Making a new world

For the past year or so, Imperial War Museum London has given over its third floor to four related but very different exhibitions marking the end of the First World War a hundred years ago.

They come under the overarching title of Making A New World, and have been accompanied by a programme of live music, performance and public debates, all addressing aspects of the aftermath of the conflict. Here’s the promotional video.

I reviewed the biggest and most conventional of the four exhibitions – Renewal: Life after the First World War in Photographs – yesterday. Next door to it is a ‘room of voices’ which does exactly what it says on the tin.

I Was There: Room of Voices

Quite obviously the sudden end of four gruelling years of sacrifice, austerity and loss was a major moment for the nation (the exhibition focuses solely on British voices). But people experienced and reacted to it in many different ways.

In this immersive sound installation, 32 people who fought and lived through the First World War share their personal stories of the Armistice. Their voices were recorded by IWM between 1973 and 2013, and form part of the larger IWM archive, which contains a staggering 33,000 recordings relating to the conflict.

The ‘immersive sound installation’ amounts, in practice, to a darkened ‘room’ dominated visually by space age, vertical, fluorescent white tubes embedded in the black walls, a little like a set from Star Wars. As your eyes grow accustomed to the dark, you realise there are also several big black metal columns containing loud speakers, and it is from these that the disembodied voices emanate.

A school trip of 10 and 11 year old girls was in the room when I visited, notebooks scattered across the floor as they listened to these voices from a distant age.

Installation view of I Was There: Room of Voices at the Imperial War Museum. Photo by the author

The selection of 32 voices tries to present a cross-section of society, featuring personal testimonies from people who in 1918 were soldiers, civilians or children, who all had different reactions to the end of the First World War, from the solemn to the celebratory.

There are benches so you can sit and close your eyes and really pay attention to the voices. Listening to the variations in recording quality, in the confidence and education of the voices, made me think less about the specific event and more about the yawning inequalities in 1918 Britain, and the way people accepted conventions of class and deference which we have long since abandoned.

Beyond the dark room, is another, more conventionally lit, space whose wall is dominated by a grid of photos and squares of card. Some of these are photos from the era, but some of them are blank cards inviting you to fill them in with any family memories you might have of the war. A surprising number had been written on by people recalling their grandparent or great-grandparents’ experiences.

Installation view of I Was There: Room of Voices at the Imperial War Museum. Photo by the author

There’s also information about a website which has been set up so that people can contribute their own stories – via photos, texts or audio recordings – to ‘the First World War digital memorial’.

• First World War digital memorial

Reflections

I couldn’t help reflecting that, from all that I’ve read, many soldiers in both the First and Second World Wars returned home and never spoke of their experiences. They came from cultures which respected reticence and restraint. The thing that gave their lives meaning was not to be publicly shared.

And then reflecting on the enormous contrast with our own times, in which absolutely everyone is encouraged to speak out and speak up and have their voices heard and share their experiences, to like on Facebook, to tweet their opinions, to call out, to name and shame, to take a video of it, take selfies in front of it, Instagram it, Pinterest it, to text and sext it and leave no stone of our passing thoughts unshared and unpublished.

That’s what these voices from the past made me think about – about the events they were describing, of course – but also about the immensely different mindset, culture, conventions and values with which they conceptualised and processed these events.

Related links

• I Was There: Room of Voices continues at Imperial War Museum London until 31 March 2019

More Imperial War Museum reviews

• More Imperial War Museum reviews

World War One-related art reviews

• Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
• Heath Robinson’s War Effort @ the Heath Robinson Museum (November 2018)
• Frank Brangwyn and the First World War @ William Morris Gallery (July 2014)
• The Great War in Portraits @ National Portrait Gallery (March 2014)

World War One-related book reviews

• The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917 to 1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)
• Lenin on The Train by Catherine Merridale (2016)
• Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia by Dominic Lieven (2015)
• Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010)
• Forgotten Victory: the First World War Myths and Realities by Gary Sheffield (2001)

• A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)
• Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon (1936)
• Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis (1936)
• All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
• The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme And Ancre, 1916 by Frederic Manning (1929)
• Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
• Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden (1928)
• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
• Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (1920) 
• Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (1917)