The Bureaucratization of Death: The First World War, Families, and the State

Abstract

After the First World War the British state tried to show the families of the dead their thanks, and memorialize the dead, through the two-minute silence and the creation of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. However, before families of deceased servicepeople encountered the state through national commemorations they encountered it through the administrative paperwork of death. Other than brief mentions in wider works, the bureaucracy of death is remarkably absent from discussions of death, yet the paperwork associated with death was a significant part of family experiences of bereavement, particularly in wartime. This article argues that state bureaucracy played a key role in defining people’s experience of wartime bereavement, both practically, through the paperwork sent, but also temporally, by controlling when and how families could carry out grave-related elements of mourning, such as choosing an epitaph. Over the course of the early inter-war period, the bureaucracy of death encountered by the families of the war dead could profoundly shape their experience of loss.

Conceptualising the ‘Administration of the Dead’: Cadavers, war and public health in the early 20th century

“…Similarly, there is a need to document if guidelines of health specialists issued to all the large imperial armies were respected on the ground and to document what did the battlefields' ‘sanitizing’ or ‘clean up’ (wording of the time) actually entail for human remains. While state administrations and armies mobilised the respectful language of grief, commemoration and sometimes glorification when referring to the dead—even if sometimes their approach could be dispassionate and bureaucratic (Foster, 2022)—dealing with a large number of corpses on the ground responded to a different logic: that of disposal. Although the words body disposal or management were not in use at the time, they offer a valid heuristic framework for an investigation of what these societies did with the corpses.…”