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

by Jay Murray Winter

Jay Winter's powerful study of the 'collective remembrance' of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Dr Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing 'modernist' interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914–18, Dr Winter instead argues that what characterised that reaction was, rather, the attempt to interpret the Great War within traditional frames of reference. Tensions arose inevitably. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War I, European History, War, Academic, Reference

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 1995

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the things that I have noticed since moving to Europe is how different the First World War looks here from the one I grew up with in New Zealand. All around are solemn memorials, but here we walk on the places the war happened, and its memorialisation is pervasive. These memorials are not just things in squares, in fields, or mounted on walls, but are in films, novels, poems, and much of our daily experience. Winter makes a strong case for understanding large parts of 20th century European history as being about the Great War – it is a compelling, well made, well presented, erudite argument.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is too long since I read this work to comment on it in an intelligent way. All I can express is the remembrance of how fascinating it was, how much I learnt and how it enabled me to look at familiar things in a new way. If ever a work called out to be reread this does. Unfortunately my library system no longer has a copy. But I will track it down and read it again.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly focused, well-organized, and accessible piece of scholarship that sets itself a task that is straightforward, though far from simple. Its goal is to trace the cultural artifacts that wars produce- the statues, the books, the memorials, and the less tangible but still vital struggles over how the war's meaning should be interpreted.

Most of the book focuses on the struggle to interpret the war while it was being fought, and in the immediate wake of the war, with the battle over meaning mostly between uber-patriots and those whose time in the charnel house turned them either into revolutionaries or religious mystics. Did the men in the trenches die for some ultimate meaning, or die for nothing? It's a question Jay Winter gives an ample airing. And here lies perhaps my only quibble, that some of the aspects of memorializing I found most interesting seemed a bit condensed, in comparison to this theme, or that of the dead returning from their graves to accuse the living of various crimes. Though it is ultimately the researcher's prerogative to dwell where he finds the greatest wellspring, for me a longer section on poetry (commensurate in length and depth to this section) would have been preferable.

Lastly, another area in which Herr Winter deserves especial credit is in making his analysis of artifacts balanced between the three main principles of the Great War, France, Britain, and Germany. Not to denigrate the contributions of other lands, including my own home of America, but these were the nations that were bled white in the combat and experienced the greatest sea change in consciousness as a result of the apocalypses at the Somme or Marne. Too many studies on this subject inevitably favor the doomed Oxford Dons of the English perspective, or the expressionistic nihilism of the German perspective (letting the French romantic, religious, and revolutionary currents get lost in the discourse). The historian in question here not only pays attention to the contributions of all three unfortunate nations, but shows, through his own diligence and keenness, how these lands had much more in common than most other historians have heretofore shown. Recommended, in any case.

[☄ · Rating 3 out of 5]

obviously extremely well-researched, but HEAVENS was this prose tepid! so difficult to push through at times. winter clearly looks back on paul fussell's Extraordinary, Perennial Masterwork the great war and modern memory a great deal, i just wish he'd taken notes on paul's gorgeously-wrought prose as well. alas! i learned a lot from this book, and that's all that matters :0)

[Kevin Keating · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book on the aftermath of war and the psychology of the people left with the loss of their loved ones. How did they respond? How do they remember?

[Shane Gower · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well researched and argued book about the way Europe, in particular, mourned and remembered the Great War in the years that followed. Some parts were a bit dense, but I enjoyed it overall. The sections on cinema were fascinating (I was riveted by the analysis of Gance's J'accuse)! Meanwhile I found the section on poetry hard to get through. It's clear that Winter has done a tremendous amount of research!

[Lauren]

Disappointingly boring. A few interesting historical observations but mostly tepid prose and superficial analysis. Maybe his other book is better.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, shows that reactions to the war were not all that modern...although, the two halves are a bit disjointed.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dr Winter's book is basically a long thesis that the post-WW1 cultural reaction wasn't 'modernist' only but that it relied on more traditional cultural references. It is, as Winter himself admits: "The aim of this study are limited: to describe only one aspect of the cultural history of the Great War and to do so primarily with respect to three major combatant countries, Britain, France, and Germany."(224)

He looks at memorials, at art, at film (focusing on Abel Gance's 1919 film 'J'Accuse') and at literature. It was written in 1995 and this would make an interesting read alongside John Garth's book 'Tolkien and the Great War', which makes - in less academic language - a similar point that Tolkien's response to his experiences in war was to look backwards to a far older tradition than forward into modernism.

He also makes some interesting comparisons to how the experiences of World War One were processed as against World War Two. Where, for example, is God after Auschwitz? Except you can argue where was God after Verdun or the Somme? Perhaps the key difference is that World War One is, arguably, the last 19th century war where the majority of casualties were men in uniforms. Where one could call back to older warrior traditions. The victims of World War Two though included vast numbers of civilians and the battlefields stretched across continents due to ongoing bombing campaigns. World War Two is in the shadow of World War One. We seem to see World War One as a war that wasn't worth fighting whereas World War Two seems a more clear cut battle between 'good' and 'evil'. Winter touches on some of this, particular in his conclusion.

I think his argument is interesting, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to know whether it is convincing. I do think, like with a lot of these things, is that the artistic response to World War One was more a combination of both a look back at tradition and a break with it.

I'm glad I read it but it is a hard read. Not because the material is difficult by Winter's writing is - with a couple of notably exceptions - stodgy. It reads like an expanded academic thesis with constant phrases like, "as I shall show in Chapter 2". He constantly refers forwards and backwards to his own work, which is fine if you're writing an essay less so if you're writing a book. Hence two stars.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an intelligent and probing study of the ways Western Europeans commemorated their war dead and grappled with the meaning of World War I. Winter argues that, although modernist art has received the most criticism, traditional forms of artwork and mourning endured into the postwar period. Modernism helped people to express their frustration with the war, but traditional monuments and poetry helped Europeans channel their grief. In some cases artists blurred tradition and experimentation, and high art with popular art, as when Edwin Lutyens combined his esoteric religious beliefs and love of Greek architecture to create the Cenotaph, the London war monument. Spiritualism appealed to many bereaved Europeans because it offered a chance to talk to dead relatives and gain some assurance about an afterlife. WWI destroyed the narrative of a noble death, in Winter's view. The conflict conveyed the immense waste of human life. Yet Europeans still sought meaning in the war, couching the loss of their friends and relatives in terms of national pride or pacifism. WWII, with its atomic and concentration camp horrors, introduced the possibility of no meaning in the suffering. Suddenly Walter Benjamin's image of the overwhelmed angel, unable to process the past or prepare for the future, became relevant, as the old ways of mourning and understanding a war broke down.

[Chris Fong · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a slog at times - very dense, I skimmed a lot. Still, an interesting argument, and clearly understood.

[Cadie Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an interesting view on how people interpreted the Great war though art, poetry, film, and writing.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Важная книга о культуре скорби и её отголовках в культуре Европы, хороший перевод - хотя иногда одно и то же имя передано по-разному (Барре и Баррес, например).

[Maddie]

Read for comps

[John David · Rating 4 out of 5]

“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 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.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although let down by its copy editor, I enjoyed this book, if you can say that about a book about war and bereavement. It was a fascinating piece of cultural history, which I felt I needed to read, because of the research I am presently doing beyond my own culture. It is good to be reminded sometimes of my own internal/cultural heritage, and to think about how this shapes my responses and assumptions as I try to understand some of the ways of dealing with mass bereavements/traumas here in South East Asia. Although we draw on such different inherited stories, languages and constructions of the world, it sometimes feels as if there are parts of our humanity that are so old and so deep, we meet each other in a common space, it seems. I say 'it seems', because I am aware that I don't really know how much I don't know!

It was quite interesting reading this so soon after Louis de Berniere's novel, 'The Dust That Falls From Dreams'. Not that I particularly recommend the novel, it was not amazing, but it did attempt to explore some of these themes, to the point that I wonder whether the author read Jay Winter's book. The return of the dead through dreams and mediums, the search for connection and for the voice and presence of the dead, the strange and seemingly supernatural experiences that comforted and disturbed, the questions about traditional faith and the power of community, the blurring of social barriers in the search for meaning and support, and the production of creative forms of expression in art, drama, poetry, literature, to enable the processing of it all.

I enjoyed the exploration of pieces of art, poetry and literature I had not heard of before, and searching them out online. I love when reading one thing leads to discovering an unexpected new other. :-)

[Andrew Nolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the chapters in spiritualism and representations of the apocalypse in art.

Overall think I probably disagree with some of the authors ideas of traditions in the face of Modernity. A lot of seemingly traditional responses to Modernity can not exist without Modernity to react against, and thus are not really "traditions", itself a problematic concept at the best of times.

I was surprised at the brevity of the conclusion to the book.

Would probably work well if read in conjunction with Robert Pogue Harrison's Dominion of the Dead.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting consideration of the cultural, societal and psychological ramifications of WWI through the lenses of mourning and memorialization. I really enjoyed this, although I found the first half of the book (mourning) more compelling than the second (memory).

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frustratingly uneven.

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very insightful, brilliantly written, clear and surprisingly touching. Used it for a contemporary history exam. I think about some passages often.

[Marie]

read for grad school