Jay Winter

History depends on how you look at it, and that is something that changes over time and over place. This book looks at how that has happened in the writing of the seminal event of the 20th Century, World War I -- the Great War. It is a fascinating exploration for those interested in the War. More broadly, it is an important book for those who are interested in history in general, showing vividly how much the interpretation of events can change, depending on who is doing the telling, and when show more the tale is told.

The authors, one a Frenchman and one an American, cite the dizzying volume of historical work on the Great War, noting that over 50,000 titles are listed in a French-language historical library (the Economist magazine cites 25,000 books and articles: maybe that's just in English). They review this literature longitudinally (over time), by country, and by topic. The national differences are profound: the consensus of anglophone writers is that the war was a tragedy, but the French view is tends towards a war of national survival. And the differences over time are profound as well. In the 20's and 30's, the focus was on the diplomatic and military aspects of the war, with a big contribution from political leaders and generals, pointing out how right they were. After World War Two, the historian's focus on the Great War shifted to social and economic factors, with a significant Marxist influence. And in the last few decades, the focus has shifted to cultural and individual topics, including the way in which the Great War is remembered. This adds up to a highly illuminating look at how the historical idea of the Great War has evolved -- and will doubtless continue to evolve.

But the importance of this book goes beyond an examination of one conflict, no matter how significant. It is a vivid illustration of the fact that writing history is a process of combining selected pieces of evidence to tell selective stories. Those stories depend on who is writing the history, on where they are writing it, and on when -- and why -- it is written. It is too easy for the reader of history to forget that even the most compelling work is a partial view, and that "what really happened" can never really be determined. That's not to say that everything is relative, but in history, most things are. show less

This is a deeply thoughtful and thorough study of how Europe learned to mourn on a scale it had never faced before. Its greatest strength is how it reshapes the way you see memorials, film, and cultural responses to the war—once you see it, you can’t unsee it. However, much of its evidence comes from art and architecture, and without a strong background in those areas, many of the examples remain interesting rather than fully cohesive. The ideas are powerful, but the connection between show more them can feel just out of reach. show less

"My Peter, I intend to try to be faithful ... What does that mean? To love my country in my own way as you loved it in your way. And to make this love work. To look at the young people and be faithful to them. Besides that I shall do my work, the same work, my child, which you were denied. I want to honor God in my work, too, which means I want to be honest, true and sincere ... When I try to be like that, dear Peter, I ask you then to be around me, help me, show yourself to me. I know you show more are there, but I see you only vaguely, as if you were shrouded in mist. Stay with me..." - Kathe Kollwitz (artist), in a letter to her son Peter, who was killed in WWI

This excerpt from a letter by Kathe Kollwitz, whose heartbreaking sculpture and prints encapsulated the loss of an entire generation, also addresses some of the concerns at the heart of Jay Winter's "Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning," which explores intellectual territory already trodden by the likes of Paul Fussell in his "The Great War and Modern Memory" and George Mosse in his "Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars" (which I reviewed for this site in January.) Unlike Mosse's book, which looks at larger national and cultural factors, Winter hones in on how people coped with tragedy on a level unknown until the trench warfare of World War I. In the second half of the book, he looks at different artistic media - film, popular art, novels, and poetry - in an attempt to distill how they dealt differently with the loss, guilt, and trauma that was visited upon them by the War.

We often think that the soldiers who fell in the War as Americans or Europeans, but of course some were from as far away as Australia. Winter argues that this affects the way even the most fundamental ways we relate to the War, especially the way that we mourn. He tells the story of Australian Vera Deakin (daughter of the pre-War Prime Minister Alfred Deakin), who was one of the most active members of the Australian Red Cross and searched endlessly for missing and unidentified soldiers. Families in Western Europe (where Winter spends most of his time in the book) read of their losses within days for the most part, but it sometimes took weeks or even months for those in Australia. Worse yet, some simply heard nothing more than that their loved one was "missing in action," and many never heard anything at all.

Culturally and aesthetically, we think of World War I as being the cynosure of modernism. However, Winter argues that in order to grieve, Europeans looked backward instead of forward. Spiritualism saw a huge resurgence during the War years. It was just one of the "powerfully conservative effects of the Great War on one aspect of European cultural history." Instead of a burgeoning modernism, these years were much more dominated by Victorian sentimentalism and traditional religious and spiritual ideas.

The second half of the book turns toward the arts for clearer insight on how grieving occurred, on both personal and national levels. One of the most interesting parts here is Winter's short history of Images d'Epinal, a tradition of popular, often kitschy, French folk art that was very popular at the time, and often catered to aforementioned Victorian ideals and religious feelings. Again, the focus is on realism and the representationalism of the past, not the avant-garde. Winter ends by jumping all the way to World War II and noting how the grammar of mourning had changed in the wake of the Shoah. To quote Adorno, "It is barbarism to write poetry after Auschwitz." Not long afterward, we start seeing the rise of even more self-consciously abstract and anti-representational in all different kinds of cultural expression. It would seem that much of the art world at the time agreed with Adorno's appraisal.

In the end, this book was not merely as good as the Mosse, which struck me as brilliant and well-argued. Nevertheless, Winter's revisionist cultural history of World War I being a time of aesthetic conservatism and tradition is one worth considering; there is certainly enough evidence to both support and refute it. I plan on reading his "Remembering the War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century" soon. show less

Jay Winter turned from a professional concentration in social history to an interest in cultural history late in his career. This book, Remembering War, essentially sums up his findings regarding the role of memory in the practices of historical remembrance. He locates the origins of the "memory boom" of the twentieth century and beyond in the responses, public and private, to the destruction and deaths generated by the Great War. He believes it was in many ways the template for historical show more remembrance associated with Holocaust, and, although he gives it relatively scant attention, for the Vietnam War as well.

Winter's minor problem is his prose, which can be turgid and fitful. What is more troublesome is his insistence on according specialized definitions to commonplace words that in many ways distort their definitions and as a result actually disrupt communication with the reader. That doesn't mean his terminology is without its uses. It has value--perhaps even a great deal of value--in giving us something to fetch hold on with slippery ideas such as "memory," "collective memory," "national memory," "fictive kinship," "remembrance," "historial," and "moral witness."

Otherwise, his greatest contribution, I think, is to note the mutating nature of memory and remembrance. Not only among the witnesses themselves but subsequent generations. All of which goes to make monuments, literature, films, and museums ever changing in regards to the reception of meaning of their contents. show less