In the course of my six-week Leadership in Action project, I worked for the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V, Landesverband Berlin (German War Grave Commission, Regional Association Berlin). The Volksbund is a German nonprofit organisation who are responsible for maintaining war graves, memorials and the memory of those who lost their lives in both the first and second world wars. My project’s aim was to ensure that the fallen buried in the former British occupation zone of Berlin are remembered with humanity, as people with their own stories, families and memories, instead of mere statistics. In order to do this, I was assigned the task of gathering comprehensive biographies about the soldiers and war personnel buried in the Berlin 1939-1945 Commonwealth War Grave Cemetery at Heerstraße. It was my responsibility to help give a name to the fallen and bring the vibrant and tragic stories of these men and women back to life. These biographies are now serving a practical purpose not only through my podcast, which contains interviews with the relatives of the fallen and academics who specialise in the field of cultural memory, but also through their use in tours of the war cemeteries in Berlin for younger people.
My primary aim in the project was an ethical one: to teach younger people about war, help them connect to the stories of the lost and encourage critical thinking about conflict in the hope that our future leaders work to prevent such human tragedies from occurring again. In the course of the project, I worked closely with the local community, engaging with British expats in Berlin and further afield to gain an insight into the grief of losing a loved one to conflict. In my podcast ‘Our shared history: War personnel of the Commonwealth remembered/Unsere geteilte Geschichte: Kriegsopfer aus dem Commonwealth unvergessen’ I strive to establish an intergenerational dialogue about conflict and its impact on modern societies through telling the stories of the fallen with empathy. In each episode, I was determined to make the stories on the dog-eared pages of letters and military reports come to life, so that younger people could engage with a catastrophe that did not occur in their lifetime. Through portraying the fallen as people with their own hardships and personalities, young people are encouraged to be critical of the human tragedy that occurs as a result of war. They are encouraged to question how conflict arises, how it escalates and its huge impact on societies. It is through telling the stories of the fallen that we are encouraged to stop such catastrophes from occurring again.
As a result, the project was of great importance on both an emotional and ethical level. Making events that happened almost 80 years ago tangible for a younger audience also served a very significant educational purpose, in helping younger people to understand what has shaped the society around them. Through helping young people to understand what their grandparents and the generations preceding them have experienced throughout their lifetime, the project’s educational purpose translated directly into everyday life and the local community in Berlin by bringing generations together. In addition to its two defining aims, both emotional and ethical, the project also had two spheres of impact. The first was its immediate impact on the community living in Berlin and the relatives I interviewed from across the Commonwealth, which bolstered intergenerational relationships and respect through encouraging a compassionate, human discussion on the consequences of war. The second was its far broader impact of humanising the fallen and thereby encouraging critical thinking about conflict among the younger generations.
A central part of the project was the podcast I created under the name ‘Our Shared History: War personnel of the Commonwealth Remembered’ (available here: http://berlin.volksbund.de/aktuell/projekte/artikel/kriegsopfer-aus-dem-commonwealth-unvergessen). The podcast consists of the biographies of the war personnel that I have gathered alongside interviews with their family members and experts in the field of cultural memory. Each episode is bilingual, both in English and in German with accompanying transcripts, posters and the overall report. This bilingual approach was essential to the project. Although recording the podcast entirely in English would perhaps have been easier, as English is my native language and is considered a ‘global language’, choosing to also record in German enabled me to address any bias towards one particular culture, as this is precisely what leads to conflict in the first place. It also enabled me to connect to the local community in a more meaningful way, as they could see me working to gain an understanding of a different culture to mine and show respect to different traditions and a different way of life. As a result of this approach, I was fortunate enough to lead interviews with the following people and collaborate with their organisations:
- Professor Rainer Hering, from the University of Hamburg and director of the regional archives in Schleswig-Holstein
- Professor Helmut König, political scientist who also worked as a professor in Aachen
- Dr Jonas Anderson from the Universität der Bundeswehr München
- Dr Rachel O'Sullivan, researcher at the Centre for Holocaust Studies as part of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich
- Bill Dawson, great nephew of Pilot Officer Ralph Henderson
- Ritchie Conaghan, researcher of the Girvan and District Great War Project
- Dr Peter Lieb military historian at the Bundeswehr
- Steve Smith, battlefield guide and author
- Jan Bejsovec, museum director in Berlin
In order to disseminate the project, I learned how to build relationships and networks by reaching out to the Commonwealth War Grave Commission with the outline of my project, including the posters and flyers I had created. After discussing the project with them further, they were kind enough to promote all of my posts with the Volksbund and resources for the project on their own social media. This proved an effective means of getting in touch with the family members of the fallen, many of whom reached out to me to provide further documents which I could incorporate into their relatives’ biographies. It also meant that other affiliated organisations in the field of military history and cultural memory could easily reach out to me or forward the contact details of family members searching for their loved ones on to me. I posted frequent photographs of laying roses for the fallen, which became a symbol for the project. With each biography I was able to gather, I visited the graves of the fallen to pay my respects. It was immeasurably rewarding to be able to provide the family members, who had waited for so long in doubt about the fate of their loved ones, further information concerning the operations their relatives were involved with, in addition to biographical information about their crews and the circumstances of their tragic loss in conflict. The flyers I distributed also allowed me to engage with the local community. The influence of the project on the local community led to me being invited to the British Embassy to discuss the project with the Military Attachè/SBLO Simon Hirst who was so impressed by the project and its outreach that I have now been invited to hold a speech at the Berlin British Embassy.
As a German student, I started the project with some knowledge of what working in Germany would be like. However, as it was my first time in the country, I did bring some popular misconceptions with me which were addressed early on in my time in Berlin. One of these popular misconceptions that is still perpetuated by British media about German culture is the advice ‘don’t mention the War’ which has been used in frequent British satires such as the cult television series Fawlty Towers. As a consequence, I travelled to Germany with a sense of anxiety about how I could avoid talking about the War when my placement revolved precisely around questions of conflict and, above all, the Second World War. I soon discovered the openness of German natives to talk about the Second World War and the movement in the nation to address their responsibility to the victims of the Holocaust. On almost every street in Berlin, there is a Holocaust memorial and dedications to the victims of National Socialism. The memory of the Second World War is by no means concealed, it is in fact a central part of German culture to try to address the Holocaust and their identity following the 1940s and 30s (a process that is called Vergangenheitsbewältigung in German, literally meaning ‘overcoming the past’). This responsibility and sense of reflection that is so engrained in German culture is also enshrined in law, as all historical monuments dedicated to the victims of the Second World War are protected and Holocaust denial is a crime.
Consequently, this openness to address responsibility and national guilt is something I found very admirable within German culture and made me reflect on my own country’s attitude to both conflict and collective responsibility. It made me realise how complicated and often problematic it is to discuss the First and Second World War from the perspective of the victors. In Great Britain, the memory of the First World War is a central component of our national identity and sense of pride. Thus, we refer to the fallen as ‘heroes’. This is problematic on many levels. First of all, because referring to the fallen as ‘heroes’ means that those who served in the First and Second World Wars are portrayed as almost superhuman, further distancing them from us and in particular, a younger audience who did not live through this time. This narrative of heroism is therefore counterproductive in many ways for remembering the fallen as human. Secondly, as I have discovered throughout the project, there is a fine line between heroizing the fallen and glorifying war. The more we integrate this pride concerning the First World War into our culture, the more we normalise conflict and furthermore present conflict as a part of our national identity, which increases the likelihood of engaging in conflicts in the future. Therefore, through being able to see how Germany, as the nation on the opposite side of the conflict, engages with remembrance culture, I have learned continually, and have developed the skills to think critically about my own country’s attitudes to war from the perspective of working for peace.
In the course of the project, I was able to convey cultural intelligence and capacity for empathy when conducting interviews. As my interviews were both in English and German, I ensured that I was sensitive about how I approached talking about the First and Second World War according to the national narrative surrounding the conflict. For example, when speaking to military veterans I was very careful when discussing the experience of soldiers in conflict, as I did not want to present a homogenous view of being in the military, when I myself have no experience in this field. I understood that my lack of a military background would be a limitation, so I ensured that I was asking war personnel about their individual experiences instead of projecting stereotypes on to them.
Similarly, I conveyed emotional intelligence when speaking with the families of the fallen. In order to ensure that they were fully prepared for the interview and were comfortable with being questioned on an understandably emotional subject, I allowed all interviewees to read and edit the questions in advance. I informed them before the recording began that at any point they could stop, take a break or decline to answer a question, as I did not want them to feel pressured to discuss anything that they found distressing. In this way, I ensured that I was listening with empathy and understanding through allowing interviewees to adapt my questions before the interview so that they could feel more comfortable about the topics covered within the discussion. Nonetheless, as the interviews were live, I had to make effective decisions in complex environments by adapting the interviews spontaneously to the comfort level of the interviewee. This meant that I was attentive to the body language and tone of my interview guests in order to direct the discussion and avoid touching on sensitive issues that they had not consented to talk about in our previous correspondence.
Additionally, I was able to use digital connectivity throughout the project effectively through reaching out to affiliated organisations in the field of cultural memory, such as the Commonwealth War Grave Commission and the British Embassy in Berlin, to gain a greater presence on social media and thereby a greater platform for the project. This endorsement from established organisations attributed my work with the legitimacy it needed to gain interviews from some of the most sought after experts in the field, such as Dr Peter Lieb, a published military historian at the Bundeswehr. The interviews allowed me to cultivate my intellectual ability through listening to the perspectives of others and contemplating my own country’s national identity and how it has been shaped by conflict.
Furthermore, the schedule that I put together within the first week of the project conveys how I was able to prioritise and manage my own time, as I set goals for each day of the project in addition to an overall goal for each week. This allowed me to fulfil my pledge to visit all the graves belonging to the fallen whose biographies I had gathered. This rigid schedule enabled me to think and work independently, as I was able to plan everything in advance in order to increase my productivity without having to share the workload. In the brief six weeks, I dedicated my time to finding twenty different crews buried at the Berlin 1939-1945 Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, all of which contained six to seven men. Consequently, I had to build relationships and networks as well as working across academic boundaries. Through collaborating with academics across many different fields, such as Professor Rainer Hering who specialises in archival work and Dr Rachel O’Sullivan who works as a researcher at the Institute for Holocaust Studies, I was able to capitalise on diversity by bringing skill sets across different disciplines together. This meant that I gained many different perspectives and could access many different resources to make the project as comprehensive as possible within the six weeks available to me. In order to use this diversity of resources and experience to my advantage, I emailed all the archives, military or otherwise, and booked a sequence of appointments to view documents all within the first week. Once finding the information I required, I was able to analyse the data in interviews by reaching out to experts in the field with all the resources I had found, allowing me to produce five episodes of a podcast (each an hour and 20 minutes long), in both German and English, with full transcripts and an accompanying report on the corresponding crew within six weeks. In this time, I was also able to meet with the British Embassy in Berlin to present my findings and gain the opportunity to hold a speech about the project in November of this year.
Throughout the project, I believe I have displayed great energy and impact. I displayed this energy in my resilience when dealing with rejection. I have learned that rejection is a part of success by continually applying to have other organisations endorse my work in order for it to gain a greater audience. This was fuelled by my sense that it was my moral duty to find war dead for those families who do not have the time and resources that I had. I chose to work full time and weekends in order to give the project my undivided attention. I was firmly committed to finding the answers for the families who had placed their trust in me to ensure that their sons, husbands, fathers and grandfathers, were not just reduced to mere statistics at the place where they are commemorated. This determination extended to the nature of the documents that I had to read in order to find this information. By nature, many of the documents I had to read contained distressing content. However, I knew that reading through the official death reports would bring me closer to giving the families of the fallen closure after decades of uncertainty. Through this unrelenting search, I was able to find extraordinary results, helping to piece together the life stories of approximately 20 squadrons, which led to the fantastic opportunity of being invited to hold a speech for Remembrance day at the British Embassy in Berlin.