Commemorating catastrophe: 100 years on

Abstract

Memory is always about the future. When political conditions change, so do narratives about the past. This essay attempts to show the present-mindedness of commemoration of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War in various parts of Europe. One case in point is the Russian rediscovery of the trilogy of a strong leader, a strong army, and a strong church in internet narratives of the Great War, in song, in poetry and in prose. Another is the stress on local rather than national narratives of commemoration, on memories rather than on memory, in a Western Europe with a troubled politics of national populism and resistance to full European integration. A third is the fracture between Western European secularized narratives of war and Eastern European and Middle Eastern sacred narratives of war. All show a profoundly divided historical landscape painting by profoundly divided contemporary commentators on the past.

Keywords:

• commemoration
• First World War
• memory regimes

Notes

¹ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ5EKBmrthg>. Published 15 August 2013, with 1.7 million views as of 27 January 2017. [accessed January 28, 2017].

² <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTzGJlaBrFY>.

³ On memory regimes more generally, see: S. Moyn, ‘Two Regimes of Memory’, American Historical Review, 103.4 (October 1998), 1182–6; E. Langenbacher, ‘Twenty-first Century Memory Regimes in Germany and Poland: An Analysis of Elite Discourses and Public Opinion’, German Politics and Society, 89, 26.4 (Winter 2008), 50–81; A. Erll, ‘Locating Family in Cultural Memory Studies’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 43.3 (May–June 2011), 303–18; and R. Ned Lebow, ‘The Future of Memory’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 617, The Politics of History in Comparative Perspective (May 2008), 25–41.

⁴ On the Assmanns’ approach to communicative and collective memory, see J. Assmann and J. Czaplicka, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique, 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies (Spring–Summer 1995), 125–33, and A. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Memory, Archives, trans. Aleida Assmann and David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

⁵ W. S. F. Pickering, ‘The Eternality of the Sacred: Durkheim’s Error?’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 35e année, 69 (January–March 1990), 91–108.

⁶ ‘Armenian Church Declares Genocide Victims Saints in Somber Ceremony’, Los Angeles Times, 24 April 2015, <https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-armenia-sainthood-20150424-story.html> [accessed January 28, 2017]; ‘Armenian Church Makes Saints of 1.5 Million Genocide Victims’, The Telegraph, 24 April 2015, <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/armenia/11559613/Armenian-Church-makes-saints-of-1.5-million-genocide-victims.html> [accessed January 28, 2017].

⁷ The Canonization of the Armenian Martyrs of 1915. What is Christian Martyrdom Anyway? (New York: The Zohrab Information Center, 25 September 2014). <https://zohrabcenter.org/2014/09/25/the-canonization-of-the-armenian-martyrs-of-1915-what-is-christian-martyrdom-anyway/> [accessed January 28, 2017].

⁸ H. Tchilingirian,‘Canonization of the Genocide Victims. Are We Ready?’, Window View of the Armenian Church 1, 3 (January 1990). From: <https://oxbridgepartners.com/hratch/index.php/publications/articles/156-canonization-of-the-genocide-victims> [accessed January 28, 2017].

⁹ H. Tchilingirian, ‘In Search of Relevance: Church and Religion in Armenia Since Independence’, in Religion et politique dans le Caucase post-soviétique, ed. by Bayram Balci and Raoul Motika (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2007), 277ff.

¹⁰ Thanks are due to Zuzanna Bogomil for bringing these phenomena to my attention. Z. Bogumil, ‘Do milieux de mémoire still exist in Eastern Europe?’, Cambridge conference on The Memory Wars, 13 May, 2013.

¹¹ Tchilingirian, ‘Canonization of the Genocide Victims’.

¹² ‘Canonization of the Armenian Martyrs of 1915’.

¹³ <www.armenian-genocide.org/Memorial.36/current_category.53/memorials_detail.html> [accessed January 28, 2017].

¹⁴ ‘Holy recognition: Church to Canonize Genocide Victims’, ArmeniaNow.com, <www.armenianow.com/genocide/60305/armenian_apostolic_church_genocide_holy_see_echmiadzin [accessed January 28, 2017].

¹⁵ ‘Turkey Commemorates Sarikamis Martyrs’, World Bulletin, January 4, 2015, <www.worldbulletin.net/haber/152222/turkey-commemorates-sarikamis-martyrs> [accessed January 28, 2017].

¹⁶ G. Nicolas, ‘Victimes ou martyrs’, Cultures et conflits, 11, Interventions armées et causes humanitaires (Autumn 1993), 115–55; M. D. Litonjua, ‘Religious Zealotry and Political Violence in Christianity and Islam’, International Review of Modern Sociology, 35.2, Sociology in a Post-American world (Autumn 2009), 307–31; H. Hanafi, ‘Voluntary Martyrdom’, Oriente Moderno, n.s. 25 (86), 2 (2006), 201–10; and D. Janes and A. Housen, eds., Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

¹⁷ The literature on this subject is vast. Here are some places to start: S. Bruce, ‘When was Secularization? Dating the Decline of the British Churches and Locating its Cause’, British Journal of Sociology, 61.1 (2010), 107–26; Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Bruce, Choice and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); N. D. De Graaf, A. Need, and W. Ultee, ‘Leaving the church in the Netherlands : a comprehensive explanation of three empirical regularities’, in Patterns and Processes of Religious Change in Modern Industrial Societies: Europe and the United States, ed. Alasdair Crockett and Richard O’Leary (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1998); E. M. Hamberg, ‘Christendom in Decline: The Swedish Case’, in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf Astor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

¹⁸ S. Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human rights in history (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

¹⁹ For a fuller treatment of this point, see J. Winter, War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), ch. 5.