Mood of the Material: War Memory and Imagining Otherwise

This essay explores the commemorative site of Fleury-devant-Douaumont (Fleury), a village destroyed during the battle of Verdun in 1916. We argue that Fleury offers a creative rhetoric of imagining otherwise by rendering a doubled demand on the imagination. It provokes visitors to attend to the fact of war’s overwhelming destructiveness. And simultaneously, it urges them to imagine the counterfactual, the “not having happened”—Fleury as a tiny and vibrant community as it would have been in the absence of war. In doing so, Fleury’s rhetoric opposes itself to a stance that sanitizes, justifies, or glorifies war.