Martin Hurcombe

Untold Crimes: The First World War and the Historical Crime Fiction of Jean Amila and Didier Daeninckx

This article considers how Jean Amilas Le Boucher des Hurlus (1982) and Didier Daeninckxs Le Der des ders (1984) expose hidden crimes committed by figures of French military authority during the First World War; how they reject the myth of a France united by combat embodied in the heroic and steadfast poilu; and how they complicate and pluralise memories of the war through the existence of a counter-memory and a counter-myth founded upon the figure of the mutin de guerre. It illustrates how the French historical crime novel resolves the tension between the historian, concerned primarily with collective ideas and responsibility, and the judge, seeking to ascertain the extent of individual guilt, thereby constituting an intermediary, marrying the ethical, the factual and the political. It concludes, however, by exploring the limits of memory, narrative and collective political identity proposed in both works, but also considers the readership of such crime fiction as a contemporary counter-community.

Introduction: The Great War in cultural memory

This is the introduction to the special issue of the Journal of European Studies devoted to the cultural memory of the Great War since the war’s end. It outlines briefly some of the political and cultural legacies for Europe, suggesting a few ways in which culture has measured and recorded, but also served as a way to articulate, the manifold ways in which Europeans continued to experience the war beyond its outbreak. It offers a brief introduction to the five articles that constitute the issue.

The Passing of Things Remembered: Sébastien Japrisot's Un long dimanche de fiançailles

Abstract This article examines Sébastien Japrisots 1991 novel Un long dimanche de fiançailles which, through the detective work of Mathilde Donnay, relates the unusual and unsuccessful execution of the young deserter Manech. It explores the construction of Mathildes explanatory narrative which, unlike the official narrative of French heroism against which it is set, points to no universal truth and is concerned exclusively with the recuperation of the individuals memory of the conflict. It argues that Japrisots novel, far from suggesting the causal relationship between the past and present we expect of much traditional detective fiction, proposes the alterity of both temporal states towards each other, an alterity that is revealed in the confrontation between Mathildes narrative and the individual memories from which it is constituted. In this, the novel highlights the problematic passage of memory into narration, suggesting the persistence of memory, but also its very fragility and limitations, and the irretrievability of the past.

The Past, Present, and Future of War and Culture Studies

The current issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies marks both continuity and a moment of transition. It is the second issue of the current volume devoted to the study of the past, present,...

Introduction: Occupation/Liberation – French Cultural Representations of 1944–1945 and its Legacy

The year 2014 saw a series of commemorative events and acts across the world associated with the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Yet it was also the year of the se...

Introduction: Traces of Conflict

This issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies continues and concludes the study of traces of conflict undertaken in the previous issue. Here, as in that issue, a number of articles explore the multiple cultural forms and manifestations through which the memories of past conflicts persist. Here too authors take the trace of a conflict as their starting point in order to uncover the complexity pertaining to a range of conflicts and their memories. In this, as in the articles of issue one of volume six, they aim to reinstate the specificity of these conflicts and the sheer density of the cultural memories that have built up around them (cf. Rousso, 1998: 38), seeking out the presence of an absence, to reprise Ricœur’s (2000: 32) terms. It is the absence of civilians evicted by conflict, or more exactly by preparations for conflict, to which we first turn. Imber is one of two ‘ghost villages’ that Marianna Dudley analyses in her article ‘Traces of Conflict: Environment and Eviction in British Military Training Areas, 1943-present’. Dudley shows how conflict has stalked the Ministry of Defence’s training grounds as evicted villagers from Imber and Tyneham have protested the continued militarization of their homes after the end of the Second World War in 1945. Like other military organizations, the Ministry of Defence would like the spaces in which it trains its personnel for combat to be free from conflict. Yet, despite the rise of military environmentalist narratives, as Dudley observes, civilians have formulated counter-narratives and memories that have staked symbolic and material claims to the now militarized sites, with varying degrees of success. One of the strengths of Dudley’s contribution is that, in the spirit of this issue’s theme, it invites us to look for traces of conflict in unexpected but also secretive places. Absence is also a theme at the heart of Andrew Sobanet’s article. ‘Elle s’appelait Sarah and the Limits of Postwar Witnessing and Memory’ considers the depiction of the wartime round up of France’s Jewish population in Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s film and Tatiana de Rosnay’s 2007 novel Sarah’s Key on which it was based and, journal of war & culture studies, Vol. 6 No. 2, May, 2013, 109–111

Veteran Identities: One Hundred Years of the First World War

Mass conscription made the figure of the veteran more visible, particularly in Western societies, in the years following the Armistice than ever before. Returning combatants became a recognized social group and, in some nations, a powerful political force. Moreover, representations of the veteran haunted the cultural landscape of the belligerent nations, and he appeared in a number of different guises. The nationalist stereotypes—the Tommy, poilu, doughboy and so on—that had peopled pro-war postcards, newspaper articles, and nationalist fiction during the war were still present in the interwar years. War memorials from diverse national contexts contain countless examples of First World War soldiers in heroic poses, and disabled veterans often played key roles in memorial ceremonies, serving as living reminders of veterans’ collective sacrifice. However, these representations were accompanied by representations that presented veterans as outsiders rather than as role-models. Disabled and shell-shocked veterans began to appear in fiction and films, sometimes functioning as a representative of the horrors of war, sometimes as an alternative hero attempting to reintegrate into an unfamiliar post-war world. Veterans themselves, sometimes organized into associations or other social groupings, produced many post-war memoirs. There was no unified ‘war story’ produced by veterans. Yet, while the interpretations of the rights and wrongs of the war and the understanding of what constituted veteran culture in its aftermath varied considerably, these works were united by the stamp of authority and authenticity given to texts produced by veteran-authors. Despite increasingly polarized political and cultural debates and divisions between veterans, having ‘been there’ often brought with it political, social, and cultural capital. The end of the twentieth century saw a renewed critical and artistic interest in cultural representations and memories of the First World War, reflected in a plethora of films and novels, a vast range of academic studies, and the creation of several

‘The sweet liberty of the trenches’: Capitaine Conan by Roger Vercel and Bertrand Tavernier

Abstract World War I has given rise to a vast literature inspired by a pacifist interpretation of the events. Generally accepted during the war years, the Great War was mostly condemned afterwards, especially from 1929 onwards. This myth of a senseless war in which soldiers are perceived as victims rather than actors has been challenged by Roger Vercel, himself a veteran, in his 1934 novel Capitaine Conan. The main character is a gung ho soldier who takes pleasure in killing and who wonders how veterans who used to be war lovers are going to cope with the return to civilian life. In 1996, French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier adapted Vercels novel to the screen. This article wants to confront novel and film without having recourse to the over-used dichotomy of faithfulness against betrayal. The point is to asses how Tavernier translates into his own filmic discourse the way Vercel described the frustration of a happy warrior who is aware that he will never be able to adapt to civilian life again. By opposing the myth of the happy warrior to the myth of the absurd war, Roger Vercel and Bertrand Tavernier tell us something about the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of being a veteran. However, the films reinterpretation shows a shift in meaning that may be the consequence of decades of pacifist discourse on the Great War.

The Soldier’s Return: The Spectre of Veterans’ Political Activism in Dorgelès’s Le Réveil des morts and Drieu la Rochelle’s ‘La Comédie de Charleroi’

Abstract Throughout the inter-war years, French veterans made repeated journeys back to the Western Front to pay homage to the nation’s dead, but also in order to assert an esprit combattant that many considered set their generation apart from the rest of society. This article examines the literary representation of two such journeys: Roland Dorgelès’s Le Réveil des morts (1923) and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s novella ‘La Comédie de Charleroi’ (1934). It considers how this sense of difference generates tension between veteran and non-combatant memories of the war, how these play out in the return to the former front and, more particularly, how this tension takes on a political and collective dimension overlooked in critical analysis of a largely neglected theme in inter-war French literature: the soldier’s return. It will argue that both works illustrate a particular response to the post-war conflict between veterans and non-combatants, a response that reflects the evolving position of veterans in France’s post-war social and political landscape. It will demonstrate that both constitute expressions of certain socio-political desires and thereby contribute to the construction of an imaginary veteran community from which they draw their authority. Central to this process is a carnivalesque inversion of post-war hierarchies generated through the memory of combat and of the dead triggered by the return to the front.

Introduction: variations on the theme of war and culture

This second Varia issue fulfils the aims of the Journal of War and Culture Studies in bringing together latest research from scholars in the field across the range of disciplines in which we work, and in presenting a range of current scholarship in any area of interest within the broad remit of the journal. This short introduction, therefore, seeks to give a possible form to the widely differing subject areas treated by the contributors, and to suggest some of the salient themes, juxtapositions and comparisons across the articles selected for this issue. We are also pleased to include work from researchers based in the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Germany and Belgium, representing the pan-European spread of the journal. As such this issue presents work based in literary studies, with two contributors considering early twentieth-century British fiction, but produced by contrasting male and female writers, and a third examining a French literary phenomenon from the Second World War; in film studies, with two authors analysing very different types of films and approaches that are nonetheless linked through the theme of war at sea, and a third exploring more recent history with post-9/11 representation in the cinema and on TV; in museum studies, with a focus again on links between the present and a more recent past, this time in eastern Europe; and finally in very different forms of visual culture, first in photography in a historical context, and