As I write the introduction to this section on remembrance and reconfiguration, I feel somewhat surrounded by memorial. During the development of this volume, we have celebrated the emergence of dada (1918), a reimagining of what language might or might not mean, and the founding of the Bauhaus (1919), which transformed architecture and design. 2022, the year we conclude the preparation of this manuscript, is modernism's annus mirabilis, 100 years since the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. While these centenaries are engendering celebrations, in the public imagination at least, these years are perhaps recognised more readily as markers of a century since the horrors of the Great War. In fact, all these memorialisations are fractured and fraught. In an artistic sense, the move away from (or at least weakening of) the canon has meant these anniversaries demand a more nuanced approach, a commitment to uncovering ‘lost’ artworks and figures obscured by the domineering modernist behemoths for so long. How to commemorate the Great War remains deeply problematic; jingoism and uncritical nationalism – two trends we certainly do not need more of in the 2020s – so often creep in.

Modernism was infused with the troublesome matters of remembrance and reconfiguration from its inception. Despite Ezra Pound's determination to ‘make it new’, modernism – whether the Variety Theatre sensibility of the futurists or the harking back to ancient Greece by Isadora Duncan – is constantly playing with the past. More than this, for all its professed modernity and futurity, modernism is more regularly defined by ‘memorial culture’. The proximity of death, war and violent revolution infiltrates not only the modernist imagination but also the landscape with statues, sculptures and gymnasiums erected to memorialise the dead.

Indeed, it is impossible to escape the memorialising fingerprints of modernism in our contemporary landscape, though many of these traces are defined, not by the excitement of aesthetic experimentation or scientific wonder, but by mourning and melancholia. Alongside the Children's Peace Monument in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (Figure 1.1), for example, an image of youthful optimism for the future, stands the Hiroshima Peace Memorial itself (Figure 1.2). The former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Hall is a modernist building, built in 1915 and designed by the Czech architect Jan Letzel.