Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on Western Front battlefield remains to examine the idea they give privileged access to the ‘reality’ of war. It interrogates the notion that material remains mediate affective knowledge that can transcend the limitations of language and imagination in the face of violence.

Paper long abstract:

In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, the Michelin Guide to the Battlefields invited people to go to France to see the ruins created by the conflict as a means to 'understand' and 'feel' a war that survivors found hard to describe in words. In my paper I examine the idea that such ruins give privileged access to the 'reality' of the war, still found today in the former battlefields of Eastern France. Drawing on ethnography conducted on the former Western Front I show how the ruins of the Great War (including the remains of military installations, materiel and objects left behind by combatants and the remains of villages) play a central role today in evocations of the conflict, especially seen as means to access and make 'real' the 'unspeakable' and 'unimaginable' aspects of war and of combatants' experience associated with the extreme violence and brutality of the conflict. Paying particular attention to collecting as a way to relate to battlefield ruins, my paper critically evaluates these claims and more generally interrogates the idea that ruins can mediate an 'affective' way of knowing, capable of transcending the limitations of language and imagination in the face of violence and violent events.