Snezhana Dimitrova ‘Taming the death’: the culture of death (1915–18) and its remembering and commemorating through First World War soldier monuments in Bulgaria (1917–44) INTRODUCTION: WHY THE DEATH? SOME NOTES CONCERNING THE THEORY, THE METHODS OF RESEARCH AND THE SOURCES 1 This article focuses first on the transformation which took place in Bulgarian soldiers’ perceptions, images and representations of death that articulated their spontaneous intimate war experience brought about by the state and local ceremonial mourning culture in combination with the official and regional architectural-sculptural monument-building policies. Secondly, the study analyses the different ideological strategies of these cultures and policies that attempted to make sense of the death in order to transform the initial wartime representations into a commonplace of war memory. Thirdly, it seeks current social renderings of such conceived and constructed historical memory on the First World War. This research is based on examination of the 1930s movie show 2 and study of the history 3 and photo-images 4 1 All the theoretical framework of this study is based on the following seminal works: P. Arrie `s, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore and London, 1974); W. Benjamin, Illuminations. Essay and Reflections, ed. and with introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1985); M. Ekstein, Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York, 1989); S. Freud, ‘Thought for the times on war and death’ in J. Rickman, Civilization, War and Death. Selection from Three Works by Sigmund Freud (London, 1939); P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, 1975); G. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford, 1990); G. Mosse, L’image de l’homme. L’invention de la virilite ´ moderne (Paris, 1997); A. Prost, ‘Sociale et culturelle indissociablement’ in J.-P. Roux, J.-Fr. Sirinelli (sous la direction de), Pour une histoire culturelle (Paris, 1997); F. Rousseau, La Guerre censure ´e. Une histoire des combatants europe ´ens de 14–18 (Paris, 1999); J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995); F. The ´baut, ‘La guerre et le deuil chez les femmes franc ¸aises’ in J.-J. Becker et al. (sous la direction de), Guerre et Culture (Paris, 1998/1938), 394. 2 ‘Repertoar na bulgarskiya zvukov film’, in Kinoarhiv, Sofia. Photos of the celebration of the First World War were published in the capital’s journal, Serdika. See also Serdika (1940–4). Social History Vol. 30 No. 2 May 2005 Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online ª 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/03071020500082751