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In April 1947, a mass grave containing the bodies of 11 Alsatians executed by the Offenburg Gestapo in December 1944 was uncovered in Rammersweier. In the following days, the bodies were exhumed, placed in coffins and, after a two day vigil by local residents, solemnly and publically reburied after a two confessional service in the presence of school children and a wide cross-section of local and state authorities. A roadside memorial was constructed for the victims in 1948. The bodies of the murdered Alsatians played a central symbolic role throughout the process of exhumation, commemoration, and response to the later vandalism of the erected monument in their name. This chapter argues that the meticulous attention to the remembrance activities surrounding the reburial and memorialisation of the Alsatians and the intensity of the vandalism investigation demonstrates that Badenese officials were convinced that their responses contained a symbolic resonance beyond giving eleven more victims of Nazi terror a proper burial. In effect, contemporary Badenese authorities and their Alsatian counterparts came to view the dead bodies as representative of the larger crimes of the Nazi regime, particularly those perpetrated against the population of Alsace.

This chapter explores how policies and practices of disaster recovery frame the emergency as ongoing and dangerous, in subsequent months and years, through its disruption of urban architecture and its lingering presence in memory. Death is understood to live on, hidden within human memory, with destabilising effects for politics. Efforts to consolidate recovery use techniques which act upon trauma (such as counselling) and which efface the memory of death inherent within destroyed landscapes (such as memorialisation). This chapter argues that memorialisation is a security practice, contra mortality. The empirical focus of the chapter is the World Trade Center in Manhattan, where the Reflecting Absence memorial has been constructed to simulate disaster recovery and the mitigating of death on the site of 9/11.

This chapter moves away from Manhattan to explore the competing memorial projects at sites connected to Anders Breivik’s attacks of 22 July 2011 in Norway. It compares and contrasts the aesthetic approaches to memorialisation used by the Norwegian state and civil society actors, while arguing that memorialisation is a security practice in both contexts. Heideggerian and phenomenological geography is used to explore the reclaiming of post-terrorist space and place by civil society actors at Utøya island.

This chapter explores the relationship between visibility, memorialisation and security through case studies of the London bombing, the invasion of Afghanistan by coalition troops, and the situation of post-terrorist memorials in tourism economies. It analyses how some invisible (underground) bombsites are made visible during memorialisation to expunge their morbid resonance, whereas other invisible deaths (those of Afghanis) remain inconspicuous given their situation in political structures of grievability. Finally, the chapter explores the integration of post-terrorist memorials into tourist agendas and the function of the tourist gaze as a signifying tool which can reconstitute formerly traumatic sites.

The sixteen ballads and songs within this section fall into two camps: elegy and remembrance. Whilst a central feature of elegiac poetry is the way in which it remembers or memorialises the dead, the dead a poem which is one of remembrance is not necessarily an elegy. Several of the songs herein use the date of Peterloo as a temporal marker – with an eye both on the contemporaneous reader or audience and the future reader. Included in this section are broadside ballads by Michael Wilson and elegies by Samuel Bamford and Peter Pindar. These songs display a self-awareness in their significance in marking the moment for posterity and in their attempts to reach an audience beyond Manchester and ensure that the public knew what had happened on 16^th August as well as preserving the event in English vernacular culture. It is also a quest for ownership of the narrative of the day; the speed with which so many of these songs were written and published not only suggests the ferocity of emotions surrounding events but also the need to exert some control over the way in which they were represented.

This chapter suggests that the awkward nature, purpose and outcome of the Korean War led to its relative neglect in British history and popular culture, unlike in the United States where both its anti-Communist rhetoric and proximity to the Vietnam War gave its veterans greater prominence. Together with its distance from Britain, unclear war aims and the growing dominance of the Second World War in British culture, charted in the other chapters of this book, this final chapter examines the ‘forgotten’ war in the context of post-1953 British history. It first examines the significance of forgetting war in the twentieth century, before turning to Korea’s cultural history in the post-1953 era and the lives and attitudes of its ‘forgotten’ veterans. It suggests that Britain’s Korean War veterans have a unique degree of agency as guardians of this war.

Chapter seven examines two aspects crucial to the construction of post-war official memories of reserved workers: public memorialisation and cultural representation. It discusses several memorials to civilian workers, including the Merchant Navy and the fire service, and analyses a range of literary, filmic and televisual depictions, including A Family at War (1970-2) and Goodnight Sweetheart (1993-9), in order to illustrate how reserved workers have been largely forgotten despite their crucial wartime contributions. The emasculation thesis appears to be confirmed by their omission in cultural memory.