12 - Whose War? Whose Nation?: Tensions in the Memory of the Franco-German War of 1870-1871

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.