THE INVENTION OF A RITUAL - The Volkstrauertag as an Institution of Memory and the Politics of Identity in Weimar Germany

Abstract

This thesis examines the image of the First World War as constructed in the ritual of a memorial-day, the Volkstrauertag, and explores the role the image played in shaping politically relevant memories in post-war Weimar Germany. The focus here is on the meaning-giving power of a ritual through its rhetoric, symbols, and performances. The analysis also illustrates the process of identity formation by means of constructing a (collective) memory of the past. Pre-war socialization and post-war political allegiance acted as a prism through which the experience of war was refracted. All sorts of groups in Weimar’s society used the memory of the war as a medium to further their own political agenda in the highly contested political context of the inter-war years. The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK), therefore, invented and practiced a ritual saturated with a heroic and glorified image of the war aimed at strengthening the participant’s conservative identity and to serve the political agenda of the conservative stratum of society. This thesis opposes a popular lament of historians who have identified the absence of meaning-giving rituals as a seedbed for the Republic’s later demise. With its memory politics, the Volkstrauertag instead intensified political identities and solidified entrenched tensions among conflicting political groups. The inherent interconnection between political identity and memory, within which the character of the latter is very much a result of the former, is foundational to any understanding of the contested political landscape of the Weimar Republic and its memory politics.