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

By Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. x plus 310pp.).

In this ambitious study, Jay Winter challenges key distinctions prevalent in scholarly writing on the cultural consequences of the Great War. In addition he compares the implications of the events of 1914-1918 and those of 1939-1945 for the literary and artistic responses that could invest these catastrophes with meaning.

In his discussion of historical interpretations of the Great War, Winter questions characterization of the years 1914-1918 as the crucial moment in the rise of modernism (defined as "a new language of truth-telling about war in poetry, prose, and the visual arts.") (p. 2) He is skeptical of opposing "traditional" to "modern" and "popular" to "elite" in discussions of culture. He stresses the common elements in (western) European culture rather than emphasizing the particular in any national tradition.

At the outset, Winter makes the case that bereavement was the central, "universal" experience of Europeans in the aftermath of the Great War and that historians have given insufficient attention to it. Winter criticizes previous studies (notably the work of Paul Fussell, Modris Eksteins and Samuel Hynes) that concentrate on postwar cultural expressions as a vehicle for political or artistic ideas while ignoring its importance in the process of mourning. For his part, Winter analyzes European cultural, social and artistic activity after the Great War in the light of its ability to mediate the grief of those left desolate by the carnage in the trenches. He contends that " 'traditional' forms in social and cultural life, in art, poetry, and ritual" (p. 5) gained new power from their ability to mediate the enormous personal losses of 1914-1918. In Winter's estimation, it was the Second World War, and the attendant catastrophes of the Holocaust and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that marks 1945 as the "real caesura in European cultural life." (p. 228)

Winter covers an impressive array of artistic expression (painting, cinema, literature, poetry, and the building of memorials), in England, France and Germany to illustrate the "vigorous mining" of "the host of images and conventions derived from eighteenth and nineteenth-century religious, romantic, or classical traditions." (p. 4) Winter provides a fresh perspective in drawing attention to the degree that the Great War "triggered an avalanche of the 'unmodern'" (p. 178) in mainstream artistic production and culture: most strikingly in the resurgence of popular piety; in the fascination of spiritualism for respected scientists, writers, philosophers and the general public; in a rebirth of imagerie d'Epinal; in the creation in film and painting of ghostly images to suggest a continuing presence of the fallen; in the reconfiguration, by artists and writers, of traditional religious allegory and images of the Apocalypse.

A more rigorous analysis is needed of the social aspects of grieving that Winter identifies as crucial and to have been neglected in favor of political analyses of commemorative art and ritual. Winter speaks generally of "communities of mourning" and aptly uses the notion of "fictive kinship" to describe how individuals unrelated by blood came together to offer each other support and consolation. Yet while noting that the public and the private spheres intersected in the process of commemoration, the distinctions between public and private expressions of grief are blurred rather than explored or explicated. Certain acts of mourning are described as commemoration "at a more intimate level" and commemoration is often termed as "collective mourning". Winter tells us that "from consolation and support, it was a short step to commemoration." (p. 30) One longs to know more clearly what this step entailed.

More troubling, and downright surprising, is to find a historian claiming the works of certain artists (in particular, the sculptor Kaethe Kollwitz and the architect Sir Edward Lutyens) to be "timeless" works of art. This is all the more curious as Winter acknowledges in passing that "great art attracts different meanings in different generations." (p. 106) Yet this understanding does not restrain him from repeatedly attributing "timelessness" to such works as Kollwitz's statue of mourning parents that she had placed in the military cemetery in Belgium where her son Peter was buried. However great the emotional impact or the artistic value of this statue, no work of art is exempt from changing perceptions and values.

An apt illustration of this occurred recently. In January 1993, the cabinet of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl voted to redesign a memorial site in Berlin as the "central commemorative site of the German Federal Republic." Kohl personally chose the site, a new inscription, and the statue to be placed there: a mourning mother cradling her dying son in her lap, an enlargement of one of Kollwitz's pieta figures that she fashioned in 1937 still mourning her fallen son. The new memorial seeks to reconnect with an older European tradition of war commemoration centered on the sacrifice of soldiers and does not address the full range of human loss as a result of National Socialism and its war. It makes no distinction between victims and perpetrators or among the ways in which people died. The placement of Kollwitz's work at this memorial site reveals that works of art do not stand outside of time, or the physical space in which they are displayed, or shifts in understanding wrought by subsequent events.

Winter's work presents a serious challenge to cultural historians to rethink the conventional view that in cultural terms, the Great War definitively ended the long nineteenth century. He argues, instead, that the Second World War marked the true collapse of "the very symbols through which meaning - any meaning - could be attached to the 'cataclysm' of war." (p. 9) In Winter's opinion, artists, poets and writers, after World War 1 managed "to express the inexpressible nature of war and its human costs" (p. 105) largely by drawing on a rich European inheritance of apocalyptical images and metaphors. However, he contends that, in the face of the Holocaust and mass annihilation by nuclear bombing, "those visions, these literary sites of memory seemed to fade away, leaving abstraction and silence in their wake." (p. 203) "Symbolic collapse", narrowly avoided after 1918 by the shoring up of the old symbols, could not be staved off after 1945.

But were abstraction and silence the most significant responses after 1945? Clearly, the prime symbols of the Holocaust, the preserved sites of concentration camps in Poland, Germany and Austria reflect a rejection of abstraction and a demand for unmediated testimony. In addition, it can well be argued that these sites show affinities with certain memorials from the Great War, such as the Trench of the Bayonets at Verdun, in their rejection of metaphor. One might also note that stylized memorials at such concentration camp sites as Majdanek and Treblinka show a continued belief in a mediating artistic language.

One finishes reading this book questioning the project of comparing responses to the horrors of war to responses to the horrors of genocide. For while the Holocaust and other large-scale atrocities may make mockery of the usual consoling terms (sacrifice, redemption, triumph over adversity, dying so that others may live), old-fashioned language served for remembering the combatants of the Second World War if not the victims of Hitler's racial exterminations and civilians wiped out in massive bombings. Furthermore, commemorations of the Great War continue to be successfully refigured to console the victims of war. When May Linn designed her widely-acclaimed memorial to veterans of Vietnam in Washington D.C. she had in mind the World War I monument to the missing at Thiepval in Belgium. To the extent there has been an epistemological break in the twentieth century associated with the Holocaust, might it not also be linked to large-scale atrocities that preceded the Holocaust (such as the genocide of the Armenians in 1911 and Stalin's murder of millions by famine in the 1930s) and to such post- 1945 horrors as the depredations in Cambodia and recent atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia?

Sarah Farmer University of Iowa