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

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

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

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.

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..