Cultural Memory and the Great War: Medievalism and Classicism in British and German War Memorials

Abstract

This chapter investigates the overlaps between the ‘cultural memory’ of the distant past and the memory of the Great War in Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1939, looking in particular at the use of medieval(ist) images in war memorials. There was a certain tension between advocates of medievalism and supporters of classicist images, but often, they reached a compromise. The chapter combines a discussion of the concept of ‘cultural memory’ with case studies on the reception of antiquity and the Middle Ages in the era of the Great War.

Historical Pageants and the Medieval Past in Twentieth-Century England

“…Goebel writes, 'established interpretations of the First World War as a cultural turning-point in modern history cannot be sustained with regard to the culture of public remembrance'. In post-war British memory of the Great War, medievalism 'flourished' 102. There was, moreover, also a new strand of 'medieval modernism' in the culture of interwar Britain, influenced by nineteenth-century medievalists such as Ruskin and Morris.…”