Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience
Author(s): George L. Mosse
Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), pp. 491-513
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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George L.Mosse
Two WorldWarsand the
Mythof the WarExperience
Much has been written about that continuity between the two world
wars which seems immediate and direct: the second world war broke
out as a result of the failure to restore an equilibrium after the
violence, cost and passion of the first world war. The continuity
between the first world war and the inter-war years has struck not
only modern historians, but was on the minds of both the victims and
the instigators of violence. Thus in 1934, the newly exiled German
theatre critic Alfred Kerr wrote that what he was witnessing was not
war once more, but a mental confusion and universal chaos which
were an extension of the first world war. At the same time, one of his
nazi persecutors wrote that the war against the German people was
continuing, that the first world war was only its bloody beginning.2
I do not intend to make a general comparison between these wars
in keeping with such perceptions of the continuity between them;
instead, I want to centre my analysis upon a comparison between the
wars through a consideration of some of their consequences. While I
will confine my analysis to examples drawn mainly from England and
Germany with some attention to France, my conclusions could then
be applied, modified or rejected by those familiar with the history of
various individual nations which took part in both wars. Moreover, I
will not be concerned with the perceptions of those soldiers who were
at the rear and never experienced fighting at first hand, but only with
front-line soldiers. The front-line soldier in the first world war created
the Myth of the War Experience, and, as a 'new race of men',
symbolized the war's promise. When the borders between the front
line and the home front became blurred, as in the second world war, it
affected the way in which the conflict was seen in retrospect. This
essay is intended to put forward certain hypotheses about the impact
of the wars upon people's perceptions, which might help to explain
some of their political consequences.
The first world war was an unprecedented experience in men's
lives, one which had to be confronted and dealt with - on a personal,
Journal of ContemporaryHistory (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills, Newbury Park and
New Delhi), Vol. 21 (1986), 491-513
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Journal of ContemporaryHistory
political and cultural level. These levels of experience were closely
related through the manner in which men and women confronted the
war by building it into their lives - domesticating the war experience,
as it were, making it an integral part of their environment, their
cultural aspirations and political dreams.
The first world war was a watershed, not only in people's lives, but
also in politics and culture, even where a facade of normalcy was
restored after the war. To be sure, the original enthusiasm of 1914 had
given way to boredom, numbness, cynicism and even unrest during
the course of the war. But after the war had ended, and even to a
certain extent during the war itself, the reality of the war was
submerged into the Myth of the War Experience. This myth
summarized some of the main themes which had moved men during
one or another stage of the war: the spirit of 1914, the war as a test of
manliness, the ideal of camaraderie and the cult of the fallen soldier
- a whole series of attitudes which helped men confront and accept
this unprecedented experience, and informed many of the literary,
artistic and political perceptions after the first world war. Whatever
the recasting of Europe after the war, the Myth of the War Experience
became a powerful engine of personal and public life, more in the
dissatisfied than in the satisfied nations, though even here it was
destined to play its part. The absence of an effective Myth of the War
Experienceconstitutes one of the most important differences between
the first and the second world wars. It meant that after 1945 the
difficult transition from war to peace did not lead to a quest for a new
politics or experimentalliteraryand artistic forms, but was embedded
in traditional politics and traditional values - some like Christian
Democracy and liberalism, even though willing to try some reforms,
essentially attempting to recapture a bourgeois age as it had existed
even before the first world war. The myth of this golden age seemed to
obliterate the Myth of the War Experience, which, for all its nostalgia
for a national past uncontaminated by modernity, had sought new
departures in personal lifestyles and politics.
The Myth of the War Experience was created by the volunteers
who had streamed to the colours in 1914, educated young men from
the middle classes, officers for the most part. Many of them saw the
war as bringing both personal and national regeneration: they had a
sense of being a people apart even before they met in the trenches.
Their war has been described by Paul Fussell and Robert Wohl, and
we shall not repeat their discussion of what was known as the spirit of
1914,3except as it bears upon the Myth of the War Experience. Here
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
493
there was a sense of freedom from the burdens of daily life, and
Friedrich Schiller's song, 'Only the soldier is free', was repeated in
various nations and tongues. 'I had no idea what war meant,' wrote
Robert Read in England, 'to me it meant freedom.'4 The war as an
escape from the restraint of bourgeois life, giving purpose to
purposeless lives, was described as a festival - that is as an event
exhilarating through its exceptionality, standing outside and above
daily routine. These voices may not have reflected the temper of the
troops at the time, though the French military, for one, was surprised
by the low desertion rate at mobilization.5Nevertheless, they spoke to
crucial needs in the post-war world.
The spirit of 1914found its most obvious and concrete continuation
after 1918 among those groups of men who wanted to repeat this
heady experience in the midst of the confusion and compromises of
post-war politics. Subsequent wars continued to evoke a similar
response from many volunteers: it has been said that young men went
to Spain in the 1930s to fight for the republic as their elders had gone
to Flanders two decades earlier. The English philosopher and pacifist
C.E.M. Joad was reminded in 1937 of scenes from 1914 when, during
one of his pacifist lectures, a young volunteer who had been wounded
in Spain walked into the hall to be greeted by tumultuous applause
from the audience.6 The spirit of 1914 also played its part among
those who joined Germany's foreign armies in the second world war.
Whatever opportunism prompted enlistment, whatever not so gentle
pressureforced men from different countries into brigadescontrolled
by the SS, the ideals they articulated without much prompting could
have come from the generation of 1914. The history of such
volunteers has not yet been written, and yet they filled the ranks of
International Brigades of the left and the right, pointing to a
continuity between the wars which addressed a need felt by many
young men.7
The evocation of the spirit of 1914 as leading to action was
extensively used by the political right in Germany and Italy: no doubt
it played a part in providing inspiration for the nazi SA and the
Italian fascist squadristas. Before 1933, images of Fiihrer and Reich
had already become central to German ideals of national regeneration, transmitted by the spirit of 1914.8Young English writers of the
mid-nineteen-twenties, Christopher Isherwood tells us, regretted
missing the war as a test of their manhood.9 The spirit of 1914, so
different from the numbness and threat of execution which actually
kept many soldiers fighting,10served as one post-war bridge between
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Journal of ContemporaryHistory
the horror and the glory of war. And yet the outbreak of the second
world war could not re-ignite the spirit of 1914. For all the
indoctrination of Nazi Youth with the spirit which had inspired the
volunteers of the first world war, and the cult of sacrificial death
which was part of the education of the Hitler Youth,11Adolf Hitler
himself was careful to emphasize that this was a defensive war and
one meant to restore what had been taken unjustly from Germany,
ratherthan a means of personal and national regeneration. The mood
in 1939 was sober in the fascist nations as well as in England and
France.
The failure to recreate the spirit of 1914 in 1939 seems to illustrate
the difference between ceremonial appeals and practical action in
fascism, but more importantly, the resurrection of the spirit of 1914
as a call to adventure and manliness was balanced by memories of the
last war. After all, in 1914 most people had no memory of war, while
in 1939 those who had lived through the Great War were still in their
prime. The Myth of the War Experience could disguise but never
eliminate accurate memories of the past, as manifested in the
reluctance of most men and women to wage war again. Bill
Gammage's study of the letters and diaries of some thousand
Australian front-line soldiers of the first world war, almost the sole
analysis of its kind, provides an insight into this ambivalence which
explained the need for the Myth of the War Experience. He concluded
that veterans tried to forget the tragic years of the war as quickly as
possible, and yet, as they resumed civilian life, they remembered the
security, purposefulness and companionship of the war.12 Many
veterans considered the war years in retrospect as the happiest years
of their lives. The Myth of the War Experience attempted to reconcile
these contradictory attitudes, making it easier to confront the
memory of life in the trenches. This was no mere nostalgia, but
through recalling ideals supposedly experienced by millions during
the war, the horror was to be transcended and the meaning which the
war had given to individual lives retained. Here the companionship of
war-time camaraderie, shared at one time or another by almost
everyone in the trenches, proved more important than the spirit of
1914which for most soldiers remainedrhetoricratherthan experience.
War-time camaraderie, together with the cult of the fallen soldier,
stood at the centre of the Myth of the War Experience, making it
possible to attach positive meaning to life in the trenches.
We do not actually know what camaraderie in the trenches meant
to the simple soldier in the front lines. The only personal survey taken
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
495
of a tiny sample of French soldiers towards the end of the war showed
that a common religious or regional background was as important a
bond among soldiers as that forged by common danger. Moreover,
personal friendships predominated rather than those among groups
of soldiers. The results of this survey were reinforced by a contemporary German observer for whom the spirit of camaraderie in
the trenches lost its hold during the first years of the war - and yet,
when he comes to describe moments of danger, the sense of
community and camaraderie rises to new and unforeseen heights.'3
The ideal of camaraderie may well have fallen victim to the boredom
and routine of daily life in the trenches, only to be experienced once
more in battle.
Nevertheless, the loyalties of the men were focused upon the squad
which has been called a small welfare state and, it should be added,
one in which a rough-and-ready equality between officers and men
prevailed: 'Equality established itself naturally'.14 Whatever the
reality of trench warfare, after the war it was perceived in large
measure through the experience of fraternityin battle, a comradeship
which separated the little world of the trenches from the base and the
home front - the harbinger of a new and closely knit society.
Looking back upon his British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley
wrote: 'This was the most complete companionship I have ever
known, except in the old regular army in time of war.... We were
banded together by the common danger of our struggle and the
savage animosity of the old world towards us.'5 Not merely fascists
but, for example, the liberal Englishman Herbert Read, as we shall
see, shared the ideal of comradeship as a weapon directed against the
old order. Henri Barbusse's anti-militarist novel UnderFire (1916)
was written in praise of the camaraderie of the squad, while even as a
memberof the Communist Party, he founded a veterans' organization
to which only front-line soldiers were admitted. The quest for this
ideal community transcended national differences and the English as
well as the Germans and French wrote about the world of the
trenches as a closely knit community of men shared by the living and
the dead: the fallen comrades remained a part of the squad.16
This ideal of camaraderie, whether actually experienced in the
trenches, or transfigured in retrospect as part of the Myth of the War
Experience,became an alternativeto parliamentarypolitics, projected
from the war upon peace-time Europe. Those nations whose
transition from war to peace had been especially difficult perceived
the ideal of camaraderie as, identical to the fraternity of the Volk, led
496
Journal of ContemporaryHistory
by an elite devoted to the nation. Once this elite had taken over, the
people themselves would be inspired by such a community - equals
in status if not in function - parallel to the relationship between
officers and men in the trenches. The ideal of camaraderie as central
to the Myth of the War Experience has been ignored as providing a
new political alternative available after the war - like the left-wing
soldiers' and workers' councils - only more successful as fascism
and much of the nationalist right saw themselves as the heirs of the
fraternity of the trenches.17 In spite of Barbusse's own front-line
veterans' organization,'8 this ideal could not be integrated into the
ideology of the left with its emphasis upon rationalism, pacifism and
equality between the sexes. How important this particular failure of
the left proved to be in encouraging the rise of fascism remains to be
investigated,but given the power of veteransin defeated or disgruntled
nations, the failure to assimilate this particular form of camaraderie
was bound to have negative political consequences. As Herbert Read
wrote, representing many front-line soldiers,'... during the war I felt
that this comradeship which had developed among us would lead to
some new social order when peace came'.19It was the political and
nationalist right which promised to fulfil this dream.
Just as 1939 could not re-ignite the spirit of 1914, of even greater
importance was the failure of the second world war to transform the
ideals of war-time camaraderie into a powerful engine of post-war
politics. To be sure, in Germany the ideal of war-time camaraderie
was used after the second world war to explain why soldiers fought on
to the bitter end though their cause was betrayed by Adolf Hitler;
they felt that they could not desert their comrades.20Yet this contrast
between the morality of the soldiers and Hitler's betrayal, argued
mainly by former veterans, could not re-awaken the ideal of war-time
camaraderie.Instead, the individual soldier, not the squad, dominates
most post-second world war literature. As a reaction against
National Socialism, individualism rather than ideas of community
revived after the war, though accounts of the exploits of individual
squads and regiments remained popular and sold well, and there were
regimental reunions, even though veterans no longer flocked to
veterans' organizations with the enthusiasm they had shown after the
first world war. To be sure, economic pressure was largely absent, as
veterans no longer had to fight for their pensions and benefits.
However, except on the far right, war-time nostalgia was not
politicized or for the most part mobilized for the purpose of present
politics. After the second world war, German literature was rarely
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
497
either nationalist or pacifist, as it had been after 1918. Typically
enough, Erich Maria Remarque, whose All Quieton the WesternFront
(1929) attempted to show the horror and frustration of the first world
war, now trivialized war, turning it into a good adventure story. The
first world war had lifted even mediocre literary talent beyond its
limitations: the second world war no longer did so. The poetry of
Siegfried Sassoon comes to mind; those who admired his bitter and
satirical poems written during the first world war are for the most
part ignorant of the fact that he wrote mediocre patriotic poetry
during the second.21
However, this comparison of the two wars' impact upon cultural
creativity ignores the film, which, especially in France, demonstrated
a level of excellence inspired by the second world war which can be
compared to the best in poetry and prose during the first.22 But
Germany no longer participated in this level of creativity and
commitment; its post-war films such as The Devil's General (1954)
emphasized individual adventure, avoiding the serious issues which
the war had raised, just as in literature Hans Hellmut Kirst's bestselling post-war trilogy of the 1950s criticized the constraints of army
life which, despite some anti-nazi remarks, are independent of time
and place, once again avoiding a confrontation with the specific
issues resulting from war and defeat.23This contrast between the
respective war literatures in Germany can be extended to the manner
in which specific battles were treated after the respective world wars.
Thus the battle of Verdun was said to have transformed the struggle
of men and machines into a new kind of community which liberated
man from his own self and transcended the individual, while the
battle of Stalingrad - its nearest equivalent - was either portrayed
realistically in all its horror, without drawing any political conclusions, or trivializedinto a story of individual courage and adventure.24
The literature which followed the second world war, and not only in
Germany, by and large refused to construct a Myth of the War
Experience in order to confront or to draw lessons from the events in
which the authors had participated.
The different nature of the war itself, not trench warfare, but a war
of movement - the blurringof the once-clear distinction between the
battle line and the home front - was an important factor in the
absence of the Myth of the War Experience after the second world
war.25Front-line soldiers now found it difficult to regard themselves
as a class apart, to follow the example of Barbusse's veterans'
organization, the Arditi in Italy or the German storm-troopers -
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Journal of ContemporaryHistory
well-defined bodies of men claiming to act as elites on behalf of the
nation. They had provided the cadres of D'Annunzio's Legions, the
fascist squadristas and the shock troops of the German political right,
inspired by the spirit of 1914 and the ideals of war-time camaraderie.
Such groups did not re-emerge after 1945 - there was no longer a
Myth of the War Experience upon which they could build. Nor was
there a new wave of books describing war as an inner experience
which had been so popular in Germany after the first world war.26
Certainly, an Ernst Jiinger would have been out of place in any but
trench warfare, but the general lack of an internalization of war
suggests a radical difference in the means through which the war
experience was confronted. Now a certain numbness, a will to forget,
took the place of the Myth of the War Experience and the
ambivalence about the war, which Bill Gammage had found among
his first world war veterans, was no longer relevant.
Yet, together with these dominant trends in post-war Germany, a
new myth arose in the shadow of the cold war. While the warjust past
could provide the setting, the thrust of this myth was not directed
towards transcending the horror of war, but instead sought gently
and at times indirectly to exorcise the crimes of the nazi past. In order
to discover this myth, we must look not to the literature read by
intellectuals or the more cultivated bourgeois, but rather to that
popular literaturewhich, however spuriously, made some pretence at
seriousness, as against romances, adventure or detective stories. The
so-called Landserhefte(journalsof the 'ordinaryfoot-soldier') provide
a good example of such myth-making. They told simple but uplifting
war stories, detailed accounts of individual battles or the exploits of
former war heroes such as Hans-Ulrich Rudel or Otto Skorzeny.
Hatred of bolshevism informs these tales, together with dislike of the
slaves and contempt for that unreliable ally, the Italians (here
commonly referred to as 'those Macaroni'). These are brutal stories
in which the enemy's bones are crushed, his head blown off or he is
impaled on a bayonet. To be sure, the ideological thrust is often
hidden beneath the adventure story, but the restorative tendencies of
these monthly and weekly journals is clear enough.
Here also, in addition to war heroes, the individual foot-soldier
and his deeds stood in the foreground, and until the end of the 1960s
the historical background given was sketchy at best. After that time
the setting was somewhat fleshed out, and a little more historical
research seems to have gone into these booklets. A decade later,
statements opposed to war slipped in: the brutality in battle, which
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
499
fills the Landserheftewill, it is hoped, encourage the reader to dislike
all war. Such statements are set off, in a special rubric, from the text
which continues much as before, including the usual stereotype of the
enemy. Concessions were made to the new mood after the 1960s, but
in general the audience towards which the booklets were directed
does not seem to have undergone much change throughout the years.
It has been estimated that until 1977 the various weekly and monthly
Landserheftehad sold millions of copies.27
From the 1950s on, Heinz G. Konsalik became the foremost
practitioner of this genre of popular war literature. His novel, The
Doctor of Stalingrad (1958), perhaps the most widely read of his
books for example, describes the heroism of German doctors in a
post-war Russian prison camp. The 'Asiatic' Russians, who are said
not to be human at all, are confronted by the German prisoners and
their love of the fatherland. The book teems with stereotypes: the
villain, a Tartar, possesses a leathery skin, slit eyes and an evil mouth,
in contrast to the Germans who are usually blond and lithe. The
Jewish stereotype is quietly rehabilitated in the one Jew featured in
the book: not threatening but puny and frightened, with greasy hair
and thick lips.28
The German past is liquidated through a reversal of roles:
conditions in the Russian camp are identical with those in the
German concentration camps, but this time the Germans are the
innocent victims. Moreover, the past is rehabilitated through the
mistreated SS physicians who are admiredfor their modesty, strength
and incorruptibility (though they frankly admit that they performed
medical experiments on humans).29Konsalik in the 1950s reflects a
more general trend in his admiration for the strength, solidarity and
purity of the SS opposed to the prurience of modernity. Thus, at the
beginning of the decade, Ernst von Salomon in his Questionnaire(Der
Fragebogen, 1951), writes about the SS walking through an American
detention camp at the end of the war (here the roles are reversed once
more), 'with nothing on but white trousers... slender, tall and blond,
respected by all'.30However, this stereotype of the SS was spread not
so much by Germans as by past members of the international
brigades of the SS: for example, in France, Saint-Loup (Marc
Augier), through his many books, devoted a lifetime to that task.
None of these writers called for the resurrection of the SS state, but
instead attempted to transform an evil into a respected past,
laundering history rather than calling for its repetition. This myth,
then, had a different function from the Myth of the War Experience:
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Journal of ContemporaryHistory
not aggressive or pointing to the future, but rather attempting to
transform an unpalatable into an acceptable past.
The nation played a role in this kind of myth as well, symbolized by
the strength and decency of the German character. Here there was
continuity, though, once more, the political implications of nationalism were latent rather than active after 1945. The older European
symbols of national immutability had survived the second world war,
as both world wars strengthened the link between nature and the
nation. The nation had always represented itself through preindustrial symbols in order to transcend the ravages of time. Love of
the native landscape was an important expression of national
identity. Soldiers at the front in the first world war used nature as a
symbol of hope, pointing away from the reality of war towards ideals
of personal and national regeneration, to a peaceful and stable world
which now seemed lost, but would be recaptured once the war was
won. Nature, symbolizing the pre-industrial national past, was easily
accessible behind the trenches, remembered as Arcadia, as Paul
Fussell has shown, by those who could claim literary knowledge.31
On another level of pre-industrial symbolism, Virginia Woolf in 1925
remembered that some of the less sophisticated'... went to France to
save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's
plays'.32Walter Flex's The WandererBetween Two Worlds(1915), a
book much quoted until after the second world war, was a paean to
nature, the nation and human beauty. The sun, wood and water fused
with the joy of youth, purified by national sacrifice, in Walter Flex's
book and in the poetry of Rupert Brooke, both symbols of their
war-time generations.
BernardBergonzi has described the British soldier-poet during the
first world war as in all probability a junior officer from a middleclass home whose sensibilities were nurtured by English rural life.33
The creators of the Myth of the War Experience in Germany came
from a similar background, their sensibilities nurtured by a German
Arcadia as they passed through the German Youth Movement and
sought to bring its values to their confrontation with war.
The cult of the fallen soldier during and after the first world war
stood at the core of the Myth of the War Experience, incorporating
some of the principal ideals we have discussed. War-time camaraderie
was symbolized through identical gravestones for officers and men,
though at first officers were buried separately (and still are in Soviet
Russia).34The spirit of 1914 was reflected in the inscriptions as well as
the construction of many war monuments: chaste and pure youths as
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
501
examples of national regeneration. It is only in France that one can
find anti-war war monuments calling for 'never war again', unveiled
by anti-militarists like Henri Barbusse.35The image of the nation
close to nature played its part in the cult of the fallen soldier,
illustrated by the English War Graves Commission's opinion that
there was much to be said for the introduction of the English yew into
war cemeteries from its association with country churchyards.36The
graves of the fallen of every nation were sited in a wood or likened to a
beautiful garden. The pre-industrial image of the nation was
reaffirmed, as, for example, in the controversy over whether or not
war monuments could be mass-produced (after all, every village,
town or city had to have its own memorial). Such mass production
was rejected and the war monuments erected in Germany after the
war of 1870-71 were now condemned as bulk goods which would
never stand the test of time.37Similar controversies erupted over the
mass production of headstones in war cemeteries, and as most of that
work had to be hand-made and not mass-produced, Rudyard Kipling
apologized in 1919 on behalf of the War Graves Commission that not
enough stone-cutting labour was available to expedite the substitution
of more permanent headstones for wooden crosses.38
Did such memorials to the fallen retain their effectiveness as
national shrines until the second world war? Evidence is almost
impossible to obtain, though it seems that by the late 1920s the
curious may have outnumbered the pilgrims among those making the
journey to the cemeteries and memorials of France and Flanders. The
most concrete piece of evidence to date comes from the Saint
Barnabas League in England which sponsored free trips to the battlefields, and which discontinued its work in 1927, asserting that now
tourists outnumbered the pilgrims.39Fascists and National Socialists,
as well as other right-wing regimes, kept the cult of the fallen alive by
building it into their political liturgy. Veterans' movements also
continued to direct pilgrimages to the battlefields for reasons of
nostalgia, or to come to terms with the war experience, but also in
order to draw attention to the plight of the widows, orphans and the
permanently disabled whose pensions were constantly cut during the
Great Depression.40 However, only a year after the Saint Barnabas
League discontinued its pilgrimages, war literature began to flood
Europe, refurbishing at its point of decline the Myth of the War
Experience and with it the cult of the fallen soldier.
The reason why it took a decade after the end of the first world war
until the mass of fiction, diaries and autobiographies made their
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Journal of ContemporaryHistory
appearance, is shrouded in mystery. This was a European-wide
phenomenon, glorifying camaraderie, sacrifice, and the spirit of
1914: the ideal of the nation as veterans perceived it, with a very few
pacifist novels thrown in. Was it that the tenth anniversary of the end
of the war meant a look backwards, or, more likely, that cumulative
disappointment with the peace, now confirmed by the Great
Depression, led to a revival of the Myth of the War Experience, and in
a few cases, such as that of Erich Maria Remarque, to a reconsideration of the war as ultimately responsible for the present crisis?Surely
there was a kind of boredom with the war once it was over, and one
German theologian remarked in 1919, with some surprise, that
bookshops no longer displayed war literature. He guessed that this
might have been different if German soldiers had been victorious, but
such books were absent not only from German bookshops, but also
from those of her former enemies, until the flood of war books
descended upon the reading public ten years later.41
Thus the Myth of the War Experience was extended to the second
world war not only by fascist regimes, but also in the democracies,
despite some lack of reverence for places of national worship.
Between the wars, war cemeteries and war memorials retained a
certain degree of effectiveness, a situation to be changed by the
second world war.
The attitude towards war memorials was different after 1945:
instead of generating patriotic passion, they were met with a certain
indifference, and if a memorial was proposed, it no longer focused
upon the heroic example set by the fallen. Yet a certain fear of the
effectiveness of such monuments in encouraging aggressive nationalism remained: for example, Germany, which had been allowed to
build new war memorials shortly after its defeat in 1918, now had to
wait until 1952before receiving the allies' permission to construct war
monuments.42Such monuments, the Germans themselves suggested,
should no longer contain a dramatic inscription honouring national
martyrs, but a simple dedication to 'our dead'.43 Moreover, they
should be reminders of the devastating consequences of war rather
than its glory. No traditional war monuments honouring soldiers
seem to have been built, and, as late as Memorial Day 1984, the
journal of SS veterans complained that no memorial of bronze and
stone existed to commemorate the soldiers of the second world war.44
Many cities and towns throughout Europe, caught between the
option of erecting traditional war monuments and those thought
suitable for the times, simply added the names of the dead of the
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
503
second world war to those of the first, or left some ruin standing as an
admonition never to wage war again. Whereas after the first world
war memorials had been designated as Ehrenmale,that is, symbols of
national honour, now those which commemorated the second world
war were called Mahnmale, symbols warning against a repetition of
the horrors of war. No second unknown warrior was brought home
with great ceremony in order to keep the older hero company, and
there was therefore no need to erect new monuments to the unknown
soldier. The lament in 1977 of veterans of the Waffen-SS rings true:
the Heroes' Woods for the fallen designed after the first world war
now served as nothing more than a convenient haven for those
wanting to escape the city's air pollution. Yet when from time to time
it was proposed to commemorate the dead, there was still concern,
especially in the smaller localities, that a war memorial should be
built along traditional lines and not reflect modern and abstract
design.45 However little enthusiasm such memorials aroused after
1945, the traditional, pre-industrial view of the nation was not easily
shed.
The debate in England towards the end of the second world war
concerning how the fallen should be commemorated best illustrates
the differences and similarities in this cult between the two world
wars. The debate centred upon the question of whether such
commemoration should follow traditional lines or whether it should
have a utilitarian purpose. Were war memorials to continue to have a
purely liturgical function as national shrines of worship or were they
to take the shape of libraries, parks or gardens, memorials which
. . . would be useful or give pleasure to those who outlive the
war'?46This was not a new controversy between the liturgical as
against the useful. It had been fought out, for example, in Germany
during the mid-twenties with the victory going to the traditionalists:
thus the proposal to build a library as a war memorial had been
rejected.47 Those who had served on the English War Graves
Commission before the second world war attempted to resist the
pressure for change. Sir Edwin Lutyens, that prolific designer of war
monuments after the first world war, argued that '. . . architecture
with its love and passion begins where function ends'.48Moreover, as
he said on another occasion, in a hundred years 1914 and 1939 will be
regarded as part of one war. At first it seemed that Lutyens might
have won his battle, for the architects hired by the War Graves
Commission were traditionalists who would let precedent decide
their designs.49
504
Journal of ContemporaryHistory
Yet even among these ancient gentlemen of the War Graves
Commission we find a change of tone reflecting that opinion we have
noted already: memorials should commemorate the individual rather
than the collectivity, and should contain a warning against all war.50
Moreover, there was growing sympathy for the utilitarian solution in
commemorating the fallen, backed up by a survey taken in 1944
which indicated that the majority preferred such memorials as parks
or gardens which people could enjoy long after the war.51 Lord
Chalfont, the President of the War Memorial Advisory Council,
summed up the dilemma which resultedfrom such popular preference:
'We must be careful... to see that the war memorial is not entirely
indistinguishable from that which is not a memorial'.52He masterminded the compromise which was reached when the National Land
Fund was established in 1946 as the principal English war memorial.
The Land Fund was to acquire great country houses and areas of
natural beauty.53 This memorial democratized, as it were, the
commemoration of the fallen through making the English rural
heritage accessible to all; no longer was the war memorial an abstract
symbol confined to one specific location as the focus of commemorative ceremonies. The Cenotaph, erected after the first world war,
continued to perform this function. Nevertheless, the traditional link
between the nation and nature was kept intact, while the great
country houses were tangible symbols of an honoured past.
War cemeteriesdid not experiencesuch compromise;they remained
as they had been designed during and after the last war. Perhaps here
the options were limited: as Edmund Blunden wrote in 1967, people
came to them as to an English garden.54Cemeteries were designed
according to a tradition of order and beauty which applied both to
civilian and war cemeteries, a means of confronting death not easily
changed or modified. The specific symbols of war cemeteries- death
and resurrection, camaraderie and equality of sacrifice - seemed
timeless, and unlike most traditional war memorials did not
necessarily glorify war or the nation. Edmund Blunden argued that
such cemeteries with their reminders of youth, dead in their prime,
were themselves a sermon against war.55Needless to say, this was not
how they had been officially regarded before the second world war.
Each English war cemetery was considered a beautiful garden, and
the new national war memorial merely extended this principle to
England's native beauty, which had inspired such cemeteries in the
first place. Germany kept the old design of war cemeteries with their
rows of crosses, while the inscription invictis victi victori - the
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
505
unvanquished who will be victorious - often used after the first
world war, was now repudiatedas irrelevant.Nevertheless, traditional
formulas used in obituaries for the fallen were difficult to change, and
at first, after 1945, obituaries of Germans previously missing and now
reported dead contained the phrase, 'Major so-and-so died a hero's
death'. But almost immediately, perhaps under gentle pressure from
the occupying powers, soldiers simply 'died'.56
The English compromise on the nature of war memorials and the
German idea that such memorials should remember the evil rather
than the glory of war, signalled a changed attitude towards death in
war - no longer was such a death undertaken as a joyous sacrifice,
regarded as central to a Myth of the War Experience. The contention
that soldiers fell and did not die, but lived on to continue their work of
national purification, was no longer regarded as important except
among certain right-wing groups. The idea of self-sacrifice motivated
by a feeling of solidarity moved to the foreground: loyalty to the
individual fellow-soldier rather than to any over-riding purpose.57
This interpretation of death in war was strongest in Germany, as we
have seen, where it filled the void left by Adolf Hitler's betrayal. But
even in Britain, where the war had been perceived as a people's war
against fascism, love for the grandiose and the pathetic, which had
been part of the worship of the fallen after the first world war, was
largely absent.
The fear of death played a role in that change, the vision of
Armageddon conjured up not only by the cruelty of a war which
knew little distinction between civilians and soldiers, but above all, by
the first use of the atom bomb. In the first decade after the second
world war there was an obsession with the menace of universal death,
at least in the west, until a certain numbness replaced earlierconcern.
But such fear of death helped to change the attitude towards death in
war and stripped it of much of its remaining glory.
Yet after both world wars, no pacifist movement of any importance
arose in the west. While the pre-war German Peace Movement with
its acceptance of the demands of nation and state was one of the
weakest in Europe, the French movement as part of the cluster of
radical organizations at the turn of the century was somewhat
stronger, helping perhaps to lay the foundations for the anti-war war
memorials after the first world war.58Yet even so, pacifism lacked
political strength. Pacifism was strongest in Britain. There, the Peace
Pledge Union with its declaration, 'I renounce war and never again,
directly or indirectly, will I support and sanction another', attracted
506
Journal of ContemporaryHistory
some 150,000 signatures. The Peace Pledge Union was part of a
network of pacifist societies which drew upon the Christian pacifist
tradition, and it seemed in the England of the 1930s that pacifism
might become a force to reckon with. However, its members proved
fickle in their allegiance.59War could be seen as the lesser of two evils,
as the popular slogan, 'Against War and Fascism' demonstrated, and
indeed, many who had just taken the Peace Pledge enlisted on the
loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. The objections to war by many
pacifists - and by the pacifist wing of the English Labour Party were often directed against the policies of the National Government
rather than against all killing in war. Yet in 1937, C.E.M. Joad
discovered that many undergraduates at the universities of Oxford,
Manchester and London held a consistent pacifist position. He
himself, as an unrelenting opponent of war influenced by eastern
philosophy, recognized the difficulty facing such pacifism: 'Would
you have allowed the Spanish generals to establish fascism over your
own passive body?'60English pacifism was not alone in harbouring
such contradictory aims. Henri Barbusse as a communist may have
inaugurated anti-war war memorials in France, but the slogan,
'Guerre a la Guerre' used, for example, by the Communist Youth
Movement applied only to the so-called militarism of the Third
Republic and not to class warfare.61
The pacifist movements which grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in
Europe contained the same contradictory attitudes towards the
abolition of war: they were against war, but supported the bloody
struggles of Third World nationalist movements. The distinction
between just and unjust wars is hardly pacifist, and yet such
distinction dominated the movement, uneasily after the first world
war but accepted as only right and proper after the second. The only
Europeans who seemed to accept the warning, 'Never Again War'
without reservation were some isolated intellectuals or members of
traditionally pacifist religious movements. Why Europe could not
sustain a consistent and effective pacifist movement after both wars is
one of the many problems raised by a comparison between the first
and second world wars which need further investigation.
Did the Myth of the War Experience, by helping to domesticate
war, to make its acceptance a necessary and given fact of life, lead to a
certain brutalization of public and private life as a consequence of
both wars? Historians of the first world war have noted, '. . . the
extent to which fighting men of all nations adjusted themselves to,
and then accepted over so long a duration the mutilations, the
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
507
indignities, the repeated displays of incompetence by the leaders, and
the plain bestiality of life in the trenches'.62They had little choice: the
threat of summary judgment hung over the heads of those who
attempted to shirk their duties. But the numbness which set in, the
routine of killing and being killed, may have had a brutalizing effect.
The relatively small number of desertions in either war by French,
German or English soldiers needs furtherexamination. Yet it was the
Myth of the War Experience which transfigured the war once peace
arrived. The absence of such an effective transfiguration after the
second world is one of the principal discontinuities between the two
world wars.
It is thus the first rather than the second world war which provides
us with some proof that a process of brutalization took place. The
treatment of political enemies as people to be utterly destroyed in
peace as in war - the language of war applied to peace-time politics
- comes to mind. War-time propaganda, as all censorship was lifted
as far as descriptions of the enemy were concerned, must have had its
effect upon the peace-time stereotyping of the political or racial
enemy, deepening and popularizing what had been a largely rightwing tradition for over a century. However, between the wars, such
stereotyping was also used, though less often, by some of the left: the
communists, but also others; for example, those who criticized the
Republic from a less dogmatic perspective. Thus the stereotyped
faces of generals with the caption, 'Animals Look at You',63used by
KurtTucholski and John Heartfield, were similar to those reproduced
in the nazi pamphlet, 'Jews Look at You'. The victory of the stereotype was certainly an important step in the process of brutalization.
The effective use of postcards and picture books led to an
unprecedented dehumanization of the war-time enemy, as warring
nations not only accused each other of rape, sadism and even
cannibalism, but also furnished the appropriate illustrations to prove
their point.64The first world war was the first European war in which
photography was widely used, and this, together with the immense
popularity of picture postcards, helped to popularize such images
during an ever more visual age. General von Seekt, the German Chief
of Staff after the war, believed that propaganda based upon war-time
atrocities had lost its effectiveness, because most people had been
brutalized by the long war and were apathetic towards this kind of
adversaryrelationship.65The old-fashioned General failed to see that
the end of the first world war began a new age of mass politics: the
politicization of the majority of Europeans, who had up to that time
508
Journal of ContemporaryHistory
by and large stood aside from the political process. Here the tradition
of war-time propaganda proved useful in mobilizing the peace-time
masses. The continued dehumanization of the enemy was a staple of
nationalist, fascist and communist propaganda, which meant that
leadership skilled in the use of mass politics regarded such appeals as
useful and effective.
The Myth of the War Experience played an important, if indirect,
role in such a process of brutalization, making those who accepted its
force more receptive to a renewed war against internal and external
enemies. This meant a greater openness to the adaptation of war-time
propaganda to peace-time uses, even if some former front-line
soldiers had felt no real hatred for those who had fought in the
opposite trenches. The frustrations of the peace felt in various
nations, the economic and political crises, facilitated this process of
radicalization in the perception of the putative enemy. Did the
massacres during and after the war, which were not a part of the Myth
of the War Experience, play a role in encouraging peace-time violence
against domestic and foreign adversaries? There has been no
examination of the effect which the Armenian massacres during the
first world war may have had upon attitudes in the post-war world:66
whether or not they were accepted as a natural by-product of war.
Moreover, from 1937 onwards, the radio drummed the large-scale
killings of Chinese by the Japanese into people's minds, producing a
kind of numbness in the face of the enormous number of dead.
Violent death on behalf of a national cause continued to assault
people's sensibilities after the war, if for the most past as rhetoric
rather than gruesome fact. Yet, as pointed out earlier, the spirit of
1914 was not revived in 1939;if a process of brutalization took place,
it may well have been kept in check to a certain extent by the memory
of the last war - perhaps more among the people themselves than
among those leaders and elites who were willing to wage war once
again.
There have been those who have seen this process of brutalization
continued during the second world war. J. Glenn Gray, contemplating
that struggle in 1945, wrote, '... So do one's values become corrupt
and conscience coarsened by the ordeal'.67Indeed, the violent and
unscrupulous language in use against political enemies in the German
Federal Republic since the second world war might serve to confirm
this observation. Yet, I would argue that the absence of a powerful
Myth of the War Experience served to mitigate this coarsening of
conscience. The war itself, the discovery of the Jewish Holocaust and
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
509
the brutal practices of National Socialism - unprecedented as far as
action by a European government was concerned - made many
Europeans think again about mass death and the domestication of
war, reflected in the changed cult of the fallen soldier. Myths of
national glory could no longer serve as a successful disguise for the
reality of war. It seems relevant in this context that after the war all
European war ministries were officially renamed ministries of
defence (taking advantage of the consolidation of the army, navy and
air force under one ministry). Though there were clear differences in
the impact of the first and second world wars upon people's
perceptions of war, and perhaps even in their effect upon the process
of brutalization, it will need much closer scrutiny of recent times to
determine with some certainty the degree of these differences.
I have taken the Myth of the War Experience as a test for the
differences and similarities between the wars. There are, of course, a
multitude of comparisons which could be made, but this myth seems
to me crucial to the manner in which many people, and especially
veterans, attempted to come to terms with the glory and horror of
war. The Myth of the War Experience was not the only way in which
this experience could be confronted: I have mentioned the numbing
effect of war, a kind of indifference to what was taking place, which
was perhaps equally important in assessing the reaction to the wars
- as those who, however inconsistently, declared that war upon all
war must not be forgotten. Yet the Myth of the War Experience
proved a dynamic force after the first world war and its absence later
proved important in considering the change and continuity between
the wars.
There are many more questions unanswered than those this article
has tried to solve, and that is only fitting for a level of comparison
which has only recently begun to occupy historians - any general
comparison must remain hypothetical while the perceptions of war in
individual nations are being examined. Yet, the direction and method
of such a comparison as this article has attempted might be helpful in
explaining not only the changing attitudes towards both wars, but
especially their political consequences. Analysing the domestication
of war and the possible brutalization of life can encourage a debate
which may give us a better understanding of the apathy, violence and
mass deaths which have characterized much of the lifetime of my
generation.
510
Journal of Contemporary History
Notes
This article is an expanded version of a paper given for the Commission for the History
of the Second World War at the 1984 meeting of the American Historical Association.
1. Alfred Kerr,Die Diktatur des HausknechtsundMelodien(Frankfurta. Main 1983),
67ff.
2. Hanns Oberlindober, Ein Vaterland,das alien gehirt! (Miinchen 1939), 10.
3. Robert Wohl, The Generationof 1914 (Cambridge, Mass. 1979);Paul Fussell, The
Great Warand ModernMemory (New York and London 1975).
4. George L. Mosse, 'Zum Deutschen Soldatenlied', in Klaus Vondung (ed.),
Kriegserlebnis,(Gottingen 1980), 331-34; Douglas Reed, InsanityFair (London 1938),
22.
5. The French military had forecast a desertion rate of thirteen per cent at
mobilization. It was under one-and-a-half per cent; quoted in Modris Ekstein, 'The
Great War: Epilogue to a Century', (unpublished lecture, 26 January 1979), 6. This
fact must be set in the context of Jean-Jacques Becker's conclusion in his monumental
1914: Commentles Francais sont entres dans la guerre (Paris 1977), that French public
opinion did not want war.
6. Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience(New Brunswick, New Jersey
1978), 102; C.E.M. Joad, 'What is Happening to the Peace Movement?' The New
Statesman and Nation, vol. 13 (15 May 1937), 803.
7. For a typical and readily accessible example, Christian De La Maziere, The
CaptiveDreamer(New York 1974);see also George L. Mosse, 'Rushing to the Colors:
On the History of Volunteers in War' in Mosche Zimmermann (ed.), Society, Religion
and Nationalism in Europeand North America (Jerusalem 1986), passim.
8. Klaus Peter Philippi, Volk des Zornes (Miinchen 1979), 99.
9. Brian Finney, ChristopherIsherwood(London 1979), 53; Andrew Rutherford, The
Literatureof War(London 1978), 114-15.
10. I.e. Michel Auvray, Objecteurs,insoumis, deserteurs(Paris 1983), 156ff.
11. For example, the SS division of the Hitler Youth; Bernd Wagner, 'Die Garde des
"Fiihrers" und die "Feuerwehr der Ostfront", zur neueren Literatur uiberdie Waffen
SS', Militirgeschichtliche Mitteilungen,No. 1 (1978), 215; Ralf Ronald Ringler, Illusion
einer Hitler-Jugendin Osterreich(St. Polten-Wien 1977), 87.
12. Bill Gammage, The Broken Years(Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1975), 270.
13. J.H. Rosny Aine, Confidencessur l'amitie des tranchees (Paris 1919), 166, 188;
Ludwig Scholz, Seelenleben des Soldaten an der Front (Tiibingen 1920), 48, 134.
14. Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914-1918. The Live and Let Live System
(London 1980), 155; Jacques P&ricard,Face a Face (Paris 1917), 75.
15. Quoted in Stephen R. Ward, 'Great Britain: Land Fit for Heroes Lost', The War
Generation. Veteransof the First WorldWar,Stephen R. Ward (ed.) (Port Washington,
New York 1975), 33.
16. Paul Fussell, op. cit., chap. 2; of the innumerable descriptions of the German
'little world of the trenches', see Karl Broger, Bunker 17, Geschichte einer Kameradschaft (Jena 1929).
17. I.e. 'Through comradeship the front line has become the cradle of the volkish
community', Wilhelm Rey, Die Bewaltigungdes Weltkriegesin nationalenKriegsroman,
Mosse: The Myth of the War Experience
511
inaugural dissertation, Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universitat, Frankfurta. Main, 1934
(Neu Isenburg 1937), 65.
18. Anette Vidal, Henri Barbusse Soldat de la Paix (Paris 1926), 26ff.
19. Herbert Read, The ContraryExperience (London 1963), 217.
20. Walter Nutz, 'Der Krieg als Abenteuer und Idylle. Landserhefte und trivale
Kriegsromane', Gegenwartsliteraturund Drittes Reich, ed. Hans Wagener (Stuttgart
1977), 275-76.
21. I.e. BernardBergonzi, Heroes' Twilight(London 1965), 108;Herbert Cysarz, Zur
Geistesgeschichteder Weltkriege(Bern and Frankfurt 1973), 193.
22. Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939-1945 (New York 1968), 257.
23. Hans Hellmut Kirst, Null-Acht-Fiinfzehn(Miinchen 1954);on the reaction to the
second world war in German literature, see Jost Hermand, 'Darstellung des Zweiten
Weltkrieges', Neues Handbuchder Literaturwissenschaft,Literatur nach 1945, vol. I,
(ed.) Jost Hermand (Wiesbaden 1979), 28ff.
24. Josef Magnus Wehner, Sieben vor Verdun(Miinchen 1930), passim; German
Werth, Verdun(Bergisch-Gladbach 1979), 345-73; Herbert Cysarz, op. cit., 198, 208.
25. I.e. Julian Bach Jr., America's Germany. An Account of the Occupation (New
York 1946), 17.
26. Ernst Jiinger, Der Kampfals inneresErlebnis (Berlin 1922).
27. Walter Nutz, op. cit., 71 and passim. See, for example, as a Landserheft, S.
Weigersdorfer,Die Schlacht am Tartarengraben(Rastatt 1985).
28. Heinz G. Konsalik, DerArtzt von Stalingrad(Minchen 1972), 17, 18, 54, 85, 91;
i.e. Jost Hermand, 'Vom heissen zum kalten Krieg: Heinz G. Konsaliks, 'Der Artzt
von Stalingrad', Sammlung, vol. 2 (Frankfurt 1979), 39-49.
29. Ibid., 167.
30. Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen (Hamburg 1951), 721; Saul Friedlander
finds this image of the SS continuing into the seventies in France, Reflets du Nazisme
(Paris 1982), 27ff.
31. Paul Fussell, op. cit., chap. VII; George L. Mosse, 'War and the Appropriation
of Nature', Germany in the Age of Total War, ed. Volker R. Berghahn and Martin
Kitchen (London 1981), 102-22.
32. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London 1950, first published 1925), 96.
33. Bernard Bergonzi, op. cit., 109.
34. Deutsche Bauzeitung, vol. 49 (1915), 500, 532; Fabian Ware, The Immortal
Heritage (Cambridge 1937), 30; George L. Mosse, 'National Cemeteries and National
Revival: The Cult of the Fallen Soldiers in Germany', Journal of Contemporary
History, 14, 1 (January 1979), 1-20.
35. Antoine Prost, Les Anciens Combattants et la Societe Francaise, Vol. 3
'Mentalit&set Ideologies' (Paris 1977), 50; Meinhold Lurtz, Kriegerdenkmalerin
Deutschland, vol. 4, 'Weimarer Republik' (Heidelberg 1985), 13/14 for the contrast
between Germany and some memorials found in France. This indispensable work
describes and classifies German war memorials from the Wars of Liberation to the
Federal Republic in 6 volumes. The last two volumes are to appear in 1986.
36. Sir Frederic Kenyon, WarGraves.How the CemeteriesAbroadshouldbe Designed
(London 1918), 13.
37. Deutsche Bauzeitung, vol. 49 (1915), 448.
38. George L. Mosse, 'National Cemeteries and National Revival', op. cit., 10-11;
Rudyard Kipling, The Graves of the Fallen (London 1919), 16.
39. 'The Final Task of St. Barnabas', Menin Gate Pilgrimage (1927), n.p.
512
Journal of ContemporaryHistory
40. Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds. German Victims of the Great War,
1914-1939 (Ithaca 1984), 170, 181ff.
41. Martin Rade, preface, Ludwig Scholz, Seelenleben des Soldaten an der Front
(Tubingen 1920), iii; Michael Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkrieges in der
Literatur(Kronberg/TS. 1978), 1-5.
42. Adolf Rieth, Denkmal ohne Pathos, Totenmahledes Zweiten Weltkriegsin Sidmit einer qeschichtlichenEinleitung(Tubingen 1967), 16.
Wiirttemberg-Hohenzollern
43. Ibid., 18.
44. Hubert Meyer, 'Zum Volkstrauertag', Der Freiwillige, vol. 30, Heft 11
(November 1984), 3.
45. DerFreiwillige, Heft 8, vol. 23 (August 1977), 15;for a contemporary controversy
about the abstract design of a monument and its emphasis upon admonition at the
expense of traditional form, see the dispute in the Bavarian village of Pocking,
'Kriegerdenkmal oder Mahnmal?', SiiddeutscheZeitung (22 December 1982).
46. Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil. A History of the Commonwealth War
Graves Commission, 1917-1967 (London 1967), 183.
47. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York 1975), 71;
typically enough, the war memorial of admonition rather than victory which Ernst
Barlach had executed for the cathedral of Marburg was removed as too modernistic,
shortly after it had been installed in the early thirties and was only returned after the
second world war. Ernst Barlachs MagdeburgerMal wieder im Dom etc., ed. Barlach
Kuratorium (Gustrow 1953).
48. Longworth, op. cit., 129; another famous architect of memorials, Sir Herbert
Baker, as might be expected, supported the traditionalist position; Arnold Whittick,
WarMemorials (London 1946), 11.
49. Longworth, op. cit., 163, 180.
50. Best seen by following 'The Conference on War Memorials, April 27, 1944',
Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, vol. XCII (9 June 1944), 322ff.
51. Philip Longworth, op. cit., 183.
52. Conference on War Memorials, op. cit., 323.
53. David Cannadine, 'War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain',
Mirrorsof Mortality. Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (New
York 1981), 233-34.
54. Quoted in Philip Longworth, op. cit., xxiv.
55. Ibid., xxiv.
56. I.e. Conference on War Memorials, op. cit., 324; Klaus von Luzan, Den
Gefallenen. Ein Buch des Gedenkens und des Trostes, foreword Theodor Heuss, ed.
VolksbundfiirKriegsgriberfursorge(Munchen and Salzburg 1952), 11;Julian Bach Jr.,
op. cit., 215.
57. J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors,Reflection on Men in Battle (New York 1959), 55.
58. I.e. Michael Howard, op. cit., 100;for the best discussion of the pre-war German
Peace Movement compared to French pacifism, see Roger Chickering, Imperial
Germanyand a Worldwithout War:The Peace Movementand GermanSociety, 18921914 (Princeton, New Jersey 1975), passim; Ludwig Quidde, the long-time head of the
German Peace Movement, defended its stand in the first world war, asserting that it
was the task of the Movement to prevent war, but once war had broken out, opposition
through a refusal to serve or a general strike would have been a criminal act. During the
war the Movement confined itself to agitation for a peace without any new territorial
annexations. After the war, a more radical wing of the German Peace Movement
Mosse: The Myth of the WarExperience
513
emerged, and though it came to dominate the Movement, its members were outsiders
in the Weimar Republic as they had been in the Empire before the war. This stands in
contrast to England where members of the Peace Movement were always insiders:
Ludwig Quidde, Der DeutschePazifismus wdhrenddes Weltkrieges1914-1918, ed. Karl
Holl with Helmut Donat (Boppard am Rhein 1979), 47, 16.
59. Keith Robbins, TheAbolitionof War.The'Peace Movement'inBritain, 1914-1919
(Cardiff 1976), 196-97.
60. C.E.M. Joad, op. cit., 803.
61. Michel Auvray, op. cit., 165, n. 4; for a more positive view of pacifism in France,
see Guy Pedrocini, Les Mutineriesde 1917 (Paris 1967), passim.
62. Alistair Home, The Path of Glory (Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1964), 75.
63. I.e. Kurt Tucholski, Deutschland,Deutschlandiiber alles (Berlin 1929).
64. R.K. Neumann, 'Die Erotik in der Kriegsliteratur',Zeitschriftfiir Sexualwissenschaft, vol. I (1914-15), 390-91.
65. Klaus Wippermann, Politische PropagandaundStaatsburgerlicheBildung(Bonn
1976), 185.
66. At least 1,200,000 Armenians were killed by Turkey. Yves Ternons, The
Armenians.History of a Genocide (New York 1981), 260.
67. Glenn Gray, op. cit., 9.
George L.Mosse
is Bascom Professor of History, University
of Wisconsin, Madison and Koebner
Professor of History at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem. He is the co-editor
of the Journal of ContemporaryHistory and
his latest books are Nationalism and
Sexuality; Respectability and Abnormal
Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York
1985) and German Jews Beyond Judaism
(Bloomington, Indiana 1985).