Winter Jay. Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century
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190 theaters of memory
the Western Front of the Second World War. When applied to the
east, and in particular to the Holocaust, then it is much harder to
justify.
But Spielberg himself has tried to do so. The end of Schindler’s
List shows the descendants of the men and women Schindler rescued
putting pebbles on his gravestone in Jerusalem. ‘‘The people of Israel
live,’’ is how a religious person might configure it. The collective
survived, and Schindler was one of those who, by saving a single life,
saved the world entire. Spielberg is clearly interested in individual
stories, but his notation is hardly the denial of collectivities Bodnar
imagines it to be.
Other facets of Bodnar’s handling of the subject of memory and
collective behavior make one pause, too. He claims that ‘‘contests
over public remembering were certainly not pervasive in most na-
tions after World War II’’ (p. 5). This statement flies in the face of an
avalanche of recent scholarship on precisely such contestation. Pie-
ter Lagrou has shown convincingly how narratives of Resistance in
France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were strategies of restoration,
needed to revive political cultures damaged or destroyed by occupa-
tion and collaboration.
∂
The struggle to displace communists from their rightful position
within the Resistance community was intense all over western Eu-
rope; the same harsh contest over who resisted and who did not
punished social democrats, liberals, and Catholics in eastern Eu-
rope. And this does not even begin to touch the question of the
eclipse of Jewish accounts of the war. All this was contested terrain.
It is true that by the 1960s, the process of political stabilization in
both east and west had taken its course, and that then and only then
other narratives of victimhood could emerge fully. The Eichmann
trial was a catalyst in this respect. But it is not true that the represen-
tation of what Bodnar calls ‘‘homegrown victimization’’ was limited
to Europe.
War, Film, and Collective Memory 191
Precisely in the field of film, such victims were visible. As Pierre
Sorlin has shown, from very early on cinematic narratives adopted
the voice of the child as the core of cinematic tales about the war.
Anyone who saw René Clément’s Les Jeux Interdits of 1952 or Rossel-
lini’s Roma città aperta of 1945, or Hans Muller’s Und finden dereinst
wir uns wieder of 1947 would be puzzled by Bodnar’s assertions.
Children are the quintessential victims in war; they cannot be blamed
for its viciousness or its stupidities; they just have to endure them.
∑
Such filmic presentations of children at war demonstrate the
danger of any argument that, in narratives dealing with the Second
World War, images of victimhood were a late-twentieth-century
phenomenon, following and displacing a di√erent and prior collec-
tive memory of collective aspirations toward a better world. The
lonely, isolated, damaged, or su√ering individual in film could and
did point to the need for collective action. The filmic children of
postwar Europe were hardly icons of the triumph of individualism
over collective action.
There is another problem in this kind of analysis. Bodnar takes
issue with work on traumatic memory, understood as an under-
ground river of recollection, likely to erupt unbidden when trig-
gered by some external stimulus. He argues that trauma may not be
so much buried as displaced, and in part displaced onto film. The
problem here is the direct transposition of a category of individual
psychopathology into the arena of cultural production. The notion
of ‘‘trauma’’ is in itself contested terrain.
∏
It is understood, in psychi-
atric or neurophysiological terms, only in a very rudimentary way.
How is it possible to take the term and apply it to a culture as
a whole?
Here is one feature of the discussion of collective memory that is
at the heart of the problem. The assumption is that individual mem-
ory and collective memory are related in a linear or aggregative way.
I know of no study in neurology or cognitive psychology which
192 theaters of memory
justifies such a rash conclusion. The language of collective memory
or cultural memory is simply too vague to bear the weight of such an
argument.
Bodnar’s claim is that film served as a field of traumatic displace-
ment. Cinema ‘‘articulated’’ anxieties arising out of ‘‘popular ner-
vousness over brute force in both wartime and peacetime America’’
(p. 6). What film showed is that ‘‘violence could be homegrown.’’
This imagery therefore enabled a ‘‘substantial amount of the trauma
and anxiety, at least in the United States’’ to be not so much ‘‘re-
strained . . . as displaced into the narratives of mass culture’’ (p. 8). In
this context ‘‘trauma and anxiety’’ evidently become collective phe-
nomena. It is hard to know what evidence would help us evaluate
these massive claims. Did Western films before the Second World
War or gangster films of the 1930s serve the same purpose? And
African-Americans, victimized in a myriad of ways by segregation,
hardly needed a demonstration of the proposition that ‘‘violence
could be homegrown.’’ The generalized form of this kind of claim
about cultural memory makes it virtually impossible to evaluate its
validity.
The same problem mars Eley’s essay on British film and the
Second World War. History, he posits reasonably, is both a ‘‘relation
to something that really happened’’ and also ‘‘a container of meaning,
a representational project’’ which was of use to certain elements in
British politics. What Samuel Hynes calls ‘‘the war in the head,’’
meaning the war imagined,
π
o√ered what Eley terms ‘‘an active ar-
chive of collective identification’’ (pp. 2–3). This set of images associ-
ated with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war contributed to
‘‘an insidious postmodern gesture’’ whereby the history of real events
was ‘‘erased in the very act of its recuperation.’’ His central argument
is that through war remembrance, imagery occluded history.
Sometimes this occurred in very indirect ways. Kenneth Bra-
nagh’s bold interpretation of Henry V clearly cut across Sir Laurence
War, Film, and Collective Memory 193
Olivier’s film version of the play, produced as stirring wartime
drama in 1944. But to Eley ‘‘Branagh ventriloquized Thatcherist
rhetoric in spite of himself.’’ Here’s the rub: how in the world do we
validate such a statement? Representations perform functions inde-
pendent of their authors, to be sure, but why adopt this one inter-
pretation when others seem equally valid? The chaos of battle is
much more evident in Branagh’s film, when Brian Blessed walks
right across his king’s postbattle path. This device seems to remove
some of the fictive order of battle and its aftermath, and thus works
entirely against post-Falklands Thatcherite posturing. I do not want
to argue that my interpretation is any more valid than Eley’s; just
that his method of analysis rests on a set of unexamined and doubt-
ful assumptions about what memory is and how it is manipulated.
Vagueness here opens the door to tendentious political interpreta-
tions of the e√ect of film, in the form of stating that Kenneth Bra-
nagh inadvertently spoke for Thatcher, interpretations which are at
best di≈cult to evaluate.
Film does indeed have power in projecting national stereotypes
and narratives. But the purposes of film are not at all the same as
those of political argument, such as that over British national iden-
tity in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century. In this regard, the
range of reference in Eley’s essay is unnecessarily limited. He is right
to state that ‘‘something like a renegotiation of national culture has
been taking place’’ in Britain since the 1960s, but he defines this
process too narrowly. Thatcher certainly tried, Canute like, to stem
the tide, but so much was against her that her failure was inevitable.
Europe sealed her fate. Surprisingly for a German historian, Eley
spends little time on the revolutionary implications of British inte-
gration, albeit hesitant and incomplete, into the European commu-
nity. For at least a century, what is British has been defined as against
what is European. ‘‘Lesser countries’’ (in Dickensian rhetoric) had to
follow a path which the more fortunate British had bypassed. Now
194 theaters of memory
that is no longer the case. How has film accommodated this sea
change? Are European stereotypes less or more evident in British
film now that integration is a troubled reality? Here is an issue
arguably central to a ‘‘renegotiation of national culture,’’ but one on
which Eley o√ers no clues.
Another di≈culty in Eley’s unanchored approach to collective
memory and cinema concerns his handling of specific filmic mate-
rial. ‘‘It’s impossible,’’ he tells us, ‘‘not to read [the] boyhood memoir
in [Boorman’s] ‘‘Hope and glory’’ of a wartime society of women
against the Thatcherized political language of the 1980s.’’ Is that
really so? Images of childhood, as Sorlin has demonstrated, have
been salient features of Second World War films from the later 1940s.
Their power is in confronting war from the standpoint of someone
who could not possibly be implicated in causing or fighting the
conflict, but whose life is shaped by it anyway. Thus I remain unper-
suaded by Eley’s claim that the film ‘‘does have a metanarrative
about the Second World War after all, though one coded through
the formally depoliticized reconstructions of everyday life’’ (p. 13).
But whether or not I share Eley’s views is less important than the fact
that he o√ers no criteria through which to evaluate them. Take it or
leave it seems to be his approach to the study of memory, politics,
and film. On balance I’d prefer to leave it.
Elsewhere, Eley speaks of ‘‘the promiscuous use’’ of the trope of
nostalgia in the last two decades tending to flatten ‘‘the specificities
of particular periods and their place in collective and personal mem-
ory’’ (p. 16 n22). There is force in this claim, but it fades rapidly
when it is used to reach a political conclusion, namely that being
nostalgic about the war tends to shift attention away from the period
1945–51, when the Third Labour government created the basic in-
stitutions clustered under the heading of the ‘‘welfare state.’’ This
period of political achievement, Eley notes, was the one in reference
to which ‘‘collective memory’’ had been ‘‘organized,’’ and the post-
War, Film, and Collective Memory 195
war consensus had been ‘‘characterized.’’ Remembering the war in
nostalgic film is thus, from Eley’s point of view, a way to avoid
remembering the postwar years, years when the welfare state was
born. To turn away from this period served the interests of Thatch-
erite conservatives who aimed to undo that postwar settlement.
Filmic settings in wartime Britain accommodated many dif-
ferent thematic readings. For but one prominent example, it would
be useful to consider the egalitarian message of Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger’s 1943 film Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Here
is the stu√ of nostalgia, nostalgia in huge quantities, married to a
message deeply o√ensive to traditional conservatism. Apparently
Churchill wanted to ban it. And this film is far from the only filmic
war narrative with a powerful populist flavor.
I understand that Eley is not making an argument about history
as past events, but rather about their imaginary reconstruction. His
argument would have been more persuasive, though, had he adopted
a more pluralist stance, enabling him to engage in multiple filmic
readings of the war—and multiple forms of public recollection in
recent years which move in di√erent directions. When John Major
tried to turn the fiftieth anniversary of 1945 (literally) into a picnic,
veterans made him think again. There was too much bitterness and
too much su√ering for their collective memory to be inscribed within
the rhetoric of the Conservative Party.
These are issues which ought to be studied and debated at length.
My point here is that the attempt to correlate the imagery of film
with something called collective memory, and to relate both to polit-
ical contestation about national identity, is a program fraught with
di≈culties.
In Youngblood’s essay on Soviet film and the Second World War,
some of these same problems recur. Once again, the absence of a
clear working definition of memory causes problems. Youngblood’s
interpretation is based on a juxtaposition of o≈cial lies about the
196 theaters of memory
war with filmic ‘‘truths,’’ ‘‘truths’’ which ‘‘succeeded in returning to
the Soviet people an authentic memory of the conflict’’ (p. 27). And
yet what makes one memory authentic and another false? Even if we
set aside Stalinist shibboleths, how can we know where the ‘‘truth’’
about the war lay? And how can we know that a particular film or set
of films came to embody something called ‘‘authentic memory’’?
∫
The authenticity of narratives about war is a highly contested
subject. Some veterans continue to claim a proprietary interest here.
The same assertions emerged after the 1914–18 war, and they are just
as unconvincing. Essentialism cannot get us very far in dealing with
imaginings of war. The experience was too varied for anyone to
claim a privileged viewpoint; furthermore, if rough casualty figures
can be believed, more civilians than soldiers lost their lives as a result
of the 1939–45 war. There can never be such a thing as an ‘‘authorita-
tive’’ eyewitness to such a multifaceted catastrophe.
Multiple witnesses must yield multiple narratives, of which film
forms but one element. To evaluate cinematic images of war, per-
haps the best way forward is to interpret film lightly. Film surely
cannot bear the weight of heavy interpretative agendas. This is not to
reify film nor is it to suggest that film has no political echoes or
origins; on the contrary, it is rather to urge a more complex and
textured approach to works which are simultaneously artistic, the-
matic, formulaic, commercial, and political.
And, above all, visual. In all three essays, the visuality of film is
given less attention than its textuality. But surely imagery can (and
frequently does) escape the confines of written language. And here a
final set of problems emerges, related to the impossibility of visualiz-
ing battle and other facets of war. There is a substantial literature on
this problem, related to the chaos of combat and the absence of a
vanishing point or a visual center around which the space of combat
can be configured.
Ω
It is at least arguable that all war films construct
a geography of engagement which is inauthentic. The best film can
War, Film, and Collective Memory 197
do is to approximate the human or physical environment of war—an
environment it can in no sense replicate accurately; the scent or
stench of combat will never be there. An authentic war film, pace
Youngblood, may be a contradiction in terms.
Film is never the same as text, and the ways in which cinema
presents past events is never direct or unmediated. The authors of
these essays have had the courage to enter a field insu≈ciently the-
orized—the field of collective memory—and have tried to relate film
to various ways of understanding it. Their presentation of the issues
is of importance, and ought to lead to much more systematic work
on the matrix of activities, including film, through which both indi-
viduals and collectives configure the past. Much interdisciplinary
work is currently under way in precisely this spirit.
∞≠
In this e√ort, greater rigor in the use of the concept of collec-
tive memory is clearly essential. Alon Confino has made a similar
point,
∞∞
and his remarks are particularly relevant in the context of
historical accounts of film and memory. The term collective memory
must be handled with precision because it may be at the heart of a
matrix indicated though not spelled out in these essays. Collective
memory may be understood as a set of signifying practices linking
authorial encoding with audience decoding of messages about the
past inscribed in film, or indeed in other sources. All three authors
o√er acute comments on the ways scriptwriters and directors encode
political and social messages in their films. Some of these hidden
agendas are carefully and subtly inserted: living under Stalin required
no less. Other messages arrive in what may have been a semicon-
scious or unintentional way: such is the nature of Eley’s claims about
the subliminal ‘‘Thatcherite’’ echoes of Branagh’s Henry V, or Bod-
nar’s argument concerning individual rather than collective config-
urations of the Second World War in American film. Let us for a
moment grant the force of these arguments; the problem still remains
as to how such messages, once imprinted on film and projected to a
198 theaters of memory
wide audience, are decoded by it. The answer is complex and related
to areas of the history or reading and reception well known to literary
scholars.
∞≤
There are conventions at work here, and their character in
the context of films about the Second World War is informed by
various kinds of images and memories, some personal, some familial,
some social, some ethnic, some gendered, some national. One way of
understanding these conventions is to term them collective memory;
that is, the memory of di√erent collectives about the past.
Here we encounter one crucial analytical distinction which these
three authors do not make. Collective memory is not the same as
national memory. National collectives never created a unitary, un-
di√erentiated, and enduring narrative called collective memory. Na-
tions do not remember; groups of people do. Their work is never
singular, and it is never fixed. The anthropologist Roger Bastide
wrote thirty years ago of the chorus of voices which address the issue
of memories about the past. Some members of the chorus are closer
to the microphone, others have louder voices, but no one orches-
trates them in a unified way. A cacophony is inevitable.
∞≥
For this
reason alone, any study of collective memory must approach the
issue from a pluralist’s point of view. In addition, the concept of
collective memory as a continuous message floating somewhere in
the air cannot be sustained. What Carol Gluck has called ‘‘memory
activists’’ are people who do the work of remembrance in public.
When they cease to act, their collective’s collective memory fades
away. Someone else or some other group speaks in their place. Mau-
rice Halbwachs provided the rudimentary form of this story seventy
years ago.
∞∂
Its implications are still of fundamental importance to
the study of memory and history. It is both a chastening and a
challenging thought that the task he embarked on prior to the out-
break of the Second World War, a war in which he lost his life, is a
task which still remains to be done.
War, Film, and Collective Memory 199
Conclusion
Liberating film from the burden of carrying something called collec-
tive memory has many advantages. Among them is the space this
move creates to explore the ways in which film serves as a mediator, a
multitiered theater in Benjamin’s sense, in which the overlaps and
elisions between our understanding of history and memory are per-
formed again and again. In other words, the individual viewer of a
film brings to that film personal memories and historical narratives.
We are touched by film, sometimes powerfully evoked, so that our
responses to film help restructure and fortify our notions of history
and our personal memories. What we build up is a set of scripts
about the past. We engage thereby in a process I term ‘‘historical
remembrance,’’ a way of ‘‘seeing’’ past events through exposure to
discursive fields like film.
Historical remembrance is not the same as family remembrance
or ritual remembrance in a liturgical framework. In film, and espe-
cially in war films, there is a narrative of the past which matters, and
which is taken into account by filmmakers; the Germans didn’t win
the Battle of Stalingrad; the Blitz failed, and so on. But that narrative
is the framework within which epic or realistic or ironic themes are
worked out. To be sure, film carries myth with great ease and power,
but it also carries historical narratives which a√ect the way viewers
think about the past. Going to the cinema is a way of bringing
history and memory together. The outcome is never stable and
rarely predictable. Film viewers do not always get the message the
directors or producers want them to get. When the subject of the
film is war, there are too many other influences at work to enable
anyone to predict the precise e√ect of the images on the screen on
the viewing public. What we can say is that the power of film is
such as to bring historical narratives into the scripts moviegoers