JAY WINTER. Remembering War: The Great War and Historical Memory in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 329. $35.00

Abstract

Jay Winter has written a fine book about what he calls the “memory boom” of the twentieth century: the lively interest in the topic of memory in public and professional circles. At the center of the book is the Great War, to the study of which Winter has devoted a lifetime of scholarship. Winter proposes the following interpretation: although the causes of the contemporary memory boom are diverse, “the initial impulse behind this varied and ubiquitous cultural project emerged during the 1914–18 war” (p. 1). The language, images, and practices of the Great War shaped and determined the modes in which other conflicts were remembered and represented. Indeed, the influence of the Great War on modern memory is not limited to the last hundred years alone but will determine also the future memory culture of our children and grandchildren. In this sense, at the heart of the memory boom of the last century, argues Winter, stands the challenge to take care and cognizance of the victims and the suffering of war. Winter identifies two generations of memory in the modern period. The first spanned the years of the 1890s to the 1920s, and it centered on memory as the shaper of identities, especially national identities. Remembering the dead of the Great War was fundamental to this generation. The second memory boom emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and was in the main shaped by World War II and the Holocaust. While the second memory boom built on the first, it also broke many of its identity narratives, for it brought to the fore the subjective experience of people and especially a new form of remembrance, that of the witness and the survivor.