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.