C O N T E X T 1 3 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 4 31 It is one of the paradoxes of the first world war that the conflict left its most lasting mark on urban space only after the guns had fallen silent.1 With the exception of Soviet Russia – which had no official war memorials, no recognised sites of mourning – cityscapes became dotted with markers of memory and loss and provided platforms for sombre rituals of war remembrance during the inter-war period. Interestingly, the legacy of the GreatWar was nowhere more visible than in some of the major cities furthest removed from the main theatres of war. The Anzac memorial in Sydney, the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne and, above all, the AustralianWar Memorial in what was then the new federal capital, Canberra, became landmarks that transformed these cities by placing the commemoration of war physically at the heart of urban life.The same could be said about NationalWar Memorial at Ottawa that gave purpose and coherence to the construction of the Canadian capital. By contrast, it proved considerably more difficult to integrate the war and its memory into the complex cultural and physical fabric of the capitals of the old world. The Panthéon de la Guerre – a giant panorama of the Great War, inaugurated on a site near the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris in October 1918 – was sold off to American businessmen and exhibited in NewYork, Washington, Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco during the inter-war years. In London, the Imperial War Museum (originally to be called the National War Museum), founded in 1917, had to move twice before finding a permanent home in a former lunatic asylum on the fringe of the city centre in 1936. Initially, the museum found a temporary home in the rebuilt Crystal Palace at Sydenham, but later relocated to the South Kensington museums site before it was finally installed in Lambeth, where it resides to this day. An uncertain project at the time of its creation, the ImperialWar Museum became very much part of the London landscape in the inter-war period, which was as much an imperial landscape as a national one. One ambitious but doomed scheme of autumn 1918 had envisaged the rebuilding of central London as a war memorial (with the war museum taking over Banqueting House). The overall plan would have literally imposed the memory of the war on the cityscape ofWestminster, but in a manner unacceptable to most Londoners. Inconceivable in London, the transformation of a city into a necropolis, an urban landscape dedicated to the memory of the war dead, was, however, what the British had in mind for the war-ravaged Belgian town ofYpres – somewhat to the consternation of many local inhabitants determined to revive the place. Hitherto a provincial town, post-1918Ypres matured into a hub of commemoration attracting tens of thousands of visitors from Britain and the empire every year. In addition, British ex-servicemen employed as gardeners by the ImperialWar Graves Commission became resident there in considerable numbers. Since the war dead lay mostly buried in military cemeteries abroad, war memorials at home functioned as substitute graves that triggered memories in the absence of bodies.The exception was the symbolic repatriation of Unknown Soldiers.This new institution represented a quintessentially metropolitan form of commemoration that spread from London and Paris in 1920 throughout the capitals of Europe from Brussels toWarsaw during the inter-war period (with the exception of Berlin). The tombs tended to be inconspicuously designed; it was the symbolism of the chosen location and its ceremonial use that infused the signifier with meaning. Britain’s Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey invoked the glory of a medieval past. The grave in the monarch’s church was paired with a secular empty tomb, the Cenotaph, in the street of the ministries. In Rome, the Unknown Soldier was interred in the monument to modern Italy’s founding monarch, itself meaningfully situated at the junction between the ancient fora, the medieval and baroque city, and the building projects of the post-Risorgimento capital. The French soldat inconnu punctuated prominent points in the Parisian cityscape. Interred under the Arch de Triomphe, the funeral cortege through the capital, however, mapped out Republican traditions. STEFAN GOEBEL Commemorative cityscapes In memorials, tombs and museums as far away as Australia and Canada, signifying public mourning and civic pride, the first world war made a lasting imprint on urban space. The Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, dedicated on 24 November 1934 Reference 1 For a fuller discussion of the war’s impact on urban life, see Stefan Goebel (2014) ‘Cities’, in JayWinter (ed), The Cambridge History of the FirstWorldWar, vol II: The State, Cambridge University Press.
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