Why are we still so fascinated by the First World War, a hundred years after its outbreak? There are several powerful and legitimate explanations for this fascination and there is no need for me to repeat or rehearse them here. Instead, I would like to add a few marginal and perhaps trivial explanations of my own.
Firstly, WWI was the first modern war, not only in terms of its capacity to wreak wholesale destruction but also at the more prosaic level of uniform. The uniforms and arms worn and used in the Franco-Prussian War seem to belong to another world but the battle dress of Fritz, Tommy and les poilus is not very different from that of the modern soldier and is thus very familiar to us. In fact, in some ways their uniform is more modern than modern, for today's fighter with his sophisticated equipment resembles nothing so much as an astronaut or a medieval knight in his suit of armour.
As we draw further and further away from the events of a hundred years ago, those of my generation draw closer and closer to our own demise, and I think at some subliminal level this adds to the fascination for Flanders fields, the trenches. Young people find it hard to identify with the dead of yesteryear, though some of them might strive earnestly to do so, but my generation is only too aware of its own mortality!
I wonder, too, whether our commemoration of WWI is not partly connected to the fact that we "won" it? Would we feel the same fervour if we had lost? Do we even know how Germany looks back on it?
Firstly, WWI was the first modern war, not only in terms of its capacity to wreak wholesale destruction but also at the more prosaic level of uniform. The uniforms and arms worn and used in the Franco-Prussian War seem to belong to another world but the battle dress of Fritz, Tommy and les poilus is not very different from that of the modern soldier and is thus very familiar to us. In fact, in some ways their uniform is more modern than modern, for today's fighter with his sophisticated equipment resembles nothing so much as an astronaut or a medieval knight in his suit of armour.
As we draw further and further away from the events of a hundred years ago, those of my generation draw closer and closer to our own demise, and I think at some subliminal level this adds to the fascination for Flanders fields, the trenches. Young people find it hard to identify with the dead of yesteryear, though some of them might strive earnestly to do so, but my generation is only too aware of its own mortality!
I wonder, too, whether our commemoration of WWI is not partly connected to the fact that we "won" it? Would we feel the same fervour if we had lost? Do we even know how Germany looks back on it?
Have you ever seen 'Heimat'?
ReplyDeleteThis starts with the end of the first world war.
We know how Germany felt about that war up to and including the second, and 'we' have to acknowledge that this was largely our fault.
But how today's Germany feels? That I don't know.