Abstract
The construction of memorials is a well-established cultural practice, widely recognised and expected. We hear about them; how they are planned, designed, debated, altered, and sometimes removed. They are celebrated, inaugurated, and critiqued; and they become the focal point for anniversaries and forms of memorialisation through which accounts of events are staged. Memorials have become a part of our cultural toolkit. It is taken for granted that major events need memorials, and it has also become commonplace to see such memorials being recast and reinterpreted to suit changing social conditions and needs including the vagaries of ideologies. On our TV screens, we have witnessed the removal of statues of leading communist figures, first from countries within the former communist bloc of Eastern Europe and then throughout the former Soviet Union. More recently, the removal of the Rhodes statue from the University of Cape Town in 2015 not only became internationally debated through the Internet, it also inspired similar claims against monuments elsewhere. In various ways, memorials and memorialisation activities are attracting attention, and they often provide a confused mix of genuine emotive involvement, political propaganda, and media interests. It is within this complex node of interconnections that the raison d’être for this volume is to be found.
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Notes
- 1.
#Rhodes Must Fall
- 2.
There is a distinct trend towards ever wider inclusion. In June 2015, a Memorial to the warhorses shipped from Hampshire during World War One was unveiled in Romsey, England. A fundraising drive to create a memorial in ‘tribute to all the animals that served, suffered and died alongside the British, Commonwealth and Allied forces in the wars and conflicts of the 20th century’ financed ‘The Animals in War Memorial’ now standing at the edge of Hyde Park, London. While the fund is now closed their website is maintained by the British ‘War Memorials Trust’ (http://www.animalsinwar.org.uk/).
- 3.
Such blanket pardons predictably result in substantial debates; these include interesting tensions between historians’ insistence that history should not be tampered with (i.e. warning against the distortion of historical facts) and relatives’ demand for injustices to be redressed. (e.g. through rhetoric like: I personally haven’t got final closure. I will only get that when Bernard’s name is on the role of honour in the cathedral of his home town of Derry, in Northern Ireland, and on the war memorial in Derry, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4797969.stm, consulted 24 November 2016.)
- 4.
See, for instance, several of the memorials created for the centenary of World War One, from the famous 2014 ‘Blood Swept Lands and Sea of Red’ memorial installation at the Tower of London, to the RBL online initiative ‘Every Man Remembered’, and the ‘We Are Here’ Somme tribute in British train stations for the centenary of the battle on 1 July 2016. See http://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/tower-of-london-remembers/about-the-installation/; http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/remembrance/ww1-centenary/every-man-remembered/; https://becausewearehere.co.uk/
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- 6.
Synthesising Brooks, Olick writes: ‘[A] “usable past” is thus an invention or at least a retrospective reconstruction to serve the needs of the present’ (Olick 2007:19).
- 7.
Sidney Herbet was Secretary at War during the Crimean War and a close ally of Nightingale.
- 8.
The original epitaph was engraved on a commemorative stone placed on top of the burial mound. It has not survived, but the epitaph was engraved on a new stone in 1955. There is some dispute about whether the epitaph is actually attributable to Simonides (Molyneux 1992: 183f); but this has not affected the almost mythological status of this attribution in popular presentations, and references to Simonides and Thermopylae are plentiful including in travel writing.
- 9.
For a detailed discussion see Vandiver 2011: 10ff.
- 10.
Except Italy which entered the war in 1915, so that the conflict there is known as ‘la Guerra ’15-’18’.
- 11.
‘Mort pour la France’ is the ritualised response after each name has been read out during the Armistice Day ceremonies (see e.g. Prost 2002).
- 12.
A famous Polish architect who is now considered to never have been properly recognised by the West.
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Sørensen, M.L.S., Viejo-Rose, D., Filippucci, P. (2019). Memorials and Memorialisation: History, Forms, and Affects. In: Sørensen, M., Viejo-Rose, D., Filippucci, P. (eds) Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18091-1_1
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