Narratives of the Blitz between Memory and Myth

During the London Blitz – the German air campaign launched against the British capital between September 1940 and May 1941 – and immediately afterwards, the British nation was portrayed as composed of self-sacrificing, cheerful, and tolerant people who had heroically resisted the German bombings and were proving to be strong in coping with the material deprivations of a war economy. This imagined country was constructed together with what Angus Calder called “the myth of the Blitz” – one in which the «“people”, improvising bravely and brilliantly», had fought off the German Luftwaffe and had withstood its fire (Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, 125). This myth has continued to be re-used and renewed on different occasions up to the present times. During the war the British Government employed a host of persuasive tactics to promote America’s involvement in the war and used for this purpose a huge quantity of visual images of London’s Blitz. These included newsreels and officially funded documentary films such as "Britain Can Take It" (1941), which was produced for American audiences. The Londoners who went to the mass shelters captured the nation’s imagination, and illustrated dramatically to the world, and to the United States in particular, the tragedy of modern war and the resilience of ordinary people. Of the many lieux de mémoire of Britain’s Second World War, to use Pierre Nora’s term, the mass shelters of 1940 are among the most important. Today they evoke images of wartime patriotism, community, and shared danger, and present a picture of national endurance and courage.This essay aims at exploring the construction of British identity through propaganda and public documents (oral, written, audio and video) during the war period, and at tracing what 1940 and the Blitz have come to mean in the subsequent sixty years. Since then, the story of London’s Blitz has been retold selectively – through cultural artifacts such as films, comics, art, literature – to suit changing times and political needs. It has been evoked, for example, by Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands war (1984) and by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani when, being in London to receive an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, as the New York Times reports, he «discussed how the attacks on New York had instantly invited comparisons with London during the Blitz when the city had persevered» (New York Times, Feb.14, 2002). The essay discusses how the memory of the Second World War and the myth of the Blitz continue to affect British contemporary life and why the war effort holds an important place in British culture, history and national identity.