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 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. ( )