Monuments and Collective Memory
Following the First World War, the leaders of Czechoslovakia created new holidays, among them, one celebrating the Battle of Zborov (“Army Day”) on July 2. Together with October 28, the day the Czechoslovak Republic was declared in Prague, Zborov was the main commemorative site on Czechoslovakia’s national-patriotic calendar. Because it was only one of many …
Continue reading “The Battle of Zborov, the Czechs, and Their Two-Tailed Lion”
Like the three-quarter-size Statues-of-Liberty that the Boy Scouts unveiled in the 1950s, and many of the Joseph II statues unveiled across the Bohemian Lands and Lower Austria in the 1880s, sculptor Ernest Moore Viquesney’s First World War statues, “The Spirit of the American Doughboy,” that dot the American landscape are production-line products. The sculptor carefully …
I’d never heard of Alvin Cullum York until I visited Nashville, Tennessee. Fascinated as I am by First World War monuments, I headed straight for the larger-than-life-sized bronze figure with bayonet drawn on corner of the capitol lawn. York, a pacifist, was born in a log cabin some 125 miles east of Nashville, in central-ish …
Continue reading “Alvin Cullum York, American Hero of the First World War”
The aftermath of the First World War, with its appalling body count and wholesale devastation, was a period of great memorial construction. In this “democracy of death,” there were attempts across the former belligerent states, with the exception of Soviet Russia, to honor all the war dead, irrespective of rank, and including the unknown dead. …
Of Monuments and Memory