The death, in 2009, of the last British veteran of the First World War, Harry Patch, prompted critical speculation on the futures of First World War commemoration. In Experiencing 11 November 2018: Commemoration and the First World War Centenary, Shanti Sumartojo gathers stimulating studies of traditional, innovative, and hybrid modes of remembrance after the loss of living memory. More specifically, she reorients approaches to the centenary of Armistice Day. Given that how we remember is central to what we remember, she argues that “a new conceptualisation of commemoration is needed: one that attends to how it feels” (13). The Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society in the Belgian State Archives supported the Commemoration Reframed project led by Sumartojo. Her multidisciplinary collaborators, some of whom invoke family ties to the First World War, respond to the historic anniversary through auto-ethnographies, digital media, and qualitative surveys. The essays span ten countries, focusing on the United Kingdom and its former colonies and Europe, especially the Western Front. Overall, Sumartojo's expansive interdisciplinary volume features nuanced explorations of diverse locales in fifteen chapters enhanced by over thirty black and white illustrations. The dynamic interplay of affect and knowledge, contingency and custom, and antagonism and reconciliation animates the analyses. The contributors revisit modern repertoires of war commemoration even as they relate the variable reception of contemporary memorial practices at a time of acute geopolitical instability.
Sumartojo's introduction accentuates the shift from discourses (representation and symbolism) to feelings (affective and sensory experience) in scholarship on commemoration. She builds upon established research by Jay Winter who conceives of “historical remembrance” as a “discursive field” (4). But she is most invested in material aspects of reception that (re)configure discourses of memory in specific surroundings. Sumartojo's chapter on the 2018 Flowers of War exhibition in Melbourne, for example, champions art as a shared vehicle for individual encounters.
The essays are organized into four parts: urban commemorations (Austria, Belgium, Poland); sites of memory (France, India, United Kingdom, United States); public art works (Australia, Belgium, New Zealand, United Kingdom); and transnational memorial practices (Belgium, Denmark, France). Sumartojo stresses the potentialities inherent in experiential reframings of remembrance rather than the intentions of event organizers. In some cases, affects and sensations wreak havoc with assumptions. When the “forlorn moo” of a cow breaks the ritual of silence in New Delhi, for instance, Peter Stanley recognizes the “incongruity” of the centenary in India (106, 105). Yet while “feeling” may be “a form of knowing,” Sumartojo might delineate distinct vantage points on cognition and emotion in the volume (157). More generally, critical debates on key concepts such as agency, empathy, experience, and performance might clarify the strengths and weaknesses of materialist perspectives on memorial cultures after historical trauma.
Synchronic interpretations of 11 November 2018 reveal divergent national traditions, local observances, and public controversies. Countries prioritize different historical dates and commemorative occasions. Jeremy Foster explains that Veterans Day acknowledges all American military personnel, making the centenary service at the Washington National Cathedral exceptional. Meanwhile, Olivier Luminet learns that the Proclamation of the Republic of German Austria on 12 November 1918 takes precedence over adjacent dates in the national calendar. Furthermore, locations engender different visitor expectations and memorial practices. James Wallis joined a queue to participate in the customary rites marking collective losses at the London Cenotaph that began in 1919. Conversely, in Wellington, Katherine Smits elevates museum galleries that enable emotional identifications over official ceremonies. Finally, groups engage with different cultural forms and political values. Danielle Drozdzewski watches a “frightening” patriotic parade during the celebration of the Second Polish Republic (66). In contrast, Emma Hanna reports that the “No Glory” campaign opposed government plans for the British centenary by calling for “international cooperation” (124). While Carol Ann Duffy, the British poet laureate, endorsed this antiwar protest, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the mayor of Warsaw, unsuccessfully banned the Polish Independence March. Heterogeneous dates and occasions, expectations and practices, and forms and values thus characterized the centenary.
Germany, a former Allied antagonist, inspires and unsettles reconciliation narratives. The 2018 exhibition Assembly Memorial Chairs in Ypres reinforced a lateral vision of national sacrifice by displaying empty chairs from all belligerents in alphabetical order. Accordingly, the New Zealand artist Kingsley Baird commemorates the ceasefire at Käthe Kollwitz's statues of grieving parents in a German military cemetery. Similarly, Caroline Winter meticulously catalogues German casualties along with statistics for Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa in the vicinity of Pozières. David C. Harvey also underscores historical inclusion in Aarhus where German soldiers were posthumously rehabilitated as Danish citizens. However, old hostilities haunted the centenary. In Liège, Chantal Kesteloot and Laurence van Ypersele notice that the German ambassador laid a wreath for civilian victims of Nazi genocide at Dachau rather than infantry combatants on the Western Front. Additionally, Christin Camia, Clara Falys, Jelena Scheider, and Luminet confirm the “reluctance” of German-speaking Belgians with Prussian ancestors to discuss the Armistice (204). The scarcity of German visitors to Ypres perplexes a German youth interviewed by Dominique Vanneste and Gregory Ramshaw, implying persistent social taboos. Although French and German political leaders attended the centenary in Paris as international allies, experiential reframings of memorial cultures outside Germany attest to unresolved silences linking the world wars.
The contributors capture the “vitality” of the centenary at a precarious global juncture in Experiencing 11 November 2018 (13). The chapters encompass environmental and political developments that disrupt the transmission and reception of memorial practices. As Foster worries, nationalist discourses have retarded coordinated actions to mitigate climate change. The atmospheric and bodily cues pivotal to efforts to reframe commemoration signal planetary crisis. Foster reviews seasonal norms in Washington while Stanley deplores air pollution in Delhi. From their cold and wet location in Villers-Guislain, Anne Hertzog and Rafiq Pirzada apprehend that differential exposure to the elements may resonate with the trials of trench recruits. Notwithstanding the affects and sensations that people may share, social positionalities remain relevant to the centenary, ranging from the fractures of class and ethnicity detected by Hertzog and Pirzada to the “xenophobic” conceptions of group belonging that disturb Drozdzewski (68). The decline of democratic institutions inflects investigations of commemorations in Europe and elsewhere. Striking historical juxtapositions of 1914–1918 with conflicts since the Second World War, including strife in the Middle East, punctuate the volume. Other topical references include the Brexit referendum in Britain and Hindu nationalism in India. Sumartojo's international essay collection on the tangible and intangible legacies of the First World War raises timely questions of affects and politics through suggestive evocations of atmospheres attuned to discourses and feelings.
