Abstract
Nigel Young’s book Postnational Memory, Peace and War: Making Pasts Beyond Borders appears at a time of worldwide rampant nationalism – not least in the two countries which are considered the standard-bearers of democracy and which are most familiar to him, the UK (Brexit – “We want our country back!”) and the USA (“America First!”). The weakening of the European Union and the dismantling of global governance structures (including the UN system) are leaving their marks on war and peace. The protection and raising of borders and erection of new walls are a central feature of the new nationalism. Its popularity has been linked to a perceived loss of identity because of globalism and the rise of worldwide migration due to war, poverty, religious persecution, and climate change. The future may be calling for a world “beyond borders,” but remembrance of the past during the present Zeitgeist means their reinforcement. Young’s book is a scholarly and profound analysis of the memory of (mainly) the two world wars; as regards World War II, particular attention is paid to the Shoah, aerial bombing (“urbicide”), and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His focus on the formation of a transnational or postnational memory, characterized by anti-war and anti-militarist sentiments and insights, truth-telling, and a recognition of “the other,” makes this an original contribution to what is already a rich literature. Young fully engages with it and draws his examples from a wide variety of cultural representations of memories of war and peace: not only literature but also painting, sculpture, photography, music, theater, and films (some 50 are listed in the filmography at the end of the volume). In a chapter on the history of modern memory he critically discusses the notions of personal and collective memory in the works of such pioneers as Bergson, Freud, Halbwachs, and Proust.
In his earlier work in the 1980s, Young, as a political sociologist but also peace activist, pioneered the cyclical mapping of peace movements, their emergence, growth, and influence followed by decline and marginalization. In the present study mapping 20th century memory about war and peace, he likewise draws on insights derived from personal involvement and experience spanning half a century and more. A particular sensitivity to transnationalism – “beyond borders” – that has characterized his work on peace movements is also a central feature of the present work. He argues that the main cultural movements of memory-making are cyclical, each lasting about a decade or more. He identifies three cycles of “memory booms”: in the 1920s/30s, 1950s/60s, and 1980s/90s and refers to Mannheim’s work on generations which “poses key questions of exactly how, when and where we ‘make memory’” (p. 89). Young pleads the need for an alternative cultural remembering whereby a universal solidarity and acknowledgement of the other starts replacing enemy stereotypes. He provides many instances of “revelatory encounters which acknowledge a shared fate, a common humanity” while admitting that “the task of transcending otherness facing postnational memory is immense” (p. 98).
An attractive feature of the book is the inclusion of more than 60 illustrations, several in color, some familiar, some less so. Another feature is a dozen evocative vignettes, each a couple of pages long and illustrated, which are interspersed throughout the text. Most recount the author’s personal experiences and illustrate vividly and memorably the wider subject matter under consideration. His interest in war and peace, and remembrance, is clearly deeply rooted and accounts for a life-long career as a foremost peace researcher, educator, and activist. We learn of his grandfather who was wounded and gassed in France from 1914 to 1918 and who survived “with much German lead shrapnel in his limbs” (p. 5); of an uncle with RAF Bomber Command who lost his life in World War II, and of his father who “never talked about the top secret blueprints and the designs for new bombers he had handled” (p. 148). There are also the lasting impressions of the Blitz on a young boy as well as meetings at home with German POWs and enduring friendships; visits to Spain and the search for a Republican hospital at the time of the Civil War; numerous visits to the battlefields of World War I in Flanders and France, the concentration camps of World War II and to “Memorial City: Berlin”. Young refers several times to Vera Brittain but not to the recent naming of a riverside walk in the heart of that city after her (Vera-Brittain-Ufer); a few years earlier, in 2014, an embankment in Hamburg was similarly named. Both cities responded positively to an initiative of Gerfried Horst to thus honor an outspoken English critic of the aerial bombing of German cities during World War II. Horst is the founder of the Berlin-based “Friends of Kant and Königsberg” society, itself a most valuable venture in transnational (German-Russian) memory making and reconciliation.
A dimension of “postnationalism” which Young barely touches upon but which has become increasingly important in making memories and peace beyond borders concerns the local, sub-national level, as well as the memory and memorialization of pre-20th century war and peace. The former is perhaps best exemplified in Germany and Austria where a growing number of cities and local communities have committed themselves to peace-making – local as well as international – as a response to memories of a difficult past. The latter is illustrated by recent commemoration of the devastating Thirty Years War (1618–1648). In 1998, the 350th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia was celebrated throughout Germany in a year-long program comprising major exhibitions and conferences; a noteworthy feature was that, for the first time, these commemorative events were the result of intense European-wide cooperation, reflecting the significance of that first “Great War” for the whole of Europe, including the common suffering it inflicted as well as the common achievements of all parties involved in bringing it to an end. A major objective was to show that the war, and the Westphalian peace, are part of a European identity. Not only were scholars, historians and artists involved but also a great number and variety of educational programs developed so as to engage the whole of society, including young people, in what amounted to a unique, imaginative, and creative culture of peace festival.
The nature of the events celebrating the anniversary of the end of the Thirty Years War, though left out of Young’s analysis, is an illustration of what he describes as “finding and articulating a common memory . . . one that can unify, on the basis of a shared loss” and of “co-operative memory work” that involves “reorientations in writing both history and memory” (p. 283). Young notes that “most memorials and cemeteries have not yet achieved that postnational “Europeanness” in their territories of mourning” (p. 286). Many national monuments concern wars and battles and do not so much mourn as celebrate bloody victories; in a uniting Europe, their preservation and meaning have become problematic. A good example is the massive Battle of Leipzig or Battle of the Nations monument (Völkerschlachtdenkmal) that was inaugurated in 1913 in Leipzig, a century after the greatest battle in European history prior to World War I. In 2003, the city hosted an international conference, European national monuments in the 21st century – National memory and European identity, which brought together directors of similar monuments in Europe with the aim of exploring ways in which nationalistic and militaristic symbols of the past could be transformed so as to reflect a new reality of European fraternity and unity. A network of European national monuments and a “monument trail” linking them were also envisaged. These two examples make clear that the project to construct postnational memories and “pasts beyond borders” is not confined to war and peace of the 20th and early 21st century and demonstrate how Young’s argument can usefully be applied to an historically wider spectrum of war and peace.
Although peace museums are briefly mentioned, little attention is paid to peace and anti-war monuments and memorials (it is of course understood that some war monuments are also anti-war monuments) and there is no index entry for them (unlike for war memorials). Yet, the former rather than the latter are explicitly dedicated to making pasts – as well as futures – beyond borders. Young writes, “Effective peace memorials are few; whilst there are war memories, we cannot speak of a ‘peace memory’ as such. But there are memorials to conscientious objectors . . . Some non-violent activists are commemorated . . .” (pp. 108–109). This overlooks the pioneering work of Edward W. Lollis, Monumental Beauty: Peace Monuments and Museums Around the World (2013), and his website depicting and detailing thousands of peace monuments. That the notion of ‘peace memory’ has substance is suggested by the events surrounding the 350th anniversary of the Westphalian peace mentioned above. A very different but similarly imaginative and creative peace festival took place in The Hague in 1999 when more than 9000 peace activists from around the world met to celebrate the centenary of the First Hague Peace Conference (1899) and draw up an agenda for peace for the 21st century. In 2013, the same municipality celebrated, in a major way, the centenary of the opening of the Peace Palace – since 1946 the home of the International Court of Justice of the United Nations. One of the lasting memorial legacies was the installation in the Palace of a bust of Bertha von Suttner – the first of a woman. No other woman had campaigned as vigorously as she had to prevent the Great War. Likewise, in 2002 the centenary of the inauguration of Jan Bloch’s International Museum of War and Peace in Lucerne, Switzerland was remembered in the city by a week-long program of events, including the unveiling of a plaque. In Young’s chronology of modern memory from 1890 to 2019, Bloch’s museum is entered under 1902 when 2002 seems more appropriate (p. 306). More than any other person, the Polish-Russian railway tycoon predicted the nature of a future great war and moved heaven and earth attempting to prevent it. The fact that both Bloch and von Suttner are not well known and were hardly mentioned during the recent 1914 to 1918 centenary commemorations, indicate that the work of peace historians as memory-makers remains hidden.
These pages are written in early June 2020 when the rise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement is in the headlines following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In Bristol, England, it resulted in the toppling of a statue of Edward Colston, a notorious slave-trader. Nigel Young’s book also touches on the making and unmaking of postcolonial and post-racist memory which are no less important than postnational memory, and inextricably linked to it.