The two sections for the two world wars at the Stuttgarter Waldfriedhof lie adjacent to each other, and yet are full of contrasts.

For one thing, there are several times as many graves for the First World War than for the Second. I assume that has to do with the relative importance of Stuttgart as a hospital site. During World War One it was relatively close to the front for a prolonged period of time. Many who survived their wounds long enough to be evacuated to Stuttgart would have died and been buried here. As in other locations, the graves are not likely to be of those who are from Stuttgart. Germany did not invest the logistical effort into revacuating every body back to its home town. They are those who died in or near Stuttgart.

More interesting, however, is the profound difference in the cultures of memory between the two postwar periods as reflected in the two sites. The site for the First World War is a place where the ethos of national military pride is celebrated. As will be shown, the imperial German military ethos is still alive and well in the 1920s. The Second World War reflects total defeat. Wolfgang Schivelbusch wrote in his study of militarily defeated countries, (Die Kultur der Niederlage see the resources page), that,

"There are different degrees of being defeated and at the end of one's strength. As long as it maintains an intact sense of national consciousness, the losing nation is unwilling to concede to the demands of moral and spiritual capitulation (regret, conversion, re-education). That only changes when in addition to the physical foundation, the spiritual and moral foundation of the country are destroyed. The losers of 1865, 1871 and 1918 weren't at that point".

This cemetery shows that in 1945, they were. As Schivelbusch explains, Japan and Germany performed all the necessary rituals of defeat and regret because, having been bombed into the Stone Age, they were simply too exhausted for any other reaction. I would add that the moral effect of the Holocaust also greatly contributed to the sense of total moral and physical defeat in the case of Germany.

In 2011, Berghahn published a volume dedicated to a phenomenon which has grown rapidly and globally since the 1980s, but which has not been studied extensively up to present: Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, edited by Peter Jan Magry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero (Basingstoke, New York-Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011). Building on Jack Santino’s concept of ‘spontaneous shrines’ (2006), which he applied in his analysis of ‘temporary monuments’ to political assassinations in Northern Ireland, the volume sets out to understand whether we are increasingly witnessing a ‘new public mourning’. Thus in addition to the discussion of memory sites, the volume engages with issues of trauma, negotiation, public memory and justice.

According to Magry and Sánchez-Carretero, this new form of mourning – in the shape of grassroots memorials – should be considered as ‘a form of individualized political participation and social action’ (28). I would not have used the term ‘individualized’ in this context, though. Grassroots memorials may reflect a process of participation which is to some extent ‘disconnected from traditional classes, ethnicities, and other imagined communities’ (29), but I don't believe it's an individual process. Nor do these memorials necessarily take place outside of the public and the official sphere, as Ewa Klekot’s chapter on the mourning rituals for the Polish Pope John Paul II in his home country illustrate. In their way, grassroots memorials bring together individuals who share a common grief, thus creating a new (memory) community.

An important element in grassroots memorials is their political significance. Generally, they originate when incidents occur that were ‘not supposed to happen’. In other words, incidents caused by human failure or malice (traffic incidents, terrorism). But what about natural disasters? Not by chance, only one chapter in the volume is dedicated to a catastrophic event, the 1999 floods in Venezuela (Revet). This chapter clearly stands out from the rest of the book as it does not really discuss a grassroots memorial, if we consider the latter as a form of social action, 'instrumentalized to articulate social or political disaffection' (Magry and Sánchez-Carretero, 2). At the most, the floods produced monuments of mourning. Although political debates regarding, for example, the government's inability to reconstruct the affected area did develop in the wake of the floods, in the end they represent a purely natural disaster which was unavoidable, and therefore did not produce any spontaneous manifestations. In addition, the main activities in the days following the disaster were focused on rescuing the survivors, and so no or very little political contention is to be traced here.

More interesting and rich examples of grassroots memorials include the 9/11 museums (Gardner) and ‘street shrines’ or ‘urban altars’ in Manhattan (Fraenkel). Several chapters in the volume demonstrate that the writing element is fundamental in these processes, where it is not only the content of the text that matters, but the mere fact of writing. It is a performance, which therefore does not limit itself to the memorial itself but ‘includes the agency of individual objects or texts and the behavior of the people involved’ (Magry and Sánchez-Carretero, 3). In other words, it reflects a desire to participate in collective action (Fraenkel, 3). The importance of writing also comes to the fore in Deborah Puccio-Den’s opening chapter on mafia victims in Palermo, Sánchez-Carretero’s contribution on the Madrid bombings in 2005, and in the co-authored piece on Carlo Giuliani’s death during the G8 in Genoa (Italy), in 2001 (Caffarena and Stiaccini). In their discussion of the various messages left by the church railings in Piazza Alimondo, near the spot where the young protester was killed by police, Caffarena and Stiaccini speak of a ‘spontaneous, collective autobiography’ (312) which reflected ‘an impulsive need on the part of the writers to record their presence’, or what they coined a ‘presentiality syndrome’ (314).

Another section of the book is dedicated to a phenomenon which has previously received attention in scholarly research: roadside memorials. Monika Rulfs analyzes the creation and reception of a similar memorial after the death of a 9-year-old girl, hit by a truck in the city of Hamburg while crossing the street on her bicycle. Bicycles are even more central in the following chapter by Robert Thomas Dobler, on the growing phenomenon of ghost bikes. Defined as ‘vernacular expressions of grief and folk art as forms of resistance to mainstream American automobile culture’ (169), these grassroots memorials clearly have a political dimension. Indeed, Dobler gives a good description of the ‘larger cultural war that is being waged along political lines, dividing cyclists and car drivers into the traditionally opposing camps of the more ecologically minded left and the conservative right’ (170).

Left and right are also at the heart of two Dutch case studies on the Theo Van Gogh memorial site in Amsterdam (Stengs), and the Pim Fortuyn murder shortly before the elections in 2002 (Magry). Both Van Gogh and Fortuyn were controversial figures with explicit and unmediated stances against immigration and the ‘islamisation’ of Dutch culture. As in other chapters featured in the book, including Sylvia Grider’s discussion of high school shootings in the USA, Stengs’s analysis is composed mostly of a description of the memorialisation process, which leaves less space for analysis and interpretation. She nevertheless offers an interesting and valuable testimony. Grider, on the other hand, raises questions about negotiation and the power of memory. In her description of the creation of memorials at Columbine High School (1999), Virginia Tech (2007) and Northern Illinois University (2008), she focuses on the role of the shooters in these memorials. Do they deserve to be remembered along with their victims? Should they be remembered at all? She thus demonstrates how these shrines have become ‘performative memorials in which the issue of forgiveness of the murderers was played out in a public forum’ (Grider, 135).

In conclusion, the volume addresses relevant questions and covers a variety of international contexts, although Europe and North America are strongly favoured. The only chapter that discusses grassroots memorials in a non-Western society – the Al Quaeda bombings in Bali, in 2002 (De Jonge) – confronts Eastern and Western ways of mourning, most of the victims being Australian and British tourists. Rather than to interpret this lack of a more transcultural perspective as a point of criticism, it may simply be exemplary of a new way of dealing with trauma in Western societies.

Almost ten years ago I first set foot in Bologna, a popular university city in the Centre North of Italy. I was going to be there for a few months, on the occasion of an international student programme, but I eventually decided to settle in the ‘red city’. Red not only for the characteristic red-brick buildings that populate the medieval city: in the 1970s, Bologna was the showpiece of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) - at the time the largest Communist party in Western Europe - which had dominated the ‘Red Belt’ regions of this part of the country since the late 1960s. Although the hegemonic position of the left has long waned and the right-wing, xenophobe ideologies of the Northern League are gaining ground fast, the memory of the 1970s is still very much alive, even (or perhaps, especially) among younger generations of left-wing activists.

This first occurred to me when I moved to a student flat near the university zone. A friend drew my attention to a curious commemorative site, only two blocks from where I was living: it consisted of a commemorative plaque for a certain Francesco Lorusso, who had apparently been killed in this location on 11 March 1977, though the plaque does not specify by whom, complemented by a glass plate a couple of meters further ahead, covering the holes in the wall left by the bullets that killed him. I had walked passed this site many times but without ever noticing it.

As I started to do research into the incident and the way it has been commemorated through the years, I discovered that Francesco Lorusso had been a left-wing student, killed by a police officer during riots, in the notorious protest year of 1977. Until present, this dramatic incident constitutes an open wound not only for Lorusso’s family and friends, but for all those who belonged to the student movement of 1977, as Lorusso’s case was closed without a trial and no legal and historical truth has been achieved.

This explains the highly ideological and unconventional text of the commemorative plaque, an initiative by Lorusso’s political companions and friends: it doesn’t focus on Lorusso as a person, that is his life, his achievements or the circumstances of his death, but on the persistence of the ideals he had died for, ideals he shared with the other members of the student movement. It thus reflects the ‘counter-memory’ that the student movement of 1977 wanted to promote through this plaque, i.e. that Lorusso (and the student movement as a whole) has not been done justice. However, the choice of the medium through which to transmit this ideological message, a marble plaque reminiscent of the ‘martyr monuments’ that have been erected in the city for partisan heroes of the Second World War. In other words, its form is that of a highly traditional and conventional form of commemoration.

This may be explained, in the first place, by the necessity to give this counter-memory a visible and tangible form of expression, to ‘fix’ it in space; secondly and more importantly, the lack of ‘agreement’ on the injustice of Lorusso’s death required a more commonly shared form of remembering for the transmission of this memory to a wider public.

This need intensified in subsequent years and is expressed in various attempts by Lorusso’s family, political companions and friends to commemorate him through the institutions. Thus, shortly before the first anniversary of Lorusso’s death in 1978, a group of left-wing students made an official request to name a popular university square after their dead companion. This demonstrates the importance of negotiations in the transmission of contentious memories of violence.

Indeed, the first official memory site that was created for Lorusso in the early 1990s - a public garden just outside the historical city centre - was a site of great compromise. The public garden offered no ‘physical’ connection, for example, with the memory of March 1977: originally a beef cattle market, the choice of this public garden was justifiable, at the most, by the presence of a student dormitory, hence demonstrating the anxiety of authorities to draw attention away from Lorusso’s circumstances of death. This form of selection was reinforced by the commemorative plaque in the public garden, which reads: ‘Francesco Lorusso, university student who died tragically on 11 March 1977’. Especially the use of the adjective ‘tragical’ implies a refusal to take any (moral) responsibility for Lorusso’s death, and in fact received many criticism from former members of the student movement in Bologna.

Word goes round that a wooden statue of Lorusso, made in 1978 by the father of one of the student leaders in Bologna, is soon to be located in the university zone. This may perhaps make Lorusso’s memory more visible and 'official', but whether it will heal the wound of 1977 is another question.

See also: 'Francesco è vivo, e lotta insieme a noi Rebuilding local identities in the aftermath of the 1977 student protests in Bologna'

In anticipation of the Centennial of the First World War (1914-1918), the World Heritage Tourism Research Network (WHTRN), an independent academic research group, is implementing an international survey project to learn more about present day reflections, views and perspectives regarding the First World War. We cordially invite your participation. Participants can take the survey once only. It should take approximately 15 minutes to complete. The survey is available in English, French and Dutch. To take the survey, please visit the following link:

http://app.fluidsurveys.com/s/Centennial-Centenaire-of-the-First-World-War/

We sincerely thank you for your participation. Please forward this invitation to your professional and academic networks, as well as to your colleagues and friends.

Regards,
WHTRN Team
Website: www.whtrn.ca

If you have problems accessing this survey, please contact wanda.george@msvu.ca.
___________________________________________________________________________

E. Wanda George, PhD, Associate Professor (on sabbatical Jan 1-July 1/12)
Business Administration and Tourism & Hospitality Management
Mount Saint Vincent University
Halifax, NS Canada B3M 2J6
tel: 902 457-6391
e-mail: wanda.george@msvu.ca
Skypename: ellenwanda

Jonah Rubin, a PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago, wrote to H-Memory about

"...a new website dedicated to gathering and publicizing information on the impact of ten years of exhumations of mass graves dating from Spanish Civil War. The website is connected with the project "Las Politicas de la Memoria: Balance de exhumaciones en España" of the Centro de Ciencias Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. You can find out more about the project, subscribe to the RSS feed, and read about recent events and publications in both English and Castellano at: http://www.politicasdelamemoria.org/.

This article on Inglewood (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kaplan-20100613,0,271441,print.story), with its remarks on geographical racial divides, spatial stereotypes, and the remark that El Segundo is "a planet away from Inglewood" reminds me of an issue that has been on my mind on and off the past several years. I look at the racial and spatial divides from the other side of the invisible fence.

In 2003, my hometown put up a memorial at a local park to publically mark the rather unsavory history of the location (click on the image to see the details).

On the one hand, this incident from the 1920s may seem like this medium-sized town's one blemish and it is good that this is finally being publicly recognized. Most towns with a history of a racist past - like the "sundown" laws prohibiting black people within citiy limits after nightfall - do not have memorials. While the marker's use of passive voice and the attribution of responsibility to the "circumstances" conveniently avoid the question of who is or was actually responsible, this kind of wording is common on markers and should not be condemned too harshly.

While some deeds may seem less reprehensible if they "reflected the views of a different time," in this case I think the case is the other way around. This is an example of an historical event which gains signifigance when seen in the wider context. We need to take the word "circumstances" on the marker seriously. The marker does well to point out that attitudes and circumstances in the 1920s were as they were. But by imbedding the tragedy into the context of the history of the park's changing names, the marker still gives the impression of an isolated incident, which dramatizes the sense of place, but shields the visitor from recognizing that segregation (spatial, economic, political) was pervasive throughout Los Angeles for decades. It remained legal until 1948 and common practice until well into the 1950s to prevent minority families from living in certain areas by explicit clauses on property deeds. I don't know if Manhattan Beach had these legal provisos, but the Bruce's Beach incident shows that other uses of state and legal force were possible even here. In the 1920s and 1930s, the White Knights, a KKK-like white supremacist organization, flourished in Los Angeles. In Manhattan Beach, they attacked and beat up at least one homosexual in the mid 1930s (I would really like to know more about whether they had a Manhattan Beach chapter and whether incidents like this were common). The transportation policies of the 1920s to 1970s further solidified racial segregation, protecting Manhattan Beach from integration, stagnating or declining property values, etc. The political battles of race and urban space continued at least into the school busing politics of the 1970s and 1980s and could be said to be still raging today.

Thus, this marker is beginning to put public, explicit contour on Manhattan Beach's place in a wider historical context involving the whole country, but especially Los Angeles. I guess my point is this: The "tragic circumstances" were not just a few houses and families on some beachfront property in the 1920s. They are that the city without a history that I grew up in has a history after all. While I grew up facing west, out to the ocean, proud that my home town was mentioned in the song Surfin' USA by the Beach Boys, there was, the whole time, a history that ties the city into the east. There is no complete history of Manhattan Beach without a history of Watts, Carson, Inglewood and East L.A. - none of which are very far away at all. Indeed Hawthorne actually touches Manhattan Beach at one point, but it was a no-go area in my youth. We may fly or drive over those places and never go there, but we are tied to those places by a common history that is not a national abstraction, but local reality well within living memory that transcends the Great Wall that is the 405.

This is not about showing up the people of my home town to be racist or to "unmask" anything for purposes of attack. Indeed, the people I knew while growing up there after 1970 were, for the most part, tolerant and open and neighborly. The article on Inglewood (linked above) would also make no such accusation. It is about perceptions of space which are tied to race, but not about race as such. But to the extent that history should be about tearing down explicit or implicit myths about why things are the way they are now, I would like to help draw attention to how this marker shows the "circumstances" under which our way of life was built. I sense we were in a way aware of this back when I was growing up, when I consider how we thought about those dark, forboding places to our east, places we would never go.

This is a slightly modified version of a text I published at http://sites-of-memory.de/images/culiacan.html in 2005. I have deleted the text there an posted this blog entry instead.

Memorials can be both "unveiled" and "veiled." This year, to mark the 65th anniversary of the end of World War Two, peace activists in Dortmund, Germany, "veiled" a war memorial: http://www.arbeiterfotografie.com/galerie/reportage/index.html

Several local peace groups invited the public to what they referred to as an act of political art to recall the 8th of May, 1945, "which liberated Europe and the world from war and fascism." The thought that the world was freed from war, even momentarily, on that day ignores the ongoing war in Asia in May of 1945 and even leaves Eastern Europe out of the picture, where the USSR was subjigating new territories and would continue waging war against armed bands for several more years.

The memorial in Dortmund-Marten was built in the mid 1930s. It is, according to the organizers, in its glorification of heroic death "less about mourning the dead of the First World War than about getting people in the mood for the wars of conquest and destruction planned by Nazi Germany."

The memorial was draped with a large peace flag and there were speeches, musical presentations and poems. Apparently, no damage was done to the memorial.

There are now 13 new sites with 385 new photographs posted at the sites-of-memory.de collection of air raid victim memorial sites. They include pictures from a 2007 visit to Hamburg as well as more recent pictures from Dresden and Stuttgart.

I am going to present a paper on these sites at the "cemeteries and gravemarkers" section of the American Culture Society annual meeting in St. Louis. In the search for patterns in the material culture of bombing war remembrance in Germany I have not found much to go on. There is little or no correlation between between variables such as the location of the city, the number of dead, the circumstances of the bombing (a single huge raid or many small raids) on the one hand and the form of remembrance on the other. The sudden, large scale attacks which killed many thousands in a single raid forced the cities to forgo individual buriel and provide for mass graves, such as in Darmstadt, Hamburg and Dresden.

One pattern is a strong element of fatalism in many of the sites, often but not always within a Christian context. This is not the theology of a god using war to punish us for our transgressions, nor an interpretation of war as something that will cleanse a decadent society. Rather, it is an interpretation of God as one whose ways are unfathomable. This makes the bombing raids seem almost like an act of nature - a mysterious and unexplicable catastrophe without purpose or of which the purpose is known only to God. A handful of markers which interpret the slaughter of war in a more hopeful, forward looking context share with the fatalistic markers an avoidance of any discussion of the wider political context.

In their failure to provide political context, however, these markers diverge markedly from the rhetoric usually offered in their presence on memorial anniversaries - speeches which from the very earliest postwar period rarely fail to mention that the Germans started the war and were the first to target cities. This brings the catastrophe back down to an earthly regime of cause and effect relationships.

Only the memorial complex at the mass grave for the victims of the raid on Dresden, built during the GDR period, offers an overtly political interpretation, noting the earthly origins of the event, putting the destruction of the city into the context of other destroyed European cities and drawing a symbolic parallel to Nazi concentration camps. That fit in well with communist efforts to put their NATO enemies into the same category as the Nazis.

The image here shows a row of graves in the Harburg section of the city of Hamburg. These people were not killed in the horrific firebombing of July, 1943, but in later, smaller-scale attacks.

On The Pentagon Channel I was watching a show (USARJ This Week) featuring a man who told about his bicycle tour through Japan. When he reached Hiroshima, it was interesting to observe how he could not formulate how or why visiting the city was significant, but only that it was significant. He said it was an intense experience, "for many reasons" but could not formulate even one such reason, his eyes veering to the side at the point in his presentation where an example of a reason would normally follow the statement that there are "many" such reasons. He had been to the city four or five times, and each time it was new. A sentence or two later, he said it was great to have gotten here because it was an historically significant site and because this time, he got there by bike. Getting there by bike is a personal accomplishment. Okay. But why is the place itself significant? Of course Hiroshima is the first place a nuclear weapon was used on a hostile target, a place where tens of thousands of people were killed within a few seconds, but what is the significance of actually being there? We all know Hiroshima got "nuked." Why do we need to visit the place? What do we learn by seeing live the places we see in the pictures - the "Peace Dome" and the other memorials? The reporter noted that it is great to see how the locals have "preserved" the site, but the photographs show neatly kept gardens and lawns. The "Peace Dome" would appear to be a neatly kept ruin. None of it would appear to have anything to do with the carnage and destruction we see in the old photographs of a city flattened by a nuclear weapon. The reporter noted that he had learned much by talking to the locals, but he did not, perhaps could not, formulate exactly what it was that was he had learned.

He went on to remark that, "The best classroom is travel. You can learn more through travel than you can in the classroom." But I couldn't help but think that his lack of words, his inability to formulate, even in a prepared statement, what it was he learned in Hiroshima and why it was important, or pehraps his inability to question the cliché of "significance" and the assumptions we all carry around with us, may have reflected a lack of formal education, or the lack of a formal education that could be applied to this situation. This is not evidence that the reporter is uneducated. On the contrary, he knows much about the country, showed cultural competence in his various interviews with Japanese people, and speaks fluent Japanese. He is clearly of well-above-average intelligence, education and reflection. But that only highlights the problem here.

I tried to put my finger on exactly what it was that he just assumed we would understand about what it is he learned. Why did it seem enough to simply say it was significant and leave it at that? It reminded me of being at Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6th, 1994 - exactly 50 years from the moment the 116th Regimental Combat Team came ashore at the exact site of where they disembarked into withering machine gun fire. I went expecting some sort of emotional event or special insight. The exact location was going to be something magical, the round anniversary would somehow conjure up meaning. But it didn't. There were 50 or 100 people standing around in small groups. I saw a man carry an American flag into the waves "in memory" of his uncle who had been killed there, as he later said - a non-traditional form of remembrance which perhaps was also somehow intended to evoke an "authentic" experience. I could look up and down the beach and at the nearby hights and get a bit of a feeling for the tactical situation. I thought, "Gee, this really is vulnerable. No cover. Sitting ducks." But that seemed then and seems even moreso now to be a kind of banality that should not have required travel. Is the significance of being at the site simply that, a bit more insight into infantry tactics? So I can say, "I was at the exact location" and people nod their heads and think, "Wow!" But I can't help but think that the more astute listeners think not, "Wow!" but, "So?" So what if you were there at the very same beach exactly 50 years later? I am still not able to formulate what it was I expected to learn there. So what if you are standing in front of a memorial in Hiroshima?

What is in the magic of the place itself? What assumptions are hiding behind the, "Wow!"? I have serious doubts that it is so profound that language can not capture it. But does that mean it is all just vacuous?

One possible way out would be to formulate such experiences with active verbs and with overt references to the self: I saw, I felt, I went, I touched, I recalled or the site evoked, the people told me that..., etc. That would produce clear, living sentences which would connect the place, the visitor and his or her readers or listeners in a direct, clear way. Some things come to mind here:

- If we do this, we stop fishing around in our heads for abstract words which seem diluted or vacuous against the backdrop of the solid, real-life location. We don't speak in abstractions such as "honor" / "heroic" / "glory" / "grand" / "horrific" / "significant" / "profound" or "freedom," but instead look for more grounded ways to express things and perhaps feel the site. We experience it directly as a physical site. We stop aiming for the transcendental and settle for the sensual. After all, if what we're talking about is really so profound and transcendental, we don't need to actually be there, since it is divorced from space and time. If we're at a real, physical site, then we can talk about it in real, earthly terms.

- The teaching exercize I do where I try to get students to critically analyze memorials is a step in this direction. This belies my claim that what I teach is not memorialization, but is instead about memorialization. By having them step back and really look at these sites not holistically, but element by element, and forcing them to find vivid words for what it is they see, I am actually encouraging students to participate in the site in a way that may, in the end, make it more "significant" and more about authentically remembering. What starts out as an academic exercize aimed at achieving distance may in fact help in finding out what these places really do or don't mean for us.

Since I teach students who come predominantly from the military community, I am particularly interested in the attitudes of military students when humanities and social science classes go into issues directly relevant to the military situation: military history, death, killing, separation, etc.

My specific issue is this: I have an assignment I give in Western Civilization class for the unit on the world wars or as part of the complex on postwar and memory in my War and Society class. While many students have commented favorably on the assignment as such, I have been somewhat disappointed in my failure to provoke critical thinking.

THE ASSIGNMENT

Students find a war or genocide memorial near where they are located, thoroughly photograph it, and describe it. Those submissions are published at sites-of-memory.de (see the student section where some, but not all, of the student submissions are collected: sites-of-memory.de/main/students.html). When it is time for the discussion on the world wars and the west's first post-agrarian, nationalist-age encounter with mass death in battle, I post a thread for each student's project, including a link to that project. Each student is then to:

1. respond to his or her thread by posting a discussion/analysis of the memorial above and beyond mere description. This analysis should be informed by the issues raised in several lectures I post about modern war memorials. My lectures talk about how to interrogate a memorial site and how war memorials have changed over the past 150 to 200 years.

2. then go to the memorials and analyses other students have posted and comment.
A discussion ensues. They are graded on

a. the technical submission of their memorial project
b. the analysis
c. their engagement in the discussion

The website publishes only photos and descriptions. The in-class discussion is supposed to go beyond that and critically analyze memorialization.

LECTURES/INSTRUCTIONS

In the instructions and readings the point is NOT to inculcate some sort of anti-military ideology. I suspect, however, that any discussion of collective political/military memory and memorial culture has an undertone of such critique, since it goes beyond the simple acceptance of the common phrases of remembrance at memorials and ceremonies (only a leftist egg head would ask why we have an Unknown Soldier). The questions and issues they are confronted with cover a wide range. I do not expect them to address all these issues, of course:

- the development of military memorialization since 1800 or so from commemoration of battles and princes to individualized, equalizing memorialization of names and individuals of all ranks. Where does your memorial fit in here?

- the various portrayals of the human form, male and female, to evoke different emotions, clothing, uniforms, weapons, poses

- does the memorial offer a justification for the deaths it commemorates, either explicitly in text or explicitly through other signs?

- what kinds of imagery are used? Classical/pagan? Christian? Military? What do they mean?

- how are the dead listed, if at all? Does the order of their listing by some criteria reflect social station or military rank?

- what kinds of information does the memorial or cemetery show or tell about the fallen? What is "left" for the visitor to know about the dead?

- the portrayal of technology (weapons, vehicles), technical data

- how, if at all, are things like combat, dying and killing represented?

- how, if at all, is the political result of the war represented?

- is it mournful? triumphant? I offer examples like this: sitesofmemory.twoday.net/stories/4878624/

- might this memorial have encouraged or discouraged enlistment in later wars? (There is a possible anti-war implication there, obviously.)

- who, exactly, is included or excluded from commemoration? Soldiers? Civilians? Combat deaths? Disease/accidents?

- is the memorial typical? (not something I expect them to be good at)

RESULTS

Results are obviously mixed. In any group of submissions I will get all kinds of stuff. But, generally, in both their descriptions of the memorials and in their analyses, students are extremely resistant to anything above and beyond variations on these themes:

- simple assertions which are true in a way but do not go beyond the most basic idea: "This memorial was built to commemorate X."

- patriotic pathos: "This memorial reminds us of the sacrifices made for our freedom" (with no reflection on the political circumstances of the war in question) or "We can all be proud of the brave young men and women who gave their lives." I tell them the assignment is not to commemorate, but to study commemoration, but that is lost on many.

- vacuous rambling: "The obelisk is taller than most."

They might remark that "There is a cross on the front of the memorial" but sometimes even after questioning will not move themselves to make the simple observation that a cross represents something - anything! At some point, I would like to hear, "A cross represents sacrifice. Christians believe that Jesus Christ shed his blood that all men might have eternal life. A cross on a war memorial draws a parallel to this by reminding the viewer that the soldier citizen, as part of the body of the nation, shed his blood so that the nation might survive." But that is a fairly heady, intellectual response, of course. A simple reference to "sacrifice" or even a non-political, purely theological, "The cross reminds us of the Resurrection and gives hope to the mourners" would be good.

EXPLANATIONS

Now, why is there this resistance? I offer some ideas in no particular order:

a. Students of all stripes avoid abstract or critical thinking if they think they can get away with it. They are probably not even reading the lectures and are trying to "wing it."

b. Either my instructions are poor or for some other reason they simply don't "get it."

c. As military students this subject is simply too close to home. It makes them sad or angry. I had this at least once, when a student analyzed a memorial to a friend who was KIA.

d. A band of brothers: As military students they have, or at least think they have, special insight into this issue. They do not feel theneed to expound upon this issue with a civilian academic who does not share this insight. They feel they have nothing to learn here.

e. Any other ideas?

On b., I have avoided posting a clear example, which might be the problem. I am coming to the conviction that I probably should. "Here are three memorial analyses for you to study and copy: a war memorial, a military cemetery and a Holocaust memorial. Feel free to borrow ideas from these." Then, in those, I would write several pages each, going into each and every angle and image I can think of. On the other hand, I think that might intimidate them.
I would welcome...
- any comments you have on this whole project
- any explanation you have for what I have found so far
- any advice on how to make it work better
- any literature on teaching touchy subjects (war, politics, sexuality, race, religion) to students
- ...especially military students

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I presented some of these ideas and experiences in April, 2006 at the American Association for History and Computing online conference: Teaching military memorials online. A report from the trenches of a history classroom.