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History 513, European Cultural History 1880-1920 - Summary
Lecture #19 - November 14, 1979 - 47:38 min (mp3)
(Save As or file will load and play in the page, load time depends on connection speed)Mosse starts the lecture by showing a series of pictures about the rediscovery of the body and the male stereotype. The common feature of the first three pictures is that the sensuousness is taken away by light and sun, by making the figures transparent.
The war was lifted into the sphere of the sacred by the volunteers who rushed to the colors, believing already that they were exceptions: They were blessed in church and connected with sacredness and with the search far an extraordinary experience: with the festival and with the search for personal and national rejuvenation. The center of the sacred was the cult of the fallen soldier. In trench warfare, they came immediately into contact with death. The dead were everywhere. The cult of camaraderie went back to the wars of liberation at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Uhland’s poem “I Had a Comrade,” which every soldier knew. In extreme situations, everyone took recourse to religion, to the well-known familiar rhythms of Christianity. The next picture shows a fresco in the Hall of the Heroes of the biggest Italian military cemetery that features a soldier, literally resting in the lap of Christ. Another one, from the same cemetery, presents the three crosses of Calvary. The next picture, a postcard of a military cemetery in Poland, shows a soldier awakened by Christ. Mosse states that military cemeteries are much alike everywhere. The function of the stone is to represent the fatherland by something unmovable. In the middle of the war, the longing for arcadia became very strong. In England, this took the form of Rupert Brooke’s poems, flowers, and village church crosses. In Germany it was different, manifesting itself in a new kind of cemetery that came about in the war. It used the graves of the dead to symbolize closeness to nature by using wood and the German national tree. In park cemeteries, as the Munich Waldfriedhof, designed in 1910, the landscape disguises the graves. Also in Italy, the idea of arcadia, nature, and innocence disguised a death beside the woods. Trees, with a pilgrimage path in the middle, received names of fallen soldiers to make them outlive death. The next image shows a British military cemetery. After the war, its wooden crosses were replaced by stones. Relatives could send for the wooden crosses free of charge. Eventually, those that were left were taken to a Church and burned there in the Easter fire.
These efforts were part of a strategy to assure that the soldiers “never died.” In the defeated nations, the cult of the dead soldiers became especially strong: the dead soldier came to visit the living to remind him to take revenge, and not to become part of the mass. It should be clear that in the military cemetery all of the ideas that make death “meaningful” are present, and all are connected to the idea of camaraderie. The idea of camaraderie was connected to the volunteer and his stereotype. When he died, he became a part of every soldier. The next picture shows Rupert Brooke. Mosse asks the students to see in it a connection with the German youth movement and its ideas of fragility and purity. (Brookes’ mother was afraid that the photo was too homoerotic). This idea of innocence is projected on the experience of wartime camaraderie. Nationalism allowed the soldiers to express their individuality, yet remain comrades. Already before 1914, camaraderie was exulted as the true national community, which was beleaguered on all sides. It became tied to the idea of death and to the idea of Greek beauty.
Ceremonies for the dead in France, England, Italy and Germany claimed that they lived in the camaraderie of the nation. This camaraderie also strengthened a democratic idea of a leadership of affinity: The officer was to demonstrate leadership and have charisma. When trench fighting became a fatalistic duty and all patriotism was muted at the end of the war, it was the myth that remained important: even after the war, and to people whose experiences should have taught them to know better. Perhaps the truest portrait of the war is Henri Barbusses’ novel “Under Fire.” Barbusse became a communist after the war, yet glorified the front line soldier. Camaraderie went together with ideas of equality (though in fact many of the volunteer second lieutenants were shot in the back by their own soldiers). The officer was good looking, clean, a natural leader, who created solidarity between himself and his men. As Barbusse wrote, it was not a class war, since a new class was born- that of the frontline soldiers. Both in Italy and Germany, ex-soldiers held strong democratic ideas; most Fascist (not Socialist) leaders had been frontline soldiers. The democratic idea of leadership entailed that the leader was only a little bit better and more virtuous than the rest, with “a touch of Christ about him.” The authoritarian leadership that was in actuality apart of wartime camaraderie was projected on the post-war world. Much of our everyday vocabulary of camaraderie comes from the war. Otto Braun, son of the famous feminist Socialist Lily Braun, wrote in his “Memoir of One who Died Early” about a higher fate, countering the nervous age, with innocence, and male beauty. All of this had of course to be stripped of homoeroticism, because, as Rupert Brooke wrote, camaraderie was purer than love. Purity was the key. It was in such camaraderie of men that Fascism presented itself all over Europe.
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