident in the ­Franco-Prussian War, which won plaudits from visitors to the 1873 Paris Salon.4 The ‘soldier’s tale’ was pictorial as well as literary. Of course, narration as such – the story that a group, couple or individual tells to itself – is a universal trait, the organizing mechanism of language that makes intelligible what has happened, especially when it is out of the ordinary or shocking. In this sense, we all tell tales. But the ability to tell such tales in writing (or imagery) is not universal. The oral and ephemeral tales of war are as old as war itself, but they have left few traces in the sources. As far as older wars are concerned, we rarely hear the voice of the ordinary soldier, who was usually illiterate. The narratives tended to be those of generals and officers, although there are exceptions. One of the novelties of the Great War, however, was that for the first time in history many of the societies that produced the ‘nation (or empire) in arms’ had literacy rates that approached our own, especially in Western Europe, North America and Australasia. The soldiers of Verdun and the Somme knew how to read and write. Already emigration to the New World in the nineteenth century had prompted ‘ordinary people’ to correspond with their families. But as the first mass event of the twentieth century, the First World War did so on a far larger scale. Never before had so many written so much.5 To the public ‘soldier’s tale’ was added, in letters and diaries, a vast but private ‘everyman’s tale’, which amounted to a collective record of the war. The same would of course also be true for the Second World War.6

The Challenge of the Great War The three categories of ‘the myth of war’, the ‘soldier’s tale’ and ‘everyman’s tale’ were all vital to how contemporaries narrated the Great War while it was going on. But the war by its nature also posed fundamental challenges to each of them in turn, for reasons that go to the heart of the subject, and which must be briefly summarized. The imagery available to the belligerent societies for shaping their narratives of the war were those of the pre-war period. They were the fruit above all of the memory of the Napoleonic conflict – that is, of a war of movement in open country that climaxed in decisive battles (Austerlitz, Jena, Waterloo). In fact, many of the battles in the Napoleonic Wars were not of this kind, and the war itself lasted far longer than the First World War. But the myth of Napoleon’s genius and the grail of the ‘battle of annihilation’ prevailed in both professional and popular understandings of war. True, the other face of war – siege – also figured in the military memory of the nineteenth century, not least through Sebastopol in the Crimean War (where Tolstoy derived his

20  John Horne inspiration for War and Peace) and the trench lines of the American Civil War. But before 1914, the ‘cult of the offensive’ and the decisive battle (reinforced by one-sided colonial wars) supplied the key ideas on future war. They were spread by the press, novels, illustrated magazines and the new-born cinema. Few grasped the underlying trend by which the second industrial revolution, of the 1880s and 1890s (cheap steel, the modern chemical industry, the internal combustion engine, powered flight), had transformed the means not only of production but also of destruction. This was in spite of evidence from the Russo-Japanese and Balkan Wars that high-explosive shells and the machinegun had industrialized and mechanized firepower, making combat far more lethal. This truth only became fully clear with the war of movement in 1914. That was when the man-based warfare of the nineteenth century gave way to the machine-based warfare of the twentieth, causing (for France and Germany) the highest casualties of the conflict. Digging in was a rational response – at the price of making any future ‘break-through’ by the offensive difficult if not impossible. To say that contemporaries simply rediscovered siege war, however, is to miss the point. For in a traditional siege, one side defends a strong point while the other attacks it or reduces it by starvation. But in this new siege warfare, each side both defended and attacked, and thus created the ‘front’, this major invention of the First World War where the outcome of the conflict was settled.7 Moreover, by the interplay of coalitions, this novel form of war extended to the east and the south, making Europe a continent under mutual siege, each side both Trojan and Greek. Yet raising the siege remained difficult for it reproduced the imbalance in favour of the defensive. Hence the repeated failure of offensives that tried to ‘break through’, and this despite the massive use of heavy artillery as a weapon of attack and new technologies (asphyxiating gas, flame-throwers, tanks). It should come as no surprise (at least in historical retrospect) that notions such as ‘attrition’, ‘usure’ or ‘Ermattungsstrategie’ became prominent, if ambivalent, as generals and others struggled to regain some control over the war. In the end, the battlefield balance tilted to the offensive – though not fully so until the ‘lightning war’ (Blitzkrieg) of 1940. The ‘victory’ of 1918 was due as much to ‘attrition’ (that is, to wearing down the enemy) in a global sense as to Allied tactics in battle.8 For much of the conflict, therefore, generals had no strictly military solution to the dominance of the defensive – no technical or tactical wooden horse for their modern siege of Troy. Consequently, a siege war, fought at the price of mass death, with no clear relationship between the effort made and the outcome achieved, strained the cognitive, linguistic and figurative comprehension of all who took part in it. How battle was narrated (in particular the great battles of 1916) thus lay at the heart of the experience of the war. When, and with what consequences, did the imagined war catch up with the real war? I shall try to answer this by looking in turn at the three types of narration mentioned.

A Tale of Two Battles  21

The Myth of War First, let us look at the ‘myth of the war’ – that is, its collective narrative at the level of a whole society. Already, the formation of the ‘front’ in 1914 had profoundly disconcerted military thinking, without cancelling out the pre-­ eminence accorded to the offensive (especially in the Allied camp), as the costly French offensives in 1915 had shown. However, Verdun and the Somme were battles of a different order, although the three powers concerned also related to them differently.9 Verdun for the Germans was actually conceived in the spirit of ‘attrition’. The German ­commander-in-chief, Erich von Falkenhayn, wanted to split the British and French to secure a negotiated outcome, and thus sought to destroy the fighting will of the French by a shock attack that would destabilize (without necessarily breaking through) their front. To do this, he counted on a favourable kill ratio from superior German artillery. He failed, and the battle became a grinding ten-month blood-letting for both sides. For the French, by contrast, Verdun was the defence of national soil against a renewed onslaught by the enemy, a second Battle of the Marne (which had stopped the German invasion in 1914). The Somme, however, was conceived of by the French and British as 1915 on a bigger scale – a great offensive that would ‘break through’ the G ­ erman positions (in different ways according to various generals) and end the war. A   largely (but not solely) British affair by the time it took place, owing to Verdun, its utter failure to achieve this goal generated a secondary justification by ‘attrition’, according to which the enemy had suffered more than the Allies. This was impossible to verify and actually false regarding losses. For the Germans, however, the Somme (like Verdun for France) was a defensive victory – the advance guard of the Rhine on enemy soil. This triangular logic, of the two battles for the three powers involved, sums up the mutual siege of Europe at the mid-point of the war. The two battles also crossed a new threshold in the violence of war. Their length defied conventional understandings of battle, as did their outcome when set against their aims. The sheer scale of the casualties involved (even if there were no accurate figures available) – three-quarters of a million dead, wounded, missing and prisoners for Verdun; a million for the Somme – made the two battles jointly the Stalingrad of the Great War except (and therein lies the difference) for any sense of a turning point. In fact, each in its own way, Verdun and the Somme embodied the appalling price of any attempt to raise the siege of Europe in the west. But they also fragmented into particular episodes, something that made it difficult for the soldiers involved to gain any overall sense of them. Scale was everything. How were Verdun and the Somme understood collectively as part of the war myth? One way to answer this is to see how they were narrated through the press. In order to get a basic idea of this, we shall focus on the British and French cases for the Somme and Verdun respectively, using the leading weekly

22  John Horne illustrated paper in each country, the Illustrated London News and L’Illustration. Each had its own long-established tradition of narrating battle in terms of the pre-war values already mentioned. Although the Battle of the Somme only began on 1 July (following a weeklong bombardment of the German lines) – that is, four months after Verdun – it was the first mass action of the war for the British army. For with no tradition of conscription, Britain and the Empire had taken two years to build up a continental-sized force by voluntary enlistment, conscription only being introduced in 1916. The volunteer citizen-soldiers who attacked on the Somme, and the nation with them, were thus still quite close to the conceptions of battle and soldierly virtues that shaped how most Europeans understood warfare before 1914. The French, by contrast, were a people in covert shock and mourning as a result of the casualties (the heaviest of the war) in the battles of 1914–15. Of the 22 issues of the Illustrated London News (ILN) published during the Battle of the Somme, seven dealt with the battle in their prime front-cover picture, five of them in the optimistic first month before offensive logic had bled into attrition. Three covers reassuringly portrayed the offensive as it was meant to be, dominated by heavy artillery (the product of a national effort) which would demolish the German trenches and spare the soldiers needless loss (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1  ‘The might of the British artillery: a big Howitzer in action during the great advance’, Illustrated London News, 29 July 1916.

A Tale of Two Battles  23 The catastrophic initial attack (with nearly 60,000 British casualties on 1  July, 20,000 of them dead) was reflected in the most anodyne form by a fourth cover in the mid-July issue showing ‘Roses for heroes: London’s welcome to soldiers wounded in the British offensive’ (Figure 2.2). The other three covers dealing with the battle (two from October) all showed German prisoners who, in the absence of any figures for enemy or Allied casualties, became the surrogate measure of success by attrition (‘they lost more than us’). This was the only possible pictorial image of victory (see Figure 2.3). Inside the journal, however, we find a more complex presentation of the battle. An attempt is made to sustain the narrative of a triumphant offensive as long as possible while also (in a fragmented battlefield) squaring conventional notions of heroism with the reality of defensive firepower from intact ­German positions that resulted in casualties defying all prediction. This occurred in both prose and picture. Philip Gibbs, one of the best-known and most ­independent-minded of the British official war correspondents, was quoted under photos of British guns and German prisoners reporting on midnight of 1 July that ‘It is a good day for England and France’ (a third of the attacking soldiers had indeed been French). Gibbs was too skilled a journalist not to see that the artillery had failed to do its work, but he used the language of military heroism, of dash and courage, to compensate for it. Recounting

Figure 2.2  ‘Roses for heroes: London’s welcome to soldiers wounded in the British ­offensive’, Illustrated London News, 15 July 1916.

24  John Horne

Figure 2.3  ‘Surrendering German soldiers’ (drawing, A.F. Dreetier), Illustrated London News, 22 July 1916.

the attack of a Scottish regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, on the village of Mametz, he wrote: These keen fighting men rushed forward with great enthusiasm until they reached one end of Mametz, and then quite suddenly they were faced by rapid machine-gun fire and a storm of bombs. The Germans held a trench called Danzig Avenue […] The Gordons flung themselves upon this position and had some difficulty clearing the enemy. At the end of the day, Mametz remained in our hands.10 Gibbs admitted that, ‘It is impossible for an eye-witness to see more than a corner of these battlefields’. But images filled the gap. Although many soldiers had their own Kodak Brownies, no more than the official photographers could they capture battle itself – only its margins and aftermath. Hence the continued importance of the war artist. To give but one example, R. Caton Woodville was both a renowned painter of historic battle scenes (he had done a series before the war on the great Napoleonic encounters), and also for thirty years the best known of the ILN’s war artists. It was he who provided a double spread of the incident in which Captain Nevill of the East Surreys (who died in the first day of the battle) gave his soldiers two footballs and a prize for the first man to score a goal in the German line (see Figure 2.4).

A Tale of Two Battles  25

Figure 2.4  ‘The Surreys play the game’ (detail, drawing, R. Caton Woodville), Illustrated London News, 29 July 1916.

This demonstrated for the ILN ‘the association between the spirit of our national games and the spirit that inspires our troops in the great game of war’.11 One incident spoke for the whole, reconciling battle with prior conventions (‘Play up, play up and play the game’). Overall, the nature of the Somme either escaped the ILN, or was suggested by what it did not say or did not show. Slowly, the ‘great offensive’ faded from its pages. Yet ‘scraps of fact’ (Gibbs) and selected images fostered the idea that a vast effort would one day overwhelm the foe.12 The vision of Verdun as seen by L’Illustration was rather different. The cover on 24 June gives us a clue. It shows a French soldier leaving his mother as he returns to the front from leave (‘There, there, mother, don’t get upset!’). The drawing illustrates the ‘notes of a captain’ on ‘the soldiers’ morale’. The author admits that the 1915 French offensives had devastated the troops’ understanding of the war. The men went forward sans peur et sans reproche [without fear or reproach, the motto of Bayard, a leading figure in French medieval chivalry]. Then, on ignoble barbed wire, in front of intact machine-guns and under artillery fire, the best fell. They began again, with rage and fury; others fell. The assault was renewed to the point of exhaustion […] It was a huge, bitter disappointment for the infantry, which they accepted with manliness [as they turned to the artillery and said]: ‘come to our aid.’13 Thus was disenchantment acknowledged … and overcome. Battle-hardened, the French soldiers had come of age: ‘our army is no longer composed of

26  John Horne

Figure 2.5  ‘Those returning [to the front]’ (drawing, Louis Sabattier), L’Illustration, 24 June 1916.

heroic big children who gaily court danger. It is an army of men who calmly do their duty [and are united] in a spirit of deep solidarity, living or dead.’14 This view is no less an ideal than that of Philip Gibbs at the Somme, but it is one in which the soldiers’ heroism has evolved to match the changed reality of combat. It underpinned the interpretation by L’Illustration and the French press generally of Verdun as an epic but defensive battle in which every week that the army survived, and each crater or fort that it won back, marked a kind of victory. Thus a quarter of the covers of L’Illustration published during the battle (ten out of 40) featured Verdun on the cover, seven during the German offensive phase (February to July) and three during the subsequent French counter-­ offensive. Half dealt with the Fort of Douaumont, taken by the Germans early on, fought over, and retaken by the French in November. It was a symbolic microcosm of the battle (and war) as a contest for possession of French soil. At the same time, the Holy Grail of the victorious offensive was a different kind of battle, and was imagined (with the artists’ help) through the success of the British on the Somme, or the Italians on the Isonzo, which in reality were both failures (see Figures 2.7 and 2.8).15 Neither journal could solve the enigma of siege warfare or integrate the kind of battle it produced into a coherent narrative of the war, any more than could the generals.

A Tale of Two Battles  27

Figure 2.6  ‘Those who retook [the fort of] Douaumont’, L’Illustration, 11 November 1916.

Figure 2.7  ‘In Picardy, Tommy victor over the “Huns”’ (drawing, Jules Simont), L’Illustration, 29 July 1916.

28  John Horne

Figure 2.8  ‘The Italian infantry crossing the Isonzo’ (drawing, Jules Simont), L’Illustration, 19 August 1916.

The ‘Soldier’s Tale’ We come now to the ‘soldier’s tale’ – a tale (we should recall) that is public. It already figured in the ‘myth of the war’ constructed by the press. But it achieved independent status by reason of the number of letters and diaries that were published during the conflict, usually written by junior officers. This group formed the cadre of the armies and led from the front with high casualty rates.16 The volumes in question were often an obituary tribute and were taken as testimony to the moral fibre of the nation.17 Naturally such accounts, which were subject to censorship, referred to the key values of wartime culture – values to which, on account of their education and social status, junior officers were particularly likely to subscribe. The soldiers’ heroism, the enemy’s responsibility for the war (and thus for its horrors), a determination to endure whatever was required, and faith in ultimate victory shone through the pages of these books. Yet the tales also revealed much more than this. As well as the tedium and discomfort of life at the front, they frequently addressed the horror of battle. The sheer terror of a bombardment by heavy artillery with nothing to do but huddle deeper in a dug-out, the numbing assault against un-subdued machineguns and the omnipresence of

A Tale of Two Battles  29 death, from the stench of corpses to the loss of comrades, or the absurdity of one’s own potential end; all this defied earlier ideas of battle and military masculinity which, as we have seen, still held sway in journals like the Illustrated London News or L’Illustration. Augustin Cochin was a conservative French Catholic historian who died at the Somme in July 1916. His letters, published in 1917, showed that he had responded conventionally to his brother’s death in February 1915: ‘Jacques has been killed gloriously […] charging at the head of his company which led the assault.’ Yet in April 1916 he described to his mother the effects of a German bombardment at Verdun, in which my poor second lieutenant simply took off for an hour or two; it is so exhausting to be there, unable to do anything, for ten, twelve hours at a time […] I admit that today […] I was almost at my wits’ end and […] I prayed that I and my poor men who had gone half mad, should not die so pointlessly.18 As for the attack, Cochin described for his mother the French offensive on the Somme: how after ‘ten minutes of joy and emotion’ when his company took German trenches, the incoming artillery barrage ‘massacred’ his men. On 5 July, on the eve of his own death under machinegun fire while leading an attack (like his brother), he wrote: ‘Chère maman […] What an odious war, days and days in holes.’19 For Cochin, the Germans remained the enemy and his Catholic faith was undimmed. But as the editor of the letters put it: ‘If he had some illusions about the poetry of war, he lost them on seeing up close the sinister reality of the battlefield.’20 Such examples could be replicated endlessly. Paul Jones was a student (and sportsman) from an English public school with a place at Oxford, who volunteered for the Army Supply Corps. He sought constantly to align his experience with the larger meaning of the conflict as he understood it, as a struggle for national survival that would only end when democracy abolished all war. Having longed for action, his first encounter with battle on the Somme led him to write that ‘the glamour has decidedly worn off. Oh! if only we could get through the Boche lines […] At present […] it is just a sordid affair of mud, shell-holes, corpses […] and filth.’21 Jones never despaired. He transferred to the Tank Corps and was killed at the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) in July 1917. But the personal testimonies appended to the volume of his letters published in 1918 reveal a private and public sphere struggling to reconcile the narrative of battle with the meaning and necessity of the war. The editor of a major London newspaper wrote: It is infinitely tragic to hear day by day of this waste of life of brilliant young men who were the hope of the future. And yet we must not say that it is a waste. The price is appalling but we must believe that it is being paid for a treasure the world cannot live without.22

30  John Horne That invocation said it all. The published ‘soldier’s tale’ revealed to a wider public both the realities of the war and also the gulf between hope and outcome, effort and result. To underline the point: these texts, which were numerous, were published during the war and formed part of the collective wartime experience. What made them acceptable was not their portrayal of war but their key concept – ‘sacrifice’. It was this that bridged the gulf between the ‘myth of the war’ and the horror of combat. But in the process, battle narrative and the status of having ‘been there’ were transformed.23

Everyman’s Tale The letters and diaries published during the war were merely a tiny fraction of those written. Men and women corresponded on a truly vast scale – at least a million postal items every day in the French army. This resulted in ‘everyman’s tale’ – a tale that was not published (and in that sense was non-public) but which was collective, and a mix of patriotism, heroism and revulsion against the war, similar to that found in published letters. It is scarcely surprising that in a war of peoples the authorities should be interested in what the people thought – and wrote. Morale was recognized as vital for the war effort, and armies monitored the soldiers’ letters by means of ‘commissions’ which opened and read a sample of their correspondence in order to find out what the men were thinking. The result for the historian is a source that survives most fully for France.24 Generalization is difficult, not least because we lack full comparative studies of the armies concerned. But it would be wrong to draw too sharp a contrast between the published ‘soldier’s tale’ and this broader ‘everyman’s tale’ in terms of class and rank or response to battle and the meaning of the war.25 In both cases, letters (but not diaries) ran the risk of censorship in the process of postal control, although in fact it was only ever feasible to open a small proportion of them. Much of the private corpus displays a similar mix of patriotism, heroism and revulsion against the war. On the other hand, unrelieved depression or even dissidence emerge in the private correspondence (depending on the time and place), whereas they are rare in the published collections. Much of the correspondence, as the French military controllers pointed out, had little to say about the war itself. However, the French historian Clémentine Vidal-Naquet has shown us that the banality of letters was part of their purpose in creating a shelter from the conflict in which the intimate relationship of the couple or family could be affirmed in the face of danger and death.26 One soldier at Verdun, writing to his wife, put it as follows, ‘material privation, risks and dangers of all kinds are of little account; what is terrible is the isolation in which everyone lives, far from the affection of their loved ones’. The postal controller (a historian, Louis Madelin) added that this was a common sentiment.27

A Tale of Two Battles  31 Yet the need to convey the nature of life at the front, and to portray the difference between routine siege warfare and the drama of the attack, meant that many soldiers at some point narrated battle. Armies were right to see that such subjective tales conveyed vital information about how the men coped with industrial warfare. Men would describe the fighting they had engaged in, sometimes proudly letting their families know they had been in an action reported in the papers, but often (as in the published collections) conveying the horrors of combat and the losses they had suffered. The controllers confirmed that French soldiers at Verdun at the start of May 1916 (during a tense phase) saw this as an epic defensive battle that the enemy was losing. But they also noted that the men still harboured the dream of a successful offensive to end the war. The men have a bitter determination to fight which neither the sight of our losses nor the vigour of the [enemy] assaults can undermine. The ‘survivors’ repeat that ‘we will do for them’ [‘on les aura’, the slogan of General Pétain] and they describe with pride the hecatombs of the Germans […] [But] for many the offensive seems the real means to finish the nightmare as soon as possible.28 If the hopes raised by the Somme counterbalanced the growing idea that Verdun had become a battle of attrition (usure), the stagnation of the Allied offensive only increased the (French) men’s anger at the story of supposed success against a weakened Germany, purveyed by the press (which they read). In other words, they reacted against the ‘myth of the war’. ‘The letters from the Somme,’ wrote the controllers in August, ‘insist on the growth of [enemy] artillery and the resistance of the German infantry.’29 Everyman’s tale was darker than that of the published letters, and subject to even greater tension over the relationship between combat and the war’s outcome. Here, the historian finds on the French side the origin of the mutinies in summer 1917, following the failure of the renewed offensive by General Nivelle. It was then that for many soldiers the tales and language used for three years to grasp the new siege warfare finally broke down. The crisis was above all one of cognition, of the framework of understanding.30 In this regard, the postal control records offer us an insight into a core function of everyman’s battle narrative. It can be illustrated with the French 71st Infantry Division as it left Verdun in mid-July after ten days in which it had suffered severe artillery bombardment (including gas) and German infantry attacks. A postal controller (once again, Louis Madelin) noted such low morale (we might say trauma) on the part of the soldiers that they could barely write to their families. ‘I have no strength; if we had to leave [for the front] now I couldn’t, I’d fall by the wayside […] I think the gas did us a lot of damage’, wrote one. Others were still sick and dizzy from the shelling: ‘you’d need a brain made of brass not to go mad’. Madelin concluded that ‘Verdun has

32  John Horne literally become a place of horror; the men have a kind of phobia about it. “Hell,” “furnace,” “Calvary” – they call it above all the “place of death”.’31 So concerned was Madelin that he conducted a second survey a week later. The mood was still grim. But the men had reconnected with their families and could see their ordeal [at Verdun] with a less tragic eye […] One man writes with a certain pride: ‘It is true that we lost ground [but] we took it back: we even lost our colonel who had been taken prisoner, and we freed him.’ […] Another sums up […] his idea of the battle, probably shared by many of his comrades: ‘No one could say we were happy to go to Verdun, because there was nothing agreeable about that furnace, but we had heard so much about it and now we have a certain satisfaction […] at having got out of it.’ More proudly, another said: ‘So, we took part in the celebrated battle!’32 This was the primal ordering of experience by language on the part of men who felt themselves victims of the war as much as agents of their own destiny. It was narrative as survival.

Conclusion The Great War in general, and the Western Front in particular, confounded the ideas with which Europeans went to war in 1914. Continental siege challenged the ‘myth’ of the war – which was supposed to justify the struggle and explain how it would lead to victory. It also disturbed the ‘soldier’s tale’ – those conventions of heroism, courage and the masculine values that could not escape the tensions of the ‘front’ – tensions between the imperative of victory and the difficulty of achieving it, between the image of a war of movement and the realities of siege warfare. ‘Sacrifice’ was the term that sought to resolve this contradiction. However, in an age of mass literacy, ‘everyman’ also narrated the war in correspondence that became a mass phenomenon, and this destabilized understandings of battle even more profoundly. The war – and the mega-battles of 1916 – thus challenged the terms of their own narration. But by the same token, narrative was crucial – as it is for any transformative event. Without a tale, no experience. In this sense, the narrative response to the challenges of the war played a crucial role in the experience of the conflict (including for those who were prevented by psychic trauma from discharging the emotions of combat via narration). Once the war ended, the narrative tense changed – from the present to the past. Was peace a betrayal or a vindication of the effort made? Had the enemy on the other side of the front been the real enemy or was that the war itself? The war, in other words, looked different in hindsight. Consequently, the ‘soldier’s tale’, as it appeared in the post-war memoirs and novels, became a different story – and quite literally a different history.

A Tale of Two Battles  33

Notes 1 A French version of this essay is published in A. Prost (ed.), Les Batailles de 1916: actes du colloque international des 21, 22 et 23 juin 2016, Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Sorbonne, 2018. 2 L. Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869), trans. R. Edmonds, London: Penguin, 1957, revised edn, 1982; S. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), republished in The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories, ed. G. Scharnhorst, New York: Penguin, 2005. 3 S. Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale. Bearing Witness to Modern War, London: Pimlico, 1988, pp. 1–30. 4 A. de Neuville, ‘Les Dernières cartouches’, 1873, oil on canvas, 109 cm × 165 cm, Maison de la Dernière Cartouche, Bazeilles (Ardennes), France. 5 M. Lyons, The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860–1920, ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 6 It may be significant that two American literary scholars, both of whom drew on their own experiences as soldiers in the US army in the Second World War, wrote pioneering accounts of the literary ‘soldier’s tale’ and the ordinary soldiers’ accounts of the war, and the relationship between them, for First World War Britain: P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; and S. Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, London: Bodley Head, 1990. 7 J. Horne, ‘Le Front’ in Vu du front: représenter la Grande Guerre, Paris: Somogy Editions d’Art/BDIC/Musée de l’Armée, 2014, pp. 19–28. 8 D. Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011; W. Philpott, Attrition: Fighting the First World War, ­London: Little Brown, 2014. 9 On Verdun see P. Jankowski, Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; and A. Prost and G. Krumeich, Verdun 1916: une histoire franco-allemande de la bataille, Paris: Tallandier, 2015. On the Battle of the Somme: W. Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century, London: Little Brown, 2009. 10 Illustrated London News, 15 July 1916; P. Gibbs, The War Dispatches, London: ­Anthony Gibbs and Phillips, 1966, pp. 47–8 (2 July). 11 ‘The Surreys play the game!’, Illustrated London News, 29 July 1916, 134–5. The regiment was the East Surreys and one of the footballs is conserved in its regimental museum. 12 ‘Here, then, are some scraps of fact about a great battle still in progress and covering a wide stretch of ground’ (Gibbs, War Dispatches, p. 51, 2 July). 13 ‘Notes d’un capitaine sur le moral de nos soldats’, L’Illlustration, 24 June 1916, 580, and drawing by L. Sabatier. 14 Ibid., p. 581. 15 As if to underline the continued preoccupation with the offensive, L’Illustration took the unusual step of publishing a military handbook by a young officer who tried to resolve the issue of ‘attrition’ by rethinking the infantry attack in its issue of 8 July 1916, at the moment of intersection of Verdun and the Somme (A. ­Laffargue, ‘Un Manuel du soldat: de la tranchée à l’assaut’, pp. 24–7). 16 E. Saint-Fuscien, A vos ordres? La relation d’autorité dans l’armée française de la Grande Guerre, Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2011. 17 ‘Let us keep as a national treasure all these letters from the front!’ wrote Jean ­Hennessy in L’Information, quoted in the editorial of L’Union des ames: Correspondance militaire privée paraissant deux fois par mois, Brest: Cercle Militaire, 13 March 1917, p. 1. This publication reproduced extracts from private letters fortnightly from March 1915 to March 1919. See also M. Barrès, Les Diverses familles spirituelles de la France, Paris: Emile-Paul Frères, 1917.

34  John Horne 18 A. Cochin, Le Capitaine Augustin Cochin. Quelques lettres de guerre, Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1917, pp. 45–6. 19 Ibid., pp. 54, 56. 20 Ibid., p. 5. 21 P. Jones, War Letters of a Public-Schoolboy, London: Cassell, 1918, p. 219. 22 Ibid., p. 271. 23 J. Horne, ‘Soldiers, civilians and the warfare of attrition: representations of combat in France, 1914–1918’, in F. Coetzee and M. Shevin-Coetzee (eds.), Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, Providence RI/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995, pp. 223–49. 24 J-N. Jeanneney, ‘Les Archives des commissions de contrôle postal aux armées (1916–1918)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, January–March 1968, 209–33. 25 F. Caffarena , Lettere dalla Grande Guerra. Scritture del quotidiano, monumenti della memoria, fonti per la storia. Il caso italiano, Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2005, pp. 97–100. 26 C. Vidal-Naquet, Couples dans la Grande Guerre: le tragique et l’ordinaire du lien conjugal, Paris: Editions des Belles Lettres, 2014. 27 Service Historique de la Défense (SHD), 16N 1391, report on the Second Army (Verdun), 14 July 1916, p. 2. 28 SHD, 16N 1485, overall postal control reports, 1916, 1 May, pp. 5–6. 29 SHD, 16N 1485, overall postal control reports, 1916, 15 August, p. 2. For soldiers reading the press, see B. Gilles, Lectures de poilus: livres et journaux dans les tranchées, 1914–1918, Paris: Autrement, 2013. 30 For this interpretation, see J. Horne, ‘Entre expérience et mémoire: les soldats français de la Grande Guerre’, Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2005, vol. 60(5), 903–19. 31 SHD, 16N 1391, Second Army (Verdun), postal control report, 22 July 1916. 32 Ibid., report, 27 July 1916.

Part II

Constructing War Narratives

3 The Stories the First World War Inherited Adaptations of Peninsular War Veterans’ Memoirs, 1814–1914 Matilda Greig In the late autumn of 1807, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, a French army marched south through Spain and invaded Portugal, occupying Lisbon.1 A few months later, Napoleon turned on his Spanish allies, occupied Madrid and placed his own brother Joseph on the throne, sparking a wave of civil unrest and rebellion that spread throughout the country. Over the next six years, the peninsula played host to a bitter and violent war, fought both on and off the battlefield with equal ferocity. While allied British, Spanish and Portuguese armies manoeuvred to oust the occupying French forces, the French themselves struggled to hold on to the territory they had won in the face of a hostile and insurgent population. This was a war with many different names, and many different meanings, from ‘the Peninsular War’ in Britain, to ‘the War of Spain’ in France, or ‘the War of Independence’ for Spain. It was a war widely credited with bringing the word ‘guerrilla’ into both French and English dictionaries, and one that would have a lasting influence on the memory, politics and literature of all participating countries – as well as on the soldiers themselves. Hundreds of veterans of the Peninsular War wrote and published memoirs of their wartime experiences: around 300, in fact, in the period from 1808 to the outbreak of the First World War. This number includes memoirs by roughly 94 British, 98 French, and 50 Spanish veterans, while comparable works by Portuguese soldiers have yet to be identified. The authors were men of all ranks and backgrounds, from eminent old generals to eager junior officers and sceptical private soldiers, aristocrats with lengthy titles to apprentices, potato farmers and landscape painters. Their books ranged from dry military histories to polemic political tirades or vivid, sensational tales of adventure, and came in all shapes and sizes, from large five-volume tomes preserved in embossed leather hardback covers to slim pamphlets bound in sugar paper, reaching audiences from wealthy politicians to railway travellers and other retired military men. This incredible diversity, particularly in terms of the content and literary styles of these memoirs, has been highlighted already by several recent studies.2 Here we shall depart from this existing literature, however, by drawing attention to an often overlooked aspect: their dates of publication.

38  Matilda Greig Peninsular War memoirs were not released in one solid wave shortly after the war, but printed and reprinted almost constantly throughout the nineteenth century, with different peaks and troughs in the different national contexts. While Spanish memoirs, which mostly took the form of self-­justificatory pamphlets, or manifiestos, were concentrated in a flurry of publication during wartime and the following few years, British and French memoirs were first printed in surges in the 1820s and 1830s, and again in the 1880s, 1890s and early 1900s, a period that one contemporary editor dubbed a ‘Napoleonic boom’.3 Throughout the whole century, however, the same memoirs were also being republished and repurposed. Many were translated: not just into French, English or Spanish, but also Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish and ­Lithuanian, in the process being appropriated into the war literature of another country.4 Others were reformatted, cut down, given new illustrations, a new introduction or a new title, taking on new meanings in a new political context. In other words, war memoirs, much like the men who wrote them, travelled extensively. Their journeys did not end at their first point of publication, nor with the start of the next campaign, and this correspondence with later wars is the main focus of this chapter. My aim is to demonstrate how Peninsular War memoirs were used to construct narratives of later conflicts: how individual stories travelled through time and space to become part of another story, in another place, for another war. Starting with examples of the general use of Peninsular War memoirs to influence future generations of soldiers, we shall move on to show how, throughout the nineteenth century, the same memoirs were adapted to give meaning to new wars, from the Spanish American Wars of Independence to the Boer War in South Africa. Finally, the discussion moves to how Peninsular War memoirs were used to educate audiences in the decades before the First World War, arguing that the language and narratives of war at the start of the twentieth century were, at least in part, direct heirs to a rich nineteenth-­ century literary landscape.

Advice for Future Generations Although Peninsular War memoirs were written in very diverse styles, one recurring trope was the author’s or editor’s dedication of the book to the next generation of soldiers, an obvious way in which narratives of one war were designed to speak to those of another. In the early 1890s, for example, literature professor Charles Bigot dedicated an illustrated collection of excerpts from Napoleonic memoirs to his students at the École Spéciale Impériale Militaire at Saint-Cyr, hoping that they might learn from these varied voices of the past: ‘generals, simple soldiers, chaplains, heroes often without knowing it’.5 Emphasizing the value of patriotism, the volume was designed to form part of the core teaching curriculum at the foremost French officer academy of the time. The advice the author intended to pass on was not always wholly encouraging, however. The French captain Léon-Michel Routier, for example, presented

The Stories the First World War Inherited  39 his memoir as a father’s cautionary tale to his children, advising them that should they enter the military profession themselves, they should be aware that they might receive little more than an intangible reward for their services: ‘that one does not often find fortune on the battlefield, that the soldier’s trade, honourable as it is, always offers more glory than profit’.6 In fact, one or two veterans set out to use their memoirs to ameliorate conditions for the next generation of soldiers. Scottish sergeant Joseph Donaldson’s Recollections of an Eventful Life, Chiefly Passed in the Army (1824), for instance, contained a consistent emphasis on improving meritocratic promotion and rewards, a strong advocacy against corporal punishment, and a detailed plea for better equipment for troops, particularly oilskins and laced boots.7 As well as being initially written or compiled to help future recruits, many memoirs, especially those published in the late nineteenth century, were deliberately marketed to a new generation of military men. Responsible for editing the war memoirs of his uncle-in-law Field Marshal Sir William Maynard Gomm, for publication in the early 1880s, Francis Carr-Gomm was keen to have the finished book reviewed in military periodicals.8 His publisher, the London-based John Murray, suggested in addition that the editor arrange for the memoirs to be put on the list of recommended reading at the Horse Guards (the office of the British army high command).9 Another editor, ­William ­Napier, this time preoccupied with his great-uncle’s war memoir, wrote to his publisher in 1895 to ask about the options for a third edition of the book. ‘My great wish is to circulate it among the rank and file of the Army, and put it within Thommy Atkins’ reach,’ wrote Napier, an ex-­ governor of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. ‘It has been suggested to me that a cheap Edition – say one or two shillings – placed in the book stalls at the Railway Stations would accomplish this object.’10 Peninsular War memoirs scattered throughout the nineteenth century, there­ fore, were both dedicated and directly marketed to future generations of soldiers, aiming to encourage, advise, help or influence them. But the timing of many of these publications was neither random nor purely commercial. Almost every major European conflict of the nineteenth century prompted printing and reprinting of Peninsular War memoirs on some scale. In each case, memoirs were adapted with different aims, from simply contributing to the debate over ­another war of independence, to directly promoting support for one side, repairing bruised national pride, supporting increased militarism and educating children.

Weapons for Future Wars The reuse of soldiers’ writings began almost immediately, during the Peninsular War itself. Spanish officers’ autobiographical manifestos, written and published in haste during the war in response to controversies over their various political and military decisions, circulated widely within Spain, often being printed simultaneously in cities across the country. At the same time, however,

40  Matilda Greig an outward current bore several of these pamphlets across the ocean to South America, where they were reprinted within months of their original publication in Spain. All produced between 1809 and 1812, at the height of the war in the Peninsula, these transatlantic re-editions coincided almost exactly with the outbreak of wars of independence across the entire Spanish American continent. Napoleon’s invasion of Spain had destabilized the power structures that stretched across the ocean, and in the space of barely two decades, nearly every country in Spain’s erstwhile Latin American empire would manage to gain independence, with the exceptions of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Following established commercial shipping routes along the eastern and southern Spanish coasts, officers’ manifiestos travelled from Valencia and ­Tarragona to Buenos Aires, Lima, Havana and most of all to Mexico City, where they were copied by two leading printers, Juan Bautista de Arizpe and Don Mariano de Zúñiga y Ontiveros. Both printers had government connections and funding that allowed them to survive – Arizpe printed the official Gazeta del Gobierno de México from 1810 to 1813, while Zúñiga became the official printer of the Supremo Gobierno in 1820 – but no single political stance dominated the Spanish texts they chose to reprint.11 One of the memoirs reproduced by Arizpe was a defensive Contestación (1810) by the Mexican viceroy, but another was a defiant Manifiesto (1812) by the guerrilla leader Francisco Espoz y Mina, attacking the local government in Navarre, while yet another was a simple, largely historical account of the first siege of Zaragoza.12 Arriving in Spanish America, these pamphlets left the public arena which they had originally addressed and entered a new one. They left behind the influential generals and Junta members whose approval they sought for further promotion; they left behind the inhabitants of their authors’ native provinces, whose patriotism they hoped to stir up in a spirit of resistance; they left behind political and literary debates whose central cadence focused on political happenings in Europe. They entered a public sphere undergoing its own ‘print revolution’, where printing monopolies were disappearing, the Inquisition was fading, restrictions on the import of foreign books were being lifted, and a parallel storm of pamphleteering was springing up, debating the decisions of other military leaders, rebellions against Spain rather than France, and the idea of Pan-American unity, rather than European liberation.13 Although few changes were made to the texts of these travelling Spanish writings, their journeys were an early and straightforward example of how one war’s literature might quickly become another’s. In 1823, a French army invaded Spain once again. The ‘Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis’, as the French troops mobilized by King Louis XVIII were popularly known, crossed the border in April to help restore King F­ erdinand VII to his former absolute power, curtailed in 1820 by a military uprising that had put in place a liberal and constitutionalist government. The obvious parallels of the event with Napoleon’s still-recent invasion of Spain produced a resurgence of interest in Peninsular War literature, with the years around 1823 coinciding with a spike in the publication of British and French memoirs.

The Stories the First World War Inherited  41 Among these was the memoir of Lieutenant General de Vedel, whose career had been publicly destroyed by his role in a humiliating French defeat at Bailén in 1808. Although reinstated by Napoleon in 1813, Vedel felt it necessary a decade later to make a public answer to the allegations made against him, especially as the events of 1823 were sure to stir up old controversies. ‘At a time when French troops are occupying Spain once again,’ he wrote in the preface to his memoir, I allow myself the liberty to better inform general opinion about the events which took place there in a still all too recent era, so that the memory of them might not become the object of debates and daily discussions.14 For the high-ranking French officer nearing retirement, this new war threatened to cast fresh aspersions on his actions in the past, and so he shaped his memoir to address them. More directly, the invasion of 1823 prompted Spanish liberals in exile around Europe to plot their next move. Among them was the famous guerrilla leader Francisco Espoz y Mina, in exile in London after having supported the liberal government in Spain and led an army in its defence when the French troops invaded. From the point of landing in England, Mina was in close contact with a network of like-minded Spanish émigrés and English sympathizers, many of whom encouraged him to maintain an active media presence in support of the liberal cause.15 In particular, Mina’s friends wanted him to write a book. In late 1823, Charles Doyle, a British officer in whose regiment Mina had enlisted at the very start of the Peninsular War, wrote to encourage him to publish a history of the recent campaign against the French: It occurred to me that you could line your pockets by publishing your last Campaign against the French, from their entrance in Spain until the day on which you embarked in Barcelona. Send me your Journal, I will put it into English, and I do not doubt that the sales of such a journal will put a good amount in your pouch, which in such times as these will not hurt.16 So as well as keeping Mina’s name – and the liberal cause – in English and perhaps international newspapers, Doyle suggested, such a book would also raise a good sum of money for the exiled and impoverished general. It seems that Mina took Doyle’s advice, but rather than publishing a history of the most recent campaigns in Spain, what the guerrilla general released was an autobiographical memoir of his actions in the Peninsular War. Entitled Breve extracto de la vida del General Mina (A Short Extract from the Life of General Mina), the memoir appeared early in 1825 and gave a detailed account of the cunning and patriotic efforts of Mina and his volunteer regiment to thwart French occupation in the northern parts of Spain during the war.17 It was a small book, printed by the London firm of Taylor and Hessey, which contained both a Spanish and an English version of the text printed side by side. Profits

42  Matilda Greig from its sales were advertised as going to the families of other Spaniards in exile, and copies were sent to influential British politicians in the hope of gaining their support.18 The book was received by Mina’s international network of correspondents as a positive step towards returning Europe’s attention to Spain, and they exhorted him to finish work on a longer, full-length version of his memoirs.19 ‘I am convinced my general,’ wrote the Irish naval officer and author Edward Blaquière to Mina in 1825, ‘that there exists no better way to serve the cause of your homeland in this critical moment.’20 Mina’s war memoir was therefore both written and marketed for deeply political reasons, meant to influence European perceptions of the meaning of both the Peninsular War and the struggles that followed, as well as to prompt sympathies for the ongoing liberal cause. It was to serve as a weapon in wars which were yet to begin. And begin these wars did, less than a decade later. From 1833 to 1840, the First Carlist War tore Spain apart, as supporters of the regent Maria Christina warred against those of Charles of Bourbon over who should succeed to the throne, and what form the monarchy should take. Upon the death of King Ferdinand, Mina had been recalled to Spain and placed in command by the regent, but his health was failing, and he died in December 1836. His Peninsular memoir, however, continued to play a role in the liberal war effort in the hands of another. In 1834, shortly after the outbreak of the civil war, a Spanish lieutenant named Francisco Nicolau based in Cadiz produced an unauthorized and Spanish-language-only edition of the Brief Extract, which was sold for four reales in cities all across the country and reprinted again the following year.21 Nicolau added his own preface to the text in which he begged Mina to permit the publication, stressing that his motives were entirely patriotic. By widely disseminating the account of Mina’s actions in the Peninsular War, Nicolau wrote, he hoped to inspire support for the liberal cause amongst the militia in Cadiz in which he served.22 Once again, as with its first publication, a book that related one man’s experiences in the Peninsular War was explicitly marketed for years afterwards as if it were part of another, longer and broader narrative: that of Spanish liberals’ struggles against absolutist monarchy. It was not the last time that Peninsular War memoirs would be reprinted without authorization to serve political ends. The republication of Mina’s short autobiography in the 1830s aligned well with his own interests, but in other cases, the reuse of these books could take them on journeys far outside what their authors might have originally imagined. In 1830, for example, as Portugal was in the midst of its own civil war between supporters of rival claimants to the throne, a popular British memoir by the officer and author George Gleig was translated into Portuguese. Although published in Liverpool, the translation was aimed at an audience in Portugal, with the anonymous translator writing in an introductory note that he or she hoped the book would prompt greater recognition for the role played by Portuguese troops in the Peninsular War. The translator also hoped that it would encourage Portuguese officers to compose their own memoirs in response.23 In other words, a memoir describing

The Stories the First World War Inherited  43 the adventures of the British army was now presented as a book commemorating the deeds of the Portuguese army, and not only had this British memoir been incorporated into another country’s literature of a past war, it was meant to act as a stimulus for the creation of more of this literature. Another striking example came much later in the nineteenth century, with the publication of a previously unknown Spanish manuscript in an attempt to attack ongoing separatist movements on Cuba and Puerto Rico, the last remaining islands of the Spanish Latin American empire. The manuscript was the memoir of Rafael de Sevilla, who had served in the Spanish army during the Peninsular War before being captured by the French at the battle of Valencia in 1811. He escaped in 1813, was captured and imprisoned again, escaped again in 1814, returned to Spain, joined the army sent to Venezuela in pursuit of Bolívar and his troops, served the entirety of that failed campaign, retired in Puerto Rico and wrote an account of his experiences, which he left to his descendants.24 Sometime later, the text was acquired by José Pérez-­ Moris, a deeply conservative Spanish publicist based in Puerto Rico. As editor of the Boletín Mercantíl, the official journal of the Partido Liberal Conservador o Español Incondicional in Puerto Rico, Pérez-Moris had spent the years 1870–71 praising Spain, denouncing separatists and launching violent attacks on any attempt to impose liberal reforms on the old colonial regime.25 When, around this time, Sevilla’s text made its way into his hands, he recycled it in the service of the same conservative narrative. Taking Sevilla’s manuscript, Pérez-Moris produced a first edition that dealt almost exclusively with the Venezuelan campaign.26 Making his own corrections to the text, abbreviating parts, and entirely removing anything dealing with history after 1821, he created a memoir that celebrated the efforts of the Spanish army to suppress one of the most famous South American independence movements of the earlier nineteenth century – and published it, in 1877, at the height of the Ten Years’ War in Cuba.27 Several decades later, another conservative journal editor based in Puerto Rico, José Díaz Valdepares, produced a second edition of the memoir, this time removing all chapters previous to Sevilla’s enlistment with the expeditionary army.28 The Peninsular War was therefore edited out entirely, as the original structure of the book was adapted to contemporary colonial strife. Throughout the nineteenth century, Spanish memoirs in particular were frequently reprinted and reused in this strongly political way, designed to influence new wars which had already broken out. In France, by contrast, the main reuse of memoirs in the later part of the nineteenth century was to heal wounds caused by subsequent wars, by constructing new, reassuring narratives around traumatic events. The humiliating defeats of Napoleon III during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), for example, left deep marks on national psyche: Brian Joseph Martin has described the war as ‘a kind of national emasculation’ for France, especially for its army.29 Seeing the descendant of the same Napoleon who had once conquered swathes of Europe surrendering on the battlefield to France’s old Prussian rivals, his army easily batted aside by the

44  Matilda Greig German forces, and then Paris itself besieged and occupied, people began to seek refuge in a comfortably nostalgic vision of France’s Napoleonic past. The necessity of reminding the French public about its historical glories and military accomplishments was felt acutely by various late-century French editors, who set about crafting new editions for a large number of Napoleonic memoirs, always emphasizing the lessons that could be learned and the comfort that could be taken from the examples of the readers’ forefathers. In the process, they recast the authors of Peninsular War memoirs as idealized embodiments of French national character, heroes who could help transmit traditional military values to contemporary readers. Among these, high-ranking officers were popular subjects. The editor of General Baron ­Dellard’s memoirs, for example, nostalgically depicted a cadre of brave and dutiful officers from the Napoleonic period, all ‘full of bravery and patriotism, who knew nothing but duty, and for them duty consisted of always being the first and last in the firing line’.30 However, there was also a strong focus on the character of ordinary soldiers, used to laud a different set of values that prioritized uncomplaining, steadfast service. Introducing the edited manuscript of Captain François in 1907, for instance, Maurice Thiéry underlined François’s persistence throughout the most incredible hardships, noting that the soldier ‘stands out for a very French trait, temerity which knows no obstacle’.31 In 1894, the editor Alfred Darimon similarly praised the discipline and endurance of Sergeant François Lavaux, comparing him to two other ‘modèles du parfait soldat’, Gunner Bricard and Sergeant Fricasse, whose memoirs had been published to great commercial success in 1882 and 1891 respectively. ‘The soldiers of the Revolutionary and Imperial epic were heroes’, wrote Darimon in his introduction, emphasizing that ‘the act of reading their recollections, so sincere in their simplicity, cannot help but to comfort souls and to instil in all the idea and the sentiment of duty’.32 This focus on ordinary soldiers was not an accidental publishing trend. Under the Third Republic, general military service had been implemented, meaning that large parts of the adult male population would experience the soldier’s profession for a time, and war was not a distant fantasy. As Darimon put it, ‘military service, obligatory for all, has made each citizen a soldier, and it is natural that we are interested in the soldier, and above all in the soldier of the wars of the Republic and Empire.’33 Peninsular War memoirs provided helpful, if romanticized examples of what war was like. They also seemed the perfect vehicle for constructing new narratives about war as the turn of the century approached. The afterlives of Peninsular War memoirs were therefore shaped in part by the military concerns of the country in which they were published and republished. Spanish memoirs were weaponized to influence later civil wars and overseas imperial struggles, while French memoirs were used to restore national confidence after defeat and prepare a new generation of soldiers for war. British memoirs of the Peninsular War, by contrast, having enjoyed great

The Stories the First World War Inherited  45 popularity in the early part of the nineteenth century, paved the way for and were to an extent later eclipsed by accounts of colonial campaigns. Light, entertaining tales of service in India by junior officers were especially popular in the 1850s, a period in which very few Peninsular War memoirs were published.34 The Second Boer War (1899–1901), however, led several publishers to revisit the memoirs of Napoleonic officers who had gone on to serve in the Empire, particularly those, like Sir Harry Smith, who had been high-level administrators in South Africa. It was the Boers’ rapid advance and siege of the town of Ladysmith in 1900, for instance, which directly sparked the publication of Harry Smith’s autobiography, linking as it did two periods of history 50 years apart. A veteran of the famous Rifle Brigade during the Napoleonic wars, Smith had later been the governor of Cape Colony and high commissioner in South Africa between 1847 and 1852, during which time a new township in the recently annexed Republic of Klip River was renamed Ladysmith in honour of his Spanish wife, Juana María de los Dolores de León. When coverage of the siege in 1900 awakened fresh interest in the former governor and his wife, Smith’s great nephew George C. Moore Smith, then a professor of English language and literature at University College Sheffield, made inquiries among his family as to whether or not any papers of his great uncle had survived – and found, to his delight, that a manuscript autobiography and a large number of letters had been preserved by Sir Harry’s former aide-de-camp and friend, General Sir Edward Alan ­Holdich.35 Approaching the publisher John Murray with a transcription of the manuscript, Moore Smith wrote enthusiastically: This story, I think abounds in interest. It contains a number of good ­anecdotes – some amusing – some thrilling, some romantic, – & generally very vigorously told. The picture here presented of his wife (who gave her name to Ladysmith, Natal) is a most charming & romantic one.36 The interest of this memoir for later audiences was therefore primarily its link to a contemporary war, with Smith’s Peninsular adventures simply fleshing out the backstory of a character known to readers more because of his place in a different narrative: that leading up to the conflict in South Africa. The pacey narration and rich personal content were simply added advantages, allowing the book to reach a wider potential audience. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century this potential audience was larger than ever. The introduction of compulsory primary education in both France and Britain in the early 1880s had created a reading public that included higher numbers of working-class readers than before, as well as schoolchildren themselves. In the context of this expanded market, publishers in Britain and France started to experiment even more with the potential reuses of Peninsular War memoirs, employing them to produce simplified, accessible narratives of the wars of the past for a twentieth-century audience.

46  Matilda Greig

Before the First World War The First World War generation inherited a rich genre of Peninsular War stories. By 1914, memoirs of Napoleon’s war in Spain and Portugal had been continuously published for 100 years, as well as reused and repurposed in a myriad of ways as later wars came and went. Moreover, the generation that would volunteer enthusiastically in 1914 for the ‘War to End All Wars’ had been deliberately educated with these reimagined Napoleonic tales. In 1897 in Britain, for example, the established textbook publisher Longman purchased the rights to print an abridged schoolbook edition of the memoirs of the French General Marbot.37 Marbot’s memoirs, first published by his descendants in 1891 at the height of the ‘Napoleonic boom’, had enjoyed incredible commercial success, running through more than 40 editions in the first six years after their release, as well as several translated English versions. Now, a British schoolmaster named Granville Sharp was entrusted with transforming what had been a large three-volume work into one small one that could be used in classrooms. Sharp decided to make selections from the first half of the original book only, limiting these excerpts to the period during which Marbot was a junior officer, and omitting anecdotes from the battle of Eylau in favour of the ‘more instructive’ campaign of Wagram.38 New footnotes were littered through the work, correcting the text where Marbot’s memory was felt to be at fault, and portraying Napoleon as unscrupulous and unprincipled. The result was an abridged, translated and simplified textbook which would help British schoolchildren learn about French history through a decidedly British lens. Above all, Sharp’s aim was to transform a detailed military memoir into an entertaining, easy historical guide for schoolboys. As he wrote in his preface: Napoleon and his doings always have an attraction for boys; but in set histories the ground covered is so wide that it is easy to lose the way. Marbot is an excellent guide. He went through most of the famous campaigns, and had a knack of turning up at all the critical moments. […] The reader cannot help sympathising with Marbot’s ups and downs, his wounds, exploits, disappointments, and successes. In this manner, the road is beguiled, and a good deal of history picked up by an easy informal method. […] In short, for teaching purposes, the Mémoires have all the qualities of a good historical novel: they are brimful of human interest.39 In this way, war and the experience of soldiering were presented as exciting stories: Marbot’s experiences of warfare were the lure that would trick schoolboys into learning some history along the way. It also became common in late nineteenth-century France for military memoirs to be reprinted in abridged or cheap formats for the consumption of children. For example, a collection of excerpts from Napoleonic memoirs, including the famous Cahiers of Captain Coignet, featured in the series Bibliothèque des écoles et des familles produced by leading Parisian publisher Hachette

The Stories the First World War Inherited  47 40

from 1879 onwards. The terms of the contract made for this edition show that it was designed to be short, pedagogic and accessible, with each extract from the original soldier’s text preceded by several lines of explanation.41 The publishers also planned to give free copies of such editions to ‘University officials’ and ‘heads of institutions’, explicitly ‘for the purpose of publicity’.42 It was not only through books, however, that children were presented with this new vision of war, but also through the very writing materials that they might use every day. In the late nineteenth century, Hachette had amassed a collection of vivid illustrations of scenes from Napoleonic memoirs, all ordered from accomplished military painters of the time, including Alfred Paris, Maurice Orange and Julien Le Blant. These imaginative and vibrant illustrations showed Peninsular War soldiers in heroic poses, charging into battle, sitting around a fire with Napoleon, or even plunging their swords through the chest of a hostile Spanish guerrillero – images that in very few cases were literal representations of descriptions in original memoirs, and which in many cases instead depicted quite a different version of war, one dominated by battles and excitement and missing much of the daily drudgery.43 The illustrations were used by the publishers in various editions of Napoleonic memoirs in the 1890s, including the collection entitled Gloires et souvenirs militaires (1894), but also, strikingly, as the covers for cahiers d’écriture destined for primary schools.44

Conclusions This chapter has used the concept of ‘narratives of war’ loosely, playing on its ambiguous meaning to denote both the plots of individual war memoirs and the broader, ongoing processes of memory construction in which these memoirs played an important role. Doing so reflects the myriad connections that blur the two categories. Books and their authors do not exist in a vacuum, fixed in one place and time, but are affected by contemporary trends and debate, while ‘grand’ narratives of war, drawing together different threads to convey a particular version of events, rely also on the reinvention and reuse of older literature. Indeed, demonstrating the interconnectivity of war literature through time, and the potential for radical changes in meaning for the same book from one war to the next, has been the key argument of this chapter. Memoirs of the Peninsular War travelled from the very moment that they were published and in some cases many decades later, and in the process they were fundamentally altered. In the space of the 100 years between the end of the war in Spain and the beginning of the First World War, these texts crossed the Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, changed languages, and were repackaged in multiple different ways, sometimes becoming almost unrecognizable, but often becoming part of a new set of literature surrounding later conflicts. Several themes are discernible amongst this diversity. One group of memoirs was simply published or reprinted in direct response to the outbreak of another war, especially when there were noticeable parallels between the two, or

48  Matilda Greig when stories from the Peninsula could give helpful context to contemporary events: this was the case for the Spanish American wars of independence, for instance, as well as the French invasion of Spain in 1823, and even the Second Boer War at the end of the century. Another group, meanwhile, were intentionally published with the political aim of supporting a particular narrative in a later war: thus General Mina’s autobiography was both printed and reprinted to gain sympathy for the Liberal cause in the Carlist Wars, while Rafael de Sevilla’s memoir was utilized as part of a conservative reaction against independence movements in Cuba and Puerto Rico. In late nineteenth-century France, by contrast, Peninsular War memoirs were published to construct a new narrative in the aftermath of defeat, drawing on the idealized military heroes of the past to encourage a new wave of militarism under the Third Republic. Finally, as the twentieth century dawned and the next great, terrible European war loomed on the horizon, popular Peninsular War memoirs were adapted for schoolchildren, presenting them with a vibrant, exciting and artificial idea of what war might really be like. Perhaps there was something enduringly fascinating about these works by veterans of one of the most vicious campaigns of the Napoleonic period: indeed, some are still being reprinted today.45 However, the movement and reinvention of books over time are concepts that can be applied fruitfully to any epoch of war writing, expanding our understanding of both the rich literary landscape surrounding certain conflicts and the complex journeys taken by particular texts in order to arrive there. Examining the long lives of military memoirs underlines the important role played by veterans in the ongoing construction of war narratives, as well as the extent to which their original words or intent can be shaped by others as time goes on. Ultimately, the way we understand any particular war owes much to the peculiar, perambulating literature of the wars which have gone before.

Notes 1 I would like to thank the Student Awards Agency for Scotland and the E ­ uropean University Institute, whose joint funding made the research upon which this chapter is based possible. I am also grateful to my PhD supervisors Lucy Riall and ­Regina Grafe for their advice, as well as to my colleagues Pablo Hernández Sau, for sharing his expertise on the Mediterranean, Mikko Toivanen, for his advice on colonial memoirs, and Gaël Sánchez Cano, for his grace and patience in being frequently consulted about matters of translation. 2 L. Montroussier, ‘Français et Britanniques dans la Péninsule, 1808–1814: étude des mémoires français et britanniques’, Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, 2007, vol. 348, 131–45; C. Esdaile, Peninsular Eyewitnesses: The Experience of War in Spain and Portugal 1808–1813, Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2008; M. Reder Gadow and P.L. Pérez Frías, ‘Memorias de Guerra y Crónicas de Viajeros, dos visiones de la Guerra de la Independencia y de Andalucía’, Baetica, 2010, vol. 32, 419–48; G. Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: Encounters with Spain and ­Portugal, 1808–1814, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 3 A.J. Butler (ed.), The Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, 2 vols., London: Smith & Elder, 1896, vol. 1, p. vi.

The Stories the First World War Inherited  49 4 I have written on the translations of these memoirs elsewhere: M. Greig, ‘Traduire la guerre au XIXe siècle: réinventions et circulations des mémoires militaires de la guerre d’Espagne, 1808–1914’, Hypothèses, 2017, vol. 20, 347–56. 5 ‘[G]énéraux, simples soldats, aumôniers, héros souvent sans le savoir.’ C. Bigot (ed.), Gloires et souvenirs militaires, Paris: Hachette, 1894, p. vii. 6 ‘[Q]u’on ne rencontre pas souvent la fortune sur les champs de bataille, que le métier militaire, tout honorable qu’il est, présente toujours plus de gloire que de profit.’ L.-M. Routier, Récits d’un soldat de la République et de l’Empire 1792–1830, Paris: Vermot, 1899, p. 10. 7 J. Donaldson, Recollections of an Eventful Life Chiefly Passed in the Army, Glasgow: McPhun, 1824, pp. 191–7. 8 Carr-Gomm to Murray, 13 June 1882 and 21 March 1881, file MS.40457, John ­Murray Archive (JMA), National Library of Scotland (NLS). 9 Ibid. 10 Napier to Murray, 28 May 1895, file MS.40868, JMA, NLS. 11 M. Guzmán Pérez, ‘Arizpe, Juan Bautista de’, in M. Guzmán Pérez (ed.), Impresores y editores de la independencia en Mexico, Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 2010, pp. 35–6; M. Guzmán Pérez, ‘Zúñiga y Ontiveros, Mariano José de’ in Guzmán Pérez, Impresores, pp. 274–5; E. Roldán Vera, ‘The history of the book in Latin America’, in M.F. Suarez, S.J. Woudhuysen and H.R. Woudhuysen (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Book, 2 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, vol. 1, p. 412. 12 F.X. Venegas, Contestación al manifiesto del Excmo Sr. Duque del Infantado, Valencia: 1810; reprinted in Mexico City: Arizpe, 1810; F. Espoz y Mina, Manifiesto de Don Francisco Espoz y Mina, Valencia: P.C. Tupper, 1811, reprinted in Mexico City: Arizpe, 1812; S. Hernández de Morejón, Idea histórica de los principales sucesos ocurridos en Zaragoza durante el último sitio, Valencia: Benito Monfort, 1809, reprinted in Mexico City: Arizpe, 1809. 13 Roldán Vera, ‘The book in Latin America’, pp. 411–12. 14 ‘Dans un moment où les troupes françaises occupent de nouveau l’Espagne, il m’est permis de vouloir fixer l’opinion sur des événemens [sic] qui s’y passaient à une époque trop voisine encore, pour que le souvenir n’en devienne pas l’objet de débats et de discussions journalières.’ D.H.A.M. de Vedel, Précis des opérations militaires en Espagne, Paris: Gueffier, 1823, p. vi. 15 Correspondence in exile of Espoz y Mina, file 1_AP_ESPOZ_MINA, box 18, no. 1, Archivo Real y General de Navarra (ARGN). 16 ‘Me ocurrí que pudiera Usted llenar un bolsillito, publicando la última Campaña suya contra los Franceses, desde su entrada en España hasta el día que se embarcó usted en Barcelona. Enbiame [sic] su Diario, yo lo pondré en Ingles y no me cabe duda que la venta del tal diario pondría una buena cantidad en su faltriquera que en estos tiempos no haría mal.’ Doyle to Espoz y Mina, 6 December 1823, file 1_AP_ESPOZ_MINA, box 18, no. 1, ARGN. 17 F. Espoz y Mina, Breve extracto de la vida del General Mina/A Short Extract from the Life of General Mina, London: Taylor and Hessey, 1825. 18 Documentos Personales – Memorias, file 1_AP_ESPOZ_MINA, box 17, no. 1, ARGN. See also letters acknowledging receipt of these copies from Gloucester, 4 June 1825, and Lansdowne, 21 January 1825, file 1_AP_ESPOZ_MINA, box 18, no. 1, ARGN. 19 Blaquière to Espoz y Mina, 18 May 1825, file 1_AP_ESPOZ_MINA, box 18, no. 1, ARGN. 20 ‘Je suis convaincu mon général, qu’il n’existe un meilleur mode de servir la cause de votre Patrie dans ce moment critique.’ Ibid. 21 F. Espoz y Mina, Breve estracto de la vida del General Mina, publicado por él mismo en Lóndres 1825, ed. F. Nicolau, Cadiz: Imprenta de Howe, 1834; reprinted in Alcoy: Febrero, 1835.

50  Matilda Greig 22 Ibid. 23 G. Gleig, O Subalterno. Traduzido do inglez, trans. anon., Liverpool: F.B. Wright, 1830, p. iv. 24 F. Durán López, ‘Fuentes autobiográficos españolas para el estudio de la Guerra de la Independencia’, in F. Miranda Rubio (ed.), Fuentes Documentales para el Estudio de la Guerra de la Independencia, Pamplona: Ediciones Eunate, 2003, p. 86. 25 J.M. García Leduc, Apuntes para un Historia Breve de Puerto Rico, San Juan: Editorial Isla Negra, 2007, p. 224. 26 F. Durán López, ‘La autobiografía como fuente histórica: problemas teóricos y metodológicos’, Memoria y Civilización, 2002, vol. 5, 163. 27 R. de Sevilla, Memorias de un militar, ed. J. Pérez Moris, Puerto Rico: Nueva Imprenta del ‘Boletín’, 1877. 28 R. de Sevilla, Memorias de un militar, ed. J.R. Díaz Valdepares, Caracas and ­Maracaibo: Empresa Washington, 1903; Durán López, ‘La autobiografía’, p. 163. 29 B.J. Martin, Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France, Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011, p. 232. 30 ‘[P]leins de bravoure et de patriotisme, qui ne connaissaient que le devoir; et pour eux le devoir consistait à être toujours les premiers et les derniers au feu.’ J.P. ­Dellard, Mémoires militaires du Général Baron Dellard sur les guerres de la République et de l’Empire, Paris: Librairie Illustrée, 1892, pp. v–vi. 31 ‘[S]e fait remarquer par un trait de témérité bien française qui ne connaît aucun obstacle.’ M. Thiéry (ed.), Journal d’un officier français, ou Les Cahiers du Capitaine François 1792–1815, Tours: Maison Alfred Mame, 1907, p. 8. 32 ‘Les soldats de l’épopée révolutionnaire et impériale ont été des héros; la lecture de leurs souvenirs, si sincères dans leur simplicité, ne peut que réconforter les âmes et inculquer à tous l’idée et le sentiment du devoir.’ A. Darimon (ed.), Mémoires de François Lavaux, sergent au 103e de ligne (1793–1814), Paris: Dentu, 1894, p. vii. 33 ‘[L]e service militaire, obligatoire pour tous, a fait de chaque citoyen un soldat, et il est naturel qu’on s’intéresse au soldat, et surtout au soldat des guerres de la République et de l’Empire.’ Darimon, Mémoires de François Lavaux, pp. v–vi. 34 A. Bubb, ‘The life of the Irish soldier in India: representations and self-­ representations, 1857–1922’, Modern Asian Studies, 2012, vol. 46(4), 782. 35 H. Smith, The Autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Smith, Baronet of Aliwal on the Sutlej GCB, 2 vols., London: John Murray, 1902, vol. 1, p. vi. 36 Moore Smith to Murray, 21 June 1900, file MS.41111, JMA, NLS. 37 Plon-Nourrit to Longman, 18 February 1897, file MS 1393 3/2243, Records of the Longman Group, University of Reading Special Collections. 38 G. Sharp (ed.), L’Aide de Camp Marbot: Selections from the Mémoires du Général Baron de Marbot, edited with notes, by Granville Sharp, M.A., late assistant master at Marlborough College, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897, p. vi. 39 Ibid., pp. v–vi. 40 Contract between Hachette and M. Bigot, 11 June 1892, file HAC 1.50, Fonds Hachette, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC). 41 Contract between Hachette and M. Bigot, 8 November 1892, ibid. 42 ‘[F]onctionnaires de l’Université’, ‘chefs d’institution etc.’, ‘dans un but de propagande’. Contract, 11 June 1892, file HAC 1.50, Fonds Hachette, IMEC. 43 File S26 HAC C61 D5, Fonds Hachette, IMEC. 44 See Article 6, contract, 8 November 1892, file HAC 1.50, Fonds Hachette, IMEC. 45 For example, J-R. Coignet, The Note-Books of Captain Coignet: Soldier of the Empire, 1799–1816, London: Frontline Books, 2017; J. Kincaid, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade in the Peninsula, France and the Netherlands, from 1809 to 1815, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

4 The Archive as Narrator? Narratives of German ‘Enemy Citizens’ in the Netherlands after 1945 Marieke Oprel ‘DJ. B. Δ. ED, PU, BBB’. These are codes and symbols, almost hieroglyphics, that even in their brevity narrate stories of war. These life stories are specifically those of men, women and children who were categorized by country of birth or nationality, and then classified by gender and occupation. They are histories of people, foreigners, who were ‘strange’ in different degrees, related to a changing meaning and mapping of national and political borders. They are also stories of a post-war administration of justice, coloured by moralistic visions of ‘rightfully behaving Dutch’ and ‘guilty Germans’, and bureaucratic inefficiency. Once deciphered, these codes and symbols offer new narratives on Dutch policies towards German enemy citizens in the aftermath of the Second World War. On 20 October 1944, the Dutch government-in-exile in London promulgated the Decree on Enemy Property (het Besluit Vijandelijk Vermogen, BVV). With this Decree, all natives, citizens, or subjects of Germany, Italy or Japan were declared enemies of the state: enemy citizens. The Decree entitled the Dutch state to confiscate all assets belonging to ‘enemy citizens’ within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. A newly established institute, the Dutch Custody Institute (het Nederlands Beheersinstituut, NBI) was authorized to detect, administer and control the expropriated assets. The objective of this administration was the liquidation of the assets (by sale or otherwise) on behalf of the Dutch state. Soon after the German capitulation, tens of thousands of enemy citizens − primarily German nationals − were stripped of their assets, regardless of their place of residence or political allegiance and without any Dutch compensation. Enemy citizens were also deprived of their social rights; they were no longer allowed a residence or work permit. Some were arrested, imprisoned or expelled; others left on their own initiative.1 Many tried to appeal their status of enemy citizen by submitting a request for ontvijanding (‘de-­ enemization’), with the hope of gaining their rights and assets back. The history of German enemy citizens in the Netherlands, as part of the post-war legal redress in general, has received little attention from historians and has long been separated from historiography on the Second World War.2 For many years, the moral perspective of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – the contrast between Dutch people who were ‘right’ since they had resisted German

52  Marieke Oprel occupying forces on the one hand, and those who were ‘wrong’ because they collaborated on the other – dominated both Dutch society and historiography. Yet another explanation can be discerned from the state of the archive of the Dutch Custody Institute. Technically speaking, this archive is a complex of archives. It holds the files of the NBI’s head office, deposited archives of the regional offices in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and several other large Dutch cities, and ‘left-over’ documents from the offices in London, Paris, New York and the former Dutch colonies. It also contains the archives of various administrators of the Institute. More importantly, the archive includes the so-called Beheersdossiers − tens of thousands of files concerning collaborators, traitors, enemy citizens and confiscated property. For many years, restrictions on public or scholarly access were imposed by the 1995 Public Records Act (Archiefwet) and the 2000 Personal Data Protection Act (Wet Beschermings Persoonsgegevens). In January 2018 the files were made publicly accessible. However, as will be demonstrated, the archive is not easily uncovered. This chapter is an exploratory journey through one part of the NBI archive: the so-called Beheersdossiers on German enemy citizens. It traces the bureaucratic procedure German enemy citizens underwent from the beginning to the end, from the index-cards that constitute the entry to the record, to the correspondence between NBI employees and lawyers, jurisprudence and eventual political decision-making. The central question here concerns the status and power of the NBI archive. It is argued that the archive must be conceptualized as both a container of narratives and a narrative device. On the one hand, the archive holds reports and testimonies on enemy citizens’ daily life and wartime behaviour, which include life stories of a very heterogeneous, diverse minority in the Netherlands. It is a repository for political and legal documents, personal testimonies, strategies of survival; a depot of individual accounts of war. On the other hand, the NBI archive is an object an sich. It reflects the work and priorities of the NBI administrators, post-war power structures, archival practices and governance. When approached as a narrative device, a narrator or protagonist that voices life stories, views and practices, the archive offers many different stories and questions. The inscriptions in the margins, together with the stamps and the codes on the documents, present a story of bureaucratic inconsistency, administrative chaos and post-war arbitrariness. Analysing both the content of the documents as well as the scrawls and notes found on them, the archive can help us towards a more nuanced understanding of the Dutch post-war administration of justice. The records highlight the experiences of German nationals and the consequences of war for foreigners in the Netherlands. But the narratives also raise the question whether the Decree on Enemy Property was a means of delivering justice. In addition, the tension and discrepancy in and between the individual accounts challenge the official chronicling of war. The NBI archive not only discloses many narratives of war experiences, but also brings out into the open a history that competes with other histories of war.

The Archive as Narrator?  53

Along the Archival Grain: Archival Thinking Ann Laura Stoler argued in her well-known account of the ethnographic and thematic registers in the archives of the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense,3 that archives are not just a record of rule but an active force with violent effect. Navigating through documented governance and other written traces of colonial lives, she demonstrated how archival documents can be active, generative substances with histories, with itineraries of their own. Focusing on what was written in prescribed form and in the archive’s margins, oblique to the official prescriptions and on the edges of protocol, she tried to uncover not just what colonial agents knew, but also what they thought, the gaps they experienced, their uncertainties and their wishful thinking. Kirsten Weld in her study, Paper Cadavers, on the archives of dictatorship in Guatemala, also placed the archives central in her work, considering them a unit of analysis by themselves rather than a simple repository of historical source material. She stressed that in order to do so, she had to learn ‘archival thinking’.4 In Weld’s definition, archival thinking has a dual meaning: first, it is a method for historical analysis, and second, it is a frame for political analysis. This corresponds to the dual meanings of the word ‘archives’ itself: 1) ­denoting a collection of objects, often but not exclusively documents, analysed for their content, and 2) the politicized and contingent state institutions that house those documents. On the historical side, archival thinking requires us to look past the words on a document’s page to examine the conditions of that document’s production. On the political side, it demands that we see archives not just as sources of data to be mined by historians and other researchers, but also as more than the sum of their parts – as instruments of political actions, implements of state formation (‘technologies of rule’), sites of social struggles.5 Archival thinking is thus understanding why and how an archive came into being, what documents it entails and what the form and style of these documents are, but also why particular documents were preserved (and others are missing), why certain documents have been grouped with other documents in a certain order, and what larger power system hides behind, or is protected with, the archive. When it comes to thinking archivally about the archive of the Dutch Custody Institute, one must start with noting the current location of the archive. Situated in the National Archives, this collection rests in the political heart of the Netherlands: The Hague. The location is within a stone’s throw of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Court of Justice, and the nearby Dutch Parliament. Not only does this location perfectly embody the dual meaning of ‘archives’ as put forward by Weld, but the site is also within walking distance of the location where the head office of the Dutch Custody Institute was once domiciled: Neuhuyskade 94. The archive of the Dutch Custody Institute, which was transferred to the National Archives in the 1970s and 1980s, rests thus not far from the place where it all ‘happened’.

54  Marieke Oprel The Dutch Custody Institute was a new political body, established in August 1945. Although officially part of the Custodian, Absentees and Legal Persons Division of the Council for Restoration of Rights (Raad voor het ­Rechtsherstel), the Institute answered to a host of Ministers: those of Finance, Justice, ­Economic Affairs, Overseas Territories, and Agriculture, Fisheries and Food policy. The Institute was founded to carry out the Decree on Enemy Property, and to make special provisions for the administration of legal persons and absentees (primarily Jews who did not return from deportation). From the start, the Institute had a substantial bureaucratic and administrative body. Next to the Head Office at the Neuhuyskade 94, it had sub-offices in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and agencies (Vertegenwoordigingen) in several Dutch cities such as Arnhem and Eindhoven. The NBI also had offices in Brussels, London, Paris, New York and the Dutch Indies, Suriname and on Curaçao. The number of agencies, offices (Bureaus) and foundations (Stichtingen) varied over the years; at the height of the operation there were 64 agencies in the Netherlands. It is estimated that the NBI had a staff of around 2,000 people, 20,000 administrators (bewindvoerders) and an unknown, but very large number of custodians (beheerders).6 Like the colonial administrations studied by Stoler, or the archives of the dictatorship in Guatemala analysed by Weld, the archive of the NBI is an archive of a deposed regime: the Dutch post-war administration of justice. Although never studied as such, the archive reflects Dutch politics in the first two decades after 1945, years in which ‘restoration’ was the code-word in both internal and external affairs. Politically, the NBI outlived several governments; the Institute – as well as the Council for Restoration of Rights in general – was dissolved in 1967. It experienced the effects of the European Recovery Program, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the decolonization of Indonesia, the founding of the Bundesrepublik, the Korean War and European integration. During its 22 years of existence, the Institute took part in the formulation of Dutch immigration policy, the restoration of bilateral relations with Germany and, naturally, the settlement of the war repayments. By the time the Institute was dissolved, Dutch society was on the eve of de-pillarization, the ‘undoing’ of the politico-denominational segregation of Dutch society. The dossiers in the NBI archive form a massive documentary record on enemies of state. Each file contains detailed personal data, questionnaires on behaviour and family history, reports of NBI administrators on the assets of the German enemies in question, and most importantly, testimonies in favour or against the German enemy citizen. Although the CABR-archives – the archives on Special Criminal Jurisdiction, which include police reports on collaborators and criminals – are generally considered the ‘terror archives’, the NBI archive also holds information on most of these people. In a bureaucratic, bookkeeping manner, the archive exposes wartime social control, albeit in the post-war period. Yet the NBI archive not only reveals the administration of the Dutch post-war administration of justice, it also reflects the Dutch

The Archive as Narrator?  55 attempts to perform and find justice. Its task was to extract repayments for the damage done by the German occupier during the war through the confiscation of property of German citizens. As a sub-department of the Council for Restorations of Rights, the eventual aim was to contribute to the restoration of order and justice in Dutch society. Justice could only be done by punishing those who were responsible for the war damage, by holding accountable all those who were somehow related to the German occupier. Whether these measures were just to target individual citizens who had been living in the Netherlands, long before war broke out because of their nationality was not at first questioned. In order to understand the NBI archive, one needs to become familiar with its language as well as the manner in which the archive was ordered and organized. Most documents are a mixture between account and police reports. For every enemy citizen who applied for a no-enemy declaration, a record was made by an NBI employee. An accompanying index-card (see Figure 4.1) was put in a box in alphabetical order – the database avant la lettre. These ­index-cards were simple: they contained name, place and date of birth, nationality. Over time, also the date of the decision(s) and announcement(s) were included. But what makes the index-cards a particularly interesting part of the archive is that they were all also stamped with numbers and signs. Together these marks also constitute a language, which, as we will see, on closer analysis reveals much about how the NBI developed as a bureaucratic apparatus and how policies towards German enemy citizens took shape.

Figure 4.1  A  blank index-card. The translation of the categories, in order of appearance: place of residence, place and date of birth, nationality, office or agency where the request was received, counsellor, management, decision, date of communication, remarks. National Archives, The Hague, NBI Archive 2.09.16, Invent. no. 10324, Index card 1.

56  Marieke Oprel

Against the Archival Grain: Archival Puzzling When in August 1945 the NBI opened its doors, it already had a backlog. Shortly after the liberation in May 1945, some Germans had already submitted requests for a no-enemy declaration. In the annual reports of 1946 and 1947 one can find that the NBI faced a substantial pile of papers. Soon a rather urgent problem arose. The definitions of ‘enemy citizens’, ‘enemy state’ and ‘enemy property’ as put forward in the Decree on Enemy Property provided for wide interpretation. Article One stated that Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as territories that had been occupied by one of these states from 1 January 1938 onwards, were classified as enemy states. Article Two then defined who enemy citizens were: 1. civil servants, officers, agents and representatives of an enemy state, as well as people who have fulfilled a similar position between 10 May 1940 and the implementation of this Decree 2. persons, who are or have been since 10 May 1940 citizen of an enemy state 3. legal entities a. founded or existing by the law of an enemy state b. of which the main seat or head office was located after 10 May 1940 on enemy territory c. of which the actual enterprise or main company was on enemy territory at the time of/after 10 May 1940 4. persons, who according to Royal Decree A6 of 7 June 1940 (as published in the Staatsblad) were declared citizen of an enemy state 5. persons, who are neither Dutch, nor a Dutch citizen, who were declared citizen of an enemy state by the Minister of Justice. Yet this definition left several questions open. How, for example, should the requests of Austrian citizens who, after the annexation of Austria by Germany on 12 March 1938, had become part of the German Reich, be handled? Should they be considered German and thus enemy citizens? What was the status of German Jewish refugees? Awaiting instructions and detailed guidelines from the Dutch government, the handling of cases by the NBI was even further delayed. How the NBI eventually started to categorize and classify the enemy citizens is made apparent on the index-cards mentioned above. As can be deduced from the Decree on Enemy Property, nationality was the first criterion to define who was an enemy citizen, and who was not. To distinguish between the various nationalities, stamps were used: a D for Duitser (German), the I for Italiaan (Italian), the O for Oostenrijker (Austrian). In 1946, the Judicial Division of the Council for Restoration of Rights in Amsterdam had come to the decision that Austrian citizens also had to be treated as Germans. Albeit it involuntarily, they had lost their Austrian citizenship as a result of the Anschluss and thus been German citizens during the war. As Austria regained its

The Archive as Narrator?  57 independence after 1945, Austrian citizens were categorized by the NBI as a separate group, but nevertheless treated as Germans. The same was true for Jews. The Gesetz über den Widerruf von Einbürgerungen und die Aberkennung der deutschen Staatsangehörigkeit of 14 July 1933, the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935, followed by the Elften Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz of 25 November 1941 applying to Jews living outside Germany, had deprived all German Jews of their citizenship, leaving them stateless. Yet in 1945 the Dutch government condemned all Nazi laws and declared all antisemitic laws invalid. Jews had to be considered German nationals, and thus were treated as enemy citizens. The cruel situation occurred that Jews, after years of horror in concentration camps, were informed upon their return to the Netherlands that they were again affected by the status of their German citizenship. In order to gain their rights and property back, they had to reach out to the NBI. Their requests to the NBI are easy to recognize in the pile of papers – the index-cards are all stamped with a J for Jood, Jew. The J could have stood for enemy citizens of Japan, the third enemy state, if research would not have shown that there were only a handful of cases of Japanese enemy citizens. The J, often in the combination DJ (German Jew) or OJ (Austrian Jew), was used to classify Jews, just as the Nazis had stamped a J in Jewish passports. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, public access to the archive of the NBI was restricted until January 2018. However, in 2015 it was possible to start researching German enemy citizens by focusing on the already accessible index-cards. A pilot study indicated that the information on the index-cards would enable the request of and access to certain ­records  – if one could provide full name and place and date of birth and prove that the person in question had been born more than 100 years ago. Over a period of three years, several volunteers helped to enter the data from almost 25,000 index-cards in a database. As it turned out, closer analysis of the index-­cards also provided much more than just an entry into the archive. For example, as noted above, the stamps D, I, O, made it possible to select enemy citizens easily on nationality, and the J marked Jews. After combining the information on the index-cards with analysis of a selection of around 200 cases, it became clear that the B-stamp in the right upper corners meant Betaald (Paid). It indicated whether an enemy citizen had paid his or her costs for the no-enemy declaration. The procedure cost 50 guilders per person, at that time (just after the war) a considerable amount of money. Another example: the code PU was used to specify that the case concerned a Pensioen Uitkering, payment of pensions. It seems that this stamp was used primarily for mineworkers who were members of the Algemeen Mijnwerkers Fonds (Miners’ Union). Not all the codes have been deciphered yet; unfortunately, a key to the different symbols is nowhere to be found. With the exception of the stamps used to mark nationality or payment, many symbols cannot be decoded. For example, the meaning of the Δ and ED mentioned in the introduction is uncertain. Several other letters of the alphabet used frequently on the cards also need

58  Marieke Oprel interpretation. Furthermore, the colour symbolism of the stamps and codes remains a mystery. Yet it seems that the colours and letters illustrate the various sub-categories and classifications defined by the NBI over the years to distinguish between the various German citizens. Close reading of 200 selected files indicated that people were categorized by occupation, religion, gender. A special category, for example, were Dutch-born women married to German men. Before 1940, German-Dutch and Dutch-German marriages were a frequent phenomenon. The Law on Dutch Citizenship of 1892 ruled that, upon marriage, Dutch women took the citizenship of their husband, losing their own nationality. As a result, thousands of Dutch women had become German citizens over the years. After the war, they were treated as enemy citizens as well. Analysing not just the content of the documents but also their state and style, one cannot help but notice the notes in the margins. In particular in cases of Dutch-born women, it appears NBI employees questioned whether these women were correctly categorized as enemy citizens. After all, most of these women had lived in the Netherlands their entire lives and had not supported the Nazi regime. Why then punish them for a marriage which had taken place long before war broke out? Furthermore, was it the government’s intention to extract repayments from native Dutch citizens? Many Dutch-born women had a few of their own possessions, like family inheritance. Were such personal belongings to be considered enemy assets? Another sub-category that provided for discussion were the so-called Grensboeren or Grenzbauern, farmers in the border areas. These were farmers in the border areas of the Netherlands, in particular the provinces ­Overijssel and Gelderland. Before 1940, the geographical borderlines between the ­Netherlands and Germany did not have the political, nationally defined status they had after 1945. People could easily work and live on both sides of the border. Many German farmers had territory in the Netherlands and many Dutch farmers owned land in Germany. People spoke a mixture of the Dutch and German language; many families had both Dutch and German roots. After 1945, the ‘border farmers’ faced many difficulties with regard to both their own legal status and the status of their territory. The Decree on Enemy Property did not provide any specified guidelines on this particular group of people, as the NBI employees soon realized. ‘Grensboeren’ thus became a sub-­ category written down on the index-cards Awaiting further instructions from the Dutch government, the NBI put all requests of the farmers on hold. As we can see on the photo of index-card there was sometimes confusion, as the statement reads: ‘this is in fact not a grensboer, but he has been counted as such’ (see ­Figure 4.2). The notes, remarks and scrawls in the margins of the documents echo personal convictions of the NBI employee who handled the request. But they also provide insight in the functioning of the NBI. Due to the lack of prescribed criteria, NBI employees were not always certain how to proceed. Many files include correspondence between NBI employees, asking each other for advice, or for a more detailed explanation of a certain criteria. Often the police,

The Archive as Narrator?  59

Figure 4.2  ‘Grensboer’ or ‘border farmer’. National Archives, The Hague, NBI Archive 2.09.16, Invent. no. 10332, Index card 11057.

the tax authorities or the Vreemdelingendienst (the Alien Registration Office), were requested to report in further detail on an enemy citizen’s status. The comments and notes by NBI employees seem to have been signs of both chaos and uncertainties. Some records have been written on by two, three or even four NBI employees, front pages of files are usually covered by notes, stamps, scratches and scribbles. Hardly any of the hundreds of files examined for this research are equal to another file in either style or content. This material leads to the conclusion that at least in the first two years, 1946 and 1947, the NBI employees had to ‘invent the wheel’ along the way and as they did so, many of their personal attitudes manifested themselves.

From Handwritten Notes to Staatscourant On 25 October 1948, official guidelines for the no-enemy procedure were published in the Staatscourant, the government gazette in which the state announced new laws or decrees. First of all, it was agreed that all German nationals in the Netherlands would regain their full legal capacity, i.e., the right to act financially independent. Second, it was proclaimed that when it was a) in the Dutch interest, or b) when someone met the criteria summed up hereafter, enemy citizens could qualify for a no-enemy declaration. The criteria were that an enemy citizen had to prove that 1) he/she had resided in the Netherlands before the war, 2) he/she had been integrated in Dutch society and 3) that he/she had behaved during wartime ‘as the greater majority of the Dutch had done, thus de facto had not sided with the enemy’. For Austrians,

60  Marieke Oprel a similar set of guidelines was published: they also had to prove they had resided in the Netherlands before the war, and that they had not politically misbehaved during war. The guidelines were a breakthrough in the Dutch policies towards German nationals. After three years of internal discussions, finally a few criteria were established and published. In the historical account of the NBI’s role in the de-enemization policy, ‘Overzicht nopens de geschiedenis van het ontvijandingsbeleid voorzover het Nederlands Beheersinstituut (NBI) hierbij betrokken is geweest’ (1962), director D. Mulder echoed the debates that preceded the criteria.7 But in this overview, the NBI employees on a local level are not mentioned, whereas close analysis of various archival documents indicates that it must have been the NBI employees who took the initiative to establish certain criteria. After all, they were the ones who handled the requests. It was not the management of the NBI, but the administrators who were the first to realize that the ‘Decree on Enemy Property’ affected ordinary men, women and children who had lived in the Netherlands for decades and who were completely integrated in Dutch society. The local officials were the first to be confronted with questions about the status of certain people, such as Jews or Austrians, and they were the ones who had to judge enemy citizens on their wartime behaviour. Thus, it seems reasonable to argue that it must have been the local NBI employees who suggested distinguishing between German enemy citizens living in the Netherlands and abroad, and between people with considerable assets or those with hardly any possessions. Their comments and notes in the margin would eventually contribute to the set of guidelines published in 1948. Still, the guidelines of 1948 were very vague. How should ‘integration in Dutch society’ be defined? What was ‘typical Dutch wartime behaviour’, mentioned as criteria for Germans, or the ‘political loyalty’ that Austrians had to demonstrate? A random selection of requests shows that enemy citizens mentioned almost everything that could be considered as evidence of their loyalty, varying from refusal to carry out orders of the German authorities to active support of a resistance movement. The lack of criteria caused not only confusion for the NBI employees who had to pass judgement on the enemy citizen’s behaviour; the enemy citizens themselves had no idea how and where to start the line of argument in their requests. As a result, most requests for a no-­enemy declaration included a list of all actions that could possibly be interpreted as acts of resistance. For example, German families were forced to send their children to German schools and German men were obliged to join the ­Wehrmacht. However, Dutch-German families sometimes managed to keep their children away from German schools and sent them to Dutch ones. In addition, some German men successfully tried to be – and were – rejected for military service, by faking an illness or disability. When the families could provide testimonies confirming they had chosen deliberately to stand up against the German authorities, this aided their defence. Other actions that were considered evidence of good conduct were listening to Radio Oranje (the broadcast of the Dutch government-in-exile in London), circulating illegal newspapers and

The Archive as Narrator?  61 supporting resistance movements, financially or otherwise. Yet the weightiest argument was when enemy citizens could prove they had actively supported the Dutch resistance, for instance by helping people hide. When this was the case, the NBI employees usually arrived at a positive decision. The question is to what extent the quite substantial administrative body of the NBI travelled the same path in judging enemy citizens. As noted above, the notes and marks in the margins echo the personal convictions of NBI employees; in some records capitals and exclamation marks are used to express approval or rejection. In particular in the first post-war years, the general debate was coloured by moralistic visions based on the categorization of ‘rightfully behaving Dutch’ and ‘guilty Germans’. Analysis of the handwriting suggests that there were certain NBI employees who were much more outspoken against German nationals than others. The NBI employee who handled the case could therefore be a determining factor in the decision-making. There was a ‘checks-and-balances’ system in the handling of no-enemy requests. An enemy citizen had to submit his or her request in duplicate at the nearest regional office. First, an NBI employee would assess the request and formulate a recommendation. Then, after consultation with his superior, the NBI employee would forward the initial request and the advice to the head office in The Hague, where the final decision was made. Officially, this system thus included a double check – first by the regional manager, then in The Hague. However, in practice, considering the enormous pile of requests that awaited the NBI in the first post-war years, the regional manager did not always have the time to check things thoroughly. Furthermore, the Head Office in The Hague carried the responsibility to verify all incoming documents and statements, which often further prolonged the procedure. Not infrequently, only the advice of the NBI employee was taken into consideration.

Narrating or Narrator In the late 1940s, criticism arose about the arbitrary treatment of German enemy citizens. Both among legal scholars and in the Dutch Parliament, the rights and status of enemy citizens was discussed. More and more, the inequity of the Decree on Enemy Property, as well as the execution of the Decree by the NBI, received attention. Then on 26 July 1951, the end of the state of war with Germany was proclaimed. Six years after the German capitulation, against the background of European integration and increasing Cold War tensions, the state of war between the Netherlands and Germany had become an anachronism. A few days before the official proclamation, on 20 July 1951, two bills had passed Parliament which at the last moment made some adjustments to the Decree on Enemy Property. They ruled that from 26 July 1951 onwards, Germans would no longer be enemy citizens, but that their property remained under Dutch trust. To recover their assets, Germans still needed to submit a request for a no-enemy declaration, only now they had to turn to the Council for Restoration of Rights instead of the NBI. The NBI had fulfilled its role.

62  Marieke Oprel The  Institute would settle the overdue matters, and eventually be dissolved in 1967. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the archive was transferred to the National Archives. Over time the NBI fell into oblivion. Now that the privacy restrictions on the NBI archive have been lifted, this peculiar page in Dutch post-war history can be unveiled. As highlighted above, the NBI archive is a container of reports, minutes, correspondence with several ministries, the law courts and various institutions and side-offices, which together provide a (new) account of the Dutch post-war administration of justice. Analysis of this collection can help us gain more insight in how ‘restoration’ and ‘justice’ were defined and perceived in the first post-war years. The annual reports of the NBI, the memos drafted for the ministers, all report what discussions were held, what choices were (eventually) made, and thus allow for a reconstruction of the course of action in Dutch administration of justice. The tens of thousands of files on German men, women and even children in the NBI archive provide another narrative, other narratives. They give insight in the treatment of a group of people who, after 1945, were suddenly excluded from the society they felt they belonged to. The requests for a no-enemy declaration, recommendation letters and testimonies, and records of individuals’ actions during the war show how German nationals in the Netherlands tried to manoeuver between their status as a German and their loyalty to the Dutch. They provide food for thought to reflect on the meaning of ‘acts of citizenship’ during and after conflict, and they challenge national notions of ‘loyalty’ and ‘belonging’. As a store for political and legal documents, a container of narratives, research on the NBI archive will add a page to post-war history. The archive lends itself to an institutional history of the NBI, as well as a source for a history of Dutch policies towards German enemy citizens. But the NBI archive has more to offer. If historians use the archive as a narrative device, a narrator or a protagonist, a narrative ‘I’ as found in novels, the archive also tells stories. It narrates the way the NBI came into existence, how it functioned and how people struggled in their efforts to bring order to the enormous pile of papers as well as in the general chaos of the post-war period.8 It reports how testimonies were deployed and empowered, but also how narratives were problematized and judged by the NBI employees. Reading along and against the archival grain, the archive reveals uncertainties, arbitrariness and even unfairness on a personal level. It echoes how notions of ‘loyalty’ and ‘belonging’ were defined differently, and how moralistic visions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ coloured the Dutch policies towards German nationals. Thus, the archive reflects the agency of the different actors, from the enemy citizens, the NBI employees, and the NBI managers to members of the Dutch parliament and the archivists who preserved the archive. The narratives in the archive of the NBI, as well as the archives narrated by the NBI, are narratives of war. Although the Institute was established after the liberation, and although the policies were part of the post-war administration of justice, the war was still the frame of reference. This was so for the enemy citizens, because they had to prove their loyalty to the Dutch and/or their

The Archive as Narrator?  63 anti-Nazi behaviour during the war, and also for the NBI employees, because their feelings of anger and revenge resulting from the years of German occupation coloured their moral judgement. It was also the case for contemporary politicians, because the restoration of Dutch politics and society after five years of war was first on their agenda and for historians today, who simply cannot analyse and understand the Dutch eagerness for confiscation of assets without the wartime context. For family relatives of enemy citizens, the opening of the NBI archive can bring closure. Some suffer to this day from the consequences of their family’s former enemy status. They faced anti-German sentiment for years; some even had to change their name. For most of them, the disclosure of the archive can finally bring recognition for their (post)war-time experiences. Now they can share their narratives of war, even though they sometimes compete with other histories. But the NBI archive also allows for (re)negotiation of the past. Some relatives seek justice by filing (presumably time-barred) claims for compensation. Whether or not they succeed, their efforts reveal that the NBI archive still exercises power as a store or container for documents. And it indicates how the post-war period produced narratives on the Second World War and its aftermath that are still relevant to our times.

Notes 1 J. Sintemaartensdijk and Y. Nijland, Operatie Black Tulip: de uitzetting van Duitse burgers na de oorlog, Amsterdam: Boom, 2009; S. Molema, Wie is de vijand, Soesterberg: Aspekt, 2018. 2 The most important sources are: J.W.F. Wielenga, West-Duitsland: partner uit noodzaak: Nederland en de Bondsrepubliek 1949–1955, Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1989; F.A.J. van der Ven, Een omstreden eiland: de eigendom van het eiland Schiermonnikoog in Geding, Groningen: Van der Ven, 1993. 3 A.L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 4 K. Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, American ­Encounters/Global Interactions, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 13. 5 Ibid. 6 Inventory of the NBI archive, 2 September 2016, available at: www.gahetna.nl/­ collectie/archief/ead/index/zoekterm/nbi/aantal/20/eadid/2.09.16, accessed 5  March 2019. 7 D. Mulder (ed.), Overzicht nopens de geschiedenis van het ontvijandings-beleid voorzover Het Nederlandse Beheersinstituut (NBI) erbij betrokken is geweest, The Hague: Nederlands Beheersinstituut, 1962, pp. 1–13. 8 J.P. Barth, ‘De liquidatie van het Duits vermogen in Nederland’, De Economist, 1947, vol. 95, 605–26; P. Stoffels, ‘Vijandelijk vermogen en volkenrecht II’, ­Nederlands ­Juristenblad, 1949, vol. 24(22), 393–400; C.M.O. Van Nispen tot Sevenaer, ‘Berooft de Nederlandse staat individuele Duitsers?’, Nederlands Juristenblad, 1950, vol. 25(30), 633–45; M.H. Bregstein, ‘De confiscatie van vijandelijk vermogen in het licht van het deviezenregiem’, Nederlands Juristenblad, 1950, vol. 25(35), 737–42.

5 Of Triumph and Defeat World War II and its Historians in Post-war Germany Christina Morina

Overview Most of the historians writing about World War II in post-war Germany had fought in it as soldiers or witnessed it as children. Yet the apparent connection between biography and historiography, between their lived experiences and the narratives they crafted as professional historians after the war, has thus far received little attention. This chapter explores the biographical dimension of these narratives by relating the war experiences of five prominent World War II historians to the narratives of war they published after 1945 in a divided Germany. It demonstrates why their influential scholarly works can and should also be read as autobiographical texts. On 8 May 1989, exactly 44 years after the end of World War II, Andreas Hillgruber died. He had been one of Germany’s most eminent historians of that war. His voluminous Habilitation on Hitler’s Strategy, published in 1965, and many of his subsequent books and articles, were considered reference texts on the history of the war, in Germany and abroad, even though most had never been translated into English. As a veteran of the war and a former POW, Hillgruber had dedicated his life to writing war history as ‘political history’; that is, to explain the costliest military conflict in human history as the result of a contingent decision-making process among human beings.1 In an essay commemorating Hillgruber’s life and work, Eberhard Jäckel, his most renowned student, raised the issue of his teacher’s war biography to shed light on the relationship between biography and historiography in general. ‘Intrigued’ by the question of why people become historians, he pondered, Every scientific activity, and the historiographical in particular, is determined by various non-scientific motives. Thus, the choice of profession is not scientifically grounded, but a life decision […] perhaps inspired by the impression left by a schoolteacher or by something so benign as an antiquarian interest. Yet, for those who turn towards political history, it might have been the experience of political upheaval and the desire to understand it better than the times and the contemporaries. For that reason, political historians have always tended to be the chroniclers of their own time or of the most recent past.2

Of Triumph and Defeat  65 The nexus of what Jäckel implied is as plausible as it is debatable. Routinely, historians themselves and many of their biographers claim that life experience and historiographical writing are linked to each other. The simple truth that contemporary historians are the chroniclers of their own times should not lead us to succumb to a simplistic notion of history being ‘written by life’. On the other hand, even professional historians are not engaged in a sterile scientific endeavour but implicated in manifold ways in the events they seek to reconstruct, explain and narrate. Torn between involvement and detachment, the spectrum delineated by Norbert Elias in his classic essay of the same title, historians also choose and approach their subjects based on particular interests, motivations and aspirations.3 The historical narratives they produce are often as much informed by academic as by personal considerations, especially if the issues they are dealing with pertain to personal experiences. Rather than brushing over this fact with an approving or a dismissive fling, it should be explored more systematically, not least because such an exploration reveals as much about the individual historian and his or her chosen historical subjects as it sheds light on the nexus between memory, history and historiography.4 For if historians through their writings, teachings and public interventions play an active role in shaping collective memory, they are themselves deeply influenced by the political and memorial cultures in which they exist. In post-war societies in particular, remembering war is a highly complex, often contentious public affair – even more so if those writing about the war had participated in it on various levels with varying personal consequences.5 Read closely, historical accounts of World War II written after 1945 in divided Germany thus reveal not only the pervasive Cold War logic, which burdened – albeit to varying degrees – every aspect of the war’s history and memory with distinct ideological and political tints. They can also be read as autobiographical texts that manifest a personal reckoning, an effort to make sense of (the) war by men who had participated in it in various ways. Hence, as the editors suggest in the introduction to this volume, narratives of war are integral parts of war histories as they form the interpretative frame within which events, contexts and actors are being recalled; they can be understood as ‘coping mechanisms’.6 Such an approach entails treating historiography as a mode of experiencing the world. As with all scholarship, history-writing has evolved in response to the human need for orientation in the present – on the social as well as on the individual level. By adhering to certain rules and methods, the historical discipline ‘rationalizes’ this need, transforming it into epistemological interests. Historiography can thus be understood as one modus of interpreting specific experiences and events, namely as a particularly reflected and regulated one. It is a ‘medium through which experiences are being made and articulated’.7 This perspective has consequences regarding the range of factors and contexts to be considered relevant when examining the genesis, features and wider social radiance of specific historical narratives. For example, as I will demonstrate

66  Christina Morina below, it can be quite relevant if and where a historian has experienced a war he is later writing about (in this case we are dealing almost exclusively with men), if he was on active duty or fought in the resistance or survived it as a child. Similarly, his position as scholar and citizen within a wider socio-­ political context at the time of writing is reflected in his historical analysis (as, vice versa, he is shaping this context in one way or another with his work). It is thus necessary to explore the full range of factors and contexts forming and informing the writing of history, particularly of contemporary history. It not only allows but calls for the inclusion of the ‘non-scientific motives’ alluded to by Jäckel. Most of these motives, particularly notions and emotions deriving from the individual historian’s personality, background and everyday life, usually remain obscure or are even considered altogether irrelevant for the analysis of the historiographical process. Thus, the biographical dimension has largely been neglected by scholars interested in the history of historiography; the few noteworthy exceptions have stirred much controversy but little conceptual reflection within the profession.8 As a crucial aspect of historiographical theory and practice, however, it deserves not just incidental but systematic attention.

A War of Two Endings: Memory and Political Culture in Post-war Germany The following exploration of the biographical dimension of World War II historiography in divided Germany focuses on the works of five historians born between 1889 and 1935. Two of them resided in the socialist East, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the other three in the Western Federal Republic (FRG). The youngest one, Olaf Groehler, was born in 1935 and had witnessed World War II as a child in the air-raid shelters of Berlin. The other four, namely Karl-Dietrich Erdmann, Stefan Doernberg, Andreas Hillgruber and Manfred Messerschmidt, were born between 1910 and 1926 and had served in the ­Wehrmacht or its auxiliary forces during the war. All of them subsequently published pioneering works on the political, military and social history of the war and were considered leading scholars in the field well beyond their respective East or West German professional communities. Before zooming in on their works it seems useful to consider briefly the respective political and memorial cultures in which they were being written. After 1945, two contrasting views of the Second World War and its outcome emerged as Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender resulted in Allied occupation and, by 1949, the partition of Germany into two semi-sovereign states. In the liberal ‘anti-totalitarian’ West, total defeat became the central motive of reference and remembrance over the years; in the ‘anti-fascist’ one-party state in the East, socialism’s final victory was at the core of the Sozialistische ­Einheitspartei Deutschland’s (SED) political memory of the war.9 Within these polarized frames of reference and the respective contrasting socio-­political contexts, a vast spectrum of personal and communal experiences was being articulated, negotiated, marginalized and silenced as the Janus-faced ‘stigma

Of Triumph and Defeat  67 of violence’ prompted elites and society at large in both Germanys to ponder suffering versus guilt.10 The ways in which Germans came to remember World War II were shaped to a significant degree by professional historians who had actively fought in the war. Both reflecting and forging what Jeffrey Herf has called the ‘divided memory’ of a shared past,11 they each contributed to the emergence of two distinct historiographical narratives about the war. In the East, historians and the ruling socialist party (SED) told a story of a costly but absolute triumph, celebrating ‘1945’ as a ‘Hegelian moment’.12 With the defeat of Nazi Germany mainly by the Soviet Union buttressed by a heroic Communist resistance, they argued, history had been steered onto the preordained path of socialism. In the West, a story of loss, bewilderment and a longing for national healing came to dominate scholarly accounts and collective memory, and the dominant ‘war stories’ particularly in the Adenauer years stressed German victimhood and the continuing ‘Bolshevist’ threat.13 Moreover, the two narratives carried contrasting perspectives on the present and future, each representing a distinct version of ‘Never again!’ In the West, historians focused on grasping how ‘it could have happened’; who was to blame – cuius erratio? – was the central question they asked. Their accounts were often infused with a desire to make sense of ‘1933’, along with a need to find closure and to contribute to a national healing in spite of Germany’s division. In the East, historians bolstered the ­battle-cry ‘Never again!’ by pointing a finger at capitalism and the complicit role of ‘capital’ in the Nazi project, thus asking cuius bono? Their self-proclaimed objective was to prevent a ‘third world war’ until socialism would conquer the West as well and forge a united socialist Germany, at last.14

First Narratives, East and West: Fate and Reason in the Age of Totalitarianism These stories of triumph and defeat were not monolithic but rather evolved over time. Some aspects, such as the ‘myth of the clean Wehrmacht’ – the notion that the German army mostly fought an ‘honourable’ war and that only the SS and special forces had committed the crimes – or the selective acknowledgement of Germany’s victims, marked both narratives of the war equally; others, such as the role of the Allies, the resistance or the persecution of the Jews, changed significantly over time.15 First versions were originally outlined in the two respective ‘first books’ on World War II, published in the two ­Germanys in 1959: Karl-Dietrich Erdmann’s Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte Bd. 4: Die Zeit der Weltkriege16 [Gebhardt Handbook of German History Vol. 4: The Era of the World Wars] in the West, and the collected volume Der zweite Weltkrieg [The Second World War], edited by Stefan Doernberg in the East.17 Both authors had participated in the war. Erdmann had fought in the Wehrmacht; Doernberg had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and resettled in the Soviet Union, where he joined the Red Army. And neither of them was a conventional military historian. They rather were universalists with powerful

68  Christina Morina positions within the respective historians’ organizations, men who set the historiographical agenda instead of writing specialized monographs. The two volumes represented first attempts at a synthetic narration of the war’s history and were to set the tone and thematic scope of future historical research. Erdmann’s case is unique as he kept a war diary during his Wehrmacht years, which can be read in conjunction with his later historical writing. In Die Zeit der Weltkriege, he portrays World War II as part of an entire epoch of war, a time of continuing catastrophes for the German people. Critics in the East would soon castigate this perspective as apologetic and ‘all-forgiving’. Haunted by the question how ‘fate and guilt’ have shaped recent German history, Erdmann felt that the goodhearted patriotic ‘idealism’ of most Germans (like himself) had been ‘abused’ by the Nazis. And rather than assuming that the ‘quintessence of our history was the result of paths laid wrongly in the distant past’, Erdmann interpreted the ‘moral and political bankruptcy’ of 1945 as the ‘severest eruption of a general process of disruptive social change’.18 Much of his own political biography was thus negotiated in the pages of Die Zeit der Weltkriege. Born in Cologne in 1910 to a Protestant family, this deeply religious man with a PhD in history first worked as a gymnasium teacher. In 1938, he joined the Wehrmacht as career officer after marrying a woman whose ‘Aryan’ roots could not be sufficiently proven. Serving first in France and from 1939 until 1943 in Russia, Erdmann’s front diary reveals that he readily fused his Christian beliefs with National Socialism, which he hailed as the ‘symbol of a coming cosmic order’.19 He likened serving as a soldier to serving as a priest: to him, both professions were ‘primordial conditions’ [Urzustände], ‘both existing through death’.20 Before being injured and sent home in 1943, he participated in the siege of Leningrad – a fact virtually unknown after the war since he avoided the topic, even when visiting the city decades later for an international conference. Yet, in the pages of Die Zeit der Weltkriege, Erdmann’s personal war was very much present, as a combined reading of the war diary and the 1959 synthesis shows. In his diary, preserved in his personal papers in Koblenz, he emerges as a routined chronicler – recording almost daily the weather conditions, death tolls and troop morale – with a curious predilection for epic moments and no manifest qualms about the unprecedentedly brutal ‘war of extermination’ he was fighting. One telling example is the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union. On 22 June 1941, the 31-year-old noted: ‘War against Russia. We spend Sunday morning at the pool; the unit is in good spirits. The war gains mythic proportions.’21 In Die Zeit der Weltkriege, published 18 years later, this sense of awe resurfaced. There, on page 277, Erdmann linked the attack against the Soviet Union to Napoleon’s order to start the war against Russia exactly 129 years earlier: ‘On another June 22, Napoleon had ordered the Great Army to attack Russia. On June 22, 1941, the German attack began.’22 Even though Hitler, according to Goebbels’s diary, had not deliberately selected that day, Erdmann relived the awe which the beginning of the ‘mythical’ invasion had inspired in him 18 years earlier. In embellishing a striking historical coincidence like that,

Of Triumph and Defeat  69 the veteran turned historian let his original sympathy for a ‘cosmic’ National Socialism resurface. For his post-war audience he coloured the drama of the story that was to unfold in a peculiar way. In stark contrast to Erdmann’s narrative of national tragedy, Stefan ­Doernberg embraced the defeat of Nazi Germany as the ‘spring of nations’ and his ‘most beautiful’ personal memory.23 After reaching Berlin as an officer of the victorious Red Army in the spring of 1945, the son of a functionary of the German Communist Party (KPD) and future distance learner at the University of Moscow, helped the NKVD (Stalin’s secret police) secure German documents and swiftly managed to transform from a battle soldier to a ‘historian at the front’ (Fronteinsatz) of the developing Cold War, as he put it in the title of one of his many autobiographical texts.24 His first major publication, the edited volume Der zweite Weltkrieg, was to establish the ‘real’ history of the war and simultaneously to unmask the ‘forged’ narratives drafted by Western ‘bourgeois historiography’. It was presented as the result of a cooperation between East German and Soviet historians, who, as Doernberg underlined in the preface, ‘had all been participants in the Second World War’. Brushing over the fact that these men had mostly fought against each other, it streamlined their war experiences by claiming that their ‘insights are based as much on the scientific understanding of history […] as on their own experiences and events in their personal lives’.25 The resultant narrative depicted World War II as the ‘most unjust of all unjust wars’. Its outcome was the ‘lawful’ defeat of fascism that has proven the ‘superiority of socialism’. Its unparalleled brutality was not the result of a general crisis of modernity, as Erdmann’s account suggested, but of an Allied conspiracy against the Soviet Union in which Hitler’s rise to power was long seen as furthering the anti-Soviet agenda of the capitalist camp; that was the true reason why the anti-Hitler coalition came as late as it did. Only H ­ itler’s extremism had forced the West into a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union, it was further claimed. Yet, since his defeat, the anti-Soviet agenda was being forcefully resumed. While historians in the West, their ‘funds flowing from sinister sources’, facilitated the launching of a ‘third world war’, East German and Soviet historians supported the continued anti-imperialist battle in the camp of peace (even if that entailed invoking antisemitic stereotypes). As historians, Doernberg once proclaimed, they remained soldiers.26 Fully anchored in the Cold War present, this view culminated in the unconditional support of the GDR as the ‘only legitimate German state in which the lessons of history, particularly of the Second World War, had been implemented’.27 Historiography was understood as crucial in bolstering the young socialist republic’s legitimacy after the first half of the century had proven that capitalism bred fascism, and fascism war. With unmatched ideological zeal, East German historians viewed the history of war as a primary field of ­inner-German confrontation, with one of the most contested areas in this regard being the struggle for archival access on either side of the Iron Curtain – a story as adventurous as consequential for the writing of contemporary history

70  Christina Morina in the post-war era.28 As with the other ‘last revolutionaries’ within the SED, Doernberg’s deeply personal commitment to a Communist state based on dictatorial rule, and a dogmatic reading of World War II history, both reflected and sustained the political violence shaping Germany’s century.29

Personal Pages: A Close(r) Reading of the West German Historiographical Canon As the two landmark books by Erdmann and Doernberg shaped the respective historiographies for years to come, historians on either side set out to explore various aspects of the war’s origins, dynamics and consequences. Writing as ‘political historians’ with more or less explicit agendas, they departed from the traditional military history and focused increasingly on political, economic, social and cultural aspects of the war, including – more so in the West than in the East – its genocidal dimension.30 In the West, Andreas Hillgruber and Manfred Messerschmidt wrote pioneering works on Hitler’s strategic thinking and the indoctrination of the Wehrmacht; both also worked as chief historians for the Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt in Freiburg/Breisgau, a research institute supervised by the Ministry of Defence. In the East, Olaf Groehler, as director of the ‘German History 1917–1945’ division at the Academy of Sciences’ Central Institute for History, wrote the first comprehensive history of the Allied air war against Nazi Germany with a special focus on its impact on German society and morale. Hillgruber was born in Angerburg near Gdansk in East Prussia in 1925. His father, a gymnasium teacher, served in the Wehrmacht and died in Soviet captivity in 1946, while his son Andreas, who had fought on various fronts throughout Europe since 1943, was captured by Allied forces in the Ruhr Pocket in 1945 and remained a prisoner of war until 1948. The months around the end of the war were arguably among the most dramatic times of his life: the uncertainty, chaos and filth of the Rhine meadow camps in which he was initially held captive, the expulsion of his family from Eastern Prussia in the wake of the Red Army’s advance, his father’s death and the total collapse of the German state were the ‘fundamental existential experiences’ forming the ‘biographical starting point and background’ of his work on World War II history.31 He claimed this nexus himself in a speech in 1983, and his entire scholarship indeed reflects it. In his second and most important monograph, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegsführung 1940–1941 [Hitler’s Strategy: Politics and Warfare 1940–1941], Hillgruber realized his historiographical vision of a ‘modern’ military history.32 War was to be understood as a form of ‘practised domestic and foreign policy’ because it constituted an ‘issue of political history’.33 Thus, the military aspects of war must be contextualized within the political frame in which war emerges and unfolds. The aim in Hitler’s Strategy was to ‘explore soberly and critically, equally free of apologetic as of polemical passions’, the extent to which Hitler’s war strategy was dependent upon factors such as his ‘programme’, the interests and policies of the Allies, or ‘factual necessities’. In addition, Hillgruber

Of Triumph and Defeat  71 deemed Hitler’s personal motives and rationalizations, including his World War I experiences, relevant to any attempt at explaining his ‘rise and doom’. The result was a dense reconstruction of the interests and calculations pertinent on all sides and a careful balancing of the ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ aspects in Hitler’s thinking – in other words, a text that reads like an antidote to the total chaos and utter destruction and confusion which Hillgruber had personally witnessed as a defeated, captured Wehrmacht soldier. The soldier turned historian here created a narrative that relied ostentatiously on a stepby-step, logical and reasoned argumentation to bring order and sense into the utter complexity of events leading up to and shaping the first years of World War II. Moreover, this narrative suggested that had Hitler, the impulsive amateur, been prevented from taking over full command of the German military, the war might have led to a less detrimental ending for the German people. Ultimately, Hillgruber’s narrative implied that the main reasons for the disastrous war had to be sought in Hitler’s personality and his movement’s propagandistic genius, not in a broad social consensus on which his aggressive, racially driven foreign policy was able to thrive.34 Personal memories, especially of the war’s ending in the Rhineland, were of fundamental importance for the assessment of the Wehrmacht’s role in the Nazi regime’s genocidal warfare. Implicitly addressing his own involvement, Hillgruber concluded that the support Hitler had received from the German people and the military for the war against the Soviet Union was the result of a grave ‘misunderstanding of the attack as a defensive struggle’. True, most soldiers ‘partly did not want to see […] the complete otherness [Andersartigkeit] of this war in its origin and approach’ – while in fact ‘they knew better or could have known’. Yet, he added, this war could only be fully comprehended if one fully ‘understood this misunderstanding’. Attached to this thought was a footnote that already contained the apologetic notion of the ‘tragic’ predicament of the German soldiers which Hillgruber was to stress emphatically two decades later during the Historikerstreit [historians’ controversy]: ‘This misunderstanding of Hitler’s aim does not invalidate the tragic momentum in the sacrificial struggle of the German soldiers fighting in the East, but rather reinforces it.’35 Thus the historian pondered his personal culpability while offering collective redemption to ‘most’ Germans. As one of the leading World War II historians in the West, and not only during the Historikerstreit of 1986–87 in which he fought a bitter battle against his denunciation as ‘constitutional Nazi’ (R. Augstein), Hillgruber sought to influence current political debates. After Helmut Kohl’s ‘conservative turn’ of the early 1980s had revived the debate about the former German territories in  the East, Hillgruber forcefully denounced any revisionist claims by pointing to the irreparable damage German expansionism had done in much of Europe.36 In spite of his personal ties to Eastern Prussia and his stubborn sympathy for the ‘tragic’ predicament of the retreating Wehrmacht, expressed most explicitly in his infamous Zweierlei Untergang (1986),37 he came to accept the legacies of total defeat. He publicly denounced nationalist revisionism, defended the Federal Republic’s liberal democracy as well as the geopolitical

72  Christina Morina status quo, and thus played his part in de-radicalizing the German Right. It was the difficult but thorough historical, political and personal reckoning of conservative intellectuals such as Hillgruber that vitally contributed to the ‘recivilizing’ of (West) German society as a whole.38 Much more prosaic are the scattered references in Manfred Messerschmidt’s opus magnum, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat (1969),39 which examined the indoctrination of the German armed forces by a ‘brilliant’ yet evil Nazi propaganda apparatus. Few other books have contributed as much to the dismantling of the ‘myth of the clean Wehrmacht’ as this one, and to this day it is considered an outstanding example of critical Wehrmacht historiography even though some of its most fundamental claims are based exclusively on personal reminiscences.40 Messerschmidt witnessed, according to several autobiographical accounts, the end of the war as an 18-year-old member of the Wehrmacht’s anti-aircraft auxiliary forces. He survived only because his ‘stupidity’ served as his ‘guardian angel’, and he was lucky enough to be captured by the ­Americans and not the Soviets. Raised in a left-leaning foster home, Messerschmidt kept a greater inner distance from the Nazi regime than Hillgruber, let alone Erdmann. Not surprisingly, he depicts his historiographical work as the professional mastering of a critical youth in which Nazi Germany’s final defeat was foreseen all along as the logic outcome of a monstrous attack on humanity.41 The most noteworthy achievement of Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat was that Messerschmidt provided irrefutable evidence of the successful National Socialist ‘seizure of the Wehrmacht’ and the far-reaching cooperation between Nazi and military leaders. He portrayed the men in charge of Wehrmacht high command (OKW) as willing executioners of a ‘totalitarian education programme’ that aimed at the mythical stylization of Hitler and, as the war dragged on, resorted to increasingly irrational ‘Illusionsmacherei’ [fabrication of illusions]. To Messerschmidt, the key reason for this fully fledged cooperation was that the military leaders agreed, at least partially, with the basic tenets of the Nazis’ domestic and foreign policy agenda, and he cites dozens of documents in support of this thesis. Few of the officers, particularly the older ones, he further argued, had the critical, non-conformist ability to question the ­Nazis’ ‘masterly’ rhetoric and ‘propagandistic refinement’.42 Even though the book’s narrative expounds a top-down perspective based on military and propaganda ministry sources, the author repeatedly raises the question regarding what rank-and-file soldiers actually made of the political ‘education’ they received. While the propaganda’s ‘penetrative power’ [‘Durchschlagskraft’] was difficult to measure, presumably, he argued, reactions ranged from ‘agreement to rejection’. Yet, only ‘fanatics or fools’ believed the delusional ‘sterile propaganda’ of the final months. Messerschmidt provides no written evidence for these claims. Instead, they seem to reflect his personal experiences as a rank-and-file soldier on the Eastern Front. Like Hillgruber, he would place them in footnotes, where he placed the most explicit autobiographically inspired judgements. One striking example is Messerschmidt’s claim that it seems impossible to gain ‘an even approximately correct picture’ of how strictly the OKW’s propaganda instructions were followed on the unit

Of Triumph and Defeat  73 level: ‘There were units, even among the reserve forces, in which the soldier hardly knew of all these things.’ The sentence bears footnote no. 1132, which reads, ‘The author has experienced this himself in a reserve battalion in the year of 1944.’43 On balance, the narrative of war unfolding in Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat offers a still plausible assessment of the OKW’s proactive role in the ideologically driven war of extermination, particularly on the Eastern Front. Even if it downplayed individual soldiers’ ideological zeal and criminal conduct, it paved the way for future studies on the complicity of the German army in the crimes of the SS. Read closely, it reveals a genuine, very personal effort to understand why millions of German soldiers kept fighting for – and millions of German civilians kept acquiescing in – a cause that proved increasingly self-destructive and brought ever-more visible horrors to the Nazi-occupied territories. Yet, unlike Hillgruber, Messerschmidt refused to identify with the ‘tragic’ fate of the retreating German army. Instead he insisted that, from a German perspective, only the fate of the civilian population in the East deserved to be characterized as tragic. Their sufferings, like those of the non-German populations, were first and foremost the result of the OKW’s unrelenting commitment to fighting a ‘total war’ to its end, whatever the cost.44

A Survivor’s Tale: Allied Bombings and the Struggle for Socialism in the GDR This position also included an unequivocal condemnation of the bombing of German cities as the consequence not of Soviet or Allied war crimes but of Hitler’s hubris. This was the central subject of the work of Olaf Groehler, one of the GDR’s most prominent historians. Groehler reluctantly praised the merits of Messerschmidt’s critical studies of the Wehrmacht, even if such acknowledgement irritated his Manichean worldview.45 At the same time, he employed entirely different moral, political and intellectual standards to his World War II scholarship. Groehler was one of the most influential historians at the GDR’s Academy of Sciences. He published a plethora of academic as well as popular accounts on the history of aerial warfare and World War II. He regularly appeared on television and radio and reached an audience who shared his fascination with everything military – a peculiar arena of ‘public’ history in view of the SED’s declared antifascist pacifism. Moreover, as we now know, Groehler cooperated closely with the Ministry of State Security (MfS), first as a student at Humboldt University in the 1950s and again from the mid-1970s until 1989 at the Academy of Sciences. There he was ‘shielding’ the Central Institute for History not only from ideological subversion from within but also providing expertise and background information on West German historians and historiographical debates to the MfS’s counter-intelligence division. In return, he was one of the few GDR historians allowed to travel frequently to the West to visit archives in Freiburg and Koblenz, which gained him access to sources most of his East German colleagues had no way of ever seeing.46

74  Christina Morina Due to the collective nature of scholarship in East Germany, genuinely personal reminiscences were the absolute exception. Aside from ideologically framed pronouncements such as the ones cited above by Doernberg, autobiographical subtexts are much more difficult to decipher.47 It is thus not surprising that one of the most intriguing examples originates from the period around 1989. Groehler, who has written thousands of pages on World War II history in the GDR, waited until the fall of the wall to add to his opus magnum Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland (1990),48 a preface recalling his childhood experiences in the air-raid shelters of Berlin in 1944–45. Perhaps, even though he had supported the socialist republic to the last, he expressed a sense of personal liberation by addressing his war memories as a ten-year-old boy. Be that as it may, the relevant passage in the book’s preface reads as follows: The trouble with books is sometimes the same as the trouble with kids: one grows most attached to those who need the longest and most intensive care. The same is true for this book, which is based on a part of its author’s life story; to whom the bombing nights were a decisive childhood experience, with which one had to come to terms with sooner or later. In accordance with the profession of the author, this reflective process is unfolded in the form of a historical documentation to neutralize subjectivity without, however, seeking to deny this personal involvement.49 Ever since its publication shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Groehler’s Bombenkrieg is considered the first comprehensive account of the impact of the Allied bombings on German society. This is a debatable assessment, since the military, political and technical aspects of the air war by far outweigh the passages on the everyday life and responses of the civilian population.50 Perhaps the praise for the book is more a reflection of a (West German) desire to count at least one East German historical work among the ‘50 classics’ of post-war contemporary historiography, rather than of its actual merits. It is nonetheless debatable because in Bombenkrieg, Groehler stuck to the paradigm he had developed in his previous monograph on the history of air warfare, published in 1981. He still saw the Western Allies’ aerial policy during World War II as part of an ‘inhumane […] strategy of exhaustion of the most reactionary circles of world imperialism’. 51 Only within the anti-Hitler coalition in 1943–44 was he willing to view their bombing of German cities as contribution to a justified war effort. Even if Groehler now refrained from castigating Allied bombings as an ‘expression of the fundamental barbarity of imperialism’, he still maintained that they followed a ‘strategy of mass murder’, created a ‘gigantic work of extermination’, yet failed to achieve their primary goal: the collapse of Hitler’s home front.52 Groehler’s actual account contains very few explicit references to the eyewitness perspective he articulates in the preface, but the sections on civilian experiences and responses are indeed the most vivid and memorable ones. Each chapter follows the same narrative pattern, starting with the Allies’ planning, their strategic and tactical considerations, followed by the technical

Of Triumph and Defeat  75 aspects of every mission, the number of deployed planes, bombs dropped and Allied casualties, the extent of material destruction, German civilian victims and finally the propagandist and practical counter-measures of the German authorities. In principle, Groehler considered the German (industrial) cities attacked by British and American bombers as illegitimate civilian targets and the cities bombed by the Soviets in the Eastern parts of Germany as legitimate military ones. In addition, the book, intended to reach a wider audience, contains graphic photo material depicting the human costs of the air war as well as statistical tables and drawings of war planes. The most remarkable sections are those that, arguably, reflect the personal childhood memories of the author. There is a scene depicting a surviving mother and child leaving the air-shelter (‘burial chamber’), struck by sheer terror; there are children running through the streets of Berlin after an airraid, ‘inspecting the destruction on sightseeing trips’, carrying home splinters as souvenirs; and there is the penetrating depiction of the moment when the sirens signalled the next air-raid: only an eyewitness, Groehler writes, knows the ‘frightening sound’ of the sirens, their ‘unexpected howls suddenly awaking long buried memories’.53 Hence, this was not only a book about military warfare and the madness of imperialism but also about ordinary Germans as mere victims. Tired of war since 1942, Groehler claimed, they were preoccupied with the daily battle for survival and entirely incapable of passive, let alone active resistance. Like Messerschmidt, he doubted the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda and instead stressed the tragic heroism with which the people of Hamburg and Dresden rushed to put out fire after fire. To Groehler, the ultimate lesson of World War II was to prevent the resurrection of fascism, for it would plunge the world into in a third, very likely nuclear world war. Yet, his unwavering commitment to the SED and its socialist project in fact made Groehler a staunch supporter of the second dictatorship on German soil. The reunification of Germany had initially promised him a new start, but it proved impossible to justify this commitment retrospectively. The moving war narrative in Bombenkrieg and his expertise on air warfare probably would have secured Groehler a position within the new historical establishment after 1989. However, he concealed a large part of his activities for the SED’s state security apparatus, and when the full extent of his abuse of power became known in 1992/93, he lost his job at the newly established Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam – and along with it all prospects of continuing his historical work from a position of influence.54

Echoes of a Shared Past: War Narratives in Divided Germany Confident and rarely troubled by the intellectual costs of an overtly political commitment, the five protagonists of this chapter saw themselves as ‘political historians’. In the context of shifting Cold War tensions, their works must

76  Christina Morina be understood as intellectual interventions in broader political and societal discourses about the past, its legacies, ‘lessons’ and relevance for the political systems to be upheld in the present. The questions these historians explored, and the narratives they composed to explore the origins, history and consequences of World War II, depended to a significant degree on the biographical and political context from which they emerged. Often, the individual perspective corresponded quite literally with their personal circumstances and whereabouts during the last weeks of the war. The reasons why historians choose a certain field of study and political alignment are rather complex, but the specific front experiences across Nazi-occupied Europe, imprisonment by Allied or Soviet forces and survival of the air war in the shelters of Berlin in a certain sense foreshadowed a later orientation towards the liberal reconstruction in the West or the socialist experiment in the East. The history of historiography should concern itself with the many contexts that shape historical writing. In doing so, it has to offer much more than a Nabelschau of an overly self-conscious profession or a mere documentation of historiographical ‘progress’. As the case of World War II historiography in postwar Germany illustrates, the two dominant narratives of triumph and defeat, and their social resonance and relevance, depended heavily on the way individual historians mastered their lives within broader, often extremely violent collective ‘realms of experience’, as Reinhardt Koselleck termed it. As mutually influential echoes of a shared past, these narratives offer a distinct vantage point from which to write an ‘integrated’55 history of post-war Germany – a war-torn, fractured yet entwined cultural landscape of which historians were not the least intriguing inhabitants.

Notes 1 See his programmatic text, A. Hillgruber, ‘Politische Geschichte in moderner Sicht’, Historische Zeitschrift, 1973, vol. 216, 529–52. 2 E. Jäckel, ‘Vom Kampf des Urteils gegen das Vorurteil: Andreas Hillgruber zu ­Ehren’, in J. Dülffer, B. Martin and G. Wollstein (eds.), Deutschland in Europa: Kontinuität und Bruch: Gedenkschrift für Andreas Hillgruber zu seinem 65. ­Geburtstag, Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1990, pp. 11–17. 3 N. Elias and S. Quilley, Involvement and Detachment: The Collected Works of ­Norbert Elias, vol. 8, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007. On the notion of being ‘implicated’ in a ‘perpetrator culture’ see M. Rothberg, ‘Multidirectional memory and the implicated subject: on Sebald and Kentridge’, in L. Plate and A.  Smelik (eds.), Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, New York: Routledge, 2013, pp. 39–58, esp. pp. 40–1. 4 The findings presented here derive from a collaborative research project exploring the nexus between biography and historiography among historians in divided Germany and their relations during the Cold War. See F. Maubach and C. Morina (eds.), Das 20. Jahrhundert erzählen: Zeiterfahrung und Zeiterforschung im geteilten Deutschland, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016. 5 J. Bourke, ‘Introduction: “remembering” war’, special issue, Journal of Contemporary History, 2004, vol. 39, 473–85, as well as the essays gathered in that special issue.

Of Triumph and Defeat  77 6 See the Introduction to this volume. 7 J. Eckel, Hans Rothfels: Eine intellektuelle Biographie im 20. Jahrhundert, Moderne Zeit 10, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005, p. 16. See further on the orienting function and experiential dimension of historiography J. Rüsen, Grundzüge einer Historik, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986, esp. p. 12; R. Koselleck, ‘Transformations of experience and methodological change: a historical-anthropological essay’, in R. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. T. Presner, K. Behnke and J. Welge, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 45–83; K. Latzel, ‘Vom Kriegserlebnis zur Kriegserfahrung: theoretische und methodische Überlegungen zur erfahrungsgeschichtlichen Untersuchung von Feldpostbriefen’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 1997, vol. 56(1), 1–30. 8 Regarding the German case, see, for example, the debate surrounding N ­ icolas Berg’s book Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und ­Erinnerung, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003 (published in English as The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Writing and Autobiographical Memory, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). On the ensuing debate see N. Frei (ed.), Martin Broszat, der ‘Staat Hitlers’ und die Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007. 9 From the vast literature, studies covering both Germanys are of particular interest here, for example J. Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999; K. Neumann, Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003; M. Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007; C. Morina, Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 10 See M. Geyer, ‘The place of the Second World War in German memory and history’, New German Critique, 1997, vol. 71, 5–40. Geyer characterizes as ‘the stigma of violence […] the mark of those who did the killing’ to describe the mass murderers’ inescapable predicament. He contends that the ‘German experience of mass death’ is ‘filtered and concentrated through this mark of the murderer as through a prism – irrespective of who actually committed the atrocity’ (p. 10). On the potentials and challenges of an approach comparing a pluralist and a largely monolithic historiography and memorial culture, see Maubach and Morina (eds.), Das 20. Jahrhundert erzählen, pp. 7–31. 11 J. Herf, ‘Hegelianische Momente: Gewinner und Verlierer in der ostdeutschen ­Erinnerung an Krieg, Diktatur und Holocaust’, in C. Cornelißen, L. Klinkhammer and W. Schwenkter (eds.), Erinnerungskulturen: Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003, pp. 198–209. 12 See also for example J.B. Olsen, Tailoring Truth, Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945–1990, New York: Berghahn, 2015; and A. ­Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth: Historical Mythology and Youth Propaganda in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1989, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. 13 R.G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001; see further, for example, N. Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. For a detailed analysis of both narratives, see C. Morina, ‘Triumph und Demütigung. Der Zweite Weltkrieg in der doppelten deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung’, in Maubach and Morina (eds.), Das 20. Jahrhundert erzählen, pp. 190–244. 14 For a broader perspective on attempts at legitimizing the nation through historical writing, see S. Berger, M. Donovan and K. Passmore (eds.), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800, London: Routledge, 1999.

78  Christina Morina 15 See for details, Morina, Legacies of Stalingrad. Comparative studies in English on the memory of war in post-war Germany are still rare. For a recent perspective, a combined reading of the essays by A. Schildt and D. Wierling, in J. Echternkamp and S. Martens (eds.), Experience and Memory: The Second World War in Europe, New York: Berghahn, 2013, chapters 13 and 14, is perhaps the most useful. 16 K.D. Erdmann, Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte Bd. 4: Die Zeit der Weltkriege, Stuttgart: Union, 1959. 17 S. Doernberg (ed.), Der zweite Weltkrieg 1939–1945: Wirklichkeit und Fälschung, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1959. In the first decades of the GDR, the ‘second’ in ‘Second World War’ was not capitalized, in order to stress the continuities of two global wars launched subsequently by German imperialism. 18 Erdmann, Die Zeit der Weltkriege, pp. 85–91. One of the mentioned critics was F. Klein, ‘Rezension Bruno Gebhardt: Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, Bd. IV: die Zeit der Weltkriege, von Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Stuttgart 1959’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 1961, vol. 9, 222–7, quotation on p. 222. 19 M. Messerschmidt, ‘Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Walter Bußmann und Percy Ernst Schramm: Historiker an der Front und in den Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht und des Heeres’, in H. Lehmann (ed.), Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, Bd. 1 Fächer – Milieus – Karrieren, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004, pp. 417–46, p. 420. 20 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, NL Erdmann N 1393, Nr. 416, Kriegstagebuch, entry 14 March 1940. 21 Ibid., entry 22 June 1941. 22 Erdmann, Die Zeit der Weltkriege, p. 277. 23 Citations from W. Leonhard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, Cologne: ­Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1992, p. 288; and from S. Doernberg, ‘Als Berliner Jude in der Roten Armee: Anmerkungen zum 8. Mai 1945 aus persönlicher Sicht’, in Neues Deutschland, 8 May 2010, Supplement. 24 S. Doernberg, Fronteinsatz: Erinnerungen eines Rotarmisten, Historikers und Botschafters, Berlin: Edition Ost, 2004. 25 S. Doernberg and Kommission der Historiker der DDR und der UDSSR (eds.), Der zweite Weltkrieg: 1939–1945, Wirklichkeit und Fälschung, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1959, p. v. 26 Doernberg and Kommission der Historikers (eds.), Der zweite Weltkrieg, pp. v–viii; Doernberg, Fronteinsatz, p. 5. 27 S. Doernberg, ‘Für eine marxistisch-leninistische Erforschung und Darstellung der Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges und seiner Lehren’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 1959, vol. 1, 271–81, quotation from p. 281. 28 See the examples discussed in Morina, ‘Triumph und Demütigung’, pp. 202, 217–20, 235–8; with a focus on the Western part of the story, see A.M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 29 C. Epstein, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and their Century, ­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 30 This rich scholarship is best reflected in the two-part ninth volume of J.  ­Echternkamp (ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg: Die deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939–1945, Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2004–5. On the notion of ‘political historians’, see J. Dülffer, ‘Politische Geschichtsschreibung der ’45er-Generation’, in C. Cornelißen (ed.), Geschichtswissenschaft im Geist der Demokratie: Wolfgang J. Mommsen und seine Generation, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010, pp. 45–60. 31 A. Hillgruber, ‘Erwiderung auf die Laudatio Theodor Schieders in der 280. Sitzung am 14.12.1983’, in Jahrbuch 1983 der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der ­Wissenschaften, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984, pp. 84–6, quotation on p.

Of Triumph and Defeat  79 85. See also his autobiographical account of his time as a POW, cited in J. Dülffer, Wir haben schwere Zeiten hinter uns: die Kölner Region zwischen Krieg und Nachkriegszeit, Cologne: SH-Verlag, 1996, pp. 21–43. 32 A. Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegsführung 1940–1941, Frankfurt am Main: Bernard & Graefe, 1965. 33 Quoted from Hillgruber’s conception of a history of World War II (1969), cited in R. Wohlfeil, ‘Militärgeschichte: zu Geschichte und Problemen einer Disziplin der Geschichtswissenschaft (1952–1967) ’, in Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 1993, vol. 52, 323, emphasis in original. 34 Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie, pp. 13–24, 58, 273. His main conclusion was that prior to the attack against the Soviet Union, a number of ‘political and military ‘alternatives’ had existed, that targeted interventions such as the British blocking of ­Germany’s access to Scandinavian raw materials could have prevented the expansion of the war into a global conflict. Yet, with ‘Operation Barbarossa’, Hitler started a new kind of war, an ‘ideological war of extermination’ based on irrational objectives, thus leading inadvertently to a dynamic total war and ‘certain annihilation’ (ibid., pp. 16, 55, 441). 35 Ibid., p. 517, note 3. 36 See for example his conversation with Helmut Kohl, ‘Selbstbestimmung – wie jedes Volk der Erde’, in Die Welt, 1 October 1986, p. 6, and further evidence in Morina, ‘Triumph und Demütigung,’, pp. 203–10. On the historians’ debate and its context, see C.S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and ­German National Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998; on the role of Hillgruber and his Zweierlei Untergang in particular, see J. Dülffer, ‘Genozid und Deutsches Reich. Was bleibt von Hillgrubers Rolle im “Historikerstreit”?’, in J.  Danyel (ed.), 50 Klassiker der Zeitgeschichte, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007, pp. 187–91. 37 A. Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen, Berlin: Siedler, 1986. 38 K.H. Jarausch, Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 39 M. Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat: Zeit der Indoktrination, Hamburg: R. v. Decker, 1969. 40 On its status as a ‘classic’ of German Zeitgeschichte, see M. Koch, ‘Unbequeme Wahrheiten. Manfred Messerschmidts Studie zur “Nazifizierung” der Wehrmacht’, in Danyel (ed.), 50 Klassiker, pp. 123–6. 41 See, for example, the most recent autobiographical text, M. Messerschmidt, ‘Typische und untypische Kriegserlebnisse im Ruhrgebiet’, in A. Neven (ed.), Jahrgang 1926/27: Erinnerungen an die Jahre unter dem Hakenkreuz, Cologne: DuMont, 2007, pp. 159–66; for a detailed analysis, see Morina, ‘Triumph und Demütigung’, pp. 220–4. 42 Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht, pp. 10–17, 53, 333–46. 43 Ibid., p. 334. Other examples can be found on p. 353. 44 M. Messerschmidt, ‘Die Wehrmacht in der Endphase’, in H. Ehlert, A. Lang, B. Wegner and M. Messerschmidt (eds), Militarismus, Vernichtungskrieg, Geschichtspolitik, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006, p. 286. 45 See his review of Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat, in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 1971, vol. 19, 1305–7. 46 For a detailed analysis of his cooperation with the MfS see Morina, ‘Triumph und Demütigung’, pp. 233–1, for a broader assessment, B. von Benda-Beckmann, A  German Catastrophe? German Historians and the Allied Bombing, 1945–2010, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010, pp. 215–69. 47 See my discussion of Dietrich Eichholtz’s work in Morina, ‘Triumph’, pp. 212–20. 48 O. Groehler, Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1990.

80  Christina Morina 49 Ibid., p. 6. 50 N. Kramer, ‘Die deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft im Visier: Olaf Groehlers Klassiker der Luftkriegsforschung’, in Danyel (ed.), 50 Klassiker, pp. 209–12. 51 O. Groehler, Geschichte des Luftkrieges 1910 bis 1980, Berlin: Militärverlag, 1981, p. 377. 52 Groehler, Bombenkrieg, pp. 14, 74–8, 450. 53 Ibid., pp. 114, 160–73, 230, 304. 54 On these events see K. Thijs, ‘Geschichte im Umbruch. Lebenserfahrung und Historiker-Begegnungen nach 1989’, in Maubach and Morina, Das 20. Jahrhundert erzählen, pp. 432–45; Morina, ‘Triumph’, pp. 233–41. 55 See C. Kleßmann and M. Sabrow,‘Contemporary history in Germany after 1989’, Contemporary European History, 1997, vol. 6(2), 219–43; C. Kleßmann and P. Lautzas, Teilung und Integration: die doppelte deutsche Nachkriegsgeschichte als wissenschaftliches und didaktisches Problem, Schwalbach: Wochenschau, 2006.

6 The Imagery of War Screening the Battlefield in the Twentieth Century Frank van Vree

The Power of the Visual Image ‘A truly immersive cinematic experience’, wrote one critic about Christopher Nolan’s historical epic Dunkirk: ‘a war movie like no other, a gripping, edgeof-your-seat thriller that doesn’t give you a moment to catch your breath’.1 Through three distinct, yet connected, perspectives – from the land, the sea and the air – the film creates a terrifying picture of the desperate situation of the British and French troops on the beaches near Dunkirk during the Battle of France in late May–early June 1940. Trapped by the German army, whose Panzer tanks are waiting in vain for orders from Hitler to launch a full-scale attack, every single soldier feels he is a potential target of German fighter and bomber planes, seeking to maximize human losses. And so does the spectator. Although the film’s main characters stay flat, and as little dialogue as possible is used, Dunkirk manages to keep its audience engaged and filled with intense suspense, by its sheer cinematography, and by music. Especially the scenes of the Stuka dive bombers attacking the horrified uniformed boys, barely out of their teens, desperately waiting for their evacuation from the shoreline, are heart-wrenching. Through its overwhelming sounds and images, and the numerous close-ups of faces and bodies, the film obtains a transfixing quality, fulfilling its audience with amazement, awe and terror – while, at the same time, it manages to create a sense of recognition, as some veterans commented: ‘Being that long ago, it had died with the memory. But when I saw the film, I was brought back.’2 Dunkirk, released in 2017, became a huge box office success, in Britain as well as elsewhere, and ranked number four on the list of ‘Best war movies of all time’ on the popular website Rotten Tomatoes a year later – an indication of the persistence of the memories of the unprecedented violence, warfare and destruction the world witnessed in the twentieth century.3 That is hardly surprising, since our world is submerged in a sea of signs that refer to these events: memorials, ceremonies, political speeches, novels and movies, stories told at family gatherings, written memories, scholarly studies, conferences and schoolbooks. From that perspective one might say that we ‘know’ about these events, that we are aware of the atrocities, the horror and the pain, the fear and the sorrow, the experiences of the victims and, albeit far less, of the perpetrators.

82  Frank van Vree At the same time, we may raise the question what ‘knowing’ exactly means here. What do we ‘really’ know? Is this ‘knowing’ more than a mental action of acquiring factual or logical knowledge, or does this ‘knowing’ also include feelings, emotions and sensations? ‘Our awareness of what “war” is and of what any specific war was in the past century is closely linked to records which were made then’, according to Pierre Sorlin, one of the first historians to acknowledge fully the importance of film for the study of the past. There are events that we experience immediately and events that we cannot apprehend but indirectly. When we deal with practical things, food or clothes, the words we use have a well-shaped significance but there is a fringe of meaning around other notions which is more akin to mental images or impressions than to defined concepts. Such is the case of ‘war’.4 This lack of understanding from experience with regard to what ‘war’ is applies even more to the notion of fighting on the battlefield. Moving images – not only original footage and newsreels but also television documentaries and feature films, often produced many years after the actual historical events – offer us, as audience, a glimpse of what actually happened, or, more accurately, an idea of what might have happened. They do so, because we recognize these pictures as ‘truthful images’: films like Dunkirk stand firmly in cinematographic traditions, not only in terms of narrative and emplotment, but also of visual representation and sound, which gives them a sense of naturalness and familiarity, and makes them suitable to serve as vehicles of moral and political meaning. And that is the subject of this chapter: the imagery of the battlefield, especially of the First and Second World Wars, in popular cinema of the twentieth century, imagery understood as pertaining to its visual, poetic and auditory qualities. It aims to uncover various aspects of the complex relationship between history, memory and visual media, by tracing some major patterns in the representation and narrativization of the wars of the twentieth century, from the British propaganda documentaries of the First World War to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). In doing so, we shall pay particular attention to the seminal film by Lewis Milestone, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). This chapter touches upon what may be called a ‘genealogy of the representation of modern warfare’, from the awareness that, to a great extent, the mental images of this violent past – including those of historians – are moulded and sustained, to this very day, by documentaries, feature films, television programmes and photography.

Outlining a Genre When talking about the imagery of twentieth-century war and barbarism, we may discern three major themes: 1) war and violence as experienced by civilians exposed to bombardments, destruction and terror; 2) war as experienced

The Imagery of War  83 by soldiers, particularly on the battlefield – the main subject of this chapter; and 3) genocidal violence, including the Shoah. Around these three themes various cinematographic genres have emerged – a ‘genre’ understood as a set of recognizable aesthetic conventions, devices and structures, a set of formal markers, which is open to change but nevertheless determines the way audiences perceive and interpret films they are watching. (Classification according to genre is, not unimportantly, also a way to get the public to go to the cinema or to purchase a copy on DVD or streaming.) The emergence of these cinematographic genres has led, in turn, to academic research. That goes particularly for the genre of Shoah or Holocaust cinema, which has been extensively mapped and documented, among others by Annette Insdorf in her comprehensive study on the filmic representation of the persecution of the Jews and other victims of Nazi racism, Indelible Shadows.5 The growing academic interest in the vast corpus of films and documentaries on the Nazi genocide is reflected in new research fields, focusing upon various sub-genres, unravelling historiographic and cinematographic traditions, with specific themes, conventions, narrative structures and iconography. With regard to the filmic representation of the battlefield, however, less work has been done so far, apart from The World War II Combat Film by Jeanine Basinger, a lone, pathbreaking study, dealing, however, exclusively with ­American movies since 1940.6 Nevertheless, it is not difficult to distinguish at least the contours of what a more inclusive description of the genre of battlefield or combat films may look like. The starting point of such an enterprise would be defining the main subject of these films: the actual fighting between opposing military forces in warfare, meant to weaken, establish dominance over or kill the opposing force, to take positions or to drive the opposing force away from a location where it is not wanted or needed, mainly from the perspective of the combatants. Or, briefly, in theoretical terms: combat as the interface between the policy behind the strategic objectives, and the target of this policy.7 Surveying the very large number of films that more or less meet this definition, going back in time from Dunkirk, one arrives, via classics like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and Andrzej Wajda’s Kanał (1956) – just to mention a few – at Lewis Milestone’s legendary movie All Quiet on the Western Front, released in 1930. Based on the internationally acclaimed anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues, written by Erich Maria Remarque (a German veteran of World War I) and published in 1929, it is the only film from these decades that still ranks high on various lists of best war films.8 Searching the web for cross-references, one is struck by the number of later films that are, in one way or another, connected to Milestone’s work, be it for its visual representations, acoustic effects, narrative structure or moral and political meaning. All Quiet on the Western Front was recognized right away as an epic masterwork, because of its storyline as well as its imagery. It was lauded as a ‘harrowing, gruesome, morbid tale of war, so compelling in its realism, bigness and repulsiveness’, for instance by the magazine Variety in 1930. The League of

84  Frank van Vree

Figure 6.1  All Quiet on the Western Front, poster of the rerelease by Realart, 1950. However, Realart reduced its length from approximately 150 to 103 minutes, thus excising more than 30 per cent of its original running time. For decades, this was the only print available to the public (Realart/Universal Pictures).

Nations could make no better investment than to distribute as many copies as possible, ‘until the word “war” is taken out of the dictionaries’.9 For the same reason, however, it was widely banned, not only by authoritarian regimes, but also – at least for some years – in some democratic countries. Choosing the perspective of ordinary soldiers, struggling with extreme physical and mental stress as well as the problems they faced returning home from the front, it comprehensively depicted the bitter truths about the fate of young men going to war. Milestone managed to put the viewer into the middle of a battlefield, by effectively employing not only the recently introduced sound technique but also other new technological devices and effects, such as faster and mobile cameras and pyrotechnics. By its innovative and dynamic imagery, the now famous battle scenes and the moving narrative, the film succeeded in taking its spectators along with it. To this very day Milestone’s film functions as a reference point for many critics and spectators, much as it did for directors Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan, as it had for Milestone’s contemporaries, like the outstanding French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author Jean Renoir, when he made his own anti-war film, La Grande illusion (1937). In the midst of the turmoil of the late 1930s, with Germany and Italy glorifying war, Renoir decided to avoid showing ‘war-is-hell’ fighting in his still

The Imagery of War  85 highly valued movie. As a pacifist and former soldier, he felt that All Quiet on the Western Front was the only film that gave a true picture of the men who did the fighting. ‘Either the drama never got out of the mud, which was an exaggeration, or else the war was made into a kind of operetta.’10 In short, in the genealogy of the battlefield film All Quiet on the Western Front obviously occupies a seminal position – as we will argue below.

Early War Films All Quiet on the Western Front did not appear out of thin air. Milestone was building upon visual traditions that had developed since the early years of the cinema in the late nineteenth century, and, further back in time, the imagery of war in painting, drawing, sculpture and photography. Most of these had been heroic representations, especially in the genre of history painting, as everybody knows from museum visits and exhibitions.11 But there has always been a more critical tradition as well, works depicting the horrors of war, such as drawings and copperplates from the Thirty Years’ War, like the famous series by Jacques Callot, Les Grandes misères de la guerre (1633). The series shows soldiers pillaging and burning towns and buildings, and how they are punished by their own superiors or hanged and lynched by the enemy – as the etching La Pendaison (The Hanging, Figure 6.2) shows. And of course there is Los Desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War), created between 1810 and 1820 by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya, a cycle of 82 etchings depicting the horrors that resulted from the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. Both heroism and misery are thus thematized throughout the history of war imagery, also with regard to the American Civil War, showing glorious

Figure 6.2  J acques Callot, The Hanging. Scene from the series of etchings, Grandes misères de la guerre, 1633. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Prints_in_the_Art_Gallery_of_New_South_Wales?uselang=nl#/ media/File:The_Hanging_by_Jacques_Callot.jpg (public domain).

86  Frank van Vree

Figure 6.3  Confederate soldiers dead, at Rose Woods in Gettysburg, PA. Photograph attributed to Alexander Gardner, 5 July 1863.  Library of Congress.

battle scenes but also, in photography – then a brand-new medium – the bitter consequences of the battle, as in the two-volume work by Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866, see Figure 6.3). As early cinema – from the very beginning – was to cover ‘real life’, creating a deep sense of capturing reality through showing action – differently from photography – war appeared to be a suitable subject for the short silent film about actual events. As early as 1898, some so-called ‘Actualities’ (after the French term actualité) were devoted to the Spanish-American War, such as US Infantry Supported by Rough Riders at El Caney, a short clip from the ­Edison Collection of early motion pictures and sound recordings at the Library of Congress.12 The picture shows a detachment of infantry, firing, advancing, kneeling and firing, followed by a troop of Rough Riders, galloping like devils, yelling and firing revolvers; other troops follow in quick succession, pressing on to the front. Scenes like these fit perfectly into what film historian Tom Gunning referred to as ‘a cinema of attractions’. According to Gunning, cinema prior to 1906 – unlike contemporary narrative cinema, which solicits a voyeuristic spectatorial gaze – is exhibitionist by nature, overtly acknowledging and inviting the spectator to look. ‘It is the direct address of the audience, in which an attraction is offered to the spectator by a cinema showman, that defines this approach to film making.’13 Filmmakers showed a strong determination to be as realistic as possible, as also becomes clear from the actualities that were made about the Boer War during the same years. To meet this standard, staging and faking were considered to be respectable: so Edison’s films on the Boer War were all shot in New Jersey. Manipulation of images, collaging,

The Imagery of War  87 staging – everything seemed permissible, in order to create what was nevertheless seen as factual, as genuine.14 Over the decades to come, cinema gradually introduced more narrative and fictional elements, while its subjects became more varied, thanks to new cinematographic technologies. Factuality and genuinity – a term that implies not only authenticity, but also a notion of truth – constituted the leading ambitions of the cameramen and directors reporting from the killing fields of the First World War. Among them were Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell, who, commissioned by the British government, made the famous propagandistic documentary The Battle of the Somme (1916), depicting the British army’s preparations for and the early stages of the Battle of the Somme. Malins and McDowell intended to show ‘death in all its grim nakedness’, so that the audience at home could better relate to what their loved ones saw or felt.15 Although the film – its length was 77 minutes – would be experienced as extremely tedious by today’s audiences, The Battle of the Somme was a huge success when it was launched in the summer of 1916, while the battle was still in full force. In Britain alone about 20 million tickets were sold in the first six weeks of release – that is to say, half the British population; it was to be distributed in 18 other countries. The film presented a gruesome, graphic image of the battles, or, more specifically, of the trench warfare, showing – ­although at a certain distance – dead and wounded British and German soldiers. These images were the clearest, most vivid pictures of war people at home had ever seen – and the closest depiction of a soldier’s individual experience. They enabled, according to Pierre Sorlin, ‘spectators to see an imitation of life, to observe, for instance, an artillery fire or an infantry attack’.16

Figure 6.4   ‘The Battle of the Somme’, from The Evening Post (Wellington, New ­Zealand), 12 October 1916.

88  Frank van Vree The impact was overwhelming, not to say devastating, due to the fact that the images were delivered without comment from the filmmakers, who even in the case of war propaganda strictly adhered to what they considered to be an objective, factual report, be it through highly evocative images. So the film followed the battle chronologically, from preparing the supplies and recruiting soldiers to the battle and its after-effects, and this ‘visual record was left to speak for itself’. But instead of getting a thorough, accurate idea of war, as the filmmakers envisaged, the audiences appeared to be horrified, not able to connect to the protagonists through a humanizing narrative, according to film historian Nicholas Reeves.17 They were caught between what was presented as ‘glorious achievements’ and the vivid, gruesome images of soldiers, many of whom might even be recognized by friends and relatives.18 The Battle of the Somme thus turned into a clear-cut narrative of senseless killing and military jargon, generating ‘myriad interviews and newspaper reports depicting the visceral, somatic effect’ the film had on its audience, describing it as ‘a horrifying yet profound, even spiritual, spectatorial experience’.19 To quote Sorlin again: ‘The emptiness of the shots gives them an impact, an intensity that tends to overwhelm the spectator and to make us feel we have been caught up in some vast, impersonal, meaningless disaster.’20 This is not to say that The Battle of the Somme really opened up the reality of the battlefield. Just like other media of that time, it continued to conceal the most cruel and shocking images from the public’s eyes, such as photographs of the victims of poison gas, or detailed images of unburied and mutilated bodies, or photographs of corpses blown into trees. Such images were virtually absent in the public domain, apart from rare books like Krieg dem Kriege by Ernst Friedrich, published for the first time in 1924 with text and captions

Figure 6.5  S  oldiers going over the top and through the barbed wire to attack the ­Germans during the first day of battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. Still from the film Battle of the Somme (1916).

The Imagery of War  89 in four languages. From this perspective the vast majority of images of war, circulating publicly for decades, were ‘neither true nor false’. ‘They were partial and limited’, according to Sorlin, and should be considered as stereotypes, ‘not because they lie but because they restrict the memory of war to a few recurring themes’. Some images of trenches and fortifications were repeated over and over to draw out a naturalizing effect on the audience. In other words, the war movies tended to become a familiar series of stereotypes, breeding a new lack of interest or even contempt.21

War Stories Whereas The Battle of the Somme lacked a humanizing narrative, later films started to employ various storylines, while drawing on the stereotypical imagery from newsreels and documentaries. Among these were vehemently anti-German love stories like Heart of Humanity, released just after the end of the war, and D.W. Griffith’s major drama Hearts of the World. The latter film was the outcome of an initiative by the British government, which had contacted Griffith, a great name then in cinema, in an effort to change the American public’s neutral stance regarding the war. The British offered him unprecedented facilities and introduced him to the royal family as well as to the political and cultural elite, some of its members actually appearing in the film. So it was not surprising that the premiere, in New York on 4 April 1918, a year after the US had entered the war, was exclusively for representatives of the American and Allied governments and other officials.22 Hearts of the World tells the story of a French couple in a village near the front-lines, facing not only military actions and bombings, but also extreme brutality by the ‘beastly Huns’; at that moment Griffith had no qualms in depicting a pitch-black image of any individual German soldier. He made two trips to France to film the trenches, but he actually used only a few scenes. After returning to Hollywood, he had British and Canadian troops recreate battle scenes on a stage. The audience could not see the difference.23 After the Armistice, war films disappeared for some years from the screen. One of the exceptions was Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (1919), described by its director as ‘a human cry against the bellicose din of armies’. The film, which became famous because of its final scene (a split-screen sequence juxtaposing a victory parade to the Arc de Triomphe with an army of dead soldiers rising from their graves), was meant as a lengthy pacifist statement. Depicting death, delusion and insanity in the trenches, it was actually shot during the war, showing real soldiers under fire.24 From the mid-1920s on, a stream of – still silent – pictures started to flow, both in Europe and the US.25 The first major production was The Big Parade (1925), possibly the most profitable silent film of all time, a film about war and love, but also the first one to tell the story of the impact of the war from the viewpoint of an ordinary soldier, with lengthy grim pictures of life and death in the trenches, deploying spectacular techniques – but with a

90  Frank van Vree happy ending.26 It was followed by Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory? (1926) and William Wellman’s Wings (1927). The first is a comedy drama about two marines, both in love with the daughter of an innkeeper, whose rivalry dates back many years, to the front-lines in France, an experience which at the same time binds them together. The latter film, Wings, a romantic war-action picture, is relevant because of its deployment of spectacular new techniques, with aerial sequences filmed without faking or process shots, by mounting cameras on the front of the planes and pilots ducking down to make room for the heroic actors. Without wishing to suggest a teleological interpretation of the evolution of the battlefield film genre, one might say that around 1930, in view of the technical possibilities and the popularity of the genre, as well as the omnipresence of the war in contemporary cultural memory, the time was right for a production where all these developments would be brought together. Especially the introduction of sound in the late 1920s offered revolutionary opportunities. It was Lewis Milestone who managed to harvest what had been sown before, combining an innovative and dynamic imagery and technology with a narrative that would move a world-wide audience.

‘The Eye of God’ All Quiet on the Western Front was based on Remarque’s 1929 novel Im Westen nichts Neues, which was a resounding success: around the world Remarque’s realistic depiction of trench warfare from the perspective of young soldiers struck a chord and in its first 18 months the novel sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages.27 At the same time it gave rise to controversies, due to its ­anti-militaristic and humanist tone, particularly in Germany, where right-wing nationalists and National Socialists considered the novel to be subversive and insulting. On 10 May 1933, exactly 100 days after Hitler rose to power, All Quiet on the Western Front became one of the first books to be publicly burnt; in previous years, screenings of Milestone’s film had been met with protests and mob attacks on both movie theatres and audience members.28 All Quiet on the Western Front follows the experiences of a group of young German students, after they had been encouraged to enlist as volunteers by an impassioned speech from their teacher, glorifying the army and the fatherland, for which it would be ‘sweet and fitting to die’.29 Gradually they turn from young idealists into embittered and disillusioned soldiers, from the moment they start their basic training, given by an abusive corporal, till their last hour in the trenches, as members of the ‘2nd Company’ of an infantry regiment. The film carries the spectator along to the battlefield, where the recruits, together with the experienced soldiers, start to re-string barbed wire in no-man’s land; after spending several days in a bunker under heavy bombardments, they move, at last, into the trenches. Here, in the midst of hell, human wave assaults are launched against machine-guns and artillery, with disastrous consequences.

The Imagery of War  91

Figure 6.6  Famous last scene from All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The hand of Paul, reaching out to a butterfly just beyond his trench, before being shot. © Universal Pictures.

At this point the most shocking scenes of the film take place, showing soldiers living in the mud and the filth, lacking food, amid a continuous baptism of fire, shooting and stabbing and dying, with moments in between in which they desperately try to find out what they are actually fighting for and against whom – to conclude that nobody outside the battlefield is able to comprehend the futility of war. This depressing message is embodied in the famous final scene, which at the same time may be seen as a passionate call to the world: Paul, the main protagonist of the film, back at the front-line, sees a butterfly just beyond his trench, but reaching out to it, smiling, he is killed by an enemy sniper – on a day that all is quiet on the front. The last frames show the members of the platoon, all dead, marching as they did on their way to the front the first time, but now against the faded background of a cemetery, one after another casting a backward glance at us, the spectator.30 The reasons why All Quiet on the Western Front made such an impact, both setting the standard for the genre of battlefield films and determining the public perception of the First World War – and even war in general – are manifold. Among the most important factors is, first, the way the film succeeded in what Hayden White refers to as the ‘narrativization of real events’:31 how the film got the spectator to believe he or she had access to the rather closed, horrifying experience of combat, by re-creating reality as an almost mythical drama, or, in a sense, a melodrama. Second, there is the overwhelming realistic style, its ‘naturalness’, giving people the feeling of knowing, of experiencing the battlefield, and third, the way the film ‘reworked’ the past and determined what people, including ourselves today, might see as ‘realistic’,

92  Frank van Vree

Figure 6.7  The eye of God: stills from the most cited parts of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). © Universal Pictures.

or, in a sense, as the ‘essence’ of the First World War. Fourth, it appealed to widespread pacifism, emerging from the war experience, by breaking down the national barriers between former enemies, abjuring nationalist sentiments and romantic ideas about the ethics of heroic patriotism. And finally, the film touched upon a fundamental notion of loss of traditional values, authority, the fatherland: it has been a tradition maintained from Plato to Goethe, as Paul Fussell pointed out in his famous book The Great War and Modern Memory, published in 1975.32 In the context of this volume – centred on the concept of narrative – the relationship between the first three of the factors mentioned above needs more elucidation. After all, the film’s ‘narrativization’ could only be effective through its very cinematographic qualities, including its use of sound. The use of new technologies, leading to highly stylized but still spectacular images, and its adherence to authenticity, was central to the film’s impact, but in the end it was the use of sound that gave All Quiet on the Western Front its overwhelming, pervasive quality. Very few films from those years so convincingly demonstrate the rich ‘sensation of watching films as a corporeal experience’, as described by film theorist Vivian Sobchack in her book The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience.33 She argues that, when discussing a film, we tend to concentrate fully on its visual aspects and meaning, leaving aside what a film actually does with us. As spectators we are not passive victims of a cinematic apparatus: watching and listening is a rich bodily and mental experience. When we watch these famous sequences of All Quiet on the Western Front – or Dunkirk or Das Boot or Saving Private Ryan – we are not only using our eyes, but also our ears; our whole body is viscerally responding, starting with our stomach and lungs. I would argue that the idea of these films as being extremely ‘realistic’ – even for veterans, as we have noticed34 – depends heavily on these sensory experiences, and not only upon the visual representations. After all, the ‘dazzlingly realistic’ sequences of these films are not realistic at all. One sees something that neither a soldier nor anyone else would ever see: the whole battlefield in one shot, scenes from different angles, even from above

The Imagery of War  93 or from behind the lines; in short, ‘an ubiquitous, moving camera gives you the eye of God’.35 In other words, the reality effect, as understood by Roland Barthes, lies for a major part in the multiple sensory experience of shock and awe these scenes arouse in the ‘spectator’.36 Another element of All Quiet on the Western Front that needs elucidation is the theme of friendship, comradeship and brotherhood as the narrative’s key. The film represents the platoon as a ‘band of brothers’, soldiers with different life stories, characters and social backgrounds, bonded by the circumstances they are in, caring for each other, sharing a common fear – a structuring element of the story that opens the way not only for attractive drama, but also for constructing moral and political meaning. Or, even more than that, by contrasting the horrors of the war with the moving altruistic emotions of the young soldiers, the message of the film – the senselessness of war – becomes inevitable, enhancing its call for peace among men.

Evolution of a Genre Thus All Quiet on the Western Front occupies a seminal position in the genealogy of the battlefield film. Most later films are, in one way or another, indebted to Milestone’s production, apart from Westfront 1918, which may be seen as its German counterpart. That film, made by the director G.W. von Pabst, was released only one month later, in May 1930. Based on the novel Vier von der Infanterie by Ernst Johannsen,37 it was set mainly in the trenches of the Western Front and carried the same anti-war message, directed against the barbarity of modern-day warfare. Showing the effect of the war on a group of infantrymen, Pabst was more sober in the use of spectacular effects than Milestone, but he too aimed for a maximum of ‘realism’. He made a tougher film – ‘so tough, in fact, that the most gruesome sequences are now missing from all prints’.38 Although Westfront 1918 takes an important position in the history of the imagination of the battlefield, its impact has been seriously reduced because copies have been hard to find since its 1930 release. The way in which later films were indebted to All Quiet on the Western Front varied considerably, depending on time, place and circumstances. Many films built strongly on its imagery of the battlefield, others on the theme of the platoon as a ‘band of brothers’; some directors followed Remarque and Milestone in their aim to humanize the enemy, or to promote the cause of peace by showing the horrors of the battlefield. It is not hard to find appealing examples of these tendencies, varying from Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1993) to The Thin Red Line (1998), the story of a US company fighting in the Pacific during the Second World War in an epic film by Terrence Malick, which resembles its 1930 predecessor in many respects. The influence can even be found in an unconventional film like ­Andrzej Wajda’s Kanał, a gloomy meditation on heroism, sacrifice and national identity, produced in 1956, in the midst of the so-called ‘Polish Spring’. Kanał tells the story of a unit of 43 men and women of Poland’s underground ‘Home

94  Frank van Vree Army’ during the Warsaw Uprising, trying to escape surrender by crawling through miles of pitch-black stinking sewers, criss-crossing the town below its surface, only to face death.39 The ‘combat films’, as film historian Jeanine Basinger calls the many films that were to be produced in the US from the beginning of the Second World War onwards, are also definitely – although not solely – indebted to All Quiet on the Western Front. Although these films, belonging to what may be defined as a sub-genre of the battlefield film, generally aimed to promote rather different (national and heroic) values, they basically employed the same dramatic and narrative structures and cinematic forms. A striking example is Bataan, a film released as early as 1943, about a platoon taking part in the defence of the Bataan Peninsula against the Japanese in the beginning of 1942. The battle unit consists of different ethnic and social groups, which negotiate their differences, thus enhancing sentiments of national harmony and identity (be it extremely gendered), as well as promoting ideals of leadership. On the other hand, these films tended to dehumanize the enemy: Bataan, for example, is laden with racist slurs where the Japanese soldiers were reduced to a nameless, faceless and speechless enemy. Other films from these years likewise represent enemy soldiers and leaders as being extremely cruel, even savage, and, in the case of non-Europeans, sub-human.40 To this very day most American World War II combat films follow these patterns, with regard to their dramatic structure and their search for an uncompromising realism, or genuinity. But to do so, new ways had to be explored. In Saving Private Ryan, for example, commercially the most successful blockbuster of the sub-genre,41 Steven Spielberg tried to enhance the sense of genuinity through what film historian Stuart Bender calls ‘reported realism’. Through the use of hand-held cameras, sound design, staging and increased audio-visual details, the film aimed to defamiliarize viewers accustomed to conventional combat films, so as to create a new sense of realism.42 Ideologically, during times of war, the American combat films tended to stay closer to the values promoted by movies like Bataan; in times of peace, however, or internal political disagreement – for example during the Vietnam and Iraq Wars – the films were generally subtler, breaking away from openly racist representations, aiming for more universal values by humanizing the enemy, as a comparison between Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) with earlier movies about the war in the Pacific may show. It would be interesting to explore the impact of the World War II combat films upon the imaginary of other wars, particularly Vietnam, both in cinema and on television, as it would be worthwhile to examine in depth the evolution of the broader genre of the battlefield film in relation to the sub-genre of the American combat film, or even to completely different genres. The same applies to the impact of the twentieth-century cinematography upon the imagery of the battlefield in video games, which had become ubiquitous by the end of the century, and in the reverse direction, as the case of Saving Private Ryan already indicates.

The Imagery of War  95 But in the context of this chapter, it is sufficient to conclude that even today, as the success of Dunkirk demonstrates, the dominant patterns in the imagery of the twentieth-century battlefields, springing from the British propaganda documentaries of the First World War, and evolving via the seminal All Quiet on the Western Front right through to Spielberg’s blockbuster, still have great impact. A remarkable confirmation of this argument was the decision, made under the George W. Bush administration during the first months of Operation Iraqi Freedom, to give a military unit training by the cameramen who had worked on Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. They were expected to report from the front-line in a way that would remind spectators of the heroic scenes from that very blockbuster, celebrating high standards in what still is commemorated as the indisputably ‘good war’ – the Second World War. And the military cameramen did so – with some collateral damage, causing a scandal with the so-called operation ‘Saving Private Jessica Lynch’.43

Imagining Past Wars The Jessica Lynch incident does not stand alone when it comes to life imitating cinema. Ever since the First World War, as Joanna Bourke has pointed out in her book An Intimate History of Killing, film has played a role on the battlefield, where combatants idealized themselves as warriors similar to heroic figures in combat films or literature. These representations determine their view, while civilians, on the other hand, ‘continue to view killing in war as though it was just another cinematic image’.44 Reality and imagination seem to converge – echoing what Paul Virilio calls ‘the logistics of perception’, describing how the technologies of cinema and warfare have developed a fatal interdependence.45 This might be unavoidable: we have to rely on the stories and pictures of others, since most of us, including historians, have had no live experience with modern warfare, in the sense of actual combat on the battlefield. From its very beginning, film has carried the promise of offering us access to these experiences. To be convincing, to give the spectators the impression they are getting a glimpse of what actually happened, or, more accurately, what might have happened, a film’s narrative and emplotment, but also its visual and auditory imagery, should evoke a sense of naturalness and familiarity – which in addition allows it to serve as a vehicle of moral and political meaning. This chapter has had the aim of laying out some dominant patterns in the imagery of the battlefield of the twentieth century, by uncovering their origins and evolution. ‘Naturalness’ and ‘familiarity’, the sense of being close to reality, are, after all, not intrinsic qualities of the narrative or images, but effects of deploying specific narrative devices, strategies and visual and auditory techniques, giving spectators the idea of an authentic experience. And this is exactly what many of the films did, belonging to the ‘family tree’ described in these pages, from World War I onwards. In doing so, these films have been structuring our imagination of past wars, as pioneering film historian Pierre Sorlin already concluded many years ago – an argument which more recently

96  Frank van Vree has been elaborated by scholars in the field of memory studies, among them Aleida Assmann and Alison Landsberg. We may classify these battlefield films as ‘cultural memories’, mediated memories which may be transferred over time and space, capable of assimilating as ‘personal experience’ historical events through which we, as spectators, never lived ourselves: we create what Landsberg calls ‘prosthetic’ memories.46 We do not take in these images passively, but subjectively apply them to ourselves; we allow the film to become our experience. The multiple, sensory, bodily nature of the experience that these films produce, as argued above, will certainly reinforce this effect, as does the ‘naturalness’ and ‘familiarity’ of the narrative, images and sound. From this perspective, studying the imagery of the battlefield film genre is equivalent to delving into our own collective and personal imagination.

Notes 1 ‘Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a cinematic experience like no other’, RTE F­ riday, 28 July 2017, available at: www.rte.ie/entertainment/movie-reviews/2017/0717/ 890953-dunkirk/, accessed 5 March 2019. 2 A. Russian and S. Perry, ‘“Hell on earth”: last surviving veterans tell what the Battle of Dunkirk was really like’, People, 19 July 2017. Cf. R. O’Connor, ‘Dunkirk veteran in tears at Christopher Nolan film premiere: “It was just like I was there again”’, The Independent, 24 July 2017. 3 See http://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-war-movies-of-all-time (accessed 14 July 2018). 4 P. Sorlin, ‘War and cinema: interpreting the relationship’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, 1994, vol. 14(4), 357. 5 A. Insdorf, Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 6 J. Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 and 2003. See also L.H. Suid, Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film, 2nd edn, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 7 T. Ingesson, The Politics of Combat: The Political and Strategic Impact of ­Tactical-Level Subcultures, 1939–1995, Lund: Media-Tryck, 2016; M. van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Combat from the Marne to Iraq, New York: Presidio Press, 2008. 8 For example, https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-war-movies-of-alltime; www.giga.de/filme/apocalypse-now/specials/die-besten-kriegsfilme-aller-zeitenkampf-ums-uberleben/page/2/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFI%27s_10_Top_10; www.senscritique.com/top/resultats/Les_meilleurs_films_sur_la_Premiere_ Guerre_mondiale/436561; www.watchmojo.com/video/id/17019; www.imdb.com/ list/ls055731784/; all accessed 5 March 2019. 9 ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (review), Variety, 7 May 1930. 10 Quoted by R. Bergan, ‘Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion’, The Guardian, 11 November 2008. See also R. Bergan, Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise, New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016. 11 See G. Paul, Bilder des Krieges – Krieg der Bilder. Die Visualisierung des Krieges in der Moderne, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004; P. Harrington, British Artists and War: The Face of Battle in Paintings and Prints, 1700–1914, London: Greenhill Books, 1993; P. Paret, Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

The Imagery of War  97 12 www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/ about-this-collection/, accessed 5 March 2019. 13 T. Gunning, ‘The cinema of attraction(s): early film, its spectators and the avantgarde’, in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, London: British Film Institute, 1990, pp. 56–62. See also V. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; L. Charney and V. Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 14 S. Bottomore, ‘Filming, Faking and Propaganda: The Origins of the War Film, 1897–1902’, dissertation, Utrecht University, 2007, available at https://dspace.­ library.uu.nl/handle/1874/22650, accessed 5 March 2019. 15 N. Reeves, ‘Film propaganda and its audience: the example of Britain’s official films during the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1983, vol. 18(3), 468. See also N. Reeves, Official British Film Propaganda during the First World War, London: Croom Helm, 1986; N. Reeves, ‘Cinema, spectatorship and propaganda: “Battle of the Somme” (1916) and its contemporary audience’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 1997, vol. 17(1), 5–28. 16 Sorlin, ‘War and cinema’, p. 358. See also P. Sorlin, ‘Cinema and the memory of the Great War’, in M. Paris (ed.), The First World War and Popular Cinema: 1914 to the Present, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999, pp. 5–26. 17 Reeves, ‘Film propaganda and its audience’, p. 464. 18 R. Smither, ‘“Watch the picture carefully, and see if you can identify anyone”: recognition in factual films of the First World War period’, Film History, 2002, vol. 14(3–4), 390–404. 19 J. Hodgkins, ‘Hearts and minds and bodies: reconsidering the cinematic language of The Battle of the Somme’, Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, 2008, vol. 38(1), 11. 20 Sorlin, ‘War and cinema’, p. 365. 21 Ibid., p. 363; Reeves, ‘Film propaganda and its audience’, p. 483. 22 J. Toland, No Man’s Land: 1918, the Last Year of the Great War, New York: Doubleday, 1980, pp. 120–1; C. Keil and B. Singer, American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009, p. 209. 23 P. Cherchi Usai and E. Bowser, The Griffith Project: Films produced in 1916–18, London: British Film Institute, 2005, p. 157; Basinger, The World War II Combat Film, p. 81. 24 J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 15ff., 133–42. 25 For an overview of titles of World War I cinema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_World_War_I_films, accessed 5 March 2019. 26 For a full description: www.filmsite.org/bigp2.html, accessed 5 March 2019. 27 M. Eksteins, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front and the fate of a war’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1980, vol. 15(2), 353. 28 T.F. Schneider (ed.), Erich Maria Remarque. Leben, Werk und weltweite Wirkung, Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 1998. 29 For a detailed description of the film: www.filmsite.org/allq.html, accessed 5 March 2019. 30 This final shot may be seen as referring to the famous final sequence of J’Accuse. Winter, Sites of Memory, p. 141. 31 H. White, ‘The narrativization of real events’, Critical Inquiry, 1981, vol. 7(4), 793–8. 32 P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. 33 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. See also ‘Vivian Sobchack in conversation with Scott Bukatman’, Journal of e-Media Studies, 2009, vol. 2(1).

98  Frank van Vree 34 See note 2 above. Regarding the experiences of veterans watching Saving Private Ryan, a great deal of evidence may be found on the web. 35 Pierre Sorlin in a debate on film realism with Bill Nichols and Garth Montgomery in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 1996, vol. 16(2), 262–72. 36 R. Barthes, ‘L’effet de réel’, Communications, 1968, vol. 11, 84–9. 37 E. Johannsen, Vier von der Infanterie. Ihre letzten Tage an der Westfront 1918, ­Hamburg-Bergedorf: Fackelreiter-Verlag, 1929. 38 S. Klawans, ‘How the First World War changed movies forever’, New York Times, 19 November 2000. 39 B. Michatek, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda, New York/London: A.S. Barnes, 1974; F. van Vree, ‘The stones of Treblinka’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 2006, vol. 6(3), 237–45. 40 C. Koppes and G.D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War, California: University of ­California Press, 1987, p. 251; Basinger, The World War II Combat Film. 41 J. Basinger, ‘Translating war: the combat film genre and Saving Private Ryan’, Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, ­October 1998, available at www.historians.org/perspectives, accessed 5 March 2019. 42 S. Bender, Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 43 D. Miller (ed.), Tell me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, London: Pluto Press, 2004; G. Paul, Der Bilderkrieg. Inszenierungen, Bilder und Perspektiven der ‘Operation Irakische Freiheit’, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005; P.H. Martyn, ‘Lynch mob: pack journalism and how the Jessica Lynch story became propaganda’, The Canadian Journal of Media Studies, 2008, vol. 4(1), 124–64. 44 J. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare, London: Granta/New York: Basic Books, 1999, pp. 370, 368. 45 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, London: Verso, 1989. 46 A. Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004; A. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; A. Assmann, ‘Transformations between history and memory’, Social Research, 2008, vol. 75(1), 49–72.

Part III

The Development and Deployment of War Narratives

7 The War Books Controversy Revisited First World War Novels and Veteran Memory Dunja Dušanić The sudden eruption of war books that swept through Europe at the end of 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s was one of the most widely discussed aspects of the ‘boom’ of cultural production prompted by the tenth anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. In those years, the literary market was overwhelmed to the point that Louis Aragon, complaining in 1930 of an offensive comeback of war literature, diagnosed that war was again à la mode.1 Although almost every piece of writing published on the subject of the Great War seemed to get an unprecedented amount of attention from the readers and the press, in the copious and varied production of war books, novels tended to elicit the strongest emotional response and incite the loudest polemics. The debates on war novels, also known in Britain as the ‘War Books Controversy’, seemed to be centred on the representation of the First World War in recent fiction, particularly on its ‘truthfulness’. This highly elusive notion was used to refer to everything from the novels’ factual accuracy to their ideological content, but most often served as a pretext for moving the discussion away from the actual texts and onto a different, extra-literary terrain. At first glance, then, both the focus and the vigour of the controversy appear more as symptoms of a serious crisis of memory than as a reaction to any particular feature of the actual novels. And yet, while one might be inclined to agree that they were indeed signs of ‘a perplexed international self-commiseration’2 and ‘a deep anxiety about the future of the political, moral, and cultural order’,3 they were not generated by the political climate of the interwar years alone. The War Books Controversy was, as Samuel Hynes observed, ‘a quarrel over history; but it was also a literary dispute’.4 It is the literary aspect of this dispute that will be addressed here. Although the war book boom has already received considerable scholarly attention, its reach has mostly been national, or limited to the reception of international bestsellers, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, in national contexts.5 A broader comparative perspective reveals striking similarities in the responses to war novels, despite significant contextual and cultural differences. In fact, the interwar period saw numerous disputes over war novels, both earlier and later, and not only in Western ­Europe, but in other parts of the world as well. In the United States, for example, controversies surrounded World War I novels as early as the publication of

102  Dunja Dušanić John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921). In a review of the novel that appeared in 1921 in The Bookman, Heywood Broun observed: The war is still too much a part of life to be accepted unqualifiedly as a field of literature. […] There are those who think that John Dos Passos ought to be sent to jail and others who hail him as the first of native authors to tell the truth about the war.6 Many veterans sent letters to the press claiming that Dos Passos’s ‘sour recollections of life in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), albeit camouflaged as fiction, were consistent with their own’, while others ‘denounced the novel as an aberrant product of faulty memory’.7 The example of a later but in many respects analogous quarrel over a Serbian war novel from the 1930s, which will be discussed here, shows that the source of the War Books Controversy was not purely ideological. What all the disputes over war novels had in common was a sense of confusion regarding the kind of narrative that they were supposed to be and the mode of reading that they required. Were war novels meant to be read as fictional renderings of real-world events, whose purpose was not to beguile the readers, but to engage them in an aesthetic experience? Or were they meant to be read as non-fictional accounts of these events, whose authors made truth claims for which they could be held accountable?

The Remarque Controversy Arguably, the one book that could single-handedly claim the responsibility for the entire War Books Controversy was Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Enough has been written on the history of its publication and its reception both in and outside Germany to fill a sizable library, but some facts of the case bear repeating.8 Following an unprecedented advertising campaign, Remarque’s novel was published in book format in 1929; by 1930 it had sold over a million copies and was quickly translated into several languages. Not only was All Quiet on the Western Front a bestseller, it was also a widely discussed book. It became the object of parodies, pastiches and extensive criticism from both Left and Right. More often, however, it was used as a pretext for all kinds of personal and political statements, a trend which culminated in Erich Erbelding’s response to Remarque, Im Westen doch Neues (Something New on the Western Front, 1930) – a 450-page-long pro-war pamphlet. However, All Quiet on the Western Front was not contested for ideological reasons alone. The attacks were frequently, and for present purposes more importantly, directed against its value as a testimony about the war. Despite being a fictional rendering of a limited experience of combat (that of a small group of German youths fighting on the Western Front), focused on one individual in particular (Paul Baümer), All Quiet on the Western Front was more often perceived as a book which pretends to a universality and a strict truthfulness one does not expect from literary fiction. The novel was printed

The War Books Controversy Revisited  103 with Walter von Molo’s praise on the jacket, hailing it as a ‘Great War monument to our unknown soldier […] written by all the dead’,9 and the president of the German Parliament, Paul Löbe, continued this trend by claiming: Remarque has set up a memorial to the field-grey mass of millions of unknowns, that will be as enduring as ever a monument would be. […] This book is great by virtue of its simplicity and stirring by virtue of its truthfulness.10 The same imagery, suggesting that the value of Remarque’s book was both documentary and commemorative, was used to describe it negatively. For instance, the cover of a widely disseminated National Socialist pamphlet accused Remarque of having built ‘a monument of shame’ (Schandmal) for the heroes of World War I.11 Its status as a testimony on the war is perhaps best illustrated by an anecdote reported by Barker and Last. In 1936, the newspaper Völkischer Beobachter printed a piece accompanied by the following editorial: ‘After all the lies told by people like Remarque, we now bring to you the experience of a soldier who took part in the war, of which you will say at once: that is what it was really like.’ What this truthful account of life at the front turned out to be was nothing other than an extract from All Quiet on the Western Front, presumably sent in by an anonymous third party.12 That anyone would read All Quiet on the Western Front as a factual account of the war may seem surprising. The novel was, however, presented by its publisher and, to a certain extent, by Remarque too, as a work based on the author’s personal experience of the war.13 In one of the first reviews, published in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, Carl Zuckmayer labelled it a ‘war diary’. Many others read All Quiet on the Western Front as an autobiography, despite the fact that it is narrated by Baümer, save for the last paragraph, in which an unidentified voice describes his death. English reviewers labelled it ‘obviously autobiographical’, the more enthusiastic ones claiming that it presented ‘the truth about the war’, or, as the London Sunday Chronicle phrased it, ‘the true story of the world’s greatest nightmare’.14 As a striking example of a factual reading of All Quiet on the Western Front, one might mention the case of Peter Kropp. Kropp was a World War I veteran who published a pamphlet, Endlich Klarheit über Remarque und sein Buch ‘Im Westen nichts Neues’ (Finally Clarity About Remarque and His Book All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930), in which he claimed that the character of ­Albert Kropp was modelled on him and that he had spent a year in the hospital at Duisberg with Remarque. This shared experience provided him with the opportunity to unveil a series of factual inaccuracies in Remarque’s novel, particularly in the hospital episode. These ranged from Remarque’s portrayal of the hospital’s management – an order of Catholic nuns, whose persistent noisy praying in the corridors disturbs the patients so much that Baümer throws a bottle at them (to which Kropp responded by describing the exact location of the chapel in the hospital in order to demonstrate that the prayers could not

104  Dunja Dušanić have been heard by the wounded soldiers) – to his description of Mrs Lewandowski’s visit.15 Kropp disapproved of All Quiet on the Western Front on more than one account, but he was especially bothered by its one-sided depiction of the war and of men who fought in it: I find no front-line spirit in Remark’s book. There were other front-line soldiers who were different from the way Remark depicts them. There were such soldiers to whom the protection of homeland, protection of house and homestead, protection of the family was their highest objective, and to whom this will to protect their homeland gave the strength to endure any extremities.16 This type of complaint was frequently voiced by veterans from Germany, Great Britain and France in reaction to Remarque’s novel, and, in more general terms, to the war novel genre. Douglas Jerrold, for instance, condemned war novels for presenting ‘a picture of the war which is fundamentally false even when it is superficially true, and which is statistically false even when it is incidentally true’.17 As a rule, these novels painted the war as ‘avoidable and futile’, and its suffering, horror and desolation as universal and meaningless.18 This ‘fundamentally false picture’ – which Jerrold’s pamphlet, The Lie about the War (1930), sought to expose – was not only the result of a disproportionate focus on the negative side of the war. What, to Jerrold’s mind, was deeply false in these books was that they elevated an individual experience of the war into a universal one, depriving other veterans of their own experience and memory of the conflict. The people who wrote and read these books were mainly ‘those who have chosen to forget or who are unable to remember’, complained Jerrold.19 In the introduction to a critical bibliography of war writings, War Books (1930), Cyril Falls expressed his disapproval of war books in similar terms. According to Falls, the writers of war novels have set themselves, not to strip war of its romance – for it was pretty well gone already – but to prove that the Great War was engineered by knaves and fools on both sides, that the men who died in it were driven like beasts to the slaughter, and died like beasts, without their deaths helping any cause or doing any good. So much for the theme; the incidental details are of like nature. Shooting for cowardice – in fact exceedingly rare, in the British Army at least – is painted as a common occurrence, drunkenness among officers often appears to have been the rule rather than the exception; every dirty little meanness – of which you will meet more in a month of peace than in a year of war – leaps into the foreground […]. But the falsest of false evidence is produced in another way: by closing-up scenes and events which in themselves may be true. Every sector becomes a bad one, every working-party is shot to pieces; if a man is killed or wounded his brains or his entrails always protrude from his body; no one ever seems

The War Books Controversy Revisited  105 to have a rest. […] Attacks succeed one another with lightning rapidity. The soldier is represented as a depressed and mournful spectre helplessly wandering about until death brought his miseries to an end.20 The tendency to narrate war in a synecdochical, pars pro toto mode, was also criticized by Jean Norton Cru, whose analysis of war writing, Témoins (Witnesses, 1929), sparked a controversy of its own and still remains probably the most discussed study of First World War literature. In his book, Norton Cru repeatedly denounced war novelists for their propensity to present rare, sensationalist scenes as frequent occurrences. Murder in hand-to-hand combat, for example, is something one seldom met in reality – ‘that is’, Norton Cru immediately corrects himself, ‘I have not witnessed it in person’. ‘Other witnesses must have seen it, but if they are honest they will admit that such a thing is infinitely rarer than traditional narratives would have us believe.’21 He concludes his reasoning with a quotation from All Quiet on the Western Front: ‘It is literary deception that makes pacifists say “this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers”.’ Remarque was one of Norton Cru’s bêtes noires; in a letter to Georges Gaudy in 1930 he denounced the book as ‘the greatest literary sham of all time’, written by a liar and a fraud, who, with the help of his German, English and French publishers, ‘conspired to trick the public in the most shameful way’.22 Remarque’s case was of course notorious, but it was by no means unique. The tendency to read war novels as factual narratives was so pronounced that even a novel as openly novelistic as Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), which is narrated by Ferdinand Bardamu and famously opens with the disclaimer that it is ‘entirely imaginary’ and ‘nothing but a fictive story’ (rien qu’une histoire fictive), was read as an autobiography and used as evidence in the condemnation of its author.23 This was not, however, the result of ignorance or of a disregard for literary conventions, but of a context in which generic expectations predetermined the sort of reading that war writing would receive.

First-Person Accounts As publishers realized soon after the conflict began, war writing sold well when presented as an eyewitness account of the front. Civilian readers, avid for news from the front and curious to gain insight into combat experience, were not the only ones who contributed to this phenomenon. War novels were frequently accompanied by publishers’ announcements, forewords written by public figures, credentials listing the name, rank and commendations of the author, all of which were meant to certify their authenticity as eyewitness accounts of the war.24 The general confusion is reflected in the fact that critics used diverse generic names (diary, memoir, autobiography) interchangeably to describe a single literary work. To be sure, war novels often were hybrid texts, evolved from intimate, non-fictional genres, such as diaries, notes and letters,

106  Dunja Dušanić which did not require continuous narration and were therefore easier to write and preserve at the front. The trace of this origin remains visible in many published texts. It is most evident in the subtitles, which frequently served to authenticate the text as an eyewitness account,25 and also, though somewhat less obviously, in the choice of narrative voice. Some of the best known war boom books were first-person accounts – All Quiet on the Western Front, Ludwig Renn’s War (1928), Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), ­Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929), Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That (1929), Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear (1930) and so on – and they all capitalized on the generic features associated with first-­ person factual narration. More importantly, they did so independently of their fictional status: the fact that Graves’s book is an autobiography, unlike the novels of Remarque, Hemingway, Aldington and Chevallier, while Renn’s text is an interesting borderline case, apparently made little difference in a literary climate in which war narratives were standardly read as non-fiction. Even before the war book boom, there were numerous instances of a conscious exploitation of this climate, sometimes for political and sometimes for literary purposes. These ranged from Louis Dumur’s Nach Paris! (1919) – a novel written in the form of a fictional diary of a German student – to Miloš Crnjanski’s Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću (1921) – a modernist novel whose ambiguous title, alternatively translated as The Journal of Čarnojević and The Diary about Čarnojević, implies a fissure in the identity of the diarist, a Serbian conscript in the Austro-­Hungarian army, traumatized by the war to the point of conceiving a doppelgänger.

Generic Ambiguity: Barbusse’s Under Fire All these examples of ambiguous first-person narration go back to one of the earliest and most influential war novels – Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916).26 Barbusse’s novel is subtitled Journal d’une escouade (Diary of a Gun-Squad), even though it has almost none of the constitutive features of a diary, such as the presence of dates and locations, frequent gaps and repetitions and limited narrative perspective and knowledge. Instead, it is divided into chapters, whose symbolic titles and careful arrangement establish a number of symmetries, the one between the opening (‘The Vision’) and the last chapter (‘Dawn’) being only the most obvious. The narrator hardly resembles a typical diarist. On the contrary, he behaves like a traditional omniscient narrator, uninhibited in his capacity to change perspectives and omnipotent in his awareness of the thoughts, emotions and actions of others. The most blatant example of his novelistic omniscience can be found in the eleventh chapter (‘The Dog’), which describes in great detail not only the unexpressed desires and unspoken thoughts of Fouillade, but also his lonely wanderings, which would directly break the code of vraisemblance, if Under Fire were indeed an eyewitness account. While today’s readers rarely doubt that Under Fire is a novel, there have been significant misunderstandings regarding both its reception and the authorial

The War Books Controversy Revisited  107 intention behind it. As Jay Winter rightly points out, ‘the reader of Under Fire may come to believe that particular events in the novel actually took place, and Barbusse offers no caveat about the issue of fact versus fiction’.27 Not only does Barbusse offer no caveat, but there were a number of signals, both paratextual and textual, which could easily have led his first readers in the direction of a factual reading. The novel appeared as a feuilleton in the paper L’Œuvre, where it was announced as notes d’un combattant (a soldier’s notes). In the Flammarion edition, it included (and still includes) the subtitle mentioned earlier and a dedication to fallen comrades (À la mémoire des camarades tombés à côté de moi à Crouy et sur la cote 119), signed H.B. These, along with the listing of the author’s military rank and commendations which appeared on the book’s jacket, were meant to confirm Barbusse’s status as a soldier and a witness.28 As far as textual indicators are concerned, the most important one is that Under Fire is narrated by a nameless ‘I’, which could easily be identified with Henri Barbusse, given the paratextual indications. Bearing in mind that the functional dissociation between author and narrator is generally accepted as a prerequisite of narrative fiction,29 this makes for an ambiguous situation, in which the reader might be uncertain whether to read Under Fire as homodiegetic fiction (i.e., a first-person novel) or as a form of autodiegesis (a testimony or a memoir, for instance). Indeed, one could easily accuse Barbusse, as Jean Norton Cru did, of proposing a sort of double pact to his reader: of assuming the role of witness and truth-teller while embracing the liberties of a novelist. Although one might find his moralizing bent unappealing, Norton Cru was not far wrong when he described the war novel as a ‘false, pseudo-literary, pseudo-documentary genre, in which the freedom of imagination, otherwise legitimate in literature, gains a more sinister role’.30 Subsequent critics merely restated the issue in more neutral terms. War literature ‘mixes the documentary and the melodramatic, the factual and the fictional, and refuses to distinguish between the two’, leading us to ‘ponder the borderland between truth and fiction in accounts of war’.31 The problem is not, however, that war writers blended the representation of real-world events and people with the representation of imaginary events and characters; the writers of traditional novels did exactly the same without causing turmoil. Besides, most fictional narratives contain references to the world outside the text, such as toponyms, with the difference that they are not bound by accuracy like references in non-fictional narratives.32 The issue of whether a narrative is fictional or not cannot be resolved if we envision that narrative as a sequence of words, some of them with and others without real-world reference. A novel may contain a significant amount of real-world references – as historical novels, for example, often do – but these, having become part of a fictional whole, lose their original status and adapt their meaning to their new environment. This is because the fictional status of a text is largely determined by the concordance of two factors – the intention of its author, and how this intention is understood by its readers – both of which operate globally, affecting the entire narrative. From that perspective, the main difference between fictional and non-fictional narratives is not one of logical content but of intention: authors of factual

108  Dunja Dušanić narratives advance truth claims with the intention of producing real-world beliefs, whereas authors of fictional narratives do not.33 Thus, when Norton Cru complains that ‘All writers of war novels pretend to speak as witnesses, to testify in the court of history’, and asks ‘How can one reconcile such pretension with the freedom of imagination?’,34 he is rightly drawing attention to a ‘semantic noise’, as it were, in the communication between the writers and their audience. While he is surely exaggerating, since it is both untrue and unlikely that all war novelists assumed the role of witnesses, his observation remains pertinent. Indeed, there were cases where the author of a war novel publicly assumed the role of witness – Roland Dorgelès, for one – and there were numerous cases like those of Barbusse and Remarque – where the authorial intention remained vague or ambiguous. The result was that both the authors and their enthusiastic readers claimed that war novels presented ‘the truth on the war’, novelistic techniques and ‘a bit of fictionalizing’ being just means for conveying that truth more persuasively. This left them vulnerable to the criticism of veterans such as Kropp, Jerrold, Falls and Norton Cru, who read their novels as factual narratives. There is another aspect of their criticism that ought to be considered. The argument advanced by Norton Cru against the abuse of hand-to-hand combat in war writing – ‘I have not seen it, and anyway everyone will agree with me that it was rare’ – was in many ways typical. In addition to close readings and fastidious comparisons between the texts and their authors’ biographies, Norton Cru often relied upon his own combat experience in assessing the truthfulness of war narratives. As Christophe Prochasson observed, this criterion also served as a basis for establishing a consensus among veterans, in spite of the diversity of their personal experiences.35 By appealing to the memory of fellow soldiers, Norton Cru was attempting to create a suitable frame for reading war narratives. Based on the shared memory of witnesses, this memory frame would ultimately pave the way for a consensus on the meaning of the war. Samuel Hynes – assuming the double guise of scholar and war veteran – expressed a similar belief in the possibility of a consensual ‘soldiers’ tale’: We are confronted with an apparent contradiction here: the man-whowas-there asserts his authority as the only true witness of his war; but the truth that he claims to tell is compromised by the very nature of memory and language. Compromised, too, by the cloud of witnesses, each telling his own relative truth of events. I think, though, that the contradiction is not absolute. It can be resolved if we think of the truth of war experience as being the sum of witnesses, the collective tale that soldiers tell. […] What other route do we have to understanding the human experience of war – how it felt, what it was like – than the witness of the men who were there?36 Just how difficult it is to agree upon such a tale is perhaps best illustrated by the fate of Norton Cru’s Witnesses.

The War Books Controversy Revisited  109

The Norton Cru Controversy The divided reactions to Norton Cru’s book, extensively documented by Frédéric Rousseau in Le Procès des témoins de la Grande Guerre: l’affaire N ­ orton Cru, can raise serious doubts about the possibility of a collective soldiers’ tale. Although Norton Cru had hoped that his relentless search for the truth would be met with approval, the appearance of Witnesses hurt the feelings of many a war writer and created a schism within the veteran community, dividing it into two camps. Led by André Ducasse, author of the influential anthology La Guerre racontée par les combattants (The War Told By Combatants, 1932), ­Norton Cru’s supporters included a number of professional historians. Although some of them, like Pierre Renouvain and Jules Isaac, expressed their reservations concerning Norton Cru’s method and questioned whether his subjective evaluation of the truthfulness of testimonies could be taken as a criterion of their reliability, their response was on the whole positive. The opponents, on the other hand, were grouped around Roland Dorgelès, who was bitterly offended by Norton Cru’s criticism of his novel Wooden Crosses (1919). These included authors like Barbusse and Florian-Parmentier, who utterly rejected Witnesses, labelling Norton Cru ‘a disdainer of Art’. More moderate critics, like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Jean Galtier-Boissière and Benjamin Crémieux, defended war novels by appealing to the superiority of literature over history in a simplified version of Aristotle’s argument: unfortunately, Mr Cru seems to have been blinded by his love of precise detail (dates, topography, etc.) and he has displayed blatant unfairness towards some very beautiful fictional narratives [récits romancés], such as Wooden Crosses, Under Fire, The Winners, in which war writers no longer sought to reconstruct their daily impressions, but to bring to life, leaving out the sites and dates, the true atmosphere of the front and the psychology of soldiers, to compose an authentic synthesis of war. This is because Mr Cru is completely insensitive to art, he is suspicious of it and he hates it like a monk would hate a pretty girl who distracts him from his duties. Mr Cru prefers a letter by Joliclerc to a page by Chateaubriand […], the log of some unknown German sub-off’ to All Quiet on the Western Front, memories which are utterly insignificant, although recorded from day to day, to the highly intimate writings of a Mac Orlan or a Giraudoux, to the masterly evocation of the parade after the attack by Dorgelès, the bombardment by Barbusse or the battle of the Marne by Georges Girard.37 The most ardent defender of war novels, Dorgelès, had used the same argument.38 History deals with the particular and the real (‘leave out the dates, erase the names, forget the numbers’, says Dorgelès), while literature dwells in the realm of the possible and touches upon the universal: ‘why recount a thousand real incidents when we can make up a single one which will summarize them all? Why copy when we can create?’ His self-proclaimed goal was

110  Dunja Dušanić to produce ‘pretended memories so truthful’ (de prétendus souvenirs si nourris de vérité) that every soldier could identify with them.39 From Norton Cru’s perspective, this was a most dubious endeavour: to sacrifice factual truth to some ‘higher’, ‘synthesized’ truth, in order to convey the reality of war more effectively, is at best just an excuse for pretentious authors craving glory. Most often, however, it amounts to falsifying history for political purposes. A later example from Serbian literature illustrates clearly just how much was at stake in novels for veterans like Norton Cru.

A Collective Novel? The most influential war fiction written by a Serbian First World War veteran was a novel by Stevan Jakovljević (1890–1962), entitled Srpska trilogija (Serbian Trilogy). Published in three volumes, from 1934 to 1936, it was unanimously hailed by readers and critics as a book that finally tells the story of Serbia’s Great War. Aptly described by the Czech journalist and writer Jan Hajšman as ‘a collective novel’,40 the Serbian Trilogy was not only perceived as a text that succeeded in capturing the experience of a particular collective (the Serbian army); it was also a rare example of a war novel whose crucial episodes were, according to its author, written collaboratively by the members of that very collective. Based, for the most part, on Jakovljević’s personal experience as an artillery officer in the Serbian army, the Serbian Trilogy was praised in the same terms as Remarque’s novel – as a testimony that manages to convey the true spirit of the war – and was, on more than one occasion, compared to it.41 The sheer diversity of generic labels that were used for it – war diary, testimony, novel, report, ‘factography’, chronicle, novelized chronicle – is also telling.42 Even though the book would probably fail by Norton Cru’s standards – it contains a considerable amount of clichés from the war novel inventory – both the author and his critics emphasized its testimonial value. Jakovljević was keen to point out that the names and characters in the novel were not invented and that he had scrupulously relied upon eyewitness testimonies in describing the events that he had not actually seen.43 He confessed, however, that he had great difficulty in writing the novel’s third volume, especially in representing the Battle of Kaymakchalan – a series of conflicts between Serbian and Bulgarian troops on the Macedonian Front, which lasted from 12 to 30 September 1916. Even though the battle ended as a victory for the Entente, both sides suffered heavy losses, due to the impossible terrain on which it was fought – a mountain on the Greek-Serbian border with a 2,500-metre high peak, dubbed ‘Gate of Freedom’ by the Serbs. While its strategic importance is questionable, the Battle of Kaymakchalan was of great emotional significance to the Serbian troops, since the seizure of the peak, which cost many lives, was considered as the exiled army’s first return home. This significance only increased after the war, Kaymakchalan having taken its place alongside the retreat through Albania as

The War Books Controversy Revisited  111 a symbol of Serbian sacrifice. Obviously, a novel whose ambition was to tell the story of Serbia’s Great War could not leave out Kaymakchalan. Nevertheless, it proved to be the most difficult episode to write. Jakovljević complained that he had to rewrite the Kaymakchalan chapters four times, as he could not get to the truth of the event: the official report did not match the stories of the survivors, who were also in complete disagreement with one another. The main source of disagreement was, according to Jakovljević, how the battle progressed and which unit had the greater claim to fame. He wrote the final version only after he had gathered the representatives of each of the competing sides in one room, in which, after many hours of debating over a relief map of the mountain, they finally reached a consensus on what had actually happened.44 The result was a compromise, in which everyone was given their fair share of the victory. Despite Jakovljević’s effort to cast this incident in a casual, humorous light, and its fortunate ending, his statements reveal that the disputes between the conquerors of Kaymakchalan were triggered by something other than warrior pride. The survivors of Kaymakchalan took Jakovljević’s novel seriously. Like Norton Cru and Peter Kropp, they did not care much for categories such as ‘poetic licence’ or ‘fictional truth’. Whether a narrative is a novel and whether this novel possesses certain artistic qualities and tells the war by using specifically literary means, was a secondary issue; the only thing that mattered was whether the events depicted in it corresponded to ‘the truth’, as experienced by witnesses. Ironically, Jakovljević also shared this suspicion of literary fiction, his artistic credo being that ‘novels are not written for their own sake, but in order to present the actions and deeds of living persons and the actual events of history’.45 The Serbian Trilogy actually dramatizes this quest for the truth by presenting it as a dispute between several convalescents wounded at Kaymakchalan – all happening to share the same hospital room with the narrator, who is recovering from malaria and is curious to hear about the battle. The episode, three chapters long, closely mirrors Jakovljević’s story of its genesis. In a sequence that bears little resemblance to an actual conversation, each of the soldiers tells his own story, as if he were giving a deposition in front of an improvised tribunal. They even compare notes over a map of the mountain, since one of the patients just happens to be the High Command’s cartographer. The discussion ends with the verdict that victory was the result of a joint effort on the part of all the witnesses and their units, to which they reply in unison, ‘We agree!’46 In fact, the Kaymakchalan episode seems unconvincing due to its feeble motivation and overt didacticism, and it struck even the enthusiastic early readers of the novel as badly written and artificial.47 This was Jakovljević’s attempt to get as close as possible to the truth of the war as experienced by witnesses, to narrate ‘the collective tale that soldiers tell’. The attempt was not only aesthetically unsuccessful; as it turned out, Jakovljević’s ‘collective tale’ was also a dubious construct.

112  Dunja Dušanić Decades after the events described in the Serbian Trilogy, a pamphlet entitled Junaci srpske trilogije govore (The Heroes of Serbian Trilogy Speak, 1971) was published. In it, three witnesses, whose notes and oral testimonies ­Jakovljević had used as sources for the novel, revisited the events of the war. Among them was a retired colonel, Svetislav Krejaković, who appears under his own name in the Kaymakchalan episode of the Trilogy. He claimed that Jakovljević’s description of the battle was false and that, furthermore, the tale which he told his interviewer was entirely made up. No consensus was ever reached among the veterans. The meeting which Jakovljević describes never took place, and even if it did, he could never have agreed that the 7th Infantry Regiment claimed the peak first.48 Knowing Jakovljević’s creative process, it is not very likely that he invented the whole story; some form of meeting between witnesses probably took place, although Krejaković must have been absent from it. In any case, of all the officers Jakovljević mentioned, Krejaković was the only one who came forward with allegations against him. More importantly, perhaps, Krejaković accused the novelist of using his own private notes from the front and incorporating them into an entirely fabricated narrative tissue, thereby distorting their original meaning. In other words, by using his narrative as material for the novel and fictionalizing it, Jakovljević robbed Krejaković of his own experience of the war. He appropriated fragments of soldiers’ experiences in order to create a false, ‘synthesized’ version of the events, thus depriving them of their voice and their right to memory. What is fundamentally the same objection was behind Norton Cru’s complaint against war novelists who exploited ‘our blood’ and ‘our fears’ for the sake of literary effect49 and Jerrold’s disavowal of the writers and readers who mistook parts of the story for the whole truth. At the time Krejaković’s testimony was published, it seemed that his accusations concerned only a small group of veterans who held onto their memory of the Great War. Just as All Quiet on the Western Front continued to be read despite Remarque’s detractors, so too did Jakovljević’s novel maintain an important place in the Serbian memory of the First World War. In that light, the numerous attacks on war novels during the interwar period begin to appear as acts of resistance against the tendency to homogenize the memory of the Great War. Some war veterans – although, obviously, not all of them – felt that their right to memory was usurped by novelists and their misguided readers, and sought to reclaim that right. To a certain extent, as we have seen, their fears were not unfounded. Generically ambiguous texts such as Barbusse’s Under Fire set an example which many subsequent novelists followed, and their publishers even more so. In that respect, there is less discontinuity between the first and the second wave of World War I narratives than it is sometimes claimed.50 Likewise, the adverse reactions to war novels were far less dependent on the context of the late 1920s in Western Europe than it might seem. Indeed, the case of Jakovljević’s Serbian Trilogy, written at a different time and in a quite different geopolitical context, shows that as long as there were living witnesses, narrating the war would remain contested.

The War Books Controversy Revisited  113

Notes 1 L. Aragon, ‘La guerre à la mode’, Le Surréalisme au sérvice de la Révolution, October 1930, vol. 2, 14–16. 2 M. Eksteins, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front and the fate of a war’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1980, vol. 15(2), 345–66, p. 362. 3 A. Halkin, The Enemy Reviewed: German Popular Literature through British Eyes Between the Two World Wars, Westport: Praeger, 1995, p. 67. 4 S. Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, London: The Bodley Head, 1990, p. 455. 5 The role of Remarque’s novel in the war book boom has been studied, among others, by H. Müller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986; H.  Rüter, Remarque Im Westen nichts Neues. Ein Bestseller im Kontext, Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980; M. Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1989; Halkin, The Enemy Reviewed; W. Natter, Literature at War 1914–1940: Representing the Time of Greatness in Germany, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999; T.F. Schneider, Erich Maria Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues: Text, Edition, Entstehung, Distribution und Rezeption, 1928–1930, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004. Otherwise, discussions of the war book boom, largely inspired by R. Wohl’s Generation of 1914, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, and, in particular, Hynes’ A War Imagined, have almost exclusively dealt with the British case. Valuable insights on the book boom can also be found in J. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; A. Frayn, Writing Disenchantment: British First World War Prose 1914–30, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014; V. Trott, Publishers, Readers and the Great War: Literature and Memory since 1918, ­London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 6 Quoted in J. Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, New York: Dover, 2004, p. vii. 7 S. Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941, Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010, p. 3. See also S. Trout, Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002, for an analysis of the controversy surrounding Willa Cather’s One of Ours. 8 Most extensively in Schneider’s Erich Maria Remarque. See also Rüter, Remarque; Eksteins, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front and the fate of a war’; C.R. Barker and R.W. Last, Erich Maria Remarque, London: Oswald Wolff, 1979; B. Murdoch, The Novels of Erich Maria Remarque: Sparks of Life, New York: Camden House, 2006; M. Ward, ‘The reception of All Quiet on the Western Front’, in B. Murdoch (ed.), All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, Pasadena: Salem Press, 2010, pp. 38–52. 9 E.M. Remarque, Im Westen Nichts Neues. Twentieth Century Texts, ed. B. Murdoch, London and New York: Routledge, 1984, p. 4. 10 Quoted in Ward, ‘The reception of All Quiet on the Western Front’, p. 40. 11 G. Nickl, Im Westen nichts Neues und sein wahrer Sinn. Betrachtungen über den Pazifismus und Antwort auf Remarque, Leipzig: Stocker, 1929. 12 Barker and Last, Erich Maria Remarque, p. 32. 13 On the role of Remarque’s publisher Ullstein see Schneider, Erich Maria Remarque, pp. 350, 353. The novel’s opening statement suggests that the author’s intention was to report (zu berichten) on a generation destroyed by the war – ‘Es soll nur den Versuch machen, über eine Generation zu berichten, die vom Kriege zerstört wurde; – auch wenn sie seinen Granaten entkam’ – an ambiguous phrasing, to say the least (see Schneider, Erich Maria Remarque, pp. 465–7; Murdoch, The Novels of Erich Maria Remarque, p. 35). Remarque was inclined to present the novel as

114  Dunja Dušanić resulting from his own war experiences, most famously in his 1929 interview with Axel Eggebrecht in Die literarische Welt, 14 June 1929, 1–2. 14 See Eksteins, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front and the fate of a war’, p. 354; Barker and Last, Erich Maria Remarque, pp. 34–7. 15 In the novel, Lewandowski is shown as a 40-year-old soldier, hospitalized with a serious abdominal wound and waiting for a first conjugal visit. He has not seen his wife in two years and is desperate to make love to her. He cannot, however, leave the hospital room, as he is in too poor a condition to move. When his wife and son finally arrive, Lewandowski proposes, much to her astonishment, that they make love in the room which he shares with other convalescents. She grants him his wish only after he explains, with the help of other patients, that conventions such as privacy were not made for war times. Two men guard the door, while the others play cards, hold the child and chat loudly with their backs to the couple as they make love in Lewandowski’s bed. Kropp found this episode utterly preposterous, claiming that he would have certainly known about it if anything similar had happened. 16 P. Kropp, Endlich Klarheit über Remarque und sein Buch Im Westen nichts Neues, Hamm: author’s edition, 1930, trans. by Barker and Last, in Erich Maria ­Remarque, p. 38. 17 D. Jerrold, The Lie About the War: A Note on Some Contemporary War Books, ­London: Faber and Faber, 1930, p. 9. 18 Ibid., p. 18. 19 Ibid., p. 14. 20 C. Falls, War Books: An Annotated Bibliography of Books about the Great War, ­London: Peter Davies, 1930, pp. x–xi. 21 J. Norton Cru, Témoins. Essai d’analyse et de critique des souvenirs de combattants édités en français de 1915 à 1928, preface and postface by F. Rousseau, Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2006, p. 567. Unless stated otherwise, the translations from the French are my own. A considerably shorter version of Témoins, which appeared in France under the title Du témoignage in 1931, was translated into English as War Books: A Study in Historical Criticism, San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1991. 22 Quoted in F. Rousseau, Le Procès des témoins de la Grande Guerre: l’affaire Jean Norton Cru, Paris: Seuil, 2003, p. 190. 23 See especially Claude Pierret’s review of the Journey to the End of the Night in A. Derval (ed.), Voyage au bout de la nuit de Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Critiques 1932–1935, Paris: IMEC, 1993, p. 133. 24 As Nicolas Beaupré pointed out, these strategies served to authenticate war books as testimonies by establishing their authors as writers who were veterans (écrivains combattants). N. Beaupré, Écrire en guerre, écrire la guerre. France-Allemagne 1914–1920, Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2006, pp. 67–70. On the role of publishers in Great Britain see Trott, Publishers, Readers and the Great War. 25 Interestingly, an early subtitle of All Quiet on the Western Front was ‘Aus den Tagebüchern des Freiwilligen Georg Bäumers’ (From the Diaries of the Volunteer Soldier Georg Bäumer). See Schneider, Erich Maria Remarque, p. 463; and Murdoch, The Novels of Erich Maria Remarque, pp. 1–23. 26 H. Barbusse, Under Fire, trans. R. Buss, London: Penguin. 2003. 27 J. Winter, ‘Introduction: Henri Barbusse and the birth of the moral witness’, in Barbusse, Under Fire, pp. xiv–xv. 28 See N. Beaupré, ‘De quoi la littérature de guerre est-elle la source ? Témoignages et fictions de la Grande Guerre sous le regard de l’historien’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue de l’Histoire, 2011, vol. 112(4), 41–55. 29 See P. Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, trans. K. Leary as On Autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 6ff.; G. Genette, Fiction et

The War Books Controversy Revisited  115 diction, trans. C. Porter as Fiction & Diction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 72ff.; D. Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, p. 19ff. 30 Norton Cru, Témoins, p. 553. 31 Winter, ‘Henri Barbusse and the birth of the moral witness’, xiv–xv. 32 Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, p. 15. 33 See J. Searle, ‘The logical status of fictional discourse’, in J. Searle, Expression and Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975 (1979), pp. 58–75; J-M. Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction?, trans. Dorrit Cohn as Why Fiction?, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010; J-M. Schaeffer, ‘Fictional vs. factual narration’, in P Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009, pp. 98–114. 34 Norton Cru, Témoins, p. 553. 35 C. Prochasson, ‘Les mots pour le dire: Jean-Norton Cru, du témoignage à l’ histoire’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 2011, vol. 48(4), 160–89, p. 173. 36 S. Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War, New York: Penguin Press, 1997, p. 25. 37 Galtier-Boissière, quoted in Rousseau, Le Procès des témoins de la Grande Guerre, p. 185. 38 R. Dorgelès, Souvenirs sur les Croix de bois, Paris: Cité des Livres, 1929, p. 34. 39 Ibid., p. 33. 40 Quoted in D. Vasić, ‘Delo Stevana Jakovljevića’, Politika, 12 November 1936. 41 E.g. in Ž. Mladenović, ‘St. J. Jakovljević: Devetstočetrnaesta’, Letopis Matice srpske, 1935, vol. 342, 268; V. Vujić, ‘Jedno prosto a dobro delo o ratu našem’, Pravda, 22 December 1934; Vasić, ‘Delo Stevana Jakovljevića’. 42 Kovačević, for example, described the Serbian Trilogy as a ‘war diary’ and even as ‘the diary of a battery’, in B. Kovačević, ‘Jedan ratni dnevnik’, Srpski književni glasnik, 16 January 1935, vol. 44(2), 142. Nearly all the mentioned reviewers used the term ‘testimony’ to describe the novel at some point, and everyone accentuated its documentary value. Jakovljević claimed that multiple generic labels were used because critics did not know what to make of his novel. See S. Jakovljević, ‘Stevan Jakovljević izbliza’, in S. Paunović, Pisci izbliza, Beograd: Prosveta, p. 68. 43 Jakovljević, ‘Stevan Jakovljević izbliza’, p. 59. 44 Ibid., pp. 57–8. 45 Ibid., p. 68. 46 S. Jakovljević, Srpska trilogija III, Beograd: Geca Kon, 1939, p. 175. 47 See, for instance, D. Gavela, ‘St. Jakovljevića Kapija slobode’, Srpski književni glasnik, 16 October 1936, vol. 49(4), 300–2. 48 K. Dimitrijević, Junaci srpske trilogije govore, Beograd: Industrodidakta, 1971, p. 152. 49 Norton Cru in 1917, quoted in Rousseau, Le Procès des témoins de la Grande Guerre, p. 116. 50 See, for example, N. Beaupré, ‘De quoi la littérature de guerre est-elle la source?’, pp. 42–5.

8 War and Peace as a ‘Paradoxical Coherence’ How the European Union Uses the Remembrance of the Great War to Construct European Identities Peter Pichler War and the European Union This volume discusses narratives of war. In this chapter, a new reading will be provided of the narrative of war which the European Union constructed through remembering World War I, especially around the time of its centenary, from 2014 to 2018. Following the shared approach of the authors of the volume, narratives, we understand the notion of narrative as ‘a sequence of experienced events, an explanation and framing of how something came into being, and where it is going’.1 The aim of this new reading is to explore the linkages in discourse between the EU’s politics of memory, history and identity, and the ‘emplotment’ (Hayden White) of World War One as a historical narration of times of war.2 To do so, the theoretical concept of ‘paradoxical coherence’ will be employed, which this author recently introduced into the discourse of European integration history to explain the EU’s cultural sui generis qualities.3 Applying this concept to the EU’s narrative of the years between 1914 and 1918 can provide fresh insights into EU history, and into the modes of the production of war narratives in transnational contexts.4 At first glance, current European integration politics seem to lack any deeper connection with the narratives of the first global war of the twentieth century. The ‘Great War’ broke out in 1914 and the actual fighting and battles finished in 1918. The de facto history of European integration, on the other hand, started after 1945, having its historically most intense and important phase after the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992 – which is not to ignore the long-lasting history of concepts of European unification going back to the Middle Ages.5 Looking at the politics of identity in European integration through the theoretical lens of paradoxical coherence, we will see that this discourse, which started in 1973, developed and cultivated an interesting and specific narrative of World War I. It became a decades-long history of political speech acts, which were performed in public to gain legitimacy and identity, utilizing the discursive instrument of historical storytelling. This history of

War and Peace as a ‘Paradoxical Coherence’  117 speech acts constructed a narrative of war in European transnational and supranational networks. It is prominent and relevant even today, perhaps even more than ever before in these times of European crisis. To explain and substantiate this history, we will focus on this discourse’s starting point in 1973, when the European Communities published a first ‘Document on the European Identity’. Then, the analysis will shift to the discourse’s development and shape since 2014, when it took up and integrated the memory of the outbreak of World War I. Finally, applying the theory of ‘paradoxical coherence’ to this process, the hypothesis will be posed that since 2014 the EU’s discourse has prompted a very specific, oscillating, ambiguous yet meaningful and ‘sense-making’ war narrative of the ‘Great War’, which underpins and supports its self-representation as a union of peace and solidarity.

The ‘Document on the European Identity’ (1973) as the Starting Point of European Integration’s Politics of Identity In the late 1940s, European integration history started with the Marshall Plan. It was followed by the European Coal and Steel Community of the early 1950s. This was the post-war situation of recovery from World War II and, at the same time, the early phase of the Cold War on the continent of Europe. Seen from a cultural-historical and transnational perspective, the years from the end of the war in 1945 to the announcement of the Schuman Plan in 1950 were years of the reinvention of images, symbols and narratives of Europe after war.6 Tony Judt’s influential concept of ‘Postwar’, covering all European history from 1945 to 1991, should perhaps also be seen as a narrative of war – because war was its major theme and the object of narratological construction.7 Hence, in the initial phase of post-war European integration, the continent faced a difficult and conflict-rich cultural situation in terms of the development of its own self-narration. Germany had – once again – lost the war, and was politically discredited, being seen as the originating nation of war, aggression and the Shoah. Nonetheless, the problem had to be continentally and globally negotiated. European unification after World War II was a crucial part of the solution to this situation of growing conflicts. It meant Germany’s reintegration into a European, even supranational political setting and framework, taking place in the growing shadow of the Cold War and its system of confrontation.8 More broadly, in European integration history, the years from 1945 to the early 1970s are to be seen in the context of global and European economic prosperity – despite the tensions of the bipolar system. In 1973, the European Economic Community saw its first enlargement, with the accession of Denmark, Ireland and Great Britain. In particular, the accession of Great Britain changed the integration system’s structural, cultural and discursive balance. From this point onwards, it was alleged to have a lack of identity, legitimation or democracy, a debate that prevails to this day. In 1973, the EEC became larger and culturally more diverse, but its political and structural framework remained virtually unchanged. It gained political power,

118  Peter Pichler economic force and European space, but did not strengthen its democratic culture. 9 At the same time, the oil crisis meant the effective end of the post-war ‘Golden Age’. Thus, the year 1973 was a crucial one in EU history. The EEC expanded and the new situation required a new form of cultural-historical discourse, facing demands to strengthen its democratic legitimacy, identity and organizational structures. It was precisely these new requirements that shaped the background of the European summit in Copenhagen in 1973. There, the member states’ leading politicians launched the Community’s own discourse of the politics of memory, history and identity. European integration’s enlarged political and economic system needed to find and strengthen its cultural construction, pushing towards the imagination of a ‘European soul’.10 The ‘Document on the ­European Identity’ was published by the nine member states’ foreign ministers in Copenhagen on 14 December 1973, and marked the starting point of this development: The Nine Member Countries of the European Communities have decided that the time has come to draw up a document on the European Identity. […] The Nine European States might have been pushed towards disunity by their history and by selfishly defending misjudged interests. But they have overcome their past enmities and have decided that unity is a basic European necessity to ensure the survival of the civilization which they have in common. The Nine wish to ensure that the cherished values of their legal, political and moral order are respected, and to preserve the rich variety of their national cultures. Sharing as they do the same attitudes to life, based on a determination to build a society which measures up to the needs of the individual, they are determined to defend the principles of representative democracy, of the rule of law, of social justice − which is the ultimate goal of economic progress − and of respect for human rights. All of these are fundamental elements of the European Identity.11 This document and its narratological stance mark the beginning of European integration’s discourse of the politics of history, memory and identity. In a situation of historical change (or even crisis), where the economies were entering decline and European unification identity seemed contested, the political leaders reacted by drafting this document.12 The notion of war does not appear in this quotation; nonetheless this remains a narrative of war because ‘unity’, shaped by the framework of the still existing post-war order of the early 1970s, is said to be a ‘European necessity’.13 In order to identify the specific mode of historical storytelling that is used to construct a European identity in this narrative of war, we need to take stock of a particular sentence in the quotation above: ‘But they have overcome their past enmities and have decided that unity is a basic European necessity to ensure the survival of the civilization which they have in common.’ Crucially,

War and Peace as a ‘Paradoxical Coherence’  119 the European identity constructed as the starting point of this discourse was an identity of peace. This European identity-as-peace was set up in opposition to the past of ­European wars. The narratological link to Europe’s pre-1945 history of war was used to construct the EEC’s identity in 1973. It was exactly this pacifist narrative of unification that was – intrinsically – at the heart of supranational ­European unification from its inception in 1950.14 Moreover, since the initiation of the integration system’s broad discourse of identity politics in the face of its crisis in 1973, this mode of historical storytelling became nothing less than its cultural-historical design, and way of emplotting history. It tells us that we should continue building a better Europe of peace in times of crisis – because of this past of war between 1914 and 1945. Thus, it remains a narrative of war.

The Discourse of History, Memory and Identity in Times of Major Crisis, Since 2009 Leaping forward to the present day (in 2018), we now examine the EU’s current discourse surrounding the politics of history, memory and identity.15 The EU faces crisis now – probably its biggest and most fundamental crisis yet.16 What began as an economic crisis in 2009 and was called a ‘Eurozone crisis’ took the dramatic path of a constitutional crisis, which had followed the French ‘non’ and the Dutch ‘nee’ causing the European Constitution to fail in 2005. In early 2018, at the time of writing, the crisis was as intense as ever, and perhaps even more intense than ever before. After the impending threat of ‘Grexit’, there now is the reality of ‘Brexit’ negotiations, all in the context of a general global and European situation of uncertainty, even fear, in the face of the ‘migrant crisis’, which reached a peak in 2015.17 Also, growing discourses on populism, on politics of ‘post-factualism’, on racism and extremism, on the role of Islam and on terrorism in Europe, are major fields of contention.18 Taken together, historically the EU today is a political system and entity transcending the classic nation-state, whose identity is being contested as never before. Constitutional crisis, Eurozone crisis, migrant crisis, ‘Grexit’ and ‘Brexit’ all mark the painful epitome of a narrative of the European Union shared by many citizens: it describes and imagines the EU as an uncertain political project, unwilling and/or unable to resolve its fundamental problems. Longing for cultural orientation and solid identities, people hark back to classic European nationalisms, and the EU has been forced to fight furiously for its identity. This situation of a contested collective identity is the context of the current EU discourse of the politics of history, memory and identity. The EU needs an even more detailed and coherent account of its past and history to represent itself positively, and to act politically as a successful ­European community. In a nutshell, the EU was and remains in fundamental crisis, and it needs a new narrative. Hardly surprisingly, again it is a narrative of war – and peace. When in 2014 the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was remembered in Europe and across the globe, the EU took the initiative and played

120  Peter Pichler a remarkably active role in memory politics. The speech given by German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the German Bundestag on 25 June 2014, just one day before the ensuing summit of the European Council in Belgium,19 is paradigmatic of European leaders’ quest for identity via history and remembrance in this context: during the recent weeks of this 2014 year of commemoration, there has been an intense debate concerning the questions which had led to the outbreak of World War I a hundred years ago. Again and again, there is the question: what have we learned from history? […] the promise of a fortunate Europe united in peace and liberty has to be protected for the generations to come; this has to be our work for the guidance of our citizens. Not the right of the strong, but the rule of law; this is our conviction. It preserves peace, freedom and prosperity, and this, today, is Europe. Because of this, the European Union is, despite all the difficulties, an attractive and good model for the future.20 This speech, as a statement given by Europe’s politically most powerful woman, does nothing less than provide an imagination of 2014’s EU identity by looking back in history. The outbreak of World War I 100 years previously became the antithesis for what the present EU stood for: peace. Peace is the opposite of war – currently and historically, but most of all narratologically. Europe, from 2014 onwards, means peace. This imagination strives to establish and secure European identity – rooted in a vast panorama of other sources of EU identities, such as the rule of law, prosperity, the euro, the ‘borderless’ Schengen area and so on.21 In EU discourse, this identity, in the contexts of constitutional, sovereign debt and migrant crisis, the avoided ‘Grexit’ and the ongoing ‘Brexit’, takes the form of a very specific way of historical storytelling. The EU uses its imagination of peace-as-identity and contrasts it with 1914’s history of war. The narratological result is a seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of histories of war and peace. How can we make sense of this discourse? The hypothesis presented here is that we can do so by using the theoretical notion and concept of ‘paradoxical coherence’, which this author developed in the course of work on the cultural characteristics of the EU.

War and Peace as a Narrative of ‘Paradoxical Coherence’ Recent research on the cultural history of the European Union shows that it is a political system that is usually and sometimes stereotypically defined as a system sui generis.22 Since the inception of European integration historiography in the late 1960s, this historical process of regional integration is told as a story of ‘success’.23 However, recent research, for instance by Kieran Patel or by G. Thiemeyer and I. Tölle, gives detailed empirical and conceptual indications that this is only a half-truth. In some ways, historically there existed

War and Peace as a ‘Paradoxical Coherence’  121 earlier forms of ‘supranationalism’ before the EU, which means we have to rethink fundamentally our narratives of the EU. How can we make sense of its history, and at the same time avoid EU-centrism while acknowledging its specific characteristics? 24 The new notion of ‘paradoxical coherence’25 is suggested as a way to explain the union’s ‘cultural constitution’, opening a new discourse of European Union cultural history. Paradoxical coherence is defined as: a description of the form of coherence which is produced by the EU cultural system, emerging from the oscillation between nationalism and supranationalism in history; as a spatially and temporally transformative, contingent ‘freezing’ of conflicts in historical time between both discursive forces.26 As a theoretical concept, paradoxical coherence aims at explaining the EU’s history in non-teleological and liquid ways. It emphasizes oscillations and pulsations, and shows a European cultural entity slowing down and accelerating again in its history of over 60 years. This means critically reframing the teleology of the ‘ever-closer union’, and at the same time acknowledging the union’s own role in history – also in terms of memorial and historical narrations of the past. We no longer see coherence as the sole product of teleology; much more, it is the result of the interplay between the discourses of nationalism versus supranationalism that have defined the EU’s cultural constitution in history.27 Paradoxical narratives do not destroy coherence but instead create new forms of coherence and meaning. This also holds true for the empirical case of the EU discourse of identity in the remembrance of the First World War in the years since 2014. Indeed, one can make better sense of this history by seeing it as an example of paradoxical coherence. In terms of the narratological coherence and identity constructed in discourse, since 2014, the EU has used World War I remembrance as a very specific kind of narrative of war. The outbreak of this war, and its whole history, are used to sharpen Europe’s identity. Today’s peace is opposed to the history of that war. Thus, this discourse features a very individual, in some ways peculiar mode of telling a narrative of war. The EU needs war to expound its peace identity. At the same time, it narratologically relies on war because war is its antithesis. The context is made clearer in a February 2014 article by the British journalist Christopher Booker, entitled ‘How the First World War inspired the EU’: The story began just after the outbreak of war in 1914, when two young men were appointed to organize the shipping between North America and Europe of food and vital war materials. One was a now forgotten […] Arthur Salter; the other […] Jean Monnet […]. By 1917 they were so frustrated by the difficulty of hiring ships from all the international interests

122  Peter Pichler involved that they had a radical idea. What was needed, they agreed, was a body armed with ‘supranational’ powers to requisition the ships, overriding the wishes of their owners or any national government. […] And thus, over the next 60 years [since the Schuman Plan in 1950], did the longdreamed-of ‘United States of Europe’ gradually take shape, extending its powers, treaty by treaty, over ever more areas of government, embracing ever more of the countries of Europe.28 This article, published months before Merkel’s speech, almost anatomically describes the narratological construction that underlies the usage of the remembrance of World War I by the EU. In the mode of paradoxical coherence, the narrative of war imagining the era of 1914–18 is used to define antithetically the EU’s identity in 2014 – and perhaps earlier. Thus the hypothesis runs as follows: in EU discourse of the politics of history, memory and identity, war and peace form a cultural and discursive amalgamation of paradoxical coherence. The EU is peace, but it needs and uses World War I to represent its peace-as-identity. From the point of view of narratological analysis of historical texts on war (and peace), it is likely that the mode of paradoxical coherence is also prevalent in other narratives of wars. Taking up Zygmunt Bauman’s theory and diagnosis of a ‘liquid modernity’, it is to be assumed that (post-)modernity’s characteristics of liquidity, social insularity, digital connections and networks, require narratives of war that recount history in paradoxical and antithetically liquid ways.29 This indicates a deep need for further research on the question of how meaning is produced, in terms of sense-making, in current narratives of war – especially in transnational and hyper-textual contexts.30 Essentially, it follows that future research should also examine the historical narration of the era of the Great War (and other histories of war and peace) in European unification discourse. As a rule, such narratives – like the one dealt with in this chapter – are to be interpreted in their spatial and temporal contexts. Not only academic history but also popular and political historical storytelling always happens in a specific place, at a specific time. As Hayden White already put it provocatively in 1973, that crucial year for Europe: I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse. Histories (and philosophies of history as well) combine a certain amount of ‘data’, theoretical concepts for ‘explaining’ these data, and a narrative structure for their presentation as an icon of set of events presumed to have occured [sic] in times past. In addition, I maintain, they contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic.31 Since the publication of White’s classic Metahistory, narratological and post-narratological research in historical theory has seen many new results, meaning progress in the explanation of history.32 However, White’s main

War and Peace as a ‘Paradoxical Coherence’  123 result, his serious theoretical provocation that history always is a narrative, remains true for histories of war, right up to today. They always have to be seen as narratives of war. We should likewise see the EU’s identity discourse in this vein.33 If we take the EU’s war narrative as ‘emplotment’ in White’s sense, the question then arises of what kind of narratological structuring it forms. Within his framework, the type of ‘romantic’ stories, of initial clashes and confrontation, resolved in supranational unification, seems to fit best. Moreover, the EU case also provides a good theoretical opportunity to rethink and develop further these narrativist and post-narrativist emplotment categories.34

Conclusion The main points of argumentation can be summarized as follows, together with their most important consequences for further research. First, the ‘Document on the European Identity’ (Copenhagen 1973) was the starting point of its own discourse of a politics of identity in European integration history. There was European identity-building before (e.g., in the discourse of the Marshall Plan) but this document introduced a new quality of depth, aiming at legitimizing the European construction,35 and the start of a broad discourse. The narrative it constructed was one of peace. Its structural and political background was the growing perceived lack of legitimation and identity of the community – ‘Eurosclerosis’ was the following stage of European Union history.36 Hence, the narrative constructed in 1973 had two main features: it was a narrative of peace (which logically needs war to define itself antithetically), and it was built in times of crisis. Second, this discourse of identity was taken up in EU politics by leaders like Angela Merkel, in the context of the rapidly growing and threatening processes of multi-crisis in 2014, when Europe and the world commemorated the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War. 2014 is a year which, on the one hand, was a climax of crisis for the EU on manifold fronts: the global economic crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the lack of identity and legitimation in the EU, its institutional flaws and the already burgeoning migrant crisis.37 On the other hand, 2014 was also the year of the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. The intrinsic connection between crisis in 1914 and crisis in 2014 prompted a specific narrative of EU identity, which told EU history as a history of peace. Yet it actually remained a narrative of war because the EU used the memory of the 1914 July crisis – and thus war – to legitimize itself to its public. Third, and more importantly, we can interpret the history of the EU discourse of identity politics, from 1973 to the present, as a discourse born of the needs of crisis, rooted in a lack of identity and legitimation. In this discourse, the narrative of war of the 1914–18 era became a narratological tool to fill this discursive gap. It was used to define EU identity as an identity-as-peace, opposed to the history of the First World War. The thesis is that the mode of

124  Peter Pichler sense-making, which structures this discourse, should be read as an example of the mode of paradoxical coherence: this narration’s meaning grows out of the antithetic and only seemingly conflictual interplay of war and peace.38 Reflecting on these results, and most of all on the hypothesis of the paradoxical coherence of the EU’s narration of World War I, there are two points that are crucial for subsequent research on this topic, and probably for the theoretical conceptualization of narratives of war at large, especially in our current state of post-modernism.39 First, assuming that the history of World War I in European discourse can be explained by the theory of paradoxical coherence, growing out of contexts of crisis, perhaps this is also true for other histories of war (the commemoration of the Second World War would be the next logical empirical case to examine). We could direct research towards the discursive links between EU identity and the memorial complex of the era from 1914 to 1945, aiming at a more coherent account. Second, supposing that the empirical case of the narrative examined here has the discursive and logical structure of ‘sense-making’ through paradoxical coherence, we should ask whether there is a deeper structural and linguistic connection between narratives of war and paradoxical structures. Do narratives of war favour such structures? And do they appear predominantly in times of crisis? Do phases of crisis make new narratives of war appear?

Notes 1 See the editors’ introduction to this volume, Chapter 1. 2 For the construction of history in discourse see H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973; H. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987; more recently, see J. Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 3 P. Pichler, ‘European Union cultural history: introducing the theory of “paradoxical coherence” to start mapping a field of research’, Journal of European Integration, 2018, vol. 40(1), 1–16; also, see P. Pichler, EUropa. Was die Europäische Union ist, was sie nicht ist und was sie einmal werden könnte, Graz: Leykam, 2016. 4 This continues my research in P. Pichler, ‘Krieg und Frieden als “paradoxe Kohärenz”: Warum und wie die Europäische Union in ihrer Geschichts-, G ­ edächtnis- und Identitätspolitik den Ersten Weltkrieg (ge)braucht’, in B. Bachinger et al. (eds) Gedenken und (k)ein Ende? Das Weltkriegs-Gedenken 1914/2014. Debatten, Zugänge, Ausblicke, Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017, pp. 95–111. 5 For the current discourse of European integration history see L. van Middelaar, The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014; W. Loth, Europas Einigung. Eine unvollendete Geschichte, Frankfurt: Campus, 2014; W. Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism: A Conceptual Approach to European History, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2016; P. Pasture, Imagining European Unity Since 1000 AD, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; W. Kaiser and A. Varsori (eds.), European Union History: Themes and Debates, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; Pichler, ‘European Union cultural history’; Pichler, EUropa.

War and Peace as a ‘Paradoxical Coherence’  125 6 G. Bischof and D. Stiefel (eds.), Images of the Marshall Plan in Europe: Films, Photographs, Exhibits, Posters, Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2009. 7 T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Penguin, 2005. 8 Ibid.; also, for a recent history of the Cold War see K. Spohr and D. Reynolds (eds.), Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 9 For the relationship between European integration and Britain see D. Gowland, A. Turner and A. Wright, Britain and European Integration since 1945: On the Sidelines, London: Routledge, 2009; also see R. Liddle, The Europe Dilemma: Britain and the Drama of EU Integration, London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. 10 Van Middelaar, Passage, pp. 158–80. 11 European Commission, Bulletin of the European Communities, 1973, vol. 12, 118–19. 12 Ibid.; Van Middelaar, Passage, pp. 158–80. 13 Judt, Postwar. 14 W. Schmale, Geschichte und Zukunft der Europäischen Identität, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008; also see Schmale, Gender and Eurocentrism. 15 Pichler, ‘Krieg und Frieden als “paradoxe Kohärenz”’. 16 S. Champeau et al. (eds.), The Future of Europe: Democracy, Legitimacy and Justice after the Euro Crisis, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014; R. Godby, The European Financial Crisis: Debt, Growth, and Economic Policy, New York: Barbara Budrich, 2014. Older but still useful: R. Kirt (ed.), Die Europäische Union und ihre Krisen, Opladen: Nomos, 2001. Historically, also see V. Dini and M. D’Auria (eds.), The Space of Crisis: Images and Ideas of Europe in the Age of Crisis, 1914–1945, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2013; M. Hewitson and M. D’Auria (eds.), Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957, New York: Berghahn, 2012. 17 E. Recchi, Mobile Europe: The Theory and Practice of Free Movement in the EU, ­London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; A. Pécoud, Depoliticising Migration: Global Governance and International Migration Narratives, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; G. Lazaridis and K. Wadia (eds.), The Securitisation of Migration in the EU: Debates since 9/11, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 18 A. Rabin-Havt et al., Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics, New York: Anchor Books, 2016; R. Leiken, Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of the Second Generation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; D. Whittaker, The Terrorism Reader, 4th edn, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. 19 Council of the European Union, European Council, 26-27/06/2014, available at: www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/european-council/2014/06/26-27/, accessed 5 March 2019. 20 A. Merkel, Rede von Bundeskanzlerin Dr. Angela Merkel zum Haushaltsgesetz 2014 vor dem Deutschen Bundestag am 25. Juni 2014 in Berlin, Berlin, 2014, available at: www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Bulletin/2010-2015/2014/06/74-1-bk-bt. html, accessed 5 March 2019. My translation. 21 Schmale, Identität; Pichler, ‘Krieg und Frieden als “paradoxe Kohärenz”’. 22 Pichler, ‘European Union cultural history’. 23 Kaiser and Varsori (eds.), European Union History. 24 K. Patel, ‘Provincialising European Union: co-operation and integration in Europe in a historical perspective’, Contemporary European History, 2013, vol. 22, 649–73; G. Thiemeyer and I. Tölle, ‘Supranationalität im 19. Jahrhundert? Die Beispiele der Zentralkommission für die Rheinschifffahrt und des Octroivertrages 1804–1851’, Journal of European Integration History, 2011, vol. 17, 177–96. 25 Pichler, ‘European Union cultural history’. 26 Ibid., p. 8. 27 Ibid. 28 C. Booker, ‘How the First World War inspired the EU’, The Spectator, 8 February 2014.

126  Peter Pichler 29 Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000; more recently, see Z. Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007; Z. Bauman, Retrotopia, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. 30 W. Schmale, Digitale Geschichtswissenschaft, Vienna: Böhlau, 2010. 31 White, Metahistory, p. ix. 32 Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy. 33 Pichler, ‘European Union cultural history’. 34 White, Metahistory, pp. 1–42. 35 Bischof and Stiefel (eds.), Images. 36 H. Giersch, Eurosclerosis, Kiel: Institut für Weltwirtschaft, 1985. 37 Recchi, Mobile Europe; Pécoud, Depoliticising Migration; Lazaridis and Wadia (eds.), Securitisation. 38 Pichler, ‘Krieg und Frieden als “paradoxe Kohärenz”’. 39 Bauman, Modernity; Bauman, Time; Bauman, Retrotopia.

9 History Wars in School Textbooks? The Massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in Polish History Textbooks since 1989 Sylwia Bobryk Introduction The Second World War was a traumatic experience for Poles.1 The war lasted for five and a half years, and six million citizens of the pre-war Polish ­Republic – three million ethnic Poles and three million Jews – were killed. It is not surprising that after the war Polish history textbooks presented Poles as heroic and innocent victims.2 Yet, while Nazi crimes and their Polish victims were investigated, Polish-Soviet war history could not be freely discussed in the Soviet Bloc. It was only in 1989 that Polish history textbooks were liberated from the official control of the Polish Communist state and the Soviet influence over historical narratives. Among the Communist taboo subjects were the massacres in the Polish Eastern Borderlands, in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, where at least 50,000 Poles were murdered by Ukrainian partisans and peasants between 1943 and 1944.3 The history of the Eastern Borderlands is fairly complicated. In the interwar period they belonged to the Second Polish Republic (1918–39). They were inhabited mostly by Ukrainians who had lost the 1918–19 war against Poland. National and class tensions intensified in the interwar period, but the demons of nationalism were particularly released by the outbreak of the Second World War. First, in 1939 the two regions were occupied by the ­Soviet Union. Second, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they fell under Nazi administration.4 The occupying powers introduced Poles and Ukrainians to the methods of brutality, mass killing and ethnic cleansing, and destroyed the local elites who might have had the social capacity to prevent the massacres. The Soviets brought with them the secret police (NKVD) who repressed the local communities by deporting the intelligentsia deep into the Soviet Union and executing thousands of Polish army officers, while Nazis treated Slavs as members of an inferior race, and between 1941 and 1943 carried out the Holocaust. Despite their common enemies, as American historian Timothy Snyder observed, ‘the war divided rather than united Ukrainians and Poles’.5 In 1943, during the Nazi

128  Sylwia Bobryk occupation, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) began what Snyder calls the ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians: At least 40,000 Polish civilians were murdered by Ukrainian partisans and peasants in Volhynia in July 1943, and another 10,000 were murdered in Galicia in March 1944. In coordinated attacks on Polish settlements, Ukrainian partisans burned homes and used sickles and rakes to kill those they captured outside. Beheaded, crucified, or dismembered bodies were displayed in order to encourage remaining Poles to flee.6 But what remains controversial up until today is that Poles were not merely the passive victims of these crimes. Killing was rampant on both sides and ‘attacks on Polish civilians prompted more than 20,000 Poles to take up arms against Ukrainians’.7 According to Snyder: news of the slaughter in Volhynia infuriated Poles in Lviv and Galicia, and Polish partisans (of all political stripes) attacked the UPA, assassinated prominent Ukrainian civilians and burned Ukrainian villages […]. Further west, where the demographic balance favoured Poles, the situation was that of a pitiless civil war. Polish partisans (usually but not always formations outside the main command of the [Polish] Home Army) engaged in the mass killing of civilians. In the eastern half of the Lublin region, Polish partisans of the Peasant Battalions matched the Ukrainians atrocity for atrocity.8 Historian Anna Maria Cienciala estimates that ‘Poles killed some 20,000 Ukrainians, mostly in former East Galicia in reprisal’.9 This chapter analyses how the Polish-Ukrainian massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia – taboo subjects under communism – were written into the Polish history textbooks after 1989. History textbooks are unique narratives for the reason that they function in the field of education. Their main purpose is to assist learning and teaching, which means that they should be concise and straightforward so that pupils can understand them. But above all, textbooks have enormous socializing power. They contain not just stories about the past but provide narratives that powerful societal and political groups press upon their youth to shape collective remembering and forgetting. By analysing specific textbooks, we can trace these narratives, or what James Wertsch calls ‘schematic narrative templates’: ‘more generalized structures used to generate multiple specific narratives with the same plot.’10 Among them we can distinguish between master- and counter-narratives. Master-narratives have been constructed since the eighteenth century by states to create national ‘imagined communities’,11 but they have been widely challenged since the second half of the twentieth century. Processes and phenomena ranging from decolonization and globalization to the development of social movements, feminist thought, the surge of ethnic and regional identities, and the collapse of

History Wars in School Textbooks?   129 Communism, have led to the production of numerous counter-narratives.12 In democratic countries, such as Poland after 1989, societal conflicts over what should be included in history textbooks, the so-called history wars, can translate themselves into competing textbooks, and accordingly history textbooks can to some extent represent ‘voices’ of different societal groups and their counter-narrative of the past.13 This development of counter-narratives has been traced in history textbooks of Western European countries. Luke Terra, for example, emphasizes that textbooks in Northern Ireland ‘reflect diverse perspectives on controversial events’.14 Similarly Bert Vanhulle notes that Belgian textbooks from 1945 to 2004 shifted from ‘a relatively one-dimensional and ideologically based narrative to a more complex one’.15 How were the ­Polish-Ukrainian massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia written into Polish post-Communist history textbooks? Were they concealed by the traditional master-narrative about Polish victimhood in the war, or did they contribute to the development of a counter-narrative? Analysing history textbooks, despite their concise form, is not an easy task. This is primarily because the democratization of history teaching and textbook production in post-Communist Poland resulted in an abundance of textbooks. For example, in the school year 2001–02 alone, 13 textbooks were available for the lower secondary school (gimnazjum). Hence, to allow for an analysis of the textbooks, selection criteria have to be introduced. This chapter analyses only textbooks induced by educational reforms or other significant changes in the curriculum, that is, in 1989, 1992, 1998 and 2008. Thus, for 1989 it analyses two textbooks for primary and secondary education that were ‘corrected’ to fit the new political reality.16 For 1992, it includes two textbooks, one for primary and one for secondary education, prepared under democratic conditions.17 Subsequently, in the light of the 1998 reform, 13 books for lower secondary education are analysed that appeared in the school year 2001–02.18 Finally, eight books for higher secondary education (liceum) that appeared on account of the 2008 reform will be discussed.19

Absence: Textbook Corrections Excluding the Massacres After the revolution of 1989, the new government considered the current state of affairs in history education. Despite the fact that the new elite of Solidarność was willing rapidly to reform history education, it took a few years to prepare for these reforms and to develop the corresponding textbooks. Therefore intermediate measures had to be introduced. The new government decided, as the majority of other post-Communist governments did, that textbooks would continue to derive from a state-sanctioned curriculum as authorized by the Ministry of Education. To comply with the new political reality, the Ministry of Education employed experts to revise the old Communist curriculum while the publishers revised the old textbooks to match the new curriculum. However, the authors who ‘corrected’ the old curriculum did not prescribe teaching about those massacres, or on the occupation of the region by the

130  Sylwia Bobryk Nazis after 1941, or on Polish-Ukrainian relations during the war.20 Instead, they decided that the Polish Home Army and various formations of partisans, some of whom took part in the massacres of Ukrainians, should be presented as national heroes. The curriculum required teaching about ‘the Polish underground state, the Government Delegation for Poland, the Union of Armed Struggle, and the Home Army, and different forms of armed resistance’.21 It is not surprising then that the two ‘corrected’ textbooks of 1989 and 1991 for primary and secondary schools still did not include the massacres.22 It appears, moreover, that the topic could not be integrated into the new master-narrative that emphasized Polish victimhood in the Second World War, suffering not only from Nazi crimes, but also – as textbooks now call it – Soviet occupation. As the Soviet Union was coming to an end, the textbook authors were preoccupied with the Soviet crimes such as the atrocities committed by the NKVD, and especially the Katyń massacre: the mass murder of around 22,000 Polish army officers and citizens by the Soviet secret police in 1940, about which open debate was denied by the Soviet Union until 1990.23 In general, when discussing the situation in the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, the ‘corrected’ textbooks presented Polish-Ukrainian war relations in a blurred and chaotic manner by leaving unclear how the experiences of Poles and Ukrainians differed and what exactly had happened to the Ukrainians after the invasions of the Soviets and the Nazis. Textbooks presented Ukrainians as clandestine figures, strangers and, sometimes, ­collaborators – instead of as co-citizens of a recently lost Polish Republic. One of the textbooks, for example, only mentions that Poles, Ukrainians, ­Belarusians and Jews found themselves under the Soviet occupation: Around 13 million people lived to the east of the borderline, including more than five and a quarter million Polish speakers, four and a half million speakers of Ukrainian, 1.1 million Belarusian speakers, and 1.1 million speakers of Jewish languages. The rest of the population were other national groups and people speaking two languages. After being taken over by the Red Army on September 17, 1939, a complicated situation arose in these territories.24 The textbook then explains that polityka stalinowska (Stalinist politics) aimed to ‘cleanse’ the border regions of ‘anti-Soviet elements’, and confusingly adds that ‘over one million Poles’ as well as Ukrainians and Jews were deported ‘deep into the Soviet Union’.25 The second textbook paints an even more confusing picture of Polish-­ Ukrainian relations under the Soviet occupation. It gives very little information about Ukrainians, Jews and Belarusians, but informs the reader that militias, which assisted the NKVD in the actions of ‘catching the enemies of the people’, were ‘recruited from Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalists, circles of the Jewish proletariat, and even common criminals’.26 Yet, it does consider the minorities when it wants to stress the Polish experience under the

History Wars in School Textbooks?   131 Soviets: ‘In total, the forced deportations and arrests affected nearly 1.5 ­million Polish citizens, 60% of whom were Poles, and the rest were Ukrainians, Jews, and Belarusians.’27

Discovery: The Massacres and the Beginning of the History Wars While the two ‘corrected’ textbooks still adhered to the master-narrative about Polish victimhood, subsequent textbooks became embroiled in the history wars. In 1992, the Ministry of Education prepared a new history curriculum. This so-called ‘temporary minimum curriculum’ did not bring any crucial changes to the obligatory teaching material. Once more the old Communist programme served as the basis, only this time the curriculum was even shorter. Neither the massacres nor Polish-Ukrainian war relations were included. But because the curriculum had become so short, it did give textbook authors more freedom on what to write about the Second World War.28 The two textbooks derived from this revised curriculum were completely different. The first one, prepared for primary schools, adhered to the master-­ narrative and did not mention the massacres at all.29 It discussed the situation in the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, but even then, it did not comment on the situation of Ukrainians.30 The intention of the authors of the second textbook was to prepare a ­counter-narrative to already existing textbooks.31 It was written by Anna Radziwiłł, a member of Solidarity, who since 1980 had been demanding changes in history education and textbooks,32 and Wojciech Roszkowski, a historian who in the 1980s had written a synthesis of Polish history that had first appeared underground under the pseudonym of Andrzej Albert, as a counter-narrative to the Communist books.33 First of all, their textbook explained not only the Soviet occupation of the region, but also what happened in the eastern territories when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.34 Second, it mentioned the massacres directly but cautiously called them ‘Polish-Ukrainian fights’ (Walki polsko-ukraińskie). The narrative is therefore not a simple accusation of the UPA for the crimes against Polish civilians. The authors compare the crimes of the Ukrainian and Polish underground and portray both Ukrainians and Poles as victims and perpetrators, Germans as observers, and Soviets as provocateurs: The war and occupation sharpened the conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. The most extreme nationalist groups moved to the front of the Ukrainian movement. At the end of 1942 the first troops of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army were formed in Eastern Galicia. Between 1942 and 1943, clashes between the Polish and Ukrainian underground intensified. In the Zamość region, victims were mostly Ukrainian, while in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia the victims were Jews (in hiding) and Poles – because the UPA undertook the action

132  Sylwia Bobryk of ‘depolonization’ by murdering the Polish population. These massacres were tolerated by Germans, and, to a large extent, provoked by Soviet partisans led by NKVD officers.35 The authors did not mention the massacres to emphasize Polish war ­victimhood – which would have been easy. Instead, they tried to present an honest and complicated picture in which Polish partisans, in other textbooks usually presented as heroes, committed crimes against Ukrainian civilians. The textbooks of the early post-Communist years became illustrative of the beginning of the history wars, with on one side those supporting the master-narrative of Polish victimhood, and on the other, those forwarding a counter-narrative dealing with some of the dark pages in Polish history and mentioning Polish crimes. Solidarity and then post-Solidarity governments (1989–93) were very clearly interested in reusing the old master-narrative on Polish victimhood and heroism. They made changes to enforce a visible break with the Communist period and legitimize the new political system by, for example, destroying old monuments and changing street names.36 By establishing the Museum of the History of Polish Independence and Social Movements (since 1992 the Museum of Independence) they wished to imply that 1989 was the year in which freedom was regained. In 1993, however, the Democratic Left Alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej, SLD), which included former members of the old Communist Party and carried on its legacy, won the parliamentary elections and two years later their candidate Aleksander Kwaśniewski won the presidential elections against Solidarity hero Lech Wałe˛sa. The SLD adopted a new stance towards the past. For example, in his presidential campaign, Kwaśniewski called upon the electorate to ‘choose the future’. If he and his party were to influence the governing of Poland, there would be no lustration, de-Solidarization, or any other actions which demand group responsibility. We will neither demolish monuments, nor build monuments. We will not change the names of streets. This is because we will be more interested in knowing that the streets are safe and there are no potholes.37

Reinforcement: History Wars and Polish Perpetrators in Textbooks Published in 2002 Nine out of 13 textbooks published for use in the school year 2001–02 ignore the Polish-Ukrainian massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.38 One explanation is that the authors did not include them because they strictly followed the curriculum, which still did not include the massacres.39 Yet four textbooks did in fact mention the massacres even though their authors were not required to do so. What is more, they absorbed various interpretations of the Volhynia massacre, and one went as far as to point to Polish perpetrators.

History Wars in School Textbooks?   133 This indicates that, if allowed by the state authorization procedure, history wars can be fought on the pages of the textbooks. The textbook authors who mention the massacres use the topics required by the curriculum to organize their chapters accordingly. They recount the story of the massacres under the topic mentioned in the curriculum as ‘the Polish underground state’.40 By doing so, they choose to tell the story from the perspective of the Home Army or the Polish partisans, and to include their role in the massacres. But the stories that the textbooks impart are still very different. Starting with the narrative about ‘good and bad’, Lech Chmiel, Bogdan Jagiełło and Andrzej Syta recount the story of Polish heroes (partisans) and Ukrainian perpetrators (nationalists): At the beginning of 1943, the Polish population living in Volhynia was attacked by groups of Ukrainian nationalists supported by Germans. […] And in Volhynia, after initial surprise, the Polish partisan troops initiated the action in order to protect the remnants of the Polish population.41 The story that Andrzej L. Szcześniak tells is far more lengthy and complicated. He dedicates more than a page to the massacres and calls the section, ‘Red nights’, to connote the burning of villages.42 He explains that in 1943, ‘groups of Ukrainian nationalists […] began the massacre of the Polish population in Volhynia’.43 The discussion, like the title, is very expressive: ‘Polish villagers were surrounded by special groups of “axlers” (armed with axes, forks and saws) who murdered all residents, including women and children. They tormented the people they murdered, often burning them alive.’44 Szcześniak portrays the Polish reaction to the massacres as a heroic act of self-defence, not allowing space for Polish crimes: After the initial surprise, Poles began to organize self-defence. The population was concentrated in larger villages, built fortifications and, armed by the Home Army, effectively defended itself against the attacks. The largest Polish self-defence unit was created in the village of Przebraz˙e in Volhynia and numbered about 20,000 people. It resisted the attack of the combined UPA forces.45 But the most intriguing thing is that Szcześniak is the only author to emphasize that Ukrainians were not only nationalists, but also heroes as well as victims: Not all Ukrainians, however, were brainwashed and afraid of UPA chauvinists. Many Ukrainians helped Poles, hid them (risking their lives), and opposed terrorist activities, considering them inhuman and unworthy of real Ukrainians. They usually paid for their stance with death and torment because the UPA troops with equal ruthlessness murdered their own compatriots, wanting to force the whole nation to obey.46

134  Sylwia Bobryk The third and the fourth textbook can also be understood as counter-­ narratives. They challenge the myth that Poles were exclusively heroes and victims by suggesting that Poles were also perpetrators who not only defended themselves, but also attacked others. Roman Tusiewicz, a history teacher who published his first textbook in 1993,47 carefully describes in the revised edition the actions of Poles in Volhynia in 1943 as self-defence through attack: The Poles began to organize self-defence, opposing the threat with arms, and attacking the Ukrainian villages. There were fights in March 1943 in Volhynia, Polesie, and then in Eastern Lesser Poland. About 100,000 Poles died, and 300,000 left the threatened area.48 While Tusiewicz’s textbook is cautious, Włodzimierz Me˛drzecki, an academic historian, and Robert Szuchta, a history teacher and advocate of Holocaust education, took this a step further and included the number of Ukrainians murdered by Poles. In this way they introduced a category of Polish perpetrators. They also highlighted that in the Ukrainian actions against Poles, ‘100,000 Poles died and 300,000 left’,49 but additionally claimed that the actions led to feelings of harm and deep dislike among the Polish population towards Ukrainians. They also encouraged some Polish armed groups to retaliate against the Ukrainian population living west of the Bug River (Hrubieszów county). Tens of thousands people fell victim to them.50 Me˛drzecki explained in an interview in 2014 that his textbook ‘was not an attempt to justify anyone’, and that in 2002 many people considered [the passage about Volhynia and Eastern Galicia] to be gentle. Do you know what I would change today? I would only delete the phrase ‘living west of the Bug River’ because the retaliation was also in Volhynia, not only in the west [Eastern Galicia].51 He claims that he wrote the history textbook with three aims in mind: [First of all] I really wanted the student to understand the history of ­Poland as a normal story, i.e. that Poland was not a special victim, that the suffering and loss of Poles is not something unusual in world history and that the mechanisms of Polish history are normal mechanisms, like the mechanisms in the history of Germany, France and every other country and nation. Now it sounds better, but twenty years ago, talking about the fact that Polish history is a normal story and that different things happened to different nations was not so obvious. Secondly, all participants of the Polish historical process, including the political ones, were people guided by good intentions, i.e., they were decent people regardless of what they thought and how they worked […].

History Wars in School Textbooks?   135 The third matter is also fundamental: it is not […] that nations are driven by hatred […]. There is an assumption […] – as if Ukrainians did various terrible things on the Polish-Ukrainian borderland – that these actions are the result of a kind of native hatred of Ukrainians against Poles. […] And this is fundamentally wrong! […] Practically speaking, due to various processes and under the influence of various factors, people are able to do things that philosophers cannot dream of […] But it does not depend on nationality and it is not that some nations are willing and others are not […] it is not that Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians are nations of perpetrators, and the Polish nation is virtuous and consisting of noble people only.52 Włodzimierz Me˛drzecki has been a member and since 2009 the co-chair of the Polish-Ukrainian Textbook Commission (Polsko-Ukraińska Komisja ­Ekspertów do spraw doskonalenia treści podre˛czników szkolnych historii i geografii). The commission, created in 1993 by the governments of the respective countries to facilitate reconciliation, in its first six years focused on preparing reviews of history textbooks. This was because – as the analysis above has shown – Ukrainians were largely absent from Polish textbooks, whereas Ukrainian textbooks thrived in their attempts to construct a national history ranged against its Polish neighbours. The meetings of the commission today include not only reviews of textbooks but also presentations of research into controversial historical issues.53 Me˛drzecki clarifies the impact that the work of the commission has had in the following way: Generally, if the author of a textbook […] is not familiar with Ukrainian matters, but would like to write a textbook well, then he could take these minutes and read these sessions of the committee meetings. He would find a lot of tips, information and suggestions there on how to depict them. In this sense, this material gives you tools […]. The second case is the matter of the execution. There is no gendarme standing and making sure that every author of the textbook does what the committee wants. I am a liberal, and I think that if someone has a tool, that is good. But if there is a substantive error in these textbooks […] and we would show it in the analyses, in a year or two [the error] will be removed from the textbook […]. There is a tacit understanding that both parties have mentioned in the protocols what they consider to be the most important issues, but there is no verification nor official procedure.54 But even Me˛drzecki, clearly in favour of a counter-narrative, remains cautious. He recalled in the interview that when discussing ‘Ukrainian matters’, there was a problem with terms like ‘genocide, crime [and] slaughter’.55 Timothy Snyder, in his book published a year after Medrze˛cki’s textbook, calls what happened in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia ‘ethnic cleansing’,56 but Me˛drzecki and Szuchta had evaded this term and spoke of walki (‘fights’).57 The content of textbooks, the terminology used and the emergence of a counter-narrative mirrors the history wars in the public sphere. The printing of textbooks had been preceded by a public debate that took place on the

136  Sylwia Bobryk pages of various newspapers, including the conservative Rzeczpospolita. The debate was dominated by articles underlining Ukrainian crimes against Poles and Ukrainian cooperation with the Nazis, but which forgot to mention Polish revenge on Ukrainians and actions organized by the Polish partisans and the Polish Home Army.58 Władysław Siemaszko, a former Home Army soldier who remained in Volhynia during the war, and his daughter Ewa Siemaszko, published a book in 2000, The Genocide Committed by Ukrainian Nationalists on the Polish Citizens of Volhynia in 1939–45.59 It documented murders committed by the UPA among the Polish population, using witnesses’ accounts, court records and state archival materials – clearly giving the narrative of the victims. Accounts trying to understand what happened in Volhynia and how to deal with it were less common. Most importantly, perhaps, in 1995 Gazeta Wyborcza, one of the Poland’s largest newspapers, published a series of 55 articles entitled ‘Volhynia – seeking the truth’, which included accounts and opinions of historians, politicians, and journalists from both countries.60 Likewise, the content of textbooks echoes history wars in academic research and publications. While the majority of historians followed the traditional master-narrative about Polish victims, and concentrated in their work on crimes committed by Ukrainian partisans, some notable exceptions were ‘revisionist’ historians such as Bogdan Skaradziński,61 Grzegorz Hryciuk62 and notably Włodzimierz Me˛drzecki.63 They contextualized the massacres to show that the UPA were not simply bandits, but also fighters for Ukrainian independence.64 The stories that textbooks tell also reflect a wider political context. The textbook polyphony was a result of a ‘Europeanization’ of Polish history education undertaken by the Polish government when preparing for accession to NATO and the EU. The government advocated history teaching following European standards. In 1996, for example, the Education Minister Jerzy ­Wiatr established an advisory Council for European Education.65 Later, in 2000, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, following other European countries, signed the Stockholm Declaration that made it obligatory to teach and research on the Holocaust.66 The ‘Europeanization’ of Polish-Ukrainian history teaching resulted from Poland’s and Ukraine’s willingness to ‘return to Europe’. By addressing current historical problems and introducing ‘European norms’ for history teaching, Poland and Ukraine were showing Western countries and their organizations, the European Union and NATO, that they were getting ready to join.67 Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma began a formal process of historical reconciliation and, in May 1997, signed a declaration of reconciliation that listed crimes committed by each side, and expressed the need for mutual forgiveness.68 Although signing this declaration did not have an immediate effect on history education, it did strengthen the cooperation between the countries and helped secure Poland and Ukraine’s ‘return to Europe’. Clearly, it also indirectly influenced the war narratives in the Polish history textbooks.

History Wars in School Textbooks?   137

Consolidation: Neighbours Killing Neighbours in the Textbooks Published in 2012 In 2012, eight new history textbooks were authorized for use in secondary schools. The curriculum still did not impose teaching about the massacres and only in general terms required that a pupil ‘compares the goals and methods of German and Soviet policy in occupied Poland’, and ‘describes the political and military structure and the activities of the Polish underground state, and assesses the historical role of the Home Army’.69 Nevertheless, the authors decided that the massacres were an important story to tell pupils. Seven out of eight textbooks introduced in 2012 deal with the massacres.70 This is a significant increase in comparison with the previous reform – in 2001–02, when only four out of 13 textbooks included them. While the massacres had previously been more or less hidden within the chapters on the Polish Underground State, Polish partisans and the Home Army, in 2012, five out of eight of the new textbooks depict them by dedicating a separate sub-chapter to the subject.71 This is a strategic decision for a textbook’s story; events to which chapters or sub-chapters are devoted are considered more significant and they often define how the entire story is told. Furthermore, while earlier textbooks tended to discuss the massacres in a couple of paragraphs, in 2012 three out of eight textbooks dedicated a page or more to them. Two even included a photograph taken in 1943 that showed a row of dead bodies – inhabitants of Lipniki village who were murdered by the UPA – and families searching for their missing relatives.72 Undoubtedly, the massacres had become an essential part of the Polish war experience. The photograph of Lipniki village brings up the most difficult matter faced by the textbooks: the role of Polish and Ukrainian villagers in the massacres. Concerning the Ukrainian side, a couple of textbooks emphasize that the local Ukrainian population assisted the UPA in crimes against Polish civilians, while another one makes it clear that ‘ordinary Ukrainians’ murdered their ‘Polish neighbours’,73 and two other textbooks, even more controversially, state that some Ukrainian civilians were killed by the UPA for helping74 and protecting their ‘Polish neighbours’.75 Regarding the Polish side, while the textbooks generally state that in ‘retaliation actions’ (akcje odwetowe) Poles killed Ukrainians, a couple also specify the crimes of the Polish underground against Ukrainian civilians and villages.76 Finally, one textbook points out that not only the Polish partisans but also Polish villagers committed crimes against Ukrainian civilians.77 Once again, textbook narratives mirror the developments in the public sphere with the public debates focusing on the experiences of individuals and villages, rather than on the victimhood of whole nations. Massacres of civilians were discussed in a series of 100 articles published by Gazeta Wyborcza up until 2009.78 Politicians, intellectuals and the general public listened to individual stories of victims coming from villagers such as Pawłokoma or Lipniki. For example, in 2003, the governments of the two countries signed an agreement to

138  Sylwia Bobryk commemorate victims on both sides of the border, and in 2006 the presidents of Poland and Ukraine, Lech Kaczyński and Viktor Yushchenko, met in the Polish village of Pawłokoma to commemorate 365 Ukrainian civilians killed by the Polish Home Army in 1945. Moreover, the textbooks and their treatment of the massacre echo the socalled Jedwabne debate, which was triggered in 2001 by the book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross, an American historian of Polish origin. Gross described how, on 10 July 1941 in the small town of Jedwabne, Poles murdered their Jewish neighbours. According to Gross, at the time when the town was occupied by German troops, Poles locked 1,600 villagers in a barn and burned them alive.79 The book may be said to have started the debate about the Polish involvement in the Holocaust.80 During the debate, two Polish perspectives on remembering the Polish ‘dark past’ emerged. On the one side were those who critically evaluated the national past and supported Gross in breaking the taboo around the problem of Polish participation in the Holocaust. On the other side were the opponents of Gross who wanted to defend the good name of the nation and who perceived his book as anti-Polish propaganda. The debate shook the Polish master-narrative about the innocence and heroism of Poles and brought the ‘neighbour’ dimension into the discussion about the Polish role in the Second World War.81 Interestingly, in the majority of textbooks, six out of eight, it was not only admitted that 100,000 Poles had died, but also around 20,000 Ukrainians.82 In doing so, these textbooks acknowledged that Ukrainians were not only perpetrators, but also victims and, in reverse, that Poles were not only victims, but also perpetrators. Yet the textbooks did not grant the two crimes equal status. They emphasized that Ukrainian nationalists and the UPA started –what they termed – a konflikt,83 walki (‘fights’)84 or even czystka ethniczna (ethnic cleansing).85 The Polish Home Army, as they explain, defended the Polish population and undertook ‘retaliation actions’. Dariusz Stola, for example, puts it this way: In 1943, the UPA launched an ‘anti-Polish action’, the aim of which was to purge the disputed areas of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia of Poles. Ukrainian troops attacked Polish villages, burning and murdering as they went along. About 100,000 Poles died, another 300,000 rescued themselves by fleeing. The UPA campaign triggered a civil war, a Polish-­ Ukrainian ‘war within a war’, in which Ukrainian civilians also fell victim to the retaliatory actions of the Polish armed forces.86 The quotation shows how the massacres were absorbed by the master-narrative of ultimate Polish heroism and victimhood in the war. If history wars intensified and counter-narratives resonated louder in the public sphere than ever before, this was clearly a result of political decision: the Civic Platform government authorized only textbooks that fitted their understanding of the past.

History Wars in School Textbooks?   139 The party had to both secure electoral success at home as well as its projects of historical reconciliation abroad. At home the textbooks were entrenched in Civic Platform’s competition with its main opposition party, Law and Justice, over the definition of the national past. As Law and Justice demanded that Ukraine recognize that the massacres in Volhynia constitute a genocide, in 2009 the government adopted a resolution ‘about the tragic fate of Poles in the Eastern Borderlands’.87 The resolution did not term the massacres ‘genocide’, but it stated that what happened was ‘mass ethnic cleansing with elements of genocide’.88 In 2012 the matter returned as the opposition again demanded the term ‘genocide’ be included in a resolution, and called to establish 11 July as a day of remembrance for Polish victims of the UPA. But Civic Platform, so as not to worsen its relationship with Ukraine, refrained.89 The textbooks had to remain Europeanized and free from xenophobic and nationalistic elements, as Civic Platform embarked on the historical reconciliation activities abroad. In 2009, for example, the party initiated the Polish-German Textbook Project and it revised the textbook authorization procedure, requiring the authors to comply with recommendations of textbook commissions and international agreements.

Conclusion: What Are Textbooks? Instead of focusing on a textbook master-narrative, this chapter has turned its gaze towards an episode that the master-narrative was trying to conceal after 1989. By analysing the representation of the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in history textbooks, we have seen how the master-narrative of Polish innocence, ultimate heroism and victimhood in the war has been challenged by a counter-narrative that also presents Poles as perpetrators. Since 1989, textbooks have been in dialogue with their societal and political contexts. They can be used by societal groups and individuals to respond to and participate in history wars, as carried out by national and transnational actors. Furthermore, to keep their stories up to date, textbook authors have drawn on the results of the latest academic research, new publications, arguments from public debates, the rationale of governmental decisions, and newly available illustrative materials – all embroiled in history wars. Because of this, textbooks are never set in stone, and are constantly evolving. Most importantly, this chapter has shown how Polish history textbooks – state authorization permitting – in various ways deviate from the master-­ narrative. They have absorbed a polyphony of interpretations resulting in numerous counter-narratives. In 1989, textbooks omitted the massacres, but as early as 1993, Radziwiłł and Roszkowski included them, and, for the first time, referred to Poles as perpetrators.90 In 2001, four out of 13 textbooks mentioned the massacres;91 one included only Polish victims,92 one more also included Ukrainian victims,93 and the two other textbooks mentioned Polish perpetrators – clearly aiming to present a counter-narrative.94 In 2012, the massacres became a firm element in the story of the war: seven out of eight

140  Sylwia Bobryk textbooks mentioned them.95 The books included various categories of Polish perpetrators (villagers, partisans, the Home Army) and their victims (UPA, villagers). Yet, although the history wars continued, the counter-narrative has disappeared from textbooks once again, and, in officially sanctioned textbooks, the massacres have been absorbed by the master-narrative of unique Polish victimhood and heroism. Will the counter-narrative − that includes the ‘dark pages’ of Polish history and the notion of a fragmented nation, responsibility, and the deeds of perpetrators − return? In 2015, the conservative Law and Justice government won the parliamentary and the presidential elections. They soon adopted a new declaration, and called the massacres of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia a genocide, while at the same time ‘expressing respect and gratitude to those Ukrainians who had risked their lives saving Poles’. They furthermore established 11 July as a Day of Commemoration for UPA victims.96 In doing so, the government not only took a new turn in the Polish politics of history, but also initiated an educational reform that requires new textbooks on the Second World War. They are not yet available. The 2017 curriculum, however, has consolidated the massacres’ place in the narrative, for it demands that textbook authors include the massacres and that they ‘explain the causes and the size of the Polish-Ukrainian conflict (the Volhynia massacre) in the Eastern Borderlands’.97 The curriculum also gives authors relative freedom in how they tell the story. There remains, however, the final authorization of the new textbooks. Only time will tell whether the conservative government will approve textbooks that go against the master-narrative of Polish innocence, heroism, and victimhood, a master-narrative that the government itself continue to promote.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise specified, all translations in this chapter are my own. 2 Z. Osiński, Nauczanie historii w szkołach podstawowych w Polsce w latach 1944– 1989: Uwarunkowania organizacyjne oraz ideologiczno-polityczne, Toruń: Duet, 2006; M. Gross, ‘Rewriting the nation: World War II narratives in Polish history textbooks’, in I. Silova (ed.), Post-Socialism is Not Dead: (Re)Reading the Global in Comparative Education, Bingley: Emerald Group, 2010, pp. 213–45. 3 T. Snyder, ‘Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory: Poland, ­Lithuania and Ukraine, 1939–1999’, in J-W. Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War ­Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 39–58, p. 43. 4 T. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, p. 154. 5 Ibid., p. 155. 6 Snyder, ‘Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory’, p. 43. 7 Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, p. 177. 8 Snyder, ‘Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory’, pp. 43–4. 9 A.M. Cienciala, ‘Epilog to the Polish-Ukrainian conflict’, History 557 Lecture Notes, 2012. Available at: http://acienciala.faculty.ku.edu/hist557/lect11.htm, accessed 5 March 2019. 10 J.V. Wertsch, ‘Collective memory and narrative templates’, Social Research, 2008, vol. 75(1), 133–56, p. 140.

History Wars in School Textbooks?   141 11 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 2016. 12 H. Schissler, ‘Navigating a globalizing world: thoughts on textbook analysis, teaching, and learning’, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, 2009, vol. 1(1), 203–6. 13 E. Fuchs, ‘Current trends in history and social studies textbook research’, Journal of International Cooperation in Education, 2011, vol. 14(2), 17–34, p. 19. 14 L. Terra, ‘New histories for a new state: a study of history textbook content in Northern Ireland’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2014, vol. 46(2), 225–48, p. 225. 15 B. Vanhulle, ‘The path of history: narrative analysis of history textbooks – case study of Belgian history textbooks (1945–2004)’, History of Education, 2009, vol. 38(2), 263–82, p. 281. 16 A.L. Szcześniak, Historia: Polska i świat naszego wieku. Ksiąz˙ka pomocnicza dla klasy ósmej szkoły podstawowej. Cz. 2: od roku 1939, Wydanie 3 poprawione, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1989; T. Siergiejczyk, Historia: Dzieje najnowsze 1939–1945: Podre˛cznik dla szkół średnich: kl. IV liceum ogólnokształcącego oraz dla kl. III technikum i liceum zawodowego, Wydanie 4 poprawione i uzupełnione, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1991. 17 T. Glubiński, Historia: 8: Trudny wiek XX, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1992; A. Radziwiłł and W. Roszkowski, Historia 1871–1945, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1993. 18 A.L. Szcześniak, Polska i świat: wspólne dziedzictwo. Podre˛cznik do III klasy gimnazjum, Radom: Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczne, 2001; M. Jastrze˛bska and J. Z˙urawski, Historia: Podre˛cznik dla klasy III gimnazjum, Wrocław: Wiking, 2001; T. Małkowski and J. Rześniowiecki, Historia III: podre˛cznik dla klasy III gimnazjum. Podróz˙e w czasie, Gdańsk: Gdańskie Wydawnictwo Oświatowe, 2002; W. Me˛drzecki and R. Szuchta, U z´ ródeł współczesności: dzieje nowoz˙ytne i najnowsze. Historia 3: podre˛cznik, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 2001; K. Przybysz, W. Jakubowski and M. Włodarczyk, Historia dla gimnazjalistów: dzieje najnowsze. Podre˛cznik klasa III, Warsaw: Oficyna Edukacyjna Krzysztof Pazdro, 2002; M. Sobaś and G. Szymanowski, Historia ludzi: od Traktatu Wersalskiego do Okrągłego Stołu. 3 klasa gimnazjum, Kraków: Znak, 2001; H. Tomalska, Polska i świat w XX wieku: historia. Podre˛cznik dla gimnazjum, Warsaw: Juka, 2001; R. Tusiewicz, Historia 3: Nasze dziedzictwo, XX Wiek. Podre˛cznik dla klasy III gimnazjum, Warsaw: Agmen, 2001; J. Wendt, Historia. Podre˛cznik.Gimnazjum III, Gdańsk: Roz˙ak, 2000; G. Wojciechowski, Historia III: podre˛cznik do gimnazjum. Razem przez wieki: Zrozumieć przeszłość, Poznań: Arka, 2001; L. Chmiel, B. Jagiełło, and A. Syta, Historia. Podre˛cznik. Klasa 3 gimnazjum, Warsaw: Adam, 2002; E. Ćwikła, Polska w świecie, 1939–2001, Warsaw: Graf Punkt, 2002; K. Starczewska (ed.), Świat współczesny. Klasa III. Je˛zyk polski, historia oraz wychowanie obywatelskie, edukacja filozoficzna, kultura i tradycja, edukacja czytelnicza i medialna. Cz. 2: Od wybuchu II wojny światowej, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Szkolne PWN, 2002. 19 B. Burda et al., Historia najnowsza. Podre˛cznik do szkół ponadgimnazjalnych. Cze˛ść 1, Gdynia: Operon, 2012; A. Brzozowski and G. Szczepański, Ku współczesności. Dzieje najnowsze 1918–2006: Podre˛cznik do historii dla klasy I szkół ponadgimnazjalnych. Zakres podstawowy, Warsaw: Stentor, 2012; R. Dolecki, K. Gutowski and J. Smoleński, Po prostu historia. Szkoły ponadgimnazjalne, zakres podstawowy, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 2012; Z.T. Kozłowska, I. Unger and S. Zając, Poznajemy przeszłość. Dzieje najnowsze. Historia: zakres podstawowy, Toruń: SOP Oświatowiec, 2012; S. Roszak and J. Kłaczkow, Poznać przeszłość: wiek XX. Podre˛cznik do historii dla szkół ponadgimnazjalnych. Zakres podstawowy, Warsaw: Nowa Era, 2012; D. Stola, Historia: wiek XX. Podre˛cznik. Szkoły ponadgimnazjalne, zakres podstawowy, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Szkolne PWN, 2012; J. Ustrzycki, Historia 1: podre˛cznik dla szkół ponadgimnazjalnych, zakres podstawowy. Ciekawi świata, Gdynia: Wydawnictwo Pedagogiczne Operon, 2012; S. Zając, Teraz historia.

142  Sylwia Bobryk Podre˛cznik dla szkoły ponadgimnazjalnej, zakres podstawowy, Toruń: SOP Oświatowiec, 2012. 20 Minister Edukacji Narodowej, Program szkoły podstawowej. Historia. Klasy IV–VIII, Kraków Wrocław: Drukarnia Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 1990, p. 29. 21 Ibid., p. 30. 22 Szcześniak, Historia; Siergiejczyk, Historia. 23 Szcześniak, Historia, pp. 58–60; Siergiejczyk, Historia, p. 135. 24 Szcześniak, Historia, p. 58. 25 Ibid., pp. 59–60. 26 Siergiejczyk, Historia, p. 135. 27 Ibid., p. 137. 28 Minister Edukacji Narodowej, Minimum programowe przedmiotów ogólnokształca˛cych w szkołach podstawowych i średnich obowia˛zuja˛ce od 1 wrzes´nia 1992, Warsaw: FREN, 1992, p. 54. 29 Glubiński, Historia, p. 258. 30 Ibid. 31 Interview with Wojciech Roszkowski, 3 September 2014. 32 NSZZ ‘Solidarnos´c´’ Krajowa Rada Sekcji Os´wiaty i Wychowania, Propozycje doraz´nych zmian w materiale nauczania historii w szkołach podstawowych i ponadpodstawowych. Ostateczna redakcja przedstawionego tekstu uwzgle˛dnia zmiany wprowadzone podczas negocjacji z Resortem Os´wiaty i Wychowania 13, 21.III.1981 r. oraz 15.IV. 1981, Warsaw: Krajowa Rada Sekcji Os´wiaty i Wychowania, n.d. 33 W. Roszkowski, Najnowsza historia Polski: 1918–1980, London: Polonia, 1989. 34 Radziwiłł and Roszkowski, Historia 1871–1945, p. 317. 35 Ibid., p. 327. 36 R. Traba, ‘Symbole pamie˛ci: II wojna s´wiatowa w s´wiadomos´ci zbiorowej Polaków. Szkic do tematu’, Przegla˛d Zachodni, 2000, vol. 56(1), 52–67. 37 E. Olszewski, ‘Pamie˛c´ społeczna i polityka historyczna w programach polskich partii politycznych’, s´rodkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne, 2013, vol. 2, 67–97, p. 69. 38 Tomalska, Polska i s´wiat w XX wieku; Małkowski and Rzes´niowiecki, Historia III; Starczewska, s´wiat współczesny; Wendt, Historia; Jastrze˛bska and Z˙urawski, Historia; ´ wikła, Polska w świecie; Sobaś and Szymanowski, Wojciechowski, Historia III; C Historia ludzi; Przybysz et al., Historia dla gimnazjalistów. 39 Minister Edukacji Narodowej, ‘Rozporza˛dzenie Ministra Edukacji Narodowej z dnia 15 lutego 1999 r. w sprawie podstawy programowej wychowania przedszkolnego i kształcenia ogólnego’, Dziennik Ustaw, 1999, vol. 129, 583–646, p. 604. 40 Ibid. 41 Chmiel et al., Historia, p. 222. 42 Szczes´niak, Polska i s´wiat, p. 240. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., pp. 240–1. 46 Ibid., p. 241. 47 Tusiewicz, Historia 3, p. 123. 48 Ibid. 49 Me˛drzecki and Szuchta, U z´ródeł współczesnos´ci, p. 251. 50 Ibid. 51 Interview with Włodzimierz Me˛drzecki, 6 August 2014. 52 Ibid. 53 L. Czechowska, ‘Klucz do sukcesu dwustronnych komisji podre˛cznikowych’, Kultura i Edukacja, 2014, vol. 103, 152–82, p. 158. 54 Interview with Włodzimierz Me˛drzecki, 6 August 2014. 55 Ibid. 56 Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations.

History Wars in School Textbooks?   143 57 Me˛drzecki and Szuchta, U z´ródeł współczesnos´ci, p. 251. 58 R. Rozbicka, ‘Tragedia ludnos´ci ukraińskiej w Pawłokomie (3 marca 1945 roku) w oparciu o polskie publikacje prasowe’, Media – Kultura – Komunikacja Społeczna, 2011, vol. 7, 191–205, p. 191. 59 W. Siemaszko and E. Siemaszko, Ludobójstwo dokonane przez nacjonalistów ukraińskich na ludnos´ci polskiej Wołynia: 1939–1945, Warsaw: Von Borowiecky, 2000. 60 A. Michnik, ‘Rana Wołynia’, 11 October 1995, available at: http://classic.wyborcza. pl/archiwumGW/199365/Rana-Wolynia, accessed 5 March 2019. 61 B. Skaradziński, Białorusini, Litwini, Ukraińcy, Białystok: Versus, 1990. 62 G. Hryciuk, ‘Polacy na Ukrainie’, Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis. Historia, 1995, vol. 118, 409–29. 63 W. Me˛drzecki, ‘Polskie relacje pamie˛tnikarskie i wspomnieniowe jako ´zródło do badania stosunków polsko-ukraińskich w okresie II wojny s´wiatowej’, Przegla˛d Wschodni, 1997, 1997, vol. 1, 227–32. 64 R. Wnuk, ‘Recent polish historiography on Polish–Ukrainian relations during World War II and its aftermath’, Intermarium, 2007, no. 1, 2–3, available at: http:// ece.columbia.edu/files/ece/images/stanowski-1.pdf, consulted 5 March 2019. 65 Minister Edukacji Narodowej, ‘Zarza˛dzenie nr 4 Ministra Edukacji Narodowej w sprawie Rady Do Spraw Edukacji Europejskiej’, Dziennik Urze˛dowy Ministerstwa Os´wiaty i Wychowania, 1996, vol. 4(15). 66 J. Ambrosewicz-Jacobs and E. Buettner, ‘What can we learn from the dark chapters in our history? Education about the Holocaust in Poland in a comparative perspective’, FLEKS: Scandinavian Journal of Intercultural Theory and Practice, 2014, vol. 1(1), 8. 67 Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, pp. 292–3. 68 A. Kwas´niewski and L. Kuczma, ‘Wspólne os´wiadczenie Prezydentów ­Polski i Ukrainy o porozumieniu i pojednaniu obu narodów’, Biuletyn Południowo-­ Wschodniego Instytutu Naukowego, 1997, vol. 3, 15–153. 69 Minister Edukacji Narodowej, ‘Rozporza˛dzenie Ministra Edukacji Narodowej z dnia 23 grudnia 2008 r. w sprawie podstawy programowej wychowania przedszkolnego oraz kształcenia ogólnego w poszczególnych typach szkół’, Dziennik Ustaw, 2008, vol. 7, 198–546, p. 334. 70 Zaja˛c, Teraz historia, p. 125; Ustrzycki, Historia, pp. 170–1; Stola, Historia: wiek XX, p. 101; Dolecki et al., Po prostu historia, p. 216; Kozłowska et al., Poznajemy przeszłos´c´, pp. 195–6; Roszak and Kłaczkow, Poznac´ przeszłos´c´, p. 199; Brzozowski and Szczepański, Ku współczesnos´ci, p. 138. 71 Zaja˛c, Teraz historia, p. 125; Dolecki et al., Po prostu historia, p. 216; Kozłowska et al., Poznajemy przeszłos´c´, p. 195; Roszak and Kłaczkow, Poznac´ przeszłos´c´, p. 199; Stola, Historia: wiek XX, p. 101. 72 Zaja˛c, Teraz historia, p. 125; Kozłowska et al., Poznajemy przeszłos´c´, pp. 195–6; ­Roszak and Kłaczkow, Poznac´ przeszłos´c´, p. 199. 73 Zaja˛c, Teraz historia, p. 125; Ustrzycki, Historia 1, pp. 170–1; Dolecki et al., Po prostu historia, p. 216. 74 Dolecki et al., Po prostu historia, p. 216. 75 Roszak and Kłaczkow, Poznac´ przeszłos´c´, p. 199. 76 Stola, Historia: wiek XX, p. 101; Kozłowska et al., Poznajemy przeszłos´c´, pp. 195–6. 77 Zaja˛c, Teraz historia, p. 125. 78 Rozbicka, ‘Tragedia ludnos´ci ukraińskiej w Pawłokomie (3 marca 1945 roku) w oparciu o polskie publikacje prasowe’, pp. 191–4. 79 J.T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 80 Ibid., pp. 1–12. 81 A. Polonsky and J.B. Michlic, The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacres in Poland, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

144  Sylwia Bobryk 82 Zaja˛c, Teraz historia, p. 125; Ustrzycki, Historia, p. 170–1; Stola, Historia: wiek XX, p. 101; Dolecki et al., Po prostu historia, p. 216; Kozłowska et al., Poznajemy przeszłos´c´, pp. 195–6; Roszak and Kłaczkow, Poznac´ przeszłos´c´, p. 199. 83 Zaja˛c, Teraz historia, p. 125; Kozłowska et al., Poznajemy przeszłos´c´, pp. 195–6. 84 Stola, Historia: wiek XX, p. 101; Brzozowski and Szczepański, Ku współczesnos´ci, p. 138; Ustrzycki, Historia, pp. 170–1. 85 Dolecki et al., Po prostu historia, p. 217; Roszak and Kłaczkow, Poznac´ przeszłos´c´, p. 199. 86 Stola, Historia: wiek XX, p. 101. 87 P. Bujak, ‘Polityczne spory o upamie˛tnienie zbrodni na Wołyniu w polskim parlamencie’, Pogranicze. Polish Borderland Studies, 2014, vol. 94, 90–9, p. 94. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., pp. 96–8. 90 Radziwiłł and Roszkowski, Historia 1871–1945, p. 327. 91 Szczes´niak, Polska i s´wiat, pp. 240–1; Chmiel et al., Historia, p. 222; Me˛drzecki and Szuchta, U z´ródeł współczesnos´ci, p. 251; Tusiewicz, Historia, p. 123. 92 Chmiel et al., Historia, p. 222. 93 Szczes´niak, Polska i s´wiat, pp. 240–1. 94 Me˛drzecki and Szuchta, U z´ródeł współczesnos´ci, p. 251; Tusiewicz, Historia, p. 123. 95 Zaja˛c, Teraz historia, p. 125; Ustrzycki, Historia, pp. 170–1; Stola, Historia: wiek XX, p. 101; Dolecki et al., Po prostu historia, p. 216; Kozłowska et al., Poznajemy przeszłos´c´, pp. 195–6; Roszak and Kłaczkow, Poznac´ przeszłos´c´, p. 199; Brzozowski and Szczepański, Ku współczesnos´ci, p. 138. 96 ‘Uchwała Sejmu Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej z dnia 22 lipca 2016 r. w sprawie oddania hołdu ofiarom ludobójstwa dokonanego przez nacjonalistów ukraińskich na obywatelach II Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w latach 1943–1945’, 2016, available at: http:// orka.sejm.gov.pl/proc8.nsf/uchwaly/625_u.htm, accessed 5 March 2019. 97 Minister Edukacji Narodowej, ‘Podstawa programowa kształcenia ogólnego dla szkół podstawowych. Zała˛cznik nr 2’, 2017, p. 90. Available at: https://men.gov. pl/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/rozporzadzenie_20081223_zal_2.pdf, accessed 5 March 2019.

10 ‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’ The Role of Religion and Competing Narratives in the Reconciliation Process in Bosnia and Herzegovina Marieke Zoodsma ‘I think one of our classes is called something like “Dialogue, the essence of life”. Which is true, there is no future without dialogue.’1 Ishak Zahirovic´, an eloquent middle-aged man, is a teacher at the JU Mješovita Srednja Škola Sanski Most – the mixed secondary school of Sanski Most, northwestern ­Bosnia and Herzegovina.2 He has been working at the school since 1997, teaching the students about Islamic religion, culture and civilization – some classes primarily focused on Bosnia and Herzegovina, while others were more oriented toward the wider Islamic world. The interview with Zahirovic´ was part of a research project into the role of religious initiatives in the reconciliation process in Bosnia.3 Religious affiliation – among other factors – was an important source of differentiation between the varied factions during the war that ravaged Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1991 to 1995. Because of this role of religion during the war, it was potentially important to ascertain how religion might play (or perhaps already plays) a pacifying role, instead of that of a catalyst in strife. Through in-depth interviews with persons involved in religious and/or peace initiatives, combined with ethnographic observations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the main research question this project examined was: how would religious initiatives engage in the troubled socio-political environment that is Bosnia and Herzegovina? This chapter will present the narratives and illuminate the efforts of some of the key actors in this fragile debate on reconciliation as they search for areas of agreement regarding a shared history. In the interviews, Zahirovic´ shed light on the question of what was being taught during Islamic school classes, and whether there was room for interreligious orientation. He explained that he teaches classes that are theologically oriented, for instance on the pillars of Islam, but also courses on ecology, history, science and dialogue. When asked to elaborate on this, he explained that at the end of the school year the topics of his classes revolved around dialogue and reconciliation because ‘Islam is the religion of peace and dialogue’.4 Neither interreligious dialogue nor reconciliation are mandatory subjects in the Bosnian school curriculum, but given Sanski Most’s war-related history, Zahirovic´’s specific reference to these topics was significant.

146  Marieke Zoodsma In May 1992 Sanski Most, an ethnically mixed town of Bosnian Serbs, ­ osnian Muslims and a small Bosnian Croat community, was shelled and B taken by Serb forces. Atrocities were committed on an extensive scale through the arrest and confinement of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, resulting in injury, permanent disfigurement and killings.5 In October 1995, shortly before the end of the war, the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina occupied the city, resulting in the murder or flight of many of its non-Muslim residents. Sanski Most, located in the Bosnian-Croat Federation but bordering the line separating the Serb and Bosniak-Croat entities,6 thereby lost many of its pre-war inhabitants through either death or displacement. Although there are few reliable data, a local non-governmental group estimates that 3,227 people died in Prijedor and the surrounding countryside – including Sanski Most – during the war.7 Refugees have returned to this part of the country but the process has been particularly difficult and, compared to pre-war figures, the region remains highly segregated.8 When asked if he talks about the war during his classes, Zahirovic´ responded firmly, ‘No, I do not talk about the war in class. That topic is too sensitive. […] You never know how people are going to react.’9 Since he had just stated that ‘dialogue is the future’, and that it is the only way to give up weapons and avoid violence, this was a confusing answer. Zahirovic´ recognized his contradictory answers and thus had trouble finding the right words. He explained that he did not feel comfortable talking about the war since he was afraid the students would misunderstand him. ‘I had a situation that when you speak about something, children misinterpreted it. It is too early I think. You speak about something, but every child accepts that a little differently.’10 Zahirovic´ therefore decided that if the war were brought up during class, it would only revolve around the hard facts of what happened in order to avoid misinterpretation. Such topics, he considered, should be discussed during dialogue sessions outside school, where one does not have to be as careful with one’s words.

The Reconciliation Process in Bosnia and Herzegovina The story of Ishak Zahirovic´ is a prime example of the fragile status of the reconciliation process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Not only does it show us that even among the youth, the events that happened during the war are still a topic to be avoided, but it also illustrates that the educational system has so far failed to provide a safe and non-hostile ground for reconciliatory topics to be discussed. Furthermore, Zahirovic´’s fear of talking about the war with his own students clearly indicates a lack of trust in his social and work environment. The social trust that was undermined during the war – the trauma of being betrayed by neighbours – has not yet been re-established and is being perpetuated by the younger generations too. ‘An “uneasy cease-fire” is an apt description of the circumstances in Bosnia-­ Herzegovina’, according to Stephen Goodwin.11 It is ‘a truce’, enforced at a crucial moment by the international community – and the military might

‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’  147 12

of NATO. The American-led Dayton Peace Agreements, signed in November 1995, divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into two entities. 49 per cent of the Bosnian territory remained Serbian (the Republika Srpska) and 51 per cent would belong to the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, following the Agreements, is a three-person rotating institution, where each of the main ethnic groups elects a representative to the presidency. Under the relatively weak central government there are two more powerful entity governments, of the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. An elaborate system of controls ensures that each ethnic group has a veto. Dayton has proven to be insufficient in terms of the elimination of the sources of the war and conflict transformation.13 It set out a broad framework for building a new state, but lacked a comprehensive vision in the area of transitional justice – resulting in ad hoc and incomplete efforts, especially in the areas of truth-seeking and reparations.14 Competing narratives and memories of the war and a profound lack of trust within and between the three ethnic groups remained strong. But what is widely regarded as one of the main failures of the Dayton Agreements is the inability of the Bosnian refugees to return home. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that around 2.2 million people living in Bosnia and Herzegovina were displaced or became refugees as a result of the war – about half the population at that time. As of 2017, there were around 98,300 internally displaced people residing in Bosnia, and approximately 47,000 minority returnees who have not yet been able to return to their pre-war homes.15 Dissatisfaction with the current political and economic situation was frequently voiced by respondents. One of the standard interview questions concerned the respondent’s view of what should be done to proceed a step further in the reconciliation process in Bosnia. The question was answered in a variety of ways, ranging from transitional justice measures (such as a truth commission) to a revision of the current educational system. Almost all respondents, however, pointed to the need for constitutional reform, better economic conditions and a change in political culture. Igor Kozemjakin, senior adviser to the Interreligious Council of Bosnia, explained, ‘Nobody will invest in this country, it is Absurdistan. “Where logic stops, Bosnia starts”.’16 Another important factor that was often cited as an obstruction to reconciliation, linked to this dissatisfaction with politics and economics, was the presence of fear and mistrust between the people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The nature of the violence during the war, the psychological trauma that it caused and the current reiteration of the same nationalistic rhetoric have left a mutually distrustful society. Anthropologist Tone Bringa wrote the following on the violence that erupted in the village in which she was conducting fieldwork: In the end, what was so painful to most Muslim villagers and to many of their Croat neighbours was that the attackers were not only ‘outsiders’. […] Starting out as a war waged by outsiders it developed into one

148  Marieke Zoodsma where neighbour was pitted against neighbour after the familiar person next door had been made into a depersonalized alien, a member of the enemy ranks.17 An old Muslim woman said to her, ‘We thought it all came from Chetniks [Serb nationalists] but not from our Croatian neighbours.’18 Even now, more than 20 years later, both Croat and Bosniak politicians have publicly advocated a third (respectively) Croat or Bosniak-dominated entity, for fear of becoming a minority themselves.19 Fear was one of the key driving forces behind hatred, polarization and violence during war, and it is one of the key emotions on which nationalist politicians feed. Politicians in Bosnia today still openly cultivate these emotions in order to stay in power. The structural lack of preconditions in the Dayton Peace Agreements left the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina living not only in mutual distrust but also under relatively poor social conditions. Reconciliation, however, is a complex process that requires the rebuilding of relationships and the restoration of trust, involving all previously warring sides and including all levels of society. The three mutually exclusive ethno-nationalist narratives regarding the root causes and dynamics of the conflict, those of the Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), have been perpetuated since the war ended by politicians and public figures from each ethnic community. Extreme violence and traumas of the war have caused deep wounds, distinct relational divisions and widespread mistrust. In such an environment, reconciliation between estranged groups seems essential for sustainable peace.20 Politicians and public figures repeatedly call for each community to stick together, out of an imagined fear of war or violence, and in doing so they are not only deepening the divide between the three main ethnic groups but also marginalizing those who are open to reconciliation across ethnic boundaries. Furthermore, Bosnia has an unemployment rate of 36 per cent, with youth unemployment often reaching over 45 per cent in recent years.21 These poor political and economic conditions, together with a post-war situation of severe segregation and mistrust, create serious obstacles to any attempts aimed at improving the process of reconciliation.

The Role of Religion in Reconciliation In this seemingly hopeless situation, for which religious differences were at least partly responsible, the question arises of whether religion itself might play a serious role in the process of reconciliation. How might religious initiatives address these issues, or if avoiding them, still be able to contribute to reconciliation? Can religion play a pacifying role? Religion is one of the key cultural components of each ethnic group in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whereby generally speaking most Bosniaks are affiliated with Islam, most Bosnian Croats with Roman Catholicism and most Bosnian Serbs with Serbian Orthodoxy. Julianne Funk Deckard has observed: ‘Though instigated by nationalist elites,

‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’  149 war came to all residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina during 1992–1995 and religion played its sinister part in supporting the competing claims of each nation in its political goals.’22 It is irrefutable that the wars that raged in the countries of the former Yugoslavia had a significant religious dimension. The hundreds of mosques and churches that were intentionally and methodically destroyed, the use of religious symbols and rituals during the fighting, and the undeniable appeals to religion in official propaganda are but a few illustrations of the religious facets of the war.23 According to Michael Sells: ‘The religious symbols, rituals and institutions have been central to the violence and will be central to any reconciliation.’24 Most people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, would not place religious symbols, rituals, institutions and leaders in a central position in the process of reconciliation. The stance that ‘nothing good comes from religion’ was often iterated by the interviewees during fieldwork in Bosnia. The director of a secular non-governmental organization (NGO) in northwestern Bosnia, even asserted, ‘In the end, every religious involvement in the reconciliation process is counter-productive.’25 Such statements clearly illustrate the ambiguous role religion is playing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but there is also a peace-building, reconciliatory and positive side to religion. Janine Clark points to the potential part religion can play in any peace-building process and argues that specifically in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, religion is a potentially valuable, but critically underutilized peace-building tool.26 Others, like Brewer, Higgins and Teeney, view the specific religious aspect of the nature of the conflict as a serious constraint on the potential for peace-building by religious groups.27 ‘How can something that is perceived to be part of the problem become part of the solution? What are the mechanisms by which religion transforms itself from a site of conflict into one of reconciliation?’28 From a European perspective, Bosnia and Herzegovina is a relatively religious society. According to 2013 survey data, 72 per cent of the respondents declared they were religious – of whom 36.7 per cent indicated that religion was a very important part of their life and 35.3 per cent that it was important – while 10.5 per cent were explicitly non-religious.29 Significantly, 80.9 per cent of the respondents indicated that all members of their immediate family belonged to the same religious tradition, compared to 17.5 per cent who stated that they live in a mixed family – pointing to the homogeneity of family life.30 The same survey also showed considerable public support for reconciliation and trust-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina, particularly among religious citizens. The survey’s researchers noted: ‘What seems quite clear is that the less religious or non-religious respondents were generally less optimistic about reconciliation and trust-building than those to whom religion is important in life.’31 The most frequently cited reason why religion should play a vital role in the reconciliation process relates to trust and its absence in Bosnia and ­Herzegovina – specifically in those areas that suffered some of the worst war atrocities of the conflict (e.g., Sanski Most, the Prijedor area, or Ahmici, in central Bosnia). While political leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina are widely

150  Marieke Zoodsma regarded as corrupt and self-interested, religious actors still enjoy considerable respect and trust, at least within their own ethno-religious communities.32 Especially the lower-ranking religious actors such as local imams and priests, who are ‘an integral part of the social fabric of their communities’,33 are present in ordinary people’s lives in an immediate way that differs from politicians. This better enables them to gain people’s trust since, as Clark writes, ‘no actors are more local – and more trustworthy – than the leader of worship at a mosque, synagogue, church or temple’.34 Another reason for the trust placed in religious leaders is the inextricable link between ethnic, national and religious identity typical in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since most Serbs are Orthodox, most Croats Catholic and most Bosniaks Muslim, their religious leaders are to some extent not only the guardians of their nation’s religious identity, but also the guardians of its national identity.35 In other words, as Funk Deckard pointed out, Religions are more clearly seen as protecting the people, while politicians, parties, government, and even the international community are seen as opportunists pursuing power. […] religions perceive themselves and are perceived as responsible for the survival and well-being of their followers. During a time of crisis, security is priority. Although the war is over, the current situation is still experienced as violent and threatening.36 During fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it became apparent that not only were political leaders considered untrustworthy and compromised, but religious leaders – specifically those in the higher echelons of the institutionalized religions – had lost or were losing their credibility and legitimacy in their work on promoting the reconciliation process. Respondents would often point to the dubious role played by religious leaders during the war (and many of them continued to hold their positions afterwards) and the overlap of religious and political establishments. Since, post-war, ‘people consider politics as fundamentally dirty, impure because of its perceived corruption’, public interference by religious leaders in this sector significantly undermines the legitimacy of religion.37 The trust placed in religious institutions by the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina thus does not necessarily refer to the senior religious leaders but to local religious representatives and actors, as Funk Deckard also observed during her research. This embeddedness of religion, through the local religious communities, is one of its greatest assets in building peace. There are some potential limitations to focusing mainly on the peace-­ building role of religion that should be addressed here. The wars in the former Yugoslavia have been attributed to ethnic, economic, political, social and religious factors. All these have played a crucial role in the outbreak and continuation of violence and logically play an important role in the reconciliation process as well. It is therefore self-defeating, as Scott Appleby also argues, to exaggerate the peace-building potentials of religious actors and communities, to see them in isolation from other contributors, or to present them

‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’  151 as uncomplicated, ready-made resources.38 Religion – as well as other factors, such as the political context, the economic conditions, and socio-cultural ­factors – is an important denominator in the reconciliation process in B ­ osnia and Herzegovina. The hypothesis here is rather that religious initiatives – ­especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina – have unique and powerful potential for fostering reconciliation between the different communities, but these would have to coincide with reconciliation and conflict transformation efforts in all those other societal fields as well.

The Interreligious Dialogue We have seen that Bosnian society is traumatized and politically unstable, and that there is a need for a society-wide process of rebuilding of trust and relationships. Additionally, the majority of Bosnia’s inhabitants affirm their religious belief, and religious leaders wield thus significant public authority. However, while senior religious leaders seem to be viewed as corrupt, the local, less formal religious actors are seen as morally uncompromised.39 This dichotomy is a definite impediment to the ability of religious initiatives and actors to advance the reconciliation process by countering the divisive narratives that are being perpetuated. This tension is heightened because it is often the formal and official initiatives that are funded by national as well as international sponsors, while many of the local informal initiatives lack resources.40 Let us now turn to one of the methods commonly utilized by religious initiatives, the interreligious dialogue. Our examination will show how the two different levels (formal and informal) approach this subject and offer insight into their contribution to the reconciliation process in Bosnia and ­Herzegovina. While ‘religious peace-building’ can be defined as ‘the range of activities performed by religious actors and institutions for the purpose of resolving and transforming deadly conflict, with the goal of building social relations and political institutions characterized by an ethos of tolerance and non-violence’,41 the emphasis here is on just one of these activities: the interreligious dialogue. Many religious organizations in Bosnia focused their work particularly on peace and non-violence, and most of them named ‘interfaith dialogue’ or ‘interreligious cooperation’ specifically in their mission statement. Dialogue can here be seen as a form of narrative sharing, as an essential tool to overcome enmity and restore peaceful relations.42 At its most basic level, interreligious dialogue can simply consist of dialogue between two individuals of different faiths. Participants can belong to all sectors of a religious community (not just religious leaders) and the content does not necessarily have to evolve around theological issues.43 Subjects during these interreligious meetings often express common concerns, prejudices or grievances. The interreligious dialogue can be carried out on different levels (top, middle and grassroots) and can be subdivided into different dimensions, such as the interreligious, intra-religious and inter-worldview dialogue.44 So considered, a broad working definition of the interreligious dialogue might be

152  Marieke Zoodsma what Sabina Stein has formulated as: ‘All forms of human communication both through speech and shared activities that help mutual understanding and cooperation between different people who self-identify religiously.’45 Zoran Brajovic´ argues, If people of different religious communities encounter each other in their everyday activities and establish trust by dialogue, this will enable them to know better areas in which mutual activity can enhance society, and also to identify the areas in which religious difference can make mutual undertakings difficult. People who participate in dialogue will also better understand their own faith. […] This will increase their self-understanding and enable them to differentiate between the pure religious message and the cultural lenses through which they are interpreted.46 The interreligious dialogue, in this view, is the sharing of stories or perceptions between people of different faiths. Through such encounters, negative ideas about ‘the other’ can be deconstructed by sharing narratives on the war and other subjects that counter the divisive imaginaries that are being publicly displayed. In addition, the interreligious dialogue can also not only enhance inter-community relations, but also intra-community relations. Brajovic´ maintains: ‘Focussing on the differences between religions, participants are forced to examine their own beliefs in order to support these positions.’47 Although Ina Merdjanova and Patrice Brodeur clearly support a top-down approach to the interreligious dialogue – thus focusing on the formal interreligious dialogue – they acknowledge the necessity of complementing it with grassroots interaction between mid-level clergy and the local religious community.48 As my own research has also shown, they argue that encounters among religious leaders alone cannot bring about sustainable positive changes in attitudes towards religious efforts without systematic and constructive efforts to empower and include the laity.49 None of the respondents in that research (nor many other Bosnians consulted), whether secular or involved in the religious communities, had a positive attitude towards the work of the religious elite in fostering reconciliation in the country. The interreligious dialogue, however, has the potential to empower and include the laity and achieve positive change in the attitudes towards the alien religion. The Islamic NGO Centre for Peacebuilding (CIM) comprehensively states: The practice of structured dialogue can transform a culture of divisive debate. It is imperative that Bosnians of all ethnicities are able to talk in an environment without winners and losers, where common understanding is the ultimate goal. By understanding all perspectives, dialogue can heal the deepest wounds and encourage true reconciliation with the past.50 There are a number of challenges that are faced by interreligious peace work, which will be illuminated in the following discussion of two of the religious

‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’  153 initiatives involved in this research. One of these challenges is the legacy of Communism in Bosnian society (leading to a poor level of religious education). As Merdjanova and Brodeur have observed: ‘The return of religion in the public sphere after the fall of communism has been marked by sectarianism and intolerance towards the religious others by a large number of people.’51 Prejudice towards faith-based organizations is a major obstacle against them being taken seriously, since they are still not accepted as legitimate peace-building organizations. Another important challenge for interreligious activities is the strong link between religion and politics, which heavily restricts religion’s potential role in civil society – especially given the particular instability of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s post-war political sector.52 The involvement of collective, ethno-religious communities in the realm of politics presents a great challenge to the religious peace-building conducted by grassroots initiatives. Funk Deckard writes, These communities have been associated with exclusive nationalism and have tended to protect the upright ‘us’ against the hostile ‘them’ even if the cost is violence and hostility in return. Since these religious communities are traditionally hierarchical and relatively inaccessible to nonelite input, civil society peacebuilders struggle to make headway within their own religious communities to rethink the messages and behavior advocated as well as consider the rightness of legitimatizing such exclusive agendas or mobilizing along these lines.53 This description corresponds to a dualistic tension in narrative sharing – the tension between the narrative promoted by the informal peace-building work on the ground (bottom-up) and that of the formal interreligious dialogue that takes place at the leadership level (top-down). While the informal peacebuilders often work to create non-hostile safe grounds where participants can engage in open (interreligious) narrative-sharing, the formal religious leadership is often engaged in publicly perpetuating the hostile and divisive narratives. The following two case studies will serve as examples for each.

CIM: ‘Peace is Our Way’ The Centre for Peacebuilding (Centar za Izgradnju Mira, or CIM) is located in Sanski Most, in an area on the former front lines of the conflict. Prijedor, the major city 40 km away, saw ethnic cleansing on a massive scale – with as many as 52,000 non-Serbs forcibly expelled from Prijedor’s total of 120,000 pre-war residents. Three of the largest and most notorious concentration camps during the Bosnian war – Trnopolje, Omarska and Keraterm – were located in the city’s vicinity. Following Dayton, Prijedor was to be included within the Republika Srpska, and thus many of its non-Serb residents decided to live in the Sanski Most canton after the war, instead of returning to their pre-war city. The economic and social challenges that Sanski Most, like the rest of Bosnia

154  Marieke Zoodsma and Herzegovina, suffers today are compounded by memories of the war and the legacy of violence that completely disrupted the pre-war social fabric. CIM, founded in 2004 by two (former) imams Vahidin Omanovic´ and Mevludin Rahmanovic´, seeks to rebuild trust and foster reconciliation among the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, specifically in the Sanski Most area. The organization’s activities are founded on the core concepts of mutual listening, understanding and compassion through (re)building relationships, with the aim of overcoming the deep physical and psychological divisions that run through Bosnian society.54 CIM’s activities consist of such matters as organizing a gathering for Eid-al-Fitr (the end of Ramadan) at the house of the local imam and inviting stakeholders representing other religions as well as local government officials, and establishing an interreligious choir, which sings at the Catholic church’s Christmas mass. Omanovic´ explained: Interreligious dialogue is our specialty […] Because we are both strong practitioners of our faith, we are imams. From the very beginning of our peace work, we found our strength to work as peace-builders in our religion.55 CIM has organized several interreligious meetings of local leaders, where they sit together and discuss concrete joint activities such as those mentioned above. Apart from the facilitation of the formal interreligious dialogue, the organization is also strongly involved in improving the informal interreligious dialogue in Sanski Most and its surroundings. In 2013, they started a project called the Interreligious School to address issues such as the persistent mistrust of the ‘other’ religion. Through education about the various faiths that make up the community, the aim is for those individuals involved to reduce their prejudices and increase their appreciation for both the peace-loving message common to all religions as well as the unique aspects of each faith. The religious leader of each faith present in Sanski Most (Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism) teaches once a month for a year on two main themes: the basics of their faith tradition and the resources for peace in their religion.56 People of all ages attend these interreligious classes. Since there is a ­Muslim majority living in Sanski Most, around 75 per cent of the participants are Muslim. In addition to the classes, they also take the group to churches and mosques and celebrate their specific religious holidays together with the participants and other (non-religious) community members – for instance by hosting a Ramadan dinner in a public park. When asked about the reactions of the participants, Omanovic´ recalled, One of the first reactions is often: ‘I can’t believe that you are imams, you do not look like imams’. The second is: ‘Do you practice Islam? But you look so normal’, and yet another reaction is: ‘In Christianity they also talk about these things!’ Or from Muslims: ‘I did not know they do fasting too!’

‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’  155 or, ‘Do they believe in one God? I thought they believed in three!’ These things are really eye-opening for the participants.57 As these reactions demonstrate, the prejudices are not only caused by a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the other religion, but also by ignorance about who the other religious individual is, what he or she looks like and how religion is practised by the other. By facilitating interreligious meetings, dialogue and education, CIM aims to weaken the prejudice against and misunderstanding about the ‘other’ and the ‘other religion’. The search by these two imams for a shared narrative within such a heavily segregated, polarized environment is courageous. The fact that the main focus of the interreligious meetings is not necessarily the search for a shared narrative on wartime experiences, might be a reason to believe that these activities can actually help in fostering reconciliation. A point of critique, however, is that the majority of the participants are Muslim, which raises the question as to whether these activities are really interreligious. One can also question the effectiveness of such bottom-up interreligious activities when there is a significant top-down negative push from the political and religious leadership to create an environment where such a shared narrative is highly discouraged.

The Interreligious Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina On 9 June 1997, four high-level representatives of each of Bosnia and ­Herzegovina’s churches and religious communities publicly issued a ‘Statement of Shared Moral Commitment’, thereby formally establishing the Interreligious Council in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Med¯ureligijsko Vijec´e u Bosni i Hercegovini, MRV). The model of the MRV is based on a top-down approach to interreligious dialogue. It is a three-level organization consisting of an assembly, an executive board and a secretariat. Each respective church or religious community has a representative appointed on each one of these levels. The joint statement of the MRV was signed by Mustafa Ceric´, grand mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina;58 metropolitan Nikolaj Dabrobosanski in the name of the Serbian Orthodox Church; Vinko Cardinal Puljic´, archbishop of ­Sarajevo; and Jakob Finci, president of the Jewish Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The motivation to join forces was a shared concern over the slow and inefficient implementation of the Dayton Agreements, which was especially at that time mainly focused on material reconstruction (houses and infrastructure) and strengthening economic potential, instead of eliminating the sources of war by addressing the divisive ethno-nationalist narratives.59 The joint statement reflects high hopes: ‘[W]e recognize that our religious and spiritual tradition holds many values in common and that these shared values can provide an authentic basis for mutual esteem, cooperation and free common living in Bosnia-Herzegovina.’60 Gradually, the Council came to the conclusion that the existence of the MRV alone would not have enough influence to foster inter-faith cooperation

156  Marieke Zoodsma and reconciliation. One of the reasons cited was that the assembly only meets once a year. Consequently, it established five working groups to deal with legal, women’s and youth issues, religious education and the media, each including a representative of the major religious communities. One significant achievement of the MRV (through its legal working group) was the drafting of a new law on freedom of religion and the legal status of faith communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was officially adopted by the Bosnian Parliament in 2004. The Council has also been very active in the publication of books on interreligious subjects, such as a Glossary of Religious Terms in 1999, and the 2012 publication of Religions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both these publications are aimed at familiarizing Bosnian society with the churches and religious communities in the country. As the four members of the Assembly explain 45 years of Socialism had left deep scars on all our churches and religious communities, distanced a great number of believers from their faith and made us unrecognizable to each other. Getting to know each other is the primary way of eliminating prejudice and fear of each other.61 In 2010, the MRV started a project focusing on the monitoring of attacks on religious sites throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina. Such crimes were written about, analysed and published in their annual report. For Igor Kozemjakin, senior adviser to the Interreligious Council of Bosnia, the most important component of this monitoring project is the joint condemnation of the attacks. Their approach is that after an attack, the religious representatives of the four communities come together in a meeting organized by the MRV, the press is invited, and they condemn the attack together. In the words of Kozemjakin: ‘This is not tolerable so we as religious officials raise strong voices against this. And it influences people a lot.’62 Outside the offices of the MRV, however, these declarations are heavily criticized and often referred to as hollow phrases. Indeed, the most frequent criticism of the MRV is that it is too formal, because the meetings of the leaders of the four religious communities have resulted mainly in the issuing of common moral statements without great practical consequences.63 The value of the MRV is therefore mainly symbolic, as an organization where the top leaders are representing good practice – especially given the fact that it was formed at a critical time just after the war. Although this symbolic role of the interreligious dialogue between religious leaders at the state level can be valuable, religious leaders at the local level often do not follow this example. Clark, for example, points to the chief imam in Kozarac, who disclosed to her that the Serbian Orthodox priest there does not desire any contact with the Islamic community.64 Omanovic´ and Rahmanovic´ recounted the problems they had in Sanski Most with establishing contact between the local imam and the Serbian Orthodox priest. So, this top-down approach to the interreligious dialogue often does not actively engage enough in interreligious relations to actually foster reconciliation in Bosnia and

‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’  157 Herzegovina. Words are not translated into action and the exemplary role to which the higher religious leadership aspires apparently does not resonate at the level of local religious leaders. One difficulty with the MRV operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina is related to the hierarchical status of the different religious leaders in the country. Not all religious communities have the same structures, and this is particularly true for those in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Neither the Sarajevo-based cardinal nor the metropolitan have the kind of authority over their respective constituents as is wielded by the grand mufti over the Bosnian Muslims.65 In 2001, the MRV met to consider the rebuilding of the famous Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka, which was destroyed by Bosnian Serb forces during the war. During the press briefing, a journalist asked the metropolitan of Bosnia and Herzegovina if he agreed with the rebuilding of the mosque. Mustafic´, interreligious advisor to the grand mufti and member of the executive board, later recalled: ‘He did not say “yes”, he said: “It is not my jurisdiction”.’66 Mustafic´ remarked that the metropolitan might at least have given a general statement about the importance of rebuilding religious heritage. As Appleby writes: Local and regional leaders in Bosnia were eager to assume control of the newly created IRC [Interreligious Council]. But their fledgling alliance experienced severe strains almost immediately when the divisive social dynamics generated by postwar political instability ignited fresh disputes over neuralgic issues, such as the resettlement of refugees and the recognition and protection of each community’s sacred space.67 The example of the less-than-positive remarks made by the metropolitan and Mustafic´ is just one manifestation of the many enduring disputes and disagreements between the religious communities. Such finger-pointing among the higher religious leadership is common since it is general practice to view the ‘other’ religious head as untrustworthy while excusing the political activity of one’s own religious leader.68 The actual influence, other than symbolic, of such formal organizations on the reconciliation process has proven to be minimally effective. One of the main reasons for this failure can be explained by the adoption of religious leaders by nationalist parties and politicians, leading to a lack of trust and credibility in the religious leadership. As with the behaviour of the political leaders, seldom are words transformed into actions by the religious representatives.

Conclusion The peace-building and reconciliation process is not a stage in time or a condition, but a dynamic social construct. This conceptualization requires a process of structural involvement by all actors on all levels of society, a strong (constitutional) foundation and continual maintenance. Religious initiatives, through the encouragement of interreligious dialogue and narrative-sharing,

158  Marieke Zoodsma have attempted to contribute to this complex process of rebuilding relationships, the restoration of trust and the creation of a society that ‘together has one idea about Bosnia’, as one respondent put it.69 The overlap of religion and politics and the compromised role of the higher religious leadership in Bosnia and Herzegovina create serious obstacles to the effectiveness of interreligious dialogue in fostering reconciliation. As this chapter has shown, however, these obstacles do not only affect the leadership’s efforts, but also those of the informal, grassroots religious initiatives. In a society that is divided, traumatized, politically and economically unstable, there are always those to be found who want to look beyond ethnic divisions and work toward a shared future. For − Dermana Šeta, who worked for the Islamic NGO Nahla, it starts here: People need to get to see the bigger picture, and the only way to do that is from the grass-roots level like some of the organizations are doing. Bringing people together and telling their personal stories. I tell my story: ‘I was a girl, I was twelve, I was in my house and the Yugoslav National Army came and expelled me. I went with my mom, I was a refugee for four years, I did not have anything to wear.’ So, I just tell my story. And if someone listens to this and says: ‘Aha, at that particular time I was in Sarajevo, and this also happened to me at the same time.’ So, we come to accept other’s stories. It is a very intimate thing; it is not something that can be imposed from above. And then I knew and we came to this understanding, that I was hurt and you were hurt too.70 War changes people. In order for individuals to share these perceptions in society, and thereby alter the negative view of the former enemy into a more positive one, more serious effort might be devoted to the interreligious cooperation and dialogue on both formal and informal levels in Bosnia. As for − Dermana, this effort begins with sharing her personal story and the discovery that some wartime experiences might be identical, even if one does not belong to the same ethno-religious group. In such a non-violent setting, where a variety of topics can be discussed, individuals are given the tools and opportunity to understand and accept that painful memories and trauma belong to all sides of the previously warring parties. Religion is a key part of the mosaic that shapes people’s identities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Enhancing the interreligious dialogue can therefore potentially play a crucial part in creating the common ground, tolerance and trust needed for the reconciliation process to move forward.

Notes 1 Ishak Zahirovic´, interview with the author, Sanski Most, 10 September 2013. 2 Of the multiple ways of spelling Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bosnia or BiH, here we will use the UN/ISO standardized version: Bosnia and ­Herzegovina. See www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/country_code_list.htm, ­accessed 5 March 2019.

‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’  159 3 This chapter is based on research carried out for my MA thesis in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Amsterdam, June 2014. 4 Ishak Zahirovic´, interview. 5 J. Funk Deckard, ‘“Invisible” Believers for Peace: Religion and Peacebuilding in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina’, doctoral dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit ­Leuven, 2012, pp. 147–8. 6 Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into two entities; the (Bosnian Serb) Republika Srpska covering parts in the north and east of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the (Bosniak-Croat) Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina covering the central and southwestern part of the country. 7 E. Stover and H. Weinstein, My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 9. 8 Funk Deckard, ‘“Invisible” Believers for Peace’, p.  148; F. Bieber, Post-War ­Bosnia: Ethnicity, Inequality and Public Sector Governance, Houndmills: Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2006, pp. 108–14. 9 Ishak Zahirovic´, interview. 10 Ibid. 11 S.R. Goodwin, Fractured Land, Healing Nations: A Contextual Analysis of the Role of Religious Faith Sodalities towards Peace-Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006, p. 1. 12 J.M. Reid, ‘The Dayton Accord elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1996’, in M. Shatzmiller (ed.), Islam and Bosnia: Conflict Resolution and Foreign Policy in Multi Ethnic States, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002, p. 149. 13 Z. Brajovic´, ‘The potential of inter-religious dialogue: lessons from Bosnia-­ Herzegovina’, in M. Fischer (ed.), Peacebuilding and Civil Society in Bosnia-­ Herzegovina: Ten Years after Dayton, Münster: Lit Verlag, 2006, p. 149. 14 R. Pejic´-Sremac, ‘Toward a Holistic Concept of Justice and Reconciliation: An Example of the Balkans’, Master’s thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2011, p. 83. 15 http://reporting.unhcr.org/node/15810, accessed 5 March 2019. 16 Igor Kozemjakin, interview, Sarajevo, 22 August 2013. Kozemjakin refers here to a song by the popular Bosnian band Dubioza Kolektiv, whose lyrics often revolve around themes of peace, understanding and tolerance, with an extreme criticism of nationalism and injustice in Bosnia. 17 T. Bringa, Being a Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. xvi. 18 We Are All Neighbours (1993), documentary in which Tone Bringa revisits the village, just before the outbreak of war, which was the focus of her ethnographic study. 19 https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/21/bosnia-is-teetering-on-the-precipice-of-a-­ political-crisis-balkans-election-law-dodik/ and www.operationspaix.net/DATA/ DOCUMENT/7825~v~Bosnias_Dangerous_Tango_Islam_and_Nationalism.pdf, accessed 5 March 2019. 20 Funk Deckard, ‘“Invisible” Believers for Peace’, p. 9. 21 https://tradingeconomics.com/bosnia-and-herzegovina/unemployment-rate and https://ec.europa.eu/epale/en/blog/youth-unemployment-bosnia-and-herzegovinahow-many-nos-youth-can-take, accessed 5 March 2019. 22 Funk Deckard, ‘“Invisible” Believers for Peace, p. 2. 23 G.F. Powers, ‘Religion, conflict and prospects for reconciliation in Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia’, Journal of International Affairs, 1996, vol. 50(1), 221–51, p. 222. 24 M. Sells, ‘Crosses of blood: sacred space, religion, and violence in Bosnia-­ Hercegovina’, Sociology of Religion, 2003, vol. 64(3), 309–31, p. 325. 25 Edin Ramulic´, interview, Prijedor, 10 September 2013. 26 J.N. Clark, ‘Religion and reconciliation in Bosnia & Herzegovina: are religious actors doing enough?’, Europe-Asia Studies, 2010, vol. 62(4), 671–94.

160  Marieke Zoodsma 27 J.D. Brewer, G.I. Higgins and F. Teeney, ‘Religion and peacemaking: a conceptualization’, Sociology, 2010, vol. 44(6), 1019–37. 28 Ibid., p. 1021. 29 According to the survey summary, the research involved a written questionnaire with 78 questions answered by a diverse sample of 2,060 respondents from 13 cities. These included larger and smaller cities, both in the Federation as well as the Republika Srpska, thereby capturing very different economic, cultural, political and geographical contexts. G. Wilkes et  al., ‘Factors in reconciliation: religion, local conditions, people and trust: Results from a survey conducted in 13 cities across Bosnia and Herzegovina in May 2013’, University of Edinburgh Project on Religion and Ethics in the Making of War and Peace, and the Center for Empirical Research on Religion in Bosnia and Herzegovina, published as a special issue of the journal Diskursi, 2013, p. 13. 30 Ibid., p. 14. 31 Ibid., p. 26. 32 Clark, ‘Religion and reconciliation’, p. 674. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.; Powers, ‘Religion, conflict and prospects for reconciliation’, p.  252; and P. ­Mojžes (ed.), Religion and the War in Bosnia, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998. 36 Funk Deckard, ‘“Invisible” Believers for Peace’, p. 88. 37 Ibid., p. 12. 38 R.S. Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 7. 39 Funk Deckard, ‘“Invisible” Believers for Peace’, p. 106. 40 Vahidin Omanovic´, author interview, Sanski Most, 8 September 2013. 41 D. Little and R.S. Appleby, ‘A moment of opportunity? The promise of religious peacebuilding in an era of religious and ethnic conflict’, in H. Coward and G.S. Smith (eds.), Religion and Peacebuilding in Bosnia, Albany: SUNY Press, 2004, p. 5. 42 B. Peuraca, ‘Can Faith-Based NGOs Advance Inter-Faith Reconciliation? The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, USIP Special Report no. 103, Washington, DC, 2003. 43 S. Stein, ‘The diversity of interreligious dialogue approaches’, KOFF Newsletter, 2014, vol. 124, Religion & Peacebuilding, Bern: Centre for Peacebuilding KOFF. Available at: www.transconflict.com/2014/02/diversity-interreligious-dialogue-­ approaches-122/, accessed 5 March 2019. 44 I. Merdjanova and P. Brodeur, Religion as a Conversation Starter: Interreligious Dialogue for Peacebuilding in the Balkans, London: Continuum, 2009, p. 3. 45 Ibid. 46 Brajovic´, ‘The potential of inter-religious dialogue’, p. 154, emphasis in original. 47 Ibid. 48 Merdjanova and Brodeur, Religion as a Conversation Starter. 49 Ibid., p. 4. 50 ‘Interreligious dialogue’, available at http://unvocim.net/eng/activities/current-­ activities/interfaith-peace-work/interreligious-dialogue/, accessed 5 March 2019. 51 Merdjanova and Brodeur, Religion as a Conversation Starter, p. 113. 52 Ibid. 53 Funk Deckard, ‘“Invisible” Believers for Peace’, p. 103. 54 ‘History and context’, available at: http://unvocim.net/eng/about-us/history/, ­accessed 5 March 2019. 55 Vahidin Omanovic´ and Mevludin Rahmanovic´, author interviews, Sanski Most, 8 September 2013. 56 ‘Interreligious school’, available at http://unvocim.net/eng/activities/current-­activities/ interfaith-peace-work/interreligious-school/, accessed 5 March 2019.

‘I was Hurt and You were Hurt too’  161 57 Ibid. 58 The grand mufti (Reis ul-Ulema or Reis) of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the highest official religious leader of the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina and is head of Riyaset, its highest executive religious and administrative organ. 59 Brajovic´, ‘The potential of inter-religious dialogue’, p. 163. 60 ‘Statement of shared moral commitment’, Med¯ureligijsko Vijec´e u Bosni i ­Hercegovini, available at: www.mrv.ba/upload/attachments/statement_DjE.pdf, accessed 5 March 2019. 61 H. Smajic´ et  al., ‘Foreword’, in Religions in Bosnia & Herzegovina: Profile of Religious Communities and Churches, Sarajevo: Interreligious Council in Bosnia and ­Herzegovina, 2012. 62 Igor Kozemjakin, author interview, Sarajevo, 22 August 2013. 63 Merdjanova and Brodeur, Religion as a Conversation Starter, p. 66. 64 Clark, ‘Religion and reconciliation’, 677. 65 Merdjanova and Brodeur, Religion as a Conversation Starter, p. 66. 66 Ifet-ef Mustafic´, author interview, Sarajevo, 20 August 2013. 67 Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred, p. 301. 68 Funk Deckard, ‘“Invisible” Believers for Peace’, p. 114. 69 Azra Ibrahimovic, author interview, Sarajevo, 16 September 2013. 70 −Dermana Šeta, author interview, Sarajevo, 14 September 2013.

Part IV

Testimonies and Survivalist Narratives

11 Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma Trauma and Narrative Structure in Interviews with Dutch and English International Brigade Volunteers of the Spanish Civil War Tim Scheffe Two Sets of Interviews with the Brigadistas As civil war tore Spain in two, an unprecedented number of volunteer fighters from many different countries heeded the call to join in the struggle to protect democracy and fight fascism. The International Brigade was born. Due to their shared ideals of an international brotherhood of mankind, this war saw volunteers from wildly different backgrounds share similar experiences. However, the situations at home to which most of these volunteers returned varied greatly, both politically and culturally. This creates an ideal opportunity to investigate the impact of external influences on the retelling or narrating of events. Investigating interviews conducted with Dutch and English volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, this chapter examines the effect of their varying backgrounds on the stories they told. More specifically, it explores the influence of national and cultural differences on their narratives, focusing on aspects of war in general and the Spanish Civil War in particular. Finally, this chapter will also investigate the interplay between influences on narrative and on trauma development. The subject material consists of a selection of interviews with Dutch and English volunteers conducted between 1976 and 1986 as part of two oral history projects. The decision to focus on Dutch and English volunteers was made because of the different views on war prevalent in their respective national cultures, which will be outlined below. The varying reception of the volunteers upon return from Spain also serves to amplify the differences in their post-Spanish Civil War experiences. The English oral history project was started in 1976 as a response to the fortieth anniversary reunion of the British International Brigade Association. It was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and intended to preserve the experience of British participants in the Spanish Civil War. Many different interviewers were employed and it is unclear whether they made use of a single interviewing method. However, the interviews show that the

166  Tim Scheffe interviewees were free to tell their own narrative, with a minimal number of questions from the interviewers to spur them on. The interviews are available through the research facilities of the IWM, and many are accessible online through the IWM website. The Dutch project was conducted by PhD researchers in Amsterdam. Initially it was part of their PhD programme, but eventually it progressed into a book, De oorlog begon in Spanje.1 In their work they reveal nothing about the methodology used in their interviews. Looking at the interviews it would seem that they used a conversational style in which the interviewees were mostly free to tell their own story, with the interviewers steering occasionally to keep them on track. A conversation with J. Flinterman, one of the authors and interviewers, revealed that they tried to approach the interviews in as open a manner as possible so as not to influence the veterans’ narratives. It is important to note that initially it was not their intention to release the interviews to the public; they were donated to the International Institute of Social History in 2006 and 2007, where they can be accessed today. Most of the interviews can be accessed both as a transcript and an audio tape, but for some there is only a transcript. This chapter includes translations from Dutch provided by the current author, with the original text in the notes. While the two projects are similar, we have to take into consideration that the Dutch volunteers were not expecting the interviews to be released to the public in full. Potentially this could have influenced what they decided to share. On other points, the two projects are more comparable. Both had as their goal to document and preserve the experiences of International Brigade volunteers, and to cover the period before, during and after the Spanish Civil War. Additionally, both projects gave the volunteers the freedom to relate their story as they saw fit. From the British project only interviews with English volunteers were selected, to ensure homogeny in their national backgrounds. Furthermore, only interviews that were conducted between 1976 and 1986 were included in this comparison in order to match the timeline of the Dutch interviews, and to ensure that a similar time had passed since the war itself.

Personal Narratives and Prevailing Cultures The idea that culture can influence personal narratives is not new. For example, in popular memory theory it is suggested that personal narratives of past events, such as the interviews discussed here, do not exist in and of themselves but must necessarily operate within larger public narratives. M. Roper defines such ‘public’ narratives as ‘generalized and shared images − such as those of the nation, or of the soldier hero − which circulate widely within the culture’.2 It is with this concept in mind that cultural differences between Dutch and ­English society will be explored. Additionally, there have been many studies that link the social support received by returning combatants to the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).3 This gives a further incentive to examine the context within which the volunteers’ narratives existed.

Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma  167 The English volunteers were viewed quite favourably by the general public. Upon their return from Spain they received a grand welcome from sympathetic politicians. When the interviewers asked the volunteers, ‘did you ever have any problems from your time in Spain?’, they were perhaps remembering the prosecution of volunteers in the United States, or the mass disappearances and executions among Soviet officers who served in Spain. If so, then the answers they received paint a completely different picture. English veteran Joe Norman, for example, explained how he found ‘terrific admiration for anybody who fought in the Spanish struggle, from conservatives, non-politicals, all sorts of people’.4 The result of such a favourable view was that the volunteers had plenty of opportunity to talk about their experiences, and found people not only interested in what they had to say, but even responding with admiration. It also meant that the public narrative within which they told their stories was itself positive about the British volunteers. For the Dutch volunteers, circumstances upon return were quite different. The moment they crossed the border into the Netherlands they were arrested and interrogated. The Dutch government revoked their citizenship because of their participation in the war and generally treated them with mistrust. Additionally, the police tried to prevent any kind of welcome ceremony upon their return from the war. The volunteers became aliens in their own country and had to report to the Vreemdelingendienst (Aliens Police) on a regular basis. They were forbidden to participate in any kind of political organization, and any employer who hired them would receive a message informing them of the volunteer’s status. This usually resulted in swift termination of employment. This marked difference in popular views on the subject of military volunteering was rooted deeply in diverging attitudes in the two cultures to war and militarism in general, as we shall see as this chapter unfolds. Most of the volunteers describe their treatment by the Dutch government as a humiliating and frustrating experience. Adriaan van Dijk, for instance, said: I have never experienced such a bunch of scum as the military police. I don’t blame them personally because everyone has to make a living, but you could be a bit nicer to us because we fought for you too.5 This was coming from a man who had experienced war against fascists in Spain and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. It is clear he still harboured a grudge against those who had treated him poorly, and because he felt he was fighting for them, it seems to stem from a feeling of betrayal. Arie Favier also expressed anger at the way the Dutch government had treated him and his fellow volunteers, saying, ‘the Dutch government pretty much kicked us into a corner’.6 This attitude towards veterans of the Spanish Civil War persisted until the end of the Cold War, because of the perceived connection between volunteers for Spain and the Communist Party, and some volunteers did not regain their citizenship until the 1960s.7

168  Tim Scheffe These differences in the response from the home front also influenced the potential audiences for their stories. As the British volunteers had the opportunity and audience to talk repeatedly about their experiences they were able to develop a structure for their narratives. Dan McAdams explains that it is through the repetition of life stories that people can attribute meaning to them and shape them into a consistent form.8 This is reflected in the fact that most of the British interviews followed a remarkably clear chronological structure, without the interviewer needing to keep the volunteers on track. Bill Alexander even catches himself before he violates the chronological order of his story, saying, ‘oh no sorry, I skipped a period’.9 It is also possible that for him this firm narrative structure was formed because he wrote about his experiences.10 Pennebaker, Mayne and Francis have shown in their studies that, at least for people with traumas, writing is a more effective way of bringing structure to a narrative than speech, because ‘by integrating thoughts and feelings, the person can more easily construct a coherent narrative of the experience’.11 It seems likely that even for non-traumatized people, writing would aid in the creation of a solid narrative structure. However, even volunteer Jim Brown showed not only a recognizable structure in his interview, but also displayed a surprising consistency in his story.12 His archival record contains two different interviews that were linked together as one. For some reason the second interview starts anew instead of continuing where the first left off, causing Jim to reiterate almost word for word the story he told in the first interview. In view of the fact that Jim had not written about his experiences in Spain, this remarkable consistency must have occurred through years and years of retelling his story, something made possible by English society’s positive view towards the volunteers. For many of the Dutch volunteers, the oral history project 50 years after the war was the first chance for several decades to relate their stories. Volunteer Adriaan van Dijk expressed his frustration with this lack of interest when he said in his interview: ‘I have to say it has taken a long time for people to write about this history. Many other people, some of our finest comrades, could have given an even better overview.’13 The negative reception by Dutch society meant that the Dutch volunteers had much less opportunity to relate their stories. Some, like Herman Scheerboom, kept their Spanish experience a secret until well into old age. Because the volunteers were offered few opportunities to talk about their Spanish past, it is not surprising that most of it has disappeared into oblivion, or at least into incoherency. Jan van Eijk commented on this when he said I can only remember vague instances, not like I should. But I married a Spanish woman, and I can speak Spanish as well, but we never really talk about the Spanish war. We experienced five years of nastiness afterwards and we can remember all of that.14

Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma  169 It is telling that Van Eijk remained silent about the Spanish Civil War, even with his own wife, despite the fact that they met during its course. This lack of space to talk about their experiences is further illustrated by noting that the ability to tell their stories through these interviews has in itself had a positive effect on the memory of the brigadistas. Arie Favier indicated this when he said: ‘A lot of what you talk about in such an interview, when you read it back later, then it starts to dawn on you, you do know a thing or two about it.’15 Sake Visser says something similar: ‘And like I said, it’s in the past, it’s coming back now. But otherwise we never spoke about it.’16 As we have noted in McAdams’s work, ‘telling the story of the event again and again may help the teller to clarify the event’s emotional meaning’,17 and this also illustrates that any possible traumatic events are likely to have remained unresolved due to the lack of space in which to express them. In any case, it is clear that the Dutch volunteers had much more fragmented narratives because of this lack of opportunity to talk about their experiences.

Diverging Cultures of War Volunteering and Resistance The repetition of life stories also affects the narrative in ways other than simply shaping them into a consistent structure. It also means that the narratives are structured according to reigning conventions. Scholars such as Bluck and Habermas, and McAdams, have stated that in order to tell a successful life story one has to be aware of the conventions present in autobiographical writings in a particular culture: ‘they are born, they grow, they proliferate, and they eventually die according to the norms, rules and traditions that prevail in a given society’.18 Culture has a large influence not only on the way a story is told, but also on what is told. One of the ideological influences on the English volunteers was the famous war volunteer of a century earlier, Lord Byron. Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the Communist Party at the time, remarked that the author ­Stephen Spender should ‘go out and get killed, comrade, we need a Byron in the movement’.19 The connection with Byron was thus actively promoted. The historian E. Roberts comments that for ‘some volunteers in Spain, Byronic iconography was irresistible. Even commemorative material produced after the war was often adorned with the banner of the British Battalion and lines from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.’20 Roberts also states that ‘the ways in which the British volunteers’ involvement in Spain was aestheticized, romanticized, and mythologized bear a marked similarity to the philhellenic experience in Greece’,21 indicating that many of the volunteers regarded their own involvement in Spain as an extension of the tradition begun by Byron. There are indications that a part of their reason for fighting involved a continuation of the Byronic tradition in which ‘going to fight in other people’s wars [was] a right – even a duty – of free-born Britons. [To] defend liberty wherever it was threatened or suppressed.’22 This is

170  Tim Scheffe echoed in Charles Bloom’s interview, where he explains that they ‘thought [they] had every right to [interfere]’.23 This desire to defend liberty is noticeable in the way the volunteers speak about their reception in Spain. Bloom for instance recounted how the inhabitants of the village in which he was stationed came to send off the British Battalion, and were crying as they were about to leave because ‘they knew we came to fight for them’.24 In this case it is relevant that he claimed the British came ‘to fight for them’, the Spanish people, and not for political reasons or to fight fascism. Significantly, the interviewer herself stated, ‘with a reception like that you and your men must have felt like you were coming to save the world’, indicating that she too saw the British as saviours. By extension, this shows that at least within a part of British culture, the volunteers were seen as heroic saviours. Indeed, when Charles Graves wrote in the Daily Mail that Spain is ‘a great Lady in reduced circumstances’,25 then the conflict was almost reduced to a fable in which heroic British volunteers rescue the Spanish damsel in distress. Thus it was not just the volunteers themselves who looked at the war with the Byronic tradition in mind; part of the English public did so as well. This positive association with war volunteering was not present in the Netherlands. Although there have been examples of Dutch men volunteering in history, for example the Zouaves who volunteered for Pope Pius IX in 1863, these were all but forgotten by the time the Dutch volunteers left for Spain. Furthermore, the Dutch have never had much of a military culture, and as Wim Klinkert explains: ‘We don’t have any form of hero worship and hardly any visible military presence in the public space […] We are, so it would seem, satisfied to be labelled non-military and are perhaps even proud of this title.’26 Indeed the only real war heroes who have survived in Dutch culture either date back to the Eighty Years’ War against Spain – such as Prince William of Orange or the heroine of Haarlem, Kenau – or were resistance fighters during the Second World War, such as Hannie Schaft or Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema. These heroes are not necessarily remembered because of their prowess in combat, but because of their resistance against oppressors. As for why there are no soldier heroes, Professor J.A.A. van Doorn stated in 1948: ‘The time that the military class formed a highly respected and honoured social element is far behind us.’27 Many of the volunteers, such as Piet Laros and Wim de Jong, were anti-­ militaristic and carried the broken rifle pin badge to prove it. As such it is perhaps unsurprising that the Dutch volunteers drew parallels to the Dutch resistance and World War II, ostensibly in an attempt to conform to this more accepted martial tradition. Almost all of them claim to have foreseen that World War II was on its way in a time when the general population had no idea what the future would hold. Van Dijk stated that ‘even before that time we’ve always said “it’s heading in the wrong direction”’.28 This is strikingly similar to what interviewee Van Poelgeest said: ‘Well, we knew anyway that we would get a big war after this. When we said it they laughed at us because such things only happen in faraway places.’29 When Van Eijk

Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma  171 says, ‘And if we hadn’t lost the Spanish war back then, then we would have never had the Second World War’,30 he is explicitly portraying himself and his fellow volunteers as the first resisters against Nazi Germany. Rather than portraying themselves as Byronic heroes, like their English counterparts, they appear to be consciously or subconsciously altering their narrative into one of proto-resistance. This is in line with Dan McAdams’s statement that ‘any narrative expression of the self cannot be understood outside the context of its assumed listener or audience, with respect to which the story is designed to make a point or produce a desired effect’,31 in this case an audience that primarily respects resistance fighters.

Prevailing Culture and the Subsequent Fate of the Volunteers A final aspect of the British interviews concerns the impact of the war on the lives of the volunteers. In this case, the interviewers did not mean the impact of their participation in a social context, but rather in a mental or psychological way. War is often seen as an experience that changes a person; James Campbell calls it ‘combat gnosticism’,32 by which he means that war provides soldiers with a ‘secret knowledge which only an initiated elite knows’.33 For the British volunteers this was no different. Commander Bill Alexander for example claimed that the war ‘raised [his] confidence in [his] fellow man, and pride in being a man’,34 and also stated that it allowed many men to ‘overcome their problems and show themselves as being a man’.35 For him the war is a transformative experience that allowed him and many others to reach their true potential as men, a concept that is almost timeless and present in all societies that wage war. Joshua Goldstein explains that ‘cultural norms force men to endure trauma and master fear, in order to claim the status of “manhood”’.36 For volunteer Charles Bloom it ‘taught [him] very much, [he] grew up very much’,37 also illustrating the maturing effect of war. In their eyes, war is a positive experience that, despite hardships and trauma, changes a man for the better showing that they adhere to the age-old view of combat as an initiation into manhood and that ‘[t]he military provides the remnants of traditional manhood-making rituals’.38 As we have seen earlier, Dutch society had a more critical stance towards war. In addition, because some of the volunteers were also pacifists they somehow had to reconcile their pacifist ideals with their desire to fight for the Spanish cause. Wim de Jong recalled his difficulties in dealing with this problem: ‘Indeed, I had something to deal with, because, well, my background was anti-militaristic. This lives in your subconscious, taking the responsibility to shoot and kill another human being.’39 They are judged not only by the general public, but are constantly judging themselves as well, because for them killing is a bad thing, perhaps even sinful. It could have been a similar notion that prompted the interviewers to ask the question, ‘have you ever killed anyone?’ This brings us closer to key traumatic events, for researchers Van Winkle

172  Tim Scheffe and Safer have shown that soldiers who have killed show a higher chance of experiencing symptoms of PTSD than those who saw others die.40 In their answers the Dutch volunteers felt compelled to explain or justify their actions. Despite the fact that it is usual, or expected, for a soldier to kill his enemies, even part of his purpose in war, they seem to feel pushed into the defensive by this question. Van Eijk, for instance, recalls: ‘You left the trenches when you were ordered to, you didn’t even think about it, you just went. […] It wasn’t like, you said I want to kill.’41 Karel Neijssel similarly stated that: An animal is not bloodthirsty, but people are. And that is actually hard to represent, what do you feel, what do you do, I prefer not to talk about it. These were things that were necessary and that I would rather not have done.42 Rather than portray possible positive effects of the war, their memories express regret at having had to participate in something viewed as inherently bad. Neijssel then stated: ‘Because you have to go through a valley of course, and naturally you must have good support, that’s important.’43 This mirrors our earlier hypothesis that the support of the community in processing trauma is important. This quotation also hints at a dual effect of a lack of community support, affecting both trauma and narrative development. One of the tactics that the volunteers used as an answer to whether they had killed anyone is one of diversion. In response to the question, ‘but as a sharpshooter you must have shot with accuracy at other people?’, Karel Neijssel answered: Yes. Yes, of course you have to shoot with accuracy. If you see something move then you have to shoot with accuracy. Because it’s still, yeah … also you don’t really think about it. It has to be done. By the way this happens in every war, it also occurred in those few days here […] It was, war, it was a very bad thing, it awakens the bad instincts in people.44 Rather than go into the specifics of his killing he changes the topic to war in general. Instead of narrowing down the topic he consciously broadens it and so distances the conversation from his own killing and the conflict in his conscience. This resonates with the statement by P. Singer and J. Salovey that ‘some people may use highly abstract and summarized memories as a means to ward off unwanted images and emotional reactions from the past’,45 indicating that a trauma might be present behind this abstraction. Neijssel seems to have become unnerved by the question and to have felt the need to accentuate that this happens in every war and that even Dutch people did it. This tactic of avoiding the question in order to prevent the reliving of a memory is also an indication of trauma.46 While the deaths of friends and comrades, traumatic as they may be, are at least describable, here we see a trauma that they cannot

Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma  173 even begin to speak about, perhaps for fear of judgement, not only by others, but also by themselves. A second response that returns a number of times is one of ignorance or refusal to know. Jan van Eijk, for instance, responded with: ‘Well, you shoot and you do, and everything that moves you shoot at. Whether I personally killed anyone you can never know. You’ve fired.’47 A little later he continued: Once I experienced a bayonet charge, but I don’t think I stabbed anyone. They had these long bayonets attached to them, they had four edges. Those were mean bayonets, the ones we had. You’re running like a madman with everyone together, you kill or someone else kills, but whether I personally did that, I don’t even know.48 His need to refuse knowledge of such actions becomes even more pressing when later he stated ‘[you had to] advance. And even if you gave me 100,000 guilders, I wouldn’t know whether I really stabbed someone with my bayonet, I  don’t know.’49 It becomes an almost desperate plea to convince the interviewer to drop the subject. As described by Graham Dawson, ‘the social recognition offered within any specific public will be intimately related to cultural values that it holds in common, and exercises a determining influence upon the way a narrative may be told’.50 This means that in a society where killing in war is almost taboo it is very difficult to speak about such incidents. Indeed, it seems that in anticipation of a negative judgement the Dutch volunteers pre-­ emptively distanced themselves from this part of their war history. As such, personal details about the actual conflict are virtually absent from the Dutch interviews as the veterans felt compelled to remain silent about this aspect of war. Compare this to Englishman Fred Copeman, who freely talks about his war experiences. Some of these are particularly gruesome and troubling to hear; for example, when he and a machinegun company were lying in ambush and annihilated a group of Moorish soldiers from close range. He recalls, ‘you’ll see how many men you can kill in a short time it is a wonderful thing’.51 He also talked about the time he killed a German soldier who had his back towards him by placing a grenade at his feet, remarking that he had never seen so much blood. While Copeman admitted that he usually did not speak about these events because he saw them as too personal, the fact that he could relate them apparently without problem for the interviews shows that he clearly did not feel the same hesitance as the Dutch volunteers. Unlike with the Dutch volunteers, these were not memories to be avoided at all cost. It is clear that for the Dutch volunteers these memories were harrowing to recall and in most cases would qualify as traumatic memories. However, only in the case of Arie Favier is explicit mention made of recurring traumatic memories: ‘And well, how do you think about that. Later you’ll think about it, later. Later you sometimes see a face in front of you. […] Even now, that’s inevitable.’52 Again, in these cases it is the act itself that is the cause of trauma;

174  Tim Scheffe killing a fellow man is enough to traumatize anyone, but the Dutch attitude towards the military and the volunteers’ own background as pacifists made them more susceptible to trauma development and less capable of processing it. There are other references to trauma. Wim de Jong, for instance, related the moment his friend Paul de Laat was shot in front of him. Wim and Paul were the last ones to leave the lines during the retreat after the Battle of the Ebro, when Paul spotted the enemy and, despite Wim’s protestations, shot at them. ‘Right at the moment he nails that guy he probably got spotted by another. Straight through the head.’53 After the death of his friend, Wim ‘couldn’t eat and couldn’t drink’54 for three days because of what would at the time have been described as shell shock. The remarkable clarity of such memories, especially in comparison to the rest of their narratives, indicates that they have made a strong impact on the volunteers. This could be because trauma constitutes a ‘literal return of the event’,55 and thus remains clear in the mind of the volunteers while the rest fades. Sake Visser described a similar story of loss: Jan Burreman, who came from Groningen, I’ll never forget his name. […] All of a sudden we received a great burst of fire. They allowed us to approach and then we had to retreat. We had to return crawling, as flat as possible. But my friend, who was next to me, he died instantly. I could hear him sigh. Hit in the head.56 These incidents seem to have taken up an increased weight over the years. Whereas other anecdotes have been forgotten, these remain almost as clear as on the day they occurred. Having never had the chance to talk about these deaths, they never fully processed them, possibly resulting in a lingering trauma. It is striking that similar anecdotes were not found in the narratives of the English volunteers. There were some Dutch volunteers, however, who described even more directly how the Spanish Civil War haunted them for many decades. Jan van Eijk, for instance, was asked, ‘What do you remember most of the various fronts?’57 He responded with: ‘Well, at Brunete it smelled horribly. It was very warm and it smelled horribly from all the corpses lying there. I still smell that every now and then.’58 Smell can be strongly connected to traumatic memories, and it is not unusual that for Van Eijk it was the smell, rather than the sight, of rotting corpses that still haunted him every now and then. Smyth and Pennebaker state that ‘if an individual is upset about a traumatic event, memories are not integrated into a personal narrative, possibly resulting in the memory being stored as sensory perceptions’,59 which appears to apply to some of these volunteers. For Arie van Poelgeest the returning sensation was quite different and in a way more direct, as it concerned the moment he was wounded: And then our tanks shot holes in the walls which we jumped through. And then I immediately received that shot, in here and out there. Of course, at first I didn’t really know anything. You receive a tremendous

Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma  175 blow, because years later you feel this blow, you still have this blow. I’ve fallen out of my bed at night because of it.60 For him the moment he was shot returned again and again, involuntarily. Instead of working through the trauma by putting it in words, the Dutch were forced to suppress it in what Burnell, Coleman and Hunt call the ‘defensive technique of avoidance’.61 Several of the Dutch narratives make explicit mention of psychological trauma, or what we would now call PTSD, which is not really present in the English interviews.

Conclusion In conclusion we can say, perhaps unsurprisingly, that societal factors have a definitive and very much recognizable influence on the formation of personal stories. For the English volunteers this resulted in a generally positive narrative, in which their roles fit in a broader cultural narrative of English war volunteers as saviours of the downtrodden. In line with the greater acceptance of military violence in English society, they describe their participation in the fighting as a maturing experience. The interviews with the Dutch volunteers in their turn reflected Dutch society where military violence is a much more problematic topic. We saw how the Dutch volunteers described their role in the fighting as a negative, although necessary, experience. In an attempt to fit in with more accepted kinds of war narratives they also portrayed themselves as resistance fighters avant la lettre. As such these narratives are shaped according to national ideas and conventions when it comes to war and war narratives. Their narratives turn into stories, not necessarily those which they want to tell, but more those which they think the audience will accept. Additionally, and perhaps because of having to adapt their narrative, the Dutch interviews displayed more indicators of trauma and related a more fragmented narrative. While several reasons for such differences have been given, the true interaction between such causes might be more than a simple cause and effect relationship. Societal aspects that influence the development of the narratives, such as societal support or national opinions on topics relating to violence, have also been shown to influence the development of trauma. Similarly the presence of trauma influences the story a person tells, and the ability to turn traumatic memories into a narrative has been shown to aid in processing of trauma. In the case of the Dutch volunteers, and possibly the English as well, the formation of narrative and the forming of trauma seem to be inextricably linked. With the same causes contributing to both effects it is likely that, at least in these cases, we cannot look at the formation of trauma and narrative separately. We must instead approach them as developments that go hand in hand: that which prevents the formation of narrative spurs the development of trauma.62 By preventing Dutch volunteers from speaking about their experiences, the Dutch government, and Dutch norms and values, have contributed to the development of trauma in ways not seen in the situation of the English volunteers.

176  Tim Scheffe

Notes 1 H. Dankaart, J. Flinterman, F. Groot and R. Vuurmans, De oorlog begon in Spanje: Nederlanders in de Spaanse Burgeroorlog 1936–1939, Rotterdam: Van Gennep, 1986. 2 M. Roper, ‘Re-remembering the soldier hero: the psychic and social construction of memory in personal narratives of the Great War’, History Workshop Journal, 2000, vol. 50, 183. 3 For example, Z. Solomon, M. Mikulincer and E. Avitzur, ‘Coping, locus of control, social support, and combat-related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: a prospective study’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1985, vol. 55(2), 279–85; T.M.  Keane, W.O. Scott, G.A. Chavoya, D.M. Lamparski, and J.A. Fairbank, ‘­Social support in Vietnam veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: a comparative analysis’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1985, vol. 53, 95–102; R.H. Pietrzak, D.C. Johnson, M.B. Goldstein, J.C. Malley, and S.M. Southwick, ‘Psychological resilience and postdeployment social support protect against traumatic stress and depressive symptoms in soldiers returning from operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom’, Depression and Anxiety, 2009, vol. 26, 745–51. 4 J. Norman, Interview with Joe Norman, interviewer Margaret A. Brooks, 1977, Catalogue number 818, Sound Archive, Archives of the Imperial War ­Museum, ­London, audio tape, available at: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/ object/80000812 (all interview tapes and transcripts consulted in the course of 2017), accessed 5 March 2019. 5 A. van Dijk, Interviews met Adriaan van Dijk, interviewer J. Flinterman, 1983 and 1985, Catalogue number 95–102, Audiocollectie Nederlandse Deelnemers aan de Internationale Brigades in de Spaanse Burgeroorlog, Archives of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, audio tape. ‘Ik heb nog nooit zo’n zootje schorem meegemaakt als de marechaussee, ik neem het je persoonlijk niet kwalijk want je moet ook je bikken verdienen, maar je kan wel effe prettiger voor ons zijn, want we hebben ook voor jou gevochten.’ 6 A. Favier, Interviews met Arie Favier, interviewers F. Groot and R. Vuurmans, 1985, Catalogue number 17–24, Audiocollectie Nederlandse Deelnemers aan de Internationale Brigades in de Spaanse Burgeroorlog, Archives of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, audio tape: ‘de Nederlandse regering heeft ons eigenlijk in een hoek getrapt’. 7 Dankaart et al., De oorlog begon in Spanje, p. 138. 8 D. McAdams, ‘Personal narratives and the life story’, in J. Oliver, R. Robins and L. Pervin (eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, New York: Guilford Press, 2010, p. 244. 9 B. Alexander, Interview with Bill Alexander, 1976, Catalogue number 802, Sound Archive, Archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, audio tape, available at: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80000796, accessed 5 March 2019. 10 B. Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty: Spain, 1936–1939, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1982. 11 J. Pennebaker, T. Mayne and E. Francis, ‘Linguistic predictors of adaptive bereavement’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1997, vol. 72(4), 162. 12 J. Brown, Interview with James Brown, interviewer M. Knight, 1977, Catalogue number 824, Sound Archive, Archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, audio tape, available at: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80000818, accessed 5 March 2019. 13 Van Dijk, Interviews. ‘Ik moet je vertellen, het is aan de late datum, dat over deze geschiedenis geschreven wordt, volgens mij hoor, want er hadden vele andere mensen, hele goede mensen van ons, hadden daar nog een beter overzicht van kunnen geven.’

Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma  177 14 J. van Eijk, Interviews met Jan van Eijk, interviewer F. Groot and R. Vuurmans, 1985, Catalogue number 9–16, Audiocollectie Nederlandse Deelnemers aan de Internationale Brigades in de Spaanse Burgeroorlog, Archives of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, audio tape: ‘Ik kan alleen maar vage dingen herinneren, niet zo als ik eigenlijk moet, maar ik ben wel met een Spaanse vrouw getrouwd en ik kan Spaans spreken ook, maar over de Spaanse oorlog praten we eigenlijk niet zo, we hebben daarna nog vijf jaar rotzooi gehad en dat kunnen we ons allemaal wel herinneren.’ 15 Favier, Interviews. ‘Een heleboel van wat je dan kletst in zo’n interview, als je dat later weer doorleest, dan begint het weer tot je door te dringen dat je er toch nog wel wat vanaf weet.’ 16 S. Visser, Interview met Sake Visser, interviewer F. Groot, R. Vuurmans, 1984, Catalogue number 83–90, Audiocollectie Nederlandse Deelnemers aan de Internationale Brigades in de Spaanse Burgeroorlog, Archives of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, Audio tape. ‘[…] en dat zeg ik, het is voorbij, het komt nou weer naar boven toe. Maar anders werd er nooit meer over gesproken.’ 17 McAdams, ‘Personal narratives and the life story’, p. 244. 18 Ibid., p. 246. 19 V. Cunningham, ‘Saville’s row with The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse’, Socialist Register, 1982, vol. 19(19), 274. 20 E. Roberts, Freedom, Faction, Fame and Blood: British Soldiers of Conscience in Greece, Spain and Finland, Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2009, p. 86. 21 Ibid. 22 T. Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 121–2. 23 C. Bloom, Interview with Charles Bloom, Interviewer M. Brooks, 1977, Catalogue number 992, Sound Archive, Archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, audio tape, available at: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80000985. 24 Ibid. 25 B. Shelmerdine, British Representations of the Spanish Civil War, Manchester: ­Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 1. 26 W. Klinkert, Van Waterloo tot Uruzgan: de militaire identiteit van Nederland, ­Amsterdam: Vossiuspers, 2008, p. 5. ‘We kennen geen militaire heldenverering en nauwelijks een zichtbare militaire presentie in de openbare ruimte […] We zijn, zo lijkt het, tevreden met de betiteling non-militair, en we zijn daar wellicht nog wel een beetje trots op.’ 27 J.A.A. van Doorn, ‘De crisis van het militarisme’, Mens en Maatschappij, 1948, vol. 23(5), 287. ‘De tijd ligt ver achter ons, dat de militaire stand een hoog gewaardeerd en geëerd sociaal element vormde.’ 28 Van Dijk, Interview. ‘Al voor die tijd hebben wij altijd gezegd “ja, het gaat de verkeerde kant op.”’ 29 A. van Poelgeest, Interview met Arie van Poelgeest, interviewer F. Groot, R. ­Vuurmans, 1983, Catalogue number 67–72, Audiocollectie Nederlandse Deelnemers aan de Internationale Brigades in de Spaanse Burgeroorlog, Archives of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, Audio tape. ‘Nou ja, dat wisten we toch wel, we krijgen toch een grote oorlog hierna, toen we ’t zeiden lachten ze ons wel uit, want dat is ver van m’n bed.’ 30 Van Eijk, Interviews: ‘en als we toentertijd die Spaanse oorlog niet verloren hadden, hadden we nooit geen Tweede Wereldoorlog gehad.’ 31 McAdams, ‘Personal narratives and the life story’, p. 245. 32 J. Campbell, ‘Combat Gnosticism: the ideology of First World War poetry criticism’, New Literary History, 1999, vol. 30(1), 203. 33 Ibid.

178  Tim Scheffe 34 Alexander, Interview. 35 Ibid. 36 J. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 264. 37 Bloom, Interview. 38 Goldstein, War and Gender, p. 265. 39 W. de Jong, Interviews met Willem de Jong, interviewer F. Groot, R. Vuurmans, 1984, Catalogue number 37–44, Audiocollectie Nederlandse Deelnemers aan de Internationale Brigades in de Spaanse Burgeroorlog, Archives of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, audio tape: ‘Ik had zelfs nog wel wat af te douwen, want ja, m’n afkomst was dus antimilitaristisch. In je onderbewustzijn leefde dat toch nog, de verantwoording te nemen om een ander mens dood te schieten.’ 40 E. van Winkle and M. Safer, ‘Killing versus witnessing in combat trauma and reports of PTSD symptoms and domestic violence’, Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2011, vol. 24(1), 109. 41 Van Eijk, Interview. ‘Je ging de loopgraaf uit, als je het bevel kreeg eruit te gaan, daar dacht je niet meer bij, je ging eruit. […] Je was niet, dat je zegt, ik wil moorden.’ 42 K. Neijssel, Interview met Karel Neijssel en Trudel van Reemst, interviewer R. ­Vuurmans, J. Flinterman and H. Dankaart, 1985, Catalogue number 109–114, Audiocollectie Nederlandse Deelnemers aan de Internationale Brigades in de Spaanse Burgeroorlog. Archives of the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, audio tape: ‘Een dier is niet moordlustig, maar mensen wel. En dat is toch eigenlijk heel moeilijk weer te geven, wat voel je, wat doe je, praat ik ook liever niet over. Het zijn dingen geweest, die noodzakelijk zijn en die ik eigenlijk liever niet gedaan had. Maar je hebt die keus gemaakt en dan sta je ervoor.’ 43 Neijssel, Interview, ‘want je moet door zo’n dal heen natuurlijk, en je moet natuurlijk ook goede ondersteuning hebben, hè, dat is belangrijk’. 44 Ibid. ‘Ja ja, natuurlijk, moet je ook gericht schieten, als je daar iets ziet bewegen, dan moet je gericht schieten. Want dan is het toch, ja, ook daar denk je natuurlijk niet bij na. Dat moet. Dat is trouwens, dat is in elke oorlog, dat is in die paar dagen hier ook geweest. […] Het is, oorlog, dat is een heel slecht bedrijf, het maakt de slechte instincten van mensen wakker.’ 45 P. Salovey and J. Singer, The Remembered Self: Emotion and Memory in Personality, New York: Macmillan, 1993, p. 105. 46 N. Hunt and I. Robbins, ‘World War II Veterans, social support, and veterans’ associations’, Aging & Mental Health, 2001, vol. 5(2), 175. 47 Van Eijk, Interviews, ‘Nou ja je schiet en je doet en alles wat je ziet bewegen daar schiet je op, of ik persoonlijk echt mensen doodgeschoten heb, weet ik nooit, je hebt geschoten’. 48 Ibid. ‘Ik heb één keer een bajonetaanval meegemaakt, maar ik denk niet dat ik iemand gestoken heb, er zaten van die hele lange bajonetten op, vier kanten zaten er aan, dat waren gemene bajonetten, die wij hadden, dan loop je als een gek met allemaal samen, jij doodt of een ander doodt, maar of ik dat nou echt gedaan heb, weet ik niet eens.’ 49 Ibid. ‘[Je moest] vooruit. En al zou je me 100.000 gulden geven, ik zou niet weten of ik echt iemand aan m’n bajonet geregen heb, weet ik niet.’ 50 G. Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities, New York: Routledge, 2013, p. 23. 51 F. Copeman, Interview with Fred Copeman, 1978, Catalogue number 794, Sound Archive, Archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, audio tape, available at: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80000788, accessed 5 March 2019.

Hints of Heroism, Traces of Trauma  179 52 Favier, Interviews, ‘En ja, hoe ga je daar over denken. Later denk je daar aan, later. Later zie je nog wel eens zo’n gezicht voor je. […] Ook nu nog wel, dat kan niet anders’. 53 De Jong, Interview, ‘En op het moment dat ie die vent te pakken krijgt, wordt hij waarschijnlijk meteen opgemerkt door een ander, precies door z’n hoofd’. 54 Ibid. ‘Ik kon niet meer eten, ik kon niet meer drinken.’ 55 C. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 5. 56 Visser, Interview, ‘Jan Burreman, dat was een Groninger, ik zal zijn naam nooit meer vergeten […] toen vielen we aan en dan: opstaan, leggen, opstaan, leggen, en dan kregen we in ene een berg vuur. Ze lieten ons komen en toen moesten we terug en kruipende weer terug, zo plat mogelijk, maar mijn maat, die lag naast me, maar die was direkt dood, hoor. Ik hoorde ‘m nog zuchten, kopstoot.’ 57 Van Eijk, Interview, ‘Wat herinnert u zich het meest van die verschillende fronten?’ 58 Ibid. ‘Nou bij Brunete, daar stonk het verschrikkelijk, het was er erg warm, het stonk verschrikkelijk van de lijken die er lagen. Dat ruik ik nu nog af en toe.’ 59 J. Smyth and J. Pennebaker, ‘Sharing one’s story: translating emotional experience into words as a coping tool’, in C. Snyder (ed.), Coping: The Psychology of What Works, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 79. 60 Van Poelgeest, Interview, ‘Toen schoten onze tanks gaten in die muren en wij ­doken door die gaten. En toen kreeg ik gelijk dat schot, hier in daar uit. Ik heb natuurlijk de eerste tijd nergens van geweten. Je krijgt een enorme rottimmer, want jaren later voel je die timmer, heb je die timmer nog. Ik ben wel eens uit mijn bed gevallen ’s nachts.’ 61 K. Burnell, P. Coleman and N. Hunt, ‘Coping with traumatic memories: Second World War veterans’, Ageing and Society, 2010, vol. 30(1), 30. 62 There is a broad range of literature; for example, T. Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976; and N. Adler and S. Leydesdorff (eds.), Tapestry of Memory: Evidence and Testimony in Life-Story Narratives, New Brunswick: Transaction, 2013, Introduction.

12 Digital Survival?1 Online Interview Portals and the Re-Contextualization of Holocaust Testimonies Susan Hogervorst Since the 1980s, public memory of the Second World War in the Western world, and especially of the Holocaust, has been strongly characterized by two mutually reinforcing processes: an increasing prominence of eyewitnesses and their accounts, and a growing concern about the temporality of their presence. Anticipating the forthcoming disappearance of these eyewitnesses, many initiatives have been undertaken to preserve their memories for the future. One of the most large-scale examples is the Visual History Archive (VHA), also known as the ‘Spielberg project’, named after film director Steven Spielberg, who initiated the interview project after the success of his feature film ­Schindler’s List.2 This collection, created in the 1990s and expanded since then, contains video interviews with more than 53,000 eyewitnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, from 64 countries. Digitization has moved this process of interrelated production and reception of eyewitness testimonies towards a new phase. During the past 10–15 years, a shift has occurred from collecting and preserving to making eyewitness accounts available to wider audiences.3 We see this development in museums, where displaying audio or video testimonies has become standard, especially in museums related to the Holocaust and the Second World War.4 Simultaneously, more and more educational projects are being developed around video testimonies.5 Also, in the last few years, multiple oral history collections have become available online, and can be watched across institutional and national borders.6 This is because institutions such as Yad Vashem and the VHA have started to publish parts of their interview collections on social media. But additionally, online portals with advanced search functions have been created. Full text search of the digital transcripts, with which the corresponding audio or video files have been aligned, allows the automatic retrieval of any interview fragment of interest. The current state of the art is the VHA’s online educational platform IWitness, which enables users around the world to watch, search, share and even edit videos online, within a secure, password-protected space.7 This chapter explores the implications of digital technology for the interaction with eyewitness accounts as narratives. It is argued that, first, online interview portals have made the practice of engaging with testimony user-­ guided instead of witness-guided, and that, second, this requires a different

Digital Survival? Online Interview Portals  181 understanding of testimonies as narratives. A case study of the Dutch online portal Getuigenverhalen.nl (‘eyewitness stories’), which contains around 500 video interviews about the Holocaust and the Second World War in the ­Netherlands, has been chosen for purposes of this discussion.8 Through a questionnaire that was attached to this portal’s homepage during the year 2017, as well as through its web statistics available in Google Analytics, data were collected on this web portal’s use and users. Furthermore, group interviews were conducted with student history teachers in 2016 and 2017 about their potential use of video testimonies, and particularly this portal website, in their teaching. Separately and combined, these data offer valuable and detailed information concerning the implications of digital technology on the interaction with eyewitness accounts in the post-witness era.

Interview Portals and the Fragmentation of Narrative Geoffrey Hartman, one of the founding fathers of the Fortunoff Video Archive, has underlined the importance of the specific interview setting, as well as the video recording of it, for both the content of the eyewitness account, and the way this narrative is presented to future listeners/watchers. For this reason, he has called video testimony a genre in itself.9 Hartman pointed at the camera as a ‘third party’ present during an interview, representing an audience that wants to hear and see. In this sense, videotaped interviews are to be considered as co-constructions of the witness, the interviewer and the audience. While the fact that the interview can be watched by a future audience may shape the content of an interview as it is conducted, the fact that the interview can be watched also influences the way an interview is used, once recorded. Indeed, video testimonies do not only give a voice to narratives about the experienced past, but also a face. The immediacy of the video image, one of this medium’s main characteristics,10 enables us – as James Young notes about video ­testimonies – to ‘respond to pictures of people as if they actually were people’.11 The medium of video produces the testimonies as much as it records them, as Steffi de Jong argues, putting the bodies of the witnesses centre-stage.12 Moreover, certainly the pioneering video interview projects such as ­Hartman’s in the late 1970s and 1980s, and Spielberg’s in the 1990s, have very often captured ‘fresh’ eyewitness testimonies, never or rarely told. Many of these diverse, subjective, sometimes incoherent, inconsistent and emotional narratives, including all the sighs, silences and breaches, are now accessible via online portals. While by now, traditional, ‘offline’ encounters with oral testimonies most probably imply a lecture by someone who has told his or her story many times before, video interview portals allow contemporary and future users to hear and watch testimonies told for the first time, over and over again. Analogous to Ranke, one might say that video interview portals allow users to access testimony as it actually was. However, although online portals to these video testimony collections offer access to the life stories as once narrated and recorded, they also modify their

182  Susan Hogervorst potential use, in various ways. First and foremost they put a user in the powerful but difficult position of choosing from an abundance of life stories. These portals showcase the interview collections, inviting a user to pick and choose something of interest. How a user may fulfil that task, is elaborated in the last section of this chapter. Second, as has become standard in the field, interviews are made searchable at fragment level. The digital interview transcripts have been time-coded and aligned with the video (or audio, in case of audio interview collections). In this way, a user can get every interview fragment on his or her screen that contains the search word he or she has typed in. This enables the dissemination of individual war histories in a potentially tailor-made way, but stimulates a fragmentation of the interviews. As a consequence, although the full interviews ‘behind’ the retrieved fragments can be watched as well, the duration of interaction with a testimony is limited. The web statistics of the portal from our case study, Getuigenverhalen.nl, which was launched in 2010, indicate that an average site visit in 2017 took only two minutes and 22 seconds. It is important to note that this number does not solely refer to the interviews; we have to take into account here that every consultation of the homepage or one of its many subpages counts as a ‘session’, in Google Analytics terminology. The portal was consulted about 26,000  times in 2017, which is on average more than 2,100 times a month. Indeed, many users just visit the site to explore what is there, and do not watch an actual interview. They may read the descriptions of one of the original oral history projects, or peruse the themes into which the interviews have been divided. But it is true that, looking at the interviews only, the longest session of all took 29 minutes. This means that, although the portal still offers this possibility, no one has watched an entire interview, which on average lasts 90 minutes. One could argue that this is quite an ironical twist to the notion that video interviewing is testimony ‘as it actually was’. For what can be left of the original narrative, when an average user of a video interview portal only watches a two-minute fragment? How can these fragments even be understandable and meaningful, when their contexts are completely lost from sight? Perhaps, in the near future, alternative strategies will be applied to provide context to online accessible interviews, and attempting to do justice to the original narrative. Just as some memorial museums that use audio or video interview clips in their exhibitions offer the possibility to hear or watch the entire interviews as an optional appendix,13 online portals could provide transcripts of complete interviews when fragments are picked out. But even then, it is uncertain if users will actually read those transcripts. Not so much because they are not interested or too occupied (which they may be): even users who are (potentially) closely involved with the subject matter haven’t watched an entire interview. As the questionnaire pointed out, quite some portal users have family connections with someone who has experienced the war years. These respondents indicated they were a ‘second generation survivor’, ‘son of a razzia victim’, or ‘grandchild of collaborationist grandparents’. In some cases, users indeed

Digital Survival? Online Interview Portals  183 commented that they had watched or searched for an interview with their own (grand)mother, (grand)father or other relative. Interpreting the rather volatile use of the interview portal Getuigenverhalen.nl as a simple expression of disinterest in eyewitness testimonies would therefore be too simple. The limited duration of a user’s interaction with the interview portal rather expresses that these portals have made the practice of engaging with testimony user-guided, instead of witness-guided.

Re-Contextualization of Narrative Fragments As we have seen, a user of an interview portal decides which interview or theme is interesting enough to read about, if interview fragments are to be watched at all, and if so, which fragments. Besides using the search bar, which is positioned centrally on the homepage, there are several options for browsing the collection: by clicking on one of the ‘special interviews’, ‘highlighted interview projects’ or ‘themes’. The contextual information that is provided for each interview or fragment varies strongly, partly depending on the way of browsing and searching the collection. Interviews can be described by a short biography of the interviewee, or by a description of the original oral history project. A description or summary of the interview itself is not provided. So, since the fragments that the search system retrieves lack the context of the full narrative, it is legitimate to ask how users put the bits and pieces of the interviews they get on their screens in a larger context, in order for these fragments to be meaningful and understandable to them.14 And, above all, what does this larger context comprise of exactly, if it is not the original narrative of the interview? These questions touch upon the specific nature of the interviews as narratives, as well as on the ways these narratives are conceived by the portal user. Following Ricoeur, reading (or listening to) a text, in our case a testimony, implies a reconfiguration of the narrated experiences and events. These experiences and events are recognizable as such because they are part of a narrative plot; the plot orders and integrates all the diverse successive instances and scattered events into a meaningful whole.15 This configurable dimension, Ricoeur explains, makes the story intelligible and comprehensible. In the act of reading (or listening), the user actively engages with the narrative, aligning it with the user’s own experiences, ideas, viewpoints, or as Ricoeur puts it, an intersection of the world of the text and the world or the hearer or reader.16 When, in the context of an online interview portal, narratives get essentially scattered by the search engine, as well as by the demands of the user, one can imagine that the user’s capacities to reconfigure the fragments into a meaningful whole are drawn on even more strongly. Moreover, it is not so much the eyewitness’s narrative that is the starting point of this process, but the narrative of the portal user, which he or she decides to confront with that of the witness. However, the very fact that we deal with interviews here may help this reconfiguration process. In the previous section, the co-constructed nature of

184  Susan Hogervorst video interview narratives has been addressed, focusing on the importance of the video camera, which represents a future audience while an interview is conducted. However, the interviewer brings in contemporary notions of the Holocaust, the Second World War and eyewitness testimony with which he or she confronts the witness. These notions are based on the interviewer’s cumulative experiences, prior representations of the past and existing knowledge. This contemporary frame of reference in which the interview is composed can be shared with, or is recognizable to, portal users who encounter the recorded interview afterwards. To put it more simply: interviewers may pose the same questions as interview portal users may want to ask, based on a shared social and temporal framework. We see, for example, that interviewers ask the witness about their experiences with or recollections of specific events, places and phenomena as known from World War II historiography, such as resistance, persecution or bystanders. Such concepts may be exactly the points of departure when searching through a video interview portal. Let us therefore take a closer look at the actual search words that portal users have typed in, and that were collected automatically. Interestingly, the majority of the terms entered were individuals’ names (38 per cent) or locations (22 per cent), which sometimes were specific addresses. This implies that these users had very detailed prior knowledge. They thus combined the interview fragment they found on the portal with their existing knowledge and idea of that particular person, place or phenomenon. The questionnaire was used to collect information about the interests of users who did not use the search bar. Many respondents had more general search objectives, such as ‘very many beautiful impressive stories’, ‘all sorts of stories that bring the war to life’ or ‘personal emotions’. In such cases, the retrieved interview fragments may function as illustrations of pre-existing views and knowledge of the Holocaust, the Second World War and/or eyewitnesses. For both user categories, however, the interview fragments that were decontextualized by the search engine need to and can be re-contextualized by the user; he or she rearranges a selection of the individual parts of the story into a narrative of her or his own.

Interview Fragments and the Configuration of Truth The act of re-configuring a narrative or a selection thereof into an account that is comprehensive and meaningful presupposes a user’s capacity to judge whether such a narrative or fragment is ‘true’, or put more pragmatically, convincing or acceptable. This judgement is first and foremost based on the user’s expectations of an eyewitness testimony, and his or her perception of eyewitnesses as a historical source. Roughly three different but interrelated lines of thought could be discerned in the often very detailed and nuanced comments of the portal users about this issue. These lines can be characterized as focusing on eyewitnesses’ authenticity; their functionality; and their subjectivity. Authenticity refers here to the fact that a witness

Digital Survival? Online Interview Portals  185 is a person from the past, someone who was there. ‘Directly involved’, and ‘first hand’ are frequently mentioned examples of this notion. Or: ‘An eyewitness can provide relevant information because he or she has experienced the events themselves so that the memory becomes living and real.’ Others simply stated: ‘The truth’, or: ‘A witness has been there himself, can tell the real story’, also referring to the witnesses’ historicity (‘pastness’). Witnesses are somehow considered as ‘relics’, as it were, who embody the bygone past. One respondent phrases this embodiment literally: ‘Eyes that have seen it. Ears that have heard it. This is crucial information.’ This embodiment makes the past tangible, and allows people to have a sense of contact with the past.17 Here, the visual aspect of video interviews is crucial. In some cases, respondents underline the importance of the emotions of a witness when telling the story. This seems to be regarded as a sign of authenticity as well, as if these are the emotions from the past that are released by telling the story: ‘With a witness, […] only the emotion has remained’; or: ‘Because a witness represents the human aspect (feelings)’. Other users, however, mention emotions in relation to themselves, or the public in general. ‘To be able to see what someone has felt and feels about the war and the impact of it brings up more. You can better imagine how and what.’ Or: ‘The emotion in the eyes and the realization that it is not so far away in time.’ This kind of response moves away somewhat from the ‘pastness’ of the witness, and anchors the relevance of testimonies more in the present, in their function of transmitting historical information. That is why these kinds of answers can be categorized differently, as ‘functional’. Other examples from this category underline the impression of the testimonies on the listeners in the present. A simple example of this is the following statement: ‘They tell the stories first hand. This makes the biggest impression.’ Here, the relevance of testimonies lies thus in their ability to transmit memories, or historical information, to the public. The third and last category, subjectivity, refers to these respondents’ emphasis on the specific informational value of testimonies, which contain know­ ledge derived from personal observation and experience. Eyewitness accounts can offer details of daily life, opinions and feelings that also belonged to historical reality, to paraphrase some responses. Others emphasize eyewitnesses’ ability to sketch a full impression of a certain time period, and how this was experienced. Moreover, witnesses have knowledge about the impact and the aftermath of the war period. It has been said, for example, that ‘you get to know what that time really did to someone’. This third type of argument seems to represent a historiographical stance, regarding testimony as a relevant if not essential supplement to (academic) history writing. Indeed, the responses in this category quite often evoked comparisons to historiography to support their argument. One respondent, for example, stated that ‘every human being has his own story from his own perception. This makes the image more nuanced than only from historiography.’ Another pointed out: ‘He or she speaks from experience and can draw attention to specific details that researchers

186  Susan Hogervorst would be unaware of at first instance.’ Or, put more strongly: ‘Researchers will (hopefully) never experience what it is like to live in a time of uncertainty, fear, and war. The eyewitnesses have, and that is why they are an important source of information.’ More implicit responses included, ‘We know the big picture by now. It is rightly the personal story that makes it interesting (for example Anne Frank)’ and ‘The facts from books are merely numbers. While you cannot get everything from numbers.’ This comparison between testimonies and historiography is interesting, for it indicates the latter as a background against which the interview fragments are being judged for their usefulness and persuasiveness, not to say their truth. To further explore users’ notions about the relation between testimonies and historiography, group interviews were conducted with student history teachers.18 This type of use and users was underrepresented in the questionnaire, although it is to be expected that online video interviews could and increasingly will be used in formal (history) education.19 Two group interviews were conducted with in total 24 students of the international minor in Holocaust education at the University of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The interviewees used the portal Getuigenverhalen.nl and then were asked to select two interview fragments that they considered useful for a secondary school history lesson about the Second World War. A plenary discussion followed, and some of the selected fragments were screened. For all students, males and females in their early twenties, this was the first introduction to a video interview portal; they had only had experience with guest lectures from eyewitnesses of the Second World War. The objective was, first, to analyse the selection process – what would the students select, and based on which criteria? The second aim was to examine the extent to which the process of selecting suitable interview fragments initiated a thinking process about the nature and value of eyewitnesses as a historical source; for example, by analysing to what extent the students made comments about reliability or made comparisons with other historical sources. The group interviews made clear that students relied strongly on historiography to assess the usefulness and truth-value of interview fragments. During the discussion, three criteria emerged as having been important in selecting the fragments: they needed to be ‘about children’ or things ‘pupils could relate to’; they needed to have a high density of topics and places known from the school curriculum, or that addressed ‘real war history’, as one participant put it; and lastly, they needed to contain stories that ‘pupils would remember’ or that would ‘make an impact’. Thus, good witness stories needed to be familiar (children’s perspective, textbook history) and extraordinary at the same time. The same double educational function ascribed to witnesses could be seen in the reactions in the discussion on the second topic: Why use testimonies? Participants felt testimonies added a ‘human dimension’ to ‘the facts’. This human dimension could refer to emotions, but also to anecdotes or specific individual situations that affected the experience of historical events. ‘Otherwise you might as well read a book’ or ‘tell it yourself’, they argued.

Digital Survival? Online Interview Portals  187 So, according to these students, adding the kind of insider information that textbooks often cannot offer can make the past more appealing and more understandable. However, they indicated that these personal accounts needed to stay fairly close to the textbook narrative. ‘Then you know that the things they [the eyewitnesses] say did really happen,’ one participant said, and others agreed. Thus, participants appeared to consider witness testimonies as not just illustrating textbook history; in their view, the textbook and the witnesses mutually confirmed historical reality. This line of thought supports the interpretation of interview fragments as being a process of re-contextualization. These users do not draw upon, or seem to be aware of, the original interview as context of the respective fragments, but incorporate these in their own existing knowledge and narrative.

Conclusion This chapter argued that that video interview portals have made the practice of engaging with testimony user-guided, instead of witness-guided. One of the key characterizing features of online video interview portals is the implication that their users need to choose from a very large number of diverse personal narratives, and thus need to take a much more active role than in their previous, more traditional encounters with testimonies. This active role not only comprises deciding which interviews are interesting enough to watch, or when the watching ends. Since, due to fragment-level search technology, and the limited time devoted to this activity, portal users may encounter interviews solely as fragments isolated from their narrative contexts, Ricoeur’s notion of reading or listening as active re-configuration of a narrative seems all the more applicable. Instead of the original, co-constructed narrative of the witness, the worldviews and narratives of the user are the starting points of this process. This observation is not so much a conclusion, or at least it shouldn’t be. ­Instead, it calls for more research into the actual reception processes of memory, of which we have acquired very little knowledge so far.20 This chapter has aimed to contribute to putting the user central in the discussion. Wulf Kansteiner has, quite radically, argued that Holocaust education should be even more user-guided than a video interview portal could possibly be, ‘including 3d and 4d geo-immersions in which users can adopt the roles of victims, perpetrators and bystanders according to their own narrative preferences’, all embedded in collective learning processes by teachers and scholars.21 This approach would fully utilize the possibilities of new technologies, and, more importantly, reach the increasing group of ‘digital natives’. In this sense, the inevitable disappearance of the eyewitness generation poses not only challenges, but also opportunities to reconsider and adapt existing means and methodologies.22 One of these opportunities was demonstrated by the group interviews mentioned in this chapter. For the educational context, the screen allows for a more critical stance towards eyewitness accounts as historical source.23 This entails less of a focus on the emotional identification and

188  Susan Hogervorst empathy that has become ubiquitous in Holocaust education. This new critical stance would, rather, take the witness seriously as a source of both individual and collective memory, and, no less, history.

Notes 1 The research for this chapter was part of the Research Excellence Initiative programme ‘WAR! Popular Culture and European Heritage of Major Armed Conflicts’, that was funded by Erasmus University Rotterdam, and was made possible by the Open University of the Netherlands. Special thanks to Tina van der Vlies and Kees Ribbens. 2 N. Apostolous and C. Pagenstecher (eds.), Erinnern an Zwangsarbeit. Zeitzeugen-­ Interviews in der digitalen Welt, Berlin: Metropol, 2013; J. Keilbach, ‘Collecting, indexing and digitizing survivors: Holocaust testimonies in the digital age’, in A. Bangert et al. (eds.), Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium, London: Legenda, 2013, pp. 46–63. 3 S. Scagliola and F. de Jong, ‘Clio’s talkative daughter goes digital’, in R. Bod et al. (eds.), The Making of the Humanities, Volume III: The Modern Humanities, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013, pp. 511–26. 4 S. de Jong, The Witness as Object: Video Testimony in Memorial Museums, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2018. 5 See for example C. Pagenstecher and D. Wein, ‘Learning with digital testimonies in Germany: educational material on Nazi forced labor and the Holocaust’, in K.  Llewellyn and N. Ng-A-Fook (eds.), Oral History and Education. Theories, Dilemmas, and Practices, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 361–78; V. Nägel and D. Wein, ‘Witnesses of the Shoah: the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation in school education’, in D. Knellesen and R. Possekel (eds.), From Testimony to Story: Video Interviews about Nazi Crimes: Perspectives in Four Countries (Education with Testimonies, Bd. 2), Berlin, EVZ Foundation, 2015, pp. 173–9. 6 Examples are the online collection of video interviews with forced laborers in Nazi Germany as hosted by the Freie Universität in Berlin, available at: www.­ zwangsarbeit-archiv.de/en/; or the European Resistance Archive, www.­resistancearchive.org/en/, accessed 5 March 2019. 7 http://iwitness.usc.edu/SFI/About.aspx, accessed 5 March 2019. T. Presner, ‘The ethics of the algorithm: close and distant listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive’, in C. Fogu et al. (eds.), Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 175–202. 8 http://getuigenverhalen.nl/home, accessed 5 March 2019. 9 See for example G. Hartman, ‘The humanities of testimony: an introduction’, ­Poetics Today, 2006, vol. 27, 249–60. 10 Keilbach, ‘Collecting, indexing and digitizing survivors’, p. 47. 11 J.E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 194. 12 De Jong, The Witness as Object, p. 61. 13 J-C. Wagner, ‘Zeitzeugen ausgestellt. Die Nutzung von Interviews in Museen und Gedenkstätten’, in N. Apostolous and C. Pagenstecher (eds.), Erinnern an Zwangsarbeit. Zeitzeugen-Interviews in der digitalen Welt, Berlin: Metropol, 2013, pp. 59–67. 14 How the design of the website may influence the selection of interviews and fragments is an interesting question that is beyond the scope of this chapter. 15 P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 65. 16 Ibid., p. 71.

Digital Survival? Online Interview Portals  189 17 S. Jones, ‘Negotiating authentic objects and authentic selves: beyond the deconstruction of authenticity’, Journal of Material Culture, 2010, vol. 15, 181–203, p. 200. See also Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 2. 18 The interviews were conducted with in total 27 students of the international minor in Holocaust education, at the University of Applied Sciences at Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in May 2016 and May 2017. 19 The questionnaire at the portal website Getuigenverhalen.nl pointed out that the portal seems to be barely used for educational purposes. Only a few respondents identified themselves as teacher (5) or student (15) (n=114), and only 10 out of 106 respondents stated that they used the site for teaching (5) or a school assignment (5). This rare educational use of the portal might be explained by the fact that oral history in general – either the practice of interviewing, or using previously recorded oral sources – does not have a strong tradition in (history) education in the Netherlands, especially when compared to the Anglo-Saxon countries and Germany. See also S. Hogervorst, ‘“Echte oorlogsgeschiedenis.” Video-interviews als lesmateriaal in een veranderende herinneringscultuur’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 2018, vol. 131 (4), 647–51. 20 M. Gray, Contemporary Debates in Holocaust Education, London: Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2015, p. 105. 21 W. Kansteiner, ‘Genocide memory, digital cultures, and the aesthetization of violence’, Memory Studies, 2014, vol. 7, 403–8, p. 405. 22 Gray, Contemporary Debates, p. 82. 23 See also C. Bertram, Zeitzeugen im Geschichtsunterricht: Chance oder Risiko für kompetenzorientiertes Lernen?, Schwalbach/Ts: Wochenschau Verlag, 2017.

13 Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen1 Anecdotes, Humour and Poetry as Survival Strategies Evelien Gans The Function of Anecdotes After surviving the Dutch transit camp Westerbork, the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and the so-called ‘Train of the Dead’ in which about 2,000 ­Jewish prisoners were deported in April 1944 from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt, Abraham (Appie) van Linda returned to Amsterdam. He and his fellow Dutch prisoners had been liberated by the Russians near the East Prussian town Tröbitz where a typhus epidemic raged. Appie survived that, too, and finally returned, ill and broken, in June 1945, to the town where he was born and raised. On the last stretch of the very long journey back, Appie van Linda (1915–2012) had been transported in an improvised ambulance, a lorry with three layers of bunks, which was very uncomfortable for a man who had, in addition to everything else, spent eight days largely oblivious to the world because of typhus. He was still muddle-headed. They drove in a column of trucks, and Appie, lying on a spot where he could look at the world outside, could just make out the inscription on the lorry behind his. It read NSB (the acronym of the Dutch National-Socialist Movement, the Dutch Nazis). He saw it over and over again and was highly puzzled. ‘What’s going on? Am I liberated or not?’ When they passed the Berlage Bridge in Amsterdam, he wept. He felt awake. Later he said to me, ‘Of course you want to know about this thing with the NSB. Well, I had spelled it wrong. It said NBS: the Nederlandse Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten, the Dutch Forces of the Interior.’2 I interviewed Van Linda several times in the context of the double biography I was writing on the Jewish historian Jaap Meijer (1912–93) and his son Ischa (1943–95). Both father and son had followed the same route from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen and Tröbitz. In the interviews, Appie talked about his experiences and anxieties, his work, the SS commanders, his wife and comrades, his survival and coping mechanisms.3 This chapter will examine how Abraham van Linda remembered his experiences in the camps. It will analyse his storytelling, and especially look at how this storytelling – conveyed in the form of anecdotes – contains aspects of drama, humour and magic. Such use of anecdotes in oral history and life stories is not uncommon. Quoting literary scholar Simon Dentith, cultural historian Timothy Ashplant has identified this device as ‘a characteristic form of working-class autobiography’, and ‘a way

Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen  191 of mediating between rawer, more unformulated experience, and more general and formulated truths; it does so by turning such truths into narrative and character’.4 According to Ashplant, working-class anecdotes ‘generate a level of meaning which goes beyond both the semantic content of the separate stories themselves, and any explicit comment by the narrator’. He characterizes life stories told by means of anecdotes by their pithiness (they are forceful and brief), their (re)constructed dialogue, and their humour.5 It will become clear that Appie van Linda, by way of anecdotes, structured or framed his various experiences in Bergen-Belsen into an ‘overarching storyline’,6 which implied he had, most of the time, been lucky (had ‘mazzel’) from the first to the very last day.7 Having ‘mazzel’ relates to miracles and magic. At the same time, the use of anecdotes, besides lessening feelings of pain, distress and misery, gives the narrator some agency, which seems to be in contrast with the sheer luck that had hauled him through the hell of the camps. These dual functions also apply to the anecdotes of Van Linda’s Jewish contemporary and co-prisoner, the historian Jaap Meijer, who will figure in this chapter as a second voice. Meijer would also convert some of his camp experiences and memories into poetry – a genre that differs from anecdotes.

Abraham van Linda (1915–2012) and Jaap Meijer (1912–93) Appie van Linda was the Jewish-Dutch son of a father who was a cigar maker and matzo baker and a mother who sold fruit at the market. Before the Shoah, he was working in the textile trade, in which he would work again after the war. During the early years of the German occupation he was an assistant porter at the Jewish Lyceum, a school organized under Nazi orders, where Jaap Meijer taught history. Although not a pupil himself, Appie enthusiastically attended some of Meijer’s lessons. They would meet again in Bergen-Belsen. The double biography for which Appie van Linda was interviewed carries the subtitle, A Jewish history, 1912–1956. My intention was not only to construct a picture of the fascinating personal histories and the numerous publications of both the historian and poet Jaap Meijer and his son Ischa Meijer, journalist and writer, but also to delve deeply into twentieth-century Jewish history in the Netherlands. The volume combines individual and collective, micro and macro Jewish history. The persecution of the Jews during the Second World War was pivotal to the interviews, so subjects were regularly steered toward ‘the world of the camps’. No one who had left that world was ever the same as when they first set foot there. Jaap, his wife Liesje and son Ischa were no longer living, so information about how they lived and survived in the camps – apart from the few written words by Jaap Meijer, was culled from interviews with Jewish survivors like Appie van Linda, and diaries of survivors who wrote while interned at Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen. Bergen-Belsen, also known as Belsen or Celle, was a camp that was originally built to house construction workers for a Wehrmacht complex, but

192  Evelien Gans was soon used for the confinement of prisoners of war. From 1943 onward, when the genocide had reached ‘a frenzied climax’, the site developed under the command of the SS into a complex of 15,000 inmates allocated over several departments, sometimes strictly separated, in differing circumstances, Jewish and non-Jewish, and of different nationalities.8 There was a group of Greek Ladino-speaking Jews (Spagniolas), Polish Jews with dual nationality – i.e., in possession of certificates (promesas) for Latin-American countries, Jews with a recognized ‘merit’ (Verdienstjuden, in the Nazi terminology), Hungarian Jews (in the Ungarlager) and ‘normal’ prisoners (in the Häftlingslager). Meijer and Van Linda belonged to a group of approximately 4,000 Jews who ended up in a relatively privileged position, as they were transported from the Dutch transit camp Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen in 1943 and 1944. In this so-called Sternlager, as opposed to most other concentration camps, existing family and friendships could remain intact, and depending on circumstances, inmates were allowed to wear their own clothing, including the yellow badge, and keep their hair and thus, to some extent, their identity. The ‘privileges’ also included being able to keep some of their own utensils. Nevertheless they were forced to perform heavy and tedious labour in the camp, were subjected to the verbal and physical violence of the camp leaders, and had to contend with poor sanitation, and limited and meagre nutritious food. Their most exceptional condition was that they were gathered not to be murdered immediately or even at some later stage, but rather as hostages to be exchanged for Germans who were being held in neutral or Allied nations. A number of Jews were in possession of a Palestine certificate, which means that they had already registered themselves early on as conscious Zionists for migration to British Palestine. They could be exchanged for Germans who were interned abroad. This exchange programme was a very slow and laborious process, but in the end 222 inmates left the camp for Haifa. In total 524 ‘exchange Jews’ left Nazi Germany.9 The Sternlager was not an extermination camp and did not contain gas chambers. Nevertheless, from the winter of 1944, when evacuation transports from throughout Germany led to overcrowding and relentless epidemics, it became a camp of death all the same. Part of the privileges granted to the inmates who were sent from Westerbork specifically to the Austauschlager (exchange camp) and Sternlager within Bergen-Belsen was that they could take luggage, which could include pens and paper. As a result, and although this was strictly forbidden, a relatively large number of inmates kept a diary about camp life.10 These inmates included the jurist Abel Herzberg, the young medical student and later psychiatrist Louis Tas (under the pseudonym Loden Vogel), the executive secretary Mirjam Bolle-Levie, the originally German adolescent Ruth Wiener (Klemens), and the secretary Renata Laqueur. When most of them were put on transports at the end of the war, they were able to take their writings with them. Their narratives describe the tensions, the fears, the hunger, the moral dilemmas, the dying and the survival techniques prisoners employed.

Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen  193 Without exception, the diaries – and this also pertains to the survivor testimonies that were put to paper after the war – were written by a select group of victims, namely the intellectuals, and not, for example, by the merchants from the Amsterdam flea market. Appie van Linda did not bring pen and paper, but instead brought packs of cigarettes, even though he had stopped smoking at the beginning of the Occupation. Westerbork as a learning school paid off. There, he had learned that a great deal could be achieved by trading with nicotine-addicted internees. Appie correctly counted on the fact that in Bergen-Belsen too, cigarettes served as currency. The Jews who were destined for the Sternlager were more or less hand-picked. Van Linda had ‘succeeded’ in getting into this group – instead of Auschwitz or Sobibor where most Dutch Jews ended up, because he had married above his rank. His wife came from a reasonably well-to-do, sizeable textile family. Although it was not a given, she ultimately managed to obtain a so-called Diamantsperre. This referred to one of the numerous coveted temporary exemptions from deportation (i.e., Sperre) that the occupying forces had set up, in order to offer (mostly false) hope for a way out. The Germans gathered the diamond workers with the intention of seizing control of the diamond trade and the actual diamonds. Appie explained how he got his Sperre: Oh God, there I go…! And then it was my turn. There was a German sitting at a table. And my wife had a little ring with two diamonds, and then a lady came to stand behind him and said, ‘Ach was schön’. And he said, ‘Wollen sie das haben?’ She put it on her finger and he wrote it down at 33,000 Guilders. It had cost 125 Guilders. Since the war, I have kept these sorts of things in mind.11 As for Jaap Meijer, he landed in the Sternlager, because as a Zionist ‘veteran’ he had procured a Palestine certificate that could be used in exchange for Germans in Palestine.12 Jaap was the intellectual of the two, but he also came from a poor, religious, family. He grew up in the north of the Netherlands and, after losing his father, was sent to Amsterdam on his own to be educated at the seminary for Jewish religious teachers and rabbis. Before the Second World War, he became both a Zionist and a historian, earning his PhD in the autumn of 1941.13 Jaap Meijer would internalize his background and mixed experiences: first as a poor Jew, a youngster, streetwise, wandering through the old Amsterdam Jewish Quarter, an outsider who came to know Jewish Amsterdam and its prewar inhabitants extremely well, later as an intellectual, scholar and polyglot all in one. In the camp, he operated and functioned as an intellectual. Jaap Meijer would publicly manifest himself as an academic – for example by giving lectures, and by using the display of his knowledge and intellect as a survival strategy, reciting Plato at length or answering in fluent German. Class differences and differences in origin and education were of importance in the camp. Some intellectuals were mocked or hated because of their background, alleged

194  Evelien Gans arrogance or ‘Oxford Dutch’. On the other hand, some would be no more than ‘plebeian’, ‘petit bourgeois’ or ‘capitalist’ – unable, in the latter case, to cope with the reversal of fortune and circumstance.14 Jaap Meijer, however, was able to find an appropriate attitude in which his ambiguous background, poor but educated, came in handy. Appie and Jaap did not just share a poor background. Like Appie, Jaap survived the camp, probably by managing to get a job in one of the camp kitchens, one of the most desirable places in Bergen-Belsen. Jaap, like Appie, would not keep a diary. Later he would talk about his war experiences mainly in anecdotes, but hardly mentioned them in his (many) publications. Contrary to Van Linda, however, Jaap Meijer would, in later years, refer to these experiences in his poetry, written under the pseudonym Saul van Messel.

The Universe of the Sternlager in Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen The kitchens in Bergen-Belsen are worthy of a novel. Hunger and an obsession with food was omnipresent for prisoners from the time of entry into the camp, but as food became scarcer, this steadily grew more extreme. With hunger as lord and master, a place in the kitchen labour battalion was one of the most coveted, only topped by a job in the food storage room. The camp was so large and diverse that it had three kitchens. Jaap Meijer worked in one of them, Appie van Linda in another. The former had successfully presented himself as a baker (in which he had received instruction just before the beginning of the war). The working days of 16 hours or longer in the kitchens were mitigated by the possibility of stealing, obtaining or (in the camp jargon) ‘organizing’ food for family members and other loved ones. In Kitchen II, the Unterscharführer Christian Höckling smashed Appie van Linda’s teeth in, and, due to the clumsiness of a co-prisoner, 40 litres of boiling water was poured on his leg, from which he never fully recovered. Despite the hardships to which he was exposed there, through smuggling and trading provisions from this kitchen, Appie managed to keep his wife Annie and her entire family alive. Fifty years after the event, Van Linda described his memories of death and ruin in unparalleled, almost hilarious and, moreover, life-saving terms. In one instance, for example, he was unexpectedly required to mop the floor after he had already stowed some butter in each of his boots. He recalled: ‘Can you imagine how that turned out? And then I came into the barracks like I was walking on ice, and said to my wife, “Annie, pay attention: all people around you are hungry, clean my feet.” Do you think they threw that butter away? No mam!’15 This was characteristic of Appie van Linda’s anecdotal style of storytelling. He makes himself the protagonist in a tale that, with due observance of the life-threatening circumstances, aims to provoke laughter. The structural conditions of camp life are not directly addressed but brought to life through incidents. Appie fulfils the role of a trickster who is too clever for the authorities, seems at first to fail, but then amazes even his loved ones with his unusual ruses.

Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen  195 Appie recounted another instance in which a friend who had just traded watches with Polish prisoners for a sack of potatoes was caught by Rooie Müller [Red Müller], an SS guard feared and hated because of his extreme violence. As his companions watched, frozen in terror, he was made to empty the sack at gun-point. Van Linda remembered: ‘Believe it or not, he shook that sack empty and only rocks fell out. Now I believe the Red Sea parted! Kazimir had robbed him, luckily for him!’ This anecdote was also about the combination of ingenuity and sheer luck, this time writ large. There was a general u­ nderstanding – repeated by Loe de Jong in his Dutch history of the Shoah16 – that the Eastern Europeans, including the Ostjude, displayed more survival skills in the camps. The West European Jewish prisoners, however, were accustomed to feeling superior to their Eastern fellow inmates, and stereotypically gave them generic names like ‘Kazimir’. Appie’s friend tried to trick the guard with his sack full of ‘stones’, but Red Müller was tenacious; it appeared that his friend had indeed been caught red-handed this time. But he had forgotten to reckon with ‘­Kazimir’, who, in turn, had outwitted Appie’s friend. No one was more delighted to have been cheated with stones for potatoes. If anyone was arrested or caught with stolen goods, at the very least it meant solitary confinement in the infamous ‘bunker’. The worst-case scenario was deportation to Auschwitz. In another memorable incident, mentioned in many diaries, a female internee encounters that fate. In Van Linda’s version, the importance of being quick-witted, streetwise and well-versed in human fallibility is again emphasized. Trying to smuggle food, the woman had successfully pretended to be menstruating, but when using the same pretext a second time, she was not believed. The woman had gambled, as it were, or perhaps had overplayed her hand, even though Appie had warned her not to persist in her denial: ‘At that point in time she could still confess. I told her, “For God’s sake, do it now”.’ She didn’t.’17 For Appie van Linda, the street, the marketplace and trading offered a school to hone survival techniques and his assessment of human character. He learned one such lesson when, under guard, he had to empty trains that had been bombarded outside the camp. He confided in the others, ‘Steal any time you can see the guard. Never steal when you can’t see him, because then he is standing behind you.’18 He added that hunger quickly makes you abandon your principles. Luckily, he was neither a big eater, nor a smoker, he confessed. Some prisoners were so addicted to smoking that they would steal bread from their own family members to trade for cigarettes. Abraham van Linda was able to employ an intelligently applied honesty to charm that same Unterscharführer who had so badly abused him. For example, he turned down his cigarette ration because he knew that he had committed an offence for which this privilege was withheld. He realized the Scharführer would value this kind of honest attitude, and he ended up indeed receiving his cigarettes after all. Moreover, Höckling allowed Appie, with his burned leg, to carry out personal chores for him like cleaning his room or polishing his shoes. Van Linda had, to a large degree, his own psychological insight to thank for this development. As he put it: ‘If you work that long for a villain, you get

196  Evelien Gans to know him.’19 The same was true for Jaap Meijer. Combining a practical attitude with erudition, he sometimes delivered ‘lectures’, standing on one of the big cauldrons. In fact, he so impressed his ‘boss’, SS Oberscharführer Theo Heuskel, that he was able to build a special relationship with him, which was very unusual under the circumstances and which served him, his family and other prisoners well. Jaap Meijer managed to work in the kitchen for eight consecutive months. Only a year after the liberation, he wrote a portrait of Heuskel for a Dutch journal.20 Appie was in the meantime most unfortunately transferred from the kitchen to the Stubbenkommando (tree stump commando), where most of the deaths resulted from a combination of exhaustion and abuse. The prisoners were forced to do the extremely heavy physical work of digging out the stumps of felled or fallen trees. Various diarists like Abel Herzberg wrote with abhorrence about this work force: ‘The Stump Command is an abomination. People do receive extra food, but they also receive extra whip.’ Herzberg also mentions that the unique prisoner court in Bergen-Belsen once sentenced a woman to five days’ bunker and assignment to the Stubbenkommando.21 Appie van Linda knew nothing about trees, and was, on top of that, afraid of the SS guard dogs that accompanied them to the worksite, outside the camp. The chaloetsiem, the Palestine pioneers in the labour battalion, were trained in agriculture, and they took him under their wing: ‘Appie, do stay with me because then we’ll make it through.’ Up until then, Appie had thought that all tree stumps were alike. He explained: ‘I learned something. If a tree has been blown over by wind, the roots are not in the ground. If a tree was cut down, the roots are very deeply anchored. That is much harder work and takes much longer.’22 Consequently, one of his comrades, Max Kellner, sought out trees felled by wind so that they could take a break from the hard labour. Once again, knowledge and cleverness provided Appie with a much needed break: then we dug a pit around that Stubbe until they couldn’t see us anymore. [Then Max] said, ‘Appie, now we shall rest. We’ll take turns as lookout to see if he’s coming.’ And that’s what we did. But I was so afraid of the dogs!23 Indeed Van Linda was so scared of the dogs that he told his wife that he would die if he had to work there much longer. ‘And I cried too.’ It was one of the undoubtedly many moments that Van Linda’s sense of humour abandoned him. During a later interview, however, his humour was present again in all its glory: ‘She said to me: “The first time he has to work, he dies.”’24 Both Abraham van Linda and Jaap Meijer had been able to manipulate, in a subtle way, their SS Scharführer. They probably succeeded for two reasons. Since not that many prisoners worked in the relatively popular kitchen commando, one man could stand out, make a difference and possibly develop some sort of personal contact.25 Second, both men appeared to have had a degree of psychological ingenuity. Jaap Meijer knew how to impress Theo Heuskel with

Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen  197 his knowledge of German culture and Jewish history. Van Linda understood it was worthwhile playing ‘the honest victim’. Both knew how to gnaw away something of their victimhood, using their brains and insight to make good impressions on their captors, and, in doing so, to improve their situations, however temporarily.

The Last Months in the Camp Not only were pencils and literature brought into the Sternlager, but also rolls of written law and holy books. In some of the barracks, there was frequent prayer and schooling. This was related to the relatively large numbers of rabbis in the camp – of whom ultimately only one would survive. Seen as the embodiment of ‘the Jew’, they were a special target of the guards.26 Because of the presence of small children in the camp, the inmates tried to provide something of regular education. This was forbidden and, moreover, extremely difficult to maintain due to the lack of material and the extreme living conditions. But it happened nonetheless. Expressions of religious sentiments or performing religious ceremonies were not allowed either. However, hard action was not always taken against communal religious ceremonies like Purim, Hanukkah and Pesach.27 Kitchen guard Heuskel turned a blind eye to the celebration of Yom Kippur in September 1944, because he probably favoured Jews who were open about their faith over those who neglected or denied their faith. He had permitted Jaap Meijer and his fellow workers to take their rations to their barracks because of the fast. The next day they were allowed to quit work two hours earlier. Appie was not religious, but he and his friends did not refuse the request of a rabbi who wanted to organize a Hanukkah party (the Jewish festival of lights) for the children. The Rabbi approached Appie for his skill in ‘organizing’ some sugar and the like. In addition, Appie and his friends decided to keep watch during the festivities in case the SS came in. If they did, the candles would need to be snuffed immediately. The rules in the camp held that candles could only be lit during Fliegeralärm, when the sirens blared, and it was dangerous to use lamps. During Hanukkah, Jews memorialize the rebellion of the ­Maccabees against Greek domination, with the re-consecration of the Temple as climax. In affirmation of Jewish autonomy, the little bit of remaining oil miraculously burned for eight days. It was during this ceremony, December 1944, that Appie van Linda experienced a miracle of his own. He explained: We warned: the SS are coming! But believe it or not, the Fliegeralarm sounded. The candles had to be lit; it really was Hanukkah. […] Then I began to have my doubts: is there really a God, or not? No, he exists. Oh, was I in two minds!28 Miracles were exceptions in the camp, however, and unavoidable misery the rule. From the winter of 1944, conditions in the Austauschlager (of which the Sternlager was a part) and especially the bordering Häftlingslager went from

198  Evelien Gans extremely bad to even worse. Appie van Linda tried to evoke this in his particular anecdotal manner when he spoke of the gruesome story of Mrs K, whose husband died on a top bunk in the barracks. Weeping, Mrs K said, ‘My husband has died. What do I get for his boots?’29 The expression: ‘My man is dead, what do I get for his boots?’ would live on as a much-used saying in the circle of Abraham van Linda and his in-laws; his own direct family members had all been murdered. The influx of prisoners from other camps created a living hell in which hunger and typhoid and mass death reigned. The severely ill, the dying and the dead lay everywhere, side by side. The prisoners were forced to load the deceased onto large freight trucks. Among the bodies flung onto the trucks and taken to crematoria or huge burning pits were also prisoners who, although near death, were still alive. Abraham van Linda saw the trucks and recalled: ‘There was still movement in there. […] Trucks came with bodies still moving. […] You cannot imagine how criminal [the Nazis] were.’30 Van Linda’s observation has been confirmed by other interviewees and in written reports. By order of the SS, prisoners were to put the inmates that were severely ill, apparently dying, on carts among the corpses, and drive them to the crematoria and pits.31 The images of liberated Bergen-Belsen with its mass graves would spread across the world and would, for a time, symbolize what the Nazis had done to their victims.32 In April 1945, the prisoners in the Sternlager were forced to board trains that would take them far away from the camp. The destination was Theresienstadt, but there was a great deal of disbelief and uncertainty among the camp residents. Meanwhile, people from other camps continued to flow to Bergen-Belsen. The mass dying continued in the freight train which carried Appie van Linda and 2,000 other inmates for two weeks through the convulsing Third Reich. The train was often halted, and eventually came to rest in Tröbitz. The two SS men and accompanying soldiers on the train had fled for fear of the approaching Russian army. Appie van Linda could not believe it. And then, once again: ‘Everyone walk, we are free!’ And my wife said, ‘Appie, we are free.’ I said, ‘Annie, if I’m free I need to see that for myself.’ And I found myself a place in the filth. And then I lay with my eyes closed, because there was a draft just where my eyes were. And I remained lying there. Then an officer came along, a Russian. On a little horse with no saddle. The man was so large: his feet nearly reached the ground. I thought, ‘now we are free’.33

Storytelling After the Liberation Immediately after the liberation, Abraham contracted typhoid fever and thrombosis. His hearing was affected and, partly because of the accident with boiling water, he had trouble walking for the rest of his life. For the most part he kept silent about the war: ‘We were just trying to start over again. Almost nothing was said about [the war]. In the end I do not understand how we could handle it all.’34

Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen  199 Jaap Meijer, who also survived both Bergen-Belsen and the ‘Train of the Dead’, together with his wife and toddler son, Ischa, would, just like ­Abraham van Linda, not deal at length with his war experiences. In his articles and books on Jewish history and culture, neither the Second World War nor the Shoah would be a topic, with the exception of his article on SS Oberscharführer Theo Heuskel, written one year after his return. In an interview he once responded to a question about his war experiences with a poem in which he expressed doubts about his faith. The surprised look of the interviewer was answered with a short explanation: ‘I give you my poetic reply regarding Belsen, Auschwitz and Westerbork. That is as far as I can go.’35 Meijer would restrict himself, saving his experiences in Westerbork or Bergen-Belsen for the spaces between the lines or in the footnotes. He would, however, make sense of the past, and underline his own will-power, by means of anecdotes. In addition to research and publishing articles and books, Jaap worked as a history teacher. He liked to tell his pupils that before the war, he had trained to be a baker (which could have been useful when immigrating to Palestine), and therefore got a place in the kitchen in the Sternlager. And that in Tröbitz, after being liberated by the Russians, he had driven around with horse and cart. At home (two more children would be born after the war) jokes were told about how, in Tröbitz, the ‘Yids’, had been making chicken soup as soon as possible – after having slaughtered many chickens – and then went complaining to the Russians that the Krauts (Moffen) flatly refused to give them eggs. A chutzpah!36 Jaap Meijer also told his pupils how he had had positive conversations with ‘concentration camp brutes’, especially when he was alone with them. In such circumstances they were much more agreeable. Furthermore in this way he could build a personal relationship, and thus deter them from punishing the inmates so readily.37 Undoubtedly Jaap referred here to his contact with SS Oberscharführer Theo Heuskel. His story contained a lesson in life for his pupils, a kind of strategy for emergency situations: be smart when things get dangerous, try to gain as much control as possible. Although Jaap’s lessons for life were addressed to his pupils, transferring them through anecdotes can also be interpreted in another way. Consciously or unconsciously, recounting anecdotes might have helped to ease psychological distress, and to experience and transfer agency. It may have offered both empowerment and control of experiences at a time when he had been utterly powerless. The same may be said for Abraham van Linda’s anecdotal storytelling. In his anecdotes, Van Linda represents a voice of Jewish Amsterdam, of the old Jewish Quarter and the marketplace. It is not the voice of the Jewish establishment, the Rabbinate, the Jewish doctors, lawyers or academics. Succulent and spicy, Van Linda’s language is laced with a sort of laconic reflection of light ridicule and self-mockery, a language that renders the terrible events it describes bearable for narrator and listener alike. Or perhaps more accurately, seemingly bearable. It captures what is so often called ‘indescribable,’ what Timothy Ashplant refers to as going beyond what is actually said: going beneath the surface, speaking the unspeakable.38 In his stories, Appie van Linda was not only recording death but also celebrating life, wondering aloud about the small

200  Evelien Gans miracles that kept him and others alive. These are the words of a survivor who knows, consciously and unconsciously, that, having survived the Shoah, there are enduring questions of life and death. And one of them is how to remember. From 1967 on, Jaap Meijer started to write poetry under the pseudonym of Saul van Messel; his war experience was one of several themes, but certainly a crucial one. The poems referred to memories of events ranging from the German occupation in Amsterdam, to Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen, but also to murdered friends and acquaintances, and to post-war experiences and emotions that were connected to the war period. In his poetry he could express feelings and find a form for memories he was unable to create so easily in his historical prose. In his poems about the Shoah, Jaap Meijer would speak a different language from that used in his anecdotes; they enabled him to memorialize what had been done to him and other Jews in a poetic, sometimes aphoristic, alternately mourning and biting manner. This related most forcefully to the experience of ‘return’ to post-war Dutch society and the town he had left, and to the antisemitism he was to encounter upon return. These were widely shared feelings of those returning from the camps or hiding places: an overwhelming awareness of absent family and friends, of abandonment, faced with vacated or re-occupied houses, and stolen property.39 Appie van Linda processed it in his own way: I was embittered about how we were received. Unfriendly. At the back of the Central Station stood people from the Red Cross. Then one of the ladies asked if I still had my home. I say, ‘How should I know? You were here. If your father has not stolen it, it will still be there.’ I was angry with everyone. […] All houses were occupied and I saw my own clothes walking in the street.40 The poetry of Saul van Messel (Jaap Meijer’s alias) about the war is equally bitter, but also melancholic; it lacks Appie’s humour but occasionally some irony, or rather sarcasm, would creep in: juli 1945 July 1945 herkregen vrijheid regained freedom maar op zicht but on approval ik wil terug I want to go back mijn kamp is dicht my camp is closed41 sternstunde hour of the star eenmaal een ster to have once te hebben gedragen worn a star dat nemen ze me that’s what they never nooit meer af will take away from me42

Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen  201 Abraham van Linda and Jaap Meijer met only once in liberated Amsterdam. They told each other anecdotes and camp stories. About the rest, they remained silent. Jaap Meijer did not relate how he was humiliated and beaten by a member of the SS, or that he was once caught stealing bread.43 Appie van Linda did not tell of the time he cried at the thought that he would need to work for a long time yet in the Stubbenkommando, and that he had nearly died from fear of the SS dogs. Appie told me that they did not talk about the bad things. ‘We just left that […] Such things come and get to you, anyway.’44

Notes 1 Evelien Gans died in July 2018, when this chapter was in the editorial stage. The editors decided in consultation to move forward in preparing this piece for publication. They thank Frank Diamand for his invaluable assistance in editing the text. 2 Interview, Evelien Gans with Abraham (Appie) van Linda, 25 January 2001. 3 For much of the history of Westerbork and the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen in this context, see E. Gans, Jaap en Ischa Meijer. Een joodse geschiedenis 1912–1956, ­Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008; E. Gans, ‘Next year in Paramaribo: Galut and ­diaspora as scene-changes in the Jewish life of Jakob Meijer’, in Y. Kaplan (ed.), The Dutch Intersection: The Jews in the History of the Netherlands, Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp. 369–87. 4 T.G. Ashplant, ‘Anecdote as narrative resource in working-class life stories: parody, dramatization and sequence’, in M. Chamberlain and P. Thompson (eds.), Narrative and Genre, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 99–113, especially pp. 101–2; S. Dentith, ‘Contemporary working-class autobiography: politics of forms, politics of content’, in P. Dodd (ed.), Modern Selves: Essays on British and American Autobiography, London: Frank Cass, 1986, pp. 70–1. 5 Ashplant, ‘Anecdote as narrative resource’, p. 102. 6 E. Ochs and L. Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 2–4. 7 Van Linda said this, literally, in the interview. 8 N. Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Concentration Camps, London: Little, Brown, 2016, p. 335. Wachsmann refers to the camp as ‘an anomaly in the KL system’ (p. 337). Between December 1944 and March 1945 the number of 15,000 had risen to 44,000 as a result of the arrival of transports from other camps, including Auschwitz. By then, there had been very numerous deaths due to overcrowding, lack of food, disease and epidemics. See J. Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 17. 9 B. Wasserstein, The Ambiguity of Virtue. Gertrude van Tijn and the fate of the Dutch Jews, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 206. Gertrude van Tijn was one of the driving forces behind the migration of Jews to Palestine before and during the war. She left the camp as part of the group of 222 migrants on 30 June 1944. 10 The German authorities wished to prevent information about the living conditions and deaths in the camp from becoming public. Mirjam Bolle writes about an actual search of her belongings for any written material (M. Bolle, Ik zal je beschrijven hoe een dag er hier uitziet. Dagboekbrieven uit Amsterdam, Westerbork en Bergen-Belsen, Amsterdam: Contact, 2005, p. 235, entry 28 May 1944). Hannah Lévy-Hass discussed her concealed diary-writing in an interview with the German journalist Eike Geisel: H. Lévy-Hass, En misschien was dat nog maar het begin… Dagboek uit Bergen-Belsen. 1944–1945, Baarn: Wereldvenster, 1980. 11 Interview with Abraham van Linda.

202  Evelien Gans 12 Gans, ‘Next year in Paramaribo’, p. 374. 13 For some of the controversies about Jaap Meijer as a historian, see E. Gans, ­‘Image(s) of “the Rav” through the lens of an involved historian: Jaap Meijer’s depiction of Rabbi Jozeph Hirsch Dünner’, in Y. Kaplan and D. Michman (eds.), The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry, Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. 316–26. 14 Gans, Jaap en Ischa Meijer, p. 252; Lévy-Hass, En misschien was dat nog maar het begin…, p. 8, 19 August 1944. 15 Interview with Abraham van Linda. Jaap Polak recalls a similar unfortunate event with melting butter from the same kitchen: J. Polak and I. Snoep, Tussen de barakken. Liefdesbrieven in Westerbork en Bergen-Belsen, Laren: Verbum, 2006, p. 188. 16 L. de Jong, Jodenvervolging in Nederland 1940–1945, Hilversum: Verbum, 2018, vol. 2, pp. 1765–72. 17 Gans, Jaap en Ischa Meijer, pp. 272, 278. The woman survived and, much later, was sent back to Bergen-Belsen. 18 Interview with Abraham van Linda. 19 Ibid. 20 Gans, Jaap en Ischa Meijer, pp. 273–9; Jaap Meijer, ‘Theo. Het portret van een Oberscharführer’, Vrij Nederland, 12 January 1946. It was most exceptional for Jaap Meijer to write so directly about his experiences in the Sternlager. 21 Herzberg, Tweestromenland: dagboek uit Bergen-Belsen, p. 287, 13 January 1945; ­Vogel, Dagboek uit een kamp, p. 52; Polak and Snoep, Tussen de barakken, p. 128. 22 Interview with Abraham van Linda. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 In the so-called Schuhcommando, for example, there were 600 prisoners. Gans, Jaap en Ischa Meijer, p. 262. 26 Ibid., pp. 294–6. 27 On Pesach, Bolle, Ik zal je beschrijven, pp. 230–3, 10 April 1944. 28 Interview with Abraham van Linda. 29 Conversation with Abraham van Linda, 3 April 2010. 30 Interview with Abraham van Linda. 31 Interviews with Wolf Stein (22 February 2002) and Louis Tas (1 June 2000 and 18 March 2006). Jacob de Heer, ‘Exposé betr. Gebeurtenissen, medegemaakt in het Concentratiekamp Bergen-Belsen, Krs. Cell-Prov. Hannover (Deutschl.)’, NIOD, 250 K C (11) 09, III, 4; Josef Weiss, ‘Bericht ueber Bergen-Belsen vom 11.1.44 bis 10.4.45’, Tröbitz 7 juni 1945, NIOD, 255 K C (11) 09, II, 7. 32 Reilly, Belsen. 33 Interview with Abraham van Linda. For this ‘Train of the Dead’, see Gans, Jaap en Ischa Meijer, pp. 342–52. 34 B. Drechsler, ‘Sally van de Albert Cuyp’, Ons Amsterdam, 5 May 2008. This article on Salomon (Sally) van Linda, murdered in Sobibor at the age of 13, includes an interview with Sally’s nephew, Abraham van Linda, at the age of 93. 35 Gans, Jaap & Ischa Meijer, p. 344. 36 Email Mirjam Chorus-Meijer to Evelien Gans, 24 October 2006. 37 Interview with Thys Ockersen, 24 January 2008. 38 Ashplant, ‘Anecdote as narrative resource’, p. 102. 39 For the specific problem of returning Dutch Jews, see E. Gans, De kleine verschillen die het leven uitmaken. Een historische studie naar joodse sociaaldemocraten en socialistisch-zionisten, Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 1999, pp. 572–7; Gans, Jaap en ­Ischa Meijer, pp. 372–3. For post-liberation (and post-war) Dutch antisemitism, see E. Gans, ‘“They have forgotten to gas you.” Post-1945 antisemitism in the Netherlands’, in P. Essed and I. Hoving (eds.), Dutch Racism, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014, pp. 71–100; R. Ensel and E. Gans (ed.), The Holocaust, Israel and ‘the Jew’: Histories

Remembering the Sternlager of Bergen-Belsen  203 of Antisemitism in Postwar Dutch Society, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016; D. Hondius, Return. Holocaust Survivors and Dutch Antisemitism, Westport: Praeger, 2003. 40 Drechsler, ‘Sally van de Albert Cuyp’. 41 S. van Messel, syndroom. joodse poezie, Rijswijk: De Oude Degel, 1971, p. 52; translation by E. Gans. See also Gans, ‘Next year in Paramaribo’, p. 385. Jaap Meijer/ Saul van Messel consistently used no capital letters. 42 S. van Messel, mijn eigen spookrijder. joodse poëzie, Heemstede: 1986, private print. Translation by Evelien Gans. 43 Gans, Jaap en Ischa Meijer, pp. 261, 282–3. 44 Interview with Abraham van Linda.

Part V

Conclusion

14 Twentieth-Century Narratives of War Conclusions Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle and Nanci Adler

The alliance between armed conflict and narrative goes back a long way. The involvement of mankind in war is so far-reaching that it would be enigmatic if humans were not capable of mobilizing their unique ability to convey imaginatively and communicate their experiences at times of horrifying ordeal and agony. The concept of war, moreover, already presupposes a story with a beginning, middle and end; a specific war identifiable by name assumes a sequential wholeness of time and causality. As for narrative, stories thrive on conflict, whereas sharing war stories has become part of initiatives of conflict resolution.1 Particular to history-writing is that a story is usually told in the past tense. War, moreover, ‘embodies history […], having been in the war is the most immediate tangible claim for having been in history’.2 These are some of the close ties between war and narrative; however, those ties have not been comprehensible in any straightforward sense since historians have become aware of the unstable relationship between historical truth and representation.3 Generations of lessons in the philosophy of history have made us aware of the subtle differences between reality and realism, and of the distinction between ideology and argumentation, which justifies a continuous exploration of the complex interplay between forms of war and forms of narrative, as this volume set out to do. The chapters in this volume all cover the juncture of twentieth-century experiences of war and the production or consumption of narratives of war. Europe is the geographical setting, even though authors incidentally reference other continents. The contributors do not adopt a uniform approach, nor do they explicate a common theoretical position. This is a volume on narratives of war by way of a varied collection of empirically based case studies, not a study in narratology. The authors tend to see narrative as a concept that gives them a general sense of reference and guidance in formulating their research questions and approaching their material. In this collection the concept of narrative is applied in investigating the creative human ability to render experiences of war in communicative representational forms. Some authors centre on the conceptualization of war, others are more concerned with practices of storytelling. As a general guideline, narratives of war are defined as representations of stories of war. Their contents, consisting of distinctive persons and events, are linked by a specific narrator’s voice in a series of time and causality. Narrative is not an absolute but a question of degree: narrativity refers to the extent to which sequences and points of view can be identified.4 The degree

208  Ensel, Wintle and Adler of narrativity rises as events follow each other, as the lives of people become entangled and the outcome remains uncertain. In this respect, the distinction between narrative and story is relevant. Stories can have different narrative outcomes depending on plot and the narrator’s point of view.5 This conclusion aims to recall some of the issues raised in the preceding chapters, focusing on content, context and the limits of narrative. Three topics in particular are addressed: the rise and fall of narrative templates, the institutionalization of modern forms of narrativization, and the non-­narrativized traces of war experiences. All three subjects relate to major turns in the ­twentieth-century development of war narratives: the extension of character types6 and positions outside the storylines of national honour, heroism and bravery; the attention to the civilian survivor-witness as a character type; and the recognition of mental distress − from ‘shell shock’ to trauma and Post-­ Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), guilt and shame − in the aftermath of war.

Plots and Character Types Ten months before the outbreak of the First World War, a colossus of a monument was unveiled in honour of the victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813. The Völkerschlachtdenkmal had literally been on the drawing board for almost 100 years but it was only in the euphoria of the Wars of Unification that the monument was realized and included in the Militärkult of Wilhelmine Germany.7 The campaign had started immediately after the battle but dragged on for decades, with the presentation of the most extraordinary designs and accompanying pamphlets, poems, novels, dedications and eulogies. One of the more celebrated contributions came from the poet-soldier Theodor Körner. On his military deathbed Körner composed ‘Farewell to Life’ (Abschied vom Leben), a poem in which he recounted his last hours on the battlefield as a member of the Freecorps, gathering strength by contemplating the higher ideal for which he had signed up, and which would be realized in the near future. What I carry so faithfully in my heart, Was ich so treu im Herzen trage, That must live with me forever! Das muss ja doch dort ewig mit mir leben! – And what I recognized here as a sanctuary Und was ich hier als Heiligthum erkannte For which I was lit up young and bold Wofür ich rasch und jugendlich entbrannte, Whether I call it freedom, or whether I call it love Ob ich ’s nun Freiheit, ob ich ’s Liebe nannte8

Twentieth-Century Narratives of War  209 In Körner’s acclaimed words, war is comprised of a succession of decisive battles, fought by honourable soldiers who are willing to die for the noble cause of freedom. This, in a nutshell, was indeed how the first generation of campaigners wished to write and remember the Battle of Leipzig. In the decades thereafter, a narrative turn became apparent. The battle was no longer just a struggle for freedom but now primarily heralded the longed-for German nation-state. Following this romantic emplotment, the unified ‘people’ (Volk) was presented as both the protagonist and the highest ideal. The Battle of Leipzig more or less announced the independent Prussian-German nation state: the war was about the past, but the war narrative inferred a future. Hence the monument in 1913. When we go another 100 years forward in time, that is, past two World Wars and the reunification of 1989, we notice how the battle has been stripped of almost every government tribute – although the site is visited more than ever by tourists.9 The narratives of war that the German unified state requires are more complex than those which the template of militarism and the glorification of violence can offer. This small vignette of a meandering war narrative not only illustrates the rich and layered conceptualization and interpretation of ‘war’ in G ­ ermany, but also provides one of the most influential narrative templates that the twentieth century inherited from its predecessor. This is a narrative of a politics of glory, one in which Körner’s topos of a heroic death struggle can be seamlessly integrated. Throughout Europe, similar war stories bestowed ­nation-states with belligerent historical roots. These are the ‘foundational stories’ to which John Horne refers in his chapter on the battle narratives of Verdun and the Somme. The cult of the fallen soldier, as coined by George Mosse, and the concomitant democratization and popularization of war heroism and sacrifice, can be seen in this light as a new chapter, a plot twist in a book that had already been opened in the years leading up to Sarajevo.10 Dying for the nation became a duty and prerogative of rank-and-file soldiers and, ultimately, of all citizens. Nineteenth-century technological innovations and changes in the economy of print and communication provided new means for waging war as well as for distributing its stories to a national audience. The nationalist master-­ narratives of war were successfully propagated. Wars from times long past became the substance of novels and plays, included in textbooks and converted into monuments. In addition to the iconic wars of antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era − from Troy, to Agincourt and the White ­Mountain − the Napoleonic or Peninsular Wars were included in the national canons of lieux de mémoire. The media revolution advanced conflicting developments. The twentieth-­ century evolution of war stories thus shows an excitingly expanding variation in plots, viewpoints and character types. New groups of narrators and new strategies of storytelling changed our view of what war is and what it entails, for many more people than before. But new points of view and plots can undermine the status of longstanding narratives.

210  Ensel, Wintle and Adler Horne extensively discusses how the increase in literacy led to a rising interest in diaries, letters and memoirs on the part of both authors and readers. It meant that the battle story was no longer the only narrative available in print. The relatively new genre of the soldier’s tale adhered to the battle story but discredited slowly but unmistakably the leitmotif of heroism and sacrifice. The change in point of view was crucial. Matilda Greig locates this change of focus in ‘the character of ordinary soldiers’ in the French Third Republic when universal male military service was reintroduced. Horne also mentions the Franco-Prussian War, but in addition credits the American Civil War. The new print revolution gave new life to old texts and made it worthwhile to publish for specific target groups. Greig shows in her chapter the reuse of Napoleonic war stories until well into the twentieth century. Veteran memoirs were reprinted, translated, re-edited and adapted to suit particular political or didactic motives or to meet local consumer needs: ‘individual stories travelled through time and space to become part of another story, in another place, for another war’.11 By abbreviating a memoir or adding an editorial, publishers were able to change the point of view, turning a century-old veteran’s memoir into an authoritative source of inspiration for a new war narrative. The next chapter in modern media attention to war was written when the memoirs of veterans about the First World War began to flood the market. Now authors and publishers truly benefited from the increase in readership and advance of the media. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), following ‘an unprecedented advertising campaign’, sold ‘over a million copies’. The novel elevated the ordinary soldier to the centre of collective memory as the literary counterpart to that burgeoning novelty, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A year later, as Frank van Vree confirms in his chapter, the American movie adaptation was a similarly resounding success. The ‘war book boom’, as Dunja Dušanić explains in her chapter, gave rise to an intense and complex controversy at the end of the 1920s. At stake were the authority of the veterans and the authenticity of their war experiences. Part of the controversy involved confusion about the veracity of the numerous publications. Fictional texts in which authors subtly manipulated genre conventions and narrative voices competed with veterans’ memoirs, claiming to be a truthful representation of the new war experience in the trenches. Remarque’s novel, as well as the movie, illustrated the added weight of descriptive detail in suggesting a truthful rendering of a past reality. This is the reality effect about which Roland Barthes would write much later, but which already shaped the controversy and the appreciation of fictionalized accounts in the interwar period.12 The war stories introduced a new view of warfare, one in which war was presented as avoidable and meaningless. Shots were discharged straight at the heart of the master-narrative of heroism and sacrifice. In terms of narratology, the narrative conflict from fighting a foreign enemy shifted to a conflict between high ideals and the actual drama of war. The voices of those veterans more inclined to heroism were certainly not silenced, however, and the

Twentieth-Century Narratives of War  211 narrative of the Great War became one of the central political topoi in the run-up to a new World War. Throughout the century, the war narrative as generic foundational myth has retained its strength. For instance, the military narrative of national heroism, manhood and individual glory was given free rein in the colonial wars after 1945.13 Peter Pichler presents a counter-image in his chapter on the ­European Union’s narrative of unification. Postwar, not only the title of Tony Judt’s acclaimed book14 but also the shortest slogan to sum up the ideal of European unity, refers to a narrative of supranationalism and peace; that is, a narrative to overcome the wars of nationalism that had been the hallmark of European politics up to then. That at least was the self-invented story of the founders of the European Communities. This was confirmed in 2013 when on the occasion of the bicentennial commemoration of the Völkerschlacht, the German president of the European Parliament said in his address that the battle anticipated ‘the trenches of Verdun and the fields of the Marne and the Somme’, ‘the total war’ and the ‘demons of hatred, intolerance [and] racial delusion’ of the twentieth century. Schulz’s address contained all the elements of an after-war emplotment: considering the European ‘Peace Project […] we no longer see the wars of the past as heroic national myths, all too often instrumentalized to make people miserably die for the great-power fantasies of their rulers’.15 The nationalist framing of war remained, however, meaningful just as the need for stories about courage and heroism. Post-war Western European commemoration cultures, emphasizing national mnemonic communities, initially left little room for the mnemonic needs of specific victim groups. Symbolic and rhetorical investments centred instead more politically safely on veterans and resistance fighters. The Second World War also gave rise to counter-stories and alternative emplotments, but most often these reached the public domain much later. The rise of the civilian survivor as a witness – after the soldier and the veteran, the third major character type in the twentieth-century war narrative – is an example of such a belated development. Regarding the First World War, ‘an old woman explained to me once’, oral historian Alessandro Portelli recounts, ‘they fought among themselves out there’, but in the Second World War ‘we all were involved’.16 After 1945 the world was introduced to ethnic cleansing and genocide as new narrative templates. The contribution of Sylwia Bobryk on history textbooks in post-war Poland offers in this respect a particularly rich case of a master-narrative under attack. Master-narratives may relegate stories to an underground existence for decades, only to emerge after a regime change. The Polish historiography of the Second World War contains several massacres that could have given cause to question the narrative of exclusive Polish suffering and Soviet-Russian liberation that prevailed until 1989. Bobryk refers to the Katyń massacre in 1940 when the Soviet secret police murdered around 22,000 Polish army officers; the massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia where Poles killed perhaps 20,000 Ukrainians in retaliation for mass killings by Ukrainian ‘partisans and peasants’; and, finally, the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom

212  Ensel, Wintle and Adler where more than 300 Polish-Jewish villagers were brutally murdered by or with the active assistance of their fellow-villagers. Bobryk’s careful reading of recent school textbooks reveals the mobilization of various rhetorical strategies to fit new character types and storylines into the current narrative that is no longer adopted from a Communist frame, but nevertheless holds onto the nationalist plot of Polish innocence, victimhood and heroism. Perhaps the old nationalist craving for war heroism has gone out of fashion; a nationalist approach to war suffering is nonetheless still relevant in political discourse, even if this may seem like a rear-guard action when contemporary trends in history-writing and the globalization of armed conflicts in the modern era are taken into consideration.

Narratives and the Archive The production and consumption of war stories do not exist in a vacuum. The twentieth century saw a proliferation of war stories in a subtle reciprocal influence of change in warfare, media and forms of expression. It seems that every war contributes to the way in which war can be told and transmitted. War stories are not immune to innovative narrative templates. Ancient stories feed current wars, just as new available forms and media rewrite the narratives of previous wars, and thereby they change what is meant by war. The changing context of narratives of war in terms of print and audio-visual media, and institutions such as libraries and education establishments, is part of the history of their twentieth-century manifestation. War experiences are still shared privately – even more so in the twentieth century by reading war prose and poetry in the sphere of the home – but what stands out in the twentieth century is the public screening of visual war narratives. It is something of a cliché to point out the enormous impact of films, but when it comes to the institutional structures that determine the transfer of war stories, it is difficult to ignore them. There are unique film productions that deviate from the norm in every era, but cinema seems to have had an impact largely in the propulsion of generally accepted storylines and closures. In the words of Van Vree in this volume, these ‘recognizable aesthetic conventions’ of popular cinema have in more than one instance become part of the institutional setting of propaganda, war preparations and the actual waging of war.17 Besides the omnipresent culture industry, the didactic use of war stories stands out as another remarkable contemporary phenomenon. The institutional context influences the listening, reading and interpretation of war stories. That brings us to the role of the archive, which is an important one with respect to understanding war testimonials. In recent decades, sitting in front of a computer to take note of personal stories has become commonplace. The Visual History Archive hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation is just one of the better-known initiatives for collecting and preserving the testimonies of witnesses to mass violence. In 1994, the foundation began recording interviews with survivors of the Holocaust on the initiative of film

Twentieth-Century Narratives of War  213 director Steven Spielberg. The repository currently contains 55,000 testimonies, including stories from survivors of the genocides in Guatemala, Armenia and Rwanda. The ‘Spielberg project’ is impressive but not unique. There are other, pioneering collections that precede this. The Holocaust Survivors Film Project, now the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies deposited at Yale University, began collecting and storing Shoah survivor testimonials in 1979. Around the same time, the French journalist Claude Lanzmann worked steadfastly on the recordings for his monumental documentary Shoah. And, in another, legal context, a series of witness statements were brought into evidence in the Eichmann trial of 1961.18 There are thus many more historic precedents.19 In this volume, two authors rely on and analyse repositories of oral history collections. Susan Hogervorst discusses in her chapter the Dutch Getuigenverhalen.nl, a website that brings together various Second World War oral history projects. Tim Scheffe compares the oral testimonies of Spanish Brigade volunteers that have been deposited respectively in the London archives of the Imperial War Museum and the archives of the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. All these collections carry typical modern features. They function as archives and are often referred to as such, which confirms Michel Foucault’s claim about the archive as the single most important symbolic model of the modern era.20 This assessment did not only pertain to the archive as a depository of material or as a public building, it was also about the archival structures that regulate particular ways of speaking and prescribe specific conventions and relations. The metaphor of the modern archive helps identify how similar modern ordering principles of archiving and administration have contributed to simultaneous processes of individuation and categorization.21 The collections of war narratives and the singular war stories that they hold can be coupled with this institutional shaping of individual voices. A first aspect of the modern archivization concerns the inclusion of separate stories in a collective repository. The archive is a delicate place of negotiation between the public and private: ‘The reader in the archive will always be in the position of the uninvited reader, the intruder into another’s private communications: notes, marginalia, private letters.’22 Recording testimonials and inserting them into a repository ensures that personal life stories become available to the public. A clear example of the archiving technology for making private war stories public is the collection of diaries at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. In May 1945 its predecessor, the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, began collecting war diaries in response to an earlier call from the War Cabinet to the Dutch population to gather and preserve diaries about the war. It is well-known that this call of March 1944 led Anne Frank to rewrite her diary. The Institute is now the curator of 1,700 war diaries (including that of Anne Frank), most of which have been digitized. Conventional restrictions that apply to documents may also be valid for oral testimonies. The Dutch Getuigenverhalen.nl

214  Ensel, Wintle and Adler distinguishes between interviews that have been made public and those that are only available ‘for scientific research’. Any archive that manages highly personal, written or oral war narratives has to deal with the tension between accessibility and a respectful handling of these testimonials. A second modern feature pertains to the dual function of archives. They are designed to enable and guarantee the functioning of organizations, as well as maintain their accountability because their communications become part of a public record. In the latter sense, public archives serve as essential artefacts of a democratic public sphere. This conventional yet utopian feature of the archive has been passed on to the repositories.23 It is utopian, not because archives can serve just as easily as instruments of repression, as, for example, when they censor information or restrict access, 24 but in the sense that the mutual ideals of sharing and learning from the past have become the prism through which oral histories, once included in the collection, are viewed. An archive clearly is more than the sum of its parts, and this is equally valid for the audio-cum-video collections. When first-person accounts are brought together, external and internal source criticism must take place at the level of the collection as a whole. It appears that stories are brought together because they deal with the same topic, but by the same token archival institutionalization induces people ‘to talk about the same thing’.25 In her 2006 work The Era of the Witness, Annette Wieviorka dealt with this third aspect of repositories as archives. She showed how, in the course of the 1970s, ‘the survivor’ became a collective noun of sorts. The large-scale recording and collecting of testimonies entails the risk of testimony collections turning ‘into “plain” archives, from which one can pick and choose anything of interest’.26 Susan Hogervorst gives careful thought here to Wieviorka’s apprehensions by examining the actual use of video testimonials. It appears that the 500 available witness accounts on the website Getuigenissen.nl were consulted 26,000 times in 2017. The average ‘user’ − and the use of this term for ‘viewer’ or ‘listener’ already indicates a changing attitude − spends two minutes and 22 seconds on the website. It seems that digitized testimonials facilitate access to the testimonies, but also invite users to jump from one interview to another. Apart from the short amount of time spent on the website, the viewing behaviour influences the interpretation of the testimonials. A digitized repository affects the degree of narrativity of war stories. It increases the ability to study fragments of testimonies and to signal discursive connections between statements. However, listening to bits and pieces reduces the narrative structure of the story, ‘the feeling of wholeness’ that a well-told story conveys. The audience strikes out in its own direction, which reduces the narrator’s agency.27 This effect has probably occurred before, namely when the testimony was recorded, based on guided questions and themes that possibly reflect biased ideas about the ideal narrative sequence. Part of the so-called archival turn concerns precisely whether and how archives function as a technology not only for the storage and retrieval of knowledge, but also for the production of knowledge and subjects. As Jacques

Twentieth-Century Narratives of War  215 Derrida, echoing Foucault, observed: ‘The archivization produces as much as it records the event.’28 Marieke Oprel discusses this archival aspect of war narratives in her chapter on the archive of the Dutch Custody Institute, the bureaucratic authority that handled the assets and civic status of ‘enemy citizens’.29 Although the Institute was set up to meet the very specific problems of the post-war transitional period, it nevertheless followed deep-rooted customary bureaucratic procedures. This applies primarily to the use of the index card for the registration of persons. The paper technology of the index card offers the prospect of standardizing the enormous diversity of private facts and circumstances and thus creating order, although at the expense of the minutiae of life. The 25,000 cards contain an abundance of symbols and formulas, including ‘J’ for Jew, ‘DJ’ for German Jews and ‘OJ’ for Austrian Jews, which reveals a persistent bureaucratic system – not particularly tailored to the specific post-war circumstances – on the one hand, together with handwritten notes in the margins that indicate erratic decision-making processes on the other. Oprel maintains that while each file contains a personal history of war, loss and grief, the archive as a whole narrates a post-war story about Dutch transitional justice. In this respect, reading along the grain – and between the lines − involves, in the words of Ferdinand de Jong, ‘a re-enactment of the archive that questions the conditions of possibility of its own making’.30

Narrators The advance of first-person accounts can be attributed to the paradigmatic changes in history-writing in the late twentieth century. Social historians rediscovered the common man and ordinary life. Cultural historians became aware of patterns of meaning and marginal voices. Instead of asking the question of how it actually happened, the leading question became how it would have been for him/her/them.31 Seen in this light, the survivor account is an emancipatory step forward, propelled, in this particular case, by developments in the field of transitional justice and human rights.32 Its success and proliferation can, arguably, be linked to Jean-François Lyotard’s enquiry into the downfall of the grand narrative (metarécit) and the advent of the petit récit.33 The utopian dimension is wrapped in the idea that the new approaches are better suited to capturing an authentic voice from the past. Contemporary attributes of repositories, such as introductory texts and thematic subdivisions, indicate that the grand narrative has certainly not disappeared. This cannot be otherwise, given the fact that the archive already contains a discursive thread about liberation, democracy and the cleansing effects of storytelling. Individual stories do not always interrupt but may actually confirm the archival meta-narrative. They are furthermore armed with authority derived from the archive. How then should we trace the non-archived and less conspicuous traces of war experiences? Christina Morina rereads German historical narratives on the Second World War against the grain of the genre and the author’s intent. Her chapter

216  Ensel, Wintle and Adler shows how some of the classics of German post-war history can be read as soldier’s tales. Tucked away in footnotes, authors provide selective autobiographical details drawing on their own war experiences. These notes create something of a paradox because they enhance the realism of the historical narrative but possibly diminish the authority of the author as a professional historian. So in the end, the omnipotent historian as author is transformed into a narrator with a specific point of view.34 Evelien Gans introduces in her chapter the anecdote, joke and short poem as forms of enunciation that differ from those with a more straightforward time sequence and, therefore, possess a higher degree of narrativity. Like its big brother, the narrative, the anecdote is hard to define. It is a small story that ignores the time sequence that would make it fit into the larger narrative; ‘it follows the logic of accumulation rather than that of narrative’.35 It resembles the joke (‘a short humorous story, ending in a punchline’)36 but relates more specifically to the real world and usually has the narrator as protagonist. The anecdote gives a sense of storytelling as a social activity that has been lost in the setting of an oral history interview. The milieux de mémoire, which Pierre Nora claimed had been lost forever, have functioned throughout the twentieth century to pass on war experiences.37 It would be difficult to imagine post-memory studies without attention to the generational oral transmission by way of allusions, anecdotes, jokes and similar performative expressions. The anecdote stands low in the hierarchy of narrative genres and is associated with ‘chutzpah’ and working-class social mores.38 The knowledge it imparts, however, does serve as a constant reminder that there is more out there than the ubiquitous war narrative. Gans mainly attributes psychological functions to the anecdote. It is a technique for coping with harrowing experiences because it offers more space for silences by not speaking in terms of successive events or of cause and effect. It may offer a way out of a threatening social situation. Jay Winter defines silence as ‘a socially constructed space in which and about which subjects and words normally used in everyday life are not spoken’.39 Narratives are meant to be shared but occasionally communication is hampered by the inability to convey experiences in a story. Anecdotes then may use metaphor and other forms of imagery to articulate the aporia of survival, when, for instance, by inexplicable chance or guile people either escaped from extreme conditions or found themselves in traumatic situations. One of the Dutch brigadistas in Tim Scheffe’s chapter on the Spanish Civil War volunteers does not rely on an anecdote but may have had a similar aim in mind when he shows himself incapable of answering a question about whether he had killed anyone, and ‘changes the topic to war in general’. A comrade feigns ignorance in a way that Scheffe calls ‘an almost desperate plea to convince the interviewer to drop the subject’. Others may omit descriptive details that constitute the essential filling of a conventional narrative, but which would bring the narrator unwillingly back to the past. The reluctance or inability to recount personal experiences in narrative form is not a purely individual matter. Because of the hostile atmosphere at

Twentieth-Century Narratives of War  217 home, the Dutch brigadistas had few opportunities to tell and retell their experiences, and in this way create coherent narratives. The narrative may function as a ‘privileged mode of ontological commentary’40 in the sense that it offers the opportunity to make sense of past experiences, and organize the transition to a new social and cultural order. Scheffe’s chapter shows what is needed in terms of emotional and social investments to realize such a comprehensible narrative of war. A similar conclusion can be drawn from Marieke Zoodsma’s case from the field of transitional justice. Here we touch upon the very first steps in the public articulation of experiences of violence, injustice, culpability and loss. Not only have the words yet to be found; neither are the appropriate contexts in which they can be pronounced yet established. Thus, as one of Zoodsma’s interlocutors confesses: ‘No, I do not talk about the war in class. That topic is too sensitive. […] You never know how people are going to react.’ Both chapters by Scheffe and Zoodsma clarify the significance of societal acceptance for telling a story in the aftermath of war, but they also highlight narratization as a process. Their work furthermore alerts us to keeping a keen eye on cultural expressions and artefacts that perhaps have not been included in canonic collections and archives, do not confirm to accepted formats and therefore have remained outside the limelight where historians seek narratives of war.

Positions and Perspectives Narratives of war are omnipresent in modern societies; they are embedded in our cultural memory, enrich our vocabulary and influence our human sensibilities. The stories that we share seem to be without beginning or end, because old stories continue to be told while new experiences are being shoehorned into prevailing plots and formats, and moreover, as noted in the Introduction to this volume, in the words of philosopher Louis Mink, ‘life has no beginnings, middles, end […] [they belong to] the story we tell ourselves later’.41 If we assume that narratives of war are told from specific authorial positions or points of view, that they include distinctive ‘character types’, and are disseminated through various media, we nevertheless notice how major changes have taken place in the content of war stories in the past two centuries. In general, there is a clear polyphony, recorded and distributed through various media, in writing and via audio-visual media. Perhaps we can speak here of an emancipation process, even if it is of a mournful character, since it relates to the increased involvement of ever-larger groups of people in war and to the way in which everyday language and popular culture is permeated with war images and metaphors. In fiction, however, but also in the context of transitional justice and truth commissions, there is clear evidence of more visibility and a greater variety of narrative voices. On European territory, the stories are still dominated by the great confrontations of the First and Second World Wars, supplemented by the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia. When extending the focus to a global scale,

218  Ensel, Wintle and Adler it becomes clear that European citizens and states have been embroiled in a constant stream of armed conflicts throughout the twentieth century. War stories were already and have remained part of shared global experiences, but at the same time, persistent ‘history wars’ make clear that canonical themes and emplotments have come under fire. Foregrounding the colonial experience, or debating the character types of perpetrator, bystander and victim, are but a few critical examples. The archive as an organizing principle, adorned and materialized in a plethora of institutions, offers the opportunity to observe a huge variety of human experiences with war. The studies in this volume call attention to the circumstances under which stories are transferred, noted and enunciated, as well as the silences, or that which remains unspoken or not captured in narrative form, often through self-censorship. That increased visibility and importance has fostered polyphony, but the institutionalization may also lead unintentionally to a further degree of uniformity. The studies presented here confirm Saul Friedländer’s dictum that writing on war offers a testing ground par excellence for our ‘conceptual and representational categories’.42 Those war stories demonstrate changes in narrative emplotments and character types, and invite further questioning about forms of institutionalization, the limits of narrativization and, ultimately, the function of the historian as storyteller.

Notes 1 E. Porter, ‘Gendered narratives: stories and silences in transitional justice’, Human Rights Review, 2016, vol. 17, 35–50. 2 A. Portelli, ‘Oral history as genre’, in M. Chamberlain and P. Thompson (eds.), Narrative & Genre: Contexts and Types of Communication, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998, pp. 23–45, p. 26. 3 S. Friedländer (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 4 G. Prince, Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: Mouton, 1982. 5 G. Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 6 Character type links up with Vladimir Propp’s ‘spheres of action’ (of hero, villain, etc.): N. Lacey, Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies, Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000. 7 W.F. Schoeller, ‘Ein hallendes Monster. Das Völkerschlachtdenkmal’, in W.F.  Schoeller, Deutschland vor Ort. Geschichten, Mythen, Erinnerungen, ­Berlin: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005, pp. 146–56; K.A. Schäfe, ‘Die Völkerschlacht’, in E. François and H. Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002, vol. 2, pp. 187–201. 8 In fact Körner was mortally wounded in a battle at Kitzen, 20 km southwest of Leipzig. Probably his most famous martial song is ‘Bundeslied vor der Schlacht’ (Nur in dem Opfertod reift uns das Glück). T. Körner and K. Streckfuss, Theodor Körner’s Sammtliche Werke, Berlin: Karl Gerold, 1838, p. 26. 9 The battle retained significance in Nazi Germany as its participants were supposed to foreshadow the nation’s Volksgemeinschaft. When Leipzig became part of East

Twentieth-Century Narratives of War  219 Germany, the battle could simultaneously figure as a symbol of Western (‘Napoleonic’) militarism and, because of the anti-Napoleonic Russo-Prussian coalition, German-Russian solidarity. 10 G.L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 1990. 11 Greig, in Chapter 3 of this volume. 12 See also Van Vree, Chapter 6 in this volume; R. Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, in T. Todorov (ed.), French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 11–18. 13 A thematic overview is presented in S. Dudink, K. Hagemann and J. Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. 14 T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, New York: Penguin, 2005. 15 M. Schulz, ‘Leipzig 1813–2013: Jubiläum Völkerschlacht und Völkerschlechtdenkmal’, 18 October 2013, available at: www.europarl.europa.eu, accessed 5 March 2019. 16 Portelli, ‘Oral history as genre’, p. 27. Outside the battlefields, the First World War was brought home by way of personal reports, letters and postcards. 17 C.R. Koppes and G.D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: Patriotism, Movies and the Second World War from Ninotschka to Mrs. Miniver, London, New York: Tauris Parke, 2000; C. Boggs and T. Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: US Militarism and Popular Culture, New York, London: Routledge, 2007. 18 Much to the annoyance of the judges, the testimonies were a crucial part of the prosecution. D. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, New York: Nextbook, Schocken, 2011, p. 141. 19 The Slave Narrative Project, for instance, contains 2,300 first-person accounts that were recorded in the years 1936–38: ‘Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938’. Available at www.loc.gov/collections/slavenarratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/, ­accessed 5 March 2019. In the 1980s and 1990s the Imperial War Museum carried out interviews with almost 200 British veterans of the Great War that are now deposited in the museum’s Sound Archive: P. Hart, Voices from the Front: An Oral History of the Great War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 20 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon, 1972, pp. 77–131. 21 Elsewhere Foucault speaks of the ‘fabrication de l’individualité cellulaire, organique, génétique et combinatoire’ by way of ‘répartition et de classement’. M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, pp. 224–7. 22 H. Freshwater, ‘The allure of the archive’, Poetics Today, 2003, vol. 24(4), 729–58, p. 35. 23 P. Basu and F. de Jong, ‘Utopian archives, decolonial affordances: introduction to a special issue’, Social Anthropology, 2016, vol. 24(1), 5–19. 24 K. Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 25 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 126. 26 A. Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. See also A. Wieviorka, ‘The witness in history,’ Poetics Today, 2006, vol. 27(2), 385–97. Wieviorka mentions the initiative of the Central Committee of Polish Jews to gather testimonials as early as 1944 (there are now 7,300 of them). 27 Currie, Narratives and Narrators, p. 11. 28 J. Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 17; A. Arvetu, ‘Spectres of Freud: the figure of the archive in Derrida and Foucault’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 2011, vol. 44, 141–59.

220  Ensel, Wintle and Adler 29 J. Caplan and J. Torpey (eds.), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. 30 F. de Jong, ‘At work in the archive: introduction to a special issue’, World Art, 2016, vol. 6(1), 3–17, p. 6; A.L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 31 M. Rubin, cited in A. Arcangeli, Cultural History: A Concise Introduction, London: Routledge, 2012, p. 6. 32 A. De Baets. Responsible History, foreword by Jürgen Kocka, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009. 33 J-F. Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, Paris: CNAF, 1979. 34 The philosophical underpinnings of this type of historiography had already been discussed by F. Ankersmit in his History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 125–30. 35 M. Hénaff and J-L. Morhange, ‘The anecdotal: truth in detail’, SubStance, 2009, vol. 38(1), 97–111. 36 G. Kuipers, Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke, Berlin: De Gruyter/ Mouton, 2015, p. 1. 37 P. Nora, ‘General introduction: between memory and history’, in P. Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, New York: Columbia Press, 1996, pp. 1–20. 38 See also M. Stefanovsk, ‘Exemplary or singular? The anecdote in historical narrative’, SubStance, 2009, vol. 38(1), 16–30; T.G. Ashplant, ‘Anecdote as narrative resource in working-class life stories: parody, dramatization and sequence’, in M. Chamberlain and P. Thompson (eds.), Narrative & Genre: Contexts and Types of Communication, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998, pp. 9–13. 39 J. Winter, ‘Remembering injustice and the social construction of silence’, in C. Barbaot and L. Davis (eds.), Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory, Kent: Kent State University Press, 2012, pp. 49–64, p. 50. 40 Prince, Narratology, p. 152. 41 L.O. Mink, ‘History and fiction as modes of comprehension’, New Literary History, 1969, vol. 1, 557–8. 42 S. Friedländer, ‘Introduction’, in S. Friedländer (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation, pp. 1–21, pp. 2–3.

Index

Note: italic page numbers refer to figures. actualities 86–7 air warfare, WWII, historiography 73–5 Alexander, Bill 168, 171 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 83–5, 90–5; see also Im Westen nichts Neues American Civil War 20, 85–6 Amsterdam, Jewish 193, 199 anecdotal storytelling 190–1, 194–5, 198–200 Appleby, Scott 150–1, 157 archives 212–5; archival thinking 53; Dutch Custody Institute 52–63; Holocaust 180, 212–3 Arizpe, Juan Bautista de 40 artists, war 18–9, 24, 47; ILN and L’Illustration 23–4, 25–8 Ashplant, Timothy 190–1, 199 atrocities, war: Bosnia 146, 149; see also ethnic cleansing; genocide attrition 20, 21, 23, 31 Austria, Austrians, NBI archive 56–7, 59–60 authenticity, eye witness 184–5 autobiography: war novels as 106; see also memoirs Banja Luka, Ferhadija Mosque 157 Barbusse, Henri 106–8 Bataan 94 battle narratives 8, 18–34 Battle of the Somme, The (1916) 87–8, 89 battle painting 18–9, 47 battlefield films 85, 93–6; as cultural memory 90, 96; see also combat films; trench warfare Beheersdossiers 52

Belarusians 130 Bergen-Belsen, Sternlager 190–201 Berlin, Allied bombing of 74, 75 Big Parade, The (1925) 89–90 biography, and historiography 64–6 Bloom, Charles 170, 171 Boer Wars 45, 86 Bonaparte, Napoleon 40, 68; see also Napoleonic memoirs Booker, Christopher 121 border areas, Netherlands and Germany, NBI archive 58 ‘border farmers,’ NBI archive 58–9 Bosnia and Herzegovina: ethnic groups 148; interreligious dialogue, and the Interreligious Council (MRV) 151–3, 155–7; peacebuilding 153–5; reconciliation 146–8; religion 148–51 Bourke, Joanna 95 Brajovic´, Zoran 152 ‘Brexit’ 119–20 Bringa, Tone 147 Britain, British: Peninsular War memoirs 38, 44–5; propaganda cinema 87–8; see also International Brigade Brodeur, Patrice 152–3 Brown, Jim 168 bureaucratic procedure 52 Byron, Lord 169–70 Callot, Jacques 85 camera techniques, new 84 Carr-Gomm, Francis 39 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 105 censorship 30 Centre for Peacebuilding (CIM), NGO 152–5

222 Index character types 208–12; see also civilian survivor-witnesses; ordinary soldiers; veterans, war Chmiel, Lech 133 cinema of attractions 86 cinematography, new 87, 94; see also sound, filmic citizenship, revocation of 167 civilian survivor-witnesses 180–203 Clark, Janine 149, 150, 156 Cochin, Augustin 29 Cold War 69, 117 collaborators 54 collective memory, WWII 67 collective narratives see myth(s) colonial campaigns, British 45 combat films 81, 83–5, 94; see also trench warfare Communism 129, 153, 167, 169; see also Soviet Union comradeship and brotherhood 93 conscription, WWI 22 context 38, 48, 65–6, 76, 122, 182–3 Copeman, Fred 173 Council for Restorations of Rights 55, 61 counter-narratives 129, 131–2, 134–5 Crane, Stephen 18 Crimean War 19–20 Crnjanski, Miloš 106 Cru, Jean Norton 105, 107–10 Cuba 43 cultural memory 14, 90, 96, 217 Daily Mail 170 Darimon, Alfred 44 Dayton Peace Agreements 147–8, 155 Decree on Enemy Property 51, 56, 58, 61 Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) 132 diaries 19, 68, 105, 191–3, 195, 196 digital testimonies, Holocaust 180–9 Dijk, Adriaan van 167, 168, 170 displacement 147 Doernberg, Stefan 66, 67, 69–70 Donaldson, Joseph 39 Dorgeles, Roland 108–10 Dos Passos, John 102 Dresden 75 Dumur, Louis 106 Dunkirk (2017) 81–2, 92 Dutch Custody Institute (NBI) 51–63; guidelines for de-enemization 59–61; language and bureaucracy of 55, 57; location and role 54–5

Dutch military volunteers (Brigadistas) see under Netherlands East Galicia, Polish-Ukrainian massacres 127–40 East Germany see German Democratic Republic (GDR) Edison 86–7 education, primary: in France and Britain 45; see also history textbooks Eijk, Jan van 168–73 embodiment 185 emotions, eye witnesses’ 185 enemy state/citizens, definitions of 56 Erbelding, Erich 102 Erdmann, Karl-Dietrich 66–9 ethnic cleansing 128, 135, 139, 153 European Economic Community (EEC) 117–8 European nation-states, war narratives 209 European Union (EU): Poland and Ukraine in 136; unification/identity discourse 119–26; war and 116–9 Falkenhayn, Erich von 20 Falls, Cyril 104–5 farmers, border areas of Netherlands 58 Favier, Arie 167, 169, 173 film see combat films; silent films; trench warfare First World War: battle narratives 18–34; representations of 87–8; see also trench warfare Fort of Douaumont 26 France, French: at the battle of Verdun 21–2, 25–8; Peninsular War memoirs 38, 43–4 Francis, E. 168 Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) 43–4 Funk Deckard, Julianne 148–50, 153 Fussell, Paul 92 Gance, Abel 89 Gazeta Wyborcza 136, 137 genocide 71, 73, 139, 140, 211, 213; see also Holocaust German Democratic Republic (GDR), German historians, WWII 66–7, 69–70, 73–5 Germany, German 66, 117; enemy citizens, Dutch policy on 51–63; war narrative 208–9; WWII, civilian

Index  223 casualties 75; see also German Democratic Republic (GDR); Holocaust; Nazism; Western Federal Republic (FRG) Gibbs, Philip 23–4 Gleig, George 42 Goya, Francisco 85 Grande Illusion, La (1937) 84 grassroots peace-building initiatives, Bosnia 153, 157 Graves, Robert 106 Great War see First World War Griffith, D.W. 89 Groehler, Olaf 66, 70, 73–5 Gross, Jan T. 138 Guatemala, dictatorship in 53, 54 Gunning, Tom 86 Hachette (Parisian publishers) 46–7 Hague, The, NBI archive 53–4 Hamburg 75 Hanukkah 197 Hartman, Geoffrey 181 Hearts of the World 89 heroism 23, 85, 95, 130, 133, 140, 170, 210–12 Herzberg, Abel 192, 196 Heuskel, Theo 196–7, 199 Hillgruber, Andreas 64, 70–2 historiography 64–6, 69, 76, 185–6 history, as narrative 122–3 history textbooks 46–7; on PolishUkrainian massacres 127–40 Hitler, Adolf 68–73, 90 Holocaust 83, 127, 138, 180–9, 212–13; see also Sternlager, Bergen-Belsen Hynes, Samuel 18, 101, 108 identity politics, European 116–26 Illustrated London News (ILN) 22–5 Im Westen nichts Neues 90, 102–5; press reviews 103; see also All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) imams, Bosnia 150, 154–6 Imperial War Museum (IWM) 165–6 index-cards, NBI archive 55–8 India, colonial tales of 45 Insdorf, Annette 83 intention, authorial 107–8 International Brigade volunteers (Brigadistas) 165–79 International Institute of Social History 166

Interreligious Council (MRV), Bosnia 155–7 Islam 154–5 Italians, post-WWII Dutch policy on 51, 56 IWitness, VHA 180 J’Accuse (1919) 89 Jäckel, Eberhard 64–6 Jagiełło, Bogdan 133 Jakovljevic´, Stevan 110–2 Japanese, post-WWII Dutch policy on 51, 56 Jedwabne debate 138 Jerrold, Douglas 104, 112 Jews 56–7, 130, 138; see also Holocaust; Sternlager, Bergen-Belsen Jones, Paul 29–30 justice 55, 62 Kanal (1956) 83, 93–4 Kansteiner, Wulf 187 Katyń massacre 130 Kaymakchalan, battle of 110–2 Klinkert, Wim 170 Körner, Theodor 208 Kozemjakin, Igor 147, 156 Krejakovic´, Svetislav 112 Kropp, Peter 103–4, 111 Kubrick, Stanley 83, 84, 93 Kwas´niewski, Aleksander 132 Ladysmith, siege of 45 Leipzig, battle of 208–9 Leningrad, siege of 68 letters, soldiers’ 19, 28–32; see also memoirs liberalism 42, 71–2 L’Illustration 22, 25–8 Linda, Abraham van (Appie) 190–201 Lipniki 137 literacy rates 19, 45 Löbe, Paul 103 loyalty, notions of 60, 62 machine-based warfare 20 Madelin, Louis 31–2 Malick, Terence 93 Malins, Geoffrey 87 Marbot, General 46 Marne, Battle of the 21 marriages, German-Dutch and DutchGerman 58

224 Index masculinity 18, 29 master-narratives 128, 130–2, 136, 138 Mayne, T. 168 McAdams, Dan 168, 171 McDowell, John 87 Medrzecki, Włodzimierz 134–5 Meijer, Ischa 190, 191, 199 Meijer, Jaap 190–201 Meijer, Liesje 191 memoirs: Peninsular War 37–50; see also personal narratives memorial/political cultures, WWII 66–7 memory studies 96 Merdjanova, Ina 152–3 Merkel, Angela 120 Messel, Saul van see Meijer, Jaap Messerschmidt, Manfred 66, 70, 72–3 Mexico City, manifiestos 40 Milestone, Lewis 81, 90; see also All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt 70 Mina, Francisco Espoz y 40–2 mineworkers, NBI archive 57 Moore Smith, George C. 45 myth(s) 6, 21–8, 32, 67, 134, 169 Napier, William 39 Napoleonic memoirs 44, 46–7 National Socialism 68–9, 72, 103 nationalism 119, 121, 127, 130, 133, 148 NATO 136, 147 Nazism 57, 71, 131; see also Hitler, Adolf NBI archive 51–63 Neijssel, Karel 172 Netherlands: International Brigade volunteers (Brigadistas) 165–79; as non-military 170–1, 173; online portal Getuigenverhalen. nl (‘eyewitness stories’) 181–9; post-WWII, and German enemy citizens 51–63 Neuville, Alphonse de 19 Nicolau, Francisco 42 Nolan, Christopher 81, 84 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Bosnia, on religion and reconciliation 149, 152 Norman, Joe 167 novels, WWI 101–15; critics on 105, 107–10; read as non-fiction 106 Omanovic´, Vahidin 154–5 oral history projects: Spanish Civil War 165–79; see also video testimonies ordinary soldiers 44, 84, 89–90, 210

Pabst, G.W. von 93 pacifism 89, 92, 171, 174; and EU narrative of unification 119–26 painters, military 18–9, 47; see also artists, war pamphlets, autobiographical, Peninsular War 40 paradoxical coherence 116–7, 120–3 Peninsular War memoirs 37–50; dedicated and marketed to future soldiers 38–9; ordinary soldiers, focus on 44; reused in South America 39–43 Pennebaker, J. 168, 174 Pérez-Moris, José 43 Personal Data Protection Act (Wet Beschermings Persoonsgegevens). 2000 52 personal narratives, and national culture 166–71 photography, war 86 Poelgeest, Arie van 174–5 poetry, Holocaust 194, 199, 200 Poland, Polish: democratization of history teaching and textbooks 129; Eastern Borderlands, WWII massacres 127–44 Polish-Ukrainian Textbook Commission 135 politicians, Bosnia 148, 150 Portugal 42 postal control, WWI 30–2 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 166, 172, 175 Prijedor 146, 153 Prochasson, Christophe 108 propaganda 72–3, 87–8 property confiscation, German enemy citizens 55 PTSD see Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Public Records Act (Archiefwet), 1995 52 published letters, WWI 29–30 Puerto Rico 43 Radio Oranje 60 Radziwiłł, Anna 131–2 Rahmanovic´, Mevludin 154 realism 86–8, 91, 94 reconciliation, Poland and Ukraine 136 Red Army 67, 69 Reeves, Nicholas 88 refugees 146, 147 religious initiatives, Bosnia 145; and reconciliation 148–55

Index  225 religious symbols/rituals, and Bosnian war 149 Remarque, Erich Maria 83, 90, 102–5, 108 Renn, Ludwig 106 Renoir, Jean 84–5 resistance movements 60–1 Ricoeur, P. 183, 187 Roberts, E. 169 Roszkowski, Wojciech 131–2 Russia: Napoleon’s war on 68; Nazi war of extermination against 73; see also Soviet Union Sanski Most 145, 146, 153–4 Saving Private Ryan (1998) 82, 92–5 Scheerboom, Herman 168 school textbooks 46, 127–40 Schumann Plan (1950) 117 search technology, fragment-level 183–4 Second World War: post-war recovery 117; see also European Union (EU); Holocaust sectarianism 153 SED 66–7, 73, 75 sensory effects, filmic 92–3 Serbian Orthodox priests 156 Serbian Trilogy 110–2 Sevilla, Rafael de 43 Sharp, Granville 46 shell shock 174; see also trauma; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder siege warfare 19–21, 26, 32, 45, 68 silent films 86, 89–90 Smith, Harry 45 Snyder, Timothy 127–8, 135 Sobchack, Vivian 92 social control, post-WWII 54 socialism, and WWII, political memory 66–7 Solidarity 131, 132 Somme, Battle of the 21–8; letters on 29–30; the press on 21–5 Sorlin, Pierre 87–9 sound, filmic 92 South Africa see Boer Wars South America, Spanish manifiestos 39–43 Soviet Union 68, 69; defeat of Nazi Germany 67; secret police (NKVD) 127, 130 Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (SED) 66–7, 73, 75 Spain, Spanish: Carlist War 42, 48; Civil War volunteers 165–79; French

occupation of 41, 85; Peninsular War memoirs 38, 43, 44 Spanish-American War 86 speech acts, and European identity 116–7 Spielberg, Steven 82, 94, 180, 181 Staatscourant 59 stereotypes 89 Sternlager, Bergen-Belsen 190–201 Stola, Dariusz 138 Stoler, Ann Laura 53 subjectivity 185 supranationalism 121–3 Syta, Andrzej 133 Szczes´niak, Andrzej L. 133 Szuchta, Robert 134 ‘terror archives,’ NBI 54 testimonies, WWI 101–15; see also digital testimonies The Thin Red Line (1998) 93 Theresienstadt 198 Thirty Years’ War 85 Tolstoy, L. 18–20 trauma, military volunteers 168–9, 171–5 trench warfare, representations of 87, 89–95 Tröbitz, East Prussia 190, 198, 199 truth-seeking and reparations, Bosnia 147 Tusiewicz, Roman 134 Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) 128, 131–3, 136–8, 140 Ukrainian textbooks 135 Under Fire (Diary of a Gun-Squad) 106–7 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 147 values, wartime culture 18, 28, 29, 44 Variety 83 Vedel, Lieutenant General de 41 Venezuela 43 Verdun, Battle of 21–8; letters on 29–32 veterans, war: Peninsular War memoirs 37–50; and WWI novels 101–15 victimhood 75, 127, 130, 137–8, 193; see also master-narratives Vidal-Naquet, Clémence 30 video testimonies, Holocaust 180–9 Visser, Sake 169, 174 Visual History Archive (VHA) 180

226 Index Volhynia, Polish-Ukrainian massacres 127–40 volunteer citizen-soldiers 22 volunteer fighters, Spanish Civil War 165–79 voyeurism 86 Wajda, Andrzej 83, 93–4 war artists see artists, war War Books Controversy 101–5 war diaries, WWII see diaries weaponry, modern 20 Wehrmacht 60, 66–8, 70; role in Nazi ideology 71–3 Weld, Kirsten 53 Westerbork, Dutch transit camp 190, 192, 193, 199

Western Allies’ aerial policy, WWII 74 Western Federal Republic (FRG), German historians of WWII 66–73 Westfront 1918 93 What Price Glory? (1926) 90 White, Hayden 122–3 Wim de Jong 170, 171, 174 Wings (1927) 90 Winter, Jay 4, 107, 216 Witnesses 109 women, Dutch, NBI archive 58 Woodville, R. Caton 24–5 writing, and trauma 168 Zahirovic´, Ishak 145–6 Zionism 192, 193 Zúniga y Ontiveros, Don Mariano de 40