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

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Winter himself states in his introduction that he is a dissenter from the 'modernist' school of interpretation when it comes to the cultural legacies of the Great War. He's thinking notably about those interpretations rendered by Paul Fussell or Modris Eksteins who set out to show how the Great War transformed European culture - turning it away from past modes of expression and thought (patriotic certainties, 'high diction' in poetry and prose, high flown and hallowed notions about duty, honor, etc., and a classical esthetic) and towards new modes in all forms of artistic and cultural expression. The surrealist and cubist movements are commonly held examples, or the cryptic writings of Joyce or e.e. cummings. Though Winter does not, as he cannot, dispute such new cultural attitudes he attempts in "Sites of Memory..." to restore some historical balance to the equation. Basically he feels that in looking at the effects the experience of the Great War had on European society too much attention has been given to what changed, and too little to what remained, or at least to those aspects of Europeans' cultural heritage that were called forth as moral buttress to the overwhelming pain and loss of the war. Religious themes would be the most obvious example here. Winter looks at a variety of cultural expressions to find this traditionalism - graveyards, engravings, war monuments, books, cinema. On the whole he did help me rethink the war and did it in a very eloquent way. At times I found myself wondering if this debate over 'ancient and modern' concerning the effects of World War I wasn't stumbling over different definitions of just what 'modern' means. Winter's choice of exhibits in his case for the persistance of the traditional had me wondering when traditional remains traditional and when it becomes a modern reuse of the past. There is nothing new under heaven, after all, and even modernists by necessity must refer to the past to recreate their present. But more to the point, this book does make you think and that's always a good sign. It's a good read and I recommend it.

There are many reasons why World War I has been labeled THE GREAT WAR: it was the war to end all wars in the minds of those who lived through it, who were directly and indirectly affected by it, who continue to reference it as the war with the most emotional cost. In times when wars seems to constantly queue since that inception of world war, wars spreading from WW II, through Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Balkans, Eastern Europe, Spain, Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, South America and on, taking a long hard look at the Great War will hopefully center our attention on a past time that can be analyzed and from which we can hopefully learn.

Now that Jay Winters' brilliant book 'Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning : The Great War in European Cultural History' is available/affordable in paperback, every household should have a copy as children grow into the years of this century. Winters' examination of the devastation of WW I and the ways in which it informed all of the arts, the architecture, the literature, films, memorials - the people of the globe - is a mighty assignment and he is more than successful in humanizing his message. This book overflows with photographs of places, faces, bodies alive and dead, paintings, sculptures, film stills - each of which drives home Winters' powerful message.

Sad though it may be to admit, war is a part of life on this abused planet: the more we study it the more we hopefully will reduce it. Winters wants to make sure that we remember, that we read, view, walk through, see, hear, and listen to the remnants the Great War left behind. This is a powerful, necessary book and should be required reading and viewing for us all. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, August 05

"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.

Shortly before his death, Otto von Bismarck ominously predicted that, "if there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." The Chancellor's premonition articulated into reality on June 28th, 1914, as the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in combination with a monolithic bipolar political system, abetted the onset of the Great War, the deadliest combat yet known in the human experience. The age of nationalism, heralded by many as a period of universal human progress, soon wallowed in the midst of nearly nine million lifeless bodies of young men; many mutilated beyond recognition or reparation. During the Great War, nearly all European families personally suffered the loss of a son, brother or father, fostering a universal sense of loss during the interwar period. In Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Jay Winter juxtaposes poetry, film, literature, paintings and war memorials produced in Germany, France and Great Britain during the interwar period, and finds "striking convergences in the experience of loss and search for meaning in all combatant countries" (11). For Winter, analyzing European cultural history during the interwar through the lens of the nation-state is an erroneous approach, as the commonalities in bereavement practices amongst all combatant nations illustrate "an unmistakable sign of the commonality of European life" (227).
A second goal of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is to challenge hegemonic opinions held by cultural and art historians whom commonly interpret the Great War as signifier of a new epoch of cultural history. Academic circles of cultural and art historians, headlined by Fussell and Hynes, compartmentalize pictorial and literary works of art produced during the Great War and interwar period as the harbingers of modernism. Fussell and Hynes maintain that after the Great War, European artists broke away from Romantic and positivist themes in their works, and instead interpreted history as remote, discontinuous, and inaccessible. Winter completely rejects this interpretation centered on the Great War as catalyzing the dichotomy between Romanticism and modernism. By divulging into artistic works seeking to explain the great personal losses suffered by Europeans, Winter finds that European bereavement practices "triggered an avalanche of the `unmodern,'" evidenced by the apocalyptic imagery utilized by European painters such as Kandinsky and Meidner, the creation on nationalistic war myths such as the French imagerie d'Epinal, and the popularity of spiritualist beliefs amongst the families of deceased soldiers (179). Further, Winter dismisses the differentiation placed on "high" and "low" forms during the interwar period as a fallacious, as both gazed back on traditional forms of artistic expression to express their grief.
Winter maintains that European internalized the atrocities and death of the Great War and World War II through profoundly different means, citing Adorno's adage that "to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (228). Winter however, fails to adequately support this claim with an analysis of World War II artistic cultural artifacts. Without evidence, Winter leaves the reader skeptical of the dichotomy he places in the cultural response of the two wars, particularly as his book is centered on breaking down the cultural dichotomies of others. For after all, are not the preserved barren concentration camps and the Kaiser Wilhelm Church sites of memory and mourning serving to assist individuals internalize their own grief and loss caused by World War II?

In this great book, all rituals for coping with the appalling losses of WWI and the everlasting effects over all forms of european cultural manifestation, are covered. But I strongly recommend that you read "Achilles in Vietnam" by Jonathan Shay. Where Dr. Shay treats the individual man, his suffering and eternal scars of body and soul; Dr. Winter jumps to the collective level. If the suffering of people in WWI sound distant to you, start by Achilles in Vietnam... Them imagine all that pain multiplied by millions..