(At The Interface - Probing The Boundaries) Elizabeth Anderson, Avril Maddrell, Kate McLoughlin-Memory, Mourning, Landscape.-Rodopi (2010) PDF

Memory, Mourning, Landscape
At the Interface
Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher
Dr Daniel Riha
Advisory Board
Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Dr Martin McGoldrick
Professor Margaret Chatterjee Revd Stephen Morris
Dr Wayne Cristaudo Professor John Parry
Dr Mira Crouch Dr Paul Reynolds
Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Professor Peter L. Twohig
Professor Asa Kasher Professor S Ram Vemuri
Owen Kelly Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E
Dr Peter Mario Kreuter
Volume 71
A volume in the Probing the Boundaries series
‘Making sense Of’
Probing the Boundaries

Memory, Mourning, Landscape
Edited by
Elizabeth Anderson, Avril Maddrell,
Kate McLoughlin & Alana Vincent
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3086-2
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3087-9
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in the Netherlands
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix
Kate McLoughlin
Designing a War Museum: Some Reflections on

Representations of War and Combat 1
Jay Winter
The Sacred Names of the Nation’s Dead: War and

Remembrance in Revolutionary France 21
Joseph Clarke
Memory, Mourning and Malvern Hill: Herman Melville

and the Poetry of the American Civil War 43
Cynthia Wachtell
Tabulating Loss, Entombing Memory: The Srebrenica-

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Sarah Wagner
Lethean Landscapes: Forgetting in Late Modern

Commemorative Spaces 79
Joel David Robinson
Morbid Family Pride: Private Memorials and Scots Law 99

Hilary Hiram
Memory, Mourning and Landscape in the Scottish

Mountains: Discourses of Wilderness, Gender and
Entitlement in Online Debates on Mountainside Memorials 123
Avril Maddrell
Seder and Imagined Landscape 147

Alana M. Vincent
Sailing Home: Boat-Graves, Migrant Identities and

Funerary Practices on the Viking Frontier 165
Erin Halstad-McGuire
Coda
The Lido in the Forest: Memory, Landscape, Painting 191

Judith Tucker
Notes on Contributors 217

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Vassiliki Kolocotroni, David Jasper,
Heather Walton, the Department of English Literature and the Centre for
Literature, Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow. We also wish
to acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research
Council and the Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities, University of
Glasgow. This support made possible the conference on Memory, Mourning,
Landscape held at the University of Glasgow on 9 June 2008.
Permission to use the images in Joel Robinson’s essay was kindly
granted by the Alvar Aalto Museum, Alvar Aallon Katu 7, 40101 Jyvaskyla,
Finland (museum@alvaraalto.fi) and EMBT Architects, Spain (© Enric
Miralles - Benedetta Tagliabue | EMBT, Passatge de la Pau, 10 bis, pral.
08002 Barcelona – Spain (info@mirallestagliabue.com)). Permission to use
the images in Avril Maddrell’s essay was kindly granted by The Nevis
Partnership, 101 High Street, Fort William, Scotland PH33 6DG
(www.nevispartnership.co.uk) and The Angry Corrie, cartoonist Chris Tyler.
The cover image is Platform (oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm) by Judith
Tucker.
Elizabeth Anderson, University of Glasgow
Avril Maddrell, University of the West of England
Kate McLoughlin, University of Glasgow
Alana Vincent, University of Glasgow

Introduction: Memory, Mourning, Landscape
Kate McLoughlin
Memory, mourning, landscape: between them, the three terms draw a
vertical, temporal axis (revisiting the past and carrying it into the future) and a
horizontal, spatial axis (grounding the first two activities). This essay collection,
assembled nearly a century after Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917), sites
itself at the intersection. As, post-Freud, our understanding of how memory and
mourning function continues to be challenged, revised and refined, increasing
scholarly attention is paid to the role of situation1 in grief and remembrance -
whether in commemorations of individuals or in memorialising the mass deaths
of late modern warfare and disasters - as geopolitical developments create new
nations and give reinforced importance to cultural memory and national identity.
The situational is itself in the course of refinement as an instrument of
analysis. Extolling the potential of the (in 1998) new cultural geography, Sara
Blair described the dawn of the ‘posthistorical era’ as ‘old news.’2 ‘Temporality,’
she continued, ‘has been superseded by spatiality, the affective and social
experience of space,’ and cultural geographers now possessed the tools ‘to
elaborate space in the abstract, as well as specific places, as sites where
individuals negotiate definitively social relations,’ in the process ‘giving voice to
the effects of dislocation, disembodiment, and localization that constitute
contemporary social orders.’3 This collection, too, drawing on historiography and
literary analysis, anthropology and archaeology, theology and law and
architecture and fine art, as well as cultural geography, aims to uncover the
situational dimension of memory and mourning and with it what those two
activities may dis-locate.
But what Blair terms ‘affective terrain’4 is difficult to conceive without a
fourth, temporal dimension. In the words of Patricia Yaeger, ‘any narration of
space must confront the dilemma of geographic enigmas head on, including the
enigma of what gets forgotten, or hidden, or lost in the comforts of ordinary
space.’5 To view landscape solely synchronically risks overlooking what is not
evident on the surface: the displaced, the buried, the otherwise vanished.
Therefore this volume also attempts to act as ‘ghost story’,6 decrypting or
unearthing the substrata of the past. Many of the memorial forms explored here
are lieux de mémoire, Pierre Nora’s term for ‘the places in which memory is
crystallized, in which it finds refuge.’7 Nora writes:
x Introduction: Memory, Mourning, Landscape
_________________________________________________________________
Memory is life, always embodied in living societies and as such
in permanent evolution . . . History, on the other hand, is the
reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is
no longer.8
The Historial de la Grande Guerre (Museum of the Great War) described by Jay
Winter, the battle-field of Malvern Hill explored in Cynthia Wachtell’s essay on
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Sarah Wagner - all these and others discussed in the volume involve historical
reconstruction but are also the loci of memory-work, embodiments, again in
Nora’s words, of ‘a commemorative consciousness that survives in a history
which, having renounced memory, cries out for it.’9
Jay Winter’s opening essay explains the museography of the Historial de
la Grande Guerre (Museum of the Great War), Péronne, Somme, France (of
whose research centre Winter is founder and a member of the board of directors).
The visual organisation of the museum deliberately emphasises the spatial
element of memorialisation, obliging visitors physically to look downwards into
shallow dug-outs or fosses and conceptually to look downwards into history. In
contrast, tall models of war memorials encourage an upwards look into the future.
Walking through the museum and viewing its exhibits therefore constitutes a
multi-dimensional experience of memory and mourning.
Winter’s piece on representing and memorialising war speaks to others
in the volume. Joseph Clarke’s essay, ‘The Sacred Names of the Nation’s Dead:
War and Remembrance in Revolutionary France’ proves that the cult of naming
conventionally thought to begin with the First World War has earlier origins. In
his discussion, Clarke brings into view both ends of the temporal axis: future-
looking Republican egalitarianism and ‘some very traditional ways of thinking
about the dead and about society’s duties towards them.’ The memorials he
analyses are, to use Nora’s terminology, crystallisations in the landscape of these
opposing impulses in time. Sarah Wagner’s sensitive and necessary account of
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explores twin impulses in space/time. Relatives of those killed in the Srebrenica
genocide of 1995, along with Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) nationalist political and
religious leaders, seek both to ‘cleanse’ (an emotive word in the context, as
Wagner notes) the landscape in which the massacre began (the UN peacekeepers’
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technological version of Yaeger’s ‘ghost story,’ remains have been identified
through DNA testing: the recovered names, initially tabulated on paper and then
Kate McLoughlin xi
_________________________________________________________________
transferred to tombstones, render the landscape both resting-place and site of
division, as disputes over interpreting and owning the past continue between
Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs.
The idea of a memorial that questions and erases its function is picked
up in Joel Robinson’s piece on middle to late twentieth-century commemorative
spaces as loci of forgetting. Robinson illuminates the manner in which the
architectural and landscaping tropes of ruin and decay, erosion and overgrowth,
have featured in these spaces. Drawing on the French ethnologist Marc Augé’s
Les formes de l’oubli (1998), he suggests that such tropes mimic the work of
oblivion, remoulding the (mental) landscape ‘in ways that make legible the
transformations there.’ Robinson’s analysis, like Wagner’s of the Srebrenica-
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reads the transformed landscape in order to decrypt it.
The essays by Robinson and Wagner reveal the strong sense of
proprietorship inherent in mourning and memorialisation, a proprietorship that is
at once emotional and territorial. In her piece on memory, mourning and
landscape in the Scottish mountains, Avril Maddrell also notes the fierce
contestation of memorialisation practises on mountaintops given rise to by the
proliferation of ‘spontaneous’ memorials. This contestation has been expressed
performatively, argues Maddrell, principally through the erection and removal of
memorials, but also discursively through interest group discussions online and in
the media. Her analysis of these debates reveals three key strands: constructions
of mountain insider/outsider that relate to authenticity and entitlement to
memorialisation; particular representations of wilderness and the natural; and
related forms of masculinity which establish (limited) acceptable parameters for
emotional expression, including the emotions of others. Hilary Hiram’s essay,
‘Morbid Family Pride: Private Memorials and Scots Law’ investigates the legal
issues of proprietorship. A series of judgments by the Scottish courts in the first
half of the twentieth century struck down directions in wills providing for the
erection of monuments to the testator or his or her family. Hiram examines the
legal reasoning employed in the judgments and draws on the theories of Freud
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that the wills were a manifestation of pathological mourning that ought not to be
legally permissible.
Proprietorship - and propriety - are also themes in Erin Halstad-
McGuire’s essay on Viking boat-burial in Orkney and Iceland. In newly
developing settler communities on the Viking frontier, Halstad-McGuire
suggests, a key aim was to signify authority and power by filling boat-graves with
xii Introduction: Memory, Mourning, Landscape
_________________________________________________________________
rich artefacts. The archaeological remains are ‘fragmentary records of the
attempts by some families to find their places in their new homes.’ The boat-
graves and their contents are migrant traces, more evidence of grounded
mourning and memory. Other traces are contained in Cynthia Wachtell’s essay on
Herman Melville and the Battle of Malvern Hill. In his poem ‘Malvern Hill’
(1862), Melville presents an unflinching account of the American Civil War
encounter. Refusing to glorify or sentimentalise the men who died and whose
‘rigid’ bodies were buried in the ‘sod,’ Melville portrays Nature as indifferent to
human fortunes: ‘Wag the world how it will / Leaves must be green in Spring.’
Yet, as Wachtell notes, the very landscape of Malvern Hill determined the
battle’s victor and endures today as a national site of memory and mourning,
mapped by guidebooks and podcasts. In this sense, Malvern Hill has become
‘Malvern Hill,’ a postmodern, hyperreal simulacrum.
Reality of a virtual kind is also the subject of Alana M. Vincent’s ‘Seder
and Imagined Landscape,’ which takes the concluding aspiration of the Passover
Seder’s aspirational L’shanah haba’ah birushalayim (‘next year in Jerusalem’),
as a point of departure for a situational exploration of memory and mourning in
the context of Jewish liturgy, taking in a range of ancient, medieval and modern
texts including 2 Samuel, a 13th century Italian psalter and the paintings of Marc
Chagall. As Vincent argues, the meaning of ‘Jerusalem’ is contingent, determined
as much by the words and actions of the liturgy, and by the reactions of the
participants, as by other factors.
The coda to these nine scholarly essays is a unique personal piece: the
illustrated reflections of the painter and academic Judith Tucker on the creation of
her series, Tense (2008). Tense, both object and process, explores Tucker’s
reactions to photographs of her mother playing as a child in a swimming-pool in
the Thüringian forest, her emotions arising on a visit to a contemporary resort in
the same location and her thoughts about the relation of her art to the site and
both its personal and Nazi pasts. Tucker’s essay reads her artistic re-presentations
of the lido in the forest in relation to ideas of transposition and postmemory,
again suggesting a carrying-through of the past via a specific, significant and
changing landscape. ‘The physical durability of landscape permits it to carry
meaning into the future so as to help sustain memory and cultural traditions,’
argues the geographer Ken Foote, likening landscape to writing, which he calls ‘a
durable, visual representation.’11 Tucker’s essay, like others in this volume, is a
reminder that landscape - like writing - may be ‘durable’ but is not permanent.
Rather, it is protean and palimpsestic: Tucker reads and paints it accordingly.
Kate McLoughlin xiii
_________________________________________________________________
Tucker describes her drawings and paintings as ‘a new, third place
between history and memory.’ This is the place, too, where this collection is
sited. Memory and mourning exist on a temporal axis that reaches downwards
into the past and upwards into the future but also on a spatial axis that grounds
them in landscapes real and virtual. If the theme of the collection is the
space/time intersection, its methodology is the intersection of discourses. Multi-
disciplinarity is Memory, Mourning, Landscape’s way into the multi-
dimensional.
Notes
1
The distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’, in which the former is treated as a
neutral and the latter as a significant location (a dichotomy ultimately deriving
from Aristotle’s idea of topos and Plato’s idea of chora), is a familiar one in
geography. J E Malpas, for instance, notes that ‘place’ is often distinguished from
‘mere location’ through being ‘understood as a matter of the human response to
physical surroundings of locations’ (Place and Experience: A Philosophical
Topography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 30), while the
environmental psychologist Jonathan D. Sime writes that ‘the term ‘place’, as
opposed to space, implies a strong emotional tie, temporary or more long lasting,
between a person and a particular physical location’ (‘Creating Places or
Designing Spaces’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 6.1, 1986, pp. 49-
63, p. 50). The full history and extent of the debate are not rehearsed here but, as
Patricia Yaeger points out, the ‘space/place binary’ often becomes ‘porous and
provisional’ (‘Introduction: Narrating Space’, in The Geography of Identity, P
Yaeger (ed), The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1996, p. 5n): the
exact nature of the response or tie to the location in question is in dispute, the
idea of a locale unaffected by human shaping is dubious and the dichotomy in
any event risks overlooking those human interactions with the environment that
are hidden or vanished. This introduction uses ‘situation’ to cover the traditional
meanings of both space and place.
2
S Blair, ‘Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary’, American Literary
History, vol. 10.3, Autumn 1998, pp. 544-567, p. 544.
3
Ibid, p. 544-5.
4
Ibid, p. 545.
5
Yaeger, p. 4.
6
Ibid, p. 25.
xiv Introduction: Memory, Mourning, Landscape
_________________________________________________________________
7
P Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, L D Kritzman
(ed), Columbia University Press, New York, 1996, p. 1.
8
Ibid, 3.
9
Ibid, 6.
10
Yaeger, 24.
11
K Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy,
Austin, University of Texas Press, 2003, p. 33.
Bibliography
Blair, S., ‘Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary’, American Literary
History, vol. 10.3, Autumn 1998, pp. 544-567, p. 544.
Foote, K., Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy,

Austin, University of Texas Press, 2003, p. 33.
Malpas, J. E., Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 30.
Nora, P., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, L D Kritzman
(ed), Columbia University Press, New York, 1996, p. 1.
Sime, J. D., ‘Creating Places or Designing Spaces’, Journal of Environmental

Psychology, vol. 6.1, 1986, pp. 49-63, p. 50.
Yaeger P., The Geography of Identity, P Yaeger (ed), The University of Michigan
Press, Ann Arbor, 1996, p. 5n.
Designing a War Museum: Some Reflections on
Representations of War and Combat
Jay Winter
Abstract:
The Historial de la Grande Guerre (Museum of the Great War), Péronne,
Somme, France (of whose research centre Jay Winter is founder and a
member of the board of directors), breaks new ground as a war museum. The
first major innovation is the development of the horizontal axis (the axis of
mourning, as the vertical is the axis of hope) as the key visual organising
principle. This avoids the upward-inflection of the design of many war
museums and hence their implicit spatial optimism. A second innovation is to
avoid verisimilitude in favour of authenticity. The visitor is not in a trench
but in a place that forces him or her to recognise the artifice of representation.
The third innovative element is to maintain silence in the museum: the visitor
sees and learns through visual representations, not through artificial triggers
of emotion or thought. Finally, there is a suggestion of the sacred in the
archaeological or funerary shape of the fosses (shallow dugouts), bringing
visitors to observe a respectful and reflective comportment while looking
down into the space of history presented below them. This light and indirect
sacralisation of space is entirely in line with contemporary expectations of
what a museum can be.
Key Words: Museography, war, horizontality, mourning, authenticity,

silence, sacralisation.
*****
1. On Regarding the Pain of Others

Imagining war means imagining the pain of others. While soldiers
experience the full gamut of human emotions in preparation for battle, during
combat and recovering from it, there are moments of terror, hardship and
suffering which are not only hard to recall but also very hard to convey to
others thereafter. Some critics go so far as to say that we cannot know or
represent the pain of others in battle; that it is beyond language or imagery.1
Others acknowledge the difficulty, but consider it a moral necessity to try to
do so anyway. The Historial de la Grande Guerre (Museum of the Great War)
(figure 1) in Péronne, Somme, France is the result of such an effort.
2 The Museography of War
______________________________________________________________
Figure 1
2. The Maastricht Moment

First, why create a monument in Péronne and specifically in 1992?
The answer is in part due to the emergence of trans-national networks in
many fields in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, indicating economic and
political trends that found expression in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. In
marking a major step towards European integration, which date turned
historians’ attention to the massive shock of European disintegration in 1914.
Then an age of globalisation literally exploded in a conflict of a kind the
world had never seen before. These two themes - war in a globalised age and
the trans-national character of the conflict - lay behind the thinking of those
who planned the shape and content of the museum. It would represent the
experience of imperial countries whose conflict brought together for the first
time industrialised nations in a struggle for European and, through their
empires, global supremacy. Our task as historians was to acknowledge the
futility of that act, and to illustrate its staggering costs and consequences. We
did so in a self-consciously trans-national context. The museum is French,
British and German in equal parts. The war belongs to us all, and left scars on
all those who took part in it. Though the funding of the museum was French,
its character was and is multi-national.
Jay Winter 3
______________________________________________________________
3. Innovation 1: Horizontality
There are a number of ways in which the design of the museum
broke new ground. The first concerns the development of the horizontal axis
as the key visual organising principle of each of the museum’s five rooms.
There are many sources for this development, but once accepted, it gave the
Historial a look very unlike that of other war museums.
One way to understand the significance of this choice is to reflect on
a painting from the German Renaissance. Hans Holbein was an artist who
worked in both Continental and English court circles. In 1524 he painted an
astonishing work entitled Christ in the Tomb, which viewers today can see in
the Kunstmuseum in Basle (figure 2).
Figure 2
It is entirely horizontal in character. A shockingly realistic dead man is

presented, one whose crucifixion is indicated by a dislocated middle finger
on his right hand. He is undeniably dead. There are no people or other figures
there to frame this body. There are no mourners. There are no soldiers
present. This is an unmistakably, unalterably dead man. To believe that such
a man in such a state could come alive again would require an enormous act
of faith. And it is precisely this, which Holbein requires us to contemplate.
When Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin saw this very painting, he said that it
almost made him lose his faith.2 And we can understand why. The horizontal
is the axis of mourning. The vertical is the axis of hope. Choosing the
horizontal axis for the Historial’s space of representation was a key decision,
since it enabled us to avoid the upward-inflection of the design of many war
museums, and thereby to avoid their implicit spatial optimism, their message
of hope.
There was a second advantage which horizontality presented to us. It
allowed us to use the floor space in a manner, which suggested the
underground war, which was the way it was lived by millions of soldiers,
below the reach of shrapnel and machine-gun fire. The use of concrete by the
museum’s architect, Henri Ciriani, reinforced this notion, since each room
has undecorated concrete pillars as structural supports. In addition, the
placement of the museum behind a medieval castle and alongside a lake
(figure 1) brought out in other ways the topography of war, the way it
required men to bury themselves in trenches or forts in order to stay alive.
______________________________________________________________
Thirdly horizontality enabled us to juxtapose the civilians’ war,
illustrated vertically in the showcases, with the soldiers’ war, illustrated
horizontally in the shallow dugouts, or fosses, and in the video screens
scattered throughout the museum which showed over and over that the two -
home front and battle front - were never far apart. Civilians knew how bad
the war was, and soldiers knew what the civilians were thinking and
enduring. No separation of military history (the story of the front) and
cultural history (the story of the home front) would be possible. There would
have to be a mix of military history and cultural history in our representations
both of battle and of the stresses faced by the families of the men who fought.
4. Innovation 2: The Retreat from Pseudo-Realism

A second innovation in the presentation of the war in the Historial
relates to a second aesthetic problem. To what extent is it possible to
represent the ugliness, the disorder, the chaos of war? Most art and sculpture
organises the experience of war through conventional means: a vanishing
point in pictures and photographs; a stylised geography in maps. None of
these representations can approximate the reality of industrial warfare. For
this reason, we made it our business to avoid the trap of pseudo-realism.
War museums, which present the war experience as a packaged
stroll through a trench, make one set of decisions about realism; we chose
another way. No one can capture the smell or light or taste of trench warfare.
Thus the decision to avoid verisimilitude and concentrate instead on
authenticity creates a museum of startling simplicity and beauty. The highly
polished floors reinforce this notion. The visitor is not in a trench or in
anything that tries to resemble a trench. Instead he or she is in a place, which
forces him or her to recognise the artifice of representation. The orderly
presentation of a soldier’s kit in the fosse cannot possibly resemble what a
soldier’s kit bag looked like. The danger in trying to represent the trenches,
as they were when soldiers lived and died in them is that kitsch replaces
representation.
All the objects in the museum are contemporary artifacts. None has
been created now to resemble the material life of the war generation. Every
object tells a story, but these narratives can emerge only if we respect the
difference between authentic objects, whose provenance can be established,
and machine-made replicas, which are supposed to be real. This distinction
emerges clearly in the fosses which present the things soldiers carried in an
array, which is too geometric, too clean, too proper. Thus the viewer knows
that the object is authentic, and its authenticity does not derive from its
having been placed in an artificial arrangement purporting to show ‘what it
was really like’ to be in a trench or a casualty clearing-station.
Jay Winter 5
______________________________________________________________
5. Innovation 3: Silence
The same problem of turning representations of war into kitsch
relates to background noise or period music. Other museums use a mixture of
both for evocative purposes. We chose another way, one that reinforces the
idea that the visitor is there to see and to learn, but to do so through visual
representations rather than through artificial triggers of emotion or thought.
Among the most evocative traces of the war are soldiers’ songs.
They carry the pathos and the good-natured bravado or cynicism of the men
who went to war. But hearing them in a museum setting will sentimentalise
the representation of war presented in the museum’s limited space. And the
distance between sentimentality and kitsch is slight indeed. The same is true
for the sounds of battle. There are recordings of artillery shells landing during
the war, but their capacity to carry a useful message about battle or the stress
soldiers faced in it is dubious. The difficulty is made worse by the fact that
visitors will come with the sound of television, film or internet
representations of the sounds of war which are entirely fabricated or false.
Silence bypasses these difficulties.
6. Innovation 4: The Suggestion of the Sacred

There is a fourth element of innovation in the museum’s design,
related both to the use of the horizontal axis for the presentation of artefacts
and to the strict rule of silence observed outside the audio-visual theatre.
There is a suggestion of the sacred in the archeological or funerary shape of
the fosses, which brings visitors to observe a respectful and reflective
comportment while looking down into the space of history presented below
them. This is an entirely indirect effect of the spatial organisation of objects,
but it helps visitors bear in mind the fact that millions of men suffered and
died in these stylised spaces, below the surface of the earth. Instead of
looking up at weapons pointing to the sky, as in most war museums, visitors
to the Historial are invited to look below and beyond the surface of things. If
it is true that museums and art galleries are the cathedrals of our time, then
this light and indirect sacralisation of space is entirely in line with
contemporary expectations of what a museum is.
______________________________________________________________
Figure 3
There is an additional element of interrogation, which a visitor meets in the

museum. In room 4, there is a poster inviting visitors to the Somme to take
time to look at its tourist sites too (figure 3). That point raises the overlap and
uncomfortable similarity between pilgrimage and tourism. Pilgrimage is
hard; tourism is relaxed and comfortable. Coming to the Historial is therefore
a complicated gesture, to be negotiated by each and every visitor.
7. Spatial Interpretations
The museum offers a number of innovative insights in the
organisation of objects in space. Five instances may be given, drawn from
each of the four rooms and from the Salle des Portraits.
A. Room 1: Before 1914 (Figure 4)

Here there is a tri-partite division of space. Facing the room, the
visitor is invited to consider on his or her right a series of contemporary
maps, arranged horizontally and blown-up to a scale which enables easy
comprehension of their messages. On his or her left, in the space in front of
the showcases, is a series of vertical displays arranged in a tripartite manner
so as to separate objects related to British, French and German society before
the war. Between the two is an empty space, at the end of which an imperial
sculpture rests. Therefore, to the right, on the horizontal axis, are the forces
leading to international conflict - the armaments race, colonial competition,
Alsace-Lorraine and the Balkans. To the left, on the vertical axis, are
representations dealing with the economic, social and cultural forces which
the great powers shared: their imperial character, their industrial growth, their
Jay Winter 7
______________________________________________________________
world’s fairs, their interlocking economies and social orders. The visitor is
therefore invited to stroll between the forces leading toward conflict and the
forces leading towards comity and community. The empty space in the
middle is the realm of choice. Thus the room’s spatial organisation suggests
that war was not built into European history as an inevitable clash, but that it
represented choices made by particular people in 1914 - those who
assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and those who let the
subsequent crisis develop into all-out war among the Great Powers.
Figure 4
B. Salle des Portraits

Walter Benjamin, the Jewish-German critic then living in Paris,
wrote in the 1930s that there is no document of civilization, which is not, at
the same time, a document of barbarism.3 The Salle des Portraits illustrates
this famous insight. On the vertical columns are inscribed the hopes of
ordinary people, written on their faces, their posture, their very anonymity
(figure 5). This ordinariness is the way peace is. But behind it is another
reality, one presented in a horizontal sequence of 53 etchings by the German
artist Otto Dix, who fought at the Battle of the Somme. Some of these
etchings emerged from photographs taken at the time. Others are fantasies.
Still others are reflections on earlier forms of artistic representation of death,
in particular the memento mori of a skull left to the mice, worms and epitaphs
______________________________________________________________
of Shakespeare’s time (figure 6) - and Hans Holbein’s too. There is a scene
of trench detritus and chaos (figure 7) that references that other masterpiece
of the German Renaissance, Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Alterpiece,
today in the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar in Alsace. The bits of soldiers’
clothing and remains hanging on a broken cruciform tree are hard to miss as
signs of a catastrophe on a Biblical scale, though without the hope of
redemption. This series of horizontal meditations on war shockingly contrasts
with the vertical normalcy displayed in the columns of faces in front of it,
and so prepare the visitor for the descent into war that follows.
Figure 5
Jay Winter 9
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Figure 6
Figure 7
______________________________________________________________
Figure 8
Figure 9
Jay Winter 11
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The use of family portraits in the Salle des Portraits invites the visitor to see
how revolutionary the war was. It touched everybody, and braided together
family history and military history in ways never before so complete and so
universal. The visitor, viewing these vertical family stories, is minded of his
or her own, and how someone in that family had his or her life changed by
the war.
C. Salle 2: 1914-16 (Figure 8)

As the visitor moves down the descending path leading from the
Salle des Portraits, he or she is confronted by three fosses in which are
displayed soldiers’ uniforms, weapons and kit. These are left in orderly array,
further removing the display from any suggestion of realism. Above the
fosses are suspended objects made by soldiers to while away their time. Some
are musical instruments, describing in a kind of Cartesian manner the
division between body and mind, between material needs and the needs of
the spirit. The uncanny similarities between and among the British, French
and German fosses present the visitor with the accepted scholarly view that
material problems and issues of morale were chronic in all three armies stuck
in this war of unparalleled attrition.
On the wall above the vitrines, there is one striking wooden
rectangle, with the German words ‘Nicht ärgern, nur wundern’ (‘Do not be
angry, but amazed’) written on it. This is a sign left by German soldiers who
destroyed Péronne before retreating to the Hindenberg Line in 1917, leaving
nothing of use for the Allies to find on occupying this town, which had been
German headquarters for the period 1914-16 (figure 9).
In the vitrine on the extreme left of the room is a woman’s mourning
dress (figure 10). Here we can see the visualisation of the current
interpretation of the war as initiating a phase in the history of mourning from
the earliest days of the conflict. Commemoration and the rituals of
bereavement did not begin in 1918; they were ever present throughout the 50
months the war went on.
D. Between Salles 2 and 3 (Figure 11)

The impossibility of representing battle in a direct, figurative
manner is illustrated in a negative way in the space between rooms 2 and 3.
There is a sign indicating the subject of the film shown in the audio-visual
theatre as the Battle of the Somme, but nowhere nearby is the battle
represented. Here in a museum dedicated to the history and memory of this
monumental battle, there is no representation of it. At this point, the visitor is
invited to ponder the question as to how such a battle, or any battle, might be
represented. He or she can pause and reflect on the film shown in the audio-
visual theatre, but will get little direct guidance to an answer to this question
there. The challenge of our museography is its interrogative character.
______________________________________________________________
Questions are posed, but not directly answered. Here the visitor is introduced
to the idea that a museum is a guide to the problematic nature of representing
our violent past, rather than a simple or direct solution to the question of how
can we represent war.
Figure 10
Figure 11
Jay Winter 13
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Figure 12
E. Salle 3: 1917-1918
Immediately upon entering into the space occupied by Salle 3, the
visitor is confronted with three fosses (figure 12). They form in and of
themselves an interpretation of the murderousness of the war. On the left is
an array of weaponry. In the centre is a fosse in which various implements
and modes of protection are placed. These means of avoiding injury are so
evidently primitive and archaic that the significance of the third fosse on the
right becomes clear. In the enormous imbalance between the weapons of war
and the means of protection, the common soldier was bound to be defeated
and dismembered. Here is Ernst Jünger’s war of matériel against men. The
repair of broken and bloodied bodies was the work of surgeons like Georges
Duhamel, the author of the ironically entitled Prix Goncourt-winning
memoir, Civilisation. In the third fosse is Duhamel’s flute, which he played
between operations to keep his sanity intact (figure 13). Here too is a wooden
screen on which previous occupants of a ward have left as good luck charms
the insignias of their units (figure 14). Hundreds of thousands passed through
these surgical wards or casualty clearing stations. Some had injuries to their
minds and were unable to move their limbs or to stop moving them, as the
video screen shows in medical training films used by the French army. Shell
shock accompanied physical injury in marking this war out as the most
harmful yet in history.
______________________________________________________________
Figure 13
Figure 14
Jay Winter 15
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A second interpretation is imbedded in the other end of the room which
curves in retelling the story of the last two years of the war. There is an
American fosse (figure 15), with implements and weaponry of the American
Expeditionary Force. But the fosse is relatively small, and the curve of the
room, leading to Allied victory and the defeat of the Central Powers cannot
possibly be attributed to it. Here is a point of interpretation expressed
visually, in bring out current historical interpretations in three dimensional
ways.
Figure 15
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Figure 16
F. Salle 4: After the War

The ubiquitous dialogue between the horizontal axis and the vertical
axis that runs throughout the Historial is here immediately visible in the
shape of two large models of war memorials (figure 16). One is resolutely
vertical, and had a life as a sculpture in the Luxemburg Gardens in Paris. The
other is more diagonal than horizontal, but the dying figure pictured reclining
Jay Winter 17
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on it is clearly in line with the funereal tone of earlier representations of
combat. We here present the visitor with the same question, the same
interrogation as to the place of hope and of despair in the lives of those who
survived the war. For French men and women it was a victory, and one
million German soldiers were forcibly expelled from the 10 French
departments they had occupied for four years. Four million French citizens
were back under French sovereignty. But the victory was so staggeringly
costly in lives and in matériel that the notion of a fundamental divide
between winners and losers began to unravel almost immediately after the
end of the war. The compromises imbedded in the Treaty of Versailles,
signed on 28 June 1919, further undermined the notion that the sacrifices of
those who had died in the war had secured a just and lasting peace. Violence
continued throughout Eastern Europe, and exploded in many parts of the
imperial world, where men and women saw that Woodrow Wilson’s promise
of self-determination was made to white men and not to them. The bitterness
and instability of the interwar years is evident in the narrative described in
the vitrines in room 4.
So is the ubiquity of the war wounded, the widows, the orphans,
numbering in the millions. One prosthetic nose and a second prosthetic eye
and spectacles stand for the mutilation of millions, patched together but
having the war’s story written on their bodies (figure 17). By the time the
visitor finishes the slow journey through the war and its aftermath, assisted
by objects and documentary film alike, the impossibility of describing the
Allies as, in any straightforward sense, victorious becomes apparent. Thus
British, French and German survivors shared more of the scars of war than a
simple political or military narrative might suggest. Here is the way cultural
history contributes to our understanding of war, and of the way those who
lived it tried to make sense of it and of its catastrophic consequences. The
spatial signature of the museum contributes to that understanding, and leaves
the visitor with questions that, in our own violent age, refuse to go away.
______________________________________________________________
Figure 17
Jay Winter 19
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Notes
1
See, for example, E Scarry, The Body in Pain, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1985.
2
F Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. D Magarshack, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1955, pp. 446-7.
3
W Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1939), in
Illuminations, H Arendt (ed), H Zohn (trans), Schocken Books, New York,
1969, p.256.
Bibliography
Benjamin, W., ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations,
Arendt, H., (ed), trans. H. Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1969, p. 256.
Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Magarshack, D., Penguin, Harmondsworth,

1099, pp. 446 – 447.
Scarry, E., The Body in Pain, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985.
The Sacred Names of the Nation’s Dead:
War and Remembrance in Revolutionary France
Joseph Clarke
Abstract:
In the apparent absence of any of the war memorials that have come to
characterise the twentieth century’s conflicts, most historians of collective
memory have assumed that the dead of earlier wars went unremembered and
remained unmourned. By uncovering some of the places where ordinary
French men and women remembered their war dead in 1793 and 1794, this
essay questions that assumption. From the unveiling of a cenotaph to the
erection of a plaque in memory of a local casualty of war, the memory of the
Revolution’s war dead was stamped on the very fabric of towns and villages
throughout France during the Revolution’s most radical phase, the Terror.
Few of these war memorials survived the ending of the Terror. And yet,
however ephemeral they proved to be, their very existence raises questions
concerning our understanding of the links between war and remembrance in
the pre-industrial age and suggests that that the ‘modern’ culture of
commemoration may not be quite as modern as historians assume.
Key Words: French Revolution, Revolutionary Wars, commemoration,

conflict, war memorials, Jacobinism.
*****
In May 1793, as news of the first battalion of the Marne’s casualties

at Valenciennes reached Reims, Bastien-Tonus, formerly vicar-general of the
Marne and now a Jacobin journalist, began compiling a list of the city’s
casualties of war.1 For the moment, Bastien’s roll-call of ‘the names of those
who have died’ for the patrie was meant for publication in his newspaper, the
Manuel du Citoyen, but a few weeks later one of his fellow Jacobins, Jean-
Jacques Ranxin, took this idea a step further and called on the city’s société
populaire to raise a monument bearing the names of ‘our brothers who have
died in defence of the patrie’ in the city centre.2 Ranxin’s proposal was
rapturously received and after a brief discussion the sociétaires resolved to
raise a memorial to the city’s war dead upon the pedestal that had until
recently borne Pigalle’s statue of Louis XV on the former Place Royale in the
city centre. A committee was appointed to work with the municipality on the
project and in the weeks that followed, the club was inundated with letters of
support, from soldiers expressing ‘the avid impression’ the club’s decision
had made in the ranks and their families expressing similar sentiments from
the home front.3 Donations to help raise the memorial arrived too, albeit less
22 The Sacred Names of the Nation’s Dead
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abundantly than the club had anticipated, and by early August, the club’s
pyramid was in place, ready to be unveiled during the city’s fête de la
Réunion.
Throughout the Republic, the first anniversary of the monarchy’s
overthrow on 10 August was celebrated in carnival atmosphere, but in Reims,
the celebrations were tinged with solemnity as an immense cavalcade of town
councillors and Jacobin club members made its way through the streets to the
memorial on the renamed Place Nationale. It was an imposing spectacle, but
in the midst of all the banners and badges of office, the cortège’s centrepiece
struck a sombre note. With the families of the dead dressed in mourning
around it, ‘a funerary urn’ bearing ‘the names of the brave defenders of the
Patrie’ was carried through the streets in a haze of incense and cannon
smoke.4 With the city’s church bells peeling out a death knell in
accompaniment, it was, witnesses agreed, a touching sight, and when the
procession finally came to a halt before the new memorial, the church bells
fell silent and the speeches began.5 They were, for a Revolutionary festival,
surprisingly succinct, and after the by-now customary commonplaces about
liberté and la patrie had been said, Reims’ mayor, citizen Galloteau-
Chappron, read out ‘the sacred names’ of the twenty-seven Rémois who had
already died by that day and promised their families that their names would
live for evermore.6
Galloteau-Chappron’s promise, like the memorial before which it
was made, confronts the historian with any number of political, cultural, even
aesthetic, questions. However, the most troubling of these questions is also
the most straightforward. It is a question of simple chronology because,
unlike the massive war memorial that André Maginot and Marshal Pétain
unveiled in the same city nearly one hundred and forty years later, 1793’s
monument aux morts confounds so many of our assumptions about the
relationship between war and remembrance in the modern era.7 This is,
perhaps, a heavy analytical burden for one monument to bear, but for most
historians of ‘modern memory,’ this memorial’s insistence that those ‘sacred
names’ should be remembered, its very existence even, seems starkly out of
place in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, such sentiments appear to
belong more properly to the twentieth century, the ‘new era of remembrance’
that began in 1914 according to Thomas Laqueur, the ‘era of the common
soldier’s name.’8 According to this view, the First World War represents an
extraordinary turning point in Western European commemorative culture, a
watershed between a largely undifferentiated early modern era where only an
elite of monarchs, generals and great statesmen were ever honoured with
statues or state funerals and a modernity where the great mass of soldiers and
civilians finally forced their way into the politics of collective memory.
There are occasional exceptions to this consensus, and some
scholars have traced the origins of this cultural transformation to the Franco-
Joseph Clarke 23
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Prussian war of 1870-1.9 However, for most historians of memory, the names
engraved on the monuments aux morts that appeared across Western Europe
after World War I all stand in marked contrast to the absence of any similar
memorials to the dead of Malplaquet, Fontenoy or Waterloo. George Mosse
and Antoine Prost, for example, both insist on the cataclysmic changes the
First World War wrought in commemorative practice while Daniel
Sherman’s study of remembrance in the inter-war years similarly maintains
that ‘modern commemoration, with the listing of names as its central
practice, originates in the aftermath of World War I.’10 More emphatically
still, Avner Ben-Amos has argued that this type of commemoration ‘could
come into being only as a result of modern warfare’: a modernity he defines
in terms of the twentieth century’s ‘democratisation’ and ‘brutalisation of
war’ combined with the ‘popular cult of the dead’ that emerged around
cemeteries like Père Lachaise during the nineteenth century.11
The implications of this analysis are clear. In an early modern era
defined by high mortality rates, casual, frequently fatal, violence and the
anonymity of the fosse commune that awaited all but the very well-to-do, life
was held too cheap to commemorate and the life of that ultimate early
modern outsider, the ordinary soldier, was held cheapest of all. By contrast,
the nineteenth century’s sentimental and increasingly secularised cult of the
dead, the coming of democratic politics and the sheer scale of the carnage of
1914-18 all combined to produce a real rupture in the ways Western
Europeans commemorated their casualties of war.12 Laqueur’s analysis of
this rupture is more imaginative than most, and his emphasis on the
heightened sense of individual identity fostered by nineteenth-century fiction
adds a novel dimension to the discussion, but even so, the argument remains
essentially the same.13 In the apparent absence of any similar sites of memory
from earlier conflicts, he assumes that the naming of the dead and the
erection of monuments aux morts constitute ‘a distinctly twentieth-century
constellation of sensibilities and practices’ the emergence of which,
conveniently enough, can be dated to the winter of 1914.14 Such precision
might give pause, but the sheer self-confidence of Laqueur’s claim is
representative enough. Indeed, he probably speaks for most twentieth-century
historians when he concludes that ‘Until our time, ‘none else of name’ as the
herald after the battle of Agincourt intoned in Shakespeare’s Henry V, was an
acceptable response to mass death.’15
So for the five centuries between 1415 and 1915, ‘none else of
name’ remained an acceptable response to the common soldier’s death. Well,
it was clearly not acceptable to the Jacobins of Reims in the summer of 1793.
Nor, indeed, was it acceptable to their colleagues in Châteaudun and Verdun
because both clubs dispatched petitions to Paris that same year calling on the
National Convention to raise monuments inscribed with the names of those
who had died ‘in defence of the Republic’ ‘on the principal square’ of every
______________________________________________________________
commune in France.16 The deputies never passed these petitions into law, any
more than they acted on any of the other plans for war memorials and
assorted gardens of remembrance they received that winter.17 Even when
those calls came from within the Convention itself, as in October 1792 when
the greatest artist of his generation, Jacques-Louis David, proposed that the
rubble of royal statues be recycled to build a massive monument bearing the
names ‘inscribed in bronze’ of all those who had died during the defence of
Lille and Thionville, they still came to nothing.18 For all that these plans
invariably received an ‘honourable mention’ in the Convention’s minutes, a
combination of financial constraint and military crisis put paid to them all.19
With the Revolution’s very survival at stake - a combination of foreign
invasion and civil war threatened the Republic throughout 1793 -
commemoration was a luxury that a patrie that was permanently en danger
could ill afford. Years later, Antoine Thibaudeau recalled this extraordinary
crisis and reflected on its legacy of unbuilt statues and unraised monuments:
Since the outbreak of the war, before and after the 9

Thermidor, we had plenty of other things to do . . . The
rapid train of events, the continual clash of party strife, the
instability of government and the expense of the war did
not leave us either the time to think about creating fine
monuments, nor the means to erect lasting ones.20
Thibaudeau’s reasons read like so many rationalisations, but they still ring
true. Circumstances, particularly when they came in the form of a war that
engulfed an entire generation, left the authorities in Paris with neither the
time nor the resources to honour the nation’s dead. And yet, the sheer
proliferation of those ill-fated petitions and unrealised plans suggests that the
anxiety that had inspired Reims’ révolutionnaires to remember ‘the sacred
names’ of their dead in August 1793 was widely shared. More importantly,
that anxiety was acted on throughout the Terror. The Convention failed to
take the lead in commemorating the citizen-soldier’s sacrifice, but in the
absence of any initiative from the authorities in Paris, Jacobin clubs and
popular societies throughout France took matters into their own hands.
As one of the earliest and most elaborate of its kind, Reims’
monument aux morts was unusual in many respects, but as the Year II
progressed and casualty reports began to arrive from the front in towns and
villages all over France, so similar monuments and identical lists began to
appear on streets and squares across the Republic. In Brittany, Saint-Brieuc’s
popular society consecrated a ‘cenotaph’ in memory of the locals who had
died fighting in the Vendée with an elaborate inauguration ceremony in
Pluviôse of the Year II.21 A few months later, Tain’s sociétaires followed suit
and engraved the names of their war dead on a pyramid in the town centre
Joseph Clarke 25
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while in the Gers, the names of Auch’s war dead were inscribed ‘in large
letters’ on a pedestal bearing a ‘fine statue of liberty.’22 Elsewhere, simple
stone cenotaphs or steles with the names of the dead engraved upon them
were the norm, and by the end of the Terror, these had appeared in towns like
Valence in the Drôme, Vesoul in the Haute-Saône and Suresnes in the Seine
where a pillar against which convicts had once been scourged after
sentencing by the seigniorial courts was rededicated in memory of the
village’s dead in early an II.23
Like Reims’ Jacobins, Suresnes’ sociétaires followed David’s
advice and recycled the architectural ‘débris’ of the ancien régime to honour
their dead but in the absence of a royal statue or feudal relic to regenerate
many clubs struggled to make ends meet when it came to raising a war
memorial.24 While some Jacobins explained the severe lines of their
cenotaphs or steles by reference to the imagined austerity of the ancients or,
more pointedly, in contrast to the immoral extravagance of the ancien régime
the real reason for this symbolic self-restraint was often more mundane.25
Having resolved to pay for the pyramid on the Place Nationale in July 1793,
the problem of finding the funds to finish it dogged Reims’ Jacobins
throughout the Year II and the cost of commemoration loomed just as large
elsewhere.26 The constraints of a war economy and the multiplicity of
demands on club finances left sociétaires little room for manoeuvre and
smaller clubs, like Artonne’s in the Auvergne, had to make do with
commissioning plaques for their meeting halls, inscribed with ‘the names of
those martyrs of liberty to whom the commune gave birth.’27 Elsewhere even
this level of expenditure sometimes proved too much. On the outskirts of
Paris, Belleville’s ‘obelisk’ was made entirely of wood with the names of the
dead simply painted upon it, although as one observer noted, this did not
diminish the ‘tender feelings’ it inspired, while the sociétaires of tiny
Cucuron in the Vaucluse had to settle for a ‘funeral service’ and a tree
planted in memory of the locals ‘who had died during the siege of Toulon’
the previous winter.28
With their resources already at full stretch, the sociétaires honoured
their dead as best they could, with the money and the materials they had to
hand. The resulting monuments were sometimes crude, but regardless of their
scale or cost one conviction informed them all: the certainty, as Châteaudun’s
sociétaires insisted to the Convention, that all soldiers ‘must be equal in the
eyes of a grateful patrie.’29 Égalité was the watchword of the Year II and this
theme was emphasised repeatedly in the discussions that decided on the
erection of a cenotaph or stele and the speeches that ultimately accompanied
their unveiling. For many Jacobins, in fact, these memorials echoed this
ideological imperative in their very design. In its most obvious form, the
presence of a list of names inscribed without reference to birth or title but
united by a shared sacrifice was both an assertion of the ‘equality’ that now
______________________________________________________________
underpinned Republican citizenship and a very unambiguous demonstration
of the duties that its defence imposed. Indeed, for some, the cenotaph’s very
shape was an almost literal expression of Revolutionary ideology itself and
the sociétaires of Saint-Brieuc described the stark lines of their cenotaph as
an incarnation of the ‘masculine virtue and republican energy’ that a nation at
war so urgently required.30 Elsewhere, the symbolic significance of a stele
was less explicitly gendered but it was no less graphic. Insisting that ‘among
them [Republicans] everything must be simple and grand at the same time,’
Reims’ revolutionaries saw the sheer severity of their memorial as an
embodiment of a particularly self-denying brand of citizenship, an
uncompromising civic virtue that took its cue directly from Horace’s Dulce et
Decorum est and willingly embraced death in the name of the patrie.31
In this very tangible sense, these cenotaphs exemplified the
Republican ideal in its most militant form: the levée en masse’s ideal of an
entire nation mobilised ‘in permanent requisition for army service.’32
Politically engaged and avowedly egalitarian, these war memorials were also
aggressively patriotic and anathemas against the Republic’s enemies:
‘royalist traitors,’ ‘overweening priests’ and, above all, their ‘perfidious’
foreign allies inevitably loomed large in many an inauguration address in an
II.33 However, if denunciation predictably played a part in the unveiling of
these cenotaphs, their long-term purpose was more constructive than this. For
all that these speeches were intended to inspire the present generation with a
burning desire for revenge against ‘those Kings who have combined against
our freedom,’ these monuments aimed to address a distant ‘posterity’ as well,
to ‘recall to our children the glorious memory of your deeds.’34 In this
respect, they were inspired by the same certainty that had informed any
number of designs for edifying civic statuary since 1789, the belief that the
urban space was a vast canvas upon which a monument might imprint ‘the
sacred fire of love of country.’35 As urban planners had argued since the
Revolution began, these were places where ‘the good father and the sensitive
mother’ could lead their son - and it was always a son - and await the
inevitable question: ‘Why this stone?’ ‘For you, son, if you enjoy the good
fortune to render a great service to your patrie and to distinguish yourself
among those who must live and die for her.’36 For the Jacobins of the Year II,
these cenotaphs were sites of memory and schools of civic virtue combined,
and like so many village Panthéons, they were intended to both honour the
Republic’s dead and inspire those they left behind.
From displacing the emblems of the old order to proclaiming the
principles of the new régime, these monuments served a variety of political
purposes. Just as importantly, the emotions that accompanied their unveiling
were just as wide-ranging, and in this respect, the clubs’ commemorative
endeavours were qualitatively quite different from the speeches that
honoured the soldiers’ sacrifice in the Convention. With the exception of the
Joseph Clarke 27
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handful of representatives who died on mission, few deputies had any direct
knowledge of the dead, and while they regularly acclaimed the heroism of
fallen soldiers, they rarely mourned them.37 However, in the towns and
villages that raised these memorials, the clubistes knew precisely who the
dead were. They were local men, friends, neighbours and frequently fellow
Jacobins, and as a result their commemoration was a much more complex
matter than it ever could be for the conventionnels. For them,
commemoration was essentially a cultural counterpoint to the levée en masse:
another means towards mobilisation and for all its aesthetic aspects, an
essentially political concern. In the close-knit world of the small-town
société, by contrast, these cenotaphs and the ceremonies that took place
around them called for consolation as often as they cried ‘to arms.’
Collapsing the distinction between the political needs of a nation at war and
the social, moral and even spiritual obligations of communities in mourning
in a way that no other Revolutionary ritual ever could, these
commemorations employed the language of Republican citizenship to full
effect but the emotions and attitudes they expressed, their moral substance in
fact, were more firmly rooted in the customary culture, the corporate
structures and sociability, of the old régime.
The Jacobins who organised these commemorations obviously
embodied a radically new form of political association but they were also
heirs to an older tradition of collective action, one embedded in the ancien
régime’s dense network of trade corporations and religious confraternities
and ingrained in the collective identity of the communities of which they had
been so much a part.38 While the clubs’ political horizons had clearly
expanded beyond the particularism of the compagnonnage and the
parochialism of the confrèrie, the fraternal spirit of the brotherhood was
common to both, as was the sense of moral community that membership
entailed and many of the social and charitable obligations that went with it.
Crucially, this sense of social solidarity and many of those obligations
extended to the grave. As William Sewell has noted, the old order’s guilds
and trade corporations had always showed a ‘seemingly obsessive concern
with funerals for their members’ while many confraternities existed for no
other reason than to preside over the last rites of their own members or the
poor of the parish.39 Obviously, for the confrèries, this concern was primarily
a pious one, but it was not exclusively so, especially for the trade
corporations where ensuring that a colleague was buried with due decorum
was a social and moral duty as much as, perhaps even more than, a religious
one.40 In a corporate world where the individual lacked a clear legal or social
status outside of his membership of a privileged body, a ‘decent funeral’ was
an assertion of individual identity and an expression of social solidarity
combined, a ritualised form of recognition that the community of the
______________________________________________________________
corporation owed its members and their families regardless of their personal
beliefs.
Seen from this perspective, the commemoration of the citoyen-
soldat was as much a reflection of the traditional moral order of the corporate
world so many sociétaires had once been part of as it was an expression of
Revolutionary ideology. By the Year II, of course, this moral order no longer
included any explicit reference to traditional religious beliefs or rituals. By
the time most of these cenotaphs were raised, the dechristianisation of public
life had effectively broken the link between customary religious culture and
the commemoration of the Revolution’s dead, a link that had done much to
define the Revolution’s rites of memory up to that point.41 From the winter of
1793 onwards, however, with the sociétaires busy closing churches and
celebrating the new cults of Reason and the Supreme Being, there would be
precious few repetitions of the requiem mass Limoges’ Jacobins had staged
in memory of their ‘fallen soldiers’ in the cathedral of Saint-Etienne in June
1792.42 For that reason, most of these commemorations were resolutely, even
defiantly, secular affairs. Yet, they were still marked by much the same sense
of moral responsibility towards the memory of the dead that had defined the
Revolution’s earlier rites of memory. The Jacobins of Bergerac’s decision to
provide a fitting funeral for any défenseur de la patrie who died in their midst
is a case in point. This resolution was provoked by the death of an
unidentified soldier from the Spanish front in the town’s hospital in
September 1793, but, more tellingly, it was inspired by the realisation that his
unclaimed body would be unceremoniously bundled into a pauper’s grave in
the absence of any assistance from the club.43 Bergerac’s first casualty of war
was not a local man, but with thirty-six sociétaires already enlisted and one
recently reported missing in action, he might easily have been, and this
realisation invested the phrase ‘our brothers in arms’ with an immediacy that
transcended the normal routine of Revolutionary rhetoric. In honouring their
unknown outsider, Bergerac’s sociétaires were not simply celebrating
equality in the abstract or even honouring some intangible ideal of the patrie:
they were paying their respects in the only way they still could to the first of
their own fallen, the missing soldier, ‘citizen Aromagnac.’44
Bergerac’s unknown soldier was an everyman, and as such he was
honoured both as a symbol for a generation and a stand-in for an absent
comrade, but in most of these cases the clubs were commemorating their own
in a much more direct sense. Their bodies might be missing, but the names
engraved on memorials were familiar ones and the family and friends they
left behind were still in their midst. Inevitably then, the hope that creating a
lasting monument might offer some comfort to the bereaved suffused these
ceremonies. The prospect that ‘in reading the name of his son, the elderly
father would find consolation and say to himself, ‘my son bears the sorrow of
his compatriots’’ had furnished the sentimental climax to Châteaudun’s
Joseph Clarke 29
______________________________________________________________
petition to the Convention and this expectation was repeated again and again
as these monuments were unveiled.45 At the inauguration of Saint-Brieuc’s
war memorial in February 1794, for example, the popular society’s president,
citizen Huette, devoted the bulk of his address to demanding ‘vengeance’ for
‘the blood of your brothers’ that had been shed in the Vendée. And yet, for
all the vehemence of this speech, it was more than just another rallying cry
for Huette acknowledged ‘the grief, gratitude . . . the outpouring of our
hearts’ that had brought a ‘a great gathering of citoyens and citoyennes’
together for the occasion.46 The inauguration of Saint-Brieuc’s cenotaph was
certainly an act of mobilisation but it was also a moment for mourning and
with family and friends of the fallen present among the crowd on 20
Pluviôse, the ‘tears’ and ‘sorrow’ that pervaded this ‘touching spectacle’ may
well have overshadowed the more obviously propagandist aspects of the
ceremony. They certainly existed alongside them because for some of those
present Huette’s claim that ‘we have lost our brothers’ was as much a
statement of fact as it was an expression of Republican fraternity.
For the sociétaires who raised it, and just as importantly, for the
crowds that joined them for its unveiling, Saint-Brieuc’s cenotaph
constituted, therefore, both a call to arms and a symbol of the community’s
sympathy for, and solidarity with, the bereaved, and the same combination of
sentiments characterised the clubs’ commemoration of the dead défenseur
throughout the Year II. When news of Dominique Diettmann’s death reached
Luneville’s Jacobins in March 1794, for instance, the club’s first response
was to send a delegation offering their sympathy and what support they could
to his family before deciding to drape their hall in mourning and prepare an
éloge funèbre in his memory, and the reaction of Artonne’s clubistes to the
death of Pierre Thiat’s son was effectively the same.47 In other cases, of
course, the clubistes’ concern in commemorating the dead was less with
comforting the bereaved than with encouraging enlistment among those who
remained behind, but even then, their motives remained mixed. In Prairial
Year II, for example, Tain’s Jacobins anticipated that their new memorial
would ‘increase, if that were possible, the ardour and devotion of the intrepid
defenders of the patrie,’ but even this rather utilitarian rationale was still
tempered by the claim that the names it bore had been ‘engraved . . . with
love and gratitude.’48
Such sentiments are, of course, easily expressed. And yet, the
significance of these words should not be lightly dismissed, especially as they
were frequently accompanied by a very active concern for the welfare of
those left widowed and orphaned by the war. Sometimes, as at Lunéville, this
amounted to no more than an expression of symbolic solidarity but elsewhere
the clubs threw themselves into organising an extraordinary array of schemes
to assist the families ‘of citizens who have taken up arms to defend the
Republic.’49 From the whip-round that produced 66 livres among Orthez’s
______________________________________________________________
Jacobins to help a soldier’s orphaned son return to his family in Toulouse to
the 18,000 livres that Bergerac’s club collected to assist the families whose
men had ‘flown to the aid of the patrie,’ the welfare of the défenseurs’
dependants occupied the clubs constantly throughout the Terror.50 With so
many Jacobins either enlisted themselves or with family members in uniform,
these measures probably owed as much to a sense of communal self-help as
they did to any more exalted notions of civic duty, but whatever their precise
motives, these schemes illustrate the variety of commitments that the death of
a citoyen-soldat involved the clubs in. A political opportunity, a moral
obligation and a social responsibility at one and the same time, the
remembrance of the Republic’s war dead was, perhaps above all else, a time
to come together in sorrow and solidarity. A club’s minute book can never
fully express what the loss of a local boy meant to its members, but in a
village like Artonne, where everybody knew everybody else and where many
clubistes had family at the front, the death of Pierre Thiat’s son was a
genuine tragedy and the decision to inscribe his name ‘in indelible letters’
was a mark of patriotic pride and real respect.51 However, just as Artonne’s
Jacobins’ first response to the death of Pierre Thiat’s son was to offer what
comfort they could to his father, so the claims of kith and kin frequently
claimed precedence over those of the patrie.
The events that followed the arrival of the first casualty reports in
Artonne exemplifies the range of reactions that the death of a citizen-soldier
evoked among the Jacobins of the Year II. Artonne’s example is, however,
revealing for another reason, and this may go some way towards explaining
why so many historians seem so certain that this type of commemoration
only emerged in the twentieth century. Unlike Reims’ pyramid or Saint-
Brieuc’s cenotaph, Artonne’s commemorative plaque was never put in place.
Pierre Thiat’s son died in September 1794, shortly after the Terror came to a
close, and within a matter of weeks Artonne’s Jacobin club had effectively
ceased to exist. Like the majority of clubs, it simply stopped meeting that
winter, and its closure the following spring was little more than a formality.52
The collapse of the Jacobin club network and the reaction of the Year III
called a halt to these spontaneous acts of commemoration, and crucially, it
also signalled an end to the celebration of ordinary soldiers like Thiat’s son.
After Thermidor, there would be no more unprompted initiatives in honour of
these unexceptional casualties of war, because by the middle of the Year III,
there were no clubs left to organise them, and, just as importantly, no
political appetite in Paris for honouring such undistinguished heroes. In the
clubs’ absence, the Republic’s rites of memory became the preserve of its
political elite, a matter for ministerial instructions, official invitations and
state funerals for the select few, dashing young generals like Hoche and
Joubert, commanders to rival Scipio or Turenne, men who merited
commemoration on the grounds that, as one minister put it, ‘the remains of a
Joseph Clarke 31
______________________________________________________________
single hero produce a thousand more.’53 Promises were still made to inscribe
the names of the nation’s dead on bronze ‘books of glory’ and official
concours were even launched in the Years IV and VII to this end, but these
came to nothing.54 With the clubs closed and radicalism in retreat, the
political will to translate these promises into reality had evaporated and from
1795 on the Republican elite casually returned to the old routine of honouring
its illustrious generals only to ignore the majority of the nation’s dead.
After Thermidor, the Republic’s rites of memory rapidly reverted to
type. More tellingly, as the clubs closed and the honnêtes gens picked up the
reins of government once more, the war memorials that had appeared in the
Year II gradually fell victim to the politics of a reaction that sought to
repudiate the memory of the Terror in all its forms. The fate of the pyramid
on Reims’ Place Nationale was typical. Having taken the place of Pigalle’s
statue of Louis XV in 1793, it was replaced by a statue of Liberty under the
Directory, which was, in its turn, succeeded by a Consular trophy in 1803 and
an Imperial crown in 1809. Finally, on Saint-Louis’ day in 1819, a replica of
Pigalle’s royal statue was hauled atop that much abused pedestal, and the last
trace of the Revolution finally disappeared from the renamed Place Royale.55
Ironically, Belleville’s more modest wooden cenotaph lasted longer. Still
standing in 1799, it withstood the onslaught of the elements better than
Reims’ too prominent pyramid could ever resist the politics of the reaction,
but if it survived the Empire, it almost certainly succumbed to the
Restoration’s policy of oubli, just as Suresnes’ cenotaph eventually did.
Capped with a cross under the Restoration, the memorial on the Place
d’Armes was reclaimed in the name of Church and King only to be
condemned as an obstacle to traffic and demolished during the Second
Empire, though by then its original purpose had been long since forgotten.56
There was no place for the nation’s dead in nineteenth-century Reims or
Suresnes, and the same pattern was repeated throughout France as the desire
to remember the Republic’s dead was replaced by the urge to forget the
Revolution, and with it, the memory of the men who had died in its defence.57
Few of these cenotaphs outlived the Republic and none of them
survived the Restoration of 1815. And yet, however ephemeral they proved
to be, they do confront the established orthodoxy on the emergence of a ‘new
era of remembrance’ in the twentieth century with a number of pressing
problems. Throughout the Terror, the Jacobins had seen their soldiers off
with ‘tender and patriotic farewells’ and promises that they would ‘never
forget them.’58 Ultimately, these promises were undone by the upheaval of
Revolutionary politics but the fact remains that they had been honoured in the
Year II. Right across the Republic, cenotaphs had been built and ordinary
soldiers’ names inscribed in the clear expectation that those names would
endure long enough to allow ‘our children to proclaim them with
enthusiasm.’59 And all of this occurred before anyone discovered ‘the anxiety
______________________________________________________________
of erasure’ by reading Dickens or Balzac and before the opening of Père
Lachaise ushered in, as Ariès claimed, ‘a new religion, the religion of the
dead.’60 It even occurred before the ‘brutalisation of war’ supposedly began
on the Somme.61
All of this happened, rather, in the midst of a Revolution that had
opened up politics to the public as never before. In so doing, and the
commemoration of the tradesmen and shopkeepers who died at the Bastille
on 14 July 1789 really began this process, the Revolution also democratised
the politics of memory in unprecedented ways.62 However, this
democratisation developed more decisively as a result of a war that
revolutionised the Revolution itself, a war that reached into cities like Reims
and villages like Artonne and made its presence felt, in one way or another,
in almost every community in France.63 This extraordinary experience, the
experience of mass mobilisation in an increasingly politicised society, the
experience of total war in effect, redefined the very nature of Revolutionary
citizenship.64 Whereas the early Revolution had merely claimed that ‘every
citizen must be a soldier and every soldier a citizen,’ the wartime Republic
effectively collapsed the distinction between soldiers and civilians and
insisted effectively for the first time that citizenship involved responsibilities
as well as rights, and that those responsibilities were potentially limitless.65
Obviously, many Frenchmen and women rejected these new responsibilities
outright, and draft dodging and desertion remained a thorn in the side of the
new régime as long as it remained at war, but more did not.66 The sociétés
populaires in particular embraced this more militant vision of citizenship
wholeheartedly and threw themselves into the war effort with unrelenting
zeal. The mobilisation of men and materials for the defence of the patrie and
the raising of public morale were staples of sociétaire activity throughout an
II, and frequently, this crusading civisme was accompanied by the ultimate
act of commitment, enlistment as well. In return, however, for accepting
these responsibilities and the sacrifices they entailed, they also demanded
recognition, or as Châteaudun’s sociétaires put it, ‘marks of esteem and
veneration that will last forever’ for the ‘brothers’ and ‘friends’ who had
given their lives ‘for you all.’67
In this sense, the very modern ideology of Republican egalitarianism
inspired the erection of these war memorials and the inscription of these
soldiers’ names. And yet, some very traditional ways of thinking about the
dead and about society’s duties towards them also contributed to the
commemoration of the citizen-soldier in the Year II. These imperatives
invested these rites of memory with a quite different type of urgency, the
moral urgency that was writ large in the embittered, almost outraged,
conclusion of Châteaudun’s petition to the Convention. Imagining the ghosts
of fallen soldiers crying out ‘from the depths of their tombs,’ the clubistes
claimed to hear ‘the plaintive voices’ of the dead accuse the Republic of a
Joseph Clarke 33
______________________________________________________________
cruel neglect: ‘Our names are no longer known, there is no memorial to
remind our fellow citizens: must our death be eternal?’68 The need to appease
those restless shades, the uneasy sense that the living owed the dead a just
measure of recognition and the desire to offer their families the consolation
of a place to mourn: these were the motives that impelled sociétaires across
France to build cenotaphs and inscribe soldiers’ names ‘in letters of gold’ as
much as, perhaps even more than, the abstract imperatives of Revolutionary
ideology.69 The extraordinary crisis of 1793 had many unexpected
consequences, but when the modern ideology of Republicanism, the
customary values of community and the experience of war on an
unprecedented scale combined a revolution took place in the way French men
and women remembered their dead. The cenotaphs they raised did not
survive and that revolution proved short-lived, but in 1793, as citizen
Galloteau-Chappron, and many others like him, stood before a newly-built
war memorial and promised a city that the ‘sacred names’ of its dead would
be remembered the politics of memory did become ‘modern.’70
Notes
1
Manuel du Citoyen, no. 16, 8 May 1793, p. 128.
2
Archives Municipales, Reims, [henceforth AM Reims] Registres de la
Société Populaire et Régénérée de Reims, F.R. R13, 7 July 1793.
3
AM Reims, Délibérations du Conseil Général, F. R. R218, f. 37, 15 July
1793. F.R. R14, 30 July and 4 August 1793.
4
Ordre de la Marche de la Fête Civique qui aura lieu à Reims le 10 Août
1793, 2e de la République Française une et indivisible, arrêté par les citoyens
administrateurs du district, les membres du conseil général de la commune et
proposé par la société populaire de Reims, Reims, 1793, p. 2.
5
Manuel du Citoyen, no. 44, 14 August 1793, pp. 355-6.
6
Discours prononcés par le citoyen Galloteau-Chappron, maire de Reims, le
10 août 1793 . . . à la place Nationale, au moment de l’inauguration du
monument que la société populaire de Reims y a fait élever . . ., Reims, s.d.,
p. 2.
7
For the unveiling of Henri Royer’s neo-classical war memorial on 1 June
1930, see Ville de Reims: Monument aux Morts, Reims, 1930.
8
Galloteau-Chappron, p. 2; P Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975; T Laqueur, ‘Names, Bodies and the
Anxiety of Erasure,’ in The Social and Political Body, T R Schatzki and W
Natter (eds), The Guilford Press, New York, 1996, pp. 123-41: p. 123.
9
D G Troyansky, ‘Monumental Politics: National History and Local Memory
in French Monuments aux Morts in the Department of the Aisne since 1870,’
F. H. S. vol. 15, 1987, pp. 121-41 and A Becker, ‘Monuments aux morts
______________________________________________________________
après la guerre de secession et la guerre de 1870-1: un legs de la guerre

nationale,’ Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporaines no. 162, 1992, pp.
23-40.
10
G Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990; A Prost, ‘Les Monuments aux Morts:
Culte Républicain? Culte Civique? Culte Patriotique?’ in Les Lieux de
mémoire, P Nora (ed), vol. 1, Gallimard, Paris, 1997, pp. 199-223: p. 200 and
D Sherman, ‘Bodies and Names: the Emergence of Commemoration in
Interwar France,’ A. H. R. vol. 103, 1998, pp. 443-66: p. 444.
11
A Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 215-6.
12
M Agulhon, ‘La ‘statuomanie’ et l’histoire,’ in Agulhon, L’Histoire
Vagabonde, vol. 1, Gallimard, Paris, 1988, pp. 135-85.
13
Laqueur, 1996, p. 136.
14
Ibid., p. 123. See also Laqueur, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War,’ in
Commemorations: the Politics of National Identity, J R Gillis (ed), Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1994, pp. 150-167: p. 150.
15
Laqueur, 1996, p. 127.
16
Archives Nationales [henceforth AN] F17a/1007, no. 1217, ‘Adresse de la
société populaire de Châteaudun . . . le 16 brumaire an II’ Archives
Parlementaires: Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des
Chambres françaises, vol. 75, Paris, 1867- [henceforth AP], p. 510
17
See for example, AN F13 207, Citoyenne veuve Boulliand to the
Committee of Public Safety, 26 vendémiaire II; AN F1cI 84, f. 2701, A
Pochet, ‘Projet pour l’institution des fêtes nationales.’
18
AP vol. 53, p. 687. Similar schemes came to nothing even when they were
sponsored by the governing authorities in an II. For example, the Committee
of Public Safety’s plans for a marble cenotaph honouring ‘the warriors who
died for the patrie’ in the Panthéon Français in Floréal Year II were undone
by the Committee’s effective implosion following the end of the Terror a few
months later. AN F17 1057, no. 3. Extrait du Procès-verbal du Jury des Arts
ou Rapport fait au Comité d’Instruction Publique sur les prix que le Jury a
décernés aux ouvrages de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture soumis à son
jugement . . . 21 prairial III.
19
AP vol. 80, p. 139.
20
A C Thibaudeau, Mémoires sur la Convention et le Directoire, Baudouin,
Paris, 1824, vol. 1, p. 118.
21
AN F17-1010a, no. 2673.
22
Journal de la Montagne, no. 52, 30 prairial an II, p. 424; La Décade
Philosophique, 13, 10 pluviôse VII, p. 243.
Joseph Clarke 35
______________________________________________________________
23
J-P Bertaud, La Révolution armée: les soldats-citoyens et la Révolution
française, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1979, p. 211 and E Boudier, Au sujet du
monument élevé Place d’Armes en 1793, Bulletin de la Société Historique et
Artistique de Suresnes, no. 5, 1933-4, pp. 212-3.
24
AP, vol. 53, p. 687.
25
See for instance the Jacobin club’s claim in Reims that ‘Republicans have
no need for pompous and magnificent monuments to honour the deeds of
their heroes,’ Journal des Jacobins de Reims, 10 floréal II, p. 275.
26
AM Reims, FR R13, 7 July 1793; Journal des Jacobins de Reims, 18
ventôse II, p. 66 and 18 germinal II, p. 188.
27
F Martin (ed), Les Jacobins au village, Juliot, Clermont-Ferrand, 1902, p.
227.
28
La Décade Philosophique, no. 10, 10 nivôse an VII, pp. 55-6. Journal
Républicain de la Commune Sans-Nom, ci-devant Marseille, no. 53, 2
pluviôse an II, p. 438.
29
‘Adresse de la société populaire de Châteaudun.’
30
AN F17 1010a, no. 2673, ‘Discours funèbre prononcé par le président de la
société populaire de Saint-Brieuc, 20 pluviôse an II.’
31
Journal des Jacobins de Reims, 10 floréal II, p. 275. For a reworking of
Horace for a Revolutionary audience, see Ranxin, Hymne funèbre pour
l’inauguration du monument élevé dans la ville de Reims, en l’honneur des
hommes libres, morts pour la Patrie, le 10 août 1793, Impre. de Piérard,
Reims, 1793.
32
AP, vol. 72, pp. 674-5.
33
Journal Républicain de la Commune Sans-Nom, ci-devant Marseille, 53, 2
pluviôse II, p. 438.
34
Galloteau-Chappron, pp. 3 and 4; ‘Adresse de la société populaire de
Châteaudun.’
35
A-G Kersaint, Discours sur les Monuments Publics prononcé au conseil du
département de Paris, Paris, 1792, p. 10.
36
Ibid., p. 26.
37
Barère’s tribute to the sailors of the Vengeur is typical: ‘Do not mourn the
Frenchmen who composed the crew of the Vengeur, do not mourn them at
all: they died for the patrie,’ Rapport fait au nom du Comité de Salut Public,
p. 5.
38
On the theme of cultural continuity between the Jacobin clubs and the
corporations and confraternities of the ancien régime, see, for example, M
Agulhon, Pénitents et francs-maçons de l’ancienne Provence, Fayard, Paris,
1968; M-H Froeschlé-Chopard, ‘Pénitents et sociétés populaires du sud-est,’
Annales historiques Révolution française, vol. 267, 1987, pp. 117-57; M Bée,
______________________________________________________________
‘Dans la Normandie, entre Seine et Orne, confrères et citoyens,’ Annales

Historiques de la Révolution Française, vol. 306, 1996, pp. 601-16.
39
W H Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: the Language of Labour
from the Old Regime to 1848, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980,
p. 36.
40
The glazier, Jacques Ménétra, for example, had no difficulty
accommodating his outspoken anticlericalism with his punctilious attendance
at funeral masses for his fellow tradesmen because he saw his presence there
primarily in terms of his social duty rather than the religious responsibility he
no longer believed in (J Ménétra, Journal de ma vie, D Roche (ed),
Montalba, Paris, 1982, pp. 87 and 124).
41
On this theme, see J Clarke, Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary
France: Revolution and Remembrance 1789-1799, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 49-87.
42
A Fray-Fournier (ed), Le club des Jacobins de Limoges, 1790-1795,
d’après ses délibérations, sa correspondance et ses journaux, Limoges,
1903, p. 53.
43
H Labroue (ed), La société populaire de Bergerac pendant la Révolution,
Société de l'Histoire de la Révolution Française, Paris, 1915, p. 277.
44
Ibid., p. 296.
45
‘Adresse de la société populaire de Châteaudun.’ See also Galloteau-
Chappron, p. 3.
46
AN F17 1010a, no. 2673, ‘Discours funèbre prononcé par le président de la
société populaire de Saint-Brieuc, 20 pluviôse an II.’
47
H Baumont, ‘La société populaire de Lunéville, 1793-1795,’ Annales de
l’Est, vol. 3, 1889, p. 371; Martin (ed), p. 227.
48
Journal de la Montagne, 52, 30 prairial II, p. 424.
49
Baumont, p. 371; M Henriot, Le club des Jacobins de Semur, 1790-1795,
Rebourseau, Dijon, 1933, p. 318. For a range of similar initiatives, see E
Chardon (ed), Cahiers des procès-verbaux des séances de la société
populaire de Rouen (1790-1795), Gy, Rouen, 1909, p. 157 and Fray-
Fournier, pp. 75, 76, 83 and 87.
50
A Plante (ed), ‘Les Jacobins d’Orthez: livre pour la transcription des
délibérations de la Société des Amis de la Constitution réunis au réfectoire
des ci-devants Capuchins d’Orthez,’ Bulletin de la Société des Sciences de
Pau, vol. 29, 1901, pp. 255-6; Labroue (ed), p. 337.
51
Martin (ed), p. 227.
52
For the dissolution of the clubs see M Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the
French Revolution, 1793-1795, Berghahn Books, New York, 2000.
53
For a comparison between Hoche and past heroes, see Raoult, Eloge de
Hoche prononcé à Meaux le 30 vendémiaire an 6, lors de la célébration de la
Joseph Clarke 37
______________________________________________________________
pompe funèbre à l’occasion de la mort de ce général (Meaux, an VI); AN

F1cI 113, no. 89, ‘Le ministre de l’Intérieur aux administrations centrales.’
54
Daubermesnil, p. 12. See also P Benezech, Appel aux artistes (Paris, an IV)
and J Eschassériaux et al., Projet de résolution sur les honneurs à rendre aux
défenseurs de la patrie . . . (Paris, an IV).
55
AM Reims, FR C943, liasse 455; P Tarbé, Reims, ses rues et ses
monuments, Quentin-Dailly, Reims, 1844, pp. 178-80.
56
Boudier, pp. 212-13.
57
On the Restoration’s policy of union et oubli, see S Kroen, Politics and
Theatre: the Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815-1830,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.
58
Journal des Jacobins de Reims, 8, 16 ventôse II, p. 57.
59
Galloteau-Chappron, p. 3.
60
Laqueur, 1996, p. 136 and P Ariès, L’homme devant la mort, vol. 1, Seuil,
Paris, 1977, p. 226.
61
Ben-Amos, p. 215. For the impact of one such death in 1794, see A M
Reims, FR C860, folio 267.
62
Clarke, pp. 49-87.
63
By the time the war that began in 1792 finally ended, one third of all adult
Frenchmen had enrolled in the army and over a million had died (A Forrest,
Conscripts and Deserters: the Army and French Society during the
Revolution and Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 20; A
Corvisier, ‘La mort du soldat depuis la fin du Moyen Age,’ Revue historique,
vol. 515, 1975, p. 16.
64
For two recent discussions of the Revolutionary wars as the first ‘total war’
see D A Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of
Warfare as We Know It, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2007 and J-Y
Guiomar, L’Invention de la Guerre Totale, Félin, Paris, 2004.
65
AP, x. 521. For a particularly clear account of the political implications of
1793’s levée en masse, see A Forrest, ‘The French Revolution and the First
levée en masse,’ in The People in Arms: Military Myth and National
Mobilization since the French Revolution, D Moran and A Waldron (eds),
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 8-31.
66
Forrest.
67
‘Adresse de la société populaire de Châteaudun.’
68
Ibid.
69
Journal des Jacobins de Reims, no. 5, 10 floréal an II, p. 275.
70
Galloteau-Chappron, p. 2.
______________________________________________________________
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Châteaudun . . . le 16 brumaire an II’ Archives Parlementaires: Recueil
complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, vol. 75,
Paris, 1867-, p. 510.
Baumont, H., ‘La Société Populaire de Lunéville, 1793-1795,’ Annales de

l’Est, vol. 3, Martin (ed), 1889, p. 227.
Becker, A., ‘Monuments aux Morts Après la Guerre de Secession et la

Guerre de 1870-1: un Legs de la Guerre Nationale,’ Guerres Mondiales et
Conflits Contemporaines no. 162, 1992, pp. 23-40.
Bée, M., ‘Dans la Normandie, entre Seine et Orne, Confrères et Citoyens,’

Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, vol. 306, 1996, pp. 601-16.
Bell, D.A., The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare
as We Know It, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2007.
Ben-Amos, A., Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, Oxford

University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 215-216.
Bertaud, J. P., La Révolution Armée: Les Soldats-citoyens et la Révolution

Française, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1979, p. 211.
Boudier, E., ‘Au Sujet du Monument élevé Place d’Armes en 1793,’ Bulletin
de la Société Historique et Artistique de Suresnes, no. 5, 1933-4, pp. 212-
213.
Chardon E., (ed), Cahiers des Procès-verbaux des Séances de la Société

Populaire de Rouen (1790-1795), Gy, Rouen, 1909, p. 157.
Joseph Clarke 39
______________________________________________________________
Clarke, J., Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution

and Remembrance 1789-1799, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2007, pp. 49-87.
Corvisier, A., ‘La mort du Soldat Depuis la fin du Moyen Age,’ Revue
historique, vol. 515, 1975, p. 16.
Discours Prononcés par le Citoyen Galloteau-Chappron, Maire de Reims, le

10 août 1793 . . . à la place Nationale, au Moment de l’inauguration du
Monument que la Société Populaire de Reims y a fait élever . . ., Reims, s.d.,
p. 2.
Forrest, A., Conscripts and Deserters: the Army and French Society during
the Revolution and Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 20.
Fray-Fournier, A., (ed), Le club des Jacobins de Limoges, 1790-1795,

d’après ses délibérations, sa correspondance et ses journaux, Limoges,
1903, p. 53.
Froeschlé-Chopard, M.H., ‘Pénitents et sociétés populaires du sud-est,’

Annales historiques Révolution française, vol. 267, 1987, pp. 117-157.
Fussell, P., The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1975.
Guiomar, J.Y., L’Invention de la Guerre Totale, Félin, Paris, 2004.
Henriot, M., Le club des Jacobins de Semur, 1790-1795, Rebourseau, Dijon,

1933, p. 318.
Journal des Jacobins de Reims, 8, 16 ventôse II, p. 57.
Journal des Jacobins de Reims, 10 floréal II, p. 275.
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Philosophique, 13, 10 pluviôse VII, p. 243.
Journal de ma vie, D Roche (ed), Montalba, Paris, 1982, pp. 87 and 124.
Journal Républicain de la Commune Sans-Nom, ci-devant Marseille, 53, 2

pluviôse II, p. 438.
______________________________________________________________
Kennedy, M., The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution, 1793-1795,

Berghahn Books, New York, 2000.
Kersaint, A.G., Discours sur les Monuments Publics prononcé au conseil du

département de Paris, Paris, 1792, p. 10 - 26.
Kroen, S., Politics and Theatre: the Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration

France, 1815-1830, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.
Labroue, H., (ed), La société populaire de Bergerac pendant la Révolution,

Société de l'Histoire de la Révolution Française, Paris, 1915, p. 277 - 296.
La Décade Philosophique, no. 10, 10 nivôse an VII, pp. 55-6. Journal

Républicain de la Commune Sans-Nom, ci-devant Marseille, no. 53, 2
pluviôse an II, p. 438
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the Politics of National Identity, J R Gillis (ed), Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 1994, pp. 150-167.
_______
, ‘Names, Bodies and the Anxiety of Erasure,’ in The Social and
Political Body, T R Schatzki and W Natter (eds), The Guilford Press, New
York, 1996, pp. 123-141.
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2005, pp. 8-31.
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Ordre de la Marche de la Fête Civique qui aura lieu à Reims le 10 Août

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administrateurs du district, les membres du conseil général de la commune et
proposé par la société populaire de Reims, Reims, 1793, p. 2.
Joseph Clarke 41
______________________________________________________________
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des ci-devants Capuchins d’Orthez, Bulletin de la Société des Sciences de
Pau, vol. 29, 1901, pp. 255-256.
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Paris, 1997, pp. 199-223.
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1793. F.R. R14, 30 July and 4 August 1793.
_______
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66 and 18 germinal II, p. 188.
_______
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Memory in French Monuments aux Morts in the Department of the Aisne
since 1870,’ F. H. S. vol. 15, 1987, pp. 121-124.
Memory, Mourning, and Malvern Hill: Herman Melville
and the Poetry of the American Civil War
Cynthia Wachtell
Abstract
This essay explores the reaction of one writer, Herman Melville, to one
battle, Malvern Hill, a day-long contest fought near the Confederate capital
of Richmond, Virginia during the American Civil War. More precisely it
examines Melville’s poem entitled ‘Malvern Hill’ in the context of military
history, Civil War poetry and the collective cultural work done by the Civil
War generation to define the meanings of death and loss. First, the essay
considers the specific terrain and the specific events of Malvern Hill. Next, it
examines how Melville chose to represent the battle. Finally, it compares
Melville’s poem, and its representation of the role played by nature in
remembering and commemorating the war dead, with works about Malvern
Hill by other poets of the Civil War era. In Melville’s unconventional
interpretation, the towering elms on Malvern Hill, radiating vitality, stand as
a harsh rebuke to the war generation that destroyed life so recklessly. Within
the landscape of the Civil War, Malvern Hill - both battlefield and poem -
holds a notable place. The one proved an impregnable stronghold for the
Union. The other proved a radical challenge to contemporary understandings
of death, memory, and mourning.
Key Words: Herman Melville, American Civil War literature, war poetry,
Malvern Hill.
*****
It was one of those magnificent episodes which dignify a

nation’s history and are fit subjects for the grandest efforts
of the poet and the painter. (Union General George B.
McClellan)1
1. Introduction: Means of Commemoration

‘It was not war - it was murder.’ So proclaimed Confederate
General D. H. Hill of the Battle of Malvern Hill. Fought on 1 July 1862,
southeast of the Confederate capital of Richmond in Virginia, the battle
resulted in a decisive Union victory. Hill’s own division was drastically
reduced in a failed frontal assault that resulted in the loss of nearly 1,750
men, almost twenty percent of the division’s strength.2 Overall, Confederate
losses numbered 5,650. Although far smaller, the number of Union dead,
wounded, and missing was not inconsequential. 3,007 men would be counted
44 Memory, Mourning, and Malvern Hill
______________________________________________________________
as casualties of the day-long battle.3 How to commemorate this Union
victory? How to commemorate this human loss?
This essay explores the reaction of one writer, Herman Melville, to
one battle, Malvern Hill. More precisely, it examines Melville’s poem titled
‘Malvern Hill’ in the context of military history, Civil War poetry and the
collective cultural work done by the Civil War generation to define the
meanings of death and loss. First, it considers the specific terrain and the
specific events of Malvern Hill. Next, it examines how Melville chose to
represent the battle. Finally, it compares Melville’s poem, and its
representation of the role played by nature in remembering and
commemorating the war dead, with poems about Malvern Hill by other Civil
War era writers. Within the landscape of the Civil War, Malvern Hill - both
battlefield and Melville’s poem - holds a key place. The one proved an
impregnable stronghold for the Union. The other proved a radical challenge
to contemporary understandings of death, memory, and mourning.
2. Malvern Hill
Malvern Hill is located in Henrico County, Virginia, roughly fifteen
miles southeast of Richmond. When the men of the Union Army, under the
command of General George B. McClellan, looked out from the hilltop on
the morning of 1 June 1862, they would have seen acres of cut wheat fields
and been surrounded by a landscape whose distinguishing natural features
were cultivated fields, dense woods, ravines, valleys, meadows and
watercourses, including Beaver Dam Creek, Boatswain’s Swamp and Turkey
Island Creek. They surely would have appreciated the astoundingly good
position that they held. Brigadier General Fitz John Porter deemed the hill
‘better adapted for a defensive battle than any with which we had been
favored.’4 It was a position of great natural strengths. Steep slopes and cliffs
made the hill unapproachable on one side. Swampy bottoms made it
unapproachable on the other. In between was a treeless terrain that gently
sloped upward.
It was over this open ground that the Confederate forces, under the
command of General Robert E. Lee, would attack, and they would do so
while facing the fire of the Union artillery that was massed on the natural
plateau atop the hill. As Brian K. Burton explains in his authoritative study,
Extraordinary Circumstances: The Seven Days Battle, ‘The entire Army of
the Potomac was assembled for the first time in the campaign, which meant
that fifty-three batteries and 268 guns were available for use, not including
the siege artillery.’ Of these guns, 171 were arrayed on Malvern Hill, all
within the breadth of a mile and a half. The Union position was nearly
impregnable. As one of the men who defended Malvern Hill that day would
recall, ‘I could hardly conceive any power that could overwhelm us.’5
Cynthia Wachtell 45
Figure 1. Map of the Battle of Malvern Hill, showing positions of

brigades and batteries, names of commanders, roads, elevation, vegetation,
houses, and names of residents. (From F. Porter, ‘The Last of the Seven
Days’ Battles’, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, vol. 30.4, August
1885, p. 617.)
The Confederate forces proved unable to overcome the tremendous

geographical advantage enjoyed by the Union lines. The landscape, the very
topography of the battlefield, helped determine the victor. The day’s fighting
was described by one Union officer as ‘the coming down of a great mass of
the enemy on the open plain to their utter destruction by the awful artillery
______________________________________________________________
fire.’6 The scene was startlingly horrific, even for men accustomed to the
sights of war. The Confederate attackers were mown down in their hundreds.
An article that ran in Harper’s Weekly later in July reported, ‘In this battle,
which closed soon after darkness set in, the rebels did not gain one inch of
ground. We drove them back at every point with fearful loss. Where our
artillery opened with grape and canister[,] the killed and wounded rebels
were actually piled upon each other.’7 As historians have noted, ‘On no other
field in the war did artillery have such dominance as the Federal guns had . . .
at Malvern Hill.’8
Although the Union army won the battle, its own losses did not go
unnoted. In July 1862 The New York Times republished a Confederate’s
account of the battle that first appeared in the Richmond Examiner on July
4th.
It must not be inferred . . . that the slaughter was all upon

[the Confederate] side. We have the best reasons to know
that the well-directed fire of our cannon and musketry . . .
fell with fatal effect upon [the Union’s] heavily massed
forces.
Describing Malvern Hill on the morning following the battle, the same
observer reported:
The battle-field . . . presented scenes too shocking to be

dwelt on without anguish. The woods [on one part of the
battlefield] . . . were covered with our dead, in all the
degrees of violent mutilation; while in the woods on the
west of the field lay in about equal number the blue-
uniformed bodies of the enemy.9
The battle fought at Malvern Hill marked the sixth and final
confrontation of the Seven Days Battles and the conclusion of the Union’s
Peninsula Campaign, which had aimed unsuccessfully to end the war by
capturing Richmond. The Army of the Potomac successfully defended
Malvern Hill throughout the day-long battle, but it retreated the very same
night to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, where the soldiers and their
officers were protected by Union gunboats. The battlefield that had been
contested in the daylight was left uncontested after nightfall. As General
McClellan would record in his memoir, ‘The order for the movement of the
troops was at once issued upon the final repulse of the enemy at Malvern
Hill.’10
Cynthia Wachtell 47
Figure 2. As General George B. McClellan would recall in his memoir,

McClellan’s Own Story (1887), ‘Malvern Hill is an elevated plateau about a
mile and a half by three-fourths of a mile in area, well cleared of timber, and
with several converging roads running over it. In front are numerous
defensible ravines, and the ground slopes gradually towards the north and
east to the woodland, giving clear ranges for artillery in all those directions.
Towards the northwest the plateau falls of more abruptly into a ravine which
extends to [the] James river.’ (Image from G. B. McClellan, McClellan’s
Own Story, Charles L. Webster, New York, 1887.)
3. ‘Malvern Hill’
‘Malvern Hill’ (July, 1862)
Ye elms that wave on Malvern Hill

In prime of morn and May,
Recall ye how McClellan’s men
Here stood at bay?
While deep within yon forest dim
Our rigid comrades lay -
Some with the cartridge in their mouth,
Others with fixed arms lifted South -
Invoking so
The cypress glades? Ah wilds of woe!
______________________________________________________________
The spires of Richmond, late beheld
Through rifts in musket-haze,
Were closed from view in clouds of dust
On leaf-walled ways,
Where streamed our wagons in caravan;
And the Seven Nights and Days
Of march and fast, retreat and fight,
Pinched our grimed faces to ghastly plight -
Does the elm wood
Recall the haggard beards of blood?
The battle-smoked flag, with stars eclipsed,

We followed (it never fell!) -
In silence husbanded our strength -
Received their yell;
Till on this slope we patient turned
With cannon ordered well;
Reverse we proved was not defeat;
But ah, the sod what thousands meet! -
Does Malvern Wood
Bethink itself, and muse and brood?
We elms of Malvern Hill

Remember every thing;
But sap the twig will fill:
Wag the world how it will,
Leaves must be green in Spring.11
Herman Melville had no firsthand knowledge of the Battle of

Malvern Hill. A failed writer in the eyes of his contemporaries, who deemed
that he had written nothing worthwhile – certainly not Moby-Dick (1851) - in
nearly twenty years, he was in his early forties and living in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts during the summer of 1862. He did not serve in the Civil War.
His only relative to participate in the Seven Days Battles, Henry Gansevoort,
did not fire a single shot during the weeklong odyssey.12
Nonetheless, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Melville
wrote a poem about Malvern Hill, as he wrote numerous other poems about
battles, generals and assorted incidents and figures of the conflict.13 Drawing
upon his readings of newspapers, periodicals and the multi-volume Rebellion
Record (a chronicling of unfolding events, composed of documents,
narratives, poems and more, that had begun to be published in 1861),
Melville attempted to capture and comment upon the war that had so
violently shaken his nation.14
Cynthia Wachtell 49
Writing from the perspective of one who visits the former battlefield
on a tranquil spring morning, Melville offers a very specific vision of how
the battle fought at Malvern Hill is to be remembered and the men lost
mourned. The poem commences with the speaker asking the trees on
Malvern Hill if they remember the battle fought by the Union soldiers. Later
in the poem the question is reiterated in various forms: ‘Does the elm wood /
Recall the haggard beards of blood?’ and ‘Does Malvern Wood / Bethink
itself, and muse and brood?’ Interspersed between these questions, Melville
paints a vivid and unsettling picture of the battle that transpired on Malvern
Hill.15
Notably absent from Melville’s depiction of the battle-dead is any
romantic gloss. At the end of the first stanza, he describes the ‘rigid’ corpses
of the Union soldiers who were killed, ‘Some with the cartridge in their
mouth, / Others with fixed arms lifted South.’ These were, as Melville’s lines
make clear, men who died sudden, battlefield deaths. Although Melville
composes their deaths into verse, the deaths themselves were uncomposed.
They lacked the important elements of what the historian - and now Harvard
University president - Drew Gilpin Faust terms ‘Good Deaths’ in her book
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War (2008). The men had no
knowledge that they were dying. They died unattended to on an active
battlefield. And their last words went both unheard and unrecorded. Indeed,
the detail that some died with cartridges in their mouths, midway through the
process of reloading their rifles, makes clear that there was no time for these
doomed soldiers to profess their faith in their cause or their trust in God.
Their lips formed no final words. In sum, the deaths of these fighters little
conformed to the highly sentimentalized and idealized vision of death
cherished by the Civil War generation and popularized by legions of poets.
Melville willfully took his poem into uncharted literary terrain. He
ends his first stanza with the emotive words, ‘Ah wilds of woe!’ It is an
exclamation that hints at the unfathomable depths of pain that the battle
brought, the ‘wilds’ of woe. It also is a line that defines the landscape, the
very terrain of the battlefield - Malvern Hill and the deep ‘forest dim’ where
the ‘rigid comrades lay’ - as ‘wilds of woe.’16 Rather than deferring to the
literary convention that defined battlefields as sacred grounds, Melville
offered a thoroughly unsentimental view of the landscape. In his Gettysburg
Address, delivered in November 1863 on the site of a far more famous Civil
War battle, President Lincoln had proclaimed, ‘[W]e can not dedicate - we
can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living
and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract.’17 Melville describes a very different type of battlefield, one
which is neither hallowed nor consecrated.
______________________________________________________________
Figure 3. Herman Melville in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1861. In 1864

Melville made his sole trip to the battlefront, when he visited his cousin
Colonel Henry Gansevoort, who was stationed in Vienna, Virginia with the
13th New York Cavalry. (Photograph courtesy of the Berkshire Athenaeum.)
Cynthia Wachtell 51
Within the two middle stanzas of his poem, Melville rehearses the
events of the battle and of the days that preceded it. He describes the ‘Seven
Nights and Days / Of march and fast, retreat and fight.’ And he describes the
men who engaged in the fight, their ‘pinched,’ ‘grimed’ faces and their
‘ghastly plight.’ At Malvern Hill, Melville explains, the Union fighters won
with their ‘cannon ordered well.’ Yet, he ends the two middle stanzas not by
celebrating the victory at Malvern Hill but by focusing upon the battle’s
deadly cost. He laments, ‘But ah, the sod what thousands meet!’18
Melville offers the fact of these deaths without any euphemisms or
embellishments. He offers the slain soldiers and officers no afterlife. He hints
at no divine reward or eternal rest. His sorrowful sigh, his quick ‘ah,’ signals
his compassion. But he does not allow his feelings to transform his depiction
of reality. The soldiers have met the ‘sod.’ The word is blunt, even agrarian.
It lacks the romantic inflection of similar nouns that appear far more
frequently in Civil War poetry, such as ‘earth’ and ‘ground.’ And readers
familiar with the history of Malvern Hill will realize that the bodies of
Northern soldiers were left behind on the battlefield when the victorious
Union army retreated immediately after the fight.19 Instead of being buried
by friends and comrades, or having their bodies shipped home to family
members and church graveyards, these dead Northerners would either have
been interred in mass graves by the Confederates who took control of the
battlefield or else left entirely unburied.20
So how do the trees respond to Melville’s questions? Is Nature
sympathetic to the loss of so much human life? The trees at last offer their
answer in the poem’s final lines,
We elms of Malvern Hill

Remember every thing;
But sap the twig will fill:
Wag the world how it will,
Leaves must be green in Spring.21
On Malvern Hill spring brings rebirth to all living things. Sap rises. But the
blood is forever drained from the Civil War dead. In Melville’s
interpretation, the towering elms, radiating vitality, stand as a harsh rebuke to
the war generation that destroyed life so recklessly. The trees remember the
battle and the men who died, but they are caught up in the cycles of nature.
They do not mourn. The elms are the indifferent sentinels on an otherwise
deserted battlefield.22
4. ‘Malvern Hill’ and Other Representations

Melville’s ‘Malvern Hill’ is not a consoling work. The loss of the
men about whom he wrote was still painfully recent when his volume of
______________________________________________________________
poetry was published in the late summer of 1866, but Melville makes no
attempt to cloak their deaths in the language of bravery and heroism. Instead,
he eschews the romantic language of valiant deeds, gallantry and manly
sacrifice that was so popular among other war poets of his era. He denies his
readers even the poetic fallacy that nature mourns along with man. He offers
a eulogy while refusing to eulogize.
In other of his war poems that appeared in Battle-Pieces, most
notably in ‘The Armies of the Wilderness,’ Melville goes even further. He
sets forth with graphic detail an image of the natural landscape as destructive
and coldly indifferent to the suffering of man. He presents wooded
battlefields aflame and corpses caught afire. He describes the decomposition
of the unburied dead. The battles are fought in what Melville terms, ‘Nature’s
old domain,’ but nature offers the living and the dead little comfort.23
Describing the terrain where the Battles in the Wilderness have been fought,
Melville writes:
A path down the mountain winds to the glade

Where the dead of the Moonlight Fight lie low;
A hand reaches out of the thin-laid mould
As begging help which none can bestow. 24
Unapologetically, Melville explores and exposes nature’s true role in the

Civil War. And when writing about the fratricidal fray, he refuses to assign to
nature any particular partiality. As an old sailor remarks in ‘The Stone Fleet,’
another of Melville’s Civil War poems, ‘Nature is nobody’s ally.’25
Later generations of war writers, most famously British World War
I poets, would, like Melville, explore the more graphic and grim aspects of
battle. But in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Melville’s works
directly challenged the accepted poetic practices - and the public practices
surrounding mourning and memory - of the period. During the 1860s, the
accepted role of Civil War poetry was to offer consolation and inspiration.26
Popular poets strove to depict the war in a way that gave to each individual
death a special significance and to assign a sublime beauty even to battlefield
corpses. Nature, often highly feminised, was cast by these poets in the role of
an empathetic and merciful witness to human strife.
Another poem about the Battle of Malvern Hill demonstrates many
of the poetic conventions that Melville so boldly challenged. Written by the
Confederate Army officer William Gordon McCabe, it is at once rhapsodic
and romantic. The work, titled ‘An Unknown Hero,’ was composed by
McCabe in camp near Richmond in 1862 and appeared in The Southern
Illustrated News, a literary weekly.27 It begins:
Cynthia Wachtell 53
Sweet Malvern Hill is wreathed in flame,

From serried ranks the steel is gleaming;
Our legions march to death and fame,
Their battle flags right wildly streaming.
Each hero bares his manly breast,
And gallant hearts are fiercely beating;
With steady tramp they line the crest,
O’er which an iron hail is sleeting.
Even before the poem arrives at it central focus - the unknown hero - it
makes clear that the battle is to be conceived of in grand and aggrandizing
terms. McCabe presents the countryside wheat fields as a lofty terrain on
which Southern heroes march manfully to their deaths. And both his
conception of the battlefield and the way he describes the fighters tidily
conform to popular conventions of Civil War poetry. The phrases he uses -
‘serried ranks,’ ‘wreathed in flame,’ ‘manly breast,’ ‘gallant hearts’ - are
borrowed from a common lexicon shared by Civil War writers. And though
clichés, they connote a common understanding of the war. 28
In the subsequent stanzas, McCabe’s focus comes to rest upon a
single soldier, a man who ‘gained immortal glory,’ expiring with ‘Death and
Honor bending o’er him,’ a man who freely poured his ‘life’s-blood’ for the
cause of ‘Freedom.’ He is the unknown soldier of the poem’s title. His name
is a mystery, but his deeds speak for themselves. A single sentence printed
beneath the poem offered readers the essential facts:
After the battle of Malvern Hill, a soldier was found dead fifty
yards in advance of any officer or man - his musket firmly
grasped in his rigid fingers, - name unknown, - simply ‘2 La.’
on his cap.
Rather than collectively memorialize all of the men who died at Malvern
Hill, as Melville does, McCabe chooses to narrow his poem to commemorate
a single death, that of the unknown soldier from Louisiana. Imagining the
soldier mid-fight, he writes:
But One still presses on amain,

When double-shotted guns are frowning;
Above, amidst the iron rain,
He nobly wins a hero’s crowning.
Having nearly ascended Malvern Hill in life, the soldier can ascend ‘to the
heights of Glory’ in death. As McCabe makes clear, the soldier can expect a
heavenly reward for his deeds on the battlefield.
______________________________________________________________
‘An Unknown Hero’ reflects the Civil War generation’s collective
understanding of how battles were fought and how men died. Or, more
accurately, the poem reflects the Civil War generation’s shared beliefs about
how battle and battlefield deaths should be presented in verse. In the neatly
rhymed lines of the poem, Death, Honor, Freedom, Valor, and Fame, all are
introduced in capital letters. All play a part in the splendid scene of heroism
played out upon the slopes of Malvern Hill.
McCabe paints a picture of flags waving and unflagging bravery,
and it is a very different vision of war and warriors than that presented by
Melville. The soldier celebrated in McCabe’s poem is found with his musket
still ‘firmly grasped in his rigid fingers.’ The dead soldiers in Melville’s
poem are described as ‘rigid comrades.’ The difference between rigid fingers
and rigid bodies is telling. It is the difference between romanticism and
realism. It is the difference between the polite decorousness of most Civil
War poetry and the startling candor of Melville’s verses.
Although the Battle of Malvern Hill did not inspire many poetic
works, there is one other notable poem about the fighting that took place on
that first day of July, 1862. Written by the Northern writer Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps Ward and published a decade after the war’s end, ‘A Message’ (1885)
conveys a highly sentimental view of the battle. The poem focuses, as does
McCabe’s, upon a single soldier. However, Ward - unlike McCabe - leads
her readers to imagine the emotional ties that link the soldier to the lonely
mother he left behind.
A young man lies on the battlefield after the fighting has ended. His
blood seeps into the ‘scarlet sand.’ In his hand he clutches a worn picture of
‘a woman’s aged face.’ It is a picture of his mother, and when a doctor finds
him, the soldier beseeches the older man to deliver a final message to her.
‘Tell her,’ the soldier begins. But his mind wanders. Amid ‘tangled words
and cries’ he mentions something about ‘the kitten by the fire / And mother’s
cranberry-pies’ and then falls silent. Finally, just as the soldier is ‘drifting’
into the solitude of death, he states his message, ‘Tell her - / Thank you,
Doctor - when you can, / Tell her that I kissed her picture, / And wished I’d
been a better man.’29
As Ward’s poem emphasizes, much of the pain of the battle was
experienced far from the battleground. More than a thousand men died at
Malvern Hill, and Ward effectively links the losses sustained on the
battlefront with the losses felt on the homefront. She gives her soldier what
Drew Gilpin Faust would deem a ‘Good Death.’ He is attended to by a caring
stranger, and his dying words are duly transmitted to his mother. But Ward’s
interest is in the impact this death will have upon the ‘poor old mother’ who
waits at home for news from her son, who waits ‘with the kitten, all alone.’30
Juxtaposed with Ward’s and McCabe’s poems, Melville’s ‘Malvern
Hill’ stands out as radical. Melville brazenly challenged the literary norms of
Cynthia Wachtell 55
his era concerning mourning, memory and landscape. He wrote of ‘sod,’

where others wrote of ‘scarlet sand.’ He wrote of an army’s ‘ghastly plight,’
where others wrote of heroic duty. He offered a profoundly unsettling
interpretation of the battle. By separating the ‘rigid’ bodies that lie in the
forests and fields from ‘glory’ - by separating them from any link to hearth
and home - he redefined the meaning of the men’s deaths. So, too, he
redefined the way they were remembered and missed. Rather than depict
traditional mourners - mothers, sisters, daughters, and sweethearts - he
depicted mourners who refuse to mourn. The towering elm trees that stand on
Malvern Hill, the sentinels on the old battlefield, remember everything but do
not grieve.
5. Conclusion: Still Commemorating Malvern Hill

Malvern Hill is not a very famous Civil War battle. Few people
would recognize its name today. Fewer still visit the old battleground. In The
Civil War Sourcebook: A Traveler’s Guide (1991), Malvern Hill merits a
mere paragraph. But those who do choose to visit Malvern Hill can download
a podcast by the National Parks Service to guide them on a ten-stop walking
tour of the battlefield. The mile and a half long tour, narrated by the National
Parks Service ranger Mike Andrus, begins at the heart of the Union position,
atop Malvern Hill. Andrus notes that it undoubtedly was one of the strongest
positions held by either army at any time during the war. At the next stop,
Andrus quotes a Union chaplain who saw a shell explode, carrying off the
head of one fighter, the arm of a second and the leg of a third. And so,
Andrus proceeds through seven more stops, marking the Confederate and
Union positions and carefully tracing the sequence of the day’s fight.31
At the final stop, Andrus describes the end of the battle. By ten
o’clock, he notes, most of the firing up and down the lines had come to an
end. The Union soldiers retreated on a night march to the James River, ten
miles away. Only some cavalry stayed behind as a rear guard. The
commander of these men, Colonel William W. Averell, later described the
sights and sounds that filled the night and the break of day. Andrus quotes
him:
Our ears had been filled with agonizing cries from thousands
before the fog lifted, but now our eyes saw an appalling
spectacle upon the slopes down to the woodlands half a mile
away. Over five thousand dead and wounded men were on the
ground, in every attitude of distress. A third of them were dead
or dying, but enough were alive and moving to give to the field
a singular, crawling effect.32
______________________________________________________________
The podcast version of the Battle of Malvern Hill ends with this bleak image
of the landscape as ‘an appalling spectacle’ covered with dead and dying
men.
Maintained by the National Parks Service, Malvern Hill is today an
official place of remembrance, marked by trails and signs, open from sunrise
to sunset, closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. But the
meaning and memory of the battle that transpired there - of the lives lost
there - cannot be captured by any poem, map, memoir or podcast. The
memory of Malvern Hill remains open to interpretation.
Notes
1
G B McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story, Charles L Webster, New York,
1887, p. 439. These lines, praising the Army of the Potomac at the Battle of
Malvern Hill and throughout the Seven Days Battles, are the last lines ever
written by Union General George B. McClellan. A footnote by William
Cowper Prime in McClellan’s posthumously published memoir reads, ‘In the
evening, before his sudden death in the night, Gen. McClellan had been
occupied in preparing, from his memoirs, an article for the Century
Magazine. Among the manuscript, which we found the next morning lying as
he left it, the paragraph [ending with the sentence quoted] appeared to be the
last work of his pen’ (ibid., p. 439).
2
Due to their position on the battlefield, Hill’s men were particularly
vulnerable in the charge on Malvern Hill. They had to approach the Union
line, some 800 yards away, across a gradual incline of meadow and wheat
fields, which left them completely exposed to the Union cannon (B K Burton,
Extraordinary Circumstances: The Seven Days Battles, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington, 2001, p. 340).
3
According to the Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, the respective
losses were as follows: 5,650 casualties for the Confederate forces (869 dead,
4,241 wounded and 540 missing) and 3,007 casualties for the Union army
(314 killed, 1,875 missing and 818 missing) (D Heidler, J Heidler, D Coles
(eds), Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, W W Norton & Co., New
York, 2002, p. 1246).
4
F Porter, ‘The Last of the Seven Days’ Battles,’ The Century Illustrated
Monthly Magazine, vol. 30.4, August 1885, p. 618.
5
Burton, pp. 306-308.
6
Ibid., p. 356.
7
‘Battle of Malvern Hill,’ Harper’s Weekly, vol. 6.291, July 1862, p. 471.
8
B Catton, This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil
War, Doubleday & Co., New York, 1956, p. 143.
Cynthia Wachtell 57
9
The article was reprinted in the Charleston Mercury on 7 July, on the front
page of the New York Times later in July, and in The Rebellion Record (F
Moore (ed), The Rebellion Record, vol. 5, G P Putnam, New York, 1863, p.
267).
10
McClellan would claim the battle as a ‘complete victory.’ In his memoir he
wrote, ‘Until dark the enemy persisted in his efforts to take the position so
tenaciously defended; but, despite his vastly superior numbers, his repeated
and desperate attacks were repulsed with fearful loss, and darkness ended the
battle of Malvern Hill.’ Nonetheless, it was necessary, as McClellan
recorded, for the Union forces ‘to fall back still further, in order to reach a
point where [their] supplies [of food, forage, and ammunition] could be
brought to [them] with certainty’ (McClellan, p. 437).
11
H Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) Da Capo Press,
New York, 1995, pp. 67-68.
12
S Garner, The Civil War World of Herman Melville, University Press of
Kansas, Lawrence, 1993, p. 175.
13
Melville explains in a prefatory note to his collection of Civil War poetry,
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, ‘With few exceptions, the Pieces in
this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond’
(Melville, p. 5). It seems certain that ‘Malvern Hill,’ a poem which takes as
its premise a return to an old battlefield, was among the poems written
between the fall of Richmond in April 1865 and the first publication of
Battle-Pieces in the late summer of 1866.
14
The Rebellion Record included five reports on the Battle of Malvern Hill,
from both the Northern and Southern perspectives, including official reports
from General Hooker and General Howe and the first-person report from the
Richmond Examiner. Melville also read Harper’s Weekly, among other
publications.
15
Melville, p. 67. On the same page of the Rebellion Record on which the
article from the Richmond Examiner begins, there appears a Confederate
account of the battle that explicitly notes the presence of elm trees in the
vicinity of Malvern Hill. Describing a mansion that stood a mile and a half
from the battleground, where McClellan’s Artillery Reserve was initially
positioned, the chronicler writes in a report dated July 7th, ‘The house at
Malvern Hill is a quaint old structure of the last century . . . A fine grove of
ancient elms embowers the lawn in a grateful shade, affording numberless
vistas of far-off wheat fields and little gleaming brooks of water, with the
dark blue fringe of the primitive pines on the horizon. It seemed a bitter satire
on the wickedness of man, this peaceful, serene, harmonious aspect of nature,
and I turned from the joyous and quiet landscape to the mutilated victims
around me’ (Moore, p. 266). It seems that Melville, inspired by this account,
______________________________________________________________
not only placed the elm trees in his poem but also used his poem to suggest
that it was, indeed, a ‘bitter satire on the wickedness of man’ that soldiers
fought and killed each other amid such an otherwise ‘peaceful, serene [and]
harmonious’ landscape.
16
Melville, p. 67.
17
Heidler, pp. 826-827.
18
Melville overstates the number of deaths. According to the figures in The
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, a total of 1,183 Southerners and
Northerners died in battle at Malvern Hill (Melville, pp. 67-68; Heidler, p.
1246).
19
As an initial article about the battle in Harper’s Weekly acknowledges,
‘circumstances compelled us to leave many on the field’ (‘Battle of Malvern
Hill’, p. 471).
20
Drew Gilpin Faust notes, ‘Practical realities dictated that retreating armies
did not have time to attend to the dead but had to depend on the humanity of
their opponents, who predictably gave precedence to their own casualties’ (D
G Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,
Knopf, New York, 2008, p. 70).
21
Melville, p. 68.
22
As Stanton Garner observes, ‘Nature attends to the more important matter
of its own rhythms, the filling of the twigs with sap and the annual renewal of
the leaves; the griefs of men concern only men’ (Garner, pp. 175-176).
23
Melville, p. 101.
24
Melville, pp. 101, 96.
25
Melville, p. 96.
26
Melville, p. 32.
27
The poem was republished in the postwar anthology of Southern war
poems, The Southern Amaranth, S Brock (ed), Wilcox & Rockwell, New
York, 1869, p. 536-7.
28
Ibid.
29
E Ward, Poetic Studies, James R Osgood & Co., Boston, 1875, pp. 98-100.
30
Ibid., p. 100.
31
Civil War Traveler Podcasts: Audio Battlefield Guides, 19 July 2009;
viewed on 19 October 2009.
<http://www.civilwartraveler.com/audio/index.html#Malvern>.
32
Colonel Averell commanded the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry. The following
month he attained the rank of Brigadier-General (W Averell, ‘With the
Cavalry on the Peninsula,’ in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, R
Johnson and C Buel (eds), vol. 2, Century Company, New York, 1888, p.
432.
Cynthia Wachtell 59
Bibliography
Averell, W., ‘With the Cavalry on the Peninsula,’ in Battles and Leaders of
the Civil War, R Johnson and C Buel (eds), vol. 2, Century Company, New
York, 1888, p. 432.
‘Battle of Malvern Hill,’ Harper’s Weekly, vol. 6.291, July 1862, p. 471.
Brock S., (ed), The Southern Amaranth, Wilcox & Rockwell, New York,
1869.
Burton, B. K., Extraordinary Circumstances: The Seven Days Battles,

Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2001.
Catton, B., This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil
War, Doubleday & Co., New York, 1956.
Civil War Traveler Podcasts: Audio Battlefield Guides, 19 July 2009; viewed
on 19 October 2009. <http://www.civilwartraveler.com/audio/index.html#
Malvern>.
Fahs, A., The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and
South, 1861-1865, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Faust, D. G., This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,
Knopf, New York, 2008.
Garner, S., The Civil War World of Herman Melville, University Press of
Kansas, Lawrence, 1993.
Heidler, D., Heidler, J., Coles D., (eds), Encyclopedia of the American Civil
War, W W Norton & Co., New York, 2002, p. 1246.
McClellan, G. B., McClellan’s Own Story, Charles L Webster, New York,

1887.
Melville, H., Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) Da Capo Press,
New York, 1995.
______________________________________________________________
Moore F., (ed), The Rebellion Record, vol. 5, G P Putnam, New York, 1863.
Porter, F., ‘The Last of the Seven Days’ Battles,’ The Century Illustrated
Monthly Magazine, vol. 30.4, August 1885, p. 615-632.
Ward, E., Poetic Studies, James R Osgood & Co., Boston, 1875.
Tabulating Loss, Entombing Memory:
TKe6rebrenica3otoþari0emorialCentre
Sarah Wagner
Abstract:
In the aftermath of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, survivors of
the genocide at the United Nations ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica demanded that
the remains of their missing relatives, the over 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian
Muslim) men and boys killed in the massacre, be identified and returned to
them. The families insisted on marking the locus of the collective violence
with a field full of slender white tombstones situated across the road from the
former UN peacekeepers’ compound. In this essay, I analyse that space and
its contentious politics of memory by focusing on two overarching aims of
WKH6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL0HPRULDO&HQWUH¶VGHVLJQWKDWLVWRLPSDUWDVHQVH
of order on the site of annihilating violence and to materialise absence
through tabulating loss. The first aim centres on physically altering the
landscape of the place where the genocide began; the second depends on the
biotechnological intervention of DNA testing that has profoundly influenced
modes of commemoration through its act of re-attaching individual names to
unrecognisable mortal remains. The ensuing results of bodies recovered and
reburied at the memorial centre provide visceral, tangible evidence of the
genocide’s scale, transferring tabulations of loss from paper onto tombstones.
Out of this insistence on accounting for and commemorating the Srebrenica
missing, a new ethnonationalist discourse emerges to delineate victim from
perpetrator and etch into memory the perceived incommensurability of
Bosniak suffering, to the dismay and frustration of many international
sponsors and Bosnian Serbs in the region.
Key Words: Commemoration, memorial centre, ethnonationalism,

Srebrenica genocide, post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, missing persons,
DNA identification.
*****
1. Introduction
We have come to recognise a pattern among national cemeteries and
war memorials to the fallen and the missing that have appeared and expanded
over the past century in places such as Arlington, Virginia and Thiepval,
France. These spaces follow a now familiar design: columns of white
tombstones stretch across swaths of green lawn, their symmetry mimicking
the orderly march of foot soldiers setting off to war. Lists of individual names
scored onto the surface of stone simultaneously insist on recognising
62 Tabulating Loss, Entombing Memory
______________________________________________________________
individual lives lost alongside collective suffering and sacrifice.1 In Bosnia
and Herzegovina, where a three and a half-year bloody conflict left 100,000
dead and 2 million displaced, a memorial centre has been built to
commemorate the war’s most infamous atrocity - the July 1995 genocide at
the UN ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica. Much of the complex’s design, especially
its cemetery, hews to the aesthetic conventions of its Western European and
American counterparts from the wars of the twentieth century. But the
6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL 0HPRULDO &HQWUH VWDQGV DSDUW IURP WKHVH RWKHU
monuments cum cemetery in significant ways that expose how landscape
(both physical and metaphorical) reflects the contentious politics of memory
among a yet divided Bosnian public.
Given that the Srebrenica memorial holds to the seemingly
international template of orderly headstones and lists of missing, its
distinctiveness lies less with the physical design than with the meaning
behind that design and the controversy underlying the memorial itself. To
begin with, the site marks lives lost not during a pitched battle between two
armed forces but rather as the result of a systematic campaign to extirpate an
ethnonational group.2 The majority of the victims being memorialised were
members of a civilian population - refugees who had taken shelter in the UN-
protected enclave of Srebrenica. In this sense, the memorial centre and its
cemetery join the ranks of monumental commemorative landscapes such as
the concentration camps of World War II, whose ‘topographies of evil’
attract visitors,3 inviting them to imagine - or remember - the suffering that
took place within their buildings.
Borrowing from and blending the genres of national memorials to
fallen soldiers, monuments to the missing, and the commemorative sites of
WKH :RUOG :DU ,, FRQFHQWUDWLRQ FDPSV WKH 6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL 0HPRULDO
Centre represents a demand on the part of the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak)
survivors and larger community that their loss be recognised and remembered
by Bosnians as well as the international community. This may not sound
original - what war memorial to the missing isn’t built on the idea of etching
into history the story of personal and public loss?4 But in the post-war society
of Bosnia and Herzegovina, memory of the past, specifically of the war, its
events, its causes, and its consequences, remains highly contested.5 Despite
local and international court proceedings, countless human rights reports, and
pressure from international representatives for truth and reconciliation
efforts, the past continues to divide the three ethnonational groups (Bosniaks,
Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats).
Nowhere are these entrenched divisions more apparent than in
Srebrenica, whose history provides Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs alike with
material to refute or diminish claims of persecution by the opposing ethnic
group and to bolster narratives of victimhood. The very location of the
memorial centre epitomises this disputed history; it was a place fought for by
Sarah Wagner 63
______________________________________________________________
the families of the missing and the Bosnian Islamic leadership, muscled into
existence by an international protectorate, and indignantly, though
eventually, accepted by Bosnian Serb authorities. The memorial centre in
turn has spawned counter narratives of loss and commemoration among
Bosnian Serbs in the region. Mid-July every year Bosniak and Bosnian Serbs
return to the battlefield of memory, with Bosniak families gathering at the
PHPRULDOFHQWUHLQ3RWRþDULRQ-XO\WREXU\WKHUHPDLQVRIWKHLULGHQWLILHG
loved ones and commemorate the massacre, and Bosnian Serbs assembling
nearby the following day to commemorate their own dead from the conflict.
In this essay, I explore two overarching aims that structure the
physical space of the memorial centre commemorating the Srebrenica
missing - aims which build on the traditions of other twentieth century
monuments to war missing: first, the need to impart a sense of order on the
site of annihilating violence and, second, to materialise absence through
tabulated loss. The first aim addresses the needs of surviving families and
friends of the missing, while the second speaks as much to the Bosniak and
international public as to Bosnian Serbs in the region. The first is enacted by
physical features, the second through the biotechnological intervention that
enables bodies to be buried and tombstones to be erected. Taken together,
these aims reveal how the politics of memory take shape and proliferate
within the reclaimed landscapes of a post-war society.
2. The Srebrenica Genocide and the Creation of a Memorial

Centre
In post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, Srebrenica is an enduring
controversy. Its name is indelibly marked by the events of July 1995,
specifically a massacre now considered the worst atrocity to occur in Europe
since World War II. Nestled in the mountains of eastern Bosnia, pre-war
Srebrenica was a small city known for its therapeutic natural springs and its
historical ties to the region’s mining industry; indeed, its very name (‘Silver
City’) came from the Saxon miners of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries who extracted the precious ore from the hills around the city.6
Ethnically mixed, Srebrenica’s pre-war population numbered approximately
6,000 inhabitants, seventy-five percent of which was Bosnian Muslim and
twenty-three Bosnian Serb.7 As Yugoslavia began to disintegrate and war
broke out in Bosnia in the spring of 1992, Srebrenica’s landscape and
demographics were radically transformed. The city and its surrounding
villages soon became an enclave housing 40 to 50,000 Bosniak refugees from
the Bosnian Serb-controlled region of the Podrinje Valley, the land to the
west of the Drina River, which serves as a natural border between Bosnia and
Serbia. In June 1993, with the war well underway, the UN Security Council
declared Srebrenica a ‘safe area’ and sent a small contingent of peacekeeping
soldiers (first Canadian forces, then Dutch) in order to protect it. However,
______________________________________________________________
RQ-XO\WKH%RVQLDQ6HUE$UP\OHGE\*HQHUDO5DWNR0ODGLüDQG
a handful of Serbian units overtook the enclave and began a campaign to
eradicate its Bosniak population. In the span of three days, with the Dutch
peacekeepers looking on, 25,000 women, children, and elderly were expelled
from the safe area. Targeting the male population, Bosnian Serb and Serbian
forces killed over 8,000 men and boys, most of who were summarily
executed and their bodies dumped into mass graves.8
The genocide at Srebrenica represented the culmination of the
systematic and violent persecution carried out since the beginning of the war
by Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces against non-Serb populations in the
eastern part of the country.9 It succeeded in completely purging the largest
remaining population of Bosniak refugees from the eastern Serb-controlled
territory of the Republika Srpska (RS).10 The effort was highly orchestrated -
from the transportation logistics enabling the swift expulsion of the women
and children to the ruthless efficiency of executing thousands of men and
boys. But killing that many people in that little time was a messy affair that
drew attention, namely the attention of US aerial surveillance and the prying
eyes of an international community defensive about its failed peacekeeping
mission. Therefore, not long after the mass graves had been filled, Bosnian
Serb forces returned to these primary sites and, with backhoes and heavy
machinery, they dug up, transported, and reburied bodies into what have
become known as ‘secondary mass graves,’ scattered throughout eastern
Bosnia.11 The brutal method of transfer resulted in the violent disarticulation
of human skeletal remains; bodies were wrenched apart, so that an individual
victim’s lower half might be found in one mass grave and the upper half in a
second, even third, site altogether. Thus, hiding the traces of so-called ethnic
cleansing became a disorderly affair.
When the war ended with the signing of the Dayton Peace
Agreement in December 1995, local and international forensic specialists
began efforts to recover and identify the remains of the Srebrenica missing. It
was an arduous task. Traditional forensic techniques were no match for the
conditions of the graves and the mortal remains slowly being exhumed from
them. After five years of frustrated attempts, international and national
(Bosniak) political will finally coalesced behind the effort to create a local
DNA laboratory to test each and every set of recovered remains with blood
samples provided by surviving relatives of the missing. The results were
astounding: whereas from 1996 to early 2001 a mere 70 individuals (i.e., less
than one percent of the total missing) had been identified through traditional
forensic methods, 600 were identified as a result of the DNA technology
between November 2001 and March 2003.
During this period, with the hope of their relatives’ survival
gradually giving way to bitter acceptance of death, families of the missing
began to turn their attention to memorialising their loved ones and the events
Sarah Wagner 65
______________________________________________________________
of July 11, 1995. The question became where best to locate the memorial and
its cemetery. Overwhelmingly - and to the dismay of some Bosniak
politicians and international representatives - families insisted that the
memorial be established at the ‘place where it all began,’ namely the UN
peacekeepers’ compound and surrounding fields in the nearby town of
3RWRþDUL ZKHUH WKH UHIXJHHV KDG IOHG DQG ZKHUH %RVQLDQ 6HUE DQG 6HUELDQ
forces separated off men and boys for eventual execution.12 Locating the
memorial centre at that site was more than just an attempt to force the
international community to acknowledge the tragic consequences of its
abdicated mission to protect the safe area. It was also an effort to transform a
landscape, binding the wounds of a community and emphatically
documenting the scale of the killings to counter Bosnian Serb dismissals and
outright denials.
3. Cleansing the Stains of Memory

The term ‘cleansing’ applied to post-war Bosnia immediately recalls
the systematic and forced removal of populations from designated territory.
Purging land of thousands of people often requires deadly, destructive force,
and in the wake of such violence both people and places are left deeply
scarred. For many survivors, these places demand a reordering response of
their own, one that seeks to piece back together bodies, lives, memories,
homes, and landscapes. Therefore, I use the word ‘cleansing’ here
purposefully in describing the aims behind the memorial centre: families of
the missing sought to memorialise the place but also to change it, to dislodge
from its spaces the harrowing images of their final moments in the enclave
and to impart a sense of order. Many wanted to transform the site of intense
anguish into a peaceful resting place - for their relatives whom they hoped
would eventually be buried there and for themselves, whether as permanent
returnees to their pre-war properties or as occasional visitors to the cemetery.
The ordering, transformative impulse driving the families’ campaign
to establish the memorial centre at the former UN peacekeepers’ compound
was not about sterilising the past. Nor did it intimate healing, ‘closure,’ or
even reconciliation. Rather, families of the Srebrenica missing sought to
create a space that could reconcile the awfulness of their past experiences
with the social realities of their present lives and, for many, address the need
to care for the souls of the dead in a place of significance and natural beauty.
Thus, unlike World War II concentration camps memorial sites such
as Auschwitz or Dachau where buildings remained relatively unchanged and
exhibits showcased the face of evil in all its mundane, gritty detail, the
6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL 0HPRULDO &HQWUH ZDV GHVLJQHG WR DVVXDJH WHUULI\LQJ
recollections by adding new experiences of community and individual
commemoration. Cleaning out the debris of memory meant literally cleaning
XS DQG RUGHULQJ WKH DUHD VXUURXQGLQJ WKH FRPSRXQG LQ 3RWRþDUL 7R EHJLQ
______________________________________________________________
with, that required intervention by the international community, namely that
of the Office of the High Representative, to secure the property from its
Bosnian Serb owners and insist on the memorial’s right to exist within the
territory of the Republika Srpska.13
Once ownership was officially transferred to the Foundation of the
6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL 0HPRULDO &HQWUH WKH FRPSRXQG GHVLJQDWHG IRU WKH
memorial was extended to include the space and structures on both sides of
the two-lane road connecting Srebrenica to Bratunac, a predominantly
Bosnian Serb city five kilometres to the north. Nested in the valley between
the hills flanking this once vital industrial zone of the Podrinje region, the
complex appears as an oasis among the dilapidated warehouses of the former
car battery factory and zinc plant, and the natural surroundings, especially
with the lush green of spring and summer, counterbalance the war’s still
visible legacy in eastern Bosnia, where much of the private and public
property that had been destroyed remains abandoned or only partially
reconstructed.
The covered prayer space (musala) located near the entrance of the memorial
centre. Photograph by author.
On the western side of the road, an iron fence was erected to enclose
a vast field containing the memorial centre proper and its cemetery. Since the
Sarah Wagner 67
______________________________________________________________
groundbreaking ceremony in 2001, this space has undergone dramatic
physical change. Beyond the construction of walkways, religious monuments
and structures, memorial stones, and fountains, the cemetery itself has
become the principal site of metamorphosis. Indeed, as the centre’s landscape
changes with each new round of freshly dug graves at the annual mass burial
on July 11, the overarching design of the space becomes increasingly
apparent: the gradual expansion of graves across the field gives form to the
discrete sections of lawn, separated by cobblestone paths, that bloom forth
like petals of a flower.
An organic movement, the cemetery grows denser and fuller with
each year’s identifications. At the base, or centre, of this blossoming expanse
of tombstones is the covered prayer space, the musala, which shelters the
awaiting coffins as the Muslim clerics and Bosniak political representatives
intermix speeches and prayers for the dead during the annual commemorative
ceremonies on July 11.
The graves themselves do much of the work in transforming the
ODQGVFDSH RI 3RWRþDUL IURP LWV FKDRWLF SDVW WR DQ RUGHUHG SUHVHQW 7KHUH LQ
the same place where the tens of thousands of terrified refugees once
gathered outside the UN compound, seeking the promised protection of the
Dutch peacekeepers, tombstones mark the scene of brutality and betrayal -
the place where the genocide began. Their symmetry and uniformity defy
recollections of confused and scared masses and of the violence that started
there. Just beyond the fence at the southwest corner of the field stands the
infamous ‘White House,’ a private residence that became a makeshift
detention site where many of the Bosniak men and boys, peeled off from the
crowd, were forced to wait before their eventual transport and execution. The
iron fencing safely encloses the memorial centre, separating the graves off
from that initial site of torture. The calm that now surrounds the neatly
ordered rows of tombstones likewise counters the throngs of people who had
pushed to get onto the buses provided by the Bosnian Serb and Serb forces
for their ‘voluntary evacuation’ after the fall of the enclave.
______________________________________________________________
Permanent white tombstones and temporary green markers gradually fill the
6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL0HPRULDO&HQWUHFHPHWHU\3KRWRJUDSKE\WKHDXWKRU
More than just reordering and resignifying the physical space of the
former UN compound and its surrounding fields, the cemetery and its
tombstones also reconstitute families torn asunder by the genocide. It is a
gendered and familial reassembling: plot by plot, the male lines of the
Srebrenica families, many of whom are missing multiple relatives, are
restored with fathers buried next to sons, brothers, uncles, cousins,
grandfathers, and so on. Names etched onto the surface of the tombstones,
like the stone panels encircling the musala itself, record the damage done to
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turn reverberates socially throughout the community: that Bosnian Muslim
women physically attend the individual burials at the memorial centre
demonstrates how the space has also helped redefine the role of women
among the post-war community of Srebrenica. Whereas before the war -
before the violent rupture of the genocide - according to traditional Bosnian
Muslim practice, women would not have been present in the cemetery for
such events, they now take their place at the graveside as mourners and
attendants of the dead.14
Sarah Wagner 69
______________________________________________________________
Beyond the gendered work of restoring and reordering families that
takes place in the cemetery, the tombstones themselves succeed in
reassembling the collective group that Bosnian Serb forces had so brutally
dispersed through their systematic program of killing and the subsequent
disposal of remains. Unlike the cemeteries and memorials of the past
century’s two world wars, where soldiers were often buried in the very
battlefields on which they fell, the Srebrenica memorial centre
commemorates the violent disarticulation (both literally and metaphorically)
of its victims at the same time that it makes manifest the scale of the
genocide through its carefully plotted expanse of white tombstones. The
reassembly of mortal remains has in turn compelled the wider Srebrenica
community to reconvene: surviving families of the missing, who ended up
scattered across the globe as resettled refugees in countries such as the United
States, Canada, and Australia, gather on July 11 at the memorial centre to
bear witness to the sanctified reburial of identified relatives. These members
of the diaspora may go on to visit their former homes and, in some cases,
perform the tevhid, the ‘formalized ritual in which congregational prayers are
said on behalf of the dead,’15 after the mass burials have concluded at
3RWRþDUL
As with any cemetery, ritual accompanies the dead, both during the
public ceremony of July 11 as well as on the more tranquil days when only a
handful of people might stroll through the complex’s grounds. Visiting the
memorial centre on such a day, one enters a space that is alive with the
murmur of flowing water. A large fountain near the entrance whose waters
cascade into a shallow pool at its base foreshadow the smaller ãadrvani
(fountains) and fonts for ritual washing (abdesthane) located at different
entry points into the cemetery. It is there before the simple brass faucets that
Muslim visitors may undertake the ritual cleansing before reciting the fatiha,
the opening chapter of the Koran, or special prayers for the dead. Religious
practice thus reinforces the aesthetic aims behind the memorial centre’s
design: just as the space works to counter the awful memories of the
genocide begun in the former UN compound, the religious fonts invite
Muslim visitors to take part in their own spiritual cleansing before they enter
the hallowed ground of the cemetery.
Underscoring the material transformation rendered by the
constructed walkways, memorial stones, and fountains, the space’s modest
landscaping likewise imparts a sense of restored calm. Trees have been
planted within and around the cemetery’s perimeter. A rose bed now marks
the site which will eventually house a collective ossuary, in anticipation of
the certain fact that there will be some recovered bones, such as phalanges of
the hand and foot, which cannot be identified and thus reassociated with
other skeletal remains.
______________________________________________________________
Just above the colorful bloom of the roses, the Bosnian national flag
flies near the entrance of memorial centre, its bright blue and yellow a rare
sight in this part of the country where the Republika Srpska (RS) entity flag,
or the national flag of Serbia, more typically adorn public and private
buildings or announce ethnonational pride among wedding convoys that
travel from one city or village to another. Although it is supposed to represent
all citizens of the post-war state, the flag’s presence at the memorial centre
nevertheless signals Bosniak rather than Bosnian Serb identity. This emblem
- and the divergent interpretations of what it stands for - hints at the socio-
political divisions that emerge from the space of the memorial centre,
especially the cemetery and its gradually expanding fields of tombstones.
4. DNA Identification: Materialising the Scale

In the immediate post-war years, few Srebrenica survivors ever
dreamed they would return to their pre-war residence let alone bury their
missing relatives in land controlled by Bosnian Serbs. The advent of a
successful DNA-based identification technology profoundly changed the
dynamics of how and where the surviving families would commemorate their
dead. Identifying individual remains from among the commingled bones that
filled the secondary mass graves through such a sophisticated means as
genetic testing promised a documentary proof of the massacre’s scale in an
unprecedented manner. Science was stepping in where rhetoric, protest, and
political pressure had failed. With individual plots slowly filling the
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of death to life - that is, from an abstraction on a piece of paper and a number
to be debated, dismissed, diminished, or even outright denied to individual
names scored onto tombstones and coffins interred into discrete gravesites.
Thomas Lacquer writes about the Great War that, ‘Bodies, of
course, being in the ground, are hidden and cannot be their own memorials,
but markers of their skeletal uniformity serve the purpose. Numbers. The
human imagination is forced to see, as concretely as possible, what a million
dead men look like.’16 In the case of Srebrenica, this act of witnessing
through marking graves required not only that remains were recovered from
hundreds of illicit sites scattered throughout the Podrinje region, but also that
those remains were accounted for; before tombstones could be erected,
individual identity had to be restored to individual sets of remains. Only then
could the ‘uniformity’ of their collective fate as victims of ethnic violence be
memorialised through identical graves in a communal cemetery.
This aim of identifying remains in order to memorialise loss
required an innovation in forensic practice. After years of frustrated efforts,
local and international forensic experts at the International Commission on
Missing Persons (ICMP), the primary international organisation leading the
identification process, eventually turned to genetic testing. They developed a
Sarah Wagner 71
______________________________________________________________
system of post-mortem analysis that stood standard forensic genetics practice
on its head. Rather than being used to confirm or exclude individual identity
for presumptive cases - that is, when forensic experts are working with a
presumed identity for a given set of mortal remains - the Bosnian model
began with testing, prioritising genetic profiles over all other clues to
individual identity, including physical characteristics, dental records, and
personal articles recovered with the bodies. DNA analysis thus became the
engine driving the entire process. The ICMP technologists created databases
and computer software necessary to match blood samples from surviving
family members with bone samples extracted from recovered remains. After
several months of trial and error, the system was up and running, and by
November 2001, the first DNA match identified the remains of a Srebrenica
victim - those of a sixteen-year old boy whose body was recovered from a
mass grave.
The international community sponsoring the development of the
DNA-based post-mortem technology - from outfitting laboratories to training
local staff - saw identifying Srebrenica’s, indeed all of Bosnia’s, missing as a
means of social repair, and, in the longer term, a step towards reconciliation
among the divided polities of post-war Bosnian society. Beyond simply
establishing the precise numbers of missing, the identification efforts
entailed piecing bodies back together and providing a space for sanctified,
witnessed burial. In the case of the latter, identification also enabled the
‘work of remembrance’17 DW WKH 6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL 0HPRULDO &HQWUH %\
March 31, 2003, some twenty thousand people gathered at the complex to
commemorate the genocide and inter the remains of 600 Srebrenica victims
identified through ICMP’s DNA laboratory. Six months later former US
president Bill Clinton gave the keynote address at the memorial centre’s
official opening. Following his remarks and the mass funeral (dåenaza), he
entered the cemetery, taking up a shovel and assisting with the interment of
one of the victims buried that day.
The technology’s success soon garnered additional political and
financial backing as state governments such as the UK, Germany, Denmark,
and Sweden pledged funds to support ICMP’s continued work.18 Tellingly,
the Dutch government, whose troops had comprised the UN peacekeeping
force tasked with protecting the ‘safe area’ in July 1995, earmarked its
donation specifically for the Srebrenica cases. The monetary and political
support further accelerated the investigative efforts, and, by May 2010 -
almost nine years after its first successful DNA-based identification - ICMP
had identified some 6,435 Srebrenica missing.19
Why was this act of re-attaching individual identity to nameless
mortal remains so critical to those most involved in the identification efforts?
For the overwhelming majority of the Srebrenica families, the return of their
loved ones’ physical remains had been their principal concern since the war’s
______________________________________________________________
end. They longed for a grave to visit. Yet those graves - thousands of
identical white tombstones filling the collective cemetery established
specifically for the Srebrenica victims - have come to represent the divisive
politics of memory surrounding the complex and the competing expectations
pinned to its creation and design. Aside from the international community’s
stakes in the project of nation-(re)building, by which the DNA-based system
of identification became a technoscientific mechanism of social
reconstruction, ethnonationalist interests seized upon the issue of missing
persons, specifically the missing connected with the Srebrenica enclave, to
advance political narratives of the wartime violence: the Bosniak nationalist
political and religious leaders seeking to buttress claims of victimhood and,
by extension, Serb aggression with scientifically-backed ‘facts’ of bodies
reassembled and reburied; and Bosnian Serb nationalist leaders and activists,
responding to the commemoration and burial of Srebrenica’s identified
victims through incendiary public protest and commemorations of their own.
These divergent histories illustrate that, far from building national consensus
through shared understandings of wartime violence, the political
interpretation and re-presentation of the results of the post-mortem
identification technology so visibly displayed at the memorial centre have
tended to sharpen rather than bridge ethnonational divisions in eastern
Bosnia.
5. Deepening Divisions
Thus, despite the technology’s relative success, internationally
sponsored aims of reconciliation have encountered significant resistance.
This has become especially apparent in contrasting Bosniak and Bosnian
Serb reactions to the July 11 annual commemoration and mass burials held at
WKH6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL0HPRULDO&HQWUH7KHLUUHVSHFWLYHSXEOLFHYHQWVDQG
political rhetoric reveal how bodies recovered and identified have led to very
different, indeed often competing, ethnonational narratives of wartime loss
and victimhood.
In the case of the Bosniak leaders, the memorial centre provided the
discursive space to forge a new nationalism, one based as much on blood
spilt as on blood inherited.20 Regardless of individual families’ intentions in
deciding to bury their relatives’ identified remains in the collective cemetery,
a highly charged and politically infused atmosphere fills the memorial centre
on July 11 each year. There, in the vast field within the complex, it is difficult
to separate out the political overtones from the religious messages in the
commemorative segment of the ceremony. In part, this is because the
Bosniak nationalist political and Islamic leadership have such close ties.
Much of the rhetoric of the leading nationalist political party, Stranka
demokratske akcije (SDA, the Party of Democratic Action) is couched in
terms of ethnoreligious identity.21 Indeed, its prominent role at the memorial
Sarah Wagner 73
______________________________________________________________
centre creates the perception that the July 11 services entail a melding of
Bosniak religious and nationalist political worlds. The funeral prayers and
burial processions reinforce this impression. Covered in bright green cloth
and borne across a bridge of outstretched hands, the coffins themselves are
explicitly marked as Islamic. In fact, all victims of the Srebrenica genocide
have been declared ãehidi, martyrs, regardless of the fact that some
individuals may not have actively practiced that religion, and, indeed, others
may have considered themselves - brought up during the Yugoslav era of
bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity) - communists and, therefore,
atheists.
Like the coffins, the tombstones that cap the mounds of freshly dug
earth are identical: slender white columns of marble bearing the inscription of
the victims’ names, birth date, and hometown, as well as a line from the
Koran, which reads, ‘And call not those who are slain in the way of Allah
‘dead.’ Nay, they are living, only ye perceive not.’ Thus, through speeches,
prayers, religious markings and ritual, the July 11 commemoration and mass
burials re-ascribe collective identity, crafting a new ethnoreligious
nationalism in response to the devastation of the July 1995 genocide.
Given the overt narrative of Bosniak victimhood and, by extension,
Serb criminality cultivated in the memorial centre, it comes as no surprise
that Bosnian Serbs in the region ignore and, in some cases, openly spurn the
public fruition of the Srebrenica-related identification efforts. Just down the
URDG IURP WKH 6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL 0HPRULDO &HQWUH LQ WKH 6HUE YLOODJH RI
Kravica, Bosnian Serbs have built a monument to their own victims,
specifically the forty-six individuals killed by Bosnian Muslim forces from
the Srebrenica enclave during the January 7, 1993 ‘bloody Christmas.’22 Next
WR WKH URDG ZKLFK WKH FRQYR\V RI EXVHV KHDGLQJ WR WKH 6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL
Memorial Centre travel each July 11, stands a small amphitheatre-like
structure built around a seven-meter high cross. On the day after the
Srebrenica commemoration hundreds of Bosnian Serbs gather at this
monument in Kravica to remember Serb wartime victims.
Kravica has become a site on which an alternative narrative of
tabulated loss is being built. For example, on July 12, 2005, following the
ten-year anniversary of the genocide, Bosnian Serb nationalist political
leaders attending the Kravica ceremony were quick to emphasise in their
public addresses and comments to the media that the number of Serb wartime
deaths in the region of Srebrenica was 3,000. Over the past few years, this
estimate has risen significantly, as the Srebrenica number of 8,000 becomes
increasingly institutionalised and accepted through processes such as the
DNA-based identification efforts. On that particular day, Bosnian Serb
mothers lamented before news cameras the loss of their own sons, some even
stressing how their relatives’ bodies had not yet been recovered. Echoing the
Bosniak commemoration held in the memorial centre the day before, Bosnian
______________________________________________________________
Serb attendees spoke in unequivocal terms of their own suffering and their
own blood spilled.
Yet as a commemorative space, the village of Kravica is fraught
with competing accounts of wartime violence. Just metres down the road
from the Bosnian Serb memorial is the agricultural warehouse where over
1,000 Bosnian men and boys from Srebrenica were captured, detained, and
executed immediately following the enclave’s fall. Riddled with bullet holes
only recently plastered over, its façade still bears witness to the horrific
massacre that took place within its walls. This too has become an impromptu
memorial site. After being obstructed from entrance the year before,
surviving family members of the Srebrenica genocide visited the warehouse
on July 13, 2009, two days after the annual commemorative ceremony and
PDVVEXULDODWWKH6UHEUHQLFD3RWRþDUL0HPRULDO&HQWUHDQGRQHGD\DIWHUWKH
Bosnian Serb commemoration in the very same village.23
Thus, within the span of three days, the spectrum of rival
ethnonational narratives reveals itself in direct response to the newly dug and
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cemetery and the counter monument erected in Kravica. While the
identification technology has succeeded in piecing back together the
brutalised, disarticulated skeletal remains of the genocide victims, the public
manifestation of that success elicits divergent, even oppositional, responses
from the national political leaders, surviving families, and general public on
both sides of the controversy. Rather than building a cohesive national
identity around shared experiences of loss and violence, the reclaimed
landscapes and commemorative spaces explicitly tabulating loss often
exacerbate communal divisions among Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs, even as
the individual identity of the missing, now recovered, victims of Srebrenica is
restored.
Notes
1
In his essay, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War,’ Thomas Lacquer
notes the dawning of a new ‘era of remembrance’ whereby the graves of
common soldiers were marked with crosses and the positions registered, a
faithful and material record of their fate becoming the responsibility of the
state (T Lacquer in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, J R
Gillis (ed), Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994, pp. 152-53). See
also Drew Gilpin Faust’s chapter, ‘Naming,’ on the practice of identifying
fallen soldiers in the American Civil War (D G Faust, This Republic of
Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
2008).
2
While there were significant numbers of non-civilians among the missing
(i.e., members of the supposedly demilitarized Srebrenica enclave’s defence
Sarah Wagner 75
______________________________________________________________
forces), the events of 11-19 July 1995 have, according to the findings of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, been established
DVJHQRFLGH6HH,&7<3URVHFXWRUY5DGLVODY.UVWLü&DVHQR,7$
Appeals Chamber Judgment, April 19, 2004, International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia.
3
C Koonz, ‘Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in
German Memory,’ in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, J R
Gillis (ed), Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994, p. 259.
4
As Geoff Dyer writes about the cemeteries and memorials erected in the
wake of World War I, ‘Publicizing the scale of loss was the best way to make
it bearable’ (G Dyer, The Missing of the Somme, Penguin Books, London,
1995, p. 27). On the memorials of the Great War, see also J Winter, Sites of
Memory, Sites of Mourning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.
5
In his innovative ethnographic analysis of divergent narrations of the recent
violent past in Bosnia, Stef Jansen illustrates how concepts of national unity
are often undercut by other social experiences, such as gender divisions,
socioeconomic status, individual histories of displacement and participation
in the military operations (S Jansen, ‘Remembering with a Difference:
Clashing Memories of Bosnian Conflict within Everyday Life,’ in The New
Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories, and Moral Claims in a Post-War
Society, X Bougarel, E Helms, and G Duijzings (eds), Ashgate, Hampshire,
2007, pp. 193-208).
6
J Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, University of Michigan Press, Ann
Arbor, 1994, p. 283.
7
The pre-war ethnonational composition of the city mirrored that of the
larger municipality. According to the 1991 census, of the recorded 36,666
residents of the municipality, which stretched over 527 square kilometers,
75.2 percent were Bosniaks, while 22.68 percent were Bosnian Serbs. United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP), ‘Rights-Based Municipal
Assessment and Planning Project, Municipality of Srebrenica, Republika
Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina, October 2003-February 2004,’ report,
2004.
8
For a detailed account of the fall of Srebrenica, see D Rohde, Endgame: The
Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre since World War
II, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1997.
9
07RNDþDµ$Q$QDO\VLVRI3RSXODWLRQ/RVVHVLQWKH0LGGOH'ULQD9DOOH\
with a Special Look at the Srebrenica Killings 11th to the 18th of July 1995,’
Sarajevo, 2005.
10
Bosnia and Herzegovina is made up of two entities, the Bosniak and
Bosnian Croat-controlled Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the
Bosnian Serb-controlled Republic of Srpska, i.e., Republika Srpska (RS). The
______________________________________________________________
latter was originally established by the Serbian Democratic Party (Srpska

demokratska stranka or SDS) at the onset of the war in 1992 as the Serbian
Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and later renamed the Republika
Srpska.
11
D Komar, ‘Patterns of Mortuary Practice Associated with Genocide:
Implications for Archaeological Research,’ Current Anthropology, vol. 49.1,
2008, pp. 123-133.
12
C Pollack, ‘Intentions of Burial: Mourning, Politics, and Memorials
Following the Massacre at Srebrenica,’ Death Studies, vol. 27.2, 2003, pp.
125-142; G. Duijzing, ‘Commemorating Srebrenica: Histories of Violence
and the Politics of Memory in Eastern Bosnia,’ in X Bougarel, E Helms, and
G Duijzings (eds).
13
S. Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for
Srebrenica’s Missing, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2008, pp. 196-197.
14
Ibid., p. 229. See also T Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995, p. 186
15
Bringa, p. 188.
16
Lacquer, p. 161.
17
J Winter, ‘Remembrance and Redemption: A Social Interpretation of War
Memorials,’ Harvard Design Magazine, Number 9, Fall 1999; see also J
Winter, 1995.
18
Several state governments have funded ICMP’s work over the years:
Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, The Holy See,
Iceland, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland,
Thailand, The United Kingdom and The United States of America.
19
The International Commission on Missing Persons publishes current data
on its identification efforts, including on the total number of DNA references
collected from surviving families, the total number of identifications of
missing persons and specifically for the Srebrenica missing, on its website:
<http://www.ic-mp.org/icmp-worldwide/southeast-europe/>.
20
Wagner, p.187.
21
See Xavier Bougarel’s analysis of ‘nation-building and reislamicization
processes initiated by the SDA and the Islamska zajednica’ both during and
after the war, especially through the commemoration of ãehidi (X Bougarel,
‘Death and the Nationalist: Martyrdom, War Memory and Veteran Identity
among Bosnian Muslims,’ in X Bougarel, E Helms, and G Duijzings (eds),
pp.167-192).
22
See Chuck Sudetic’s chapter on the Bosnian Muslim force’s attack on
January 7, 1993, the day of the Serbian Orthodox Christmas (C Sudetic,
Sarah Wagner 77
______________________________________________________________
Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia, Penguin
Books, New York, 1998, pp. 137-64).
23
Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, ‘Kravica 14 Years On,’ 13 July
2009, <http://www.bim.ba/en/175/10/21034/>.
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Veteran Identity among Bosnian Muslims,’ in The New Bosnian Mosaic:
Identities, Memories, and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society, Bougarel, X.,
Helms, E., and Duijzings, G., (eds)., Ashgate, Hampshire.
Bringa, T., Being Muslim the Bosnian Way, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ, 1995, p. 186.
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Politics of Memory in Eastern Bosnia,’ in Bougarel, X., Helms, E., and
Duijzings G., (eds).
Dyer, G., The Missing of the Somme, Penguin Books, London, 1995, p. 27.
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Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008.
Fine, J., The Late Medieval Balkans, University of Michigan Press, Ann
Arbor, 1994, p. 283.
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Y5DGLVODY.UVWLü&DVHQR,7$$SSHDOV&KDPEHU-XGJPHQW$SULO
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Conflict within Everyday Life,’ Bougarel, X., Helms, E., and Duijzings G.,
(eds), 2007, pp. 193-208.
Komar, D., ‘Patterns of Mortuary Practice Associated with Genocide:

Implications for Archaeological Research,’ Current Anthropology, vol. 49.1,
2008, pp. 123-133.
______________________________________________________________
Koonz, C., ‘Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in

German Memory,’ in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, J R
Gillis (ed), Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994, p. 259.
Lacquer T., ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, in Commemorations:

The Politics of National Identity, J R Gillis (ed), Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ, 1994, pp. 152-53.
Pollack, C., ‘Intentions of Burial: Mourning, Politics, and Memorials

Following the Massacre at Srebrenica,’ Death Studies, vol. 27.2, 2003, pp.
125-142.
Rohde, D., Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst
Massacre since World War II, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1997.
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Penguin Books, New York, 1998, pp. 137-64).
7RNDþD0µ$Q $QDO\VLVRI 3RSXODWLRQ/RVVHVLQWKH0LGGOH'ULQD9DOOH\

with a Special Look at the Srebrenica Killings 11th to the 18th of July 1995,’
Sarajevo, 2005.
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Assessment and Planning Project, Municipality of Srebrenica, Republika
Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina, October 2003-February 2004,’ report,
2004.
Wagner, S.. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for
Srebrenica’s Missing, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2008, pp. 196-197.
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Cambridge, 1995.
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Memorials,’ Harvard Design Magazine, Number 9, Fall 1999.
Lethean Landscapes:
Forgetting in Late Modern Commemorative Spaces
Joel David Robinson
Abstract:
Forgetting - the art of forgetting - is no longer seen as the simple opposite of
remembering, but has been increasingly validated in modernity, as that which
is intrinsically a part of memory. This essay will question the degree to which
European memorial spaces (specifically burial grounds, cemeteries or graves)
of the late modern period have exemplified a more self-reflexive approach to
forgetting. It will explore how the funerary projects of twentieth-century
architects have manipulated or mediated the landscape in such a way as to
incite reflection on the dialectic of memory and forgetting. What is peculiar
to these projects is that they reject the traditional aspirations to timelessness,
permanence and monumentality in funerary architecture. Instead, they would
seem to ground the space of memory in an experience of the changeable
landscape and the ruinous work of time and the elements. To the extent that
an analogy is being drawn here between forgetting and those processes that
erode architecture’s imprint on the landscape over time, this essay will
inquire into the significance of forgetting for memorial landscapes today, and
argue that such landscapes can be perceived as Lethean sites (Lethe being, of
course, the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology).
Key Words: Modern, architecture, monument, cemetery, landscape,

funerary, memory, commemoration, forgetting, erosion.
*****
Cemeteries are those places where landscape and memory are most
closely bound up with one another. Such places are laid out or built in order
to perpetuate memory, to prolong the lives of the dead in the memory of
family and friends. In this respect, they are meant to counteract the forgetting
that occurs over time, from one generation to the next. Inasmuch as
cemeteries are spaces of memory, safeguarding the memory of loved ones
against oblivion, they have often been highly monumental, especially in the
West. They have been built to look immutable, timeless, permanent, i.e., to
look as if they will outlast the ravages of nature, or time and the elements.
For memory is only as enduring as the monuments or monumental sites that
serve it - or so it has generally been thought in Western culture. As the
influential critic John Ruskin pointed out, ‘there are but two strong
conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture, and the
latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality.’1
More recently, however, the age-old assumption that monuments
can serve as vehicles or receptacles of memory, which conquer forgetting,
80 Lethean Landscapes
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has been questioned. What is more, monumentality in architecture has - over
the last century - been the subject of a debate that has led several architects to
think more self-critically about the nature of memory and the memorial, if
not renounce these altogether. Whilst the Italian Futurists threatened at the
outset of the last century to blow up our monumental heritage, influential
architectural critics during the inter-war era - such as Karel Teige in Europe
and Lewis Mumford in America - were very disparaging of monuments.
Critical of those who still had the vanity to commission monumental edifices,
Mumford wrote:
[T]hey place their hopes of remembrance in solid stones

joined to other solid stones, dedicated to their subjects or
their heirs forever, forgetful of the fact that stones that are
deserted by the living are even more helpless than life that
remains unprotected and unpreserved by stones.2
This questioning of monumentality and memory in the modernist

era arguably had an impact on the design of funerary landscapes - be they
public burial grounds or other types of commemorative space - where certain
more reflective architects would seem to have been as much concerned with
the inexorability of forgetting as with the desire to remember. To take one of
the most striking examples, consider Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós’ Park
Cemetery of Igualada. In regard to this project, the architects are recorded as
having written: ‘A cemetery is not a tomb. It is, rather, a relationship with the
landscape and with forgetting.’3 In this cemetery, I would suggest, the
architects negotiate landscape and forgetting in such a way as to invest the
space of death with new meaning.
In what follows, I will consider how landscape and forgetting are
addressed in this and other commemorative (or funerary) spaces of the late
twentieth century. After describing some of these extraordinary places, I will
try to explain why their architects reject the conventionally monumentalist
language of the cemetery in favor of its reinterpretation as a place where
visitors are ushered into a nether-worldly domain, evocative of the mythical
banks of Lethe, where architecture’s presence in the landscape is under
erasure, subject to erosion. In doing this, I will draw on a recent discourse on
forgetting, including the reflections of the French ethnologist Marc Augé in
Les formes de l’oubli, a treatise of 1998 whose popularity led to its English
translation in 2004 under the title of Oblivion. Augé’s essay is particularly
suggestive in this context, for in it he not only reminds us of how the relation
between memory and forgetting is akin to that between life and death, but
draws on the metaphorical potential of the landscape (and the processes of
erosion at work in the landscape) in elucidating a philosophy of forgetting.
The Park Cemetery of Igualada is situated on the outskirts of an
industrial town just northwest of Barcelona (figures 1-6). Planned and
designed in 1985, the first stages of building were mostly complete by 1994.
Joel David Robinson 81
______________________________________________________________
Having said that, this architectural landscape was never meant to look
finished or resolved; instead, it was meant to look ‘under construction’ as one
critic put it. It was meant to afford the possibility of future transformation and
expansion, through the rather unlikely landscape in which it is situated.4
Indication of this can be found in the plan, as well as the mound of earth
situated in the entrance plaza, where an upwardly turning path delineates a
spiral, a familiar emblem of growth or outward expansion. This apparent
openness to change brings the temporal dimension of this place into the
foreground.
Figure 1. Enric Miralles and Carme Pinòs: Site Plan, Park Cemetery of
Igualada, Barcelona, Spain, 1985-88 (Copyright: EMBT Architects
Archives).
Figure 2. Enric Miralles and Carme Pinòs: Park Cemetery of Igualada,

Barcelona, Spain, 1994 (Copyright: Author’s Photograph).
______________________________________________________________
Figure 3. Enric Miralles and Carme Pinòs: Sections, Tombs, Park Cemetery
of Igualada, Barcelona, Spain, 1985-88 (Copyright: EMBT Architects
Archives).
Figure 4. Enric Miralles and Carme Pinòs: Tombs, Park Cemetery of

Igualada, Barcelona, Spain, 1994 (Copyright: Author’s Photograph).
______________________________________________________________
Figure 5. Enric Miralles and Carme Pinòs: Plan and Sections, Mausolea,
Park Cemetery of Igualada, Barcelona, Spain, 1985-88 (Copyright: EMBT
Architects Archives).
Figure 6. Enric Miralles and Carme Pinòs: Mausolea, Park Cemetery of

Igualada, Barcelona, Spain, 1994 (Copyright: Author’s Photograph).
______________________________________________________________
Not a conventional choice of site for a burial ground, the Igualada
Park Cemetery is located in a dried-up river gorge. As can be seen from the
photographs and photomontages that the architects created before any
intervention occurred, this is a changeable landscape of tortuous ups and
downs. Rather than completely leveling the site and forcibly imposing design
on nature, the architects sought to incorporate it in their project, letting the
topography guide their intervention. The switchbacks of the ravine thus
dictate, in some measure, the lines of passage that were excavated here, so to
render this otherwise intractable landscape amenable to visitors - visitors who
are ushered downward, along paths and ramps, into this twentieth-century
valley of death. The lines of passage produced by this excavation are likened
to ‘imprints like abstract signs, an abstraction that begins with walking and
with tracing the best path with one’s steps.’5 The experiential nature of this
place is fundamental to any understanding of this place.
In addition to cutting a passage through the site, this excavation
serves to put architectural design into a more dynamic relation with the
natural landscape. This dialectic is visible in the structures, whose penetration
deep within the clefts of the valley betrays a kind of strife between design
and nature; these structures reflect the forces, tensions, or stresses inherent in
the meeting of architecture and landscape. Terraced over two or three strata,
they double as retaining walls that keep earth and rock from caving inward
(figures 1-2). To either side of the main passage through the cemetery,
evocatively anchored in the hillside, are the columbaria or horizontally
oriented walls of loculi (figures 3-4). Further along, in the lower regions of
this cemetery, are the family mausolea, cavernous chambers set into walls of
piled rock fixed in place by iron bar meshwork (figures 5-6).
Instead of rising up out of the ground, these structures appear
coextensive with the landscape. Submerged in the earth, they could be said to
give new meaning to the eighteenth-century architect Etienne-Louis
Boullée’s often-cited idea of a ‘buried architecture.’ In Boullée’s vision of a
buried architecture, ‘low, sunken lines’ not only intimate how ‘a part is
concealed in the earth,’ but give rise to thoughts or feelings appropriate to the
space of death.6 Yet, in high contrast with this French academician’s funerary
design, which envisioned a static and disembodying architecture of arresting
form and material permanence, this place immerses visitors in an temporal,
kinesthetic and embodying experience. Any experience of this space
depends on our bodies moving through it. It makes no pretension to being
removed from human experience, and from time and the elements. On the
contrary, it spurns the language of timelessness and eternity that is usually
reserved for such a monumental landscape.
Not seeking to annul the temporality of this world, this place is
implicated in time. As it draws the surrounding landscape into view, it
simultaneously draws the temporal processes and transformations occurring
in that landscape into itself. One might say that the physical or natural flux
previously characteristic of this site is remembered in the scattering of the
______________________________________________________________
wooden planks, embedded in the paths and plazas, so as to suggest the flows
and eddies of the river that once ran through it, not to mention the traffic of
bodies moving through it now. What is more, this place invites time to take
its effect upon it, to work at the gradual dissolution of architecture, to hasten
its return to nature. Indeed, time is made visible here, in everything from the
weather-stained concrete of the structures, through the iron furnishings that
have turned earthy orange with rust, to the vegetation that has begun to
spring up through various nooks and crannies.
That this is indeed the architects’ intention is corroborated by certain
statements that they make about their project, which imply a preoccupation
with the tropes of ruin and decay. ‘To use this place,’ they write, ‘is to make it
disappear, like leaves on a wooden pavement or rain washing soil towards the
bottom of the cutting.’7 Inside the space opened up by this cutting in the earth, one
has the feeling that it is just a matter of time before this cemetery disappears,
interring itself in the earth. The view of the roof garden above the area of the
chapel offers an intimation of this future oblivion. This is a future in which
the earth and rock held in place by the retaining walls has spilled inward, in
which the vegetation - which has already begun to encroach on the area - has
overgrown or covered over all traces of architecture’s impression in the
landscape. To quote the architects:
Not until the trunks have grown up and the treetops have filled
out will they obstruct the view of the incision from above and,
as it were, reconstruct the original level of the ground. The
entire cemetery will then seemingly disappear under the earth
and form a kind of communal grave, covered by a green
gravestone.8
In this and other progressive examples of late twentieth-century

funerary design, the quasi-romantic tropes of ruin, erosion and overgrowth
might be said to signal a rejection of monumentality and almost become like
visual analogues of forgetting (or indications, at the very least, of a more
profound understanding of the relationship between forgetting and memory).
This may not always be explicitly intended, but may instead be the result of a
rejection of monumentality, or a more self-reflexive definition of this. We
could easily point to several examples of this, not forgetting the interesting
movement towards ‘green’ cemeteries in the United Kingdom and elsewhere,
where there is little or no monumentalising expression; but I want here to
consider briefly two of the more remarkable practices within progressive
twentieth-century landscape architecture, which would seem to have
employed the tropes of erosion, ruin and vegetal overgrowth as visual
analogues of forgetting within the space of death.
These are the architectural practices of Alvar Aalto in Finland in the
mid-twentieth century and Carlo Scarpa in the Veneto (Italy) throughout the
1960s and 70s. In their funerary landscapes, there is arguably manifest a
______________________________________________________________
greater appreciation for the dialectical relation between memory and
forgetting, and a greater validation of forgetting than previously seen in
western architectural culture. It is through their manipulation or negotiation
of - or their reference to - the natural landscape that these architects invest the
space of the dead with greater meaning, vis-à-vis changing ideas about
memory and forgetting.
Aalto’s personal fascination with erosion, ruin, subsidence and over-
growth comes to the fore in a lot of his work from the 1930s onward, but
most palpably in his funerary design. His unbuilt project for a cemetery in
Lyngby-Taarbaek (1951-52) (figure 7), just north of Copenhagen, is a case in
point. Here, as in several projects from the mid-1930s, including the Virtanen
grave (Hietaniemi Cemetery, Helsinki, 1937) (figure 8), Aalto was
experimenting with what historian Richard Etlin has since termed ‘the space
of absence.’9
In regard to smaller scale projects like the Virtanen grave, where
one corner of the Carrara marble headstone has been carved away to
resemble the imprint or impression of an antique vase or urn (or two such
vessels), Aalto’s biographer Göran Schildt referred to this negative space or
negative form as ‘negative sculpture.’10 In the Virtanen grave and Lyngby-
Taarbaek cemetery, this negative form or ‘space of absence’ might be taken
as a reflection of the architect’s interest in the aesthetics of erosion, as found
in buildings and landscapes alike, inasmuch as they can both reveal the
deleterious marks of time, age and ruin.
This interest in erosion was evident in Aalto’s sketches - from the
1920s onward - of the relics or remains of antique monuments, fragments of
columns, ruinous amphitheatres. The elevation for the Lyngby-Taarbaek
cemetery not only recalls his sketches of weathered hilltop towns, but
predates a 1953 sketch of the tiers of the Theatre of Dionysus carved into the
rock below the Parthenon in Athens.
For this burial ground, he was to exploit the topographic lines of
contour in the landscape, creating two dales terraced with graves and linked
with paths lined by terra-cotta pipes streaming water down into two reflective
pools, thus making for an Elysian (or Lethean?) atmosphere (figure 9). These
earthy cavity-like spaces were to be presided over by an acropolitan complex
of courts, crematoria and chapels with diagonal roofs and ivy draperies, all
bounded by high walls clad in white ceramic tile, and thereby evoking the
Mediterranean image of a Città dei Morti (figure 10). The whole would have
no doubt appeared as a long lost settlement reclaimed by nature and
transformed into a green burial ground.
______________________________________________________________
Figure 7. Alvar Aalto: Perspective Sketch, Cemetery and Chapel of Rest,

Lyngby-Taarbaek (Competition Entry), 1951-52, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
(Copyright: Alvar Aalto Foundation, Finland).
Figure 8. Alvar Aalto: Virtanen Tomb, Hietaniemi Cemetery, Helsinki,

Finland, 1937 (Copyright: Author’s Photograph).
______________________________________________________________
Figure 9. Alvar Aalto: Site Plan, Cemetery and Chapel of Rest, Lyngby-
Taarbaek (Competition Entry), 1951-52, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
(Copyright: Alvar Aalto Foundation, Finland).
Figure 10. Alvar Aalto: Elevation Study, Chapel of Rest, Lyngby-Taarbaek

(Competition Entry), 1951-52, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark (Copyright: Alvar
Aalto Foundation, Finland).
______________________________________________________________
The landscape is used in a rather different but no less evocative way
in Scarpa’s funerary designs two decades later, where erosion and water are
also key ingredients. From 1969 onward, this Venetian architect was at work
on his little burial garden for the wealthy Brion family in San Vito di Altivole
(near Asolo) (figures 11-12) still partly incomplete on his death in 1978. This
is a tranquil pastoral landscape, open to the public, bounding two sides of the
older village cemetery.
Its lawns host a labyrinthine network of fragmentary structures - the
propylaeum; the arcosolium; the tempietto; etcetera - interlinked by
corridors, sunken paths, reflective pools and water rills redolent of Venice’s
cityscape, but also perhaps of the mythical waters of forgetfulness. Whilst
these buildings may still appear monumental, a statement by Scarpa suggests
that the physicality of the architecture was of less importance than the landscape
and the cypresses that are so symbolic of the space of death: ‘I could have
suggested planting a thousand cypresses - a thousand cypresses are a large natural
park, and a natural event, in the years ahead, would have produced a better effect
than my architecture.’11
Scarpa brings the natural landscape - or nature more generally - into his
funerary design via the use of water and the tropes of erosion, submergence and
vegetal overgrowth. According to some of his critics, erosion is figured in his use of
serrated or stepped mouldings (the zigzag of which is the Egyptian hieroglyph for
water) of an asymmetrical or incomplete nature, and other fragmentary forms,
especially when these are situated in proximity with, or even immersed in, water.12
This is evident at the burial garden, as well as in other projects that make use of
water, be it the intriguing pool in the forecourt to the Istituto Universitario di
Architettura di Venezia (IUAV) of 1968 (figure 13) or the floating base of the
Monument to the Partisans of the Resistance (1969) on the Riva di Sette Martiri at
the edge of the Giardini Castello (figure 14).
Coloured by his Venetian heritage, by Ruskin’s vision of a sinking or
festering Venice, and by his involvement in restorations in which he would have
come face to face with the mortal or transient character of architecture, Scarpa
created some of the most absorbingly meditative spaces that twentieth-century
funerary architecture has seen.
I have only had space here to briefly describe the funerary
landscapes of Aalto and Scarpa. Further examples could just as easily be
pointed to here. Consider, for instance, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s proposed
extension to Urbino’s San Bernardino Necropolis (1974), resembling an
archaeological dig, or a colossal tumulus quaked open to reveal the long lost tombs
of a vast city of the dead - or a dead city of the Pompeian sort - along its fault lines.
Or Hans Dieter Schall’s urnfield for the Singen Woodland Cemetery at Hohentwiel
(1983-86), where the postmodern classicism of an ashen white complex of broken
structures (portico, columbaria, temple and columns) surrounds a cloistral square
with an artificial pond that contains a sunken miniature model of a ruined city. Or
Fumihiko Maki’s crematorium for Nakatsu (Japan, 1997), a grouping of disparate
______________________________________________________________
buildings partially sunken or leaning, set in a graveyard where burial mounds
dating to the third century have been excavated.
Figure 11. Carlo Scarpa: Tempietto, Brion Family Cemetery, San Vito di
Altivole, Italy, 1969-78 (Copyright: Author’s Photograph).
Figure 12. Carlo Scarpa: Tempietto, Brion Family Cemetery, San Vito di
Altivole, Italy, 1969-78 (Copyright: Author’s Photograph).
______________________________________________________________
Figure 13. Carlo Scarpa: Courtyard, Istituto Universitario di Architettura di

Venezia (IUAV), Venice, Italy, 1968 (Copyright: Author’s Photograph).
Figure 14. Carlo Scarpa: Monument to the Resistance Partisans, Castello

Gardens, Venice, Italy, 1969 (Copyright: Author’s Photograph).
______________________________________________________________
Since the late eighteenth century perhaps, architects - be it John
Soane in the nineteenth century, or Albert Speer, Louis Kahn and James
Stirling in the twentieth - have reflected on the mortality of their projects; but
such reflection becomes all the more meaningful in respect to the creation of
a space of death. Such evocative landscapes as those that we have looked at
here might lead one to ask about the extent to which these places are intended
as a metaphor for the work of oblivion. Indeed, the image of ruinously eroded
monuments, weathered and overgrown, gradually sinking into the earth and
disappearing, would seem to invalidate them as loci of memory, and lead one
to ask whether they are not meant instead as concrete analogues of forgetting.
Yet, the following question would then arise: why is it that the emphasis should be
placed on oblivion or forgetting here, in what is traditionally taken to be places of
remembrance? In order to respond to more philosophical questions like this, it will
be helpful to recount how forgetting has been conceptualised in the recent
discourse on memory and forgetting, and especially in Marc Augé’s tribute to
forgetting called Oblivion, published not so long after the Park Cemetery of
Igualada was inaugurated. (It should be clear by now that we are talking about
memory and forgetting in abstract philosophical terms here, rather than in terms of
their collective or personal experience, which are of more interest to the disciplines
of sociology and psychology.)
In the recent literature on memory and forgetting, certain age-old
assumptions have been contested, including the assumptions that forgetting is
merely the destructive antithesis of memory, and that it can be thwarted by
material things like monuments. Against Ruskin’s claim that ‘we cannot
remember without her [architecture],’ it has been increasingly argued that
memory is not something merely stored in material objects or places, but
something rather less stable, perpetuated instead by social practices, customs
and rituals.13
This is a theme that runs through the essay collection, The Art of
Forgetting (1999), in which the editors Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler
provocatively claim in their introduction: ‘architecture is and has been above
all an art of forgetting.’14 Some authors have indeed suspected that
monuments or monumental sites do very little to stall forgetting, that they do
very little to perform what Ruskin called ‘the funeral offices of memory.’15
These authors have gone so far as to imply that monuments promote
forgetting instead, inasmuch as they stand in for the work of memory,
relieving onlookers of having to do the hard work themselves.16
Within these contemporary debates, moreover, some authors have -
in line with intellects like Nietzsche, Proust and Borges before them -
adopted a more affirmative view of forgetting, recognising that memory (if
not life itself) hinges on the capacity to forget. For instance, whilst David
Gross has explored the cultural value of memory and forgetting in his book,
Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (2000),
Harald Weinrich has charted this interesting dialectic through nearly all of
Western literature in his 1997 study, Lethe: The Art and Critique of
______________________________________________________________
Forgetting. To be sure, none of these authors are suggesting that an
affirmation of forgetting ought to cancel out the value of remembrance or the
memories of things that we hold dear. For as Augé states: ‘To praise forgetting is
not to revile memory.’17 On the contrary, it is to acknowledge how these terms are
inextricably bound up one another, how ‘remembrance is the woof and forgetting is
the warp,’ as Walter Benjamin put it in his essay on Proust.18
In view of the funerary landscapes I have considered here, I have
found Augé’s meditations on forgetting (or the work of oblivion) to be the
most resonant, not least because of his observation that the dialectic of
memory and forgetting is analogous to that of life and death. Oblivion, he
reminds us, is conventionally defined as the loss of remembrance, i.e., the
loss of an impression in the mind. As this impression is a negative rather than
positive form (merely present as a trace or the sign of an absence), oblivion
might - he suggests - be construed as its ‘natural continuation.’19 Oblivion is
what corrodes these impressions over time, preventing memory from
becoming saturated beyond functional capacity, and allowing certain
impressions to stand out over those that are receding. In other words,
oblivion is what names the processes of discrimination or selection that
effectively determine what remains in memory:
But what is interesting is that which remains. And what

remains - remembrances or traces . . . is the product of an
erosion caused by oblivion. Memories are crafted by oblivion as
the outlines of the shore are created by the sea. . . . In short,
oblivion is the life force of memory and remembrance is its
product.20
Continuing with this geophysical metaphor, Augé goes on to describe erosion

as a process of attrition that does not so much spoil the defining features of a
landscape as continually remould them anew, in ways that make legible the
transformations there. He writes:
For millennia on end, the ocean has blindly pursued its

work of eroding and remodelling: to those who know how
to read, the result (a landscape) really has to have
something to say about the resistance and weakness of the
shore, of the nature of its rocks and its soil, of its faults and
its fractures, and whatever else . . . something of the
complicity between earth and sea, which have both
contributed to the lengthy work of elimination of which the
present landscape is the result.’21
The processes of attrition at work in nature - while analogous to the work of

oblivion - are the very processes that reshape that landscape into a record of
something else.
______________________________________________________________
This image of erosion – as a metaphor for oblivion - is tangible in
the burial grounds we have looked at here. The architects of the Park
Cemetery of Igualada speak of their excavation of the site as a process of
‘artificial erosion.’22 This term suggests that the excavation is prompted by
the processes of natural erosion, which have over the millennia sculpted the
outlines of this river valley. It suggests that excavation and erosion, recovery
and loss, memory and oblivion, are understood to succeed one another,
dynamically, in a relation of cyclical recurrence. This place expresses that
cyclicality, as it does the cycles of decay and regeneration, life and death
even. Its excavation - whilst generating ‘a path of coming and going’ - serves
to put architecture and landscape into a relation of strife.23 Yet, in doing so, it
points ahead to the resolution of this strife, over time, in and through
processes that will erode the imprint of architecture on the landscape - only to
make way, in turn, for another excavation, one that will dig up the ruins and
make a new imprint in the ground.
In this essay, I have sought to elucidate what it means to define the
cemetery - in the words of the architects Miralles and Pinós - as ‘a
relationship with the landscape and with forgetting.’ This rather surprising
definition calls for an explanation, I believe, given that such places as the
cemetery have traditionally been at odds with forgetting. Whilst those who
write about memory have been more appreciative of the dynamic role
forgetting plays in memory, architectural culture has until more recently
neglected the importance of forgetting, especially in the construction of
monumental spaces like the cemetery, and persisted in regarding memory as
something that can be kept alive by objects or places rather than in the rituals
surrounding them. This is hardly surprising. For architecture - and especially
monumental funerary architecture - has almost always been regarded in
Western culture as a proof of immortality, a bulwark against forgetting - as
Ruskin believed.
The projects examined here exemplify a departure from the
traditional model for a place of commemoration, and the pursuit of a more
self-reflexive relationship with forgetting - with the forgetting without which
memory is meaningless! They express a relationship with forgetting through
the physical properties and transformations of the landscape in which they
are situated. The image of the architectural landscape’s erosion - the
metaphorical potential of which was recognised by Augé in his treatise on
oblivion - is rendered tangible here, in a manner that would invest the space
of the cemetery with new meaning. Whilst memorial parks and burial gardens
have often exploited the metaphorical or allegorical suggestiveness of the
landscape, in order to bestow meaning on human loss, they have rarely if
ever done so in this manner and degree. Here, to quote the architects Miralles
and Pinós one last time, ‘a cemetery is not a tomb’; it is not merely a
utilitarian or functional space for the disposal of corpses. It is, or rather could
be, a landscape where forgetting is confronted in a more positive light.
______________________________________________________________
Notes
1
J Ruskin, ‘The Lamp of Memory,’ in The Seven Lamps of Architecture,
Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1855, p. 324.
2
L Mumford, ‘The Death of the Monument,’ in The Culture of Cities, Secker
and Warburg, London, 1940, p. 434.
3
E Miralles, ‘Igualada Cemetery, 1985-96,’ in Enric Miralles: Works and
Projects, 1975-1995, B Tagliabue (ed), Monacelli Press, New York, 1996, p.
52.
4
A Zabalbeascoa, Igualada Cemetery, Phaidon Press, London, 1997, p. 19.
5
Miralles, 1996, p. 52.
6
E Boullée, ‘Architecture, Essay on Art,’ in Boullée and Visionary
Architecture, H Rosenau (ed), S de Vallée (trans), Academy Editions,
London, 1974, p. 106.
7
Miralles, ‘Miralles-Pinós: Park and Cemetery, Igualada, Barcelona, Spain,’ GA
Document, vol. 32, 1992, p. 80.
8
Miralles, ‘From what time is this place?,’ Topos: European Landscape Magazine,
vol. 8, September 1994, p. 102.
9
See R A Etlin, Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its
Legacy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p. 180. Chapter seven, ‘The
Space of Absence,’ mentions Aalto’s project, and a few other modern examples.
10
G Schildt, Alvar Aalto: Complete Catalogue of Architecture, Design and Art,
Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 289. The carving in the Villa Mairea fireplace
- contemporary with the Virtanen grave - is most indicative of ‘negative sculpture.’
Stuart Wrede argues that it reflects an interest in erosion and ruin, (‘An
Archaeology of Aalto,’ Progressive Architecture, vol. 58, April 1977, pp. 57-67).
See also G Baird, Alvar Aalto, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970, p. 12, who
describes Aalto’s works from the 1930s onward as ‘metaphors of ruins.’
11
C Scarpa, ‘A Thousand Cypresses,’ in Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works, F
Dal Co and G Mazzariol (eds), Rizzoli, New York, 1985, p. 286.
12
See especially Manfredo Tafuri, who writes that the fragmentary stepped
moulding in Scarpa’s architecture ‘seems to have been derived from a kind of
emblematic distillation of a figurative process much prized by Scarpa: that of
erosion,’ in ‘The Architecture of Carlo Scarpa,’ in Carlo Scarpa, p. 85.
13
Ruskin, p. 324.
14
A Forty and S Küchler, The Art of Forgetting, Oxford, Berg, 1999.
15
Ruskin, p. 357.
16
J Young, ‘Monument/Memory,’ in Critical Terms for Art History, R S
Nelson and R Shiff (eds), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, p.
240. Young observes that ‘to the extent that we encourage monuments to do
our work for us, we become that much more forgetful.’
17
M Augé, Oblivion, M. de Jager (trans), University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2004, p. 14.
______________________________________________________________
18
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust,’ in Illuminations, H Arendt (ed),
H Zohn (trans), Fontana Press, London, 1973, p. 198.
19
Augé, p. 17.
20
Ibid., pp. 20-21.
21
Ibid., p. 20.
22
Miralles, 1994, p. 102.
23
Miralles, 1996, p. 52.
Bibliography
Augé, M., Oblivion, trans. M. de Jager, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2004.
Baird, G., Alvar Aalto, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970,
Benjamin, W., ‘The Image of Proust,’ in Illuminations, H Arendt (ed), H

Zohn (trans), Fontana Press, London, 1973.
Boullée, E., ‘Architecture, Essay on Art,’ in Boullée and Visionary

Architecture, Rosenau, H., (ed), S de Vallée (trans), Academy Editions,
London, 1974.
Etlin, R. A., Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994.
Forty, A., and Küchler, S., The Art of Forgetting, Oxford, Berg, 1999.
Miralles, E., ‘Miralles-Pinós: Park and Cemetery, Igualada, Barcelona, Spain,’ GA

Document, vol. 32, 1992, p. 80.
Miralles, E., ‘From what Time is this Place?,’ Topos: European Landscape
Magazine, vol. 8, September 1994, p. 102.
Miralles, E., ‘Igualada Cemetery, 1985-96,’ in Enric Miralles: Works and

Projects, 1975-1995, B Tagliabue (ed), Monacelli Press, New York, 1996.
Mumford, L., ‘The Death of the Monument,’ in The Culture of Cities, Secker
and Warburg, London, 1940.
Ruskin, J., ‘The Lamp of Memory,’ in The Seven Lamps of Architecture,
Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1855.
Scarpa, C., ‘A Thousand Cypresses,’ in Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works, F Dal
Co and G Mazzariol (eds), Rizzoli, New York, 1985.
______________________________________________________________
Schildt, G., Alvar Aalto: Complete Catalogue of Architecture, Design and Art,
Academy Editions, London, 1994.
Wrede, S., ‘An Archaeology of Aalto,’ Progressive Architecture, vol. 58, April
1977, pp. 57-67). Young, J., ‘Monument/Memory,’ in Critical Terms for Art
History, R S Nelson and R Shiff (eds), University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1996.
Zabalbeascoa, A., Igualada Cemetery, Phaidon Press, London, 1997.

Morbid Family Pride: Private Memorials and Scots Law
Hilary Hiram
Abstract:
A series of legal decisions in the first half of the twentieth century turned on
the validity of testamentary directions for memorials to the testator and his or
her family. In all of the cases, the testators had no close heirs to whom they
would otherwise have been expected to have left their fortunes but, in each
case, the courts held the provisions of their wills were extravagant, excessive
and eccentric; accordingly, they were contrary to public policy and struck
down. The chapter examines the legal reasoning employed by the courts and
goes on to examine the theories of Freud and Volkan in arguing that the
courts were expressing their intuitive sense that the testators’ directions were
a manifestation of pathological mourning that ought not to be legally
permissible.
Key Words: Wills, succession, Scots Law, private memorials, Freud,

Volkan, mourning, commemoration.
*****
1. Private Memorials and Scots Law

The law of succession regulates the manner in which property that
belonged to a deceased person during life is distributed after death. It may be
seen as, on the one hand, supporting, and on the other, discouraging, a
pathological connection between mourner and deceased. Reflecting the
growth of an idea of ownership, which includes the power to dispose of
property in any way whatsoever on death,1 a major reforming trend in Scots
law since the end of the nineteenth century has been towards the idea of
testamentary freedom. This more full-blooded conception of ownership was
challenged in a collection of six cases involving wills making provision for
private memorials during the first half of the twentieth century, with the
courts holding in each case that the provisions ought to be struck down. In
each case, a testator had directed by will that a significant proportion of his or
her estate on death be used to memorialise himself or herself and members of
his or her family in perpetuity. In three cases, the testator directed that large
commemorative structures be erected; in the fourth, that a house be converted
for commemorative purposes. The fifth involved provision for private acts of
commemoration and the sixth - the only one permitted by the courts –
provided for a memorial to be created for a group.
There have been no similar cases since the last in the series was
decided in 1968; this may because the culture of commemoration has
100 Morbid Family Pride
______________________________________________________________
changed markedly or because the law has limited the extent to which they
may be funded, at least after the death of the testator if not during life, or
both, but the reasons for the relatively short lifespan of memorial litigation
are not the focus of this essay. Rather, it focuses on the cases as a means of
exploring how the law has reflected and articulated social attitudes towards
and psychological reactions to death and mourning. It considers, first, the
legal reasons given by the judges in setting limits to the scale and type of
memorial. The striking aspect of the memorial cases is that the reasoning of
the judges was made in terms almost as extravagant as the proposals they
struck down while the legal reasons they relied on remain obscure. At the
same time, the language used appears to articulate insights underlying the
rather weak reasons that were used to justify them. The second part of the
chapter focuses on what these underlying insights might be, linking the
reasoning for the decisions by the court to Freud’s distinction between
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perennial, or pathological, mourning.
Historically, the law has encouraged ‘pathological’ mourning by
prohibiting or circumscribing bequests of certain things, particularly to land
and things relating to place, both by restricting the power of an individual to
bequeath his or her property outside of the family and by conflating the
identities of ancestor and heir. For example, until the late nineteenth century
land could not be bequeathed to a person outside the family at all and, still,
certain rights possessed by the deceased during life will accrue automatically
and immediately to the beneficiaries of his or her estate on death. But, almost
simultaneous with the statutory abolition of forced heirship in relation to
land2 - whereby only a person’s legal heir, selected on the principle of
primogeniture, could inherit - was the introduction by the courts, through the
memorial cases, of public policy as a source of law in relation to succession
as a means of protecting the very principles which the reforming legislation
had set out to change. But while it is possible that the courts were fighting a
rearguard action against social change, it seems equally plausible to suppose
that other, more deeply nuanced factors were involved.3
This essay argues that succession law, in both its facilitative and
prohibitive modes, regulates the transmission of property from the dead to the
living in a manner that resonates with psychological reality, a reality
articulated only tangentially but always coherently. The Scots memorial cases
are exceptionally graphic examples of the way in which the law articulates,
defines and manages the psychic relationships between the living and the
dead through property and the rules of succession.
2. The Scots Law Memorial Cases

The first cases in the series were McCaig v University of Glasgow4
and McCaig’s Trustees v Kirk Session of United Free Church of Lismore5
Hilary Hiram 101
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and the combined decisions set down the fundamental principles that were to
be applied thereafter.6 The two cases were closely related and concerned the
estates of two siblings, John and Catherine McCaig, and the dispute in each
centred on their respective testamentary provisions for the erection of towers
and statues on Battery Hill overlooking Oban Bay on the west coast of
Scotland. The parties to the disputes included the executors of John’s and
Catherine’s estates and, variously, the University of Glasgow, the Free
Church of Scotland, the Town Council of Oban and, potentially at least, the
whole Gaelic-speaking community. It was not for lack of funds that
McCaig’s Tower (or ‘McCaig’s Folly’, as it is known locally) remains to this
day incomplete7 but because the law refused to permit the expenditure
required.
John McCaig was the second son of a farmer on Lismore, an island
in the Inner Hebrides roughly opposite Oban.8 Such was the success of his
career that in 1897 he began on Battery Hill above Oban the construction of a
structure intended as a scaled-down replica of the Coliseum in Rome9 but he
only got as far as building the outer walls of a tower before his death in
1902.10 Neither he nor any of his seven siblings had married and five of them
had predeceased him. In his will, he bequeathed annuities to his two
surviving siblings, Duncan and Catherine,11 but the bulk of his estate vested
in the University of Glasgow as his trustee,12 with the obligation to
administer the trust for the purpose of erecting statues of himself, his parents
and his siblings on top of the tower at a cost of not less than £1,000 each.13
The statues were to be made by Scottish sculptors and modelled after
photographic likenesses of each member of the family. If there were no such
photographs available, they were to have a family likeness to either his own
photograph or any other of his siblings. ‘Artistic towers’ were also to be
constructed at prominent intervals on the site, with the purposes of
encouraging ‘young and rising artists’ (and giving prizes for the best statues
and towers), and to provide work for Scottish stonemasons during the winter
months.
Duncan survived John by only a month and died intestate without
issue; in consequence, Catherine succeeded Duncan as John McCaig’s heir-
at-law and was thus entitled to his whole estate should it become intestate,14
an eventuality that could occur only if Catherine were to challenge
successfully the provisions of his will. Her claim that the provisions of John’s
will were invalid was based on the argument that they were void from
uncertainty and contrary to public policy because they excluded her rights as
heir without conferring a beneficial interest on anyone else, including the
public.15 The court at first instance found nothing wrong with the provisions
of the will and rejected her arguments. Catherine appealed, and each of the
four judges in the Inner House upheld her claims. The provisions for the
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memorial were struck down as invalid, the estate became intestate and
Catherine succeeded to the whole of it as her brother’s heir-at-law.
Catherine died in 1913, also without issue, and, notwithstanding her
own successful challenge to her brother’s will, had made a will and codicil in
very similar terms to his. It gave equally detailed directions for the
completion of the tower and statues; these were to be of bronze, to cost not
less than £1,000 and to be arranged in a very particular way within the tower
precincts. Statues of her father and mother were to be placed in the centre
facing the doorway, those of herself, her brothers Donald and John on her
father’s right hand side and those of her brothers Duncan and Dugald and her
sisters Jane and Margaret on her mother’s left. A statue of her brother Peter,
who had died in infancy, was to be placed opposite the statues of her mother
and father. If there was difficulty in finding a likeness of her father, his statue
was to be modelled on a likeness of John. The tower and the statues were to
be maintained in all time coming. She also left directions for the building of
the McCaig Memorial Institute and created a fund to further the study of
Gaelic language and literature and to support the education of Gaelic-
speaking students. Out of any surplus income were to be made bequests to
the United Free Church of Lismore and the Town Council of Oban.
In McCaig’s Trustees v Kirk Session of United Free Church of
Lismore,16 the beneficiaries of the charitable bequests challenged the
provisions of the will relating to the tower and statues, on the basis that they
were contrary to public policy. The court held that, apart from matters of
detail (such as the fact that while John McCaig had wished the statues to be
erected on the top of the tower while his sister preferred them to be placed at
the centre of the circular walls), there was no substantial or legal distinction
between the two cases. The provisions of Catherine’s will conferred no
benefit on anyone and their ‘unreasonable, extravagant, and useless
character’ rendered them invalid on the grounds of public policy.
A similar approach was taken in the subsequent case of Aitken’s
Trustees v Aitken.17 Here, the testator was a farmer and merchant from
Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, who had twice been elected as the town’s
Champion at the riding of the marches or ‘common riding’. In his will, he
had directed that one of his properties on the High Street be demolished and a
‘massive equestrian bronze statue of artistic merit’ be made of himself and
erected on the site, at cost of no less than £5,000. He had taken some steps to
effect the project before his death but, by 1925, no statue had been erected
due to the outbreak of the First World War. The town council had passed a
resolution that the scheme was a ‘fantastic proposition’ and should not be
approved and the trustees of Mr. Aitken’s estate, together with the heir-at-law
and the residuary legatees, sought the direction of the court as to whether the
provision was valid. If it were not, the fund set aside for that purpose would
enlarge the share available to the heirs. The court struck down the provision
Hilary Hiram 103
______________________________________________________________
as contrary to public policy, citing the McCaig cases as authority for the
proposition that such a ground of invalidity was competent. The provisions
were just as ‘unreasonable, extravagant and useless’18 and, although the
testator’s object was not in itself unreasonable, the method prescribed by him
for carrying it out was irrational and destructive of that object and thus
contrary to public policy. It took from the combined McCaig cases the legal
proposition that if testamentary directions are unreasonable as conferring
neither a patrimonial benefit upon anybody nor a benefit upon the public or
any section thereof, the directions are invalid.19
In Lindsay’s Executor v Forsyth20 the executor of the deceased
applied to the court for direction as to the validity of two provisions made by
the testator: £1,000 was to be invested for each of two purposes: to place
flowers on her and her mother’s joint grave every week and for masses to be
said bi-weekly for them both. If one or both of the directions were invalid,
the sum would fall to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh as residuary legatee.
The court held that the direction for flowers conferred no benefit on anyone
and was too indefinite and unreasonable to receive effect. It was
‘extravagant’ and, while it was not the heir but the residuary legatee whose
right was divested, no beneficial interest was created in any third party.
Rather, the direction was intended merely to perpetuate an act begun by the
testatrix. The direction for masses did not come into this category. Although
expressed to be for the benefit of particular individuals, it was in substance an
endowment of a particular church for an act of its public worship. While it
would be invalid to direct that the masses be said for these individuals in
perpetuity, the general and paramount purpose of the gift was a general
religious one and was, accordingly, a good bequest in perpetuity.
Lastly, in Sutherland’s Trustees v Verschoyle,21 the testator had
directed that her trustees purchase and maintain a building to be called
‘Sutherland House’ for the purposes of displaying what she called her
‘valuable art collection,’ worth about £12,000 and to be called ‘The
Sutherland Collection’, and a residential caretaker be employed to look after
it. While not finding the collection to be a ‘mass of junk’, the court held it to
be ‘a heterogeneous conglomeration with no group of material sufficient to
provide or illustrate any historical or educational theme such as might attract
scholar, student or even the general public.’22 Any public benefit derived
from the bequest would be minimal, so that to implement it would be ‘grossly
extravagant and so completely wasteful as to be contrary to public policy.’
3. The Courts and the Legal Basis of Restraint

The decision by the courts in each case to declare the provisions for
memorials invalid constitutes a restraint on the fundamental principle of
freedom of testation in Scots law; that is, that an individual is free to dispose
of his or her property after death in any way whatsoever, provided that it is
______________________________________________________________
not illegal, immoral, impossible, uncertain or contrary to public policy.
Failure to provide for a particular person or class of relative is not considered,
for example, to fall in to any of these exclusions, with the result that, unlike
in English law,23 it is not possible to challenge a will on this basis.
Accordingly, provided that both the form and manner in which a will has
been executed are valid - the will is made in the correct legal form by a
person of full legal capacity, free of the influence of others - a person is free
to bequeath his or her property in any way of his or her choosing, as long his
or her wishes are capable of being given effect to in terms of the criteria set
out above.
In the memorial cases, the courts held that the provisions were
contrary to public policy and therefore void, notwithstanding that the wills
themselves were valid. Until then, the only other instances of substantive
provisions held to be contrary to public policy were those that attempted to
restrict the freedom of a beneficiary to an excessive degree or where a
putative beneficiary had unlawfully killed the person from whom the
succession opened.24 The innovation in McCaig v University of Glasgow was
in formulating the rule so as to include within its ambit provisions that it
considered simply to be wasteful, provisions that meant that the testator
might as well have thrown his money into the sea.25 The idea that
extravagance and immodesty would invalidate an otherwise valid deed was,
until these cases were decided, unknown in law. This new formulation of the
principle of public policy appears at first sight, therefore, to contravene the
cardinal principle that must guide the courts in interpreting and giving effect
to the terms of a will: namely, that intestacy must be avoided wherever
possible.26 In these cases, intestacy was induced, specifically in order that the
testators’ heirs would become entitled to the estate under the rules of intestate
succession,27 in preference to applying the fundamental rule of testate
succession that the stated intentions of a testator must, provided they can be
ascertained, given effect to. Thus, in these cases, intestacy - and, in
consequence, the vesting of rights in living individuals - was to be preferred
over the testators’ desires to have the money spent, in effect, on themselves.
The strictly legal justifications are, however, unconvincing. The
reasoning is tainted by moral opprobrium and social condescension towards
the testators involved. The courts set limits on the degree to which
individuals may dispose of their money after death so that directions for
anything except ‘customary and rational’28 monuments were to be invalid.
However, the decisions of the individual judges demonstrate radically
different interpretations of the law and radically different understandings of
its more technical aspects. It is these features that have made the cases some
of the most puzzling in Scots law.
The court at first instance in the first McCaig case had pointed out
that the rights of heirs arise only on intestacy and also took the view that ‘a
Hilary Hiram 105
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truster may . . . do what he wills with his own, provided his testamentary
disposition is expressed with sufficient clearness, and is not contrary to
public policy or immoral.’29 In dismissing Catherine’s claims that the terms
of her brother’s will came within the sphere of this exclusionary category, the
Lord Ordinary took the view that:
the money was Mr M’Caig’s, and the project is neither, so

far as I can see, contrary to public policy or morals, nor
more vague and indefinite in scope than some of the
schemes which have been held to be within the recognition
of the law . . . though the scheme may be characterised as
eccentric or of doubtful wisdom, no ground occurs to me
upon which it can be held to be illegal.30
The higher court took a very different view. The deceased was ‘eccentric’,
his directions were ‘crazy’ and the proposals would open the family to
‘ridicule.’ According to the Lord Justice Clerk, the testator was ‘possessed of
an inordinate vanity as regards himself and his relatives, so extreme as to
amount almost to a moral disease, though quite consistent with sanity.’31 In
the view of Lord Kyllachy:
if it is not unlawful, it ought to be unlawful, to dedicate by

testamentary disposition, for all time, or for a length of
time, the whole income of a large estate - real and personal
- to objects of no utility, private or public, objects which
benefit nobody, and which have no other purpose or use
than that of perpetuating at great cost, and in an absurd
manner, the idiosyncrasies of an eccentric testator. I doubt
much whether a bequest of that character is a lawful
exercise of the testamenti factio.32
While the court doubted that the provisions were consistent with public
policy, it was unclear what public policy required and it instead based its
refusal to give legal effect to the will on what it called the ‘safer’ ground of
an established rule of law, albeit itself founded on public policy (and without
precedent); namely, that a will must be based on ‘what is right and just as
between the varied interests in a deceased’s succession.’ Its justification
relied on what it asserted was the ‘elementary doctrine’ that there could be
‘no divestiture of a man's heirs or next of kin, except by means of beneficial
rights, validly constituted in favour of third parties.’33
When, only seven years later, the court was obliged to consider the
validity of Catherine’s own, very similar, testamentary provisions,34 its
formulation was bolder. This time, the provisions were invalid simply on the
______________________________________________________________
ground that they were simply contrary to a conception of public policy which
prevented the indulgence of self-glorification to an excessive degree at the
expense of third parties. The provisions of Catherine’s will conferred no
benefit on anyone, including the public, and their ‘unreasonable, extravagant,
and useless character’ rendered them invalid. While some judges claimed that
it was settled law that the rights of heirs could not be defeated except where a
beneficial interest had been created in a third party, others considered this to
have either no foundation in authority or to be entirely illogical.
The judges in neither case agreed on the matter of whether
displacement of the heir was a ground of invalidity and even those who were
strongly of this opinion gave no justification for the application of the
doctrine in the particular case, seeming to suppose that the extravagant nature
of the bequests was self-evident. Accordingly, citation of authority was
‘perhaps superfluous’ and, although going on to cite it anyway,35 the judges
failed to explain how it was that it was relevant. However, three separate
reasons for striking down the provisions for the towers and statues were
given. First, they involved ‘a sheer waste of money.’ Lord Guthrie asserted
that while the provisions were not illegal in the sense of being contrary to any
express rule of the common law or contrary to any statute, the question of
whether it is contrary to the principle of public policy depended on the degree
to which it is contrary to public policy. Secondly, it was ‘a dangerous thing . .
. to gratify the vanity of testators, who have no claim to be immortalised.’
Lord Guthrie took the view that, even if the statutes were faithfully to
represent the people commemorated impossibility in the case of the infant
Peter - and even if anyone went to see them:
it would not be to admire them but to laugh at them, and

perhaps to philosophise on the length to which morbid
family pride may drive an otherwise sensible person . . .
[t]hey would turn a respectable and creditable family into a
laughing stock to succeeding generations.36
Had Catherine confined her scheme to reasonably priced statues of her

parents only, it may have been permissible, the matter of appropriate
commemoration being one of degree; however, she had ‘gone over the
line.’37 The court, therefore, knew how to protect their reputation better than
the McCaigs’ themselves and preventing the completion of the towers and
statues would be to do them a service. It seemed that the court considered it
its duty to protect the testators from the consequences of committing the
ultimate in vulgarity. Thirdly, the project would benefit no one except those
connected with the carrying out of the work, persons for whom Catherine,
unlike her brother, had otherwise shown no concern for in her will.38
Hilary Hiram 107
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Following this, the way was clear for Lord Sands in Aitken’s
Trustees39 to decide that the crux of the matter was simply whether
testamentary provisions were such as should be given effect to: ‘the question
with an heir resolves itself into this; is the deceased intestate as regards this
estate in respect that, though he purported to dispose of it, he did not do so in
a manner which the law regards as effective?’40 Lord Sands considered that
the aim of the testator in providing for the memorial was that the memory of
his family and his own name and memory ‘should be held in honour in
Musselburgh’41 and that this aim should be understood in light of the fact that
‘interest in one’s ancestors and pride in one’s ability to trace them for many
generations, and in their respectability if not their distinction, is a typical, and
in some respects a not unlaudable, trait of the Scottish character.’42 However,
in contrast to the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, an architectural memorial
‘to a citizen whose name is held in honour throughout the world,’ a
monument ‘to the memory of an obscure tradesman who had happened to be
captain of the orange colours, with a massive statue of the tradesman in the
centre of it’ would be bound to elicit negative reactions:
[W]ould the citizens of Edinburgh have regarded this

monument with pride, would they have cherished the
memory of that tradesman with affection, would their
hearts have glowed with honest civic pride in the orange
colours whenever their eyes rested upon the stately pile? I
think not. I think they would have regarded the monument
and the statue with loathing as making the city ridiculous
and . . . would have wished the monument and the statue
and the orange colours with the memory of the deceased
tradesman all at the bottom of the Forth.43
Erection of the statue would ‘cause the memory of the testator and his family
to stink in the nostrils of the community’ and ‘make their town and their
ancient civic customs ridiculous.’44 Lord Ashmore simply gave up trying to
make sense of the reasoning in the McCaig cases and relied, in the end, on
the fact that the town council, with the support of the community, opposed
the statue and that its erection would involve ‘the destruction of a valuable
rent-producing property.’45
In the following case Lindsay’s Executor v Forsyth,46 there was no
question of the rights of any third parties being materially displaced. The
testator had directed that flowers be laid on the graves of herself and her
‘beloved mother,’ and that masses said for them both bi-weekly, both in
perpetuity. The direction for flowers was held to be excessive, since it did not
confer a benefit on anyone; the direction for the masses was valid since the
payment made for such masses ‘form portion of the ordinary income and
______________________________________________________________
means of livelihood of priests, and are generally [distributed] amongst priests
whose circumstances are such that they stand in need of the assistance
offered.’47 Given that this would be a charitable outcome, the direction was
held to be valid, notwithstanding the fact that John McCaig’s auxiliary object
in his scheme, of providing work for stonemasons during the winter months,
was held to have been too vague.48
Part of the court’s concerns in the previous cases related to
permitting private memorials to be permanent features of the landscape. The
prospect of Scotland ‘being dotted with monuments to obscure persons who
happened to have amassed a sufficiency of means, and cumbered with trusts
for the purpose of maintaining these monuments in all time coming’ was
‘little less than appalling.’49 Private memorialisation of this kind was
inappropriate, possibly immoral, without some kind of claim to public or
national distinction, particularly when, as they saw it, it was dressed up in the
guise of philanthropy. Lord Guthrie in McCaig v United Free Church of
Lismore50 observed that, with the exception of John McCaig and his brother
Major Duncan McCaig:
none of the persons whose statues are proposed to be

erected within the M'Caig Tower did anything in or for the
town of Oban or county of Argyll to make it natural that
their memory should be perpetuated, for all time, in a
building which, from its commanding situation and unusual
design, is the most conspicuous object in Oban.51
Modest memorials would be permitted but anything further would be to ‘take

things outside the ordinary methods for commemorating respectable but
undistinguished people.’52 Accordingly, the view that only the nationally
distinguished were worthy of immortalisation, and thus their memorials
immune from public ridicule, was upheld where, in Campbell Smith’s
Trustees v Scott, the memorial in question was to the Royal Scots Regiment.
The freeing of capital for productive use seemed to be as much a part of the
reasoning as the abstract principle that property must pass for the benefit of a
person or a body of persons rather than remaining locked up for objects that
appeared to lack either virtue or logic. Further, persons of humble
background ought not to presume to impose their likeness or trumpet their
somewhat parochial achievements in public. But notwithstanding the court’s
pithy comments and reliance on obscure authority, the nature of the policy
objectives articulated by the court appear, on the face of it, insufficiently
robust to justify their becoming part of the law and the legal justifications for
constraining testamentary freedom remain obscure.
If the purpose of the law of succession is to transmit rights in
property from the dead to the living, these testators were attempting to turn it
Hilary Hiram 109
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on its head by continuing, in effect, to enjoy their property post mortem.
Thus, not only was the erection of memorials to oneself and one’s family
illegitimate where the individuals had no claim to greatness; the erection of
such memorials to oneself, with the consequent denial of benefit to any living
person, seems to have been regarded as an act of such profound narcissism
that it could not receive legal sanction. Clearly, the court considered the
character of these single, childless individuals as morally and emotionally
deficient, lacking in the ability to recognise their own modest claims to the
attentions of posterity and unable to regulate their inflated vision of their own
and their family’s place in the world. Legal intervention to restrain displays
of such ‘morbid desire for self-glorification’53 in stone, bronze and floral
tribute (though prayer could be allowed, if only to help support financially
the religious house charged with its performance) was required to re-direct
resources towards living persons.
It seems clear that the desire of these individuals for
memorialisation on a grand scale was driven by social ambition and a
somewhat defensive pride in their own achievements; if no-one else would
remember their mercantile and philanthropic success, they would do so
themselves. At one level, the reviling by the court of the motives of George
Aitken and the McCaig siblings in particular can thus be read as snobbish
attacks on the arriviste pretensions of provincial tradesmen. At another, the
provisions of Catherine McCaig’s will must have seemed particularly
shocking during the First World War, when bereavement was on a mass scale
and individuals yet unable properly to commemorate their dead. Moreover, in
preventing attempts to situate physically prominent representations of private
memory within the landscape, the court upheld traditionalist ideas of what
may appropriately be included within the collective memory of the
community.54 However, in each of the cases, the testators had been
predeceased by all of their close relatives and were not survived by any
spouses of children. In in addition to defining and expressing the proper
limits of both personal and social forms of commemoration, the courts’
decisions can also be understood as giving effect to more nuanced dynamics
underpinning the testators’ individual psyches. Were the courts performing a
normalising function in insisting that commemoration, as a vehicle for
mourning and, by extension, self-mourning, be conducted within certain
bounds if certain norms of individual and social psychology were to be
observed?
4. Memorials as Linking Objects

Freud believed that mourning and melancholia are related but
distinct phenomena. While each has the same immediate cause - the loss of a
loved person - their characteristics depend on the degree of narcissistic
identification that the individual has with that other.55 In this scheme, the
______________________________________________________________
ways in which individuals react to loss will depend on the degree to which
the boundary between the self (ego) and other is indistinct or partial.56
Whereas mourning is the processing of grief, with the mourner gradually
relinquishing the lost object57 by withdrawing his or her libido from him or
her and placing it somewhere else, the state of melancholia is, by contrast, of
a different order:
An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular

person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight
or disappointment coming from this loved person, the
object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the
normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object
and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something
different … the free libido was withdrawn into the ego
[and] served to establish an identification of the ego with
the abandoned object.58
The result of such a narcissistic identification with the object is that,

in spite of the conflict with the loved person, a conflict at the root of
narcissistic identification, the love-relation need not be given up. Like a
cannibal, the narcissistic person wants to incorporate the object by devouring
it.59 Rather than occurring as the result of withdrawal from the object as part
of the process of separation that is mourning, melancholia occurs when
narcissistic identification with the lost person is such that he or she is never
given up but must remain embedded within the individual’s ego. Like
mourning, melancholia is a reaction to the real loss of a loved object but it is
the ambivalent, love-hate nature of the relationship with the object that
characterises the pathological state of the melancholic. In melancholia, the
object is never really lost; indeed, its whole purpose is to ensure that the loss
is never fully experienced, far less accepted. The key characteristic of
melancholia is narcissistic identification with the object in substitution for
erotic cathexis into the other. Melancholia is thus rooted in narcissism. The
result is, in Freud’s encapsulation, that whereas ‘in mourning it is the world
that seems poor and empty to the mourner, in the case of melancholia, it is
the melancholic’s ego - his or her sense of self - which appears diminished’.60
Drawing on and developing Freud’s distinction between mourning
DQG PHODQFKROLD WKH SV\FKLDWULVW DQG SV\FKRDQDO\VW 9DPÕN 9RONDQ61 posits
the existence of a position somewhere between the two states: that of
pathological, or perennial, mourning. In developing his analysis, he relies
crucially on the concept of ‘object’ in the double sense: that of inanimate
thing and as target of the individual psyche. While the mourner gradually
loosens his ties with the lost person and the melancholic struggles with deep
ambivalence between love and hate of both self and the lost object, the
Hilary Hiram 111
______________________________________________________________
perennial mourner remains frozen in an intermediate position where
assimilation to the ego of the object is not total (as in melancholia) but where
the lost object is displaced onto a tangible or ideational object which
performs the function of mourning instead, thus ensuring that identification
between mourner and mourned remains,62 even while the ego withdraws from
the actual lost object. Such partial assimilation to the ego of the object entails
the perennial mourner investing ‘some inanimate object with symbolism that
establishes it as a link between himself and the dead individual.’ This
‘linking object’ provides an internalised ‘meeting point’ or linkage between
the lost object and the mourner and externalises aspects of the work of
mourning by splitting the mourner from the mourned.63
By displacing the libido from the object to its auxiliaries - typically,
old letters, keepsakes, portraits, glasses, bits of hair, clothing and other
intimate possessions64 - linking objects function in ways similar to relics and
mementoes65 and to things that act as reminders of the lost object. The closer
a thing is to the body, physically or psychically, the more likely it is that the
possessor will regard it as forming part of his or her self (or ego).66 The
linking object is usually selected on the basis of its proximity to the deceased,
either in time and place or in corporeal terms. It may be a body-related thing:
personal belongings of the deceased such as clothing or jewellery or else
something with which the person ‘extended his senses,’ such as a camera.
Alternatively, it might involve representations of the person such as a
photograph or it could be anything that happened to be near at hand when the
death was discovered by the mourner.67
Volkan’s linking objects are not confined to inanimate objects. They
may take the form of beliefs, such as the presence of spirits. They may take
the form of what Volkan terms ‘living linking objects,’ involving the use of a
person as the living representation of another or the possession of an animal,
such as a dog, that belonged to the deceased. The final category is the
‘created linking object’. Here, the mourner creates something invoking the
lost other, which then functions as the meeting place between mourner and
deceased: Volkan gives the example of a painting made by the mourner after
the other’s death. The memorials discussed in this essay fall into the same
category in that they are also represent the lost person, in a medium selected
by the mourner as appropriate to that function.
The linking object is similar to D. W. Winnicott’s ‘transitional
object,’68 though the function of what Winnicott calls ‘the first not-me
possession’ is precisely the reverse of the function of the linking object. The
first not-me possession works to make bearable the separation of infant from
mother, not to provide the means of the other’s retention. The similarity
between the linking object and the transitional object lies in the ‘magical’
properties of the object and its function in controlling the tie to the other:
______________________________________________________________
in striking contrast to the original transitional object or the
adult fetish, in both of which the inclusion of aspects of
body image are necessary, the texture, odor, portability,
and visibility of the linking object are not important. The
linking object is in a sense a higher-level symbol, its
relation to body parts more ideational . . . [it] also contains
anger and is similarly an instrument for controlling the
expression of anger, especially anger that arises from
narcissistic hurt relating to separation panic.69
Whereas an important quality of the transitional object is that it is usually soft

and imbued with organic or sensory matter, the linking object is generally
constructed of some hard, and more durable, material. In contrast to the use
to which the child puts the transitional object, the linking object is typically a
thing which is not actually used but is, in fact, stored or hidden, to be brought
out only from time to time as required. In mourning, the mourner is
comfortable with putting such objects to appropriate use; the pathological
mourner cannot do so. Instead, he or she feels ‘a kind of taboo about wearing
or utilising the keepsake.’70 The linking object is thus the locus of a
continuing relationship with the dead person, not used but, rather, enjoyed
privately. In a way similar to that in which fetishes are used, people suffering
from pathological grief use certain, symbolised objects as ‘tokens of triumph
over the loss.’71 Such actions are a form of regression, resulting from a total
or partial inability to mourn normally.
Memorials fulfil the functions that Volkan attributes to linking
objects. They can be categorised as created linking objects, involving things
that are created to evoke lost objects. In the cases of the McCaigs and Aiken,
these included physical representations of the body. Both McCaigs directed
expressly that the statues of their family members were to be based on
photographic likenesses. In the cases of Sutherland and Lindsay, they
involved personal possessions and, in the case of the flowers, symbolic
objects. The masses for the mother and daughter can be understood as
ideational linking objects, the ongoing expression of certain beliefs and
aspirations.
In each of the cases except, apparently, that of George Aitken, the
memorials were to family members who had predeceased the testator as well
as to the testator him- or herself. However, with the exception of Miss
Lindsay, who wished merely that the practices of remembrance she had
followed during her life be continued after her death, none of the testators
took more than preparatory steps towards creating the memorials during life,
when they could easily have done so without hindrance from the law. In
Catherine McCaig’s case, the court pointed out that neither she nor her
brother took any practical steps to commission the statues during their lives -
Hilary Hiram 113
______________________________________________________________
or, as the court put it, ‘they could not bring themselves to part with the
money during their own lifetimes’72 The fact that they were to be created
only after the testators’ own deaths would not seem, immediately, to
correspond with the theory that they were to function as linking objects. If
their purpose is to provide linkage between mourner and mourned, this
purpose must fail when the object is not created until the mourner is himself
dead and thus the link would seem, on any account, to be broken irrevocably.
This apparently curious failure to get started during life on what were, in fact,
major undertakings may make sense only if it is considered that it would be
only on death that the ‘magical’ purposes for they were planned could occur
and it is remembered that part of the function of the linking object is not that
it is used or even acknowledged openly but that it instead be kept safely for
private enjoyment. Thus, the memorials could not be started during life since
this would negate their purpose; instead, their more appropriate function was
to exist only as an idea, to be actually constructed when their originators were
themselves dead.
The case of George Aitken seems, at first sight, to be anomalous. He
dedicated the memorial entirely to himself and seemed to have no express
intention of linking himself to his lost objects. However, narcissism is the
primary characteristic of both Freud’s melancholic and Volkan’s pathological
mourner and it is of the essence that a subject is unable to distinguish himself
or herself from his or her object - he or she does not, indeed, consider his or
her objects in terms other than as an extension of himself or herself, inflating
his or her own importance as compensation for a total absence of feelings of
self-worth. The inability of each of the testators to form close bonds with
others was highly symptomatic of this condition and suggests strongly that, in
each of their cases, the testators were unable to distinguish between
memorialising themselves and memorialising their deceased relatives. Thus,
the purpose of the memorials was to provide a concrete means of integrating
themselves with their objects and death was the moment at which this could
occur. George Aitken’s memorial was an expression of pure narcissism, the
act of a person who had regressed to a state, common to all children, where:
[T]he laws of nature and society shall be abrogated in his

favour; he shall once more really be the centre and core of
creation - ‘His Majesty the Baby’, as we once fancied
ourselves. The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the
parents, which they never carried out - the boy shall
become a great man and a hero in his father’s place.73
In its rejection of his grandiose scheme to immortalise not only himself but
also, crucially, the Aitken name75 - thus enshrining the heroic fantasies of the
testator - the court appears to have understood at an intuitive level that
______________________________________________________________
precisely the same motivation as that of the McCaig siblings was at work
and, for precisely the same reasons, refused to give it legal sanction. As in
their cases, George Aitken’s desire to erect a massive statue of himself was
an attempt to gain admiration, both for himself and for his family, in a
manner that had been denied them during life.
5. Conclusion
The question being asked by this chapter is this: why should it be
that these few memorial cases represent the only instances in which the
courts have expressed unanimous and total antipathy towards the provisions
of testamentary dispositions? Where and how far law and morality ought to
meet is a big question and the cases raise interesting questions about the
proper limits of legal intervention in private lives; but it does not follow that
judicial unease with the provisions of these wills, even if based on the
intuition that something unhealthy was involved, leads directly to it being a
legitimate function of the courts to correct it. Freud’s conceptualisation of
melancholia provides the context in which not only the actions of the
testators but also the views of the courts may be understood.
The McCaigs and Mr. Aitken most clearly illustrate the projection of
the libido into themselves and exhibit the narcissism of melancholia.
Volkan’s theory of linking objects describes those in an intermediate position
between mourning and melancholia where the lost object is relinquished up
to a certain point, but displaced onto an inanimate thing to be retained,
controlled and taken back in, to soothe the diminished ego as required. The
wills of Miss Sutherland and Miss Lindsay, while rather less financially
extravagant, were functionally identical, in that they also called for the
perpetual remembrance of themselves and their families. That all of them
died single and without any closely related heirs seems highly relevant; their
primary relationship was rooted in their childhoods and, once they died, there
would be no other to mourn them as they mourned their parents. The
memorials were to operate as perennial linking objects: refusal by the court to
permit them appears as an articulation of the intuition that the law ought not
to condone pathological acts; and, while not entirely unsympathetic, their
ridiculing of the testators’ objectives mirrored the difficulty and discomfort
which an observer of its manifestations often feels when confronted with an
individual acting out similar rituals.
The courts appear to have been attuned, if not directly to Freud and
the emerging influence of psychoanalysis in public and private life,76 at least
indirectly to the spirit of the age. The judges discovered something
pathological in the testator’s bequests but had neither vocabulary nor, except
in the nebulous form of public policy, authority, to articulate it. Public policy
can, in this light, be understood as the vehicle for expressing intuitive insights
that resonate with the times and embedding them within the law. Although
Hilary Hiram 115
______________________________________________________________
different sorts of not necessarily coherent legal and moral justifications were
given for striking down the provisions, the fundamental reason was that these
wills were, by their very nature, antithetical to the logic of the Scots Law of
Succession. Its purpose is to transfer to one or more living persons the
property of a deceased; the very words ‘succeed’ or ‘inherit’ make this clear.
Further, the very structure of rights in succession, in preferring descendents
to ascendants in the acquisition of rights of the deceased, is precisely to
provide benefits to future generations.77 Trusts created and designed for the
pure or primary purpose of perpetuating the memory of the deceased or his or
her relatives fail to satisfy the law’s intrinsic aims. Hence the decisions of the
court achieved congruence between, on the one hand, the intuitive sense that
property is for the living and, on the other, the requirements of the law of
succession.
Notes
1
Ownership need not, logically, include the power to dispose of property on
death as one of its incidents: see A M Honoré, ‘Ownership’ in Oxford Essays
in Jurisprudence: A Collaborative Work, A. G. Guest (ed), Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1961.
2
Titles to Land Consolidation (Scotland) Act 1868.
3
The law is still labouring to reconcile the conflicting demands of family
responsibility and personal freedom. For example, the absolute right of a
surviving spouse or civil partner to a fixed share of a deceased’s moveable
property has existed in Scots law since time immemorial: see J C Gardner,
The Origin and Nature of the Legal Rights of Spouses and Children in the
Scottish Law of Succession, W Green & Son, Edinburgh, 1928. It remains
popular with the general public (see Attitudes Towards Succession Law:
Findings of a Scottish Omnibus Survey (MRUK Research, 2005) paras 2.14 –
2.24) but this can be contrasted with the recent recommendations of the
Scottish Law Commission that these rights should be radically reduced (see
Scottish Law Commission, Report on Succession (Scot Law Com No 215),
2009, Part 3.
4
McCaig v University of Glasgow 1907 SC 231.
5
McCaig’s Trustees v Kirk Session of United Free Church of Lismore 1915
SC 426.
6
There is a separate body of case law relating to graves, internment and
ownership of corpses, aspects of which may be considered as overlapping
with the memorial cases but it is not directly relevant to the issues under
examination here.
______________________________________________________________
7
Around £10,000 of capital and £2,000-3,000 of income per year was
available to complete it. This represents around £1 million plus around
£250,000 per year respectively, updated using GDP deflator.
8
The censuses of 1851, 1861, 1881, 1891 and 1901 record him as draper’s
assistant, Inspector of Poor, Merchant, Banker and Gas Works Director
respectively. ‘Banker’ is recorded on his death certificate.
9
It measures about 200 metres in circumference and between 9 and 14 metres
high and sits at the top of the hill overlooking Oban Bay with views of the
Sound of Lismore. In McCaig’s Trustees v United Free Church of Lismore
1915 SC 426 at 431 Lord Salvesen considered, however, that it resembled
more closely ‘the outer wall of a Spanish bull ring.’
10
Images of the Tower may be found easily on the internet: see for example
http://www.freefoto.com/preview/806-20-8024?ffid=806-20-
8024&k=McCaig's+Tower.
11
The annuities were worth £300 a year, around £30,000 at today’s prices
using GDP deflator.
12
Acceptance of the office of trustee appears to have been the quid pro quo
for the direction that a John Stewart McCaig Chair be established at the
University. As a result of the provisions of his will being struck down, it
never was.
13
Around £100,000 at today’s prices using GDP deflator.
14
See M Meston, The Succession Scotland Act 1964¸ W Green/Sweet &
Maxwell, Edinburgh, 5th edn., 2002, Chapter 1.
15
She had also raised an earlier action against the University of Glasgow on
the basis of essential error: McCaig v Glasgow University Court (1904) 6F
918.
16
SC 426.
17
Aitken’s Trustees v Aitken 1927 SC 374.
18
Ibid. at 385.
19
Ibid. at 381.
20
Lindsay’s Executor v Forsyth 1940 SC 568.
21
Sutherland’s Trustees v Verschoyle 1968 SLT 43.
22
As in Re Pinion [1965] 1 Ch 85.
23
In English law, certain persons may apply to the discretionary power of the
court under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependents) Act 1975.
24
See H Hiram, The Scots Law of Succession, Tottel, Edinburgh, 2nd edn,
2007, paras 2.21 -2.23, 7.3, 10.11-16.
25
McCaig v University of Glasgow 1907 SC 231 at 242 per Lord Kyllachy.
26
Ewen v Ewen’s Trustees (1830) 4 W & S 346 at 359; Macduff v Spence’s
Trustees 1909 SC 178 at 184; Forsyth v National Kidney Research Fund
[2006] CSIH 35.
Hilary Hiram 117
______________________________________________________________
27
On the meaning of heirs in intestacy see M Meston, The Succession
(Scotland) Act 1964, W Green/Sweet & Maxwell, Edinburgh, 5th edn., 2002,
Chapter 1. The ranking of persons entitled to succeed on intestacy remains
almost the same under the current law except that the Succession (Scotland)
Act 1964 abolished primogeniture and now includes surviving spouses and
civil partners as persons entitled to succeed, ranking before more remote
relatives: see Hiram, Chapter 4.
28
McCaig’s Trustees v Kirk Session of United Free Church of Lismore at 436
per Lord Guthrie.
29
Reproduced in McCaig v University of Glasgow 1907 SC 231 at the note p.
236.
30
As reported in McCaig v University of Glasgow 1907 SC 231 at 236.
31
Ibid. at 239 per the Lord Justice Clerk.
32
Ibid. at 242 per Lordy Kyllachy.
33
Ibid.
34
SC 426.
35
McCaig v University of Glasgow 1907 SC 231 at 240, citing: Bell
Principles, ss 1682, 1691, 1692; Ross v. Ross Mor. 5019; Gardner 20 D. 105;
Neilson 22 D 646; Cowan v Cowan 14 R 67.
36
SC 426 at 438 per Lord Guthrie.
37
Ibid. at 437.
38
Ibid. at 436.
39
Aitken’s Trustees v Aitken’s Trustees 1930 SLT 509 (OH).
40
Ibid. at 380 per Lord Sands.
41
Ibid. at 382.
42
Ibid. at 383.
43
Ibid. at 383.
44
Ibid. at 382.
45
Ibid. at 385 per Lord Blackburn.
46
Lindsay’s Executor v Forsyth 1940 SC 568.
47
Ibid. at 573 per Lord Justice Clerk (Aitchison).
48
McCaig v University of Glasgow 1907 SC 231 at 243 per Lord Kyllachy.
49
McCaig v United Free Church of Lismore 1915 SC 426 at 433 per Lord
Salvesen.
50
Ibid. at 438 per Lord Guthrie.
51
Ibid. at 435.
52
Ibid. at 436.
53
Ibid. at 435.
54
M Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, London, 1992.
______________________________________________________________
55
Freud had explored narcissism shortly before completing his paper on
mourning and melancholia: S Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction,’ in
The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, J Strachey (ed), vol 14,
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1917 [1914], pp.
69-102. The concept was to become crucial to the development of later object
relations theory; for an account, see, for example, N Symington, Narcissism:
A New Theory, Karnac Books, London 1993.
56
S Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, in The Standard Edition of the Works of
Sigmund Freud, J Strachey (ed), vol 13, Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, London, 1912-13, pp. 1-255.
57
It should be noted that ‘object’ within psychoanalysis refers not to an
inanimate thing but, rather, to the target, or object, of the instinct and the
them is used ‘in the philosophical sense of the distinction between subject
and object’: see L Gomez, An Introduction to Object Relations, Free
Association Books, London, 1997, p. 1.
58
S Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ in The Standard Edition of the
Works of Sigmund Freud, J Strachey (ed), vol 14, Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1917 [1915], pp. 243-258: pp. 248-9.
59
Ibid. p. 249.
60
Ibid. p. 246.
61
V Volkan, ‘More on Linking Objects’, in Perspectives on Bereavement, I
Gerber et al (eds), Arno Press, New York 1979; V Volkan, ‘Not Letting Go:
From Individual Mourners to Societies with Entitlement Ideologies’, in On
Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, L G Fiorini et al. (eds), International
Psychoanalytical Association, London, 2007, pp. 90-109; V Volkan, Linking
Objects and Linking Phenomena, International Universities Press, New York,
1981.
62
Fiorini, p. 100.
63
Volkan, 1981, p. 373.
64
G H Pollock, ‘Mourning and Adaptation,’ International Journal of Psycho-
Anaysis, vol 42, 1916, pp. 341-361.
65
B Jones, Design for Death, Deutsch, London, 1967.
66
D McClelland, Personality, Sloane, New York, 1951.
67
The things used by Volkan’s pathological mourners as linking objects are
the same sorts of things that have been associated with the idea of an
extended self, defined by Russell W. Belk as ‘self plus possessions’ (R Belk,
‘Possessions and the Extended Self,’ Journal of Psychology, vol. 47, 1959,
pp. 13-23). They are also similar to Ernst Prelinger’s hierarchy of things
based on subjects’ perceptions of them as self or not-self (E Prelinger,
‘Extension and Structure of the Self,’ Journal of Psychology, vol. 47, 1959,
pp. 13-23). In descending order, Prelinger’s hierarchy is: body parts;
psychological or intra-organismic processes (such as conscience or itching on
Hilary Hiram 119
______________________________________________________________
the sole of the foot); personal identifying characteristics and attributes (such
as age or occupation); possessions and productions (such as a watch or toilet
articles); abstract ideas (such as, the morals of society); other people (such as
mother, father, neighbours); objects within the close physical environment
(such as dirt on the hands, furniture in a room); the distant physical
environment (such as the house next door, the moon). The school of symbolic
interactionism goes further; possessiveness, whereby something is identified
as ‘mine,’ denotes identification with ‘me,’ so that not only may objects act
as reminders and confirmers of our identities, our identities may reside in
objects more than they do in individuals: see E D McCarthy, ‘Toward a
Sociology of the Physical World: George Herbert Mead on Physical Objects,’
Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 1984, pp. 105- 121.
68
D W Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,’
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 53, 1953, pp. 89-97.
69
Volkan, 1981, pp. 371-2.
70
Volkan, 1979, p. 195.
71
Volkan, Typical Findings in Pathological Grief,’ The Psychiatric
Quarterly, vol. 44, 1970, pp. 231-50: p. 247.
72
SC 426 at 434 per Lord Salvesen.
73
Freud, ‘On Narcissism,’ p. 91.
75
See the quotation from Lord Sands in Aitken at 382.
76
The second McCaig case was heard in 1915, the same year in which Freud
wrote ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ though it was not published until 1917.
77
Although the deceased’s property may not necessarily vest in an individual
directly on his or her death, vesting of property in trustees will be valid only
if the purposes for which the trust was created, either private or public, are
valid. Whether the purposes are private (for example, to maintain a class of
beneficiary) or public (for example, animal welfare) they must actually
transmit property to an ultimate beneficiary; if this fails, the property will
revert to the estate of the deceased to be distributed to beneficiaries in
intestacy under the provisions of the Succession (Scotland) Act 1964.
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Memory, Mourning and Landscape in the Scottish
Mountains: Discourses of Wilderness, Gender and
Entitlement in Online Debates on
Mountainside Memorials
Avril Maddrell
Abstract:
This essay examines the impact of the recent trend of spontaneous
memorialisation in the Scottish mountains. These acts and marks of
remembrance are indicative of meaning-making and remembrance on the part
of the bereaved within a landscape which had significance for the deceased or
has for themselves. Online debates about these memorials shows how this
growing practice comes into conflict with those who treasure the Highlands
for their wild qualities, separate from the built and domestic environment, as
well as a place of re-creation through embodied challenge and performance.
Analysis of these debates show gendered assumptions about what constitutes
wild places, what performances and who are acceptable there, and who is
entitled to arbitrate on these matters. Implicit and explicit gendering and
definitions of insider and outsider underpin significant threads of this multi-
stranded engagement.
Key Words: Mountain, memorial, Scotland, contested, landscape,

performance, gender, wilderness.
*****
1. Introduction
This essay is part of wider research on ‘Mapping Grief’ that
explores the ways in which we can apprehend, interrogate and understand
more of the spatiality of bereavement and mourning in contemporary society
in the British Isles.1 It is my contention that mourning is an inherently spatial
as well as temporal phenomenon, experienced and expressed in/through
corporeal and psychological spaces, virtual communities and physical sites of
memorialisation. I am interested in individual mappings of bereaved people’s
experiences of significant spaces/places and how these change over time;
how they are expressed through performance in space, written as corporeal,
landscape or literary texts; and how these individual emotional maps impact
on particular places. In the instance of mountainside memorials, as with other
forms of spontaneous or informal memorials such as those for road traffic
accident victims, there is an intersection - and potential clash between the
‘mourners’ and other landscape ‘users’ who may have a differing sense of
124 Memory, Mourning and Landscape in the Scottish Mountains
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place, aesthetic values, environmental ethics and the boundary between
public / private.
Mountainside memorials are one aspect of recent trends to create
domestic private memorials in public spaces and clearly exemplify a
relationship between memory, mourning and landscape. In this essay the
focus is on memorial performance in, and the marking of, the Scottish upland
landscape and how this has generated a new dimension to these spaces as
contested landscapes. This contestation has been expressed online, in the
press and in other forms of interest group media and appears to have acted as
a lightning rod for debates concerning expression of private grief in public
spaces, and the definition of wild places and appropriate behaviour therein.
2. Grief, Belief and Landscape: An Intermeshing

Departure rites and associated memorialisation are a part of
everyday life and part of the ‘life activities’ through which people experience
landscape. The raising of memorials represents part of ‘the work of
mourning.’2 These memorials can take material or immaterial form, but
usually include evoking or inscribing the name of the deceased and important
aspects of their life and/or identity - including place association. In Western
society memorials have been recognised as part of the prehistoric and historic
tradition of honouring the dead. In the modern era they have been regulated
by religious and civil authorities in terms of location, form and discursive
framing. However, the intersecting (but not always coincidental) social
processes of reduced attendance at formal religious services, the increased
practice of bodily disposal through cremation and a growing desire for and
sense of entitlement to individualised rites has led to increased and
unregulated spontaneous ritual and memorialisation in the UK.3
Within geographical thought and practice the distinction between
space and place is important; while ‘space’ refers to an area or physical
container, space becomes place through interaction and signification. As
Nigel Thrift articulates, places have meaning.4 The significance of this
distinction within geographical thought and practice is borne out in the
everyday practice of memorialisation and remembrance as a growing number
of the bereaved seek to gain meaning through acts and material expression of
remembrance in places which were meaningful to the identity of the
deceased. Sometimes these identity ‘homes’ might coincide with domestic
home, e.g. when ashes are scattered in the garden, but the place where
identity is fulfilled might be an idealised place or place of leisure such as a
favourite park, holiday destination, football ground or golf course. And for
those whose identity was bound up with outdoor pursuits in, or simply the
aesthetics of, the Scottish highlands, this meaningful place has become a
locus for departure rites and memorialisation.
Avril Maddrell 125
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The material spaces associated with death and remembrance are
becoming more varied, in part as a result of the distancing of many from
spaces of formal religion, but also as a result of what Sarah Hallam and
Jennifer Hockey have described as an ‘informalisation of emotional
expression’ which is increasingly being expressed in public rather than
private contexts, coupled with what Clark has described as a growing sense
of the entitlement or ‘authority’ on the part of the bereaved to express
themselves, as they see fit.5 They might also be seen as representing a kind of
‘Third Space’ for remembrance, between both the physical spaces and
associations of home and cemetery, between short-lived and permanent
memorial.6 These evolving patterns of remembrance and memory making
will be considered in case studies of online debates about mountain
memorials below.
3. Memorials and Ash Scattering in the Mountains: Contested

Sacred Landscape
The raising of personal ‘spontaneous’ memorials on mountains and
roadsides are a relatively new part of the lexicon of memorialisation in the
UK with its largely Protestant tradition.7 However, in recent years it has
become an increasingly widespread cultural practice, going hand-in-hand
with the practice of informal ash scattering of cremated human remains. Ash
scattering services are offered by a wide range of organisations and
businesses such as Clevedon Pier in Somerset, Anglesey Charter fishing trips
in Wales and ‘Forever Caledonia’ which repatriates ashes to Scotland for the
Scottish diaspora from around the world.8 In contrast to the rest of the EU, in
the UK there is very little juridical or practical limitation as to where these
human ashes can be kept, buried or scattered, although some religious
authorities regulate practice. In the UK, the general lack of regulation allows
for maximum choice in disposal of ashes, facilitating freedom of expression
concerning place attachment, either on the part of the deceased or the
bereaved, exemplified by Clevedon Pier: ‘If you have a loved one that always
found Clevedon Pier to have a special place in their heart, the pier can be
used to hold a Scattering Service in their memory or to scatter ashes from the
end of the pier by prior arrangement.’9 While the latter is part of the a range
of services offered by the Pier and can be supplemented by a bronze
memorial plaque, the wider practice of informal ash scattering and/or the
fixing of spontaneous memorials in public spaces has engendered a contested
landscape of bereavement and memorial practices. This contestation is
marked in the case of memorial practices in the British uplands, and more
specifically in the Scottish mountains, where there is a clash between
different perspectives on place meaning and attachment.
Before turning to the issue of contemporary mourning practices in
the uplands, it is important to sketch something of the ‘mountain community’
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who are both initiators of and respondents to the practices under discussion.
They are made up of a broad alliance of local residents, landowners,
charitable trusts, stakeholder groups and leisure users. The latter can be
further broken down into tourists, walkers, mountaineers, frequent/
infrequent users etc.. Yet these user groups can be both overlapping and
further segmented. Walkers in the Scottish hills have been identified as a
performance-based ‘collective outdoor community,’ but one which is
grounded on very different leisure identities: those who see themselves as
continuing a historical tradition, those who see themselves as expressing a
form of patriotic engagement with the Scottish landscape, those undertaking
a bodily challenge, those experiencing personal empowerment and those
seeking phenomenological experience, i.e. the ‘walkers’ alone represent ‘a
wide variety of performances of both personal and collective identities.’10
When considering why people use their often precious leisure time
to walk and climb mountains, it is necessary to understand what they are
seeking through this activity, and how this inflects their view of nature and
the landscape, their own identity and other co-users of that landscape.
‘Landscape’ can be read and understood in multiple ways, as a physical
environment, as ‘view,’ work of art, rural or urban place. The varying and
shifting meanings of landscape need to be seen in the context of local
historical, social, cultural, economic and political practices. ‘No landscape is
a natural landscape, no matter how original, natural or exotic it may appear.
There is always a cultural narration – writing and reading involved … it has a
grammar and a glossary, and it bears intertextual references.’11
Within geographical literature three conceptual perspectives on
landscape dominate scholarly debate: landscape as capital amenity/resource,
landscape as ‘text’ and landscape as interactive site of embodied performance
and practice. Each of these potentially overlapping perspectives can be seen
to relate to particular user groups, e.g. the tourist visiting a National Park for
its aesthetics and leisure opportunities; the farmer who reads it as ‘taskscape’,
a palimpsest of generations of labour; and the fell walker or mountaineer who
seeks fulfilment through physical challenge and achievement. The recent
shift from focus on landscape as ‘text to site of embodied performance’ has
added greater sensitivity to the role of practice in making and interpreting our
experience of landscape and nature.12 Eeva Jokinen and Soile Veijola further
argue that a traditional view of landscape ‘is too flat, too one-dimensional a
concept, to apply to the space created for and by bodily movement and
relation.’13 For those who focus on performative body practices,14 nature and
landscape ‘cannot be understood outside performance,’ but in turn this
performance has to be contextualised by an understanding of landscape
tradition.15 In the British context ‘conventions of the romantic landscape
canon were routed through a personal, emotional connection with nature’s
sublime qualities.’16
Avril Maddrell 127
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The notion of the sublime within this European romantic tradition is
closely tied to perceptions of wild places. While the existence of ‘wilderness’
in the British Isles is debated,17 the absence of vast tracts of wilderness
results in pockets of ‘wild places’ being highly valued by those with a
predilection for landscapes with minimal evidence of human presence. This
group has a low tolerance threshold for evidence of human management or
even presence, including litter and what is considered to be excessive
signage.18
The idea of the mountain as sacred space, a place of encounter with
God, is deeply rooted in the monotheistic and other religious traditions, but
mountains are also increasingly recognised as constituting a secular form of
‘sacred’ space, which might be referred to as ‘secular-sacred.’19 Richard
Tressider argues that secular-sacred landscapes are ‘defined though reflexive
practice’ and through opposition to the ‘profane’; it is constructed as the
space where one is free from quotidian demands and pressures. ‘The
landscape is not merely a physical entity, but is a social, reflexive, liminal
space in which we are freed from our normal social constraints, it is this
freedom which defines the importance of such a segregated delineated
space.’20 However, whilst there was an implicit acceptance that the ‘wildest’
places were the most sublime and precious, those who expressed their desire
to memorialise loved ones on Ben Nevis because it was the UK’s highest
point and therefore ‘closer to God,’ were castigated for ‘kindergarten
theology.’21 These notions of ‘sacred’ and freedom are central to the ways in
which mountain memorials are perceived by different individuals and groups.
In their 2003 study of the practice of walking in the Scottish
mountains, Hayden Lorimer and Katrin Lund identify a ‘wide variety of
performances of both personal and collective identities’ amongst walkers22
who hold in common an overarching collective identity for whom
performance can be seen as the intersection between the material and social
landscape. For many within that collective Sir Hugh Thomas Munro’s
inventory of Scotland’s highest mountains is a pivotal element in the
distinctive social and historical context shaping contemporary perceptions
and experiences of the Scottish uplands. For this group, what have come to
be known as the Munros and the practice of ‘Munro-bagging’ represents a
means of systematising the landscape to a tick list of physical challenges and
performances. Indeed the other Scottish mountains and hills have been
further systematised according to height into the Corbetts (2,500-3,000 feet),
the Grahams (2,000-2,500 feet) and the Donalds (2,000 feet foothills), and
there is a rapidly growing Munro Society for ‘Completists’ who have
summited all Munros.23 For those who are less target-driven, the Munros
merely frame their ‘embodied sensuous performances of nature.’24 Although
somewhat in tension with the title of his book The Munros and Tops. A
Record-Setting Walk in the Scottish Highlands (2006), Chris Townsend
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argues that, although famed among the Munro ‘Completists,’ ‘I am not
primarily a Munro-bagger or even a peak bagger. I just find walking in wild
country an addictive pleasure and in the Highlands the summits are where the
wildness lies.’25
Lorimer and Lund also found that the practice of walking was
discursively set within an ethic steeped in both safety and responsibility,
coupled with a certain traditionalism which eschewed the use of the Global
Positioning System and other navigational technologies in favour of the self-
reliant skills of compass and map reading. These ideas of the embodied
experience of performed landscapes, the ethic of safety, responsibility and
traditionalism, the high, even sacred, values attributed to ‘wild’ places shed
light on how members of this same ‘practising outdoor community’26 respond
to mountainside memorials.
4. Room for Memorials in the Scottish Highlands?

In the twentieth century occasional mountain memorials in memory
of those who had a ‘special relation’ to a particular mountain, such as a
climber or rescue personnel, were widely accepted as part of the landscape of
the British uplands. One notable example is the memorial to Bill Stuart on
Lochnagar where he died climbing in 1953.27 The memorial reads ‘Sacred to
the memory of Bill Stuart . . .’ and it is this opening phrase which is so
familiar to memorials that it can be glossed over, which holds the key to
understanding both the drive to create and the significance of these and other
memorials.28 This place is sacred because a loved/respected person died
there, their memory is held sacred by the bereaved, and perhaps the deceased
held this place as sacred too. Locations of violent or mass death also tend to
be inscribed as sacred,29 and while this may most readily be applied to
communal sites of death and tragedy such as Auschwitz or Ground Zero, this
process can be seen in the case of untimely and accidental death, whether on
or off the mountainside.
The growing material practice of erecting informal, individualised
memorials, often with accompanying rituals, is to the chagrin of others who
view and value the same landscape as pristine and unchanging. Spontaneous
memorials, such as those for road traffic accidents, are contested in urban and
suburban contexts,30 so it is of little surprise to find that they are contested in
rural areas, especially places which are considered ‘wild’ and of high scenic
value. A debate concerning hillside memorials has emerged within the British
hill walking and mountaineering community, especially in Scotland, where
Ben Nevis as highest mountain in the UK has dozens of memorials at the
summit (see figure 1, note the memorabilia and ephemera as well as
memorials). These debates have been expressed through representative
bodies, interest-based journals, online blogs, local and national media.
Avril Maddrell 129
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Figure 1. Memorials and memorabilia from Ben Nevis summit (Courtesy of

www.nevispartnership.co.uk/policy.asp)
Writing a ‘Talking Point’ opinion piece for the Mountaineering

Council of Scotland’s online journal The Scottish Mountaineer in 2005,
Balmoral Estates Ranger, Glyn Jones, described the proliferation of
memorials:
About 300 metres from the Spittal of Glen Muick car park
you arrive at ‘Doug’s favourite place.’ Doug’s favourite
place is a glacial erratic . . . Since Doug died in 1992 his
boulder has had a stone slab screwed onto it which informs
everyone, that now visits, that they are at ‘Doug’s favourite
place.’ A little further up the track we arrive at ‘Mother’s’
boulder. This boulder has a good selection of pot plants
around its base, including a begonia. There is also a black
metal frame with the words ‘In Loving Memory of Dear
Mother’ inscribed in gold lettering. If you venture behind
the boulder you find, stuffed into a crevice, a collection of
poems and pictures dedicated to Mum.31
Noting that this spread of memorials seems more common in Scotland than in
the Welsh hills, Jones asks whether Doug’s favourite place would have still
been his favourite place if there had already been a plaque commemorating it
as ‘Bob’s favourite place’? He goes on to summarise the problem of
memorials: ‘they are intrusive; they have been erected in prominent places
on the open hill so that they can be seen and they are usually found in remote
locations where the landscape possesses ‘wild land’ qualities. In these
circumstances they have the greatest impact.’ He goes on to suggest that, just
like litter, the presence of one memorial leads to the accumulation of more,
through a process of normalisation: ‘the more memorials that people see, the
______________________________________________________________
more likely they are to perceive that it is an acceptable thing to do and erect
more.’ 32
The following discussion analyses online debates around the issue of
mountain top memorials hosted by the BBC, the Mountaineering Council of
Scotland and The Angry Corrie.33 They include a range of viewpoints, with
the former being most generalised, the other two sites inevitably reflecting
the more specific interests of their membership. An analysis of these online
and media debates shows the emergence of several recurring themes, which
will be outlined in the next section.
5. Key Themes in Online Debates about Memorials and Ash

Scattering in the Scottish Mountains
The first theme to highlight within the online debates is a distaste for
memorials which was articulated as the impoverishment of the natural
landscape through the intrusion of ‘domestic clutter.’ A strong rationale
underpinning objections to the memorials was grounded in the belief that
material forms of memorialisation impinged on and diminished the very
qualities the mountains represented and were valued for. Drawing deeply on
the ‘nature as wilderness’ discourse expressed as ‘take only photos, leave
only footprints,’ this was coupled with discursive representation of the
mountains as place of escape from everyday life and its associations (i.e.
‘sacred’ space in Tressider’s terms above): ‘What makes them special is that
they are relatively untouched by human trappings and should stay that way . .
. no individual has a right to place their mark on it just because they feel like
it.’34 While these views were shared by two of the minority of female
contributors to the debate, this position implicitly taps into gendered
discourses of the mountains as an outlet for masculine endeavour through
mountaineering and walking, both the context and performance defined in
opposition to the feminised suburb.35
Part of the dislike for mountainside memorials was reported on
aesthetic grounds, with references to ‘tat,’ ‘tacky’ and ‘litter.’ ‘Like the tatty,
tacky roadside memorials which blight our verges, these are just out of place
in our beautiful hills and mountains. It always feels like an intrusion to come
across one of these in an otherwise unspoilt place.’36 Particular criticism was
reserved for children’s memorials featuring teddy bears and/or toys. These
are commonly used as contemporary funerary markers for children, a means
by which bereaved parents maintain ‘the material culture of childhood’37 of
their children, despite their child’s death preceding their own and breaking
the perceived natural order. One contributor commented that memorial
plaques were acceptable but that mini gardens and teddy bears (i.e. the
domestic elements) could be ‘dangerous;’ another referred to the possible
litigation which might arise if a walker tripped on a memorial. While safety
and responsibility have been shown to be at the heart of Scottish walkers’
Avril Maddrell 131
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ethics, discussion of safety issues can be a cover for deeper-seated views
and/or prejudices, which are not articulated. There are parallels here with the
river Soar in Leicestershire, which has been sanctified for Hindu ash
scattering, and has kindled debates about what sort of performances and
people are ‘fitting’ in the area; in Tim Cresswell’s terms who is ‘in’ or ‘out of
place.’38 As one commentator pointed out, the same climbers complaining
about memorials are notorious for leaving the landscape littered with ropes,
old bolts in cliffs and for erecting bothies, which are often considered
unsafe.39
Another theme relates to gender, already hinted at in the references
to the domestic above. Some commentary was accompanied by masculinist
assumptions and/or expressions concerning who was fit to be on the
mountain and therefore ‘fit’ for memorialisation there. As one commentator
on the BBC website argued: ‘As a dedicated mountain man with a love of
wild places I would have to say control is required.’40 This control, for
safety’s sake, included banning ‘pals, wives and bairns’ and ‘Keep the
masses off the hill and leave the wild places to us mountain men’ and ‘hard
nosed hill types.’41 This is a clear gendering of the Scottish mountains, or at
least the more challenging of them, as a homo-social space for men, for their
camaraderie, their performance and risk-taking: them versus nature. As
Robert Macfarlane has noted, the mountaineering tradition is one of
masculine heroism,42 despite over a hundred years of women’s climbing (e.g.
by travel writers Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark).43 The whole process of
memorialisation was also discussed by some contributors in gendered terms,
with numerous expressions of distaste for post-Diana emotional outpourings,
and reference to public expressions of grief as ‘mourning sickness,’ that is,
both distasteful and an intrinsically female condition. These views are
grounded in a construction of the mountains as a place of masculine
performance and risk-taking, but free from ‘feminine’ emotion. As Catherine
Nash has noted, analysis based purely on body practices and a
phenomenological experience risks obscuring the underlying political
dimensions of these activities, not least the critique of the gendered politics
of those performances and their wider contexts.44
This relates further to a common view that only those who were
‘true’ mountain people and/or people who actually died in situ should be
memorialised there (e.g. Bill Stuart at Lochnagar), implicitly the ‘hard nosed
mountain men,’ those who died climbing, walking (above a certain height) or
on mountain rescue operations: ‘I can see why people want to leave
memorials to those who actually died on the mountain, but I don’t think it is
appropriate to place memorials for people who were never there.’45 One
commentator made a sweeping assumption that plaques, crosses or teddies
commemorating Mum, Dad or kids, i.e. those memorials based on domestic
______________________________________________________________
familial attachment, were inevitably for people who had no real experience
of or appreciation for the mountains:
[T]here is a good percentage of these [memorials] that are

left by the relatives of people who have never even stepped
foot on the mountain in question. They may have looked at
it a few times and thought it looked nice, but they never
really walked there and appreciated all it had to offer.46
The same group of mountain users and commentators also considered

themselves as judge and jury, entitled to remove memorials, a process one
contributor described as ‘the game:’ letting people erect memorials and then
quietly removing them. This was justified in terms of acting as guardian or
protector of the landscape:
I am among those who remove memorials wherever

possible. I put them in my rucksack . . . and deposit them in
the most convenient skip on my journey home . . . Because
I too thought it was a special place. It gives me enormous
pleasure to practise such acts of kindness on our
landscape.47
This positionality is deeply embedded in a discourse about the

regulation of unsuitable behaviour of those who should not really be there
anyway: ‘I think those who erect shrines etc. probably have no appreciation
of this ‘wildness’ in the first place;’ and ‘wild places must not be desecrated
by a tasteless minority.’48 There is a clear resonance here with David
Matless’ commentary on ‘landscaped citizenship’ in interwar England:
‘While landscaped citizenship is set up as potentially open to all and
nationally inclusive, it depends for its self-definition on a vulgar other, an
anti-citizen whose conduct, if not open to re-education, makes exclusion
necessary.’49 See the ironic cartoon published in The Angry Corrie in Figure
2 below, which articulates these questions of taste.
Avril Maddrell 133
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Figure 2. ‘I think it looks quite nice … blends in really well with the
landscape.’ (Courtesy of The Angry Corrie)50
Nevertheless, respondents expressed the view that the proper place

for memorialisation was in the heart and/or the cemetery - what Anna
Petersson has described as a sense of ‘the proper place for death.’51 This was
in part about private acts in public space: ‘the hills are public spaces and it is
not appropriate that people should use them for their private acts of grief,’52
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but also about what is threatened by this reminder of death. People do not
want to be reminded of their mortality in unanticipated ways, confronting
death is to be spatially controlled in its proper places - not on the
mountainside.
One of Hayden Lorimer and Katrin Lund’s female Scottish
interviewees offered further insight into this when she articulated the physical
attuning of mind, body and landscape during walking:
For me walking is a physical activity, it is a demanding

physical activity sometimes, it also requires that you think
about it . . . so your mind has to be engaged . . . so there is
an acute awareness of the sort of micro-environment as
well as the larger situation.53
When sensitivity to landscape, combined with physically pushing and testing

oneself and putting oneself potentially at risk, intersects with an
unanticipated encounter with a memorial, it seems out of place and
immediately speaks of death. In the heightened sense of awareness described
above, those walkers who respond negatively to memorials in the mountains
experience an unanticipated and unwanted reminder of their own mortality,
which potentially threatens their determination to complete the challenge
they have set themselves, shifts the meaning of the landscape from site of
performed leisure and achievement to ‘deathscape,’ and may even impinge
on their ontological security. One walker appreciated memorials for those
who had died on the mountains: ‘They enhance one’s understanding of the
rich interaction between mountains and people over the years and have a real
poignancy and often I will just reflect on the lives lost.’54 Others rationalised,
‘I hike for fun and exhilaration, I do not want to be reminded of death at
every turn of the path’55 and another resented the visual and emotional
imposition of another’s grief: ‘I think building memorials in the wild places
is intrusive. Unnecessary and contemptuous of other hill users. It assumes we
are obliged to share the grief of others.’56 Much of this viewpoint centres on
the unanticipated encounter and/or sense of inappropriateness of memorials
in this landscape, which has been discursively framed as ‘wild,’ distinct from
the everyday etc. The memorial - the reminder of mortality - is out of place; it
is not in its ‘proper place.’
Most participants in the discussion supported compromise initiatives
by the Nevis Partnership to create a dedicated base of hill communal
memorial site (often couched in the debate in terms of ‘improving access’ for
those who probably couldn’t climb the hills anymore anyway). Others did not
even want even this and referred to the ‘mawkish’ and ‘selfish’ needs of the
bereaved imposing on their space, mental and physical. Coupled with this
was a clear sense of what was appropriate practice and use of space. While
Avril Maddrell 135
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there was a general tolerance for environmental- and people-sensitive ash
scattering, the declared personal preference of several of the ‘mountain men,’
this should not impinge on the ‘real’ business of the mountains: ‘The
scattering of ashes is one thing, to leave them in a neat pile where dozens of
Munro-baggers will munch their sandwiches is quite another.’57 Clearly,
within this discourse the relatively recent popularisation of Munro-bagging
takes precedence over ash scattering as appropriate performance on the
mountain. A distaste for religious ritual or ‘pseudo-religious shrines’ was
also seen ‘as out of place’58 by a number of commentators, which suggests
the mountains are framed as a secular space, and it is not only physical
memorials which are deemed to impinge on walkers’ freedom, but also the
performance of memorial rituals.
There was also debate around who was entitled to have an opinion
or arbitrate on these matters, with conflicting views of authenticity and
authority, expressed with reference to insider/outsider, Highlander/non-
Highlander, ‘mountain types’/others, which included ‘local Highlander’
versus ‘outsider mountain type.’ This included ‘locals’ pointing out that some
areas, which are currently thought of as wild places by ‘outsiders’ had
previously populated or farmed:
Comments about maintaining the ‘wild’ country I think

underplay that the Highlands used to be a living working
landscape with all these jumbles of stones occupied by
families . . . Trying to recreate or protect a wilderness is
imposing an outsider or alien perspective because it is not
what the Highlands used to be.59
As can be seen from the discussion above, it is important to stress that views
expressed in the various web-based debates were far from homogenous. This
was particularly apparent in discussion of Bill Stuart’s memorial, which had
been erected by the local climbing community and his family. Those
landscape purists who argued for the removal of all memorials, caused great
offence to the family of the late Bill Stuart; others suggested the memorial
blended in with the landscape and should remain; others still that while the
original memorial was acceptable, the addition of a photograph and brief
biography was not.60
Some commentators, despite their own preferences for a memorial-
free landscape, were aware of the complexities of the issue and critical of the
insensitivity of some participants in the discussion to the grief of others and
the sacred quality and symbolism of memorials: ‘These memorials are a way
of grieving and I believe that nobody has the moral right to tell somebody
how and where they show their grief.’61 The call for action by those
removing or proposing to remove memorials was described as ‘arrogance’
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and those ‘outsiders’ wanting to control any change to the landscape as guilty
of ‘eco-fascism’ and/or neo-imperialism. As one commentator argued, ‘It is
the height of arrogance for the climbing fraternity - in search of some
romantic vision of wildness - to object to such an interesting addition
[memorials] to the landscape.’ 62
6. Finding a Way Forward on the Mountain

Evidence from these online debates suggested policy on memorials
ranged from zero tolerance and active removal of all memorials, to retaining
‘long-standing’ memorials but banning new additions, to finding acceptable
sites for memorialisation within the wider mountain environment, e.g. a
memorial garden at the base of Ben Nevis. Perhaps reflecting Munro’s
culture of systematisation, the editor of The Angry Corrie suggested that
policy on memorials reflect a geographical distinction based on height: ‘in
hill country it shouldn’t be within 1000 feet of the top . . . Below that a
different set of guidelines apply.’63 As one moderating voice on the
Mountaineering Council of Scotland website forum noted, although eighteen
of the responses to Glyn Jones’ ‘Talking Point’ article disapproved of the
memorials, six responses demonstrated that ‘the issue was more complicated
than [the] 18 other correspondents suggested.’64 Ultimately, and to its credit,
the Mountaineering Council of Scotland recognised that if there was to be a
ban on memorials there could no toleration of any for the mountain elite - if
memorials were unacceptable, then they all were, regardless of whether the
deceased was local or died in situ.
The Nevis Partnership, the group which oversees the Ben Nevis area
and includes the Scottish National Trust and The John Muir Trust, have taken
the lead in providing an accessible area of ‘contemplation’ in Highland
Council woodland near the Glen Nevis visitor centre and within clear view of
Ben Nevis (see figure 3 below). Reflecting the view ‘[as] for a cemetery at
the foot of Ben Nevis, I don’t think walkers want to see this at the start of
their day,’65 it is located off the main mountain access track and has been
designated as a single communal memorial area. The bereaved have a
dedicated and permanent space in which to perform their remembrance
within the context of this ‘sacred’ landscape. The stone bench is clearly
intended to be sympathetic with the surrounding landscape, and its
inscription ‘We must be humble . . . these stones are one with the stars’
prompts reflection on the sacred quality of the landscape as well as the
deceased. The bench encircles a cairn, a traditional local form of way-
marking and remembrance (e.g. the Peace Cairn retained on Ben Nevis’
summit), which by its very nature may implicitly invite the addition of stones
by the bereaved,66 but no plaques or floral tributes are permitted ‘in order to
maintain the neutrality of the site for all visitors.’67 This has been
supplemented by an online virtual remembrance site, where photos and
Avril Maddrell 137
______________________________________________________________
details are recorded in a ‘Book of Remembrance’ and individuals are linked
to the particular place on the mountain, which they cherished or were
associated with. However, on the grounds that the majority of opinion in the
debates discussed above was against memorials, the Nevis Partnership began
removing physical memorials from the mountain in Autumn 2006 and are
committed to removing any new memorials.68 The Scottish National Trust,
blending the 1937 Unna Principles for maintaining ‘primitive land’ and its
2002 Wild Land Policy, similarly identify memorials as ‘recent signs of
human activity’ to be buried or removed, ideally in consultation with those
responsible for the memorials.69
Figure 3. Ben Nevis Site for Contemplation (Courtesy of the Nevis

Partnership)70
Other alternative approaches to the memorialisation of those who loved the

mountains are based on the performance of walking. For example, in 2008 a
memorial walk in the Brecon Beacons was organised to honour Mike Ruddal,
a local mountain rescue volunteer who was killed during a rescue in 1983.71
The Scottish National Trust suggests volunteering to work on path
maintenance as an alternative material contribution to maintaining the
venerated landscape. Other traditional non-material remembrance initiatives
______________________________________________________________
have focused on memorial fund-raising in aid of place and activity-related
voluntary groups such as the local Mountain Rescue team.
7. Conclusion
Landscape has been variously read as aesthetic, historic record and
symbolic text, but rather than being seen merely as a cultural product,
landscapes are increasingly recognised as polyvocal, dynamic, cultural
processes72 which are experienced through embodied performance. This is
certainly true when considering the issue of mountain memorials in the
Scottish mountains, which have resulted in fierce contestation of place
identity, wilderness and memorialisation practices as a result of different
private and collective meanings attributed to the landscape. Conflict has
arisen principally between those who see the mountain landscape as a sacred
place of personal leisure and performance, which is separate from the claims
of everyday life (and death), and those who read the landscape of the Scottish
mountains as a text to be inscribed with physical remembrance of a loved one
and space for the performance of remembrance and mourning. Analysis of
online debates shows key strands relating to constructions of mountain
insider/outsider that relates to authenticity and entitlement to
memorialisation; particular representations of wilderness and the natural; and
related forms of masculinity that establish (limited) acceptable parameters for
the expression of the domestic and emotional, including the emotions of
others. Mountain memorials need to be placed in the context of wider debates
about private memorials in public spaces and mechanisms evolving to
regulate this practice through spatial management and control, what
Petersson describes as ‘the proper place for death,’ but also intolerance of
other incursions of the built environment in wild places, such as roads,
windfarms and ski lifts. As one commentator noted: ‘the hills face far more
serious challenges (windfarms, Beauly to Denny pylons, etc. etc.) than a wee
teddy stuck in a crevice on your ‘favourite mountain’. 73
Notes
1
See A Maddrell, ‘A Place for Grief and Belief: the Witness Cairn at the Isle
of Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland,’ Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 10.6,
2009, pp. 675-693; A Maddrell, ‘Mapping Changing Shades of Grief and
Consolation in the Historic Landscape of St Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man,’ in
Emotion, Place and Culture, M Smith, J Davidson, L Cameron and L Bondi
(eds), Ashgate, Farnham, 2009, pp. 35-56.
2
S W Howard, ‘Landscapes of memorialisation’ in I Robertson and P
Richards (eds) Studying Cultural Landscapes, Arnold, London, 2003, p. 67.
3
Maddrell ‘A Place for Grief and Belief’.
Avril Maddrell 139
______________________________________________________________
4
N Thrift, ‘‘Us’ and ‘Them.’ Re-imagining Places, Re-imagining Identities,’
in Consumption and Everyday Life, H Mackay (ed), Sage, London, 1997, pp.
159-211.
5
E Hallam and J Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, Berg,
Oxford, 2001, p. 99; J Clark, ‘Authority from Grief, Presence and Place in
the Making of Roadside Memorials,’ Death Studies vol. 30, 2006, pp. 579-
599; Maddrell, ‘A Place for Grief and Belief,’ ‘Mapping Changing Shades of
Grief and Consolation’.
6
Maddrell, ‘Mapping Changing Shades of Grief and Consolation’.
7
Maddrell, ‘Mapping Changing Shades of Grief and Consolation’
8
<http://www.clevedonpier.com/hire.htm>
<http://www.angleseycharterfishing.co.uk/Loading.swf >.
<http://www.busybee-webdesign.co.uk/portfolio.html.>
(All accessed 23/9/09).
9
Ibid.
10
H Lorimer and K Lund, ‘Performing Facts: Finding a Way over Scotland’s
Mountains,’ in Nature Performed. Environment, Culture and Performance, B
Szerszyrski, W Heim and C Waterton (eds), Blackwell, Oxford, 2003 pp.
130-143: p. 133.
11
E Jokinen and S Veijola, ‘Mountains and Landscapes: Towards Embodied
Visualities,’ Visual Culture and Tourism, in D Crouch and N Lübbren (eds),
Berg, Oxford, 2006, pp. 259-278: p. 259.
12
C Nash, ‘Performativity in Practice: Some Recent Work in Cultural
Geography,’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 24.4, 2000, pp. 644-53.
13
Jokinen and Veijola, p. 270.
14
N Thrift, ‘The Still Point. Resistance, Expressive Embodiment and Dance,’
in Geographies of Resistance, S Pile and M Keith (eds), Routledge, London,
1997, pp. 124-51.
15
D Crouch, ‘Performances and Constitutions of Natures: A Consideration of
the Performance of Lay Geographies,’ in Szerszynski, Heim and Waterton,
pp 17-30.
16
Lorimer and Lund, p. 130.
17
R Macfarlane, Wild Places, Granta, London, 2007; M Cawthorne, The Call
of Scotland’s Last Wild Places. Wilderness Dreams, The In Pinn, Glasgow,
2007.
18
See C Townsend, The Munros and the Tops. A Record Setting Walk in the
Scottish Highlands, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 2006.
19
See Maddrell, ‘A Place for Grief and Belief’ for discussion of the secular-
sacred continuum.
______________________________________________________________
20
R Tressider, ‘Tourism and sacred landscapes,’ in Leisure/ Tourism
Geographies. Practices and Geographical Knowledge, D Crouch (ed),
Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 137-146.
21
Ibid, p. 133.
22
23
Townsend. See <http://www.smc.org.uk> (accessed 30/9/09) for the
growing numbers of the Munro Compleatists.
24
25
Townsend, p. 8.
26
27
See The Scottish Mountaineer (2005), <http://www.mountaineering–
scotland.org.uk> (accessed 12/9/06); (note the addition of a photo plaque and
anniversary flowers).
28
Maddrell, ‘A Place for Grief and Belief’.
29
J Jacobs, ‘From the Profane to the Sacred: Ritual and Mourning at Sites of
Terror and Violence,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion vol. 43,
2004, pp. 311-315. Also see K Foote, Shadowed Ground, Texas University
Press, Austin, 2003.
30
K V Hartig and K M Dunn, ‘Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New
Deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales,’ Australian Geographical
Studies vol. 36, 1998, pp. 5-20; J Clark and M Franzmann, ‘Authority from
Grief: Presence and Place in the Making of Roadside Memorials’, Death
Studies vol. 30, 2006, pp. 579-599.
31
G Jones, ‘Talking Point: Mountain Memorials,’ The Scottish Mountaineer,
vol. 28, 2005, <http://www.mountaineering-scotland.org.uk/nl/65b.html>
(accessed 12 September 2006).
32
Ibid.
33
Accessed primarily in September 2006.
34
‘Brian’ from Edinburgh, ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers,’ BBC
September 2005; <http://news.bbc.co.uk-news/scotland/4242576.stm>,
35
See D Matless, Landscape and Englishness, Reaktion, London, 1998, on
the relationship between landscape and suburb.
36
‘Alex’ from Scotland, ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers,’ BBC 2005.
37
S Hallam and J Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, Berg,
Oxford, 2001, p. 88.
38
T Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place\: Geography, Ideology and
Transgression, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.
39
D Morrod, Mountaineering Council of Scotland forum 2005;
<http://www.mountaineering-scotland.org.uk/pitch-in/memorials.html>
Avril Maddrell 141
______________________________________________________________
40
Jim Brown from Kilmarnock, ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers,’ BBC
2005.
41
B Barnett, The Angry Corrie 2006.
42
R Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination, Granta,
London, 2003.
43
A Maddrell, Complex Locations. Women’s Geographical Work in the UK
1850-1970, RGS/ Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009.
44
Nash.
45
C Jeffries from Mullingar, Ireland, ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers,’
BBC 2005.
46
Jay, Mountaineering Council of Scotland forum, 2005.
47
M McCance, The Angry Corrie, vol. 67, February/March 2006,
<http://news.bbc.co.uk-news/scotland/4242576.stm> (accessed 12 September
2006).
48
J Johnson, Edinburgh, ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers,’ BBC 2005.
49
Matless, p. 62.
50
Reproduced by kind permission of The Angry Corrie and cartoonist Chris
Tyler. Note that although this may not be intentional, the memorial is for a
woman (Mum) and is being approved of by the female walker and
disapproved by the male walker.
51
A Petersson, ‘A Proper Place for Death?,’ in Architects of the Twenty-First
Century - Agents of Change?, K Rivad (ed), The Royal Danish Academy of
Fine Arts, Copenhagen, 2006, pp. 110-17.
52
‘Paul’ from London, ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers’, BBC 2005.
53
54
A MacGregor from Banff, Scotland, ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers,’
BBC 2005.
55
C Jeffries from Mullingar, Ireland, ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers’,
BBC 2005.
56
J Fidler, England, Mountaineering Council of Scotland forum, 2005;
<http://www.mountaineering-scotland.org.uk/pitch-in/memorials.html>
57
A Beaton, The Angry Corrie 2006.
58
J Brown, ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers’, BBC 2005.
59
S Slater, Mountaineering Council of Scotland forum, 2005.
60
See Mountaineering Council of Scotland forum, 2005.
61
D Coleman, Mountaineering Council of Scotland forum, 2005.
62
F Mackenzie, Mountaineering Council of Scotland forum, 2005.
63
The Angry Corrie vol. 67, February/March 2006 (<http://bubl.ac.uk/org/
tacit/tac/tac66plaquesp.html>).
64
DColeman, Mountaineering Council of Scotland forum, 2005.
______________________________________________________________
65
‘A Walker from Dunfermline,’ ‘Mountain Memorial Storm Gathers’, BBC
2005.
66
See Maddrell, ‘A Place for Grief and Belief,’ on the adoption of the
Witness Cairn, Isle of Whithorn as memorial site.
67
The Nevis Partnership: the Site for Contemplation,
<http://www.nevispartnership.co.uk/contemplation.asp>.
68
See <http://www.nevispartnership.co.uk/policy.asp> (memorials) (accessed
14 November 2008).
69
The National Trust for Scotland, Wild Land Policy, January 2002.
70
The Nevis Partnership, 101, High Street, Fort William PH33 6DG,
<http://www.nevispartnership.co.uk>.
71
BBC ‘Memorial Walk for Mountain Hero’, 3 May 2008;
<http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/wales
/mid/738> (accessed on 7 June 2008).
72
I Robertson and P Richards ‘Introduction,’ in Studying Cultural
Landscapes, I Robertson and P Richards (eds), Arnold, London, 2003, pp. 1-
6.
73
S Slater, Mountaineering Council of Scotland forum, 2005.
Bibliography
Literary References
Clark, J., and Franzmann, M., ‘Authority from Grief, Presence and Place in
the Making of Roadside Memorials,’ Death Studies vol. 30, 2006, pp. 579-
599.
Cresswell, T., In Place/Out of Place\; Geography, Ideology and

Transgression, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996.
Crouch, D., ‘Performances and Constitutions of Natures: A Consideration of

the Performance of Lay Geographies,’ in Szerszynski, Heim and Waterton,
pp 17-30.
Foote, K., Shadowed Ground, Texas University Press, Austin, 2003.
Hallam, E. and Hockey, J., Death, Memory and Material Culture, Berg,
Oxford, 2001.
Avril Maddrell 143
______________________________________________________________
Hartig, K. V. and Dunn, K. M., ‘Roadside Memorials: Interpreting New

Deathscapes in Newcastle, New South Wales,’ Australian Geographical
Studies vol. 36, 1998, pp. 5-20.
Howard, S. W., ‘Landscapes of Memorialisation’ in Robertson, I. and

Richards, P. (eds) Studying Cultural Landscapes, Arnold, London, 2003.
Jacobs, J., ‘From the Profane to the Sacred: Ritual and Mourning at Sites of
Terror and Violence,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion vol. 43,
2004, pp. 311-315.
Jokinen, E. and Veijola, S., ‘Mountains and Landscapes: Towards Embodied

Visualities,’ Visual Culture and Tourism, in D Crouch and N Lübbren (eds),
Berg, Oxford, 2006.
Lorimer H., and Lund, K., ‘Performing Facts: Finding a Way over Scotland’s
Mountains,’ in Nature Performed. Environment, Culture and Performance,
Szerszyrski, B., Heim W. and Waterton C., (eds), Blackwell, Oxford, 2003.
Macfarlane, R., Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination, Granta,

London, 2003.
Macfarlane, R., Wild Places, Granta, London, 2007; M Cawthorne, The Call
of Scotland’s Last Wild Places. Wilderness Dreams, The In Pinn, Glasgow,
2007.
Maddrell, A., ‘A Place for Grief and Belief: The Witness Cairn at the Isle of
Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland,’ Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 10.6,
2009, pp. 675-693.
Maddrell, A., ‘Mapping Changing Shades of Grief and Consolation in the

Historic Landscape of St Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man,’ in Emotion, Place and
Culture, M Smith, J Davidson, L Cameron and L Bondi (eds), Ashgate
Farhham, 2009, pp. 35-56.
Maddrell, A., Complex Locations. Women’s Geographical Work in the UK

1850-1970, RGS/ Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2009.
Matless, D., Landscape and Englishness, Reaktion, London, 1998.

______________________________________________________________
Nash, C., ‘Performativity in Practice: Some Recent Work in Cultural

Geography,’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 24.4, 2000, pp. 644-53.
Petersson, A. ,‘A Proper Place for Death?,’ in Architects of the Twenty-First

Century - Agents of Change?, K Rivad (ed), The Royal Danish Academy of
Fine Arts, Copenhagen, 2006.
Robertson, I. and Richards, P., ‘Introduction,’ in Studying Cultural

Landscapes, Robertson, I. and Richards, P. (eds), Arnold, London, 2003.
The National Trust for Scotland, Wild Land Policy, January 2002.
Thrift, N., ‘The Still Point. Resistance, Expressive Embodiment and Dance,’
in Geographies of Resistance, S Pile and M Keith (eds), Routledge, London,
1997.
_______
, ‘Us and Them: Re-imagining Places, Re-imagining Identities,’ in
Consumption and Everyday Life, Mackay, H. (ed), Sage, London, 1997.
Townsend, C., The Munros and the Tops. A Record Setting Walk in the
Scottish Highlands, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 2006.
Tressider, R., ‘Tourism and Sacred Landscapes,’ in Leisure/ Tourism

Geographies. Practices and Geographical Knowledge, D Crouch (ed),
Routledge, London, 1999.
Website References
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2006.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk-news/scotland/4242576.stm> accessed 12/09/06.
<http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/l/hi/wales
/mid/738>, accessed on 07/06/08.
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Avril Maddrell 145
______________________________________________________________
<http://www.mountaineering–scotland.org.uk>, accessed 12/9/06.
<http://www.nevispartnership.co.uk/contemplation.asp>, accessed 14/11/08.
<http://www.smc.org.uk>, accessed 30/9/09.

Seder and Imagined Landscape
Alana M. Vincent
Abstract:
This essay addresses memory and mourning in the context of Jewish liturgy.
The long and complex relationship between Judaism and the city of
Jerusalem has been recorded in scripture, liturgy, visual art and literature.
Taking the concluding words of the Passover Seder, L’shanah haba’ah
birushalayim (‘next year in Jerusalem’), as a point of departure, this essay
engages with the idea of Jerusalem as a landscape of redemption, in which
the covenant between God and Israel is fully realised and the divine plan
fulfilled. Thus, the Seder liturgy not only draws on participants’ own real
memories in order to construct the shared memory of slavery and exodus, but
also uses this imagined memory to lay the foundation for the hope expressed
in the concluding words. The meaning of ‘Jerusalem’ then becomes fluid,
determined as much by the words and actions of the liturgy, and by the
reactions of the participants, as by geography or history. This essay engages
primarily with contemporary revisions to the traditional Seder liturgy, with
reference to a range of ancient, medieval and modern texts including 2
Samuel, a 13th century Italian psalter, essays by André Aciman, and the
paintings of Marc Chagall. The interplay between these representations
constructs a broad understanding of the dialogic relationship between
memory, landscape (both real and imagined) and religious identity.
Key Words: Liturgy, landscape, Israel, Jerusalem, Judaism, Passover Seder,

Samuel, Aciman, Chagall.
*****
1. Introduction
This essay was originally written in spring 2008, immediately before
my first trip to Israel, and substantially revised upon my return to Scotland in
Fall 2008. The political situation at the time was mostly quiet; the Gaza War
(Operation Cast Lead) did not break out until December of that year. While
the purpose behind my visit was to undertake text study in a yeshiva, even
the limited amount of travelling I did in and around Jerusalem made clear
that the living situation of most Palestinians was becoming increasingly
desperate. As a theologian, with little background or interest in international
law and politics, I had been (and, in fact, continue to be) hesitant to address a
situation with such a long and tangled history; the ability of theology to make
a meaningful intervention into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems so small
that any attempt might appear laughable. But while this is not a problem that
148 Seder and Imagined Landscape
______________________________________________________________
theology is likely to solve, it is a problem which theology must address; it is a
very clear and pertinent reminder of what is at stake in religious devotions, in
liturgy, and in precisely which space is designated as ‘sacred.’ Jerusalem is a
site distinct from other loci of recollection, whether historical or
mythological, in the layers of symbolic and metaphoric meaning it has
accrued, over and above its situation as an actual geographically situated city,
in which real people go about their daily lives. It is this distinction which
theology must address.
As a scholar of Jewish liturgy, my concern here is with the Jewish
heritage of scripture and liturgy that figures Jerusalem as the site of the
sacred. I say ‘scripture and liturgy’ aware that the line between the two often
appears blurred, at best - both to insiders and outsiders. Much of Jewish
liturgy may seem at first glance to consist mostly of recitations of scripture,
with a few notable Rabbinic insertions (such as the Amidah). What becomes
apparent upon further study, however, is that this recitation is also a
commentary, that the liturgy shapes understanding of scripture just as
scripture forms and informs the liturgy, so that one cannot be fully engaged
without reference to the other. Due largely to the overlap between liturgy and
scripture, Jewish liturgy is infinitely expandable; one might even call it
fractal. Almost any section, any line, can point to a chain of interpretation
and re-interpretation that, if followed long enough, leads one through if not
‘the whole of Judaism,’ then certainly a reasonable facsimile thereof. Almost
any line, then, can be seen as foundational, the religious first principle from
which all others are derived. I have little interest here in reconstructing the
liturgy exactly as it existed in some distant past, noting each change that has
occurred since that time and identifying the factors, both internal and external
that led to such changes. My focus is, rather, on the construction and
presentation of what Paula Hyman calls a ‘usable past.’1 Hyman defines a
‘usable past’ as one, which can lend coherence and legitimacy to religious
practice in the present, and shape a more desirable future.
2. Beginning at the End

My point of entry for this particular discussion is the last line of the
Passover Seder:
L’shanah haba’ah birushalayim.

Next year in Jerusalem.
This is only one of many references to Jerusalem to be found in Jewish

liturgy - a sensible argument could also be made for beginning from the last
line of the Yom Kippur synagogue liturgy, which is identical to the line under
discussion today;2 from the third blessing of Birchas HaMazon, recited after
every meal that involves bread, ‘Blessed are you, Hashem, who rebuilds
Alana M. Vincent 149
______________________________________________________________
Jerusalem;’3 or from the identical conclusion to the fourteenth blessing of the
Amidah, which is recited up to three times per day.4 While it is true that all of
these have been subject to a certain amount of liturgical revision, especially
in the prayer books of the Reform movement, the Passover Seder is unique in
that it is a home liturgy, more susceptible to alteration to suit a smaller, more
familial group than the others.5 It is also notable that the Passover Seder,
alone amongst these other examples, is essentially narrative. Where the other
instances above rely on the participants’ pre-existing background knowledge
of Judaism and the importance of Jerusalem in Jewish religious thought for
their impact, the Seder conveys, at great length, the origin story of the Jewish
people from the time of Abraham up to the present day. The reference to a
future in Jerusalem comes at the conclusion of a much longer tale of multiple
exiles and returns; it hints at the eschatological conclusion of the cycle of
Jewish history. The Seder is meant, in part, to invest members of the
community with a sense of shared history; the final line asserts their newly
discovered or re-discovered sense of shared destiny.6
This last line is an echo of the ha lachma anya recited earlier, at the
beginning of the re-telling of the exodus, over the broken matzah:7
This is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land
of Egypt.
Let all who are hungry, come and eat.
Let all who are needy, come and celebrate Passover.
This year we are here - next year, may we be in the Land of
Israel.
This year we are slaves - next year, may we be free.8
The memory of the ha lachma illuminates the ultimate line of the Seder,
building a clear parallel between Jerusalem (there is a synecdochic
equivalence between the city and the Land of Israel) and freedom. This echo
encapsulates one of the central tensions in Judaism. ‘Next year,’ participants
in the Seder say, ‘we will be in Jerusalem, our spiritual home, where we are
free to be true Jews in a way that we cannot be out here, in galut, in exile.’
But wandering, homelessness, is also integral to Jewishness.9 Even prior to
the series of exiles that gave rise to the Rabbinic re-interpretation of Torah on
which contemporary Jewish practice is based, the Torah itself was given to a
wandering tribe.10 Its injunctions concerning sacrifice, its extremely elaborate
descriptions of vestments, altar, ceremonial vessels and, most importantly,
the Mishkan, or Tabernacle, assume that these will be located within the
easily portable Tent of Meeting, rather than the somewhat less portable
Temple.
Beginning at the end, from the last line of a liturgy spoken in the
present day, obscures (as, indeed, it is meant to) the vast gulf between the
______________________________________________________________
journey described in the pages of the Haggadah and the journeys undertaken
by the people who sit around the Seder table. To speak the longing for
Jerusalem is to forget that from the time of the exodus up until the time of
King David, the geographical goal of the Israelite tribes was, as indicated in
the ha lachma, the general land of Israel, not a specific city therein.11
Jerusalem became the centre of religious observance only with the building
of the Temple, plans for which are first put forth in 2 Samuel 7. In this
passage, David proposes to rectify the inequality of his residing in a ‘house of
cedar’ while the ark of God’s presence resides in a tent (mishkan shares the
same root as shekhinah, the presence-of-God-dwelling-amongst-Israel).12 The
prophet Nathan initially endorses this plan, but during the night, God speaks
to him in a vision, saying:
Are you the one to build a house for Me to dwell in? From
the day that I brought the people of Israel out of Egypt to
this day I have not dwelt in a house, but have moved about
in Tent and Tabernacle. As I moved about wherever the
Israelites went, did I ever reproach any of the tribal leaders
who I appointed to care for my people Israel: Why have
you not built Me a house of cedar?13
This is a complex passage, and I would point out only one particular detail:
the resistance of God to a fixed dwelling-place.14 Nonetheless, the Temple is
eventually built (by David’s son, Solomon); the dwelling place of God does
become fixed, and the people of Israel learn to forget that God ever travelled
and dwelt in a tent amongst them.
This is not the usual shape the story takes. Beginning from the end,
reading backwards, one hears about covenants and the fulfilment thereof,
promises made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of obedience tested on Mount
Moriah, which tradition suggests later became the Temple Mount;15 one hears
of a predicted exile in Egypt and the slow, inexorable progress back towards
Jerusalem; one hears of the covenant reaching a consummation in the time of
David, and then being broken by Israel’s disobedience, punished by exile;
one hears of attempts by the Rabbis to construct, where there was none
before, a religion capable of existing outside of the city of Jerusalem and in
the absence of the Temple. The last line of the Passover Seder, spoken after a
lengthy recollection of multiple exiles and returns, enforces the sense of
Jerusalem as the natural centre of Jewish existence, the fixed location from
which God may be approached.
______________________________________________________________
3. Seder Landscapes
What is at stake here is the way that our understanding of the past,
the collective memory transmitted through the liturgy, shapes our actions in
the present and the futures available to our imagination. To accept without
question a narrative that places the geographical Jerusalem at the centre of
Jewish identity and religious practice in the modern era is to acquiesce,
however reluctantly, to a political program that is, at best, in tension with
many other foundational principles of the faith - for example, the ethic of
radical inclusiveness towards strangers, ‘for you were strangers in the Land
of Egypt.’16 That so many do take that narrative at face value, to the
exclusion of possible alternatives, other potentially usable histories, is
indicative of something more than a political decision.
It is also something more than simple reverence to tradition. In a
sample of eight contemporary haggadot (short books containing variations on
the Seder liturgy), only two actually alter the text, and these do not alter it
very much. The Women’s Haggadah, produced by E M Broner and Naomi
Nimrod, replaces ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ with ‘Under the wings of the
Shekinah, we fly homeward to Zion in song’; an earlier version of the Seder
ended with ‘Next year in Jerusalem or wherever your Jerusalem lies.’17
‘Zion’ is metonymically equivalent to Jerusalem and/or Israel, although its
use instead of either of those designators successfully detaches the locus of
freedom from the locations frequently featured on the nightly news.
Similarly, The Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah, by far the most
overtly political of the haggadot reviewed (much of the text is devoted to
discussion of the Palestinian occupation), concludes with ‘L’shanah ha-ba’ah
b’olam b’shalom’ (‘Next year may we all live in a world of peace’), followed
by a wish for a year of good fortune, and, finally, a cry from Deuteronomy
chapter 16, verse 20: ‘Tzedek tzedek tirdoff’ (‘Justice, justice you shall
pursue).’18
More commonly, the concluding line of the Seder is fenced off by
commentary, either in a sidebar or a preface meant to be read out loud
(indeed, the Love and Justice Haggadah also includes such a preface). A
Night of Questions, put out by The Reconstructionist Press, includes the
following sidebar:
In a world where Israel is just hours away by plane, this

declaration requires more than a commitment to be in
Jerusalem physically. It may be easier to have a Seder in
Israel next year than to bring Jerusalem into our lives every
day.
As we prepare to leave our Seder, we are reminded that

redemption is two-fold: to join together as a people in a
______________________________________________________________
redeemed Jerusalem, and to be truly liberated wherever we
are.19
The illustration featured on the facing page of the Haggadah is a montage of

matzah, postcards, maps and plane tickets from Israel/Palestine, emphasising
the mobility of the contemporary world while keeping the geographic focus
firmly on the Holy Land. Similarly, The Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for
Pesach, which orients itself roughly in the Reform/Renewal traditions,
prefaces the actual closing line with the following discussion:
It is traditional to end a Seder with L’shanah ha-ba’ah

b’Yerushalayim - Next Year in Jerusalem! The call speaks
to a feeling of exile, which characterized the Jewish
Diaspora for centuries. But now that the State of Israel
exists, the call is different. What are the chances that we
will all be in Jerusalem next year? Wouldn’t we rather be
together?
But the meaning of the word Yerushalayim shows the cry

has a double meaning. The word’s root can be read as Ir
Shalem (‘City of Wholeness’) or Ir Shalom (‘City of
Peace’). Even if we don’t perceive ourselves as being in
galut (exile) from the literal Land of Israel (even if it
happens that we are in the Land of Israel!) we are still in
exile from the state of wholeness and unity which only
connection with our Source can provide. Next year,
wherever we are, may we be whole and at peace.20
What is being liturgically encoded here is not so much the presence of an

alternate narrative, but a discomfort with the existing narrative, a need to
insert some separation between the disputed territory that is the geographical
Jerusalem and the spiritual liberation and fulfillment of the symbolic
Jerusalem.
Unsurprisingly, the Haggadah published by the Conservative
Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly eschews any direct commentary on the
line, instead offering a reading from the Song of Songs (a traditional reading
for Passover) in the sidebar, explaining that it tells of ‘the eternal love
between Israel and its Redeemer.’21 The accompanying illustration, an
abstract block-print of a skyline whose architecture roughly resembles that of
Jerusalem, rising from the horizontal stripes that typically decorate the
bottom of a tallit, or prayer shawl, with the Israeli flag waving overhead in
much the same position the sun would occupy in a child’s drawing,
emphasises a strong link between the promised liberation, the political and
______________________________________________________________
geographical state of Israel, and religious devotion. Likewise, the
commentary in Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Haggadah focuses entirely on the
long endurance of ‘the Jewish attachment to Jerusalem.’22 The geographic-
political and symbolic are, in both cases, entirely undifferentiated. The
Reform Movement’s Central Conference for American Rabbis also utilises
sidebar commentary in its most recent Haggadah, The Open Door, although
two of the three texts selected are somewhat more impressionistic,
commenting on the ideas of travel and homeland, rather than directly
addressing the content of the liturgical text. The third text, an Israeli soldier’s
letter, dated 1975, directly links the idea of freedom to the land of Israel.23
The Hillel Haggadah for the Nights of Passover refrains from
commentary entirely, but inserts a final line after the traditional closing is
recited in both Hebrew and English: ‘Next year may all humanity be
redeemed,’ thus strengthening the association between Jerusalem and
liberation, but also extending that association to all humanity, shifting the
locus of desire from a definite time and space (next year, in Jerusalem) to
sacred time and sacred space - while it may be possible for the participants at
a Seder to resolve to travel to Israel in the coming year, the redemption of all
humanity is a firmly eschatological matter.24
There are two conclusions to draw here. The more obvious one is
that in Judaism, liturgical innovation goes hand in hand with religious (and
social) liberalism. The Women’s Haggadah rewrites the entire liturgy in order
to produce a meta-narrative of women’s exclusion from religious life; the
alteration of a single line, then, comes as no surprise. The more interesting
one is that, in spite of a certain degree of discomfort with the geographical-
political reality of modern Jerusalem evident in several of the haggadot
reviewed, both in the closing line and in earlier discussion sections, not one
omitted some variation on the line - including The Women’s Haggadah,
which, in spite of its according particular significance to matzah and the
afikomen (the piece of broken matzah that is hidden to be consumed at the
end of the Seder), omits the ha lachma entirely.25
How, then, might one explain the unwillingness of even the most
liberal compilers of haggadot to eliminate the final line? How, indeed, might
one explain the long endurance of the Jewish attachment to Jerusalem? I have
shown that a scriptural argument can be made against Jerusalem as the fixed
place of approach to God, or, indeed, the religious validity of any
geographically fixed place of approach. While rabbinic commentary on this
issue is mixed, the theological dangers associated with assigning God a fixed
location are just as great as those posed by anthropomorphism.26 Melissa
Raphael-Levine’s recent work on Holocaust theology has provided a chilling
demonstration of the consequences that stem from a too-narrow perception of
where and how God might dwell.27 Judith Plaskow, of course, has also put
forth strong arguments about the dangers of fixed images of God, but only
______________________________________________________________
certain images; intriguingly, and not without relevance to the point at hand,
she admits the image of God as place (makom) as a religiously productive
metaphor.28 This is not as contradictory as it appears; there is a great
difference between speaking of God in place and God as place. The metaphor
Plaskow embraces does not bind God to a particular location, but speaks of
God as the source of all locations - although Plaskow herself does not
necessarily make the distinction between the two quite as clear as one might
wish, turning quickly from the image of God as the place of all to the idea of
community as the place of God. Leaving these details aside, the point
remains that there are ample reasons for resistance to a strong religious focus
on Jerusalem, and for this resistance to be liturgically encoded to a greater
degree than it has been.
4. Imagined Landscapes
What we see embedded in the Passover liturgy is an instability that
haunts contemporary - and especially progressive - Judaism. Jerusalem acts
as both symbol and metaphor: it is linguistically bound to that which it
represents (Ir shalem/shalom, city of wholeness or peace), but also
conceptually unstable - there is a disparity between the Jerusalem of liturgy
and the geographically accessible city.29 The Jerusalem of liturgy retains its
centrality not in spite of, but because of this disparity: the actual city becomes
an anchor point for the redemptive hope expressed throughout the Seder
ritual because it points to both what is and what might be, but is not yet. Neil
Gillman’s commentary in Lawrence Hoffman’s recently released volume, My
People’s Passover Haggadah, comes close to expressing this idea, reporting
on yet another (unattributed) alteration to the final line of the Seder:
L’shanah b’rushalayim hab’nuiah, ‘Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt.’ ‘That
reworded statement,’ writes Gillman, ‘expresses the hope that one day in the
future, Jerusalem may be a flourishing city where its diverse populations
could live in peace with one another. That’s the Jerusalem we yearn to return
to.’30
Contrary to Gillman, however, I do not believe that a rebuilt
Jerusalem is a sufficient answer to the yearning expressed in the liturgy. Or,
at least, I do not believe that a simple rebuilding of the geographical
Jerusalem will do the job. An examination of extra-liturgical sources reveals
a deeper ambiguity in the way Jerusalem’s sacred space is constructed. As an
image, Jerusalem owes as much to imagination as to geography. This is not
to suggest that Jerusalem is often portrayed with details of landscape,
inhabitants, or architecture that do not exist in reality - far from it. There
appears to be a long history of Jerusalem being rendered with details that
conform to the reality with which the artist portraying it is most familiar.
A few examples must suffice. In her article on illuminations in
thirteenth to fifteenth century Hebrew Psalters, Thérèse Metzger
______________________________________________________________
demonstrates that in most Psalters of the period, illuminations illustrate
specific lines from the text.31 She presents, as a particularly striking example,
an illumination from a late thirteenth century Italian Psalter.32 It belongs to
Psalm 48, one of the Korahite psalms, which describes ‘the city of our God,
His Holy Mountain, fair-crested, joy of all the earth, Mount Zion.’33 The
illumination depicts a figure with an animal head holding a lute in one hand,
and a banner in the other; in the background, there is a circular walled city,
with three arched gates visible. A small collection of buildings rises from the
middle of the walls; one of these has a distinctive chimney, and several have
hatching on their roofs which gives the impression of tiling - although this
could also be an attempt at shading to indicate depth. The drawing is small
enough that an examination of the buildings themselves cannot yield a
definite indication of the location depicted. The walls of the city and the
banner in the figure’s hand are far more helpful. The banner contains the
words ‘Great is our God, and highly to be praised, in the city of our God, in
his holy mountain’; Metzger takes this as an indication that the walled city is
meant to represent the city of God on Mount Zion: Jerusalem. The walls of
the city, however, are crowned by crenulations which feature a deep ‘V’ cut
into their tops - a style of battlement favoured in thirteenth-century Italy,
though not to be found in the architectural vocabulary of the Levant.
Another, similar, example may be found in the same Psalter, this
time illustrating Psalm 30: ‘A song for the dedication of the house,’ or the
Temple.34 This illumination depicts a figure wearing a cap (or possibly a
skullcap; again, the drawing is too small to offer a definite indication), with
hands raised in a gesture of supplication, standing inside a tall, narrow tower.
The tower itself is decorated with Gothic arches, and appears to have a clock
housed in its uppermost portion, directly below a set of crenulations identical
to those adorning the walls of the city in Psalm 48. As Metzger points out,
‘Only the figure at prayer indicates that the building, a typical, secular Italian
one, is intended to represent the Temple.’35
In the twentieth century, the work of Marc Chagall provides
multiple examples of this shift between historical reality and the idealised
landscape of personal memory in the representation of Jerusalem. The peaked
rooflines of his native village, Vitebsk, although typical of Northern
European architecture, look nothing like anything found in Israel.
Nevertheless, it is these rooflines that are depicted more often than not in
Chagall’s depictions of scenes from Jerusalem, such as his famous ‘White
Crucifixion’ (1938), or his portrayal of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (1973). The onion-
shaped dome of a Russian church, seen silhouetted against the horizon of
‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ is particularly notable for its ability to suggest the location
in which the action of the painting takes place. The ladder is the brightest,
most realistic image in the painting; the city appears dream-like in the
______________________________________________________________
background, as if a shadow of something that has either ceased to exist or not
yet come to be.
What artists such as Chagall and the anonymous Psalter illuminator
have done is to impose their own versions of ‘home’ onto the image of
Jerusalem, the far-off, idealised home to which Diaspora Jews always aspire
but where they seldom arrive. This layering is indicative of the sort of
‘double consciousness’ that Samir Dayal and others have hypothesised as
characteristic of diasporic identities, but there is something more to be made
of it in theological terms - especially in the case of Chagall, whose images of
Jerusalem-as-Vitebsk were produced after a visit to the city of Jerusalem
itself.36 If the place from which one is exiled is made to look like home, then
home, too, becomes a place of exile. This point is clearly made by André
Aciman in his essay ‘In Double Exile,’ a meditation on his own experience of
Passover in light of his childhood spent in the now extinct Jewish community
of Alexandria, Egypt:
[E]ach one of us is a dislodged citizen of a country that was

never really his but that he has learned to long for and
cannot forget. The fault lines of exile and diaspora always
run deep, and we are always from elsewhere, and from
elsewhere before that.37
This feeling of unsettledness, of continual exile, haunts the Passover liturgy

to the point that even in Jerusalem one concludes the Seder with ‘Next year
in Jerusalem,’ looking forward to a time and place in which the yearning for
home will be answered.
This may be an eschatological yearning; the end of exile may be part
of the mending of the world towards which religious Jews also strive without
ever achieving.38 This yearning could also be a way of internalising the
Haggadah’s command to re-live the Exodus story: ‘In each and every
generation people must regard themselves as though they personally left
Egypt.’39 But even as Seder participants re-live a story of repeated exile, what
Aciman refers to as ‘the many exoduses that went unrecorded but that every
Jew knows he can remember if he tries hard enough,’ the liturgy reminds
them that they are also re-living a story of repeated homecoming, a
continuation of the move back towards Jerusalem recorded in the Biblical
narrative: ‘as it says, ‘He brought us out of there in order to bring us to and
give us the land that He swore to our ancestors.’’
The land being discussed here is usually, and quite reasonably,
assumed to be the Land of Israel. But I would propose a more radical
interpretation of the text. The Psalter artist did not draw Italian cities because
he (or she) was incapable of rendering any other kind of architecture, but
because they represented the pinnacle of architectural achievement as that
______________________________________________________________
artist understood it; they embodied the spirit of Jerusalem, even though they
clearly failed as representations of the actual city. Chagall painted a ghostly
Vitebsk at the site of Jacob’s ladder instead of a temple because, to Chagall,
Vitebsk had become Bet-El, the house of God. This is emphasised again
when Vitebsk appears amongst the emblems of the royal house of Judah:
Vitebsk has taken on the importance of Jerusalem as a place of approach to
God, and thus shares in the authority derived from direct linkage with God.
André Aciman claims to carry a ‘private Egypt’ with him - but he also carries
a private Jerusalem, a city called Alexandria. Jerusalem is the space of
redemption, yes - but it is, perhaps, more accurate to say, as the Hillel
haggadah implies, that redemption is the space of Jerusalem, and it, like God,
is present, to every generation, no matter where its members may be located.
Notes
1
P Hyman, ‘The Jewish Family: Looking for a Useable Past,’ in On Being a
Jewish Feminist: A Reader, S Heschel (ed), Schocken Books, New York,
1983, p. 20.
2
J Sacks, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Haggadah: Hebrew and English Text with
New Essays and Commentary, Continuum, New York, 2007, p. 98.
3
J Sacks, The Koren Siddur, Koren Publishers, Jerusalem, 2009, pp. 982-
983.
4
L A Hoffman (ed), My People’s Prayer Book: Traditional Prayers, Modern
Commentaries Volume 2: The Amidah, Jewish Lights Publishing,
Woodstock, VT, 1998, p. 140.
5
The Seder is also more susceptible to alteration for particular political and
historical circumstances - see below, and also D C Jacobson, ‘Writing and
Rewriting the Zionist National Narrative: Responses to the Arab Revolt of
1936-1939 in kibbutz Passover haggadot,’ Journal of Modern Jewish Studies,
vol. 6.1, 2007, pp. 1-20.
6
This function of the Seder is apparent in its emphasis on the participation of
the youngest members of the community - the tradition of the four questions
being asked by the youngest present, and the story of the four children, two
of which are addressed by direct quotations from Exodus 13:8: ‘And you
shall explain to your son on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for
me when I went free from Egypt’.’ This, and all Biblical quotations, from the
New Jewish Publication Socieity Tanakh; haggadah quotation from Sacks,
pp. 18-19. In this essay, I am taking Sacks’s translation as a normative text
from which to base my later comparisons, rather than any of the Artscroll
editions of the haggadah, which almost certainly have a far wider circulation,
as the problematics of Artscroll’s translations are too great, and too well-
known, to ignore - see, for example, B B Levy, ‘Our Torah, Your Torah, and
______________________________________________________________
Their Torah: An Evaluation of the Artscroll Phenomenon,’ in Truth and

Compassion: Essays on Judaism and Religion in Memory of Rabbi Dr.
Solomon Frank, H Joseph, J N Lightstone, and M D Oppenheim (eds),
Wilfred Laurier University Press, Waterloo, ON, 1983, pp. 137-190.
7
See A Gray, ‘Medieval Commentators,’ My People’s Passover Haggadah,
L Hoffman and D Arnow (eds), vol. 1, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock,
VT, 2008, p. 126.
8
Sacks, pp. 10-11.
9
Although the accuracy of this has been brought into question - see M Y
Shreiber, ‘The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics,’
PMLA, vol 113.2, March 1998, pp. 273-287. However, see also S D Ezrahi,
Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000; A H Rosenfeld (ed), The
Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington, 2008; Mordecai Richler, This Year in Jerusalem, Chatto
& Windus, London, 1994, for examples of the literary working-out of the
exile/return dialectic.
10
For a discussion of the continuity or lack thereof between Biblical and
Rabbinic Judaism, see W S Green, ‘Old Habits Die Hard: Judaism in the
Encyclopaedia of Religion,’ in The Blackwell Reader in Judaism, J Neusner
and A J A Peck (eds), Blackwell, Oxford, 2001, p. 9.
11
David transferred the seat of political power from Hebron to Jerusalem,
somewhere between the tenth and eighth centuries BCE; see 2 Samuel 5:6-13;
dating taken from Nadav Na’aman, ‘The Contribution of the Amarna Letters
to the Debate on Jerusalem’s Political Position in the Tenth Century B. C.
E.,’ Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, issue 304, 1996,
pp. 17-27.
12
Although Louis Jacobs notes that, while mishkan is definitely Biblical,
shekhinah is a Rabbinic term - see ‘Holy Places,’ in Judaism and Theology:
Essays on the Jewish Religion, Vallentine Mitchell, London, 2005, pp. 51-65.
13
2 Samuel 7:5-7
14
See especially P K McCarter, Jr., II Samuel: A New Translation with
Introduction, Notes and Commentary, The Anchor Bible, Doubleday, Garden
City, NY, 1984, pp. 200-201.
15
Jacobs 54.
16
This formula first appears in Exodus 22:20, and is repeated at Ex. 23:9,
Lev. 19:34 and Deut. 10:19.
17
E M Broner and N Nimrod, The Women’s Haggadah, HarperCollins, New
York, 1994, p. 68; p. 17.
18
D Silverman and M Bazant, Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah,
viewed on 16 May 2008, http://colours.mahost.org/events/haggadah.pdf, p.
______________________________________________________________
82. Silverman and Bazant render the final line in English as ‘Justice, justice
we shall pursue’ (emphasis added), transforming it from a commandment into
a pledge.
19
J Levitt and M Strassfeld (eds), A Night of Questions: A Passover
Haggadah, The Reconstructionist Press, Elkins Park, PA, 2000, p. 144.
20
R Barenblat, The Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for Pesach, Version 6.0
(2008) 59 <http://velveteenrabbi.com/VRHaggadah.pdf> (accessed 14 May
2008).
21
R A Rabinowicz (ed), Passover Haggadah: The Feast of Freedom, The
Rabbinical Assembly, USA (no city given), 1982, p. 137.
22
Sacks, pp. 98-99.
23
S L Elwell (ed), The Open Door: A Passover Haggadah, Central
Conference of American Rabbis, New York, 2002, p. 112.
24
R N Levy (ed), On Wings of Freedom: The Hillel Haggadah for the Nights
of Passover, Ktav Publishing House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1989, p. 122.
25
Broner and Nimrod, pp. 16-17.
26
See Jacobs for an excellent summary of Rabbinic viewpoints on this.
Jewish attitudes towards anthropomorphism are well documented and need
not be rehearsed here.
27
M Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist
Theology of the Holocaust, Routledge, London, 2003.
28
J Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective,
Harper San Francisco, New York, 1991, p. 165. Plaskow’s reasoning is that
the image evokes the shekinah, emphasising the importance of the entire
community as the bearers of God’s presence.
29
I take my distinction between symbol and metaphor from Paul Ricoeur.
See P Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination,
trans. David Pellauer, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1995, pp. 51-52.
30
Gillman, ‘Theologically Speaking,’ in My People’s Passover Haggadah, L
Hoffman and D Arnow (eds), vol. 2, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock,
VT, 2008, p. 193.
31
T Metzger, ‘The Iconography of the Hebrew Psalter from the Thirteenth to
the Fifteenth Century,’ in The Visual Dimension: Aspects of Jewish Art, C
Moore (ed), Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1993, pp. 47-81.
32
Metzger, fig 3.18; p. 57.
33
Ps 48:2-3. For a lengthy discussion of the geography of Psalm 48, see R P
Gordon, ‘How Did Psalm 48 Happen?’ in Holy Land, Holy City: Sacred
Geography and the Interpretation of the Bible, Paternoster Press,
Waynesboro, GA, 2004, pp. 35-45.
34
According to a Jewish Publication Society footnote.
35
Metzger, p. 56.
______________________________________________________________
36
S Dayal, ‘Diaspora and Double Consciousness,’ The Journal of the
Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 29.1, 1996, pp. 44-62. See also
B Bryan, ‘Homesickness as a Construct of the Migrant Experience,’
Changing English, vol. 12.1, 2005, pp. 43-52.
37
A Aciman, ‘In a Double Exile,’ in False Papers: Essays on Exile and
Memory, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2000, p. 109.
38
In other words, it is a yearning towards the messianic age (as conceived of
by Walter Benjamin): the eternal not-yet.
39
Mishnah Pesahim 10:5, The Mishnah: A New Translation, J Neusner
(trans), Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1988, p. 250.
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______________________________________________________________
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trans. David Pellauer, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1995, pp. 51-52.
Rosenfeld A. H., (ed), The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile

Literature, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2008.
Sacks, J., The Koren Siddur, Koren Publishers, Jerusalem, 2009, pp. 982-
983.
Sacks, J., Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Haggadah: Hebrew and English Text with
New Essays and Commentary, Continuum, New York, 2007, p. 98.
Shreiber, M. Y., ‘The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic
Poetics,’ PMLA, vol 113.2, March 1998, pp. 273-287.
______________________________________________________________
Silverman, D. and Bazant, M., Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah,
viewed on 16 May 2008, <http://colours.mahost.org/events/haggadah.pdf>,
p. 82.
Sailing Home: Boat-Graves, Migrant Identities and
Funerary Practices on the Viking Frontier
Erin Halstad-McGuire
Abstract:
Boat-burial is a well-known feature of Viking Age funerary ritual. The boat-
graves from Scar (Sanday, Orkney) and Kaldárhöfði (Árnessýsla, Iceland),
each draw on powerful symbolism to link the deceased and their survivors to
the Scandinavian homeland. Scar represents Scotland’s richest Viking Age
grave excavated under modern conditions; it was a multiple burial of a
surprisingly elderly woman, a young child and mature man. The boat-burial
at Kaldárhöfði, which held the remains of two individuals, demonstrates a
combination of religious and secular messages that is at home within the
Viking diaspora. Using the boat-burial of a woman from Vinjum (Sogn og
Fjordane, Norway) for a basis of comparison, this paper will examine these
two graves in order to understand how the emigrants used funerary ritual and
material culture to display, construct and define new identities on the Viking
frontier. It also considers how they adapted existing funerary rituals to new
physical and social environments. *
Key Words: Viking, identity, boat-burial, migration, gender, migrant

identity, mortuary practices
*****
1. Introduction
The Viking Age marked a period of dramatic change in the North
Sea and North Atlantic regions. In this period spanning the 8th through 11th
centuries, Norse raiders, traders and settlers began expanding into new
territories in the British Isles and as far west as the coast of North America,
settling the islands of the Faeroes (c. 825 CE), Iceland (c. 875), and
Greenland (c. 985). Although the settlements in North America and
Greenland were lost before the end of the Middle Ages, the rest of the Viking
expansion was to have a long-term impact on the North Atlantic region.
The consequences of migration affected the settlers and their
families as well as the broader scope of Scandinavian and western European
society. Research on modern population movements has demonstrated that
migration-induced stresses change the lives of immigrants, shaping how they
adapt to their new homes.1 Migration affects societies and people in a number
of ways: it changes family and household organisation; gender relations and
roles shift; and general socio-cultural structures are altered through the
integration of different practices and beliefs.2 While the identification of
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these migration-induced societal changes has been the focus of research in a
number of fields, it is still a new territory for archaeologists.
Viking Age burial remains in Scotland and Iceland demonstrate
increased flexibility in gender relations and roles and reveal that some
migrant families were seeking new ways to display their identities and
connections to their homelands. This paper examines some of the impacts on
gender roles and migrant identities during the landnám (literally land-
claiming) period, within the Viking diaspora. Coming out of a broader
research project, it offers a glimpse of the bigger picture that is emerging.3
Three case studies form the centre of the current analysis: one from Western
Norway, representing the point of origin for the migrants, and one each from
the emigrant communities in Scotland and Iceland. The case-studies selected
are all boat-burials. Although this was a relatively infrequent mode of burial
in the Viking Age, it was a key practice in Western Norway, and continued at
a lesser frequency in the emigrant communities of the North Atlantic. Boat-
burial is selected for analysis in this instance partly because of the many
layers of meaning that may be embedded in the ritual.
2. Theoretical Background
It is the responsibility of an archaeologist not just to present data,
but to interpret it. Behind any interpretation there inevitably exists a series of
ideas that influence the interpretive approach. For the purposes of this paper,
it is important that two aspects of this theoretical background are made
explicit: migrant identities and mortuary archaeology.
Migrant communities develop distinct identities.4 These migrant
identities play active roles in the funerary rituals of their respective
communities. Funerals, in addition to expressing respect for the dead and
addressing the needs of the survivors, can be ‘tools for the construction of
individual and collective identity,’ particularly in the context of emigration.5
E. Reimers proposes that mortuary rituals not only display migrant identities,
but create them.6 New identities emerge through the interplay of funerary
ritual and mnemonic symbolism, linking the migrant to both the homeland
and the new (possibly hybridised) community. Because they contain elements
of both the home society and the new one, these new identities and the
associated rituals become hybridised.7 Moreover, migrant women frequently
have access to roles and opportunities in settler communities that were
unavailable to them in their homelands.8 It seems likely that these new
opportunities would also lead to new types of identity in a migrant context.
Some archaeologists have come to see funerary remains and
practices as texts, even poetry.9 The grave holds multiple meanings, nuanced
by the experiences and knowledge of the observers, and subject to dialectal
variation. One development from this approach is that burial ritual is now,
more than ever, seen to be a tool for the creation of memory within a society.
Erin Halstad-McGuire 167
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The symbolism embedded in grave-goods (and other aspects of a funeral) is
not limited to the identity of the deceased during life, but rather can serve as a
tool for the creation of idealised identities of individuals, families and
communities.10
3. Scandinavian Boat-Burial
Boats and ships have played a role in Scandinavian death rituals
from the Mesolithic through to the beginning of the 12th century.11 The
numbers of boat- and ship-burials from Viking Age Norway has been
suggested to exceed 500 based on the presence of rivets in graves, although
T. Sjøvold has argued for a more conservative estimate.12 Incorporating the
work done by M. Müller-Wille with recent finds, O. Owen and M. Dalland
have estimated that over 250 clinker-built boats dating to AD 800-1100 have
been found in Northern Europe.13 Boat-graves will contain the remains of one
or more people, in or under a boat. Typically, individuals in boat-graves are
accompanied by a large number and variety of grave-goods.
The meaning behind the boat and ship funerary rituals has been
much discussed. Three principal interpretations have been identified, and
many scholars have suggested that multiple meanings/purposes may have
existed simultaneously.14 The first possibility is that the boat served a
functional purpose: the vessel acted as a convenient container to
hold/transport the deceased, or as a source of fuel for the pyre.15 However,
although boats may have been practical in some instances, boats were
probably not the most convenient or efficient sources of wood for a pyre.
Furthermore, if a coffin was needed, there were probably other options
available; the decision to use a boat must have been a deliberate one.
Secondly, scholars have also argued that ships and boats may have
been secular symbols of power, authority and/or status. As part of a grave
assemblage, boats may be seen to reflect social status, roles and even
property ownership.16 Although connected to certain male-dominated
activities (trading, raiding, warfare, etc), the symbol of the boat could be
extended to some women who achieved status by other means. The presence
of a boat in a woman’s grave does not tell us that she was a trader or that she
liked fishing, but rather that she held a position of some importance in her
society. The richer and more elaborate the burial, the bigger the boat, the
higher the status may have been – they become examples of conspicuous
consumption. Thus, rich ship-burials such as Oseberg and Valsgärde are
typically connected with royalty. E. Wamers argues that the ship-burials at
Hedeby and Ladby must be seen in the context of state formation and not as
being part of a religious practice, 17 but in doing so, he is viewing the ship-
graves in isolation from what appears to be a much more widely-ranging
funerary rite and neglecting the role that religion may have played in politics
at the time.
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Finally, boat- and ship-burials may have had embedded religious
symbolism. The nature of this symbolism has also been widely debated. In its
most basic form, the boat is seen to be a means of transport to the afterlife.18
Some scholars have chosen to see the boat as a semiotic link to one of the
Norse gods, connecting the deceased to Freyr, Óðinn or Njörðr, depending
upon the chosen interpretation. Furthermore, rather than being simply a
passive symbol of faith, the use of a boat in funerary ritual can be understood
to be an act of sacrifice or votive offering.19
The following sections will consider three examples of boat-graves
from Norway, Scotland and Iceland (figure 1). Each grave will be described
before the overall discussion of how they fit in to the general practice of boat-
burial in the Viking world.
Figure 1. Locations of the case studies. 1: Vinjum, Norway; 2: Scar,

Scotland; 3: Kaldárhöfði, Iceland (map courtesy of E Pierce).
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4. Vinjum, Aurland, Sogn og Fjordane (Norway)
The Vinjum boat-grave was excavated prior to 1925. Although
mostly undisturbed, the human remains were poorly preserved.20 The grave,
which was covered by a round cairn, lay on a steep hillside, overlooking the
fjord. The small boat was oriented north south, roughly parallel to the water
(figure 2). The body was laid out on its back, possibly on bedding consisting
of woollen textiles and birch bark. Based on an analysis of tooth wear,
Dommasnes claims that the individual was an older adult. While the sex of
the individual must remain uncertain, the oval brooches, which formed a
fundamental clothing element for many Viking women, suggest that she may
have been female.
The body was accompanied by a range of grave-goods, including 38
beads, possibly worn as a double strand between an ornate pair of bronze
oval brooches. A third brooch, found at the neckline, was a re-used fragment
of Irish religious metalwork. The rest of the jewellery included an Irish silver
pendant, two bronze bracelets and a bronze piece for suspending the beads
from the brooches. A final element of insular material consisted of a high
quality bronze holy water sprinkler. 21 The amount of imports in the woman’s
grave is indicative of some form of contact between her region and that of
Ireland. However, the presence of an ecclesiastical object might suggest that
this contact was not peaceful, as objects used in Christian church rituals are
unlikely to have been acquired by non-Christians or even Christian laymen
through trade or gift-exchange.
The tools in the assemblage were rather mundane, but what is
striking is the quantity and variety of them in a single grave. The textile tools
ranged from loom weights to spindle whorls; but the grave also included an
iron sickle and an adze. Her keys suggest possession of items kept locked
away, and may be seen as indicative of social power within the home.22 There
was a cooking pan and two iron rods identified as roasting spits.23 Spits are
rare finds in graves and N. Price has raised the possibility that they may not
have been cooking spits at all, but rather tools used by v߭lur (sorceresses).24
This raises the possibility that the woman buried in this grave was a religious
leader, as well as an important land-/house-holder in the area. Clearly, the
Vinjum woman held a position of some status within her community as is
suggested by her burial in a prominent location, within a boat and richly
accompanied. Her death must have had an impact on her community and her
funeral would have served to address this.
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Figure 2. Hypothetical reconstruction of the Vinjum grave, Aurland, Sogn og

Fjordane, Norway (J. Craig).
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5. Scar, Sanday (Scotland)
Located on the north end of Burness in Sanday, the Scar boat-burial
is one of few modernly excavated boat-graves in Scotland. Discovered in
1991, it is one of the most remarkable Viking graves found in the United
Kingdom.25 A small clinker-built rowing boat (ca 7.15 m long), was set into
the sand, with large flagstones holding the boat in place. A chamber had been
created in the western two thirds of the boat by the placement of an upright
stone slab across the width. The remainder of the boat was filled with stones.
An elderly woman, approximately 70 years old, lay on her back in the centre
of the chamber. On her left was a child, about ten years old. At her head, in
the prow of the boat, an adult male was placed on his side with his legs
tightly flexed (figure 3).
The woman had the majority of the grave-goods, although much of
the man’s equipment may have been lost to coastal erosion. The woman’s
sole piece of jewellery was an ornate equal-armed brooch of the Troms type
that was old prior to its deposition within the grave. A virtually complete
whalebone plaque had been placed near the woman’s feet, and on her right-
hand side lay a weaving sword, an iron sickle and a locked maple-wood box
containing other textile equipment. The whalebone plaque is an intriguing
object; its function is uncertain, although it may have served as a sort of
ironing board for special textiles, and is sometimes associated with the cult of
the goddess Freyja.26 The man was accompanied by a sword and a quiver
with arrows. He had 22 gaming pieces, an antler comb, and possibly a shield
and lead weights. Because this section of the grave was heavily affected by
erosion, more artefacts may have been present in the grave, but are now lost.
The man’s sword was a Petersen type H sword, a common Viking Age type
frequently bearing ornamental inlay in the hilt.27 Weapons burials,
particularly those including swords, are generally believed to be associated
with high-status males, perhaps indicative of a warrior elite.28 It is impossible
to know if the child had any grave-goods. Although children are sometimes
buried with objects (for example, at Cnip, on Lewis, and Straumur, in eastern
Iceland), it is not uncommon for them to be unaccompanied in the grave.29
The Scar boat-grave has strong connections with northwestern
Norway. Small boat-burial was a common feature of the region, although it
existed elsewhere as well. Whalebone plaques are primarily found in western
and northern Norway. Virtually identical examples of the rare Troms-type
brooch have been found in the far north of Norway. The rest of the grave-
goods could have come from anywhere in the Scandinavian world, but in
occurring together, they form a package with a distinctly northwestern
character. The dating is also curious - although the grave-goods suggest
earlier dates (the grave was initially dated to c. AD 850), radiocarbon dates
have produced later results. The published date for the site is c. AD 875-950,
that is to say, it is not a grave of early, first-wave settlers in Scotland. The
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excavators have suggested that it was a ‘late gesture to the old gods and old
customs of the homelands.’30
6. Kaldárhöfði, Árnessýsla, Iceland

In 1946, erosion in the region of Lake Úlfljótsvatn exposed a grave
on a small island. The grave, excavated by Kristján Eldjárn, takes its name
from the nearby farm of Kaldárhöfði. The grave was in the form of a low
stone and earth mound covering a small boat. The boat was oriented W-E,
with the prow of the boat pointing towards the water. Within the boat were
the poorly preserved remains of an adult male, with his head to the west and
probably a young child; the only preserved remains of the child, however,
were two teeth (figure 4).31
To the adult’s right lay a sword, a large spearhead (blade alongside
the feet), six arrowheads and a broken axe. The Kaldárhöfði sword was a
Petersen type O sword, a Hiberno-Norse form that is rare in Scandinavia and
even more so Iceland, where this is the only example. 32 His weapons could
not have come from Iceland, but had to have been brought to the country,
either by the deceased, or by someone with whom he had contact. This type
of sword belongs to the tenth century, and unfortunately, the only dating for
the grave as a whole is based on the typology of the grave goods. It would
have been useful to know if the sword could have been an heirloom. As with
the Scar sword, the presence of the weapon suggests that the man was a high-
status individual whose funeral linked him to Scandinavia and a Nordic
identity. We cannot know for certain if he was a warrior, but it seems
reasonable to suppose that the weapons may have been his.
A bronze Borre-style buckle, Frankish strap end with acanthus
motifs and a small bundle of silver wire were found near the man’s waist.
Two shield bosses were located at opposite ends of the boat as though they
had once leaned up against the prow and stern. A much smaller spearhead
and axe were discovered under the right-hand side of the boat (beyond the
individual’s left side) and Eldjárn has interpreted them as belonging to the
child.33 Although this is one explanation for their unusual placement, it is not
certain that it is the only interpretation. An examination of the published plan
raises the possibility that several of the artefacts were found outside the boat
and it is feasible that this occurred because the available space in the small
boat was limited.34 Among some of the more everyday artefacts included in
the grave were some items of fishing equipment, including a fish hook, a
possible boat hook and a line sinker.
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Figure 3. Hypothetical reconstruction of the Scar grave, Sanday, Orkney,

Scotland (J Craig).
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The Kaldárhöfði grave is unusual not because of what is present in
the grave but rather what is not; there is neither evidence of a horse nor horse
equipment. While in Norway or Scotland this would not seem noteworthy, in
the context of Iceland, with its dramatic number of horse burials in this
period, it is worth considering. In both Norway and Scotland, only 20% of
boat-burials include horse equipment or horses. Of the entire collection of
graves from these regions, horse or horse equipment are included in 18%
(Norway) and 10% (Scotland) of the graves. This is in contrast to the
situation in Iceland where approximately 40% of graves had some horse-type
component.35
The previous sections have described three important boat-graves.
The first, a Norwegian woman’s grave from Vinjum in Sogn og Fjordane,
was found to contain a large number of artefacts, many of which might be
seen as high-status. The Scottish grave from Scar, Orkney, held the remains
of three individuals and a variety of Scandinavian artefacts. The final
example was a double burial found in southwestern Iceland, at Kaldárhöfði,
containing weapons and subsistence tools, but little else. The question that
inevitably arises is thus: what do these graves tell us about migrant identities
and changes to society? To answer this question, the remainder of the paper
focuses on the deployment of the boat-burial ritual and its interpretation
within the context of the Viking diaspora.
It has been argued that the boat was a commonly accepted symbol
that may have changed meaning over time.36 To this statement, we can add
that the symbolic meaning behind boats and boat-burial likely changed over
distance as well. As noted above, although boats and ships may be
traditionally identified with men’s activities, women were not infrequently
accorded burial in boats or ships. To fully understand the significance of
these female boat-burials, it is necessary to briefly consider the famous
female ship-grave from Oseberg, Norway.37 An extraordinarily rich grave, it
has been the subject of interpretation and reinterpretation for over a century.38
The ship was filled with an enormous array of grave-goods, including
furniture, sleds, a wagon, tents, textile and cooking equipment. Moreover, a
number of horses, dogs and oxen were sacrificed and buried in and around
the boat. A. Ingstad argues that the horses were votive offerings because
there was a dearth of harness and fittings for them; without this equipment,
the animals could not have served a practical purpose for the deceased.39 She
also claims that many of the grave-goods (such as the tapestry, the wagon and
the rattles) had connections to the cult of Freyja. While there have been some
strong criticisms of Ingstad’s association of the burial with Freyja,40 it is
apparent that the burial assemblage indicates the presence of a complex set of
funerary rituals that exceed simple functionality.
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Figure 4. Hypothetical reconstruction of the Kaldárhöfði grave, Árnessýsla,

Iceland (J Craig).
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7. Discussion
Two of the case studies presented here also had women at the heart
of them. The individual interred at Vinjum was probably an older woman of
some status in her community. Her cairn sat high on a steep hill, overlooking
the fjord and may have once been a monument within the landscape. Among
her grave-goods were an Insular ecclesiastical object and an iron rod, which
might have been a ritual staff.41 These items hint at wealth, power, and a
social position that was outside of the ordinary. Likewise, at Scar, an older
woman lay in a boat by the sea, also bearing rich grave-goods. In this case,
she was not alone, but accompanied in death by two others. Looking out over
the North Atlantic, it is difficult to say if this grave was particularly visible
within the landscape in the Viking Age, although the prow and stern of the
ship may have originally remained above ground for a short time. The
grave’s impact on the landscape was ephemeral, and it is possible that the
performance of the funerary ritual created a social memory that did not
require the long-term visual connection of the funerary monument itself. This
pattern reflects that seen elsewhere: while most of the Norwegian boat-graves
had large cairns or mounds, the Scottish and Icelandic ones were largely flat
or dug into existing features, such as sand dunes.42 It is possible that the
investment of time and energy required for the building of large mounds was
too much for the settler communities.
Only one boat-grave from Iceland is known to have held the remains
of a woman - Vatnsdalur, in Patréksfjord - once again over-looking the water.
Although seven bodies were found in the grave, it has been suggested that
one of the women was the primary burial.43 Even though it is not clear which
of the two female skeletons may have belonged to the primary interment, it is
interesting to note that neither is elderly (18-25 and 36-45), in contrast to the
previous cases. And unlike at Scar, it seems that the secondary inhumations
were not simultaneous, but rather the result of later activity at the site. While
it is tempting to draw on this grave as a comparison for the Vinjum and Scar
burials, the confusion with regards to the nature of the grave and its
disturbance complicates the issues too much.
Multiple burials where individuals were buried simultaneously
occurred infrequently in the Viking Age. The Kaldárhöfði grave apparently
included the remains of an adult and a child who had been buried at the same
time. The presence of three individuals buried simultaneously, as at Scar, is
even rarer. While the woman and child seem to have been the main focus of
the Scar burial, the man presents an interesting dilemma. Because of his
cramped position at the prow of the boat, the awkward way in which his legs
have been folded, and the single-sidedness of the stone burial chamber, he
seems almost like a last minute addition to the burial. Owen and Dalland
examine the possible reasons for this in some detail.44 They raise and dismiss
explanations involving human sacrifice and secondary burial and instead
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propose that the three people all died at the same time. They do not, however,
explain why the man’s burial seems almost like an afterthought. Perhaps the
woman was of higher status than the man, and the child was somehow
directly associated with her, thereby leaving the man to a lesser position
within the grave. Conceivably, the man could have died shortly after the
burial for the woman and child had begun - we do not know how long a
funeral took in this period - and so was added to the grave because it
provided a convenient and sufficiently high-status means to satisfy the needs
of both the dead and the living community. Although the man had high-
quality grave-goods and was apparently deemed worthy of a status-bound
burial, he was not given one of his own, in spite of the difficulties associated
with including him in the boat. If resources were limited in the settler
community, it would make sense to use what was currently and conveniently
available. By finding a way to fit the man into the grave, there would be no
need to sacrifice another boat or to invest in the building of another grave.
What do these boat-burials mean? The possible explanations for
boat-based funerary rituals described above were that the boat was a
convenient container for burial, a secular symbol of power/status, or a
religious symbol for transportation or devotion/sacrifice. The boats in the
case studies could have served the purely functional role of a coffin. If
function were the main reason for using the boats, it would be expected that
they were no longer useful in their original capacity. Unfortunately, the poor
levels of preservation render it impossible to determine if the boats had still
been sound at the time of their placement disposal.
As secular symbols, the boats offer little to us. All three graves are
relatively rich in terms of their other grave-goods. They contain valuable
items, such as swords and brooches and all three graves have a large quantity
of artefacts. But other graves in each of the regions are comparable, in spite
of lacking boats. For example, Baldursheimar, in Iceland is a particularly
noteworthy grave, containing a number of weapons, a horse and riding gear
and game pieces similar to those found at Scar, among other items.45
Balnakeil, Durness is a rich grave from Scotland, again containing a selection
of weapons, game pieces and personal items.46 If the meaning behind the
boat-burials in the Viking diaspora was purely secular and tied to power, then
we might expect to see a greater frequency for the ritual than we actually do,
instead boat-burial becomes increasingly rare.47 Furthermore, we might
expect that the boat-burials would be somewhat richer in terms of their
contents, but the grave-goods decline in Scotland and further still in Iceland
(Table 1). Still, if the boat itself is a form of conspicuous consumption, it is
possible that in areas such as Iceland, where wood suitable for ship-building
was lacking, that the boat itself was sufficient to indicate status and other
grave-goods were less necessary.
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Table 1: Average number of artefact types in boat-graves, based on data
collected for 33 graves from Western Norway, Scotland and Iceland.
Study area # of types

Norway 8.27
Scotland 7.00
Iceland 6.43
There is yet one final explanation that might be considered for Scar,
Kaldárhöfði and even Vatnsdalur: if boat-burial was perceived to be a
significant practice in the homeland, then it is conceivable that the ritual was
a means to reconnect with and emphasise the migrants’ identities as well as a
tool by which people could be connected to particular lineages or kin groups.
As previously discussed, migrant funerals are used to both display and create
identities. Frequently, they exaggerate aspects of funerary rituals from the
homeland, sometimes emerging as hybrids of several different traditions.
Owen and Dalland believe that the people from Scar emigrated from
northwestern Norway, and may have lived for in Orkney for a while.48 As
such, it would not be unexpected for them to practice a recognisably western
Norwegian burial rite. Stable isotope analysis of the remains from
Kaldárhöfði and Vatnsdalur failed to identify any migrants, although results
were not possible for all of the individuals.49 However, research in modern
contexts has noted that migrant funerary practices change very slowly,
persisting through several generations; although they are frequently refreshed
by the arrival of new immigrants. It may be the case that the boat-burials at
Kaldárhöfði and Vatnsdalur represent a traditional funerary ritual, linking the
deceased and their survivors to Norwegian roots through the use of hard-to-
come-by resources (the boats and the metalwork), in spite of being second or
third generation Icelanders.
According to Dommasnes, women achieved high status by
managing their family farms while their husbands were away.50 She sees the
increase in high-status female burials as being connected to men’s raiding
and trading activities in the Viking Age. This explanation could apply to the
Vinjum grave, but how can it relate to Scar and Vatnsdalur? Perhaps the
migrant men took their families to new homes and then left them while they
raided and traded elsewhere. It is feasible that the women emigrating from
Norway already had high status and were therefore accorded a similar burial
rite to what they might have expected at home. Alternatively, they may have
attained personal status in their new homes through their spouses or their own
efforts, as for example, Auðr the Deep-Minded (Auðr inn djúpúðga), a
widow who came to be a powerful Icelandic landowner in her own right.51 At
the beginning of this paper, it was suggested that women in historical settler
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societies had access to roles, and therefore status, that were inaccessible in
their more conventional homelands. If this was the case in the Viking
diaspora, then it may explain why women are able to appear central to these
particular boat-graves. It is notable, however, that they remain in the minority
overall.
8. Conclusion
The Vinjum woman was likely to have been a v߭lva, and would
have held high-status within her community. Is it possible, on the basis of the
evidence for the funerary ritual, to suggest that the woman from the Scar boat
held a similar position to that suggested for the woman from Vinjum and
other v߭lur? Probably not. Of her grave-goods, only the whalebone plaque
appears to have any connection to the ritual sphere and as a link to Freyja
rather than to any aspect of seiðr (magic). It is perhaps more likely to see her
as an influential figure in her community. J. Jesch, in her study of Viking
women, wrote:
In the more settled societies of the Norway they came from

and Iceland as it became, women probably had fewer
opportunities to play any role other than those of wife,
mother and housekeeper. But in the brief interval between
leaving Norway and arriving in Iceland, some women
clearly had to be more.52
The Scar woman’s knowledge of the homeland, her connections to old ways
of believing, and her life experiences would have made her a valuable
resource within a nascent settler society. The funerary ritual practiced at Scar
may have been a means for the survivors (family or community) to reconnect
to the ideal of the homeland, memorialising the dead and proclaiming their
migrant identities.
The grave at Kaldárhöfði presents an image more rooted in
masculine identities. Here are the symbols of a warrior and a provider. The
grave-goods bring to mind the image of a man who could hold his own
territory and look after those who were in his care, the kind of man who
would have been of considerable value in the potentially unstable social
climate of landnám-period Iceland. These symbolic messages were likely
conveyed by the man’s grave assemblage at Scar, but were complicated by
the presence of the old woman.
All of the case studies presented have an aristocratic character. The
men and women were richly accompanied by many of the artefacts we expect
from a Viking Age grave, with the notable exception of the missing oval
brooches at Scar. The men have impressive weapon kits and other artefacts,
180 Sailing Home
______________________________________________________________
while the women have jewellery, an array of tools and other valuable objects.
Moreover, their boats represent a significant investment of resources and
energy. In Scandinavia, at this time, elaborate funerary rituals were likely
fundamental for maintaining high social positions.53 It seems likely, that in a
newly developing settler community, the establishment of authority and
power would be crucial. The funerary rituals seen here, embedded in tradition
though altered by the circumstances of migration, are fragmentary records of
the attempts by some families to find their places in their new homes.
Notes
* I am grateful to my supervisor, Colleen Batey, for her insightful input into
my on-going research. I wish to thank Jennifer Craig for her drawings of the
hypothetical reconstructions of my case studies. And finally, I am grateful to
Elizabeth Pierce and Courtney Buchanan for their feedback on drafts of this
paper.
1
S Pedraza, ‘Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender,’
Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 17 (1991), p. 231.
2
N Foner, ‘The Immigrant Family: Cultural Legacies and Cultural Changes,’
International Migration Review, vol. 31.4, 1997, p. 970; S M Kanaiaupuni,
‘Reframing the Migration Question: An Analysis of Men, Women, and
Gender in Mexico,’ Social Forces, vol. 78.4, June 2000, p. 1337; Pedraza, p.
310; C G Pooley and J Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain since the
Eighteenth Century, University College London Press, London, 1998, p. 4.
3
This research forms one component of a PhD project examining Viking
burial rituals in the Viking diaspora: E McGuire, Manifestations of Identity in
Burial: Evidence from Viking-Age Graves in the North Atlantic Diaspora,
unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009.
4
L S Crowder, ‘Chinese Funerals in San Francisco Chinatown: American
Chinese Expressions in Mortuary Ritual Performance,’ Journal of American
Folklore, vol. 113. 450, 2000, p. 451.
5
E Reimers, ‘Death and Identity: Graves and Funerals as Cultural
Communication,’ Mortality, vol. 4.2, January 1999, p. 148.
6
Ibid., p. 150.
7
Crowder, p. 461.
8
See the following studies for comparative material: D J Walther, ‘Gender
Construction and Settler Colonialism in German Southwest Africa, 1894-
1914,’ The Historian, vol. 66.1, 2004, pp. 1-18; J Parle, ‘History, She Wrote:
A Reappraisal of Dear Louisa in the 1990s,’ South African Historical
Journal, vol. 33, 1995; A Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and
the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871, University of Toronto Press,
Toronto, 2001.
______________________________________________________________
9
E.g. M O H Carver, ‘Burial as Poetry: The Context of Treasure in Anglo-
Saxon Graves,’ in Treasure in the Medieval West, E M Tyler (ed), York
Medieval Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 2000; H Williams, Death and
Memory in Early Medieval Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2006.
10
E.g. M Parker Pearson, ‘Mortuary Practices, Society and Ideology: An
Ethno-Archaeological Study,’ in Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, I
Hodder (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982, p. 112; Parker
Pearson, The Archaeology of Death and Burial, 2nd edn, Sutton, Stroud,
Gloucestershire, 2003; H Williams, Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death
and Memory in Past Societies, Kluwer Academic Publishers, New York,
2003; Williams, ‘Keeping the Dead at Arm's Length: Memory, Weaponry
and Early Medieval Mortuary Technologies,’ Journal of Social Archaeology,
vol. 5.2, June 2005, pp. 253-275.
11
e.g. P Birkedahl and E Johansen, ‘The Sebbersund Boat-Graves,’ in The
Ship as Symbol in Prehistoric and Medieval Scandinavia: Papers from an
International Research Seminar at the Danish National Museum,
Copenhagen (5th-7th May 1994), O Crumlin-Pedersen and B Munch Thye
(eds), Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, 1995; and others in the same volume.
12
AW Brøgger, H Falk, and H Shetelig (eds), Osebergfundet vol. 1,
Universitetets Oldsaksamling, Kristiania, 1917, p. 399; T Sjøvold, The Iron
Age Settlement of Arctic Norway: A Study in the Expansion of European Iron
Age Culture within the Arctic Circle, vol. 2, Norwegian Universities Press,
Tromsø, 1974, p. 190-191.
13
O Owen and M Dalland, Scar: A Viking Boat Burial on Sanday, Orkney,
Tuckwell, East Linton, 1999, p. 47.
14
Ibid; and several papers in Crumlin-Pedersen and Munch Thye (eds).
15
Birkedahl and Johansen, p. 164; P Shenk, ‘To Valhalla by Horseback,’
unpublished MA thesis, University of Oslo, 2002, p. 23.
16
= .RE\OLĔVNL µ6KLSV 6RFLHW\ 6\PEROV DQG $UFKDHRORJLVWV¶ LQ &UXPOLQ
Pedersen and Munch Thye (eds), p. 15; and JP Schjødt, ‘The Ship in Old
Norse Mythology and Religion,’ in Crumlin-Pedersen and Munch Thye
(eds), p. 24.
17
E Wamers, ‘The Symbolic Significance of the Ship-Graves at Haiðaby and
Ladby,’ in Crumlin-Pedersen and Munch Thye (eds), p. 157-158.
18
6FKM¡GWS.RE\OLĔVNLS
19
For a variety of approaches to boats as symbols and sacrifices, see papers
in Crumlin-Pedersen and Munch Thye (eds) and Owen and Dalland, 1999, p.
49.
20
This grave has been published only as part of J Bøe, ‘An Ornamented
Celtic Bronze Object, Found in a Norwegian Grave,’ Bergens Museums
Aarbok 1924-25, Bergen, 1925, pp. 2-36. It is also catalogued in L-H
182 Sailing Home
______________________________________________________________
Dommasnes, ‘Yngre Jernalder I Sogn - Forsök På Sosial Rekonstruksjon,’

unpublished MA thesis, Universitetet i Bergen, 1976, p. 239.
21
Insular, in this context, refers to artefacts produced in the British Isles,
particularly those from Early Medieval Ireland, Scotland and Anglo-Saxon
England.
22
G Halsall, ‘Female Status and Power in Early Merovingian Central
Austrasia: The Burial Evidence,’ Early Medieval Europe, vol. 5.1, 1996, pp.
19-20.
23
Dommasnes, p. 239.
24
V߭lur (singular is v߭lva) were female practitioners of seiðr (magic), and
might best be likened to shamans or sorceresses. See N S Price, The Viking
Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia, Aun, Dept. of
Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala, 2002, p. 186.
25
Owen and Dalland.
26
Ibid., p. 74-86.
27
J Petersen, De Norske Vikingesverd, En Typologisk-Kronologisk Studier
over Vikingetidens Vaaben, Videnskapsselskapets Skrifter, J. Dybwad,
Kristiania, 1919.
28
E.g. M Hayeur Smith, Draupnir’s Sweat and Mardöll’s Tears: An
Archaeology of Jewellery, Gender and Identity in Viking Age Iceland, BAR
International Series, John and Erica Hedges, Oxford, 2004, p. 70; B Solberg,
‘Social Status in the Merovingian and Viking Periods in Norway from
Archaeological and Historical Source,’ Norwegian Archaeological Review,
vol. 18.1-2, 1985, pp. 241-256.
29
C Callow, ‘First Steps Towards an Archaeology of Children in Iceland,’
Archaeologia Islandica, vol. 5, 2006, pp. 55-96; A Dunwell et al, ‘A Viking
Age Cemetery at Cnip, Uig, Isle of Lewis,’ Proceedings of the Society of
Antiquaries of Scotland, vol. 125, 1995, pp. 719-752.
30
Owen and Dalland, p. 188.
31
K Eldjárn, Gengið Á Reka. Tólf Fornleifathaettir, Norðri, Akureyri, 1948,
pp. 28-31; K Eldjárn and A Friðriksson, Kuml Og Haugfé: Úr Heiðnum Sið Á
Íslandi 2nd edn, Fornleifastofnun Íslands, Reykjavík, 2000, p. 88.
32
There are five Pet. O swords in the data-set, all from the Sogn og Fjordane
and Lofoten Islands regions (McGuire). See also Petersen, p. 129.
33
Eldjárn and Friðriksson, p. 91.
34
The boat’s approximate dimensions were 2.8m in length, and 0.8m across
the widest point. This makes it significantly smaller than either of the other
two boats examined here. It is possible that the size of the boat has been
under-estimated; it may be feasible to add up to one metre to the overall
length, but even so, the boat remains 2-3m smaller than the other case studies
(McGuire, p. 150).
35
McGuire.
______________________________________________________________
36
(J.RE\OLĔVNLS
37
Brøgger, Falk, and Shetelig (eds).
38
See Ingstad and Shenk, pp. 30-45 for recent descriptions and
interpretations of this grave.
39
Ingstad, p. 144-145.
40
Shenk, pp. 32-43.
41
See Price, p. 187 for a discussion of ritual staves.
42
McGuire.
43
Eldjárn and Friðriksson, p. 118.
44
Owen and Dalland, pp. 153-157.
45
Eldjárn and Friðriksson, pp. 200-203.
46
C E Batey and C Paterson, ‘A Viking Burial at Balnakeil, Sutherland,’ in
Festschrift for James Graham-Campbell, A. Reynolds and L. Webster (eds),
Brepols, Turnhout, forthcoming.
47
McGuire.
48
Owen and Dalland, pp. 188-189.
49
Stable isotope analysis is a relatively recent scientific process by which
isotopes in human teeth are analysed to determine where an individual spent
his/her childhood. The Icelandic material has been extensively studied and is
under-going several phases of publication. The data used here has been
supplied by H Gestsdóttir (personal communication). Further details on
Icelandic isotopic studies have been published by T D Price and H
Gestsdóttir, ‘The First Settlers of Iceland: An Isotopic Approach to
Colonisation,’ Antiquity, vol. 80.307, 2006, pp. 130–144.
50
L-H Dommasnes, ‘Late Iron Age in Western Norway: Female Roles and
Ranks as Deduced from and Analysis of Burial Customs,’ Norwegian
Archaeological Review, vol. 14.1-2, 1982, p. 83.
51
Auðr figures as a character in several Icelandic sagas, including Brennu-
Njáls saga, Laxdæla saga, Eiríks saga rauða, and Grettis saga.
52
J Jesch, Women in the Viking Age, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk,
1991, p. 83.
53
F Svanberg, Death Rituals in South-East Scandinavia Ad 800-1000:
Decolonizing the Viking Age 2, Acta Archaeologica Lundensia, Almqvist &
Wiksell, Stockholm, 2003, p. 131.
184 Sailing Home
______________________________________________________________
Bibliography
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Festschrift for James Graham-Campbell, A. Reynolds and L. Webster (eds),
Brepols, Turnhout, forthcoming.
Birkedahl, P. and Johansen, E., ‘The Sebbersund Boat-Graves,’ in The Ship

as Symbol in Prehistoric and Medieval Scandinavia: Papers from an
International Research Seminar at the Danish National Museum,
Copenhagen (5th-7th May 1994), O Crumlin-Pedersen and B Munch Thye
(eds), Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, 1995.
Bøe, J., ‘An Ornamented Celtic Bronze Object, Found in a Norwegian

Grave,’ Bergens Museums Aarbok 1924-25, Bergen, 1925, pp. 2-36.
Brøgger, A.W., Falk, H. and Shetelig, H., (eds), Osebergfundet vol. 1,

Universitetets Oldsaksamling, Kristiania, 1917, p. 399.
Callow, C., ‘First Steps Towards an Archaeology of Children in Iceland,’

Archaeologia Islandica, vol. 5, 2006, pp. 55-96.
Carver, M. O. H., ‘Burial as Poetry: The Context of Treasure in Anglo-Saxon

Graves,’ in Treasure in the Medieval West, E M Tyler (ed), York Medieval
Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 2000.
Crowder, L. S., ‘Chinese Funerals in San Francisco Chinatown: American

Chinese Expressions in Mortuary Ritual Performance,’ Journal of American
Folklore, vol. 113. 450, 2000, p. 451.
Dommasnes, L-H., ‘Yngre Jernalder I Sogn - Forsök På Sosial

Rekonstruksjon,’ unpublished MA thesis, Universitetet i Bergen, 1976, p.
239.
Dunwell A., et al, ‘A Viking Age Cemetery at Cnip, Uig, Isle of Lewis,’
Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, vol. 125, 1995, pp.
719-752.
Eldjárn, K., Gengið Á Reka. Tólf Fornleifathaettir, Norðri, Akureyri, 1948,

pp. 28-31.
______________________________________________________________
Eldjárn, K. and Friðriksson, A., Kuml Og Haugfé: Úr Heiðnum Sið Á Íslandi

2nd edn, Fornleifastofnun Íslands, Reykjavík, 2000, p. 88.
Foner, N., ‘The Immigrant Family: Cultural Legacies and Cultural Changes,’
International Migration Review, vol. 31.4, 1997, p. 970.
Halsall, G., ‘Female Status and Power in Early Merovingian Central

Austrasia: The Burial Evidence,’ Early Medieval Europe, vol. 5.1, 1996, pp.
19-20.
Hayeur-Smith, M., Draupnir’s Sweat and Mardöll’s Tears: An Archaeology

of Jewellery, Gender and Identity in Viking Age Iceland, BAR International
Series, John and Erica Hedges, Oxford, 2004, p. 70.
Jesch, J., Women in the Viking Age, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk,
1991, p. 83.
Kanaiaupuni, S. M., ‘Reframing the Migration Question: An Analysis of

Men, Women, and Gender in Mexico,’ Social Forces, vol. 78.4, June 2000,
p. 1337.
.RE\OLĔVNL = µ6KLSV 6RFLHW\ 6\PEROV DQG $UFKDHRORJLVWV¶ LQ &UXPOLQ

Pedersen and Munch Thye (eds), p. 15.
McGuire, E., Manifestations of Identity in Burial: Evidence from Viking-Age

Graves in the North Atlantic Diaspora, unpublished PhD thesis, University of
Glasgow, 2009.
Owen, O. and Dalland, M., Scar: A Viking Boat Burial on Sanday, Orkney,
Tuckwell, East Linton, 1999, p. 47.
Parker-Pearson, M., ‘Mortuary Practices, Society and Ideology: An Ethno-

Archaeological Study,’ in Symbolic and Structural Archaeology, I Hodder
(ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982, p. 112.
Parker Pearson, M., The Archaeology of Death and Burial, 2nd edn, Sutton,
Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2003.
Parle, J., ‘History, She Wrote: A Reappraisal of Dear Louisa in the 1990s,’
South African Historical Journal, vol. 33, 1995.
186 Sailing Home
______________________________________________________________
Pedraza, S., ‘Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender,’

Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 17 (1991), p. 231.
Perry, A., On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British
Columbia, 1849-1871, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2001.
Petersen, J., De Norske Vikingesverd, En Typologisk-Kronologisk Studier

over Vikingetidens Vaaben, Videnskapsselskapets Skrifter, J. Dybwad,
Kristiania, 1919.
Pooley C. G. and Turnbull, J., Migration and Mobility in Britain since the
Eighteenth Century, University College London Press, London, 1998, p. 4.
Price, N. S., The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age
Scandinavia, Aun, Dept. of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala,
2002, p. 186.
Price, T. D. and Gestsdóttir, H., ‘The First Settlers of Iceland: An Isotopic

Approach to Colonisation,’ Antiquity, vol. 80.307, 2006, pp. 130–144.
Reimers, E., ‘Death and Identity: Graves and Funerals as Cultural

Communication,’ Mortality, vol. 4.2, January 1999, p. 148.
Schjødt, J. P., ‘The Ship in Old Norse Mythology and Religion,’ in Crumlin-
Pedersen and Munch Thye (eds), p. 24.
Shenk, P., ‘To Valhalla by Horseback,’ unpublished MA thesis, University of

Oslo, 2002, p. 23.
Sjøvold, T., The Iron Age Settlement of Arctic Norway: A Study in the
Expansion of European Iron Age Culture within the Arctic Circle, vol. 2,
Norwegian Universities Press, Tromsø, 1974, p. 190-191.
Solberg, B., ‘Social Status in the Merovingian and Viking Periods in Norway
from Archaeological and Historical Source,’ Norwegian Archaeological
Review, vol. 18.1-2, 1985, pp. 241-256.
Svanberg, F., Death Rituals in South-East Scandinavia Ad 800-1000:

Decolonizing the Viking Age 2, Acta Archaeologica Lundensia, Almqvist &
Wiksell, Stockholm, 2003, p. 131.
______________________________________________________________
Walther, D. J., ‘Gender Construction and Settler Colonialism in German

Southwest Africa, 1894-1914,’ The Historian, vol. 66.1, 2004, pp. 1-18.
Wamers, E., ‘The Symbolic Significance of the Ship-Graves at Haiðaby and

Ladby,’ in Crumlin-Pedersen and Munch Thye (eds), p. 157-158.
Williams, H., Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past

Societies, Kluwer Academic Publishers, New York, 2003.
_______
, Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2006.
_______
, ‘Keeping the Dead at Arm's Length: Memory, Weaponry and Early
Medieval Mortuary Technologies,’ Journal of Social Archaeology, vol. 5.2,
June 2005, pp. 253-275.
Coda
The Lido in the Forest: Memory, Landscape, Painting
Judith Tucker
Abstract:
This essay presents a consideration of the relationship between ‘landscape,’
memory and painting from a practitioner’s perspective and contributes to the
aesthetic discourse about art after the trauma of the Holocaust. Painting, both
as object and as process, has become a site for my investigations of loss,
memory and mourning. I consider a triangular relation between three types of
place and temporalities: pre-war photographs, a contemporary resort in the
German forest and a new, third place between history and memory: re-
presentations of the former two through drawing and painting. I examine my
recent series of works, Tense (2008), in which I re-present lido architecture in
order to form a meaningful connection to the surrounding Thüringan forest. I
think about this swimming pool architecture in the forest as bringing a
domestic space outdoors and through this trope interrogate the uncanny in
this landscape. I reflect upon the uncanny disposition of both the actual place
and the painted place. While this series references photography, it also
emphasises the difference between painting and drawing as a materialisation
of the seen. I read my re-presentations of ‘landscape’ in relation to notions of
‘transposition’ and Marianne Hirsch’s considerations of ‘postmemory,’ and I
also bring into play the implications of John Urry’s notion of the ‘tourist
gaze’ and Anthony Vidler’s considerations of the ‘architectural uncanny.’
Through these explorations another set of interrelations become apparent
including the paradoxical and anxious associations of grief to leisure and
mourning to visual pleasure.
Key Words: Painting, postmemory, landscape, lido architecture, Marianne

Hirsch, Antony Vidler, John Urry, Jill Bennett.
*****
1. Background, Back-Story
For several years both my material practice and thinking has
interrogated the relationship between the practice and objects of landscape
painting and theoretical concerns relating to intergenerational transmission,
in particular Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory. Photographs from my
grandmother’s album, considerations of second-generation memory and the
practice of painting have triggered this work. Within my practice, the journey
to a particular place, working on location and then developing that work in
the studio have always been central. My paintings and drawings are infused
192 The Lido in the Forest
______________________________________________________________
with a sense a sense of being elsewhere than the site of direct experience, of
being not there but here. I realised that the paradox of distancing and then
attempting to connect across that distance created a tension that became the
subject of the work. My mother and grandmother were refugees from Hitler’s
Germany arriving in Britain in 1939 after Kristallnacht. I wondered if
unconsciously, through my painting practice, I was repeating, in a seemingly
inconsequential way, some aspects of a sense of dislocation that might result
from this uprooting. This has become much more self-conscious over recent
years when I have been informed by considerations of transposition or
postmemory. When working on location now it is as if I attempt to anchor
fragments of relived experience in a new embodied encounter, perhaps in an
attempt to create a corporeal echo of a ghostly memory.
For several years my paintings and drawings employed the
metaphor of the border between land and sea, which offers possibilities of
passage and displacement. I developed this in my recent series of exhibitions
entitled Resort; these works were developed after visiting the seaside resort
of Ahlbeck, North Germany. In this series I employed the motif of the
Strandkorb.1 The structures themselves appear strange, indeed bizarre, to
British eyes, yet to German eyes they are a familiar, even clichéd, sign of
holidays. They might also be seen as a way of bringing a private world into
the public realm: in one way they complicate notions of inside and outside by
inviting a consideration of the domestic in the wilderness, the risk of an
intimate space within the basket contiguous with the open expanse beyond.
These structures fluctuate between offering a sense of being places of
protection and in their very deficiency becoming almost mawkish ciphers of
vulnerability. The representation of the Strandkorb through painting and
drawing further explored this web of interconnections. In contrast, this new
series, entitled Tense, takes a designated leisure space in an enclosed inland
location as its starting point, yet, as I will argue, this space, too, might be
considered liminal. In these images I re-present lido architecture in order to
form a meaningful connection to the Thüringan forest, notions of the relation
of the private in public are developed further and through this trope I
interrogate the uncanny in this tourist landscape.
2. Private Snapshots: Public Photographs

In this section I consider two contrasting groups of photographs and
their relation to a wider social history. Annette Kuhn has observed in relation
to family photographs: ‘In these case histories outer and inner, social and
personal, historical and psychical coalesce; and the web of interconnections
that binds them together is made visible.’2 The making visible of a complex
set of associations, the bringing together and blurring of inner and outer, the
relationship between public and private strikes a chord with my own
preoccupations. My grandmother brought with her to England some holiday
Judith Tucker 193
______________________________________________________________
photographs of various trips to resorts in Germany. The sets that particularly
caught my eye were a series taken in two resorts. The first was a beach resort
and the second in a forest resort: Friedrichroda in Thüringia (formerly in the
German Democratic Republic). The group taken in Friedrichroda during the
mid-1930s provided the catalyst for this body of work. These are amateurish
snaps of forest walks, teas in villas and swimming lessons. Of these
photographs, the ones I found most intriguing were those of a swimming
pool. One of my mother learning to swim wearing the apparatus common in
those days to help children swim also had the look of a hangman’s noose.
Figure 1 is a painting derived from this photograph. The other was of a group
of girls, including my mother, all wearing swimsuits and sandals, all with one
arm raised, probably in imitation of athletes on a sporting occasion but with
unfortunate and obvious resonances of a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. I found this
peculiar mixture of innocent enjoyment and intimations of death inherent in
the belated viewing of these holiday photographs compelling.
Figure 1. Evi Swims (charcoal, 76 x 61 cm).

______________________________________________________________
It was not only that public swimming pools and the interest in the
healthy body reminded me of my grandmother who, against her parents’
wishes, trained to be a gymnast, but that the architecture and setting all
seemed to evoke and locate the interwar era very specifically. Furthermore,
the swimming pool architecture in the forest and the space of the pool
seemed to offer a logical development from my previous motif, the
Strandkorb. Both incorporate the notion of bringing the domestic outside, of
creating a ‘home away from home.’ I discovered that there was a pool in
Friedrichroda in which the famous 1936 German Olympic diving team
practised. My mother had holidayed there that very year, a strange
coincidence. This seemed a rich seam of enquiry to pursue - all sorts of
resonances occurred to me including, of course, Leni Riefenstahl’s epic film
Olympia. On arrival, I realised this was not the same pool that my mother and
grandmother had used. On consideration, it occurred to me that, as Jews, they
would probably have been forbidden to swim there. Through examining old
maps of the town I discovered that there had been a smaller pool elsewhere
which was now no longer there. This at first seemed disappointing, but this
other pool has proved to be a lasting motif for my concerns. I realised this
was in keeping with my project: it is poignant that there is nothing to return
to and, had the pool been there, the work might have become rather literal.
Figure 2. A postcard of the official opening of the Friedrichroda pool in 1935.
The Friedrichroda pool is neither ruin nor a site of destruction;

indeed, while it is a recognisable remnant of another era it is actually rather
well cared for. While the historical photos of both pool and forest might bear
Judith Tucker 195
______________________________________________________________
the traces of unknown lives, the actual pool with its careful paintwork and the
surrounding forest with its re-growth as a covering do not. This lack of
evidence actually allows space for imaginative projection. The state of not
being a ruin, not being clearly of the past and yet somehow not being quite of
the present is one of the things that attracted me to the pool: it seemed to be
strangely between. The ease with which I could now enter this lido area
opened up the possibility of emotive and resonant metaphors of forbidden
places, of transgression, of enclosures, of places that are concomitantly
places of pleasure and danger.
Figure 3. The changing rooms in 2006.
When I had drawn, painted and photographed there for some time,
the Schwimmbadmeister suddenly presented me with a CD of images of the
pool from its construction in 1935 to its seventieth ‘birthday.’ This was an
incredible gift for my work. It contained a range of photographs from its
official opening by Nazi officials (figure 2) and strange images of its
construction; it also included images from the German Democratic Republic
period, including from the 1960s and 1970s when the pool became strangely
tropical, sprouting cacti and large plants. There were also shots of those who
worked there and of families enjoying the space. This semi-official archive
provided me with a way of developing the work I had begun in Resort. The
work in Tense was similarly triggered by family photographs and a new
embodied encounter in a particular place: this swimming pool where my
______________________________________________________________
family could not have swum did, while playing no part in my family history,
become a site for thinking about the relationship between the social and the
personal, the historical and the psychical. The work that I have produced in
relation to these photographs of holiday resorts might on one level be seen as
memory work. Yet, as Griselda Pollock contends:
In the space of the second-generation thinkers, however,

memory work on and with family album has other
connotations than tracking the inscription in this informal,
private space of class gender and sexuality. Often, precious
photographs were the only remnant of the past that
survived.3
The following section in which I discuss Marianne’s Hirsch’s notion of

postmemory will elucidate and expand on the significance of this. Through
the catalyst of investigating an intimate family history, of visiting the resorts
where my family once holidayed, I found that there is, inevitably, a link to a
wider cultural context, to external events.
3. Belated
Marianne Hirsch has developed her important and now well known
concept of postmemory, which is a ‘second generation’ memory or
‘transposition’ informed by belatedness, dislocation and displacement.
Through considering the effect on those whose childhood was eclipsed by
events that happened before they were born, Hirsch distinguishes
postmemory from memory by its generational distance and from history by
its deep personal connection. Hirsh’s postmemory is:
a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely

because its connection to its object or source is mediated, not
through recollection but through an imaginative investment and
creation . . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those
who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth,
whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the
previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be
neither understood nor recreated.4
In a way there is a paradox here for those of us who are second-generation

artists: the overwhelming nature of the traumatic events can simultaneously
overshadow and stimulate a search to articulate one’s own experience. The
somewhat indirect, oblique approach that I take to the subject matter echoes
and indeed, it might even be claimed, embodies the nature of postmemory’s
distance from its source. The character and methodology of my practice does
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not operate in a teleological way in search of answers. There are no definitive
answers here: the affect of the work is unfinished and unresolved. This would
seem to resonate with Hirsch’s considerations of what she calls a diasporic
aesthetics of temporal and spatial exile that needs simultaneously to rebuild
and to mourn:
It creates where it cannot recover. It imagines where it

cannot recall. It mourns a loss that cannot be repaired. And
because even the act of mourning is secondary, the lost
object can never be incorporated and mourning can never
be overcome.5
While I accept that the business I am dealing with is almost by definition

unfinished, this inconclusiveness may itself become valuable. Through my
practice, I explore not only a resonance of the experience of the past but also
the affect of the vicarious, mediated experience of the second generation.
Thus, while this work certainly concerns the effect of the past, it is, in fact,
very much a journey in the present. There is an attempt to connect to the past
yet the attempt is made in the full knowledge that the connection is
impossible. Recognition of the impossibility is both an acknowledgment of
the gap between the generations (avoiding an over-identification) and an
acceptance that the act of attempting to connect is in and of itself worthwhile,
allowing for precisely the kind of imaginative investment which I understand
Hirsch to consider as consistent with postmemory. The impossible attempt
might be considered a cipher for the subjectivity of the second generation
and, indeed, I speculate whether it might allow for the possibility of some
sort of working through.
4. A Tourist Landscape: Friedrichroda 1935-2006

In the following section I consider the significance of visiting the
site of my family’s holiday snaps. Central to Tense is the journey made to the
resort and spa town of Friedrichroda. My mother and grandmother somehow
managed to go on holiday there between 1933 and 1938 when it was very
difficult for Jews to find places to stay. Jill Bennett discusses artists who
produce visual art in the context of conflict and trauma; of particular interest
to me are her deliberations on the relation between corporeality, place and
affect:
The artists I consider may each be understood to produce

affective art, although affect in this context does not equate
with emotion or sympathy, nor does it necessarily attach to
persons or characters in the first instance, In many of the
works discussed, affects arise in places rather than human
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subjects, in a way that allows us to isolate the function of
affect, focusing on its motility.6
The relation of affect to place and, in turn, the relation of corporality and
affect to a painted representation of place are themes to which I will return.
We need to consider what kind of place is Friedrichroda, what kind of affect
might it engender? The changing fortunes and popularity of Friedrichroda
and its pool are, of course, absolutely connected with the wider political
situation, giving rise to implications for the possibilities of travel and the
question of whether or not a resort such as this is seen as a desirable holiday
destination. Mimi Sheller and John Urry remind us of the ways in which a
holiday destination can be altered by the changing behaviour of its visitors
and inhabitants: ‘places to play are also places in play: made and remade by
the mobilities and performances of tourists and worker.’7 Holidaying in the
‘landscape’ is inextricably linked to urbanisation. Urry has pointed out that
mass tourism developed in industrialised Britain, soon to be followed in the
rest of industrialised Europe; the rise of the seaside resort followed.8 Spa
towns such as Friedrichroda also became attractive destinations. In general,
the rise of foreign holidays and of indoor leisure centres during the 1960s and
after contributed to the drop in popularity of the outdoor pool, but the
situation was different in East Germany where travel was much more
difficult. Hence this particular pool kept its glamour and romance for much
longer than it might had it ended up in West Germany. Similarly, a
modernist-looking hotel that was a workers’ holiday home has remained.
Apparently, another hotel was once a Stasi safe house.
Urry considers what kind of place might produce a distinctive tourist
gaze:
Minimally there must be certain aspects of the place to be

visited which distinguish it from what is conventionally
encountered in everyday life. Tourism results from a basic
binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the
extra ordinary. This is not to say that other elements of the
tourist experience will not make the typical tourist feel that
she or he is ‘home from home,’ not too much ‘out of
place.’ 9
This can help to explain why my decision to make work in the landscape
context of a holiday resort seemed strangely appropriate, opening up as it did
questions of home, of here and there, of the everyday and the extraordinary.
Dora Apel comments that many of what she terms ‘secondary witnesses’
attempt to work through their relation with the past through retracing aspects
of their ancestors’ lives, perhaps visiting birthplaces or locations of death
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camps. She notes that ‘their journeys of discovery often end in perplexity,’10
and Tina Wasserman similarly asks in the context of Daniel Eisenberg and
Rea Tajiri’s work, ‘How can one access the temporal past by confronting a
place? What can a place reveal?’ Wasserman answers herself: ‘In many
ways, nothing is revealed. A place cannot be interrogated. The landscape is
mute . . . Yet a landscape can be physically investigated and examined.’11 My
own answer would be that, personally, my painterly investigations do
actually become a kind of interrogation of place: might they be a journey to
the past through an embodied exploration in the now? As Wasserman
acknowledges, ‘landscape and site are concrete remnants of the past that
continue to exist in the present. Thus, they have the capacity to be powerful
visual surrogates for a tie that no longer exists.’12
However, I knew from the outset that there would be no physical
site of a ‘home’ to be found; I was not searching for a home or for roots.
Unlike some other second generation writers and artists I did not want to go
the more obvious sites of atrocities - I would rather look at the everyday, the
apparently innocent spaces of leisure. I wanted to steer clear of ‘dark
tourism’ in such places that have now become metonymical for the
Holocaust. What intrigues me is that, in the viewing of holiday photographs
from 1930s’ Germany, now in the present tense, there is disjuncture between
this voluntary, everyday travelling to be safely ‘home away from home’ and
a concomitant evocation of other kinds of perilous journeys, ones in which
there will be no home to return to. This echoes the structure of the uncanny.
Indeed, what I have come to realise through making this body of work is that
in certain landscapes pleasure and horror seem to be inextricably intertwined,
I will be developing this theme in the following section: ‘Sun and Water:
Night and Fog’. In visiting these resorts, these ‘remnants,’ this work becomes
not so much an attempt to bear witness to past events as an attempt to
understand and unravel the present.
5. Sun and Water: Night and Fog13

Lido architecture and the rise of the cult of the healthy body have
come to be regarded as the epitome of the interwar years in both Germany
and beyond. Of course, it was the usual mixture of economic, social, cultural
and political matters that resulted in a sudden increase in the construction of
open-air pools. Christopher Wilk considers that the whole Modernist
enterprise was infused by a deep concern for health. He notes that
Modernism’s social agenda was a direct response to the interrelated problems
of poor health and poor housing. Health was discussed and written about in
literal terms but also as a metaphor for a bright Utopian future.14 Of course
the link between health, hygiene and water was considered paramount:
swimming pools were an important contribution to this. Interestingly for my
project, Ken Worpole, who writes influentially on architecture and social
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policy, notes in relation to the rise of pools in parks in Britain and beyond
during the 1930s that ‘The design of the new pools sought to merge the park
pool into the surrounding landscape, rather than to create hard-edged,
municipal and highly functional facilities.’15 As he points out, the atmosphere
of the surrounding terraces was more holiday then sports setting; this is
certainly true of the pool in Friedrichroda where the water is surrounded by
grassy lawns, broad sun terraces and plenty of benches. Helen Pussard
explores the idea of the outdoor pool as a mini-holiday area in detail in her
case study of London’s Tooting Bec Lido. She is writing about pools in cities
but the way that the space surrounding the pool provides an opportunity of
making a ‘home away from home’ is nevertheless pertinent to my project.
Pussard focuses on the performative:
It is also through rituals and practices that the domestic

sphere is reproduced. Visitors to the lido recreate domestic,
often gendered, roles in setting up an area with towels and
blankets on the ground and laying out food and drink for
each other. This produces miniature versions of home at
the lido, where the private world comes under the public
gaze. Some groups come for the whole day, others for a
swim and a picnic, but there are observable domestic
rituals that characterise the lido experience.16
It might also be apposite to consider these informal, self-constructed ‘homes

away from home’ both in relation to and as reactions to the more formal,
modernist architecture of the pool that, in turn, reflects the city architecture
of the period. In Friedrichroda there is a further layer as here the architecture
of the lido itself becomes a manufactured ‘home,’ a sheltered and enclosed
place of play artificially created in the forest. The constructed space of an
outdoor pool can be seen as an in-between space: ‘a halfway house between
town and country, between a London suburb and the Cote d’Azur.’17 It can
also be seen as a designated space for escapism. What intrigues me for my
series of paintings is the potential of these designed spaces to contain these
informal activities; whilst the paintings and drawings have very few figures
depicted in them there is a potential place for them. To image empty pools
and their surroundings is, therefore, to invite considerations of who is not
there. In my paintings it is very the fact that the depicted spaces are relatively
empty that creates a tension and thus the possibility of imaginative projection
for any viewer. He or she knows that in these spaces there is not only the
potential for these activities to happen, but also that in the past they would
have happened and, indeed, have the potential to happen again.
Exposing the body both naked and dressed for sport to the open air
became commonplace during the interwar years. Christopher Wilk tracks the
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rise of nudism in Germany from the late nineteenth century when it was
upper middle class pursuit to its transformation during the 1920s into a
widespread political and social movement.18 Furthermore, he goes on to
make the well-known link between social hygiene and racial hygiene.19
Taking this into consideration allows for a rich and complex metaphoric
interpretation of both the pool itself and the water in the pool. It is interesting
to note that, whilst during the modernist era the pool of water might have
been considered a symbol of cleanliness and health, nowadays by contrast,
open water in fountains or pools in hospital grounds is often opposed by
infection specialists due to its health risk as a breeding ground for ‘super
bugs’ such as MRSA. In this image of apparent health there are in fact the
incipient beginning of a deadly illness, toxicity in the midst of wellbeing.
This seems very apt for my project.20 Thus, implicit in my images of the
pool, these images of spaces of pleasure and leisure, are thoughts about those
other bodies, those far from healthy bodies that perished in the same forest:
in Buchenwald and at Ohrdruf. The entwining of resort and camp is
explicitly examined in a sequence in Memories of the Camps.21 This
documentary film of the camps as they were liberated lay for years in the
archive of the Imperial War Museum London since, intended for de-
nazification purposes, it was considered too inflammatory for release in the
aftermath of the war and as new alliances were being formed. The section I
describe takes place at the beginning of chapter four and is part of the less
polished footage taken by the Russians. The hand-held camera hovers and
wobbles slightly as it moves over idyllic-looking scenes of a chalet by a lake
surrounded by trees; couples, holiday makers and locals in lederhosen and
traditional dress sit, chat, walk and boat; and then, as instructed, the camera
pans across to barbed wire and inmates, demonstrating the closeness of the
camp to the everyday. The slightly incongruous voice of Trevor Howard
intones as a voiceover:
Ebensee is a holiday resort in the mountains. The air is

clean and pure. It cures sickness and there is sweetness
about this place: a gentle peace. In this place the Luftwaffe
or S.S. Panzer officer on leave relaxes, eats well, breathes
deeply, finds romance. Everything is charming and
picturesque. But the concentration camp had become an
integral part of the German economic system, so it was
here, too. They were able to see the mountains, but what
use are mountains without food?22
We might consider that the uncanny double of the lido architecture

might be the architecture of the concentration camp. On first viewing this
seemed to provide a literal example of the themes with which I was working:
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without recourse to being illustrative or heavy-handed I seek to create
understated images of everyday architectural spaces that contain both
pleasure and violence. This domesticity cut into by catastrophe is profoundly
uncanny. Anthony Vidler reminds us in The Architectural Uncanny that:
As a concept then, the uncanny has, not unnaturally, found

its metaphorical home in architecture: first in the house,
haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security
while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror, and
then in the city, where what was once walled and intimate,
the confirmation of community . . . has been rendered
strange by the spatial incursions of modernity.23
In his terms, the spaces of this outdoor pool, which appear private and secure
and yet are also vulnerable, might offer the potential for provoking a sense of
the uncanny, but Vidler reminds us that no architectural space in and of itself
can be guaranteed to bring about an uncanny feeling.24 In the following
section I examine how painted and drawn representations of such spaces
might do so.
Figure 4. Tense (oil on Canvas, 76 cm x 61 cm).

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6. Painted Pools
In my series of painted pools I do not seek to be overt or didactic in
my approach but rather to infuse these painted spaces of leisure, these places
of play, with a sense of tension and anxiety. I chose to focus on three motifs:
the high diving board or platform, the springboard and the changing rooms,
all situated against trees and sky. In the paintings the chosen motif is not
subordinate to the landscape - the two are in conversation, and it is precisely
the tension of the relationship between the two that is one of the subjects of
these paintings. The landscape here serves both as a refuge from city life but
also as a threat to the designed spaces of play. In some of the paintings the
forest looms behind the changing room block, in others it appears indirectly
as a reflection and the doubling of both architecture and forest are distorted.
The hills and terrain depicted behind the pool, while clearly developed
through photography, are also peculiarly painterly, employing a pictorial
space reminiscent of much earlier painters, in particular Lucas Cranach the
Elder, who himself used the Thüringian forest as a setting or parergon to his
paintings. I was struck by Bodo Brinkmann’s description of a fragment of
landscape: ‘Light and dark, close up and far away, steeply rising elements
and flat surfaces, barricades and wide open spaces form a mysterious
symbiosis.’25 More or less five hundred years later, the parallels seem
unexpectedly exact. I am particularly interested in the way in which Cranach
images the barrier in proximity to the expanse of landscape beyond. At first
these parallel interests were entirely unconscious and derived entirely from
being in place, but latterly I have begun much more self-consciously to
emulate some of the ways in which Cranach so successfully combines
opposing binaries in a limited space. The sort of painted space both implies
distance and yet is also a little claustrophobic.
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Figure 5. Changing (large version, oil on Canvas, 121 x 152 cm).

Judith Tucker 205
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Figure 6. Platform 1935 (charcoal, 76 x 61 cm).
Griselda Pollock argues that in the Resort series the strandkörbe

may be seen to both stand in for and displace a figure in the landscape in
romantic tradition.26 In Tense, I would suggest that the pool and in particular
the high diving platform might also be seen to operate in much the same way.
The diving boards become transformed into a combination of monuments,
viewing platforms or towers in the forest (see the image on the front cover of
this volume). This allows for multiple readings, including a possible relation
to fairy tales. In some paintings they are imbued with a rosy tint, the red
edges of the boards serving as pictorial devices that demarcate the edges and
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also appear to hover spatially in front of everything else. There are other
images of the platform derived from photographs of its construction. In one
photograph the workers standing atop seem to have a sense of pride and
achievement in their task, yet they become transformed through paint to
become much less certain: there is a sense of a fragility in the scaffold
wrapped around the shadowy diving board, an ambiguity to the figures and in
the whole a sense of surveillance. The chiaroscuro has been heightened and
the tower is painted in predominantly cool dark blues with some highlights in
warmer colours. The ground is painted in reds, pinks and golds, infusing this
muddy building site with a hint of violence.
Figure 7. Springboard (oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm).
The springboard might be thought of as having the potential to turn

the quiet, passive water into an active, physical space. Most of the paintings
of the springboard do not focus on it, often it is not in the light and it seems
to slide in from one side and make an incision into the paintings. Changing
rooms are spaces for bodies, intimate, yet at the same time public. Both the
boards and the changing rooms invite considerations of bodies, both absent
and present, both then and now. The drawings and paintings of this aspect of
the pool depict several interior and exterior spaces, some hidden and some
available for viewing. The interiors of the changing rooms are hidden and so
is the interior of the forest: it encloses, surrounds and protects but also hides.
Judith Tucker 207
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Like Russian dolls, there are spaces within spaces. Sometimes it is the
outside space that is concealed from view and sometimes the inside and
viewers are, as it were, sandwiched between knowledge and unknowing. This
partial concealment and the consideration of the blurring of public and
private that these images evoke brings to mind Freud’s thoughts about
Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as ‘something that should have
remained hidden and has come into the open,’ the return of the repressed. 27
Figure 8. Changing (charcoal, 76 x 61 cm).

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The use of exaggerated parallel perspective in some of the images is
reminiscent of well-used images of the railway tracks and of the low
perspective of some totalitarian art. Yet these images lack that sort of
bravura, seeming somehow brittle and delicate: the surface’s delicate colours
merge with the geometry of the architecture to form an uncertain pictorial
space. The iridescent pigment that I use shimmers and appears to hang in
front of the apparent picture plane reminding the viewer of the materiality of
the pieces and counteracting any sense of perspectival space or sense of three
dimensional form created through chiaroscuro. Not only this, but the constant
reminder of surface can feel claustrophobic and closed off: there is not a trace
of the canvas ground visible. The water in the pool is sometimes transparent
and available but at other times the reflections prevent us seeing within;
indeed, in some paintings, the paint surface and the water surface appear to
be transposable.
Why paint then, why not present the images in a photographic form?
After all, most artists whose work may be considered postmemorial use
photography or lens-based media, in many cases directly incorporating
family photographs into their work. In my own case, the family photograph,
rather than being literally embedded in the work, is used at one remove and
also acts as a catalyst to visit the location where the photograph was
originally taken. It is important that it is evident that my paintings and
drawings reference photography: through their tonality, their compositions
and in the bold use of chiaroscuro. In addition the liquidity of materials and
the iridescent and metallic pigments appear to reference or mimic the
photographic process, seeming to echo the emergence of an image in a dark
room and also adding to the fluid sense of spatial ambiguity. This hints at an
already mediated experience - experience at a distance - yet also, in apparent
contradiction, at a phenomenological experience of place.
My choice of medium, either oil paint or charcoal, influences the
way in which I image the pool in the forest. It is through paint that I turn
what might be a comfortable image of a swimming pool in the forest into an
unfamiliar one. In shifting light the image emerges and is then obscured,
refusing to be precisely pinned down. All paintings appear to change in
different lights but since I use metallic pigments and reflective surfaces mine
alter more than most. At times the layering of glazes and the metallic and
reflective surfaces and pigments completely obscure the images when the
light catches them directly - all that is visible are trails and globules of liquid
paint. At other times the whole image is clearly visible and in certain lights
the iridescent pigment, the blue in particular, appears to hover in front of the
picture plane almost like a hologram. The smoothed, dragged and modulated
surfaces draw the viewer close in, the shimmering glazes both offer an
invitation to explore this uncertain place I have made and, since they are
highly reflective, deny entry to the viewer’s eye. The result is that each
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painting has multiple viewing possibilities; I have paradoxically created
static images that refuse to remain still. There is a corresponding series of
drawings: the fact that they are monochrome emphasises the photographic
source materials, the rough textures and heavily worked surfaces operate in a
way that is parallel to the glazed surfaces. The dramatic monochrome and
tone in combination with the use of line and marks made on the surface
simultaneously invites the viewer’s eye to explore the space and reminds him
or her that it is a drawn surface. This promise of a pictorial space which is
then denied is redolent of Hirsch’s considerations of the spatial dimension of
postmemory in relation to photography:
Photographic images are and also, decidedly, are not

material traces of an unreachable past. They invite us in,
grab us, giving the illusion of depth and thus deep memory,
and they also repel us. They convey the spatial dimension
of postmemory, where trapped on the surface, we never the
less fall for the promise of a glimpse into the depths of
remembrance...a granting of alterity and opaqueness.28
In much the same way, the constantly shifting, complex web of iridescent
pigments and richly textured surfaces operates both as enticement and as a
screen preventing one from seeing.
The painter Marlene Dumas considers what for her is the significant
difference is between painting and photography:
Unlike photography, in painting there is nothing to start

with. You start with emptiness . . . even if you use
photographic sources as inspiration, you don’t manipulate
the photo. You make something else out of it. A painting is
not an image. A painting is not like its reproduction. A
painting is physical even if you may compare it to a corpse.
An image is closer to a ghost.29
Her reminder of the very physical presence, the materiality, of paint strikes a
chord with my practice. Hirsch suggests that in the present we ‘try to
reanimate it [the photograph] by undoing the finality of the photographic
‘take’.’30 I speculate why I am transmuting a photograph into paint or
drawing. It is not precisely to reanimate it. Rather, it occurs to me that, to use
Dumas’s metaphor, I might be attempting to change a ghost into corpse.
Might then this activity allow mourning to begin? The corporeal nature of
paint (for example, the time taken, layering, the evidence of the body which
made the marks) is one characteristic of what I consider to be particular to
painting as a practice. This is a way of mediating the external world that
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offers some sort of possibility of fusion not only between the internal and the
external.
While painting or drawing on location allows for an embodied
experience of place as it unfolds, the viewing as well as the making of
paintings has often been considered an embodied practice. In almost all
painting there are clear indication of the body of the artist: this is indexed in
the marks, in the tactility of surface through those traces of the contact
between brush and canvas. Jill Bennett argues that certain ‘images have the
capacity to address the spectator’s own bodily memory; to touch the viewer
who feels rather than simply sees the event, drawn into the image through a
process of affective contagion.’31 Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s
considerations of the relationship of sensation and thought and the way in
which, through the artist’s engagement, the medium (in my case paint) does
not become a residue of self-expression but emerges as sensation in the
present, Bennett summarises thus:
Painting is thus essentially non referential; as the emphasis

shifts from expression to production, from object to
process, sensation is less subject matter than modus
operandi. A Deleuzean framework does not, therefore,
allow us to theorise are as a transcription of a
psychological state. But this may be of the essence in so far
as sense memory is about tapping a certain type of process;
a process experienced not as a remembering of the past but
a continuous negotiation of the present with indeterminable
links to the past. The poetics of sense memory involve not
so much speaking of but speaking out of a particular
memory or experience. - In other words, speaking for the
body sustaining sensation.32
What is important for me in this thought is the implication that, while my

paintings and drawings themselves depict a liminal space, indeed perhaps an
uncanny space, they also, through the mediation of my material practice,
themselves become places between, interstitial areas, between past and
present. As such, they arguably hold the potential for a postmemorial affect.33
It is critical that the paintings which derive from the different source
material are seen in relation to each other: those from the family album, from
the semi-official archive and those derived from my own photographs and
drawings referencing an encounter in Germany. For the viewer these works
might create a consideration of the intertwining of public and private, of
inside and outside, of social and individual experience and in addition,
perhaps, act as a bridge between what Hirsch terms familial and affiliative
memory.34 Hirsch suggests that postmemorial work:
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strives to reactivate and reembody more distant
social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by
reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial
forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. Thus less-
directly affected participants can become engaged in the
generation of postmemory, which can thus persist even
after all participants and even their familial descendants are
gone.35
Using this particular combination of public and private imagery, of both

directly experienced and mediated images of place, facilitates a way of
avoiding some of the possible risks of over-identification and sentimentality.
Nevertheless, the decision to include the paintings derived from my family
album indicate that there is a deep personal connection; this also both
acknowledges the importance of past and shifts the focus to the present.
7. Tense
The summer I visited Friedrichroda it happened to rain a lot. That
led to a certain amount of wandering around the town and on one of these
aimless strolls, I peered in through the wet glass of a shop window at some
miniature aeroplanes. I was intrigued to notice that they were models of
World War II planes and duly photographed them. I then noticed a grainy
black and white photograph of a plane with the name of the manufacturer
Gothaer Waggonfabrik. What was odd about this photograph was the
decision to carefully, but only partially, cover the swastika on the tail of the
plane with a very neat masking-tape cross. There was something very telling
about this gesture: it is very easy to imagine the dilemma the shop owner
went through in wanting to show the photograph - just precisely how much
of the swastika, if any, should remain visible? He or she would not want to
be seem to be denying the difficult past, yet by the same token would not
wish to be seen in any way condoning it either. The result of this internal
debate was a strange compromise; this small cross of cream tape seemed to
me to epitomise some of the complexities of a contemporary relation to a
difficult past.
It brings to mind Jörg Heiser’s thoughts in relation to Susan Hiller’s
J Street Project, in which she records the 303 street names in Germany that
still bear the word Jude (Jew). Heiser contrasts the two possible readings of
the photographs that seem to him to be ‘evidence’ and the accompanying
film that is more contemplative:
These two readings - ‘soft’ everyday scene and ‘hard’

crime-scene - can each be understood as the dangers of an
inappropriate handling of German-Jewish history . . . the
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danger of being lost in the present, our awareness of history
eroded by the sheer abundance of everyday banality. The
danger of a kind of ‘pleasure in guilt’ that revels in the
viewer’s own horror at the gravity of historical atrocities
even in their absence at the empty ‘scene of the crime.’36
This kind of revelling in guilt at past atrocities might also distance and
obscure an appropriate relationship to the present and current events. In his
reading of Hiller’s installation Heiser argues that placing the two kinds of
images together results in the forming of a tense relationship and that this
indicates precisely how unresolved and uncertain is our contemporary
relation to history. It seems to me that, in a small way, the inadequacy of the
masking-tape cross attempted to acknowledge the difficulties of these issues,
becoming a clumsy metaphor for events that we cannot remember properly
nor completely forget.
It has been important for me to circumvent and avoid the pitfalls of
the two dangers Heiser outlines: forgetting a sense of history and the
fetishisation of a violent past. I offer this tense relationship in a less clear-cut
fashion. The tension in my work lies between the subject of the images, a
cosy everydayness and the way in which they are depicted. It is crucial that in
my work there are no images of distress or devastation: the opportunity to
reflect on the implications of genocide is only incipient, never determined. I
depict the concurrent possibilities of the space of the lido pool: escapism and
of fear, release and entrapment, reassurance and anxiety, pleasure and
mourning. In some ways my paintings are analogous to the masking-tape
cross: on the one hand they hover between revelation and secrecy, on the
other hand they become an attempt to both mark the place between
remembering and forgetting and to become that place.
Notes
1
The literal translation of Strandkorb is ‘beach basket’ and these hybrids
between beach hut and deck chair are synonymous with the beaches of North
Germany.
2
A Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, Verso, London,
2002, p. 5.
3
G Pollock, ‘Going to the Past via a Journey to the Present: Mother/Daughter
and Other Germans in Judith Tucker’s Painting from Caesura to Resort,’ in
Resort by J Tucker, Wild Pansy Press, Leeds, 2006, p. 17.
4
M Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997, p. 22.
Judith Tucker 213
______________________________________________________________
5
M Hirsch, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,’ in Exile and Creativity,
Susan Suleiman (ed), Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1998, p. 422.
6
J Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2005, pp. 9-10.
7
M Sheller and J Urry, Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play,
Routledge, London and New York, 2004, p. 1.
8
J Urry, The Tourist Gaze, London, Sage, 1990, p. 12.
9
Ibid., p.12.
10
D Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Act of Secondary
Witnessing, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ and London,
2002, p. 109.
11
T Wasserman, ‘Constructing the Image of Postmemory,’ in The Image and
the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, F Guerin, F and R Hallas
(eds), Wallflower Press, London and New York, 2007, p. 169.
12
Ibid., p. 165.
13
The title of this section refers to Night and Fog/Nuit et Brouillard (France,
1955, D: A Resnais, Sc: J Cayrol), which in turn refers to ‘Nacht und Nebel,’
a directive of Hitler of 7 December 1941 which resulted in the deportation of
political prisoners to camps and thus their disappearance into the ‘night and
fog.’
14
C Wilk, Modernism: Designing a New World, V and A Publications,
London, 2006, p. 250.
15
K Worpole, Here Comes the Sun: Architecture and Public Space in
Twentieth-Century European Culture, Reaktion Books, London. 2000, p.
117.
16
H Pussard, ‘Historicising the Spaces of Leisure: Open-Air Swimming and
the Lido Movement in England,’ World Leisure Journal, vol. 49.4, 2007, p.
20
17
Worpole, p.114
18
Wilk, p.250
19
Wilk, p. 257
20
This is an idea widely explored in literature; among other examples, I am
thinking of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in which the public baths
are discovered to be polluted and also of Aharon Appelfeld’s novel
Badenheim 1939 in which the Holocaust is explored through the trope of a
resort town.
21
Memory of the Camps, UK 1945, D: Sidney Bernstein.
22
Ibid.
23
A Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992, p.11.
24
Ibid., p. 11.
______________________________________________________________
25
B Brinkmann, Cranach, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/Main, Hatje Cantz
Verlag and Royal Academy of Arts, London. 2007, p. 112.
26
Pollock, p. 22.
27
S Freud, The Uncanny, Hugh Haughton (trans), Penguin, London, 2003 p.
248.
28
M Hirsch, ‘Marked by Memory: Feminist Reflections on Trauma and
Transmission’ in Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, eds., Extremities:
Trauma, Testimony and Community, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and
Chicago, 2002, p. 81.
29
M Dumas, ‘Marlene Dumas,’ in The Painting of Modern Life 1960s –
Now, R Rugoff (ed and curator), London, Hayward Publishing, p. 121.
30
M Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory,’ Poetics Today, vol. 29.1,
2008, p. 115.
31
Bennett, p.36.
32
Ibid., p. 38.
33
Elsewhere I have considered painting as a place, using Edward Casey and
Bridget Riley among others. See J Tucker ‘Painting Landscape: Mediating
Dislocation,’ in Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist
Criticism, F Becket and T Gifford (eds), Rodopi Press, Amsterdam, 2007, pp.
197–213, and J Tucker, ‘Painting Places: A Postmemorial ‘Landscape’,’ in
Migratory Aesthetics, S Durrant and C Lord (eds), Rodopi Press, Amsterdam,
2007, pp 59 -79.
34
Hirsch, 2008, pp. 114-116
35
Ibid., p.111
36
J Heiser in S. Hiller, The J Street Project, Compton Vernay and Berlin
Artists-In-Residence Programme/DAAD, 2005, p. 625.
Bibliography
Apel, D., Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Act of Secondary
Witnessing, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ and London,
2002.
Bennett, J., Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art,

Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2005.
Brinkmann, B., Cranach, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/Main, Hatje Cantz

Verlag and Royal Academy of Arts, London. 2007.
Dumas, M., ‘Marlene Dumas,’ in The Painting of Modern Life 1960s – Now,
R Rugoff (ed and curator), London, Hayward Publishing, p. 121.
Judith Tucker 215
______________________________________________________________
Freud, S., The Uncanny, Hugh Haughton (trans), Penguin, London, 2003.
Heiser J., in S. Hiller, The J Street Project, Compton Vernay and Berlin
Artists-In-Residence Programme/DAAD, 2005.
Hirsch, M., Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory,

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.
Hirsch, M., ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,’ in Exile and Creativity,

Susan Suleiman (ed), Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1998.
Hirsch, M., ‘Marked by Memory: Feminist Reflections on Trauma and

Transmission’ in. Miller N. K and Tougaw, J. (eds)., Extremities: Trauma,
Testimony and Community, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago,
2002.
Hirsch, M., ‘The Generation of Postmemory,’ Poetics Today, vol. 29.1,

2008, p. 115.
Kuhn, A., Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, Verso, London,
2002.
Pollock, G., ‘Going to the Past via a Journey to the Present: Mother/Daughter
and Other Germans in Judith Tucker’s Painting from Caesura to Resort,’ in
Resort by J. Tucker (ed.), Wild Pansy Press, Leeds, 2006.
Pussard, H., ‘Historicising the Spaces of Leisure: Open-Air Swimming and

the Lido Movement in England,’ World Leisure Journal, vol. 49.4, 2007, p.
20.
Sheller, M. and Urry, J., Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play,
Routledge, London and New York, 2004.
Tucker J., ‘Painting Landscape: Mediating Dislocation,’ in Culture,

Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism, Becket F. and
Gifford T. (eds), Rodopi Press, Amsterdam, 2007.
Tucker, J., ‘Painting Places: A Postmemorial ‘Landscape’, in Migratory

Aesthetics, Durrant S. and Lord C. (eds), Rodopi Press, Amsterdam, 2007, pp
59 -79.
______________________________________________________________
Urry, J., The Tourist Gaze, London, Sage, 1990.
Vidler, A., The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, The
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992.
Wasserman, T., ‘Constructing the Image of Postmemory,’ in The Image and

the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, Guerin, F., and Hallas R.
(eds), Wallflower Press, London and New York, 2007, p. 169.
Wilk, C., Modernism: Designing a New World, V and A Publications,

London, 2006.
Worpole, K., Here Comes the Sun: Architecture and Public Space in
Twentieth-Century European Culture, Reaktion Books, London. 2000.
Notes on Contributors
Joseph Clarke is a Lecturer in History at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
He is the author of Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France:
Revolution and Remembrance 1789-1799 (2007).
Erin Halstad-McGuire is a University Teacher at the University of

Glasgow, UK. She holds a PhD in Archaeology, and specialises in the Viking
Age, migration and burial ritual.
Hilary Hiram was a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Glasgow,

UK, until 2009. She is the author of The Scots Law of Succession (2002, 2nd
ed. 2007).
Avril Maddrell is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of the

West of England, UK. She is the author of Complex Locations: The
Production and Reception of Women’s Geographical Work and the Canon
1850-1970 (2009).
Kate McLoughlin is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of

Glasgow, UK. She is the author of Martha Gellhorn: The War Writer in the
Field and in the Text (2007) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to
War Writing (2009).
Joel David Robinson is a researcher in the history of modern art,

architecture and landscape design. He teaches part-time for the Open
University and Birkbeck College, London, is the author of Life in Ruins:
Architectural Culture and the Question of Death in the Twentieth Century
(2008) and practises freelance journalism for various contemporary art
magazines.
Judith Tucker is a Lecturer in the School of Design, University of Leeds,

UK, and a practising painter. She is the co-convenor of LAND2, a landscape
and visual arts research network.
Alana M. Vincent holds a PhD in theology from the Centre for Literature,
Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow, UK.
Cynthia Wachtell is an Assistant Professor of English Literature, Yeshiva

University, New York City, USA, and the author of War No More: The
Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914 (2010).
218 Notes on Contributors
______________________________________________________________
Sarah Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University
of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. She is the author of To Know Where
He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing (2008).
Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University, USA.

He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in
European Cultural History (1995).

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Memory, Mourning, Landscape

Probing the Boundaries

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Designing a War Museum: Some Reflections on

The Sacred Names of the Nation’s Dead: War and

Memory, Mourning and Malvern Hill: Herman Melville

Tabulating Loss, Entombing Memory: The Srebrenica-

Lethean Landscapes: Forgetting in Late Modern

Morbid Family Pride: Private Memorials and Scots Law 99

Memory, Mourning and Landscape in the Scottish

Seder and Imagined Landscape 147

Sailing Home: Boat-Graves, Migrant Identities and

The Lido in the Forest: Memory, Landscape, Painting 191

Notes on Contributors 217

Elizabeth Anderson, University of Glasgow

Avril Maddrell, University of the West of England

Kate McLoughlin, University of Glasgow

Alana Vincent, University of Glasgow

Foote, K., Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy,

Malpas, J. E., Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Cambridge

Sime, J. D., ‘Creating Places or Designing Spaces’, Journal of Environmental

Key Words: Museography, war, horizontality, mourning, authenticity,

1. On Regarding the Pain of Others

2. The Maastricht Moment

It is entirely horizontal in character. A shockingly realistic dead man is

4. Innovation 2: The Retreat from Pseudo-Realism

6. Innovation 4: The Suggestion of the Sacred

There is an additional element of interrogation, which a visitor meets in the

A. Room 1: Before 1914 (Figure 4)

B. Salle des Portraits

C. Salle 2: 1914-16 (Figure 8)

D. Between Salles 2 and 3 (Figure 11)

F. Salle 4: After the War

Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Magarshack, D., Penguin, Harmondsworth,

Key Words: French Revolution, Revolutionary Wars, commemoration,

In May 1793, as news of the first battalion of the Marne’s casualties

Since the outbreak of the war, before and after the 9

après la guerre de secession et la guerre de 1870-1: un legs de la guerre

‘Dans la Normandie, entre Seine et Orne, confrères et citoyens,’ Annales

pompe funèbre à l’occasion de la mort de ce général (Meaux, an VI); AN

Agulhon, M., ‘La ‘Statuomanie’ et l’Histoire,’ in Agulhon, L’Histoire

Archives Municipales, Registres de la Société Populaire et Régénérée de

Archives Nationales F17a/1007, no. 1217, ‘Adresse de la société populaire de

Baumont, H., ‘La Société Populaire de Lunéville, 1793-1795,’ Annales de

Becker, A., ‘Monuments aux Morts Après la Guerre de Secession et la

Bée, M., ‘Dans la Normandie, entre Seine et Orne, Confrères et Citoyens,’

Ben-Amos, A., Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, Oxford

Bertaud, J. P., La Révolution Armée: Les Soldats-citoyens et la Révolution

Chardon E., (ed), Cahiers des Procès-verbaux des Séances de la Société

Clarke, J., Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution

Discours Prononcés par le Citoyen Galloteau-Chappron, Maire de Reims, le

Fray-Fournier, A., (ed), Le club des Jacobins de Limoges, 1790-1795,

Froeschlé-Chopard, M.H., ‘Pénitents et sociétés populaires du sud-est,’

Guiomar, J.Y., L’Invention de la Guerre Totale, Félin, Paris, 2004.

Henriot, M., Le club des Jacobins de Semur, 1790-1795, Rebourseau, Dijon,

Journal des Jacobins de Reims, 8, 16 ventôse II, p. 57.

Journal des Jacobins de Reims, 10 floréal II, p. 275.

Journal de la Montagne, no. 52, 30 prairial an II, p. 424; La Décade

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