Contested Commemorations. War Remembrances and Republican Politics in Weimar Germany

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This research project seeks to reconsider the legacy of the First World War for republican politics in Weimar Germany. Analysing the contested field of commemorations of the Great War from 1918 to 1933, the project will demonstrate how pro-republican currents and associations tapped into the popular memories and representations of the war experience in order to legitimise, defend and boost the republican project. While they criticised the 'stab-in-the-back' legend and other right-wing narratives, these groups also developed their own interpretation of the meaning of the war experience. Crucially, they aimed to show how the war experiences had turned a majority of war veterans into devoted supporters of a republican polity. An investigation of these republican war remembrances will thus not only offer a fresh perspective on the impact of the war experience on political discourses in 1920s and early 1930s Germany. It will also make a crucial contribution to the scholarly debate about the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the Weimar Republic.Empirically, the project will focus on the contributions of two large-scale associations to the symbolic representation of war and violence. The first, the 'Reichsbund' of war victims, widows and orphans, was founded already during the war in 1917 by members of the Social Democratic Party and the socialist trade unions. From 1919 onwards, the Reichsbund quickly emerged as the largest association of injured and mutilated war victims, war widows and orphans, with a peak membership of 600,000. The second association, the 'Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold', was explicitly founded as a 'League of Republican Ex-Servicemen' in 1924, and quickly attracted a mass membership of around one million men, two-thirds of whom were actual veterans of the First World War. While the Reichsbanner was formally a non-partisan organization devoted to defending the republic and its colours (black-red-gold) against attacks from the extreme right and left, the overwhelming majority of its rank-and-file members and functionaries were Social Democrats. My research will investigate the semantics of pro-republican, social-democratic attempts to endow the experiences of physical and psychological trauma, loss and bereavement during the Great War with meaning. In addition, it will analyse the specific position of pro-republican discourses in the polarised and contested field of commemorations of the Great War. Finally, the project will highlight both the achievements and the ambivalences of the attempts by Reichsbund and Reichsbanner to represent the Republic and its core constitutional element, popular sovereignty, as a necessary consequence of the corruption of the Wilhelmine officer corps and the senseless victimisation of ordinary people in the Imperial Army from 1914 to 1918.Overall, my project will emphasise the significance of republican war remembrances for the legitimacy of the democratic project since 1918. As the project reconsiders the legacy of the Great War for the Weimar Republic, it will also make a contribution to the ongoing debate about the origins of National Socialism in the war experiences of the Great War.