Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning The Great War in European Cultural History Book

It has become a running joke in my reviews that every time I review a book from graduate school that contains the word “memory” in the title, I begin by saying that I don’t remember reading it. Happily, this book breaks that tradition, because as I picked it up and looked at my extensive highlighting, it quickly came back to me in full, or at least as fully as I had time to read it in those busy years. Finally, a book on memory that is actually memorable! I’m tempted to say that is because this book is less “theoretical” than the others, but that’s not quite accurate: it’s better to say that Winter deploys his theory more effectively. He uses theory to create an effective methodology for answering questions that are hard to answer without it, rather than indulging in theory for the sake of creating more theory. This, in short, is how cultural history should be done.

What Winter does is to examine the ways in which Europeans on both sides of the war grieved or expressed grief in public. This includes war monuments, creation of military graveyards and the disposition of war dead, creation of literature and cinema dedicated to remembrance, and other forms of dealing with grief, such as séances and spiritualism. He challenges the classical narrative of the war constituting a final break between “traditional” and “modern” forms of expression, finding that both persisted side-by-side. “Modern” memory was “multifaceted,” dislocated, paradoxical and ironic, and “could express anger and despair, and did so in enduring ways; it was melancholic, but it could not heal.” For healing, Winter shows again and again, Europeans had to turn to “traditional” forms of commemoration. He opens the book with a brief discussion of Abel Gance’s “J’accuse” (1919), a film which he discusses at greater length later in the book, and many other artistic representations of the war and its dead follow, grounding this firmly in cultural history, with the writings of Celine, the paintings of Ludwig Meidner, and the statues of Käthe Kollwitz representing very different ways of representing the dead.

This remains a fascinating study, though it will not please military history buffs and will seem limited to anyone not interested in cultural history. It works primarily within the inter-war years, and especially the earlier portion (through 1930 or so), and does not address political questions such as fascism’s, socialism’s and communism’s particular handling of war memory in detail. Most of the sources are from France and the UK, although Germany is examined as well in some depth. Most of the other participant nations get only minor discussion in relation to specific subjects, as for example in the case of the Australian Red Cross Information Bureau. Doubtless many will take issue with his definitions of “modern” and “traditional” and with his claim that the “traditional” continued in full strength at a time when most artists had come to reject it, but these are questions best considered with a careful reading of the original, and by checking sources as carefully as Winter has. To truly refute this book will take someone as skilled in cultural history as Winter himself, and that is a rare person indeed.