Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part One Germany, The United States, and Total War
- Part Two War and Society
- Part Three Memory and Anticipation: War and Culture
- 11 The American Debate over Modern War, 1871-1914
- 12 Whose War? Whose Nation?: Tensions in the Memory of the Franco-German War of 1870-1871
- 13 War Preparations and National Identity in Imperial Germany
- 14 Military Imagination in the United States, 1815-1917
- 15 Dreams and Nightmares: German Military Leadership and the Images of Future Warfare, 1871-1914
- 16 “A Calamity to Civilization”: Theodore Roosevelt and the Danger of War in Europe
- Part Four The Experience of War
- Index
12 - Whose War? Whose Nation?: Tensions in the Memory of the Franco-German War of 1870-1871
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part One Germany, The United States, and Total War
- Part Two War and Society
- Part Three Memory and Anticipation: War and Culture
- 11 The American Debate over Modern War, 1871-1914
- 12 Whose War? Whose Nation?: Tensions in the Memory of the Franco-German War of 1870-1871
- 13 War Preparations and National Identity in Imperial Germany
- 14 Military Imagination in the United States, 1815-1917
- 15 Dreams and Nightmares: German Military Leadership and the Images of Future Warfare, 1871-1914
- 16 “A Calamity to Civilization”: Theodore Roosevelt and the Danger of War in Europe
- Part Four The Experience of War
- Index
Summary
In 1910 an East Prussian pastor named C. Mozeik, seeking to bridge the gap to his working-class flock, sat down for seventy hours of interviews with one of his elderly parishioners. Identified only as Frau Hoffmann, she was a sixty-nine-year-old former maid and factory worker chosen for her rough-and-ready intelligence, good sense, and long-term perspective on village life, customs, and attitudes. When asked about common topics of conversation, Frau Hoffman told her pastor: “Sometimes at home we just die laughing when my husband comes home drunk and starts talking about Paris and the French war, even though he wasn't there. But he's heard war stories so often from veterans that when he's drunk he thinks he himself was in the war, and then he tells his stories.”
Falsely believing that one is a war veteran may be the most extreme form of memorializing a war. Yet there can be no doubt that the memory of the “Great and Glorious War of 1870-1” was a central part of national identity in the German Reich. No matter that more than 97 percent of the German population had not gone to France in 1870-1 - years later, nearly all Germans would “remember” the war.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Anticipating Total WarThe German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, pp. 281 - 306Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999