Public Commemoration Research Paper

Public commemoration is therefore a process with a life history. It has an initial, creative phase; followed by a period of institutionalization and routinization. Such markings of the calendar can last for decades, or be abruptly halted. In most instances, the date and place of commemoration fade away with the passing of the social groups which initiated the practice.

Commemoration operates on many levels of aggregation and touches many facets of associative life. While commemorative forms were familiar in the ancient and medieval period, they have proliferated in more recent times. Consequently, the subject has attracted much discussion in social scientific literature. We therefore concentrate on public commemoration in the epoch of the nation state, primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the modern period, most commemorative events were marked distinctively and separately from the religious calendar. There has been, though, some overlap. Armistice Day, 11 November, in countries remembering the end of the 1914–18 war, is close enough to the Catholic feast of All Saints on 2 November; in some countries with a large Catholic population, the two days occupy a semisacred space of public commemoration. The day marking the end of the Second World War in Europe, 8 May, is also the Saint’s day of Joan of Arc. Those engaging in commemorative acts on that day may be addressing the secular celebration or the Catholic one; some celebrate the two together.

Commemoration is an act arising out of a conviction, shared by a broad community, that the moment recalled is both significant and informed by a moral message. Moments of national humiliation are rarely commemorated, although here too there are exceptions of a hortatory kind. ‘Never again’ is the hallmark of public commemoration on the Israeli Day of Remembrance for victims of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Where moral doubts persist about a war or public policy, commemorative moments are hard to fix. That is why there is no date commemorating the end of the Algerian War in France, or the end of the Vietnam War in the USA. There was no moral consensus about the nature of the conflict; hence there was no moral consensus about what was being remembered in public, and when was the appropriate time to remember it (Prost 1999).

1. Commemoration And Political Power

Much of the scholarly debate about commemoration concerns the extent to which it is an instrument of the dominant political elements in a society. One school of opinion emphasizes the usefulness to political elites of public events establishing the legitimacy of their rule (Nora 1984–92). Some such events are observed whoever is in power—witness Bastille Day in France or Independence Day in the USA. But other events are closely tied to the establishment of a new regime and the overthrow of an older one: 7 November was the date in the calendar marking the Bolshevik revolution and establishing the Communist regime in power in Russia. That date symbolized the new order and its challenge to its world-wide enemies. May Day similarly was a moment when labor movements, and Labor parties in power, publicly demonstrated their place in history.

This top-down approach proclaims the significance of commemoration as a grammar of national, imperial or political identity. Anzac Day, 25 April, is celebrated as the moment when the Australian nation was born. It commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops as part of the British-led expeditionary force sent to Turkey in 1915. The fact that the landing was a failure does not diminish the iconic character of the date to Australians. It is the day, they hold, when their nation came of age (Inglis 1992).

By no means are all commemorative activities associated with warfare. The birthdates of monarchs or deceased presidents are marked in similar ways. Queen Victoria’s birthday, 24 May, was Empire Day in Britain; now (2000) it is celebrated as Commonwealth Day. The creation of such commemorative dates was part of a wider movement of what some scholars have termed ‘the invention of tradition.’ That is, at the end of the nineteenth century, new nation states and preeminent imperial powers deepened the repertoire of their ceremonial activity. Such flourishes of the majesty of power were then immediately sanctified by a spurious pedigree. To display ceremonies with a supposed link to ancient habits or forms located in a foggy and distant past created an effective cover for political innovation, instability or insecurity (MacKenzie 1986, Ranger and Hobsbawm 1986).

This functionalist interpretation of commemoration has been challenged. A second school of scholarship emphasizes the ways that public commemoration has the potential for dominated groups to contest their subordinate status. However much political leaders or their agents try to choreograph commemorative activity, there is much space for subversion or creative interpretation of the official commemorative script. Armistice Day, 11 November, was, for different groups, a moment for both the celebration and the denigration of military values. Pacifists announced their message of ‘Never again’ through their presence at commemorative ceremonies; military men used these moments to glorify the profession of arms, and to demonstrate the duty of citizens, if necessary, to give their lives for their country in a future war. The contradictions in these forms of expression on the same day were never resolved (Gregory 1994, Winter 1999).

This alternative interpretation of the political meaning of commemorative activity emphasizes the multivocal character of remembrance. From this point of view, there is always a chorus of voices in commemorations; some are louder than others, but they never sound alone. Decentering the history of commemoration ensures that we recognize the regional, local, and idiosyncratic character of such activities.

Very occasionally, these dissonant voices come together. Between 1919 and 1938 in Britain, there was a two-minute silence observed throughout the country. Telephonists pulled the plugs on all conversations. Traffic stopped. The normal flow of life was arrested. Then the Second World War intervened, and such disruption to war production was not in the national interest. Thereafter the two-minute silence was moved to the Sunday nearest 11 November. But in the two decades between the Wars, it was a moment of national reflection. Mass Observation, a pioneering social survey organization, asked hundreds of ordinary people in Britain what they thought about during the silence. The answer was that they thought not of the nation or of victory or of armies, but of the men who were not there. This silence was a meditation about absence. As such it moved away from political orchestration into the realm of family history. To be sure, families commemorated their own within a wider social and political framework. But the richest texture of remembrance was always within family life. This intersection of the public and the private, the macrohistorical and the micro-historical, is what has given commemoration in the twenty-first century its power and its rich repertoire of forms.

2. The Business Of Remembering

Commemoration is and always has been a business. It costs money; it requires specialists’ services; it needs funding and, over time, re-funding. There are two kinds of expenditure we can trace in the history of commemoration. The first is capital expenditure; the second is recurrent expenditure.

The land for such sites must be purchased; and an appropriate symbolic form must be designed and then constructed to focus remembrance activities. The first step may require substantial sums of public money. Private land, especially in urban areas, comes at a premium. Then there are the costs of architects’ fees, especially when a public competitive tender is offered inviting proposals from professionals. Finally, once the symbolic form is chosen, it must be constructed out of selected materials and finished according to the architect’s or artist’s designs.

When these projects are national in character, the process of production is in the public eye. National art schools and bodies of ‘experts’ have to have their say. Standards of ‘taste’ and ‘decorum’ are proclaimed. Professional interests and conflicts come into play.

Much of this professional infighting is confined to national commemorative projects, but the same complex stepwise procedure occurs on the local level too, this time without the same level of attendant publicity. Local authorities usually take charge of these projects, and local notables can deflect plans towards their own particular visions, whatever public opinion may think about the subject.

Most of the time, public funding covers only part of the costs of commemorative objects. Public subscriptions are critical, especially in Protestant countries where the concept of utilitarian memorials is dominant. In Catholic countries, the notion of a ‘useful’ memorial is a contradiction in terms; symbolic language and utilitarian language are deemed mutually exclusive. But the Protestant voluntary traditions has it otherwise. In Protestant countries, commemorative projects took many forms, from the sacred to the mundane: in Britain there are memorial wards in hospitals, memorial scholarships in schools and universities, alongside memorial cricket pitches and memorial water troughs for horses. In the USA and in Australia there are memorial highways. The rule of thumb is that private citizens pick up most of the tab for these memorial forms. The state provides subsidies and occasional matching grants, but the money comes out of the pockets of ordinary people. The same is true in Britain with respect to a very widely shared form of public commemoration: the purchase of paper poppies, the symbol of the Lost Generation of the First World War. These poppies are worn on the lapel, and the proceeds of the sale go to aid disabled veterans and their families.

Recurrent expenditure for commemorative sites is almost always paid for by taxpayers. War cemeteries require masons and gardeners. The Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission looks after hundreds of such cemeteries all over the world. The cost of their maintenance is a public charge. Private charities, in particular Christian groups, maintain German war cemeteries. Once constructed, memorial statues, cemeteries, or highways also become public property, and require public support to prevent them from decomposing. They are preserved as sites of commemorative activity.

Much of this activity is directed towards inviting the public to remember in public. This means directed the public towards particular sites of remembrance. Some of them are nearby their homes. In Britain and France there are war memorials in every city, in every town, and in every village; it is there that Armistice Day ceremonies are held annually. Churches throughout Europe of all denominations have memorial plaques to those who died in war. Special prayers were added to the Jewish prayer book to commemorate the victims of the Nazis in the Second World War, and later, those who died on active service in the Israeli army.

Remembrance in local houses of worship or at war memorials required that the public travel a short distance from their homes to sites of remembrance. But given the scale of losses in the two World Wars, and the widely dispersed cemeteries around the world in which lie the remains of millions of such men and women, the business of remembrance also entails international travel. Such voyages start as pilgrimage; many are mixed with tourism (Lloyd 1998). But in either case, there are train and boat journeys to take; hotel rooms to reserve; guides to hire; flowers to lay at graves; trinkets and mementos to purchase. In some places, museums have arisen to tell more of the story the pilgrims have come to hear and to share. There too money is exchanged along with the narratives and the symbols of remembrance.

This mixture of the sacred and the profane is hardly an innovation. It is merely a secular form of the kind of pilgrimage, for example, that made San Juan de Compostela in Spain the destination of millions of men and women in the middle ages who came to honor the conventionally designated resting place of the remains of one of the original Apostles. Pilgrimage to war cemeteries is public commemoration over long, sometimes very long, distances. Today (2000) thousands of Australians make the journey to Gallipoli, on the border between Asia and Europe, to be there for the dawn service on 25 April (as we have already noted), the day of the Anzac landing in 1915. Where does pilgrimage stop and tourism take over? It is impossible to say, but in all cases, the business of remembrance remains just that—a business.

3. Aesthetic Redemption

Public commemoration is not only a set of political gestures and material tasks. It is also an art form, the art of arranging and interpreting signifying practices. This field of action can be analyzed on two different levels: the first is aesthetic; the second is semiotic. The two are intimately related.

Some national commemorative forms are distinctive. Others are shared by populations in many countries. The figure of Marianne as the national symbol of the French Republic could not be used in Germany or Britain. The German Iron Cross, on commemorative plaques, denotes the location and the tradition in which commemoration is expressed. Germany’s heroes’ forests or fortresses are also imbricated in Teutonic history.

At times the repertoire of one country’s symbols overlap with that of others, even when they were adversaries. After the First World War, the first industrialized war fought among fully industrialized nations, many commemorative forms adopted medieval notation. Throughout Europe, the revolutionary character of warfare was marked by a notation of a backward-looking kind. Medieval images of heroic and saintly warriors recaptured a time when combat was between individuals, rather than the impersonal and unbalanced duel between artillery and human flesh. The war in the air took on the form and romance of chivalry. On the losing and the winning sides, medievalism flourished.

On war memorials, the human form survived. In some instances, classical images of male beauty were chosen to mark the ‘lost generation’; others adopted more stoical and emphatically untriumphalist poses of men in uniform. In most cases, victory was either partially or totally eclipsed by a sense of overwhelming loss. Within this aesthetic landscape, traditional Christian motifs were commonplace. The form of the grieving mother—Stabat Mater—brought women into the local and national constellation of grief.

In Protestant countries, the aesthetic debate took on a quasireligious character. War memorials with crosses on them offended some Protestants, who believed that the Reformation of the sixteenth century precluded such ‘Catholic’ notation. Obelisks were preferable. In France, war memorials were by law restricted to public and not church grounds, although many local groups found a way around this proscription. In schools and universities, the location of such memorials touched on such issues. Some were placed in sacred space—in chapels—semisacred space—around chapels—or in secular space. Public thoroughfares and train stations also housed such lists of men who had died in war.

Twentieth-century warfare democratized bereavement. Previously armies were composed of mercenaries, volunteers, and professionals. After 1914, Everyman went to war. The social incidence of war losses was thereby transformed. In Britain, France and Germany, virtually every household had lost someone—a father, a son, a brother, a cousin, a friend. Given the nature of static warfare on the Western front, many—perhaps half—of those killed had no known grave. Consequently, commemorative forms highlighted names above all. The names of the dead were all that remained of them, and chiseled in stone or etched on plaques, these names were the foci of public commemoration on both the local and the national scale.

This essential practice of naming set the pattern for commemorative forms after the Second World War and beyond. After 1945, names were simply added to Great War memorials. This was partly in recognition of the links between the two twentieth-century conflicts; partly it was a matter of economy. After the Vietnam war, naming still mattered, and First World War forms inspired memorials, most notably Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington. Her work clearly drew on Sir Edwin Lutyens’s memorial to the missing of the Battle of the River Somme at Thiepval, inaugurated in 1932.

By the latter decades of the twentieth century, artistic opinion and aesthetic tastes had changed sufficiently to make abstraction the key language of commemorative expression. Statues and installations thereby escaped from specific national notation and moved away from the earlier emphasis upon the human figure. The exception to the rule is Soviet commemorative art, which resolutely stuck to the path of heroic romanticism in marking out the meaning of what they called the Great Patriotic War. In many instances in Western Europe, but by no means all, forms which suggested absence or nothingness replaced classical, religious or romantic notions in commemorative art.

This aesthetic shift had important social and political implications. Great War commemorative forms had sought out some meaning, some significance in the enormous loss of life attending that conflict. There was an implicit warning in many of these monuments.

‘Never again’ was there ultimate meaning. But ‘never’ had lasted a bare 20 years. Thus after the Second World War, the search for meaning became infinitely more complex. And the fact that more civilians died than soldiers in the Second World War made matters even more difficult to configure in art.

Finally, the extreme character of two elements of the Second World War challenged the capacity of art—any art—to express a sense of loss when it is linked to genocidal murder or thermonuclear destruction. Both Auschwitz and Hiroshima defied conventional notations of ‘meaning,’ although some individuals continue to try to rescue redemptive elements from them both. The construction of a national Holocaust memorial at the Brandenburg gate in Berlin, the construction of which began in 1999, is a case in point (Young 1999). The debate over this and similar projects does not abate, since such events seem to force all participants—public officials, the public, survivors, architects, artists—to the limits of representation and beyond.

4. Ritual

Public commemoration is an activity defined by the gestures and words of those who come together to remember the past. It is rarely the simple reflection of a fixed text, a script rigidly prepared by political leaders determined to fortify their position of power. Inevitably, commemoration overlaps with political conflicts, but it can never be reduced to a simple reflection of power relationships.

There are at least three stages in the history of rituals surrounding public commemoration. The first we have already dealt with: the construction of a commemorative form. But there are two other levels in the life history of monuments which need attention. The second is the grounding of ritual action in the calendar, and the routinization of such activities; the third is their transformation or their disappearance as active sites of memory.

One case in point may illustrate this trajectory. The date of 1 July 1916 is not a national holiday in Britain; but it marks the date of the opening of the British offensive on the river Somme, an offensive which symbolized the terrible character of industrial warfare. On that day the British army suffered the highest casualty totals in its history; on that day a volunteer army, and the society that had created it, were introduced to the full terrors of twentieth-century warfare. To this day, groups of people come to the Somme battlefields to mark this day, without national legislation to enable them to do so. Theirs are locallydefined rituals. In France, 11 November is a national holiday, but not in Britain. Legislation codifies activities the origins and force of which lie on the local level.

Public commemoration flourishes within the orbit of civil society. This is not true in countries where dictatorships rule; Stalinist Russia smashed civil society to a point that it could not sustain commemorative activity independent of the party and the state (Merridale 1999). But elsewhere, local associations matter.

And so do families. Commemorative ritual survives when it is inscribed within the rhythms of community and, in particular, family life. Public commemoration lasts when it draws about overlaps between national history and family history. Most of those who take the time to engage in the rituals of remembrance bring with them memories of family members touched by these vast events. This is what enables people born long after wars and revolutions to commemorate them as essential parts of their own lives. For example, children born in the aftermath of the First World War told the story of their family upbringing to grandchildren born 60 or 70 years later. This transmission of childhood memories over two or sometimes three generations gives family stories a power which is translated at times into activity—the activity of remembrance (Winter and Sivan 1999).

This framework of family transmission of narratives about the past is an essential part of public commemoration. It also helps us understand why some commemorative forms are changed or simply fade away. When the link between family life and public commemoration is broken, a powerful prop of remembrance is removed. Then, in a short time, remembrance atrophies and fades away. Public reinforcements may help keep alive the ritual and practice of commemoration. But the event becomes hollow when removed from the myriad small-scale social units that breathed life into it in the first place.

At that moment, commemorative sites and practices can be revived and reappropriated. The same sites used for one purpose can be used for another. But most of the time, commemorative forms live through their life cycle, and like the rest of us, inevitably fade away. This natural process of dissolution closes the circle on public commemoration. And rightly so, since it arises out of the needs of groups of people to link their lives with salient events in the past. When that need vanishes, so does the glue that holds together the social practice of commemoration. Then collective memories fade away.

We have reached, therefore, a quixotic conclusion. Public commemoration is both irresistible and unsustainable. Time and again people have come together in public to seek meaning in vast events in the past and try to relate them to their own smaller networks of social life. These associations are bound to dissolve, to be replaced by other forms, with other needs, and other histories. At that point, the characteristic trajectory of public commemoration—creation, institutionalization, and decomposition—comes to an end.

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