memorial

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noun

Something, as a structure or custom, serving to honor or keep alive a memory: commemoration, monument, remembrance. See remember/forget.

adjective

Serving to honor or keep alive a memory: commemorative. See remember/forget.

adj

Definition: commemorative
Antonyms: abusive, dishonorable

Memorials have been a feature of the commemoration of war since early recorded history. They were once largely triumphalist. The pharaoh Tuthmosis III (1479-1425 bc) erected two obelisks to proclaim his victory over his enemies in Asia, and the Roman Emperor Trajan had his victories depicted on the column which bears his name. By the 19th century memorials also celebrated the idea of nationhood: the Arc de Triomphe in Paris celebrates Napoleon's victories, and the Victory Column in Berlin commemorates the defeats of Denmark, Austria, and France in 1864-71 which were fundamental in bringing about German unity. Sometimes these memorials were retrospective: Germany commemorated Leipzig a century after the battle, and France erected a memorial at Malplaquet two centuries after the battle was fought, gently obscuring the fact that it was a French defeat, although a hard-fought one.

Memorials often recognized sacrifice as well as proclaimed victory. On Frederick ‘the Great’'s battlefield of Kolin (1757) stands a distinguished eagle-topped pillar which remembers the Walloon dragoons, the Austrian regiment whose charge decided the battle. Individual noblemen or senior officers might receive individual commemoration: the blind king of Bohemia is remembered by a cross on the field of Crécy (1346). The walls of English cathedrals glisten with marble plaques commemorating the paragons of a hundred campaigns: at Canterbury ensigns Tritton and Jones of the 31st Regiment are remembered on a memorial beneath the colours they died carrying against the Sikhs at Sobraon in 1845.

The involvement of growing numbers of ordinary folk in the wars of the 19th century saw the proliferation of memorials, and the battlefields of the American civil and Franco-Prussian wars are strewn with them. Generally they commemorate individual regiments, and typically list a regiment's dead on the ground where they fell. Thus a row of memorials to the Guard Corps and the individual regiments of the Prussian Guard tops the ridge at Saint-Privat (see Rezonville/Gravelotte), acknowledging the appalling loss inflicted by the breech-loading rifles of the French defenders on an ill-advised frontal assault.

The memorials of WW I, however, are altogether more numerous, and still dot the landscapes of the combatant nations. They were built in three waves: during the war, in the first five years after the Armistice, and in the period from 1928 to 1932, when a more universal meaning was sought for the terrible loss of life in the 1914-18 war. After August 1914, commemoration was an act of citizenship. To remember was to affirm community, to assert its moral character, and exclude from it those values, groups, or individuals that placed it under threat. This form of collective affirmation in wartime identified individuals and their families with the community at large, understood both in terms of a very localized landscape and a much broader and more vaguely defined national entity under siege or threat. The first event commemorated was the call to arms. The fact that mass armies were mobilized in all combatant nations without any significant opposition or obstruction was remarkable enough. Monuments were built early in the war to celebrate this unprecedented response. Where the prompting of notables stopped and popular initiatives began is very difficult to determine. Proud citizens of a working-class district in East London marked the voluntary enlistment of 65 men in a street of 40 houses in one cul de sac by setting up what they called a ‘street shrine’. The religious echo was one they chose, possibly reflecting the strength of Irish Catholicism in the area, but also blending in well with general views of the war as a conflict of the sons of light against the sons of darkness. According to the bishop of London the Anglican rector of South Hackney helped create the shrines, which were visited by the queen in 1917. In Australia and New Zealand, celebrating the act of volunteering was also central to commemoration. The lists engraved in stone during the war of those who had joined up helped encourage further enlistment; later lists formed a permanent and immediate chastisement of those who chose not to go.

As soon became apparent, the war the men of 1914 engaged to fight was nothing like the war that developed after the battle of the Marne. Henceforth, the focus of commemoration shifted away from the moment of mobilization to the stupendous character of the world conflict itself. One form of such commemoration was the collection and preservation for posterity of the ephemera of war. This was by and large a civilian operation, although many soldiers were collectors as well. It was also a patriotic act, and led (unintentionally at times) to the creation of what remain to this day the most important public repositories of artefacts and documents about the war. In Britain, an officially sponsored Imperial War Museum was formed in 1917, ironically enough on the grounds of the former ‘Bedlam’ lunatic asylum. It houses many military objects and records, as well as an invaluable collection of photographs, manuscripts, books, and works of art. In France, the initiative was private. What is now known as the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine started its life as the repository of wartime records, collected by the Leblanc family in their apartment in avenue de Malakoff, but intended from the start as a state museum. In the trench journal Taca Tac Teuf Teuf, soldiers on leave were encouraged to visit the collection, which ultimately was indeed passed on to the City of Paris, and then the University of Paris, in one of the outlying campuses of which it remains to this day. The Australians established a ‘War Museum’ (not the Australian War Memorial) in October 1917 and soldiers were invited to submit objects for display.

A more austere parallel is the private initiative of a German industrialist, Richard Franck, which led to the creation of the Kriegsbibliothek (now the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte) in Stuttgart. The director of the Historical Museum in Frankfurt was responsible for yet another German collection of documentation and ephemera related to the Great War. On a smaller scale, the Cambridge University Library, spurred on by the University librarian, gathered together a war collection of printed books and other documents. Similar efforts produced war collections in the New York Public Library. Most of these acts of preservation were intrinsically valuable. They were the work of civilians, many too old to fight, or with sons in uniform, and determined to preserve the dignity and honour of their country's war effort. By their very nature, they both glorified the war effort and contained, at least initially, little about the appalling character and costs of trench warfare. This was in part a function of censorship, but it also reflected some features of the mystification of warfare, especially in the press, whose ‘eyewash’ struck many soldiers as absurd or dangerous. Commemorating the war in this ill-informed and blatantly non-combatant manner took on the air of propaganda, as indeed some intended it to do. And like most propaganda, it did not dwell on the sadder facets of the war: the maimed, the deformed, the dead, the widows, the orphans, and the bereaved.

After the war, the character of such collections was mocked by the pacifist activist Ernst Friedrich, who set up an Anti-War Museum in Berlin in 1924. Its collection of documents and gruesome photographs showed everything the patriotic collections omitted. By displays of savage images of the mayhem caused by war, Friedrich pointed out graphically the dangerous selectivity of the patriotic collectors of wartime memorabilia, documents, and books. It is important to note that even though Friedrich's monument to the victims of war was more unsparing and (in a sense) more truthful than the pro-war collections, both arose out of prior political commitments. Commemoration was a political act; it could not be neutral, and war memorials carried political messages from the earliest days of the war.

The mobilization of popular culture on behalf of the nation's war effort occurred in all combatant countries, and was bound to mark commemorative forms. Each nation developed its own language of commemoration, but some features were universal. One was the tendency to locate the men of 1914-18 in the long history of martial virtue. There is hardly any difference between the treatment of Marlborough in Blenheim palace, Nelson in Trafalgar Square, and, a century later, Hindenburg in Berlin, except that Hindenburg was immortalized in gigantic form while the war was still going on. The victor of Tannenberg became a towering figure, whose lofty achievements were symbolized by a three-storey model placed prominently in the Tiergarten in the heart of Berlin.

The celebration of military or naval commanders was one way in which to glorify national military traditions. In some countries a more egalitarian language was used to proclaim the virtues of the martial spirit. In Australia and New Zealand, generals and admirals did not bear this symbolic weight; the common soldier or sailor was the link with the past. In France, both elevated and obscure soldiers celebrated the Gallic military tradition. What cities did on a grand scale, individual households could replicate in a more domestic manner, thanks to the emergence of the thriving industry of wartime kitsch. Commemorative images were marketed on the mass scale in WW I. Iron Hindenburgs were available in many materials and sizes.

Whether on the level of national celebration or domestic ornamentation, each nation adopted its own distinctive commemorative forms. One excellent example is the German phenomenon of ‘iron nail memorials’. These objects decorated sculptures, plaques, and domestic items like tables, and have (as far as we know) no equivalent in France or Britain. We can learn much about them from an instruction book prepared by two public-spirited Germans early in the war. They were made of ‘Ready for use materials’ and were ideal ‘for patriotic undertakings and ceremonies in schools, youth groups and associations’. These objects were described both as ‘war landmarks’ and as war memorials, but the distinction between the two was rarely clear. In each case, the figure or image to be celebrated or sanctified was outlined or described by a series of nails. The iron cross was the most popular choice for such objects, requiring according to the handbook between 160 and 200 nails per cross. Among the images they displayed were iron crosses embellished by the imperial initial or the date, but other nail memorials picture the turret or outline of a U-boat, Teutonic floral designs, swords, and mosaic designs for table tops.

Austrian examples of this form of patriotic art may also be found, but it would be a mistake to assume a common Catholic origin for it. Indeed, Crucifixion images and motifs were probably more prevalent in Protestant than in Catholic art, especially in Germany, where Marian and other saintly iconography proliferated. Furthermore, the culture of popular nationalism in imperial Germany was essentially Protestant. Sedan day was to a degree an anti-Catholic festival, and the ambiguous place of Catholics within the state was never resolved before 1914. Iron-cross nail memorials fit in much more closely with Protestant celebrations of the Prussian military genius and the grandeur of the Kaiserreich.

Ceremonies at which these iron nail memorials were created or displayed enabled patriots of whatever faith to show their commitment to the cause. Some paid for the privilege of nailing by contributing to a war charity or benevolent organization. Others introduced schoolchildren to the nobility of sacrifice in war by the declamation of lofty poetry. We can get some idea of the deliberate medievalism of this practice by citing but one of these poems:

From whistle of lead, the bloody wound
A warrior falling
A red cross on the white ground
A trusted arm;
Leaning and leading in the heat of battle
A red cross arm
A good bed is made
Warm and comfortable …

And so on into a misty, medieval past remote from the ugliness of industrialized war.

A 24-part ceremony surrounding such poetic affirmations was outlined for school or other civic use. It was replete with the choreography of uplifting allegorical Teutonic plays, songs, and noble poetry. Items 22-4 were the following: ‘Deutschland über alles’, a ‘Pledge of Truth and Faith in Victory’, and a round of ‘A mighty fortress is our God’, Luther's hymn. The imagery of cleansing through the shedding of blood is repeatedly invoked, further suggesting the militarized Christianity of the memorial itself. It is not at all surprising that such objects, and the ceremonies surrounding them, soon framed lists of the fallen.

This is indeed the commemorative art of Tannenberg, not Verdun, and we can almost see the idealized form of Hindenburg, presiding in spirit over these ceremonies, just as he had done after his famous victory. Here is his own version of it, written just after the war:

In our new Headquarters at Allenstein I entered the church, close by the old castle of the Teutonic Knights, while divine services were being held. As the clergyman uttered his closing words all those present, young soldiers as well as elderly ‘Landsturm’, sank to their knees under the overwhelming impression of their experiences. It was a worthy curtain to their heroic achievement.

Some of the central themes of commemoration are visible in these early wartime rituals and the legends surrounding them. The need to reaffirm the nobility of the warrior by an appeal to ‘ancient’ tradition, the tendency to highlight soldiers' sacrifice and civilian debt, and the consequent unending duty of dedication to some noble communal task: all are expressed here in a romanticized form which described a war which changed rapidly after August 1914—so rapidly indeed that these rituals and the verse they inspired were bound, as Siegfried Sassoon put it, ‘to mock the riddled corpses’ of whatever nationality ‘round Bapaume’.

The phenomenon of ‘nail memorials’ is but one example of the initial phase of commemorative art, in which the glorification of sacrifice was expressed in a deliberately archaic language, the cadences of knights and valour, of quests and spiritualized combat. The problem with this language was that it was too unreal, too uplifting, too patriotic, and insufficiently sensitive to the desolation of loss. For this reason, other forms of commemorative art emerged, both during and after the war. These objects and rituals expressed sadness more than exhilaration, and addressed directly the experience of bereavement. These two motifs—war as both noble and uplifting, and tragic and unendurably sad—are present in most post-war memorials; they differ in the balance struck between them. That balance was never fixed; no enduring formula emerged to express it, though traditional religious images were used repeatedly to do so.

Both religious and lay communities devoted themselves to the task of commemoration after 1918. The resulting monumental art provided a focus for ceremonies of public mourning beginning in the decade following the Armistice, and continuing to this day. The languages, imagery, and icons adopted varied considerably according to artistic convention, religious practice, and political conviction. They also reflected more mundane considerations, such as the ability of the community to pay for monuments. Consequently, some plans were scrapped and others had to be scaled down or redesigned to suit the means of the donors. Despite powerful currents of feeling about the need to express the indebtedness of the living to the fallen and the near universality of loss in many parts of Europe, commemoration was and remained a business, in which sculptors, artists, bureaucrats, churchmen, and ordinary people had to strike an agreement and carry it out. Certain general lines of iconography may be identified. These objects were by and large non-triumphalist. They were ambivalent about the war; it would have been jarring to remember only the heroism and not the horror. And too many of the lame, the crippled, and the blind were there, on the street corners, in the railway stations, in the nursing homes and hospitals, reminding any who sought an easy grammar of imagining the human price of ‘glory’.

War memorials were indeed reaffirmations of the symbols of decency, comradeship, and sacrifice expressed by millions of soldiers during the war. This attempt to reconfigure the symbols of brotherhood is part of the history of commemorative forms. It is not possible in a brief essay to do justice to this many-faceted exercise in symbolic resurrection, the fruits of which are part of the landscape of contemporary Europe. But perhaps one or two salient points about commemoration, more than 80 years after 1918, may be pertinent.

Within that history of healing and grief, these sites of memory rest on a discourse which was profoundly traditional. These statues, paintings, poems, plaques, buildings, and other commemorative forms reflect the backward gaze of so many writers, artists, politicians, soldiers, and everyday families in this period. They inhabited a world in which bereavement was virtually universal. Everyone had lost someone; many had lost everyone. No one can understand the heavy gloom of the end of 1918 without recognizing this simple and tragic reality.

In this atmosphere, and throughout the inter-war years, there flourished a complex traditional vocabulary of mourning, derived from classical, romantic, or religious forms. These gestures and modes of expressions were the language in which ordinary people mediated bereavement. The power of this cultural configuration has been ignored in much writing on the cultural history of the Great War. Some hold that ‘modernism’, a portmanteau for languages of irony, abstraction, and experimentation, was the language best configured to express the chaos and horror of the war. Through the validation provided by soldiers' memoirs, the argument goes, some modernist modes of writing and visualizing the war were granted a kind of post-war authenticity, the imprint of the direct experience of the men in the trenches. Thus the first industrialized war provided a new way of looking at the world, an ironic vision suited to the even larger catastrophe to come. And that war was seen through the lenses fashioned twenty years earlier at Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele.

There is much of value in this position, but it leaves out as much as it explains. Above all it omits the cultural significance of commemoration and the traditional languages in which it was expressed. Modernist modes of expression, while profound and exciting in many ways, could stir, disturb, inspire, but they could not heal. Like a giant star flaring up just before it disappears, this grammar of compassion inspired the commemorative movement during and after the war. It captured the final phase of a culture of consolation, a culture through which meaning could be ascribed even to an event as terrifying as the war of 1914-18. That culture was soon to be engulfed by an even more terrible war. And after that disaster, there was no going back. After Auschwitz and Hiroshima, there could be no full return to the commemorative forms, so redolent and so moving, which still reach out to us now, more than 80 years after the end of the catastrophe we call the Great War.

WW II memorials made some attempts to strike old chords. The Royal Air Force Memorial at Runnymede resembles the cloister-style memorials used to commemorate the missing on WW1 battlefields, and the marine corps memorial of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima catches the heroic determination of an earlier age. Amongst attempts to use the war's ruins as memorials were the incorporation of the ruins of Coventry cathedral as a narthex to the new one, and the preservation of the truncated spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. Russian war memorials were often on a gigantic scale, like the huge Soviet soldier in Berlin's Treptow park, and the battlefield of Kursk houses a panorama, a popular 19th-century form of battle commemoration. Alan Borg is generally right, however, to suggest that WW2 memorials ‘are seldom executed by artists of the first rank’.

There are memorials to many post-1945 conflicts, amongst them the gigantic Martyrs Memorial in Baghdad and the Martyrs Fountain (with its blood-red water) in Tehran. The Vietnam wall in Washington DC, which bears the names of the dead incised in black marble, is more modest, but permits comrades or relatives to trace the names with their fingers and reflects the viewer's image. Its construction embodies part of America's coming to terms with the experience of Vietnam, and it remains a place of pilgrimage. As the 20th century ends there is no sign that humanity's desire to commemorate war has lessened. War memorials are still being built on the western front. In recent years the Accrington Pals have been commemorated by an enigmatic brick memorial near Serre on the Somme, and a few miles away a dragon embodying 38th Welsh Division glares out towards Mametz Wood. From the nationalist triumphalism of Bagdhad to quieter commemoration on the Somme, the traditional functions of war memorials remain.

Bibliography

• Borg, Alan, War Memorials (London, 1991)

— James J. Wirtz/Richard Holmes

An architectural or sculptural object or plaque commemorating a person or an event.

membrane waterproofing

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Memorial (1973), a novel by Francis Stuart. Set against a background of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, it involves Fintan Francis Sugrue, an ageing writer prone to fantasizing; Herra, a neurotic young girl who reawakens him as a sexual being and an artist; and Liz Considine, an alcoholic governess hired as Herra's chaperone when the couple set up home, insulated from the world's disapproval in a remote country house.

Memorial, a self-described "international, historical-educational, human rights, and charitable society," was founded in Moscow in 1988. Its original inspiration lay in the work of scattered professional and amateur historians who had quietly and often covertly done independent research on Soviet history, realizing that their works might never see the light of day, at least in their lifetimes. In some cases they had given their work to the young Leningrad historian Arseny Roginsky, who from 1976 to 1981 included them in his anonymously produced samizdat (typewritten, self-published) journal Pamyat, or Memory. He then smuggled the journal abroad, where successive issues were published in Russian as separate volumes.

Memorial emerged in 1987, when individuals started to collect money to erect a monument to the victims of Josef Stalin's "great terror." This goal was achieved when a short tribute to these victims was carved on a boulder from a concentration camp near the Arctic Circle, and, on October 30, 1990, the boulder was installed in a square facing the Moscow headquarters of the KGB. In the meantime, Memorial had chosen the former dissident leader Andrei Sakharov as its honorary chairman and established groups in dozens of towns all over the USSR. However, official resistance to the new organization remained tenacious. Only in 1991 did the authorities give it the legal registration that it needed.

Memorial's mandate for historical research concerns all varieties of official persecution and discrimination conducted against individuals and groups during the Soviet era. Its researchers have sought access to governmental archives, rummaged through the buildings of abandoned concentration camps, and searched for the many unmarked and overgrown burial grounds that hold the remains of millions of prisoners who died in captivity. They have also solicited documents, letters, and oral history from surviving victims and witnesses. Apart from building up Memorial archives in Moscow and elsewhere, the researchers have had their work published by Memorial in Russian and other languages in hundreds of journals, newspapers, and books.

Memorial also researches current violations of human rights in Russia and other former Soviet republics, especially when these occur on a large scale. Examples are atrocities committed during the two Chechnya wars, and continuing official discrimination against the Meskhi Turks, who were deported from southern Georgia in 1944.

Memorial's charitable work consists of helping victims of oppression and their relatives (e.g., materially and with legal problems).

Memorial's activities have been directed from Moscow by a stable core of individuals, including Roginsky, Nikita Okhotin, and Alexander Daniel. Its funding has primarily come from bodies such as the Ford Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Germany, and a few domestic sources.

Since the early 1990s most of public opinion in Russia has become indifferent or even hostile to the work of Memorial. However, its members derive hope from pockets of societal support and the launching in 1999 of an annual competition for essays on Memorial-type themes by high-school children that attracted 1,651 entries during its first year. Some members recall that, after the fall of Adolf Hitler in Germany, three decades went by before German society began seriously to confront the Nazi era and to create a more reliable national memory. A similar or longer period may be needed in the former USSR, before Russian society, in particular, can face up to myriad grim truths about the seven decades of communism. In the interim, Memorial has unearthed small pieces of truth about hundreds of deportations and millions of deaths.

Bibliography

Adler, Nanci. (1993). Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement. Westport, CT: Praeger.

—PETER REDDAWAY

For a list of words related to memorial, see:

• Celebrations, Observances, Rites, and Gatherings - memorial: gathering to commemorate something or someone, esp. after death
• Burial and Funerals - memorial: service in honor of the deceased after burial or interment

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See words rhyming with "memorial."

  See crossword solutions for the clue Memorial.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - mindesmærke
adj. - minde-

idioms:

• Memorial Day    (US) mindedag for de faldne
• memorial service    mindegudstjeneste

Nederlands (Dutch)
gedenkteken, herdenkings- plechtigheid, memorandum (m.n. juridisch), souvenir, verslag, petitie/ toespraak tot regering, herdenkings-, gedenk-, betreffende geheugen/ herinnering

Français (French)
n. - mémorial
adj. - commémoratif, à la mémoire de

idioms:

• Memorial Day    (US) jour de commémoration des soldats américains morts à la guerre
• memorial service    messe commémorative

Deutsch (German)
n. - Denkmal, Denkschrift
adj. - Gedenk-

idioms:

• Memorial Day    Volkstrauertag
• memorial service    Gedenkzeremonie

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μνημείο, υπόμνημα, (πληθ.) χρονικά, ιστορικές αναμνήσεις
adj. - αναμνηστικός, επιμνημόσυνος

idioms:

• Memorial Day    (ΗΠΑ) Ημέρα των Πεσόντων (30 Μαϊου)
• memorial service    μνημόσυνο, επιμνημόσυνη δέηση

Italiano (Italian)
memoriale, monumento, commemorativo

idioms:

• Memorial Day    giornata della Rimembranza
• memorial service    cerimonia commemorativa

Português (Portuguese)
n. - memória (f), monumento (m), feriado comemorativo (m)
adj. - comemorativo

idioms:

• Memorial Day    dia em memória dos soldados mortos na guerra (amer.)
• memorial service    cerimônia comemorativa (f)

Русский (Russian)
памятник, меморандум, поминовение, памятный, мемориальный

idioms:

• Memorial Day    день памяти погибших в войнах
• memorial service    заупокойная служба

Español (Spanish)
n. - monumento conmemorativo, memorial, recuerdo
adj. - conmemorativo, mnemotécnico

idioms:

• Memorial Day    día de conmemoración de los Caídos (EE.UU.)
• memorial service    misa u oficio en memoria de

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - minnesmärke, betänkande
adj. - minnes-

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
纪念物, 请愿书, 记念的, 记忆的

idioms:

• Memorial Day    阵亡将士纪念日
• memorial service    追悼仪式

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 紀念物, 請願書
adj. - 記念的, 記憶的

idioms:

• Memorial Day    陣亡將士紀念日
• memorial service    追悼儀式

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 기념비
adj. - 기념하는

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 記念物, 記念館, 記念行事, 記録, 記念祭
adj. - 記念の, 追悼の

idioms:

• Memorial Day    戦没将兵記念日, 英霊追悼の日
• memorial service    慰霊祭, 追悼式

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) بناء تذكاري (صفه) تذكاري‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מצבת זיכרון, מפעל הנצחה, יד, תזכיר, דברי הימים (ברבים), קורות (ברבים), מסמך דיפלומטי לא רשמי‬
adj. - ‮משמר את זכרו של אדם או דבר‬

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