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FALLEN SOLDIERS: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars
At the outbreak of the First World War, an entire generation of young men charged into battle for what they believed was a glorious cause. Over the next four years, that cause claimed the lives of some 13 million soldiers--more than twice the number killed in all the major wars from 1790 to 1914. But despite this devastating toll, the memory of the war was not, predominantly, of the grim reality of its trench warfare and battlefield carnage. What was most remembered by the war's participants was its sacredness and the martyrdom of those who had died for the greater glory of the fatherland.
War, and the sanctification of it, is the subject of this pioneering work by well-known European historian George L. Mosse. Fallen Soldiers offers a profound analysis of what he calls the Myth of the War Experience--a vision of war that masks its horror, consecrates its memory, and ultimately justifies its purpose. Beginning with the Napoleonic wars, Mosse traces the origins of this myth and its symbols, and examines the role of war volunteers in creating and perpetuating it. But it was not until World War I, when Europeans confronted mass death on an unprecedented scale, that the myth gained its widest currency. Indeed, as Mosse makes clear, the need to find a higher meaning in the war became a national obsession. Focusing on Germany, with examples from England, France, and Italy, Mosse demonstrates how these nations--through memorials, monuments, and military cemeteries honoring the dead as martyrs--glorified the war and fostered a popular acceptance of it. He shows how the
war was further promoted through a process of trivialization in which war toys and souvenirs, as well as postcards like those picturing the Easter Bunny on the Western Front, softened the war's image in the public mind.
The Great War ended in 1918, but the Myth of the War Experience continued, achieving its most ruthless political effect in Germany in the interwar years. There the glorified notion of war played into the militant politics of the Nazi party, fueling the belligerent nationalism that led to World War II. But that cataclysm would ultimately shatter the myth, and in exploring the postwar years, Mosse reveals the extent to which the view of death in war, and war in general, was finally changed. In so doing, he completes what is likely to become one of the classic studies of modern war and the complex, often disturbing nature of human perception and memory.
War, and the sanctification of it, is the subject of this pioneering work by well-known European historian George L. Mosse. Fallen Soldiers offers a profound analysis of what he calls the Myth of the War Experience--a vision of war that masks its horror, consecrates its memory, and ultimately justifies its purpose. Beginning with the Napoleonic wars, Mosse traces the origins of this myth and its symbols, and examines the role of war volunteers in creating and perpetuating it. But it was not until World War I, when Europeans confronted mass death on an unprecedented scale, that the myth gained its widest currency. Indeed, as Mosse makes clear, the need to find a higher meaning in the war became a national obsession. Focusing on Germany, with examples from England, France, and Italy, Mosse demonstrates how these nations--through memorials, monuments, and military cemeteries honoring the dead as martyrs--glorified the war and fostered a popular acceptance of it. He shows how the
war was further promoted through a process of trivialization in which war toys and souvenirs, as well as postcards like those picturing the Easter Bunny on the Western Front, softened the war's image in the public mind.
The Great War ended in 1918, but the Myth of the War Experience continued, achieving its most ruthless political effect in Germany in the interwar years. There the glorified notion of war played into the militant politics of the Nazi party, fueling the belligerent nationalism that led to World War II. But that cataclysm would ultimately shatter the myth, and in exploring the postwar years, Mosse reveals the extent to which the view of death in war, and war in general, was finally changed. In so doing, he completes what is likely to become one of the classic studies of modern war and the complex, often disturbing nature of human perception and memory.
273 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 1990
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252 people want to read
About the author
George L. Mosse
55 books31 followersGerman-born American social and cultural historian.
Mosse authored 25 books on a variety of fields, from English constitutional law, Lutheran theology, to the history of fascism, Jewish history, and the history of masculinity.
He was perhaps best-known for his books and articles that redefined the discussion and interpretation of Nazism.
Mosse authored 25 books on a variety of fields, from English constitutional law, Lutheran theology, to the history of fascism, Jewish history, and the history of masculinity.
He was perhaps best-known for his books and articles that redefined the discussion and interpretation of Nazism.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 19, 2011
This book, one of the best and most insightful I have read in a long time, rests at a cross-section between art, culture, sociology, and memory. At 225 pages, it is both extremely short, and yet scholarly, well-argued, timely, and convincing.
Does the sudden emergence of trench warfare in any way transmute the ways in which we walk about and experience war? Did the shift from monarchy to burgeoning nation-states during this time period change soldierly ideological motivations in wanting to engage in warfare? Why did separate cemeteries appear for soldiers, completely unheard of before the nineteenth century, suddenly start appearing in France and Germany? These questions form a group of concerns the book discusses, yet Mosse manages to touch on a number of other topics, as well.
About 600,000 soldiers died during the American Civil War, while just two generations later in World War I, almost 9 million perished. Mosse argues that facts like this, along with the horrors of trench warfare, gave rise to a construction of civic religion centered around remembrance and a search for human meaning as a way to cope with heretofore unknown amounts of barbarism. This remembrance, along with the various ways of glorifying and sanctifying battle that would arise, Mosse refers collectively to as the “Myth of the War Experience.”
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the constitution of many armies gradually shifted from conscripted poverty-ridden peasants to bourgeois, well-educated professional soldiers, who envisioned themselves fighting for Aufbruch (a nascent national-democratic spirit). Suddenly, going off to war was no cause for angst and concern, but rather a chance to fight for the fatherland, and an opportunity to get to see new and exotic places (see the work of soldier-poets like Lord Byron and Theodor Korner). Aesthetic representations of triumph were built from both classical pagan imagery and Protestant piety, which were used to create “communities of the dead” (military cemeteries) where soldiers could rest pure, away from mere civilians.
Mosse claims that culture and art, too, have a definite place in shaping the ideology of the Myth of the War Experience. The Italian Futurists (like Marinetti) and German Expressionists added to the Myth Experience a sense of camaraderie to war in which a “new man” would be created, forming a society free of hypocrisy and tyranny (highly ironic, as Marinetti is perhaps best remembered for his flirtations with fascism). Youth now symbolized manhood, virility, and pure energy. Death was no long an unfortunate loss, but a sacrifice and a chance for eternal resurrection (again, that Christian imagery) for a glorious cause.
A retroactive Romanticism was also invoked, full of its images of bucolic hills and untainted, rural countryside, and used to symbolize purity away from an ill, noxious city (the literature of the nineteenth century is replete with metaphors of the city as rotten and diseased). Movies touting the moral virtues of mountain climbing as a “manly” conquering of nature filled the screens, effectively masking the dangers of death and destruction while at the same time shoring up ideas that were attractive to far right political elements, like adventure, domination, and conquest.
The Myth’s appearance in popular culture was perhaps inevitable, but had a most interesting result: the “process of trivialization.” There are several photos in the book depicting the war as a humorous, quaint, distant affair. There is a German postcard of a rabbit laying eggs with the caption “Frohliche Ostern” (Happy Easter), one from Au Bon Marche showing two little girls stomping all over a helpless German toy soldier, and perhaps most disturbingly, a father cradling his baby boy and looking aside admiring another of his boys with the caption “The New Conscripts.” Some artists, including the German Rudolf Grossmanns, made a career producing nothing but kitsch showing heroic boys yearning for the joys of the battlefield. Closely related to trivialization is the brutalization of political discourse in which themes and tropes of militarism and aggression gave additional emphasis to notions of manliness, a trend which continued until World War II.
But around this time, these ideological means started to outgrow their political and historical usefulness. After German defeat in the First World War, it could be effectively argued that the courageous Germans had not actually lost the war, they just hadn’t yet won. But after losing another World War, the Myth was too tendentious and suspicious to garner populist support for the political right. Thus the fiery rhetoric of manliness and sacrifice in the name of one’s country saw its last days.
For anyone convinced that “ideology” is just a word used in the ivory towers of academia, or that popular culture doesn’t drastically affect the way we perceive and experience some of the most fundamental aspects of our world, this book will forever change your mind. It is most highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of war memorials, changing perceptions of war and the soldier, and the politics of the interwar years.
Does the sudden emergence of trench warfare in any way transmute the ways in which we walk about and experience war? Did the shift from monarchy to burgeoning nation-states during this time period change soldierly ideological motivations in wanting to engage in warfare? Why did separate cemeteries appear for soldiers, completely unheard of before the nineteenth century, suddenly start appearing in France and Germany? These questions form a group of concerns the book discusses, yet Mosse manages to touch on a number of other topics, as well.
About 600,000 soldiers died during the American Civil War, while just two generations later in World War I, almost 9 million perished. Mosse argues that facts like this, along with the horrors of trench warfare, gave rise to a construction of civic religion centered around remembrance and a search for human meaning as a way to cope with heretofore unknown amounts of barbarism. This remembrance, along with the various ways of glorifying and sanctifying battle that would arise, Mosse refers collectively to as the “Myth of the War Experience.”
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the constitution of many armies gradually shifted from conscripted poverty-ridden peasants to bourgeois, well-educated professional soldiers, who envisioned themselves fighting for Aufbruch (a nascent national-democratic spirit). Suddenly, going off to war was no cause for angst and concern, but rather a chance to fight for the fatherland, and an opportunity to get to see new and exotic places (see the work of soldier-poets like Lord Byron and Theodor Korner). Aesthetic representations of triumph were built from both classical pagan imagery and Protestant piety, which were used to create “communities of the dead” (military cemeteries) where soldiers could rest pure, away from mere civilians.
Mosse claims that culture and art, too, have a definite place in shaping the ideology of the Myth of the War Experience. The Italian Futurists (like Marinetti) and German Expressionists added to the Myth Experience a sense of camaraderie to war in which a “new man” would be created, forming a society free of hypocrisy and tyranny (highly ironic, as Marinetti is perhaps best remembered for his flirtations with fascism). Youth now symbolized manhood, virility, and pure energy. Death was no long an unfortunate loss, but a sacrifice and a chance for eternal resurrection (again, that Christian imagery) for a glorious cause.
A retroactive Romanticism was also invoked, full of its images of bucolic hills and untainted, rural countryside, and used to symbolize purity away from an ill, noxious city (the literature of the nineteenth century is replete with metaphors of the city as rotten and diseased). Movies touting the moral virtues of mountain climbing as a “manly” conquering of nature filled the screens, effectively masking the dangers of death and destruction while at the same time shoring up ideas that were attractive to far right political elements, like adventure, domination, and conquest.
The Myth’s appearance in popular culture was perhaps inevitable, but had a most interesting result: the “process of trivialization.” There are several photos in the book depicting the war as a humorous, quaint, distant affair. There is a German postcard of a rabbit laying eggs with the caption “Frohliche Ostern” (Happy Easter), one from Au Bon Marche showing two little girls stomping all over a helpless German toy soldier, and perhaps most disturbingly, a father cradling his baby boy and looking aside admiring another of his boys with the caption “The New Conscripts.” Some artists, including the German Rudolf Grossmanns, made a career producing nothing but kitsch showing heroic boys yearning for the joys of the battlefield. Closely related to trivialization is the brutalization of political discourse in which themes and tropes of militarism and aggression gave additional emphasis to notions of manliness, a trend which continued until World War II.
But around this time, these ideological means started to outgrow their political and historical usefulness. After German defeat in the First World War, it could be effectively argued that the courageous Germans had not actually lost the war, they just hadn’t yet won. But after losing another World War, the Myth was too tendentious and suspicious to garner populist support for the political right. Thus the fiery rhetoric of manliness and sacrifice in the name of one’s country saw its last days.
For anyone convinced that “ideology” is just a word used in the ivory towers of academia, or that popular culture doesn’t drastically affect the way we perceive and experience some of the most fundamental aspects of our world, this book will forever change your mind. It is most highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of war memorials, changing perceptions of war and the soldier, and the politics of the interwar years.
January 4, 2010
Like several of Mosse's books -- including Mass and Nationalism - this book is better read than reading --
Mosse demonstrates, though the text itself is less than titillating at times - the way in which the sentimentalization or sanctification of the fallen (die Gefallenen, the war dead) was used by reactionary and nationalist politicians as a tool for the political extermination of the Left -. Based on the Post-WWI experience in Germany and in the rest of Europe, one cannot help but recognize that this phenomenon was in play in the post-Vietnam era. We have not yet seen it with Iraq, but the danger always lurks.
Mosse demonstrates, though the text itself is less than titillating at times - the way in which the sentimentalization or sanctification of the fallen (die Gefallenen, the war dead) was used by reactionary and nationalist politicians as a tool for the political extermination of the Left -. Based on the Post-WWI experience in Germany and in the rest of Europe, one cannot help but recognize that this phenomenon was in play in the post-Vietnam era. We have not yet seen it with Iraq, but the danger always lurks.
July 16, 2019
Durante la batalla del Somme (1916) murieron más hombres que en todas las guerras anteriores desde la Revolución Francesa (1789) ¿cómo afectó este cambio de paradigma en la representación de la guerra? ¿Cómo siguieron existiendo guerras después de la muerte de más de 14.000.000 de hombres? ¿Por qué unos años después sucedería otro conflicto muchísimo peor? Este libro ofrece las respuestas a estas preguntas, resumidas en un concepto: el mito de la experiencia de guerra. La guerra, y los caídos en ella, se revistió de símbolos y mitos que ayudaron a los hombres a morir en ella pensado que fallecían por una causa más elevada. Cementerios militares, monumentos, himnos, juguetes, novelas, poemas, etc., ayudaron a crear una religión secular basada en la glorificación del soldado caído que ha llegado hasta nuestro presente. Un libro fascinante.
June 4, 2023
Bellissimo testo, che enuclea quella che l'evoluzione del pensiero della dimensione mitica all'interno dell'esperienza bellica. Un'evoluzione caratterizzata da una continua esaltazione della figura del soldato-cittadino, dell'uomo virile, maschio, eroico, del soldato schietto e onesto. Una figura che oggi risulta essere in declino nei paesi occidentali, ma ben presente in altre società - specialmente in questi mesi. Una figura che lascia un carico di morte e di sacrifici anche sui civili, uomini e donne, bambini e bambine, che hanno subito l'influenza di una religione civile che, per dare senso alla morte, usò la morte come mezzo.
April 14, 2019
Oh, it was fine. It would have been a very useful book had I actually written my thesis on the politics of postwar memorialization and monument building in the two Germanys. Learned a few new things, and Mosse has a fine (if not a bit convoluted) research question he is trying to interrogate, but overall, I was left a bit bored and underwhelmed.
November 7, 2018
L'incontro con la morte di massa nelle trincee, il fenomeno dei volontari di guerra e la costruzione del mito dell'esperienza di guerra.
Un saggio che è riuscito a rendere affascinante ai miei occhi un tema controverso come quello della guerra.
Un saggio che è riuscito a rendere affascinante ai miei occhi un tema controverso come quello della guerra.
February 25, 2025
Relu ces derniers jours à l'occasion de réflexions sur la longue guerre israélo-palestinienne et ses récents développements.
Livre extrêmement stimulant en dépit de ses quelques défauts, qui vaut surtout pour les deux concepts de banalisation de la mort de masse (en anglais, "trivialization") à l'issue de la Première guerre mondiale et de la brutalisation des sociétés dans l'entre-deux-guerres.
Mosse est en particulier très pertinent sur l'Allemagne ou (pour autant que je sache) le Royaume-Uni, mais me semble beaucoup plus faible sur la France (confirmé par Audoin-Rouzeau en préface) ou l'Italie.
Il n'en reste pas moins un livre important, très complémentaire de l'autre grand livre de Mosse, Les Racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich (chez Calmann-Lévy).
Livre extrêmement stimulant en dépit de ses quelques défauts, qui vaut surtout pour les deux concepts de banalisation de la mort de masse (en anglais, "trivialization") à l'issue de la Première guerre mondiale et de la brutalisation des sociétés dans l'entre-deux-guerres.
Mosse est en particulier très pertinent sur l'Allemagne ou (pour autant que je sache) le Royaume-Uni, mais me semble beaucoup plus faible sur la France (confirmé par Audoin-Rouzeau en préface) ou l'Italie.
Il n'en reste pas moins un livre important, très complémentaire de l'autre grand livre de Mosse, Les Racines intellectuelles du Troisième Reich (chez Calmann-Lévy).
September 23, 2021
Reading this book was like getting punched in the face. "The Myth of the War Experience [...] is tied to the cult of the nation: if this is in abeyance, as it was after the Second World War in Western and Central Europe, the myth is fatally weakened, but if nationalism as a civic religion is once more in the ascendant the myth will, once again, accompany it."
Want to read
March 13, 2024ملاحظة لي: لم اقرا الكتاب بعد - كيف تم اقناع الجنود في الحربين العالميتين بالبطولة وكيف تم استخدام مُثُل الشهادة من الانجيل لاجل ذلك (حشد الجنود)
April 15, 2024
interesting book, may have enjoyed it more if my own timekeeping skills were better and i didn't need to cram it over the span of a weekend
December 23, 2017
This is a solid but relatively minor work from one of the great historians of the 20th century- and for my money, the greatest intellectual historian, though there's stiff competition. Wouldn't that be a fun radio show, like those sports radio shows where they argue who was the best shortstop based on obscure stats and get all heated about it, except about historians? I think it would be fun.
Anyway! In "Fallen Soldiers," Mosse continued his examination of the cultural and intellectual trends that eventually fed into fascism. He sees these trends as a Europe-wide phenomenon, and talks a fair amount about France and Britain, but in the end, Germany and the way Germans memorialized their war dead, especially those from WWI, are his subjects here. Preexisting modes of prettifying death (Mosse writes a lot about cemetery design in the early chapters), already rife with conservative Christian and pastoral themes, get supercharged by nationalism and revanchism after the war. Again, this is more in Germany than anywhere else, but is also prominent in Italy and elsewhere the war touched.
War memorialization became a way not just to ennoble the chaos and slaughter of war, but a promise of a kind of secular deliverance. The new thing of total war would create the new man prophesied by the fascist right (and, to a lesser extent, the communist left), hard and fearless, shorn of the flabby lies of bourgeois civilization. Even conventional war monuments, Mosse argues, contributed to this gestalt, but nowhere was it more potent than I Germany, with results we all know. Ultimately, these are variations on the themes Mosse established in such earlier works as "The Crisis of the German Ideology," but it's a welcome additions to his project. ****
https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...
Anyway! In "Fallen Soldiers," Mosse continued his examination of the cultural and intellectual trends that eventually fed into fascism. He sees these trends as a Europe-wide phenomenon, and talks a fair amount about France and Britain, but in the end, Germany and the way Germans memorialized their war dead, especially those from WWI, are his subjects here. Preexisting modes of prettifying death (Mosse writes a lot about cemetery design in the early chapters), already rife with conservative Christian and pastoral themes, get supercharged by nationalism and revanchism after the war. Again, this is more in Germany than anywhere else, but is also prominent in Italy and elsewhere the war touched.
War memorialization became a way not just to ennoble the chaos and slaughter of war, but a promise of a kind of secular deliverance. The new thing of total war would create the new man prophesied by the fascist right (and, to a lesser extent, the communist left), hard and fearless, shorn of the flabby lies of bourgeois civilization. Even conventional war monuments, Mosse argues, contributed to this gestalt, but nowhere was it more potent than I Germany, with results we all know. Ultimately, these are variations on the themes Mosse established in such earlier works as "The Crisis of the German Ideology," but it's a welcome additions to his project. ****
https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...
January 22, 2009
What a stinker! Dull, dull, dull-- academic droning on a topic of great interest to me, I could barely keep my eyes open to read it. Two blatant errors in it also led me to think the author doesn't know his caboose from his elbow when it comes to WWI-- he refers to a photograph of what is clearly an artillery piece/field gun as a machine gun, and also refers to the 'joy' with which the German nation embraced war-- not universally so. Not accessible at all for the general history reader, it reminded me of some of the more boring tenured professors I had to suffer through in college history lectures. PEE-YEW!
October 1, 2014
Mosse is brilliant as ever. Went back to this book after years and because of the shock seeing my son reading 'Le Soldat Inconnu' (Arthur Tenor) for his primary school obligatory reading. In Belgium they still don't know that unknown soldier fairytales are nothing else but nationalism myth-making of the pure and proud totalitarian national (socialist) state.. in full glory with with blood and sacrifice at its foundations. Do Belgian schools need to be denazified?
February 20, 2016
Beyond boring! While the author does provide some interesting insights into theories such as the Myth of the War Experience, the Cult of the Fallen Soldier, and others, this does not mitigate the fact that the narrative is dull.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews