When “Return” seems to be the future, it’s easy to forget that in the 20th century, modernism was popular. The Victorian city centres whose demolition we now mourn were dismissed as relics of the past. Many celebrated their replacement with modern, progressive steel-and-concrete boxes.

But less often asked than “Why is it all so ugly?” is: how did we get here?

This might seem an odd way to start an article about Remembrance Day, and the centenary of the Poppy Appeal. But writing about how we commemorate the Great War, over a century after it ended, is to ask: what, exactly, are we remembering? And why?

Of course, when we memorialise that war, we honour its 10 million dead and 23 million mutilated. But, less obviously, we also mark the start of an ongoing, monumental collective effort of forgetting.

The most visible traces of that forgetting are everywhere around us, in the modernist art, architecture and anti-culture that seemed, to contemporaries, not just necessary but essential in the wake of the Great War: a wholesale reboot of human culture.

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The American Right's civil war

By Mary Harrington

At root, the modernists hoped that somehow, if they could only make everything, clean, rational and anti-traditionalist enough, we’d never have to go to war again.

Why, then, did Europe go to war? Popular sentiment today holds that the Great War was fought for democracy. This is also the story America has always told about its own involvement in the conflict. But it’s far from clear that the modern-day abstraction of “democracy” was uppermost in the minds of British people in 1914, when the war began.

The Europe of 1914 was a place of competing empires, where the word of hereditary monarchs still had meaningful sway. The heads of state of three of the main belligerents were first cousins: George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas of Russia. As historian Miranda Carter shows, the glittering, solipsistic worlds of these three royal cousins became ever more out of kilter with the industrialising empires they ruled.

Ever more intricate webs of alliances, woven by statesmen in the name of realpolitik and balancing competing interests, drove Europe’s imperial powers inexorably toward disaster. After the assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, Britain declared war on Germany partly out of treaty obligations to Belgium, but more broadly to maintain that balance.

It wasn’t until America’s 1917 entry into the fray, under Woodrow Wilson, that anyone talked about “democracy” as a motivating force in the conflict. Wilson’s liberal internationalism blamed an inherently unstable dynamic of “power politics” for the bloodbath, and sought a new way of ensuring peace through “collective security”.

Though it’s widely understood today that Wilson’s efforts helped to create the conditions for a reprise of world war in 1939, recent writers see in Wilson’s project the first germs of the “liberal international order”. The settlement imposed on Germany after 1918 was, after all, America’s first go at imposing democracy at gunpoint.

So from the perspective of grand historical narratives, the poppy marks the end of the 19th-century world of great-power politics, and the long, slow ascent of the supposedly universal Pax Americana.

From the perspective of the ordinary citizen, of course, the poppy simply marks an unimaginable loss. You’ll find a memorial in every parish up and down the country, some huge and some simple plaques. They’re markers of a collective grief, all the more unspeakable because so universal.

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The death of Britain's dignity

By Mary Harrington

In some British families, World War I killed every adult man. The memorials where their names are carved remind us that the schemes of statesmen impose a terrible cost, in empty seats at dinner tables in ordinary homes.

But today even those who remember the fallen are almost all gone themselves. So what, in fact, is the loss we’re left to remember? It’s perhaps most clearly visible in the things we no longer feel able to celebrate, except in subcultures such as Reactionary Architecture Twitter.

For the Great War saw the beginning of the end for faith in the foundations of European culture. By the end of 1918, Tsar Nicholas was beheaded by revolutionaries, Kaiser Wilhelm was deposed and exiled, and George V presided over a broken, debt-ridden empire. The war precipitated a crisis in institutional Christendom. It spawned the first Communist state. And it shattered confidence in Western civilisation.

Patriotism took a hammering; and, perhaps more profoundly, so did institutional Christianity. Most Christian denominations on both sides of the war supported the conflict: according to historian Philip Jenkins many at the time viewed it as “a holy war”. Notoriously, in 1915 the Bishop of London declared it the duty of “everyone that puts principle above ease” to “kill Germans […] not for the sake of killing, but to save the world”.

The aftermath saw an elite backlash not just against nationalism, but also traditional religious faith and cultural forms. As historian Anna Neima shows, after the Great War all energy among the world’s avant-garde focused on how human society might be re-imagined, such that nothing as horrifying could ever happen again — by transcending borders of faith or nation.

Humanity, such visionaries hoped, might be induced to forge links across mere national identity in favour of something higher. In the early Twenties, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, founder of the utopian Santiniketan-Sriniketan community, expressed this vision in a letter to fellow utopian Leonard Elmhirst as “a great meeting of world humanity”.

The elites who corresponded, shared inspiration and travelled between these and other utopian communities, reads like a Who’s Who of high modernism. Figures as diverse as Amartya Sen, Anton Chekhov and Aldous Huxley were shaped by contact with these attempts to forge humanity anew atop the smoking rubble of the imperial 19^th century.

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The humiliation of the British Army

By Aris Roussinos

Some went on to found their own visionary communities: in due course, Elmhirst founded his own at Dartington Hall, near Totnes in Devon. In time, Dartington served as a petri dish for further influential modernist innovations, including progressive education and battery farming.

At Dartington and other communities like it, all traditional practice was to be thrown on the scrap-heap. Classical music; realist painting; traditional architecture. Everything should be new, stripped of the atavistic loyalties that had powered the slaughter of millions and left Europe in ruins.

Very little survives now of the original reasons to mourn, and none of the original mourners. But we go on remembering every year. Because even if there’s no longer anyone alive who feels the real-world loss of those ten million who lost their lives, we still feel the shock of the catastrophe that ended Europe as the heart of world civilisation, in the name of realpolitik.

Today, with a century of hindsight, it’s clear that Wilson’s enthusiasm for “national self-determination” itself contained a measure of realpolitik. For in practice, the high American ideal of nations shaping their own destinies meant unravelling the dominions of America’s Old World imperial rivals.

And the liberal internationalism Wilson inaugurated has itself, ironically, come adrift in another set of poppy fields: those of Afghanistan. Now, the American civilisation that took the torch from Europe is itself embattled, under economic and cultural siege in a once-again multipolar world. And as the ghosts of 19^th-century style realpolitik stir and begin to mutter, so too the poppy has become a site of culture war.

For some, the poppy is about patriotism, jingoism, an unreconstructed Kipperanschauung. So we get the annual row over wearing a poppy on telly, or a tabloid scandal about some zealot setting fire to poppies to signify their contempt for those who hew to a sense of national identity.

And as we drift ever further through the digital looking glass, so too the byproducts of Remembrance Sunday get steadily more unreal. This year, you can commemorate the end of institutional Christendom, the collapse of four empires, and 100 years of the poppy, with a limited edition NFT inscribed with the names of 118,000 fallen Canadians. Or if you say “Dulce et decorum est” three times into the mirror, the Poppyman will appear (maybe).

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How to survive our tragedy

By Terry Eagleton

But perhaps we go on remembering, ritually, every year, as a means of acknowledging that the West did in fact once have an astonishing, vivid, remarkable culture — and that we blew it all, along with millions of lives, in two immense bonfires between 1918 and 1945.

This week, I’ve watched my small town putting up the wrought-iron soldier silhouettes that mark Remembrance Sunday here every year. Metal outlines round empty air, they’re perfect emblems for how we reacted to that disaster.

They stand as markers for the ghostly persistence of that old Europe, whose spirit burned out in the Great War. And they’re perfect metaphors for the collective decision we made in its aftermath, to evacuate our civilisation of everything suspected of having caused that cataclysm.

It turned out that this meant evacuating our civilisation of, well, everything. And having more or less completed that emptying-out, no one is quite sure what to believe any more. But if history suggests anything, it’s that now the end of history has ended, something will eventually come along capable of mobilising people at scale, for another round of grand historical events.

As ever, when that happens, it’ll be statesmen who shape the bigger story. And no doubt this will be formed of countless little ones. We can only hope these don’t end up told in empty seats, around dining tables in ordinary homes.

On his desk they had found three badges. One declared: “Red and Proud”. Another: “No to all racism”. The third was the emblem of the Labour Party Youth, with white letters on red: “AUF”.

When Kristiansen’s body returned from the island Utøya, his parents dressed the 18-year-old in his first real suit, one they had bought together that very summer, pinning the badges through the fabric. Around him they wrapped the blue bedlinen she had weaved just before he left for the summer camp on Utøya. “Blue, blue like the sky,” he had answered when she asked what colour he wanted it to be. He had planned to move out to finish his last year of high school in Tromsø, the capital of Northern Norway, and hoped to take it with him.

And then, exactly a decade ago, on July 22, 2011, his life ended.

“Something is not right,” Kristiansen said when he heard through the walkie-talkie that a policeman had arrived on the island. He went to investigate. The last words he was heard screaming were: “Just run! Don’t look back!”

Kristiansen was one of ten teenagers found on the “Lovers’ Path” that loops around the island, his arm around a girl with long, curly hair. The eleventh on the path, the only survivor, later explained that when the shots came closer they had decided to lay down, pretending to be dead.

In the years after the terror attack, I followed the Kristiansen family for my book One Of Us, a study of both the neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik and his victims. I was able to glimpse into the abyss that the bereaved were forced to endure for the rest of their lives. In Bardu, far above the Polar Circle, Anders’s mother, Gerd, showed me how dark it was down there, how cold, how lonely.

Death, in a way, fades into oblivion for those of us who aren’t close to it. We sweep away the abyss, brush it off and look away. Time creates an enormous distance between those who still grieve, and the rest of us. In the years after Breivik’s attack, I learned from the victims’ families that grief wants to be seen, to be remarked upon, to be recognised.

Still, I dreaded calling Gerd last week, after so many years since we last spoke. She taught me that the cardinal sin against a parent in mourning is not to mention the one who is no longer there, as if they had never existed. We avoid the subject because we are afraid to hurt, not knowing that the loss is so enormous that it needs to be shared.

Gerd was in a workshop when I called. She was ordering a bronze heart to put on Kristiansen’s grave for today’s anniversary. For years her pain has been mixed with anger. She was mad at the police, at the Government, at the Labour Party. It felt as if no one took responsibility for the children killed. Where were the secret services, the special forces, the police, the guards? Then she was frustrated with the marches, the outpourings on Facebook and the fact that she couldn’t scream out her pain in a society where you were supposed to show what they called dignity.

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By Kester Aspden

“This is a coup d’état”, Breivik told the policeman sitting on top of him when he was finally apprehended on the island. His killing spree had then lasted for more than an hour. Around him lay 69 of his victims. Marxist hunter, read a badge on his chest. Still on the island, he told the police that the children around him were far from innocent. “They are extreme Marxists. Marxist spawn. It’s the Labour Party, the youth wing. They’re the ones with power in Norway. They’re the ones who have presided over the islamisation of Norway.”

Meanwhile, other officers were looking for survivors. Kristiansen’s comrade Viljar Hanssen was found nearby, assumed to be dead. Parts of his brain lay bare, some of it outside his cranium. His eyes were a bloody mess. Somehow, a policeman found a pulse; he put the boy’s brain back into his broken skull and wrapped a cloth around it. The 17-year-old woke from a coma ten days later, missing an eye, the fingers that had tried to shield his face from the bullets, parts of his shoulder and many friends. Fragments of the bullets were so ingrained in his brain that they couldn’t be removed.

Ten years on, Viljar studies law in Tromsø. In his mind, he still discusses politics with his best friend Kristiansen. “Whenever I take important decisions, he’s with me, sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree,” he tells me from his parents’ hut in the mountains of Valdres.

It has been a dark decade for Viljar. First, he had to recover from his injuries, his angst and adapt to his glass eye and hand prosthesis. Then, he says, he was supposed to be grateful to be alive, without showing anger or remorse. But the heaviest burden throughout the years has been the ongoing harassment. Especially online, particularly from middle-aged men. “Breivik should have finished his job”, one wrote. Another wished for Viljar to be forever and continuously sodomised by Breivik. They criticised his liberal immigrant policies, however mainstream they were.

As the tone of the public debate hardened, Viljar broke down and stepped away from politics. Ten years after Utøya, a generation of politicians are gone. “Few survivors are politically active now,” Viljar says. “That is no coincidence.”

Further reading

You can't deradicalise every terrorist

By Liam Duffy

The Labour Party was in power when Breivik attacked, and a tearful Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg insisted that Norway would never give up its values and let the terrorist win. “We will answer hatred with love,” he said, and urged for “more democracy, more openness and more humanity, but never naïveté”. He was applauded across Norway for his leadership following the attack. But now that rosy picture has started to crack.

What seemed right at the time — to show unity — has stood in the way of important political discussions, such as the need to confront far-Right views and extremist opinions. When AUF has suggested that Breivik’s views are not only found on the internet, but resemble words that are spread even by parliamentarians on the Right, they have been ignored. When they have asked Right-wing parties to take a stand against racism, they have been accused of wanting to restrict freedom of speech. Anders Breivik has been considered an anomaly, rather than someone symptomatic of a broader far-Right movement. For that reason, he has not been mentioned in debates about immigration, integration or racism in Norway. Until now.

But something has started to change in recent months, as an avalanche of young Labour supporters have decided that enough is enough. “The attack was politically motivated,” writes former general secretary of AUF Tonje Brenna in her new book, it was “not a natural disaster!” After revealing the awful emails, letters, text messages, phone calls and social media posts she has received, she states that Breivik was not alone in hating the Labour Party, “nor in wanting us dead”.

“This is the last chance to make a stand,” Viljar echoes ahead of the anniversary. “That window will close now. The next rounds will be taken by historians.” In recent years, Viljar made a gradual return to politics and holds a Labour seat in the city parliament of Tromsø. Though he carries a burden heavier than most; if the fragments in his brain move even the slightest — from a hit, a fall or by themselves — his main artery could be ruptured. The closest fragment lies just three millimetres away.

When I spoke to Jens Stoltenberg last week, his voice cracked a little when he greeted me. I asked him immediately about this summer’s debate: “What was right then, and what is right now? What has changed?”

Stoltenberg — who left Oslo when he became the current General Secretary of Nato in 2014 — acknowledged that “until now the AUF has carried the heaviest burden”. It is a fact that clearly pains him. He was only fourteen years old when he became a member of the Labour Party Youth, and visited Utøya every year once he turned fifteen. “The debate is broader now; it has more voices. That is good,” he says.

But he was reluctant to say whether his decision to answer hatred with love — to indirectly de-politicise the attack — was wrong. “As the years have passed, I have become more conscious about how important it is to seek answers why the terror hit us,” he says. “It was indeed a targeted attack on the Labour Party and AUF. The terrorist wanted to change our country with violence. Therefore, it was also an attack on Norway.”

I tell him of Gerd’s grief. “I remember Anders,” he recalls. He met Gerd and her husband at a gathering three days after the attack, when their son was still just registered as “missing”. Stoltenberg remembers how he hugged them, and how he struggled to find the right words, afraid of saying anything wrong.

“We lost some of our finest young people and the Labour Party’s greatest talents that day,” he says. “The finest thing we can do for them is still to talk about July 22nd and stand up for the values they believed in, and fight so that it doesn’t happen again.”

For my part, whenever I’m asked about how Norway has changed since the Breivik attack, I’ve often compared it to a wound that has healed but leaves behind a scar. It still hurts, but Norway’s functions are not affected. Terror didn’t change us, unlike the attack on the US on September 11th 2001, which set off two wars within two years and leading to further radicalisation, the growth of ISIS.

Further reading

Why ISIS love to kill

By Simon Cottee

But I have come to realise that it’s not as simple as that. For just like a wound that becomes re-infected if it’s not opened and cleansed, Norway is now suffering from its decision to shy away from asking uncomfortable questions; its failure to address the root causes of the Breivik attack.

“You know, I’ve had two guys by the name of Anders fighting in my head. One kind, one mean,” Gerd tells me. “The mean one was stuck in my brain so I couldn’t find my child. How he tormented me!” she exclaims. “It still bugs me that he breathes,” she says. “That he gets an hour of fresh air every day.”

“By the way, they don’t carry the same name,” she adds. “Our boy’s name is Anders.” She pronounces the name in her Northern dialect, with stress on the A, and a hard d. She then pronounces Breivik’s first name in a cosmopolitan Oslo accent, with a light A and a mute d. “And apart from the spelling, they had nothing in common,” she concludes.

Gerd still weaves, and now even she owns her own loom. “We got money for Anders,” she says, referencing the victim compensation payment she received. “It was gruesome. I had my child in my bank account.” Then she spent it on a loom and the money stopped aching.

One evening recently, she went up to his room where his clothes still filled the shelves. One by one, she gathered his pairs of jeans, a dozen in total, carried them down to the cellar and took out her scissors. Gently she cut them up, trying to make the shreds as long as possible. Some dark blue, some stonewashed and light, almost white. The shreds piled up on the floor and she spent time arranging the colours. Then she lay the warp and started weaving.

Blue, blue like the sky. The colour she had thought she could never weave with again as her child lay dead in the blue linen, wrapped around the suit and the badges. Red and Proud. No to all racism. AUF.