ABSTRACT
How historical remembrance deals with forgetting the pain of recalling the traumas of 1914–18, and the suppression of memory. Memory and silencing are illustrated from as diverse frames as Walter Benjamin, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Käthe Kollwitz, Vera Brittain, Ernst Friedrich and Abel Gance’s film J’Accuse. Loss is related to spaces, absences, ‘the unknown soldier’, the missing in action, the theme of spiritualism and ‘Ghosts’ as well as shell shock in Barker’s Regeneration novels represented as a metaphor for collective memory. Numbing and denial is both a civilian and a military response to the war experience. The issue of the spaces and absences are analysed in relation to Eliot’s Wasteland, Lutyens’s memorials (Thiepval, the Cenotaph) and visuals of mourning: the preservation of mementos of loss. The theme of madness in and after war recurs, along with the silencing of the veteran, and modes of rebellion in subsequent memoires, film and literature (Remarque).
