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Journal of War and Culture Studies Volume 1 Number 1 © 2008 Intellect Ltd
Position Paper. English language. doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.1.39/0

War memorials at the intersection

of politics, culture and memory
Bill Niven Nottingham Trent University

Abstract Keywords
War memorials are amongst the oldest memorials in the world. This paper war memorials
provides a brief history of the way their function has evolved, focusing in particular monuments
on European war memorials constructed after the First and Second World Wars. remembrance
It argues that, generally speaking, war memorials before the First World War commemoration
were celebratory in character and served to underpin the authority of victorious national identity
leaders or nations. After 1918, they functioned often as crystallization points for
collective mourning and remembrance. But the political interest in constructing
celebratory war memorials remained, not least after the Second World War, as
the example of the many Soviet war memorials erected in Eastern European
countries demonstrates. However, this paper warns against understanding war
memorials as immutable statements. Many memorials have undergone rededica-
tion, alteration, removal and reconstruction, and relocation during their history.
This makes them significant as markers of political and cultural change.

Monuments to war are one of the most frequent kinds of monument. Their
construction has accompanied and followed wars around the globe for
centuries. Prior to the First World War, they generally had an affirmative,
political and often truly ‘monumental’ character. One only needs to think,
for instance, of the Arc de Triomphe, the construction of which was
inspired by Napoleon’s triumph at the battle of Austerlitz; or, for a quite
different perspective on the Napoleonic wars, of the Narva Triumphal Gate
in St Petersburg hailing Russian victory over Napoleon. Even decades later,
victory against Napoleon could be recalled in memorial form; the
Memorial to the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig in 1813, with its long
gestation period (it was dedicated in 1913, but conceived much earlier),
implied that the post-1871 Prussian-dominated Kaiserreich somehow ful-
filled the legacy of that battle. More so than any other cultural articulation
of war, war monuments operated at the nexus of politics and culture.
Their sheer size, and/or occupation of often significant public urban space
was a manifest demonstration of the right of a ruler – past or present – to
authority. They were symbolic assertions of historically grounded power.
The First World War, of course, marked a watershed. Not that war
monuments after 1918 ceased to be monumental: the Menin Gate or the
Ossuary near Verdun are impressive constructions. But smaller, more
modest monuments, such as Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Whitehall Cenotaph, also
became quite common as a focus for national commemoration. Big or
small, this was the essential point: after the First World War, which one

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might see as the first truly global war, one fought out between citizens
rather than professionalized soldiers, looking back on war became a
process of mourning – often independent of victory or defeat. Monuments
to triumph appeared to give way, in part at least, to memorials to human
loss, foci for the articulation of grief and remembrance; points of crystal-
lization for the feelings of ordinary civilians made to fight the wars, rather
than for the self-aggrandizement of military and political leaders.
Representative of this was the integration of graves to unknown soldiers
into memorials, or indeed the constitution of such graves as memorials.
Thus the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, unveiled in November 1920 in
Paris, offers a sharp contrast to the Napoleonic pomp of the Arc de
Triomphe under which it lies. Seemingly, a true democratization of
memory set in as spontaneously established village, municipal and
regional committees in Britain, for instance, coordinated the building of
local, urban and district memorials (Figure 1).
Yet one should be cautious of seeing in the post-1918 era a total tran-
sition from war monument as political muscle-flexing to war memorials
as politically neutral centres for the collective expression of private
grief. Public enactments of private mourning subject the latter to ritual,
the observation of which becomes as important a part of memoriali-
zation as the construction and sheer presence of memorials themselves.

Figure 1: Nottingham City War Memorial, Victoria Embankment, unveiled 1927 (Bill Niven).

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Commemorative rituals often involve politicians, their structure and

contents often reflect political interest. The carefully orchestrated perfor-
mance of private grief as a public experience served to express the need for,
and perhaps even achieve, national unity and purpose for the future. For
those who lost the war, the Unknown Soldier could have an ambivalent
significance, as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Munich indicates:
the massive recumbent figure could be construed as a call to take up arms
once more (although the contrasting friezes of marching soldiers and
marching crosses suggest a more critical view of war).
Nor should one make the mistake of thinking that war monuments as
assertions of political will were a thing of the past. What was the massive,
fortress-like Tannenberg Memorial in East Prussia, dedicated in 1927 in
honour of those Germans who fought in Hindenburg’s famous victory at
Tannenberg, if not a cultural marker of defiance in the face of past defeat,
the Versailles Treaty and the post-war order, in which East Prussia had
been severed from the Reich? The Tannenberg Memorial came about in
large part thanks to the efforts of a memorial association (in 1926,
however, its appeal for the right to lobby for donations was supported by
the Reich); but it became a focus of nationalist sentiment, not least for
Hitler. The Weimar Republic failed to come up with a contrasting central
memorial that captured the public imagination.
Elsewhere, state governments did play a direct part in erecting politi-
cized monuments. Italy’s King Vittorio Emanuele III was behind the con-
struction in 1928 of a fairly inflammatory war memorial in Bolzano. In
addition to commemorating the war dead, it asserted Italy’s right to political
hegemony in South Tyrol – acquired controversially by Italy in 1919 – by
asserting ‘here is the border of the fatherland’. In the 1920s, Alexander I
of Yugoslavia had a memorial constructed near Belgrade to the ‘Unknown
Hero’ of the First World War and the preceding Balkan Wars, which com-
memorated the dead of all parts of his new kingdom (Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes); thus a memorial was deployed to help build a collective political
identity in the present. Franco attempted a similar act of national concilia-
tion with the Valley of the Fallen near Madrid, inaugurated in 1959 to
honour those who fell during the Spanish Civil War, but the nationalistic,
Catholic, indeed even anti-communist tone of the memorial and its dedication
effectively downgraded those who had fallen for the Republican cause to
the status of second-class victims. After the Second World War, the Soviets
and their satellite governments in Eastern Europe constructed massive war
monuments as one conduit for the imposition of politically desirable
memories. Huge monuments to the Soviet Motherland, to Stalin or, in
some form or other, to the Great Patriotic War called on Eastern European
citizens to remember the Soviets as grand liberators from Nazism and to
embrace communism – and to forget that this liberation had simultane-
ously constituted a reoccupation.
Generally speaking, war memorials erected after the Second World War
are much more diverse in their statements and focus than those erected
between the two World Wars; they reflect the differences between both wars
in terms of their development, character and outcomes. The abiding impres-
sion left by the First World War was one of trench warfare, and of a struggle
between nations; the abiding impression left by the Second World War was

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Figure 2: Memorial to a Female Partisan, Venice, dedicated 1968 (Bill Niven).

one of global struggle against Nazi evil. At the very latest after the
Nuremberg Trials, it became important for those nations occupied by the
Nazis to remember their history as one of moral rejection of Nazism. This
clearly had implications for national self-esteem and the reconstruction of
national identity; hence the emphasis in memorials and commemoration
not just on Allied heroics, but also on resistance, as in Venice’s ‘Monument
to a Female Partisan’ commemorating Italian resistance (Figure 2).
What also made the Second World War different was the Holocaust.
But nations were slow to remember this. The number of memorials
commemorating the Holocaust has, of course, increased over recent
decades – often prompted by private initiatives, sometimes by govern-
ments, sometimes, as in the case of the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe, resulting from parliamentary endorsement of what began
as the vision of a citizens’ action group (Figure 3).
The memorialization of the Holocaust presupposes a preparedness to
acknowledge national complicity (such as that of Vichy France in the
deportation of Jews). The construction of Holocaust memorials and the
establishment of days of Holocaust commemoration imply the stabilization
of national identities; resistance narratives are no longer needed to the
same degree, at least not in Western Europe.
Fledgling Eastern European states, however, released from the Soviet
grip only recently, appear to be developing new, more nationally oriented

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Figure 3: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, dedicated 2005 (Bill Niven).

resistance, victimhood and liberation narratives focusing on their suffering

under the Soviet Union (supplanting the anti-fascist resistance and libera-
tion narratives installed under communism). These can take the form of
days of commemoration for victims of communism, and memorials (such
as the notorious ‘potato-on-a-skewer’ Memorial of Rebirth in Bucharest to
the victims of the 1989 revolution against Ceausescu). At the same time,
Holocaust memorials are being constructed (such as the Rumbula
Holocaust Memorial in Riga, Latvia, dedicated in November 2002). No
doubt the latter process is driven, in part at least, by a sense of the appro-
priate. If Western democracies measure the maturity of the national polity
by a manifest and (ideally) self-critical commitment to remembering and
opposing genocide, then Eastern European states, as new or prospective
European Union members, will feel bound to follow suit. But the tensions
in Eastern European states between the simultaneous processes of rapidly
needing to build national identity on historical constructions of national
victimhood and evolving a more self-critical memory are manifest – not
least in Poland’s ongoing debate about the complicity of Poles in the murder
of Jews in Jedwabne in 1941.
To sum up: the cultural significance of memorials as reminders of past
wars has always been simultaneously a political one. In the nineteenth
century, their placement in strategic key areas of public space was
designed to symbolize the centrality of their message, a message often tailored

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to the political interests of those leaders who had conducted the war in
question. This significance continued in the twentieth century, but can be
contrasted with developments toward a ‘democratization’ of memorial
space; war memorials became focal points for the collective articulation of
grief, the ritualization of which is nevertheless rarely quite free of political
significance. But it would not be judicious to restrict discussion to new
memorials. More than anything, perhaps, it is the way memorials have
changed over time that reveals the intimate link between the cultural and
the political.
Europe knows many examples of memorials that were given one
meaning, then resignified (often through changing dedications); memori-
als that were dismantled and then rebuilt; memorials that were changed
either through the removal of parts or through accretions; memorials that
were attacked, blown up or recycled (even as an anti-tank defence, as in
the case of the Moscow Triumphal Gate in Leningrad); memorials that
were dumped in back gardens or put up in theme parks (the fate of some
communist memorials in post-communist Eastern Europe); and itinerant
memorials that were moved around from one part of a city to another or
indeed from one country to another. Memorials appear to set history in
stone, but in fact they may be cultural history’s most vulnerable and
adaptable hardware, as capable of updates as a modern computer. This is
certainly the case with war memorials. The key to understanding this lies
in the fact that memorials stand in, literally, for the political orders that
built them. Once those orders have been replaced, the memorials remain
as stony anachronisms, telling of a bygone age and representing values
now rejected or even despised. Destroying or updating them is a cultural
form of marking political change. Sometimes, as during the Hungarian
revolution in 1956, or in Prague in 1968, memorials symbolizing a political
system are attacked while this system is still in power. It is hard for disaffected
individuals or groups to topple a system or gain access to the hated politi-
cians who spearhead it; hence rage is focused on the stone Stalins or
Lenins that stand in for power in public space.
I would hope that the introduction of this journal might encourage
contributions on war memorials, and not least on their material transfor-
mation and transposition over time: a kind of diachronic archaeology of
forms and locations. A good place to start might be The Flensburg or Isted
Lion, unveiled in Flensburg to celebrate the Danish victory in the first
Schleswig war (1848–1851). The lion, given the shifting status of
Flensburg, soon became the focus of a tug-of-war between Prussia/Germany
and Denmark. It moved around over the next 150 years, from Flensburg to
Berlin (where it was copied and rededicated to Prussian military strength),
and from there to Copenhagen. It may yet return to Flensburg – truly a
memorial odyssey.
All the talk at the moment, of course, is of Estonia’s Bronze Soldier,
erected to symbolize Soviet victory over Nazism, and recently dismantled
because today’s Estonians see the memorial as a symbol of Soviet oppres-
sion. Yet at the same time the memorial has gained significance for
Estonia’s Russian minority as a symbol of their rights, so that its removal
is understood as part of a process of anti-Russian discrimination to which
this minority currently feels subjected. It is the case, then, that we need a

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synchronic as well as a diachronic approach: not only do perceptions and

understandings of memorials change over time, they can differ at one and
the same time. Above all we need to understand that debates in the pre-
sent can crystallize not just around views of the past, but also quite physically
around the memorial traces of that past; of all cultural artefacts, it is the
memorial that most frequently becomes the flashpoint of struggles over
history, politics and identity.

References
Fussell, P. (2000), The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Goebel, S. (2007), The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and
Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–940, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
King, A. (1998), Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of
Remembrance, Oxford: Berg.
Stamp, G. (2007), The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, London: Profile.
Winter, J. (1998), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European
Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Young, J.E. (1994), The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New
Haven: Yale University Press.

Suggested citation
Niven, B. (2008), ‘War memorials at the intersection of politics, culture
and memory’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 1: 1, pp. 39–45,
doi: 10.1386/jwcs.1.1.39/0

Contributor details
Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent
University. He is author of Facing the Nazi Past (Routledge, 2001) and The
Buchenwald Child (Camden House, 2007), as well as editor of Germans as Victims
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He is currently working on a history of the expulsion
of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War.
Contact: Bill Niven, Department of History and Heritage, Nottingham Trent
University, Clifton Campus, Clifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS.
E-mail: william.niven@ntu.ac.uk

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