Earl of Clancarty
Main Page: Earl of Clancarty (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for laying out the plans for marking the centenary of the 1914-18 war, including culture and the arts.
One central question that needs to be asked is: what precisely is it that we are commemorating? What is the nature and purpose of this commemoration? Is it a history project? Is it a military commemoration? Is it cultural, and what do we mean by that? In trying to answer that question, I want to lay some emphasis on the artists and writers of the time of other countries. What is it that we want to achieve? Are certain values being imposed on this commemoration—for instance, in schools? In that respect, this debate touches on the one that will be held tomorrow on British values in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey.
I want to voice some concerns here. I accept that commemoration does not have to be celebration, even though Chambers gives it as a possible synonym, but there are other traps that can colour these commemorations and I worry that they are already doing so. The first is nostalgia, and in a way this is something that many of us can easily fall into. It is nostalgia not necessarily for another era of soldiering, which some may have—in spite of the horror of the war itself, which nostalgia also somehow pushes to one side—but for the era that immediately preceded the First World War and which the war destroyed, the subject of many TV costume dramas. The feeling has been particularly heightened this week because yesterday, as the noble Lords, Lord Faulkner and Lord Shipley, mentioned, was the centenary of the famous train ride that Edward Thomas took from Paddington to Malvern to visit his friend, the American poet Robert Frost, inspiring the poem “Adlestrop”—an event that took place four days before the shooting in Sarajevo. As it happens, Edward Thomas is our local Hampshire hero; he was a brilliant poet, and I pass the house where he wrote that poem and many others every day when I do the school drop-off.
It is very easy to get thrown back into that era but it is important to point out that the nostalgia for this period is not a purely British phenomenon. Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer, in his biography, The World of Yesterday, called that period, which he lived through in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the golden age of security. However, he also admitted that that sense of security must have been an illusion. The First World War did not start in Sarajevo. I am not an historian, but I know that historians say that if you want properly to understand the origins of the First World War, you need to go far back into the 19th century and look closely at not just British history but European history. I hope that is something that schools will do.
Secondly, respect and remembrance alone can so easily turn into justification, and I sense this when I see schoolchildren interviewed on camera across the channel against the backdrop of World War I cemeteries expressing similar platitudes about “the sacrifices of our heroes” and “plucky little Belgium”. This is not, of course, the fault of the children, but it has a lot to do with the current mood. Jonathan Jones writing in the Guardian in May on German art of the time, which I will come to, said:
“It’s as if the clock is being turned back and the propaganda of the war believed all over again”.
I agree with him. I feel concern about the context of remembrance and the strong military context of the schoolchildren’s visits. I feel concern that this is only or largely about Britain. The project of sending schoolchildren to battle sites should have nothing to do with patriotism, a misguidedly imposed value. If it is to be done, it should have everything to do with the objective study of history, the study of one event that affected this country deeply, as it did others in Europe and the rest of the world, including Africa and the Middle East.
I want to quote some words that were written about Goethe, which show that there were other views, even at the time:
“Among our writers and men of letters there are ... few if any whose present utterances ... will be counted among their best work. Nor is there any serious writer who at heart prefers Koerner’s patriotic songs to the poems of Goethe ...
Exactly, cry the super-patriots, we have always been suspicious of Goethe, he was never a patriot, he contaminated the German mind with the benign internationalism which has plagued us so long and appreciably weakened our German consciousness.
That is the crux of the problem”.
The writer continues that Goethe’s,
“devotion to humanity meant more to him than his devotion to the German people, which he knew and loved better than anyone else. He was a citizen and patriot in the international world of thought, of inner freedom, of intellectual conscience”.
These words were written in September 1914 by Herman Hesse, in a piece entitled O Friends, Not These Tones—echoing Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”—who with fellow writers Stefan Zweig and Romain Rolland, two of whom were future Nobel prize winners, formed a loose triumvirate of pacifists who argued against the war from the very beginning and throughout their lives for a cosmopolitan culture that crossed national boundaries.
Something of that internationalist spirit is in an important exhibition I went to last month in Wuppertal, in Germany: a collaboration between Wuppertal’s Von der Heydt-Museum and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Reims, looking at the war through the eyes of both French and German artists and writers with film footage from both countries and much more. It is an important exhibition because there was absolute parity between the two contributions. It is called “Human Slaughterhouse”, which gets to the nub of what happened, and deals directly with the destruction and trauma of this conflict at it affected the two sides. As Otto Dix records in his 1915-16 diary:
“Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, grenades, bombs, caves, corpses, blood, schnapps, mice, cats, gases, cannons, filth, bullets, machine-guns, fire, steel, that’s what war is! Nothing but the devil's work!”.
This exhibition also contains Dix’s 1924 graphic series of etchings “The War”, a work far removed from the sense of nostalgia to which I have referred.
The exhibition is also, in a sense, the European Union—to which the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, referred—working at its best, meaning not provincial, not introverted but a demonstration of the Union’s success in the ways that have mattered, which are cultural. In the 1980s, particularly before the wall came down, the watchword for young artists was cultural exchange. Today, from the individual’s point of view, it appears much easier to explore other cultures. We have many more contemporary artists visiting the UK from countries across the world, but collaboration between countries at a formal level in terms of arts and cultural exchange is something that still needs to be valued and supported in an era when the accent in the UK is on the one-way and perhaps more insular tool of soft power.
The way we mark this centenary will have an influence on the way we react to future conflict when the spotlight will be on other parts of the world. I asked the question: what is this commemoration ultimately for? I answer with the title of a book published in 2000 by the French sociologist Alain Touraine, Can We Live Together? It is in my view the best question, but is something that necessitates a reaching out rather than a reinforcement of our own country’s inherent insularity, and an understanding of the response of the arts of other countries to an event such as the First World War must be an effective part of this.