Remembering and Forgetting the First World War in Western Europe

Abstract

In 1918 Marcel Proust contemplated the cathedrals which lay in ruins on the Western Front: ‘I weep, and I admire the soldiers more than the churches, which were no more than the physical expression of a heroic gesture, renewed today at every moment’ (Proust 1918, 193). It is not surprising that Proust expressed so well the fate of most of the inhabitants of Europe and, indeed, of much of the rest of the world. After the war the survivors could rebuild even the cathedrals; but the dead, what was left of them, apart from that double injunction forever reinvoked: never forget, and never allow such a catastrophe again? A few years later, in 1925, Maurice Halbwachs invented the concept of collective memory (Halbwachs 1975, 1980, 1992). He was the first professor of sociology ever to be appointed in a French university; it was of course in Strasbourg, which had been recaptured from Germany, not least intellectually, by those who were to become the most important university teachers of their generation (Craig 1984). Marcel Proust and Maurice Halbwachs were masters of the suffering of mourning and the pain of memory, and because the pieces which interest us here were written during the war or in the years immediately after it, they seem to be good guides through the wanderings of the private and public transfiguring ordeals of mass death.