Collective Memory: When History Becomes New

Channel surfing through my Amazon Prime choices I finally, in desperation, alighted upon "The Long Shadow," a documentary series by David Reynolds, a Cambridge don who has done his work on the history of World War 1, which, as he repeatedly points out, happened before he was born. This is an important point: there is history we live through, history that happened while there are still those alive who remember it, and then there is the rest of history.

David Reynolds

He dwells for the entire opening episode about how the way Brits and Germans and Americans remember World War One was different right after that war and was different 20 years later and was different again 50 years later.  

History is seen differently in the memories of different peoples and it morphs in the minds of the same population, as time progresses.

Right after World War 1, in Britain, it was the glorious, sacred war of sacrifice for King and country.  But within 10 years, as soldiers returned and accounts were taken, it became a story of futility, of senseless, meaningless slaughter, wrought by stupendously stupid generals who were not themselves in the trenches and by self absorbed monarchs who had no personal skin in the game. 

Kaiser Wilhelm

Because of the way WW1 was perceived by 1935 in England--much the way Americans now remember the quagmire, the stupidity of Vietnam--Brits were loathe to rise to the challenge of Mussolini and Hitler. A pox on all their houses; we got suckered into a war once, not again. While Brits were not alienated enough to reject monarchy outright, and were not persuaded to become communists, they agreed with the basic Lenin argument about war: A bayonet is a weapon with a worker on either end.

One thing Reynolds points out, which I had not realized somehow, that while Wilson's windy phrase, "We must make the world safe for democracy" was empty in many ways, it was a very essential message and truth in another sense.  
It's true Wilson's idea of democracy was a representative government for those who deserved to be represented, namely white males, preferably with a Princeton education, but we he went to Britain and was feted at Buckingham Palace with all the princes and dukes of British royalty in their elaborate costumes, Wilson arrived to dinner in a plain black suit, and, as Professor Reynolds remarks, "He must have brought to mind, 'Oh, here is Oliver Cromwell.'" 
I had to Google Cromwell, but I knew he was an anti monarchist, and in fact, he signed the death warrant for the execution of the king and he reigned over a parliament which replaced king with a representative body, of sorts.
Wilson, of course, was a Virginia aristocrat, a spiritual descendant of the Lost Cause, who rooted Blacks out of the federal government, disdained the idea of women voting, and was as close to Jefferson Davis in the White House as we have ever got (until, perhaps, Donald Trump) but he was no friend of the idea of monarchy and empire, and in this way he was something of a shock to the Brits.

No Blacks nor Women Need Apply

As Reynolds points out,  WW1 did change things in Europe. The disillusion with military governments ruled by monarchs was so deep and pervasive nine new republics emerged, one in Germany, briefly. But France, and much of the rest of Europe got parliaments and kings no longer could start wars over matters of offended royal pride.  

In England, after WW1, a new parliament was voted in by legions of newly enfranchised voters from the lower and middle classes, who could now vote and also by women, or at least women over the age of 30. (Why a 29 year old woman was denied the vote is not explained.)

So the memory of WW1 in England went from glory, to revulsion at the cupidity and stupidity and selfishness of the ruling class. And that meant England allowed Hitler to rise without challenging him before his particular version of spider wasp was able to eat Germany out from the inside. 

Archduke Ferdinand

Hitler, it must be remembered was not of the aristocratic German nobility, but was elected to office, albeit with a small plurality.

As much as I've recently read about WW1 lately, I had not seen it the way Reynolds, who is a man with a mind capable of seeing the same thing, but in a different way and he emphasizes how memory is plastic and molded to the current purpose but also how the stubborn facts of what really happened do matter.

Wilfred Owen

He points out that when WW1 was taught in schools by the mid 20th century, it was taught using the poems of the famous war poets, but one of the most famous, Wilfred Owen, is remembered in an edited form.  Owen, wrote of the cost, the horror the slaughter and his poems had all that, but they also had the thrill of battle and the idea that war might mean something. In fact, Owen chose to return to the trenches, although he did not have to go back, and he was killed there. When his brother, who managed his memory and his literary legacy published his poems, the brother edited out the pro war passages and made sure only the anti war stuff remained.  Another famous soldier poet, Siegfried Sassoon, met with Owen while Owen was weighing whether or not to go back to the trenches and implored him to stay home, away from the senseless carnage, but for Owen the carnage made sense.

Siegfried Sassoon

Owen and Sassoon's poems became part of a narrative of war as anything but glorious. Their work joined work from the other side--Eric Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," from the German side, all of which suggested the masses, who died in waves of charges against machine guns and artillery had been duped into dying for a corrupt cause.

Revulsion against this notion ran deep in Britain--even to "Lady Chatterley's Lover" where a woman who was left behind safe at home had to deal with her crippled but imperious husband who returned from the war, paralyzed from the waist down, and Constance sees the mockery of those aristocratic British "values" as a hideous lie.

Paul kills Frenchman All Quiet on the Western Front

Listening to Reynold's description of Mussolini, who most Americans, if they know anything about him at all, remember as a clownish figure of strutting impotence, it is stunning how closely Mussolini resembles Donald Trump--they even look like products of the same litter.

History, as Reynolds presents it is a living thing, something which has shaped the lenses through which we see our world today. 

The Lost Cause (Slavery and Gone With the Wind)

Reynolds' argument is a twist on Faulkner's famous line, "The past is not dead. It is not even past."

But, in Faulkner's mind, the past is immutable, ever present, a living ghost standing right behind us; What Reynolds knows is that the past is like the rest of life: It is what we make it today.