Pierwsza wojna światowa w pamięci Brytyjczyków w okresie międzywojennym

Abstract

Anniversary rituals commemorating WWI in the form of very symbolic red poppies developed in Great Britain in 1918-1921 and are still continued today. In the interwar period, the Great War memory was particularly dynamically commemorated because veterans, participants and witnesses of the war together with their families and friends who remembered the war were still alive and took part in anniversary rituals, particularly at the Cenotaph and Tomb of Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, as well as celebrations held in the Empire’s military cemeteries. Official celebrations were always accompanied by a certain ideological message to justify the sense of immense losses suffered in result of this unreasonable carnage. For this reason, the ideal of a “honorable gentleman” and honors for serving the King and Country dominated a verbal message of the Great War, which was also reflected in the form, shape, epitaphs and inscriptions on thousands of then erected memorials and in military cemeteries in Europe and all over the world. The British memory of the Great War and the way it was commemorated, however, was diversified from the very beginning, which was confirmed, among others, by an apparent dichotomy between rituals and ceremonies held by the veterans and civilians, or war memories of men and women, as well as its image depicted in the literature and historiography shaping the picture and memory of these events.