In this study, Stefan Goebel, a historian, employs “empirical comparative history” (6) to analyze the ways in which German and British (non-Irish) memorials of the Great War serve as both sites of “personal mourning” and “sites of political (re)mobilization” (2). Specifically, Goebel is interested in the ways in which memory, as a cultural and social construct, draws on nineteenth-century medievalism in the commemoration of the Great War. Goebel presents “a study of medievalism in public war remembrance” (23). Goebel argues that “medievalism” is a “brand” that permits artists and other agents of memorialization to meet the “existential needs” of the public and their desire for both “meaning and symbolism” in war memorials, specifically those of World War I (18).

Goebel catalogs not only war memorials proper but also a variety of commemorative materials, including memorial windows, posters, speeches, and postcards. Thus, while a historical study, Goebel's work draws on many of the methods familiar to studies of popular culture. Goebel's most interesting discussion, however, has to do with the ways in which medievalism was employed in both Britain and Germany in an attempt to construct existential meaning from the seemingly meaningless atrocities of the Great War. Accompanying Goebel's cleanly written text is a variety of useful illustrations. Goebel's work is organized thematically, allowing him to compare various types of memorials and commemorative activities in both Britain and Germany.

In chapter 1, “Catastrophe and Continuity: The Place of the War Dead in History,” Goebel discusses the ways in which divergent war memorials place the Great War in a historical context by eliding distinctions between past and present. While many recent studies explore the Great War as a break with the historical past as it gives rise to modernism, Goebel is interested in the ways in which the activity of remembrance combines past, present, and future as a way to find meaning. Specifically, Goebel explores the ways in which British memorials of the Great War tend to focus on and valorize the individual, giving meaning to individual suffering and sacrifice, while German war memorials tend to place the individual in the context of the whole of society. His most insightful example is his analysis of the memorial and burial of the “Unknown Warrior” in Westminster Abbey. The British “Unknown Warrior” is, according to Goebel, a project that recaptures and valorizes the individual while placing him in a specifically historical and even medievalized context, one that imparts meaning to the suffering and death of each individual. In Germany, however, the unknown soldiers that are subsumed in the memorial are viewed as a kind of superman. The individual death, then, gains meaning in Germany, particularly in Hitler's Germany in this case, only insofar as the individual's death promotes Germany and a German way of life. This sort of analysis is indicative of Goebel's work, as a whole, and represents the sort of analysis that Goebel provides throughout his work.

In pursuing his “comparative historical study,” Goebel devotes thematically organized chapters to the “narrative” of war, especially the ways in which this narrative is tied to particular locations, especially the Middle East and the Eastern and Western European fronts; to “three commemorative motifs that projected something of the ‘experience’ of the Great War and its connection to history and modernity: the mystique surrounding iron and steel; evocations or rocks and castles; and, finally, medieval ruins, the restoration of historic ruins, and the ruin of art-historic treasures at the front” (157); to the reference to traditional, medievalized notions of chivalry and the cruelty of the enemy; and, finally, “variants of spiritual medievalism” for the survivors, both combatants and noncombatants, of war (232).

If Goebel's work has a weakness, it lies in Goebel's tendency to analyze German memorials and commemorative activities in more detail than he devotes to British memorials. For example, in his discussion of the German Tannenberg memorial, Goebel provides an extensive analysis that teases out the paradoxes represented by the Tannenberg. This acknowledgment and analysis of the complexities involved surrounding the “imagined nature of the war” (150) are instructive and interesting. Goebel often affords this sort of thoughtful attention to the German uses of medievalism in the memorializing of the Great War. However, Goebel's analysis of the British uses of medievalism is often much more simplistic. In fact, Goebel focuses his third chapter, dealing with the soldier's firsthand experience of war, almost exclusively on the German medievalizing tendency, as he admits. He focuses nearly exclusively on Germany because his theme—the medievalizing of material objects as “medieval motifs” (185)—does not apply to the British of “medievalist representations of the experience” of the Great War (157). If, however, Goebel is pursuing a project grounded in “empirical comparative history” (6), it seems that more comparison of the theme would be in order. If comparison is impossible because the tendency is “virtually non-existent in the British context” (159), then a specifically comparative analysis, as such, becomes impossible.

In spite of Goebel's tendency to focus on the German case at the expense of an analysis of the British situation, Goebel fills a gap both in medievalism studies and in analyses of the effects of World War I. Rather than pursuing the somewhat trite assumption that the cultural and literary heritage of the Great War is modernism, Goebel presents a new thesis, one that is, in the end, tenable. One way of reading reactions to the war, both German and British, is by seeing these reactions as retrogressive, as Goebel demonstrates. Rather than seeing the Great War as a break with a historical past, Goebel explores the medievalizing tendency as a way to create a war narrative that places the Great War in the context of a historical past. The creation of such a war narrative, says Goebel, allows for both a justification of military action and a comfort that the atrocities of the war are not entirely in vain.