Winter Jay. Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
10 introduction
Institution in Washington, ‘‘The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the
End of World War II,’’ was constructed painstakingly as history in
1995, it was attacked and rejected by people—ex-servicemen—who
had their own history. And the ‘‘witnesses’’ won. The exhibition was
reorganized. This was no simple tale of sordid political pressure. Here
was a real collision between ‘‘history’’ and ‘‘memory,’’ a collision
arising out of the di√erent subject positions of those involved in the
exhibition. The outcome was a kind of historical remembrance
which made space for the claims both of historians and of those
whose lives as soldiers they were describing.
If ‘‘history’’ has di≈culty in withstanding the challenges of
‘‘memory,’’ the opposite case can be just as problematic. Over three
decades ago I interviewed Leonard Woolf about his part in the re-
construction of the Labour party in Britain in 1918. He was at the key
meetings, and participated in all the discussions, records of which I
had just read. I asked him about what happened, and the tale he told
me was completely mistaken: wrong dates, wrong places, wrong
people, wrong decisions. The errors were not even interesting ones,
covering up alternative narratives. He had just forgotten, as we all
do. To be sure, this was fifty years after the fact, and he was much
more interested in talking about his wife, Virginia Woolf, as—after a
brief interval—was I. I did not challenge his memory, but could use
none of it in writing up the history in which I was engaged. In this
context, memory alone would have made the rendering of history
impossible.
Historians do matter, but not as much as they think they do.
Those who try to reconstruct their ‘‘memory’’ of past events need
historians to establish the boundary conditions of possibility. We
can establish with much greater firmness what did not take place
than what did, and historians have access to records which—at
times—prevent people from either misconstruing or lying about the
past. In the case of Leonard Woolf, misconstruction was the prob-
Introduction 11
lem; in many other instances, willful distortion is the name of
the game.
But even if we assume honorable intentions in all parties, the
problems associated with remembering the past are greater still.
‘‘Memory’’ is a category with its own history, and its own mysteries.
Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have taken huge strides
in understanding how individuals remember, but leaders in the field
admit that there is a vast amount of fundamental work still to be
done. How much harder is it to construct a model or set of pathways
to describe how groups of people remember together.
And yet these traces are all around us. Historical remembrance is
a discursive field, extending from ritual to cultural work of many dif-
ferent kinds. It di√ers from family remembrance by its capacity to
unite people who have no other bonds drawing them together. It is
distinctive from liturgical remembrance in being freed from a preor-
dained religious calendar and sanctified ritual forms. And yet histor-
ical remembrance has something of the familial and something of the
sacred in it. When all three are fused, as in some powerful war memo-
rials—Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial in Washington comes to mind—
historical remembrance is a phenomenon of enduring power.
Adopting the term ‘‘historical remembrance’’ has other advan-
tages as well. Using it helps us avoid the pitfalls of referring to
memory as some vague cloud which exists without agency, and to
history as an objective story which exists outside of the people whose
lives it describes. Historians have memories too, and their choice of
subject is rarely accidental. They are part of the memory boom,
though not its leading part. When they join other men and women
who come together in public to remember the past—their past—
they construct a narrative which is not just ‘‘history’’ and not just
‘‘memory,’’ but a story which partakes of them both. Historical re-
membrance is what they do, and how they contribute to a memory
boom which extends well beyond the historical profession.
12 introduction
Commemorative moments, alongside acts of witnessing and
healing, are the most public features of the memory boom. But it is
important to note too that in virtually every facet of the arts, the
subject of memory is ubiquitous. It is hardly surprising that this is
so. Cultural studies have long since dispensed with the outmoded
division between politics and the arts. Both form part of a public
conversation on themes of importance in contemporary life. Pi-
casso’s Guernica was painted in the privacy of his atelier on the Left
Bank in Paris, but it was almost immediately transferred to the
Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Paris international exhibition of the arts
and technique of daily life. Was it a private statement or a political
statement? Why not both? The same is true for Benjamin Britten’s
War Requiem, in which Wilfred Owen’s poetry is set to music com-
posed to mark the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962.
Private or public? Certainly both.
In the exploration of aspects of cultural work that deal with
representations of war in the second part of this book, one funda-
mental theme recurs. It is the struggle against forgetting, mediated
in a host of ways in social practices, in literature and the arts. It is not
only that much of the violent history of the twentieth century is
intrinsically worth remembering, but rather that those who died or
who were injured can so easily be forgotten. A painting or a poem
may defer oblivion a bit, but most of those whose works we survey
were well aware of the quixotic nature of their enterprise. What
photographs, or plays, or poems, or letters provide are traces of a
world that has almost vanished from both memory and history. The
memory boom, therefore, may be understood as an act of defiance,
an attempt to keep alive at least the names and the images of the
millions whose lives have been truncated or disfigured by war.
To be sure, there are many other sources of the memory boom.
This book deals with but one, and does so by and large from the
perspective of European history. The focus is on the long shadow of
Introduction 13
the First World War; that of the Holocaust and the Second World
War requires a study of its own, well beyond the limitations of this
book. The story of historical remembrance in the twentieth century
is much broader than the one told here, but to emphasize one (and
only one) facet of it, related to the Great War, should draw attention
to the commemorative impulses which refer to other events and in
other ways. What this study hopes to do is simply to open the door
for others to pass through to their di√erent destinations.
Part One
War and Remembrance
chapter 1
The Setting
The Great War in the Memory Boom of
the Twentieth Century
Memory is in the ascendancy these days. In virtually every corner of
intellectual life, there is evidence of a major change in focus, a
movement toward the analysis of memory as the organizing princi-
ple of scholarly or artistic work. Whereas race, gender, and social
class were foci of early waves of scholarship in cultural studies, now
the emphasis is on a set of issues at the intersection of cultural
history, literary studies, architecture, cognitive psychology, psycho-
analysis, and many other disciplines besides. What they have in
common is a focus on memory.
Part of the force and logic of this cultural movement is academic,
and I will turn to this matter later in this chapter. But part of it is
largely independent of the world of scholarship. We historians are
swimming in a stream of memory studies, but our current is but one
of many which have become a torrent both inside and outside of the
academy.
This chapter explores the setting in which the activity I term
historical remembrance has unfolded. It is a complex, multifaceted
environment, reaching issues related to the economic, political, and
intellectual history of diverse groups in many di√erent parts of the
world. The previous chapter provides a synopsis of the argument of
this book, and some of its fundamental claims and assumptions.
18 war and remembrance
This chapter o√ers some remarks of a general nature on the origins
and contours of our contemporary fascination with ‘‘memory,’’
however defined.
It is important to insist upon the fact that we are by no means the
first generation to be drawn almost magnetically to memory. We
have inherited and are working through an earlier generation’s fas-
cination with, indeed obsession with, memory. What I would term
the first generation of memory in the modern period spanned the
years from the 1890s to the 1920s. Its focus was on memory as the key
to the formation of identities, in particular national identities, al-
though social, cultural, and personal identities were also in mind.
Remembering the fallen of the Great War was a very significant part
of this movement. The second ‘‘memory boom,’’ which emerged in
the 1960s and 1970s, was in large part a form of remembrance of the
Second World War and the Holocaust. There are other issues at stake
here too. In recent years many people have come to see in memory a
way out of the confusion bred by the fragmentation of the very
identities forged by and during the first ‘‘memory boom.’’ The term
‘‘memory’’ has become a metaphor for ways of casting about in the
ruins of earlier identities and finding elements of what has been
called a ‘‘usable past,’’
∞
or what the French historian Pierre Nora calls
lieux de mémoire.
≤
But what the contemporary fascination with
memory seeks is not the same past or set of sites which, for example,
James Joyce sifted through in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, published in 1916. We are in another world. Who today would
try to ‘‘forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of
my race’’?
≥
The tortured history of Ireland—a fragmented identity if
there ever was one—simply cannot be constituted in this way. The
Second World War and the Holocaust broke many of the narratives
at the heart of the first ‘‘memory boom.’’
Instead, today we confront subjectivities, hybridities, multiple
subject positions which we all occupy at di√erent times and places in
The Setting 19
our lives. A century ago, the concept of memory was harnessed by a
host of men and women as a means to constitute or fortify identities,
in particular national identities in an imperial age. That age has
gone, and so has its unities and its certainties. In its place memory
still stands, but as a source of fractured national, ideological, and
cultural forms, forms which are resistant to linear reconstruction;
the onward march of progress is a thing of the past.
∂
To be sure, memory was a term used to define history, ethics, and
art well before the late nineteenth century. The arts of memory were
highly developed in the Renaissance,
∑
and there is little we would
add to ancient Egyptian commentaries on the plight of those ‘‘with-
out a yesterday,’’ without memory understood as a sense of obliga-
tions and duties to those around us.
∏
What modern commentators
o√er is less a set of new ideas than new configurations of old ones.
Today those drawn to memory adopt widely varying styles and
inflections in their work. For some the memory boom is nostalgic, a
yearning for a vanished or rapidly vanishing world. For others it
is a language of protest, seeking out solidarities based on common
narratives and traditions to resist the pressures and seductions of
globalization. For others still it is a means of moving away from
politics, and of re-sacralizing the world, or of preserving the voice of
victims of the multiple catastrophes of the last century.
π
And for
some, it is a way of confronting the Holocaust at the very moment
which the survivors are steadily passing away. To capture their
voices, their faces, and, through them, to establish a bridge to the
world of European Jewry which the Nazis succeeded in destroying, is
a major agenda fueling the contemporary memory boom.
We are clearly dealing with a dissonant chorus of voices here, and
the sheer variety of work on memory in contemporary culture pre-
cludes any easy analysis of its origin or quality. Above all, it is the
overdetermined character of the memory boom which is its most
striking characteristic. There are so many sources of it that it is hard