Preliminary Programme

The Battle of the Somme is considered a landmark in cinematographic representations of war. A compilation of actuality footage shot at the front line by the official British cinematographers Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell between 25 June and 10 July 1916, it opened in London in August of that year and played to packed cinema houses there and in the provinces, being seen by an estimated 20 million British cinema goers. Most sources suggest that the film was well received by the British public, who responded positively to the first ‘authentic’ or ‘truthful’ film of the war, though there were some voices which expressed their unease at ‘unpatriotic’ shots of dead British soldiers. Badsey (1981) and Reeves (1997) have analysed the contemporary reception of the film, while Smither (1994) has demonstrated conclusively that most of the offending shots were in fact reconstructions staged after the event. The consensus amongst commentators, however, is that the film functioned primarily as a bridge between two separate forms of wartime experience, familiarising waiting relatives at home with the world of the soldier on the Western Front.

What is missing in this analysis is the fact that the film had another audience. It, along with other films, had repeated showings behind the lines on the Western Front where cinema going had become part of soldiers' regular recreational activities. Soldiers' reactions to the film were divided. Rowland Fielding who commanded a Battalion on the Somme took his men to see it whilst the battle was in action in September 1916 and found that its 'wonderful and most realistic' depictions relieved the nerves of troops who had not yet gone into combat. Wilfred Owen was more cynical, writing to his sister that 'those Somme pictures are the laughing stock of the whole British Army'. This paper moves away from a focus on the domestic audience to consider how the film was received by those in the best position to judge its veracity: the soldiers who participated in the battle itself. It draws upon some soldiers’ letters from the Imperial War Museum archive. The paper will also place the soldiers’ response to The Battle of the Somme in the context of soldiers’ recreational habits and debates within the War Office and the film trade about the provision of suitable ‘entertainment’ for the troops. (Show less)

For the reopening of Vienna’s well-known Theater in der Josefstadt in the first war season in October 1914, an aesthetically worthless, but truly patriotic, up-to-date war-comedy – Bernhard Buchbinder’s Das Weib des Reservisten – was to be staged. The censors weren’t so amused though – they obliged the director Joseph Jarno to transfer the action on stage to the era of the Napoleonic wars and to avoid any allusion to the present war. As a result, critics as well as the police officers present at the first performance noticed how much the public related the play to current events.
This little anecdote shows, like thousands of similar cases throughout the war, how theatre censorship was tightened up (or even reintroduced like in France) with the beginning of the war and tried to ban not only critical allusions to the state and to its war policy, but everything suitable for public excitement, diplomatic protest, or transgression of moral standards. And it shows, on the other hand, that censorship always has to deal with its potential failure – theatre goers can understand the slightest allusions, playwrights and producers can adapt to censorship practices and find out ways to convey their ideas.
In nearly all war-leading countries in World War I, censorship institutions were one key element for taking influence and control over the public sphere. Thousands of play scripts were vised by censors, sentences or scenes cut, characters replaced, prescriptions for stage design and costumes, even for the way of acting were made. Sarcastic and critical authors like Carl Sternheim, Romain Rolland or Karl Kraus had nearly no chance to see their plays staged. But also plays that wanted to show overwhelming patriotism by denigrating the enemy were cut by the censors. And the war also served as an argument to regiment all types of frivolities or sexual allusions.
For the historian however, the existence of theatre censorship can be seen as a stroke of luck: these institutions with their bureaucratic accuracy left behind complete collections of all submitted play scripts during the war, together with the cuts, comments and decisions of the censors. In many cases – especially concerning music-hall and variety theatres – these scripts are the only remaining written record of the performance. This material doesn’t only tell a long story on First World War censorship but also gives insights in the history of entertainment theatre, of the relation between state institutions and the field of mass culture, of moral standards and modes of criticism, etc.
The proposed paper will address the different rules and institutions of theatre censorship in the warring European countries, it will analyze censorship practices along telling examples in different countries and present questionings of the censorship archives’ material that go beyond the history of wartime censorship itself. (Show less)

This paper investigates how Wilfred Bion’s 1917-18 war experiences formed the raw material for the theoretical ideas that he developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly those concerning maternal containing and the development of the capacity for thinking. Recent studies (eg Stonebridge) have emphasised how Bion’s experience as an army psychiatrist during the Second World War, working with traumatised soldiers at Northfield Hospital, contributed to his thinking on anxiety and group processes. But Bion’s experience of battle stress as a young man had an equally profound influence on the of thinking that he developed in his late fifties.

Trench warfare gave Bion first hand experience of extreme anxiety and of how anxiety could attack the capacity of the mind to make links and to process emotional sensations. I will use Bion’s war memoirs, written in summer 1919 as evidence of his state of mind at the time. These are ‘almost raw material, with hardly any emotional or intellectual elaboration’ It is as if the experiences Bion has undergone are not yet fully capable of being symbolised. In writing, Bion ejects fragments of emotional sensation onto the page. The narration often comprises of ‘beta elements’, disturbing and disturbed undigested sensations which are communicated, albeit in the symbolic activity of writing, through primitive mechanisms of projective identification.

The First World War continued to haunt Bion: he suffered from repeated dreams and would wake up not knowing what was real and what he had imagined. In late life Bion, like many other veterans wrote prodigiously about his personal experience of war. There are notes on the Battle of Amiens, written on a visit to France in the late 1950s during the height of the developments in his clinical thinking; an autobiography The Long Weekend (1982); and further recollections in All My Sins Remembered (1985). Bion’s novelistic trilogy, a ‘biography of his unconscious life’ written in his late seventies and published as A Memoir of the Future (1979; see Lopez-Corvo, p. 174), also contains fragments of war memory. Bion’s prolific war writing exemplifies the psychic logic of veteran memoirs: the struggle to subject traumatic experiences to thought and desire for writing to act as a means of containing. Bion’s theoretical writings by contrast, are spare, precise and so tightly formulated as to be barely capable of assimilation by the reader. And while the war is omnipresent in the memoirs, it does not appear in the clinical writings. These theories drive straight back from the mental productions of the present to the most primitive and profound human relationships, with little space to apprehend and conceptualise the influence of events in the external world.

The relations between Bion’s war, his war writings, and his psychoanalytic activities and thinking, raises larger questions, questions about how events in the external world are handled within psychoanalytic theories; and about how such theories themselves bear the imprint of historical events. (Show less)

From as early as September 1914, British Women civilians headed for Serbia to help with the war effort as aid-workers and hospital staff. Unlike other belligerent countries, Serbia welcomed these volunteers, grateful for any assistance offered. The women came from a range of different backgrounds and travelled with various organisations: the British Red Cross, the Serbian Relief Fund, the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, and the British Farmer’s Unit.
For over a year these women worked with the Serbian people, civilian and military, dealing with both the casualties of war – Serbia’s third in as many years – and a crippling typhoid epidemic. But in October 1915 they faced a new threat. Serbia was invaded on several fronts by the armies of Germany, Austria and Bulgaria. The women, like the Serbians, waited for the Allies, who had advanced as far as Salonika and had allegedly promised aid. They never came. Many of the women were evacuated. But some refused to abandon their posts, to leave their hospitals, their staff and their patients. Inadvertently, they became prisoners of war.
This paper explores these experiences through the written records of the women who chose to stay behind; who deliberately put themselves onto the front line because their sense of commitment and duty would not allow them to do otherwise. Lady Paget, commandant of the Serbian Relief Fund hospital at Skoplje became a prisoner of the Bulgarians. Also the wife of Sir Ralph Paget, the Commissioner for the British relief units in Serbia, she left a full published report of the experience. Dr Elsie Inglis and Dr Alice Hutchinson, both of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, were kept prisoner by the Germans in Serbia and in Hungary. They too wrote of their experiences. These testimonies illustrate the extraordinary situation that the women found themselves in, the hardship they endured and their determination to retain their civilian status (for under the terms of the Geneva Convention they should not have been kept prisoner at all). The accounts also emphasise their resolution to represent Britain in wartime, while never forgetting the patients, whose welfare they always placed above their own. (Show less)