In the interwar period, all political and ideological currents used the legacy of the First World War for their own ends, often completely contradictory, because this rich source of violent images and metaphors of destruction proved very malleable. But the fact that the memory of the massacres of such divergent interests was spread introduced a violent dimension into post-war political discourse, channeling it into a constant preoccupation with human and material devastation. Of course, the glorification of war took many forms after 1918. The most visible and emotionally powerful was the commemoration of the fallen soldiers. While these public symbols of mourning expressed implicit or, more rarely, explicit criticism of the war, they also sought to make more sense of soldiers` deaths, obscuring the fact that the war had largely been about senseless carnage. The sacrifice was thus glorified while its context was reshaped to enhance the nobility of its victims. Since commemoration is more about giving meaning and purpose to the past than simply remembering it, the official commemoration of millions of fallen young men could not help but give retrospective meaning to the war in which their lives were wasted for the benefit of the living. When the war finally ended, veterans felt an even greater need to make sense of it. This does not mean that they all glorified the war, but on the whole, most seem to have glorified their own experiences and those of their comrades, even if they opposed the war itself. Here, a paradox was of considerable importance, because opposition to war, even pacifism, shared an important element with extremism and militarism, namely the glorification of the individual soldier, whether as a ruthless fighter or as an unfortunate victim. Some hoped that the common destiny of veterans would become a formula for unity, national and international peace. But as we know, exactly the opposite happened, not least because all these soldiers had years of fear and atrocities, murder and mutilation in common. It was a treacherous basis for peace.
After the First World War, both types of mourning and attribution of meaning to death were common features of the vast and unprecedented wave of commemoration that swept Europe, although the balance between the two varied from nation to nation. But if public commemoration naturally tends to emphasize collective sacrifice for the national cause, it seems increasingly marked by the search for a new individual heroism. This synthesis between the collective and the particular was directly linked to the emergence of mass society, the immense conscription armies and total war, a context in which there was no longer any place for the traditional hero, whose ultimate sacrifice was inscribed in his destiny and inherent in his existence. The First World War ushered in the glorification of the base, which in countries such as Britain and France expressed itself in the erection of national monuments to the Unknown Soldier. Here is a figure representing both the individual and the masses: glorified by the nation, he also represented the masses sent to their deaths and quickly forgotten. Thus, he gave a face to anonymity by personifying and glorifying precisely those masses who had no place in public memory; In other words, by remembering, the unknown soldier legitimized forgetfulness. The figure of the unknown soldier thus made it possible to move from the inflated and largely discredited rhetoric of the abstract nation to the individual, but presented the individual as a soldier who, by definition, had no specific traits and characteristics, and therefore embodied the nation. For all that was known about this “unknown” character was his status as a soldier, his gender and his nationality (or “race”). Thanks to him, the nation was able to present itself as the place of resurrection and, thanks to the sacrifice of its sons, to return from the valley of death.
It was this identification of the living nation with its anonymous but glorified dead soldiers that offered a way to cope with the trauma of war and normalized haunting images of the dead returning from the endless cemeteries where they now lived, for the desire for the return of the dead mixed with a healthy dose of shame and anxiety. At the end of the war, people wanted to return to normal as soon as possible, bury the dead and then continue to live. But the presence of so much death and grief also led to a wave of mysticism, spiritualism and occultism. The unknown soldier fulfilled the requirement to focus both on the suffering and sacrifice of the person for whom there was a great need, and to distance himself from a particular member of the fallen family or community.