Winter Jay. Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century

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270 theaters of memory

imbedded. It is di≈cult to sustain the view that experience is a

‘‘thing,’’ which has a material form veriﬁable by experimentation

and conﬁrmation, a form which follows physical laws. Instead,

though they do not admit it, men like Norton Cru and Wells, narra-

tors par excellence, use experience in an entirely di√erent sense, one

which contradicts their own claims to objectivity. Joan Scott has put

the point well. Experience is not something which the witness has,

but rather something out of which his sense of self emerges. To

recapitulate, her argument is that experience is not ‘‘the authorita-

tive (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known,’’ but

rather the social construction of knowledge by people who deﬁne

themselves in terms of what they know.

π∂

This is precisely what

witnesses do. Experience from this point of view is constituted by

subjects and thus highly volatile; it changes when identities change

and has no inert, external, eternally true existence outside the person

reporting it.

Both Norton Cru and Wells try to persuade us that their experi-

ence is positivist and not subjective. It is ﬁxed, and they have access

to it. That is why they know who is right and who is wrong about the

past. That is why they can correct the record and stand up against

the tendency to clean up or romanticize the story of war and per-

secution. And yet, their stories are just as much social constructions

as are those they reject or rebuke. It is best to see their witnessing as

an amalgam of both kinds of ‘‘experience.’’ There is no need to deny

the materiality of the events they describe, but they are not outside

of the story; their witnessing is part of the event itself.

This set of di≈culties does not diminish the signiﬁcance of their

words or their witnessing. It merely guards us against accepting their

own claims at face value. For the monstrous nature of Norton Cru’s

time under ﬁre or Wells’s period as a slave laborer was bound to

a√ect the way they tell the story. Some of those who went through

similar times were unable to speak of what had happened to them.

Authority, Experience, and the World Wars 271

We have discussed the way which these people carry ‘‘traumatic

memory’’ as an underground river of recollection.

π∑

Witnesses, in

contrast, are able to speak, and the way they retell the story is shaped

by the lives they led thereafter. What moral witnesses o√er is not

unvarnished truth, but rather a very subjective construction of the

extreme conditions under which they lived. That very subjectivity,

the quirkiness of Wells’s English or the angularity of Norton Cru’s

pedantry about every little detail of a soldier’s narrative, tell us as

much about who they were as about where they were.

And yet, whatever intellectual objections we make to the claim of

the ‘‘authority of direct experience,’’ it is clear that part of the current

obsession with memory is fueled by it. Moral witnesses speak to us

from the other side of a veil. They have seen radical evil and have

returned to tell the tale. They embody memory of a certain kind, and

remind us that remembering the cruelties of the past is not a choice

but a necessity. They are part of the archive. They demand that we

face them. Their plea for recognition, for active knowledge, or ac-

knowledgment, is at the heart of the memory boom.

Part Four

The Memory Boom and

the Twentieth Century

chapter 12

Controversies and Conclusions

‘‘Language,’’ wrote Walter Benjamin, ‘‘shows clearly that memory is

not an instrument for exploring the past, but its theatre. It is the

medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which

dead cities lie interred.’’

∞

In this book, I have followed Benjamin’s

lead and have explored multiple facets of memory as theater, mem-

ory as a medium of both personal and collective experience. In

doing so, in exploring this overarching subject, this vast arcade of

remembrance, I have focused on one particular historical setting.

That setting is war and the e√ort of survivors to defer or to defy the

slipping away of the faces, the names, the forms of those who su√er

and die in war. This anamnesis,

≤

or e√ort to remember, this work of

re-cognition, of re-collection, of the victims of war and violence, is

at the heart of what I have termed the memory boom. In the twen-

tieth century, the two world wars have precipitated many commem-

orative forms. Though the subject of war and Holocaust has been at

the heart of our recent meditations in this area, it is important to

remember that there was a prior ‘‘generation of memory,’’ one which

was determined to ﬁnd signifying practices appropriate to the scale

of the catastrophe which they termed the Great War.

276 memory boom and the twentieth century

The Memory Boom and Historical Remembrance

The memory boom is overdetermined. It has many sources and

many facets, indeed so many facets that the ﬁeld seems to expand

more rapidly than the conceptual tools we have to comprehend it.

Here an archeological study has its merits. One key task has been to

see how practices of remembrances have arisen, and against the

backdrop of which events? When we pose this question, we are led

inevitably to the subject of international war and violence, the traces

of which are salient features of the memory boom in the twentieth

century.

When we face this archeological e√ort, we confront a second task

as well. It is the need to rethink the terminology we use to examine

the subject of memory itself. The term denotes a process, not a

product. It is a set of practices, not a ﬁxed or static category or

concept. It arises out of the activities of groups as much as, or even

more than, those of individuals. In an earlier study, Emmanuel Sivan

and I addressed this problem and o√ered a way out of the forest of

linguistic imprecision we face today.

≥

It is to see the term memory as

a metaphor for practices of collective remembrance. That is, groups

of people come together in public to do the work of remembrance.

These groups may work in concert with the state, but they are never

wholly subsumed by it. Remembrance is a facet of family life and of

civil society, that space which reaches from the family to the state,

and which includes the market. Collective memory—an equally

abused phrase which can mean virtually anything or nothing—we

redeﬁne as the practices of remembrance of di√erent collectives

which come together in public to speak or write or interpret the

past in a host of di√erent ways. These collectives contest narratives

about the past. They try to come as close to the microphone of

public discourse as they can, and this prise de la parole is part

Controversies and Conclusions 277

of what deﬁnes their collective character. Collective remembrance—

or, if you will, collective memory—is rarely what the state tells

us to remember. There are always too many people who construct

their own narratives which are either at a tangent to those con-

structed by politicians or their agents, or which are totally in-

consistent with what the state wants us to believe happened in the

past.

∂

Those who hold power always try to construct a narrative of the

past legitimizing their authority. But their voices are never the only

ones engaged in acts of remembrance. To recognize this multi-

vocality in the ﬁeld of memory work helps us avoid all kinds of dead

ends. It sidesteps the meaningless title of the Web site of the digitized

holdings of the American Library of Congress, misleadingly entitled

‘‘American memory.’’

∑

It deﬂects well-intentioned interpretations,

like those of the former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky, to

champion American poetry as a repository of ‘‘American memory.’’

∏

Whose memory? How can a nation remember? When did we nomi-

nate these people to construct or carry it? Do elites, the exceptional

people who write poetry, carry the memory of the masses? Reﬂect-

ing on these conundrums does not disclose a particularly American

approach to this matter. The promiscuous use of the term memory

without any precise meaning at all is evident in many other national

cases. Once we recognize that it is extremely di≈cult to apply to

collectives the terminology developed by cognitive scientists and

others in their work on individuals, it is but a short step to seeing the

virtues of shifting our discussion from memory to remembrance,

from the passive to the active voice.

This conceptual premise is at the heart of this book. We all

recollect the past, but remembrance is generated by action. In con-

sidering the subject of remembrance, it is essential to distinguish

between and among its forms. Family practices are replete with

278 memory boom and the twentieth century

remembrance, and it is impossible to engage with the liturgical

world of Islam, Judaism, or Christianity without entering the realm

of religious remembrance. Alongside these practices, I consider a

third set—those I incorporate under the portmanteau term ‘‘histor-

ical remembrance,’’ acts and practices of groups of people who come

together to remember particular historical incidents and upheavals.

The focus here is on forms of remembrance triggered by what men

and women consider to be major events which have touched their

lives in signiﬁcant ways. If they did not think so, they would not

make the e√ort of remembrance. And we must not forget that it is

always an e√ort.

In this process of historical remembrance, historians play a role.

It is not a foundational role, or, at most times, a central role.

But it

matters nonetheless. The script collectives express or develop in

forms of historical remembrance can be challenged, and historians

are among the arbiters of such challenges. So are lawyers and psychi-

atrists, who bring to bear their own professional training in sifting

evidence and in dealing with contradictory ﬁndings or eyewitness

testimony.

Historical remembrance entails not only ﬁrst-person narratives,

but scripts which later generations form and disseminate about sig-

niﬁcant events in the past. That is why any consideration of the

contemporary memory boom much recognize the role of novelists,

playwrights, poets, ﬁlmmakers, architects, museum designers and

curators, television producers, and others in this varied set of cul-

tural practices we term historical remembrance. Many of these peo-

ple are in it for the money, and, viewed cynically, it is easy to see how

some exploiters of the ‘‘heritage trade’’ turn a pretty penny out of the

nostalgic clichés of ‘‘olde Englande’’ or Dracula theme parks. Most

of those engaged in the business of remembrance, though, are not in

it as a business.

Controversies and Conclusions 279

War and Historical Remembrance

There is clearly a market for historical remembrance. What has

triggered it? In the ﬁrst chapter of this book I addressed some aspects

of this question. There are many sources located in the thrust of

what we now call ‘‘identity politics,’’ in the structure of consumption

patterns of educated sectors of the population, and in the spread of

what might be termed broadly as psychoanalytic cultures in many

parts of the world. This study recognizes the overdetermined nature

of the memory boom and focuses on but one source of this powerful

cultural current.

One answer to the question as to why so many people choose to

do the work of remembrance lies in the subject of war and its after-

math. Among the most prominent sources of the ﬂowering of public

remembrance in the twentieth century has been the desire to recap-

ture the proﬁle and to keep alive the name of those who, because of

war, are no longer there. Remembrance is an act of symbolic ex-

change between those who remain and those who su√ered or died.

They went through much; they lost or gave much; we give the little

we can—starting with recognition and acknowledgment and then

moving on, at times, to material expressions of both.

These terms show why the subject of memory has taken on such

a powerful collective character. Acknowledgment—understood as

active knowledge, expressed in public as the recognition, the re-

thinking, and the restating aloud of claims—moral, political, mate-

rial—which other human beings have on us. Among those claimants

are victims of war and violence. The least of their claims is that we

not let them and their stories vanish without trace, that we face

them, that we face what happened to them. That act starts alone, in

our individual reﬂections on an injured or absent person, but ac-

knowledgment, in the sense I am using the term, never ends alone. It