32 C O N T E X T 1 3 7 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 4 In all three cases, Unknown Soldiers added another cultural layer to symbolically saturated spaces. Paradoxically, the desire to take the Unknown Soldier to the very heart of the capital cities went hand in hand with efforts to insulate him – architecturally or ritually – from the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life. That was the effect of the two-minute silence on Armistice Day, which brought urban life to a complete halt.Wherever it was held, the silence proved a powerful marker of loss, but in no other place was it as powerful as in the restless capitals. Similarly, for nearly 90 years, the traffic has flown through the Menin Gate memorial at Ypres during the day, but has been stopped for the duration of the sounding of the Last Post ever since the ceremony on the evening of 1 May 1929 (with the sole exception of the period of German occupation during the second world war). Despite the plans of other cities (such as Leeds) to bury local Unknown Soldiers, the institution remained confined to national capitals or their environs (as in the case of the United States and Yugoslavia). The Cenotaph, however, set a trend for similar structures in cities throughout Britain and the empire, for instance in Glasgow and Toronto. In second and provincial cities, cenotaphs were signifiers of both public mourning and civic pride. London, by contrast, seemed wanting in local patriotism, for no metropolitan war memorial as such was ever built. The same is true of Paris and Berlin and also the Scottish capital. Edinburgh Castle houses the Scottish National War Memorial, but the city lacks a single, collective memorial dedicated to its fallen soldiers.This might indicate that the inhabitants of capital cities did not perceive a difference between the metropolitan and the national war memorial, or that their horizon did not extend beyond the neighbourhood. Below the national and metropolitan levels, capital cities were distinguished by a high density of war memorials: mostly small and medium-sized structures, typically erected by local people for local people. The evidence of metropolitan commemorations suggests that the identities of quarters were never completely subsumed by the rapidly expanding city as a whole. Certain building projects further strengthened the role of the neighbourhood as the basic cell of collective memory in the metropolis. From Hamburg to Melbourne, planners envisaged the building of new blocks of houses and sometimes entire wards whose identity rested firmly on the experience of the GreatWar. The construction of war service homes or garden cities for disabled veterans and war widows (see page 28)was principally a response to long-standing concerns about urban housing conditions. The secondary effect was, however, that here family stories of loss and bereavement became embedded within the socio-spatial conditions of the city. To be sure, the most ambitious schemes for ‘homes fit for heroes’ remained paper dreams, and those that were realised did not generally facilitate durable communities of remembrance. In western Europe, often only street names evocative of battles or explicit about their former designation (in German towns the ubiquitous Heimstättenweg– that is, streets with housing for veterans and war widows) are all that remain. By contrast, many settlements for Greek expellees from Asia Minor constructed in the Athens-Piraeus metropolitan region after the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey retained their social cohesion for another two generations. While the sense of dislocation was greatest among the first generation, even their children and grandchildren continued to refer to themselves as refugees. The ‘memory boom’ of the 1990s breathed new life into the commemorative cityscapes dating from the era of the Great War. In Britain’s cities, the restoration of the two-minute silence (which had been moved to Remembrance Sunday in 1946) on Armistice Day 1995 proved a powerful and popular marker of the memory, bringing urban life to a temporary halt again. The institution of the Unknown Soldier, too, was reinvented and its metropolitan character restated. On 11 November 1993, an Unknown Australian Soldier exhumed from a war cemetery in France was interred in the Australian War Memorial at Canberra; seven years later, Ottawa followed suit. These were impressive affirmations of the presence of the dead of the first world war (and, expressedly or implicitly, all subsequent conflicts) in these two capital cities. However, the remaking of commemorative cityscapes was not everywhere a smooth process. In Berlin, an attempt to revamp the war memorial in the Neue Wache at Unter den Linden in 1993 showed that, in terms of urban history, the scars of the Great War pale into insignificance when juxtaposed with the ‘topography of terror’ of an even greater war. Stefan Goebel is a senior lecturer in the school of history, University of Kent at Canterbury. Among his publications are The GreatWar and Medieval Memory: war, remembrance and medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940, Cambridge University Press, 2007, and, as editor, Cities into Battlefields: metropolitan scenarios, experiences and commemorations of total war, Ashgate, 2011. The Cenotaph,White Hall, London, unveiled on 11 November 1930
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