ABSTRACT
Emphasizing the civilianization of war memories, this chapter discusses the device of recognition scenes as a trope in modern memory work. Human linkage in conflict demythologizes the enemy-other (Owen’s ‘enemy as friend’). It is an empathetic moment of common humanity, both in real and in fictional narratives: used in film (Jarman, Pabst, Milestone, Attenborough), in poetry (Douglas, Owen) and prose (Woolf [Thoughts on Peace]), Orwell, Brittain, Remarque). The real-life stories of veterans – for example, Vietnam, and such events as the 1914 Christmas Truce which are widely misinterpreted – are often postnational in their identifications. The author’s contact with Italian and German war prisoners 1944–47 are described in a vignette, where the smell of Italian coffee brings back wartime memories of fellowship of a child with ‘the enemy’, first Italian, then German. Such recognition scenes in film, literature and reality, and their mythologizing in later wars, are discussed in relation to postnational deconstruction of images of the enemy, empathy and male bonding in war.
