During the interwar period all political and ideological trends drew on the legacy of World War I for their own, often wholly contradictory purposes, since this rich source of violent images and metaphors of destruction proved to be highly malleable. But the fact that the memory of mass killing was widely employed by such divergent interests introduced a violent dimension to postwar political discourse, channeling it toward a constant preoccupation with human and material devastation. To be sure, the glorification of war after 1918 took many forms. The most visible and emotionally most potent was the commemoration of fallen soldiers. Significantly, even when such public symbols of mourning expressed implicit or, less frequently, explicit criticism of the war, they simultaneously strove to endow the death of the soldiers with a higher meaning and thereby ended up obscuring that the war had largely been an affair of senseless slaughter. Sacrifice was thus glorified while its context was refashioned in a manner that would enhance the nobility of its victims. Since commemoration is more about instilling the past with sense and purpose than with simply remembering it, the official remembrance of millions of fallen young men could not help but provide the war, in which their lives were squandered, with a retrospective meaning for the benefit of the living.
The investment of death in war with meaning can be accomplished by both generalizing and individualizing it. In giving war a unique moral significance, the fallen soldier can be presented as having sacrificed himself for a greater cause: death is glorified by the context in which it occurred, abstract principles and entities are valued higher than individual lives. Hence mourning will focus on the service rendered by the dead for the nation’s historical mission and future; rather than being deprived of its sons, the nation is enriched by those who die for it. Conversely, by concentrating on individual devotion, suffering, and sacrifice, the fallen glorify the cause and endow it with deeper meaning because they had given their lives for it. Here mourning will focus on individual qualities as an example to be followed by others. Put differently, in the former case the soldier is an extension of the nation, in the latter the nation is an extension of the soldier who embodies its very best essence. Rhetorically, one might either say that great nations produce heroic sons or that heroic soldiers deserve a nation fit for their sacrifice.
In the wake of World War I, both modes of mourning and ascribing meaning to death were common features of the vast and unprecedented wave of commemoration that swept through Europe, although the balance between the two varied from one nation to the next. Yet even while public commemoration naturally tended to emphasize collective sacrifice for the national cause, it seemed to be increasingly informed by a quest for a new type of individual heroism. This synthesis between the collective and the particular was directly related to the emergence of mass society, vast conscript armies, and total war, a context in which there was no more room for the traditional hero, whose ultimate sacrifice was inscribed on his fate and inherent to his existence. World War I ushered in the glorification of the rank and file, expressed in such countries as Britain and France in the erection of national memorials for the unknown soldier. Here was a figure that represented both the individual and the mass: glorified by the nation, he also stood for the multitudes sent out to die and quickly forgotten. He thus gave a face to anonymity, personifying and glorifying precisely those masses that had no place in public memory; in other words, in being remembered, the unknown soldier legitimized forgetting.
The figure of the unknown soldier thus made possible a shift from the inflated and largely discredited rhetoric of the abstract nation to the individual, yet presented the individual as a soldier who by definition had no specific traits and features, and who consequently embodied the nation after all. For all that was known about this “unknown” figure was his status as soldier, his gender, and his nationality (or “race”). Through him the nation could represent itself as a site of resurrection, returning from the Valley of Death thanks to the sacrifice of its sons. It was this identification of the living nation with its anonymous but glorified fallen soldiers that provided a means to come to terms with the trauma of war, and normalized the haunting images of the dead returning from the endless cemeteries in which they now resided, because the longing for the return of the fallen was mixed with a good deal of shame and trepidation. At the end of the war, people wanted to return to normality as soon as possible, to bury the dead and then to go on with life. Yet the presence of so much death and mourning also gave rise to a wave of mysticism, spiritualism, and occultism. The unknown soldier fulfilled the requirement of both focusing on the suffering and sacrifice of the individual, for which a powerful need existed, and of distancing oneself from any particular fallen member of family or community. The final death of the soldier was thus acknowledged through this familiar yet unknown figure safely and irrevocably locked in a national sepulcher.
Significantly, Germany did not erect a tomb for the unknown soldier; unlike France and Britain, Germany could not come to terms with the trauma of war through a symbol of final and irredeemable death. Rather, many Germans hoped to overcome defeat by continuing the struggle; for this purpose, the dead could not be locked away, since they still had a role to play in urging the living to win back victory. In France and Britain, the glory of the unknown soldier, confined as he was to his tomb, was a matter of the past, and thereby helped the rest of the nation to get on with the present. In Germany, the unburied unknown soldier continued to roam the old battlefields and to march in the cities, reminding those who might have forgotten that his mission must still be accomplished. In France and Britain, especially the former, the specter of the fallen served as a warning that such slaughter should never be allowed again. But in Germany, the pain and sorrow of mourning was increasingly oriented to the future, and loss could not be accepted precisely because of the refusal to come to terms with the past. Ultimately, it was one of those surviving unknown soldiers who claimed to embody the nation and persuaded increasing numbers of Germans that he indeed personified its fate and would mold its future.
Adolf Hitler was one of millions of unknown veterans, who, unlike their fallen comrades, had urgent material and psychological needs. Glorifying the dead came more cheaply than caring for the living, many of whom had been physically and mentally mutilated at the front. Interwar European politics, society, and culture were deeply influenced by the massive presence of former soldiers, who often felt abandoned and misunderstood by the civilian environment to which they returned. Indeed, it was precisely the difficulties of social and economic reintegration in countries still reeling from the human and material costs of total war that stimulated the urge among the veterans to realize those vague but powerful aspirations they had forged during the war, and to translate their discovery of comradeship and sacrifice in the trenches to the realities of life after the disaster. The story of post-1918 Europe is thus largely about the cleavage between those who “had been there” and those who had not; it is a tale of rage and frustration, resentment and disillusionment.
If most soldiers returning from the war wanted to pick up their lives where they had left them before they marched off to the trenches, this was rarely possible. Both they and their societies had been irreversibly transformed during the war years, and the idealized prewar world was as far from the present as the front had been from the rear. Postwar Europe had neither the resources nor the skills to deal with the mental needs of men exposed to the horrors of sustained industrial warfare. Hence the tendency of veterans to organize their own associations, which provided them with psychological support and served as pressure groups on governments to meet the economic and the political demands of those whose sacrifice for the nation endowed them with a moral weight well beyond their numbers. Here the veterans could rekindle the comradeship that had sustained them at the front, mourn their fallen comrades and celebrate their sacrifice, and shelter from what they deemed to be an alienated society, impatient to put the war behind it, and unwilling to heed its lessons. In contradistinction to the state’s glorification of the dead, the veterans associations glorified their war experience, which they both represented as incommunicable and as having tremendous political import for postwar society. Beyond this vague but powerful notion that society had to be radically transformed, these associations often embraced very different political stances, ranging from pacifism to Communism and fascism, and depending largely on the national, political, and economic context in which they functioned. But what they all had in common was the sense that they had learned something in war that could not be grasped by those who had not been there. Hence their effort not only to endow the war with meaning but to employ their shared experience as a tool to mold the future.