I have been dreading commemorations of the First World War. What are they for? Already a flood of books is pouring off the presses - and you have to wonder what remains to be said. An astonishing number are lazily entitled '1914 + variation'.
What does 'The First World War' signify in 2013? It's not very clear. Somehow the obscenity of the war has been smothered by sentiment and commemorative drivel. We honour when we should be angry.
One of the most remarkable books about the war is Paul Fussell's 'The Great War and Modern Memory'. But this masterpiece is not a 'war book'. It's about the invention of a specific kind of irony. Patriotic Philip Larkin denounced the book as 'obscene nonsense'. It's a masterpiece. One of the most impressive chapters focuses on Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That' that Fussell aligns with other anti war masterpieces such as Joseph Heller's 'Catch 22'.
Fussell said in an interview:
To have public life shot through with that kind of optimism and complacency is the grounds for horrible, instructive irony when those generalities prove not true. War tends to prove them not true. War is about survival and it's about mass killing and it's about killing or being killed -- that is, in the infantry -- and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don't fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony.
In the turgid flood of new books about the 'Great War' very few stand out as worthy successors to Fussell's work. Christopher Clark's 'The Sleepwalkers' is one that does.
Astonishingly, a member of that loud mouthed brigade of battle field touring, armchair warriors and trench obsessives excoriates Clark in Boris Johnson's reactionary old rag 'The Spectator'. This author - who seems to suffer from a rabid jealousy of Clark's academic position - delivers the following ad hominem judgement:
Clark is, as his brief author’s biography makes very clear, such a Teutonophile that I am surprised that he doesn’t deliver lectures to the Cambridge History Faculty wearing a Pickelhaube. He also holds the ‘Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany’, although he doesn’t say whether this comes encrusted with diamond clusters and oak leaves.
What seems to be intolerable to these pseudo historians with trench foot in mouth is that Clark dares to contextualise the matter of German 'guilt' - which was enshrined at Versailles in 1919. Evidently, right wing historians cling desperately to the raft of German national guilt and are limbering up for five years of finger pointing.
Clark is not apologising for or justifying Wilhelmine Germany's part in the drift to war in August 1914 but setting it into a complex weave of diplomacy and intricate nationalist energies. It's a remarkable achievement.
So why do we still need 'German guilt' a century later? Is is to make the 'Great War' - that adjective is one of Fussell's cruel ironies - comprehensible to right wing simpletons? Does the guilt of the Other in some way exonerate the grotesque way in which a British government permitted and then 'commemorated' the slaughter of millions? When we visit Lutyens' remarkable memorial in France the only conceivable emotion is angry disgust: that so many tens of thousands of the war's victims could not be identified.
It is to be hoped that in the rumbling torrent of new books more will follow Clark's path and debunk the foolish score settling mythologies we need to grow out of.
What does 'The First World War' signify in 2013? It's not very clear. Somehow the obscenity of the war has been smothered by sentiment and commemorative drivel. We honour when we should be angry.
One of the most remarkable books about the war is Paul Fussell's 'The Great War and Modern Memory'. But this masterpiece is not a 'war book'. It's about the invention of a specific kind of irony. Patriotic Philip Larkin denounced the book as 'obscene nonsense'. It's a masterpiece. One of the most impressive chapters focuses on Robert Graves' 'Goodbye to All That' that Fussell aligns with other anti war masterpieces such as Joseph Heller's 'Catch 22'.
Fussell said in an interview:
To have public life shot through with that kind of optimism and complacency is the grounds for horrible, instructive irony when those generalities prove not true. War tends to prove them not true. War is about survival and it's about mass killing and it's about killing or being killed -- that is, in the infantry -- and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don't fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony.
In the turgid flood of new books about the 'Great War' very few stand out as worthy successors to Fussell's work. Christopher Clark's 'The Sleepwalkers' is one that does.
Astonishingly, a member of that loud mouthed brigade of battle field touring, armchair warriors and trench obsessives excoriates Clark in Boris Johnson's reactionary old rag 'The Spectator'. This author - who seems to suffer from a rabid jealousy of Clark's academic position - delivers the following ad hominem judgement:
Clark is, as his brief author’s biography makes very clear, such a Teutonophile that I am surprised that he doesn’t deliver lectures to the Cambridge History Faculty wearing a Pickelhaube. He also holds the ‘Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany’, although he doesn’t say whether this comes encrusted with diamond clusters and oak leaves.
What seems to be intolerable to these pseudo historians with trench foot in mouth is that Clark dares to contextualise the matter of German 'guilt' - which was enshrined at Versailles in 1919. Evidently, right wing historians cling desperately to the raft of German national guilt and are limbering up for five years of finger pointing.
Clark is not apologising for or justifying Wilhelmine Germany's part in the drift to war in August 1914 but setting it into a complex weave of diplomacy and intricate nationalist energies. It's a remarkable achievement.
So why do we still need 'German guilt' a century later? Is is to make the 'Great War' - that adjective is one of Fussell's cruel ironies - comprehensible to right wing simpletons? Does the guilt of the Other in some way exonerate the grotesque way in which a British government permitted and then 'commemorated' the slaughter of millions? When we visit Lutyens' remarkable memorial in France the only conceivable emotion is angry disgust: that so many tens of thousands of the war's victims could not be identified.
It is to be hoped that in the rumbling torrent of new books more will follow Clark's path and debunk the foolish score settling mythologies we need to grow out of.
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