‘Astray in a Dark Forest’? The Emotional Politics of Reconstruction Britain

Based on material generated by the British social investigative organisation Mass Observation between 1944 and 1946 this chapter maps some of the political work that emotion did in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It adapts cultural theorist Sara Ahmed’s question ‘What do emotions do?’ to a precise historical moment. It approaches emotion through the lens of social, as well as cultural, history by asking an additional question: ‘What did people do with emotion?’ It examines how the interlinked categories of feeling and experience were invoked by individual Mass Observers as ways of knowing a rapidly changing world and as grounds for participating in a dynamic public sphere. The chapter argues that a distinctive form of ‘emotional citizenship’ emerged out of the war; one which deployed feeling as a form of epistemology and experience as an evidential base.

Emotions in Times of War: Private and Public, Individual and Collective

In private and public affairs the concepts of honour and shame were crucial from the outbreak and throughout the entire duration of the First World War. The roots of these concepts can be traced back to a highly gendered 19th-century aristocratic-bourgeois code of honour and duty, which in 1914 was translated into the willingness to sacrifice one’s own life and the life of beloved ones. While in the early days of the war propaganda focused on female (sexual) honour and the role of protective chivalrous males, humiliation and public shaming—of enemies, ‘cowards’, and POWs, for example—eventually became common practice in warfare and on the Home Front. Yet as the war and its hardships raged on, more and more people became sceptical of these attitudes. Finally, when the war ended, ‘honour’ maintained its importance, especially in negotiating and bearing the terms of armistice and peace.

Introduction

War is often lived through and remembered as a time of heightened emotional intensity during which patriotic fervour, the break-up of families, encounters with the enemy, loss of life, and extraordinary levels of violence engendered a range of complex emotional responses. This edited collection places the emotions of war centre stage. It explores specific emotional responses in particular wartime locations, it maps national and transnational emotional cultures, and it proposes new ways of deploying emotion as an analytical device. This introductory chapter considers what happens when we place the emotions of war centre stage, demonstrating how cornerstones of historical writing and analysis, such as the chronological divide between ‘war’ and ‘postwar’ can look very different when we approach war through a study of emotions.

Wounded Pride and Petty Jealousies: Private Lives and Public Diplomacy in Second World War Cairo

This chapter offers a case study of the affective registers of British imperial policy during the Second World War. It examines how the conduct of war and diplomacy by Sir Miles Lampson, British Ambassador in Cairo, was shaped by his emotional dispositions, in particular his domestic obligations and attachments, his insecure pride, and his susceptibility to jealousy and resentment. It locates Lampson’s personal negotiation between private feeling and public action in the broader context of the heightened emotional registers of wartime Egypt, where it became virtually impossible to quarantine intimate desires, especially romantic and sexual longings, within the private sphere. More critically, it also demonstrates how broader anxieties about Britain’s waning global hegemony during the Second World War were manifested in the various forms of psychological projection, displacement, and compulsion exhibited by Lampson, and also in the Ambassador’s recourse in his statecraft to gossip and rumour.

‘Macabre and Hilarious’: The Emotional Life of the Civilian Gas Mask in France during and after the First World War

The anticipation and fear of what chemical weapons might do to a civilian population haunted the interwar imaginary in the aftermath of the introduction and widespread use of poison gas on the battlefields of the First World War. In no place, perhaps, was this more apparent than France, one of the few nations whose civilian and combatant populations bore direct witness to this innovative weaponry. One object—the gas mask—emerged to mitigate the physical effects of gas warfare. It would come to play a crucial role in the calculated management of the destabilising emotions of anxiety and fear that accompanied the deployment of chemical arms, but its emotional life extended beyond its intended aims. This chapter combines the material and emotional history of total war by using a single object to uncover more fully the dislocation and devastation wrought by modern, industrial war. It does so by analysing key aspects of the life of the civilian gas mask from its first appearance in France during the First World War to its symbolic power in interwar civil defence and war resistance.

The Tears of 1939: German Women and the Emotional Archive of the First World War

This chapter focuses on tearful reactions to the outbreak of war in 1939 as described and recalled by German women in diaries, memoirs, and oral histories. Women who were at different life stages in 1939 offer nuanced and explicit testimonies of their emotional responses, which were predominantly framed with references to the First World War. Retained memories of bereavement and hardship are particularly striking, and this chapter argues that both personal and familial experiences of the period between 1914 and 1918 were of key importance as they accumulated into an emotional archive. This emotional archive represented a crucial reference point for women to gauge a contemporaneous response to a political event—the outbreak of war in 1939. It also facilitated the construction of a personal stance and political positioning to war in a retrospective post-Second World War context. Women’s tears of 1939 were therefore about more than the outbreak of war; they were about owning and disowning different parts of their past.

In Search of Victor: Transnationalism, Emotion, and War

In October 1949, in the closing month of the Greek Civil War, a young soldier named Pandelis Klinkatsis was killed stepping on a landmine in Northern Greece. Pandelis was my uncle. The announcement of his death devastated his immediate family including my mother Sophia. I focus this chapter on the individual story of the loss of my uncle and my mother’s grief to cast a wider canvas on the emotions of war and their enduring legacies. This story explores the repercussions of war such as migration, the impact on sibling and romantic love, absence and separation during and after war. It examines the implications of these displacements in writing an emotional history of war. Such a history is typically conveyed through oral storytelling, and oral history forms the basis of the narrative. But there are two other ways in which the memory and emotion of war experience are kept alive in a transnational world. The first expression is in the form of photography, the second is the role grave sites play in the nexus between mourning and memory over time. Pandelis’s story takes us to Greece, Austria, America, and Australia. I argue that it encapsulates the complex geographical and emotional fragments created by war, which are manifest in love and death, mourning and memory, in a transnational context across four countries. Both the Second World War and the Greek Civil War created a landscape of emotions—the legacies of which are indelible—and continue to the present day.

Communities of Feeling: Fear, Death, and Grief in the Writing of British Servicemen in the Second World War

The Second World War saw the conscription and mobilisation of around 5.8 million British men for military service. Very few had any prior military experience or training. This chapter looks at some of the letters, diaries, and memoirs written by men serving in the Army to consider how they tried to construct a new, militarised sense of identity, and the emotional styles that they used to communicate this. Letters, diaries, and memoirs provided a resource for both the expression of emotions that could not be articulated in the military community, and for the process of fashioning a new militarised selfhood. Drawing on work undertaken by historians working on the construction of selfhood, the chapter examines a range of these documents to consider the ways that men constructed and articulated this new militarised identity, and the emotional styles that they utilised to do so. However, war provided multiple challenges to these new, hybrid, identities, none more so than the threat of death, or the death of friends and comrades. The chapter concludes by considering the emotional styles that some men used to record their encounters with death, and the ways that these encounters could destabilise their new, militarised, selfhoods.

Little Ruby’s Hand: Young Women and the Emotional Experience of Caregiving in Britain after the First World War

‘Little Ruby’ was the daughter of the head gardener at St Dunstan’s, the voluntary organisation set up in 1915 to support blinded servicemen, whose role as a guide was widely represented in pictures and sculptures during the war and who became an iconic symbol of the charity. This chapter draws on the story of Ruby to explore the role played by children—and young girls in particular—in the care of disabled soldiers after the war. Based on interviews with descendants born in the 1920s and 1930s, and now in their eighties and nineties, it explores the domestic history of caregiving through the eyes of daughters. Their experience of growing up was often at odds with the historical narratives surrounding young women between the wars, who are assumed to have enjoyed more freedom and leisure than their mothers. Many daughters of disabled servicemen experienced strong pressures to remain living at home and help their mothers through domestic and paid work. Their ambitions for education, career and service during the Second World War were often constrained. Looking back now, in an age where the domestic obligations of young women are fewer and their career aspirations are taken more seriously, the women expressed contrary feelings. On the one hand, they continued to regard familial duty as a valued aspect of their identities as daughters. On the other hand, they talked about the emotional pressures of care and their regrets at opportunities lost. Focusing on the life course from girlhood to old age, the chapter reveals the impact of the First World War across the 20th century and through the lives of those born after the conflict’s end.