Herito - A Rather Small War

What is HERITO?

Written by Maciej Górny

When the war was over, that is to say, when the history of its memory and commemoration had begun, some events occurred that downgraded the previous four years almost completely. The emergence of new nation states was a result not of the war, but of the defeat of empires.

Let me begin with a scene from academic life,which is funny as well as characteristic of the issue we are concerned with. On the centenary of the last day of European peace (27 June 2014), Bellevue Palace in Berlin – the official residence of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany – hosted historians who discussed the significance of the memory of the Great War to their home countries, and the chances of working out a shared European memory of the event. The organisers made every effort to secure the most diverse attendance.

Besides representatives of Belgium and France, other invitees included an Englishman, a German, a Turk, a Croatian, a Russian and a Pole. The discussion was chaired by Etienne Francois, a co editor of the monumental publication Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (German Memorial Sites). Despite painstaking attention to detail, the organisers realised a certain shortcoming of the undertaking rather late. Nine people at the podium plus limited time (presidents, as we all know, tend to be very busy) are a sure recipe for disaster.
Unavoidably, the discussants had to be divided into smaller groups. The selection was made a few minutes before the meeting. The idea of unity beyond division, so special to the organisers, had to make way for practical considerations and finally two debates were held: one attended by historians from Eastern Europe (including Turkey), and the other from Western Europe. None of the participants protested; they all agreed that such a division, albeit slightly improper, was fitting, given the subject matter. But was it really?

We live in a time when the division of Europe into the capitalist modern West and communist backward East is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The Elbe River, a once obvious border, has grown less and less important in economy and politics. Our memory, the memory of cataclysms of the twentieth century in particular, is a stronghold of the old order. In this light, in the East (not without exceptions, though) the status of the First World War is in fact slightly different, less prominent, than in the West. Below I will try to address the following three issues: firstly, why is the war “forgotten” in this very part of the world?; secondly, are there any areas in this public amnesia in which the Great War plays a momentous role?; and thirdly, what scientific, political, and social effects can be caused by recent phenomena – especially the expected boom connected with the centenary of the conflict?

The insignificant presence of the First World War in Central and Eastern European communities’ collective memory may come as a surprise, especially bearing in mind the physical consequences of these hostilities. The figures are really striking, even if we consider just the territory of Poland. More than four hundred thousand Poles in the military uniforms of three empires were killed, and over twice as many were injured. The often compulsory Russian evacuation in the summer of 1915 comprised nearly one million people, whose return stretched out until the mid 1920s. The destroyed cities and villages, material and cultural losses were comparable with the worst affected land near the front line in Belgium and northern France. Small wonder – the battles on the Eastern Front were no less fierce and bloody than those on the Western Front, only that they were fought in larger areas. Because it was a war of manoeuvre, more arduous and also more dangerous – to both the soldiers and the civilians – than a war of position.

There are a number of explanations, and each of them concerns not only Poland but also some other states in the region. In the East, great empires fought with each other; however, it was mainly representatives of smaller nations who lost their lives. In spite of the fact that practically all nationalities remained loyal to the throne, none of them could consider a potential victory of their state to be a dream come true.

On the contrary, enfeebling the ruling elites in order to win concessions from them to Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Jews, Serbs, Croatians or Slovenians was in the interest of the majority. Fighting spirit must have been mitigated by a feeling that it was most likely fellow countrymen would fight and die in the uniforms of an enemy empire. When the war was over, that is to say, when the history of its memory and commemoration had begun, some events occurred that downgraded the previous four years almost completely. The emergence of new nation states was a result not of the war, but of the defeat of empires. When the dust of battle settled, it turned out that it was not the majority, namely, combatants who fought for the Tsar or the Emperor, who were in possession of collective memory – but representatives of numerically marginal groups. The number of Polish legionaries, like Czechoslovak soldiers or Croatians fighting on the Allied side, never exceeded per cent of the country’s military personnel. Small wonder then that the tale of war, which they had monopolised, did not become a common heritage.

As a matter of fact, it was soon overshadowed by the memory of another war, whose consequences in this region were even more tragic. The year 1945 exacerbated the situation by subjecting memory to the rigours of geopolitics, and – in Yugoslavia – to “mandatory forgetting” of the conflict, in which Croatians, Serbs, Slovenians and Bosnians dressed in Habsburg uniforms fought against Serbs. As it turned out later, making the First World War taboo in Yugoslavia seemed like a very reasonable idea. In the 1960s, when both historiography and pop culture rediscovered the “Serbian Golgotha” and made it a pillar of the independent, Serbian collective memory, the hitherto consistent structure of the multi ethnic federation began to break.

The weakness of memory of the Great War in the East has two sources. The first is an inability to relate with any side of the conflict, as most of the states there at the outset failed to survive until 1918. The second is a potentially toxic memory of the fratricidal conflict, or – in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia – the conflict between nations inhabiting one state after 1918.

However, there are no rules without exceptions. If we take a closer look at local communities and civic initiatives, the picture becomes a tad complicated, and regional differences, which do not always respect present day political borders, come to the fore.These regionalisms have been justified by the material heritage. An ever present feature of the landscape of East Germany (including the former East Prussia), Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary is crosses and small monuments commemorating those who died in one or both world wars.

In Poland we can come across them in Cieszyn Silesia, for example. Military cemeteries, especially the ones established by Austro Hungarian military authorities during the war, constitute a special vestige. Several dozen of them are outstanding creations of the Slovak architect Dušan Jurkovič – fascinating both for their historical significance and for their artistic merit.

In the area of the former Russian region of partition, and also in Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia, there are not as many symbols of affinity between local communities and casualties of the Great War, and, more importantly, only very few people can read them. Sometimes local memory preserves scraps of information about the First World War, yet it associates it with the “real” war that followed. In fact, it is hard to find cities and towns here whose experiences between 1914 and 1918 were so dramatic that the Second World War could not blot out the memory of them. Consequently, exceptions become even more prominent.

In the Galician towns of Gorlice and Przemyśl, the First World War constituted the worst disaster in history. The battles of Riga, Belgrade, Warsaw, or Kaunas were merely a glimpse of the atrocities that followed. As early as the 1980s, a grassroots social movement emerged for the protection of the heritage of the Great War, military cemeteries in particular.

It developed during the following decade, as a renovation of necropolises in Slovakia and in Poland was initiated – often supported by Austrian institutions (chiefly the Austrian Black Cross). Recently, an informal network of Polish, Slovak, Austrian, Czech, and Hungarian associations have taken care of the cemeteries and propagated the knowledge of the First World War in the region. They shall have enough work to keep them busy: Austro Hungarian architects, whose job was to blend the graveyards in with the submontane scenery, built many crosses and fences using wood, i.e. a material that is hardly permanent.
Furthermore, in the 1920s, stealing lumber from cemeteries was extremely common. This phenomenon had the biggest impact in the former Russian region of partition, but ordinary citizens and then the nationalism of the new authorities left their imprint on military cemeteries in Galicia, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, too. Many of the cemeteries which had not been destroyed were “nationalised” by the new national states. The procedure involved distorting the truth about the origin of the deceased. Multi ethnic graveyards officially became the burial grounds of Polish legionaries or Latvian riflemen, although in some of them not even one representative of these formations had been buried. Sometimes in – or next to – graves from the First World War,
graves of victims of the following hecatomb appeared.

The centenary of the Great War has enabled grassroots initiatives for heritage protection to come to prominence, to gain access to the media and regional education programmes. It has also increased the (hitherto weak) interest of historians from East Central Europe in the subject – partly due to external causes rather than an inner need: international projects need and actively seek Polish partners. A slight rise in popularity of the First World War can be observed in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia and Romania; all the neighbours, however, are now outdistanced by Serbia, where Christopher Clark’s well known book about the causes of World War I has been discussed even more ferociously than in Germany. Will this situation last? In my opinion, it depends on the status of the First World War in prevailing national historical narratives. In Serbia it is a significant element of them; elsewhere, it matters far less. Due to the fact that Poland’s calendar is filled with events, the “renaissance” of the subject in the public space lasted literally a few days – until August 1, that is, when discussion on the Warsaw Uprising began anew. Perhaps the memory of the Great War might be rekindled by showing how strongly it is connected with events which have been important to local and national communities: the establishment or re establishment of independence, the end of empires and the birth of the Europe of nations in which we have lived? By showing that there was practically no discontinuity between 1914 and 1920; that the process has occurred in the region as a whole? It seems that a similar thought inspired the poet Kazimierz Przerwa Tetmajer in the early 1920s, when he wrote: “The war was a womb from whence Poland came which we have now”. It is worth thinking about it as our war, if only for that very reason.

Maciej Górny – historian, employee of the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, scholarship holder of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. In 2014, together with Włodzimierz Borodziej, Górny published the first volume of the history of the First World War in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Nasza wojna, vol. I: Imperia 1912–1916, WAB). His book devoted to the influence of war on the development of modern science (Wielka Wojna profesorów. Nauki o człowieku (1912–1923), Neriton 2014) is due out this autumn anniversaries.