Cities, Images and Transformed Memories: Some Examples from World War I and its Centenary

At first glance, the First World War, as perceived by historians and narrated in public memory, does not seem to be directly connected to the idea of the city or to representations of or damage to cities. The Great War is represented in literature, memoirs, cinema, and even historical research more as a war of “Flanders fields”, “massacres of the trenches”, or “no man’s land”. A war in which mud was mixed with the blood of poor infantrymen and poilus. From Remarque to Hemingway, from Cendrars, Céline and Gadda to Comisso, Lussu(1) as well as many great writers and filmmakers such as Monicelli and Kubrick up through the recent film 1917, with some significant exceptions cities seem to appear in accounts of WWI as backstages, places of refuge, the settings for hospital scenes or retreat (as in Hemingway’s account of Italy’s defeat in the Battle of Caporetto and Malaparte’s La rivolta dei santi maledetti); sometimes, cities host liaisons between illicit lovers and nurses (again, Hemingway). Finally, cities are spaces for commemorating veterans’ legacy and the violence, misery, resentment smoldering until the emergence of Fascism and Nazism war’s terrible reverberations in the post-war period. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to show how backlit narratives and visions of cities emerge in media and cultural representations more generally (including online digital media published by web sites and museums, as well as monuments dedicated to the WWI Centennial).