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

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30 war and remembrance

These trials brought out two critical features of the second gener-

ation of memory. The ﬁrst was the way they disseminated very

widely the notion that discussions of the Second World War could

not be separated from discussions of the Holocaust. And the second

was the way they brought out vividly the notion that memory was

moral in character, and that the chief carriers of that message were

the victims themselves. These points had emerged in part during the

Nuremberg trials of 1946 and the Eichmann trial of 1961, but the ﬁrst

had focused on the perpetrators. The memory boom of the 1970s

and 1980s was based on a di√erent optic: its gaze was increasingly

turned to the victim.

Thus a new form of collective remembrance was born, that of

the witness, understood in both senses of the term. The witness was

a survivor, a truth-teller, sworn under oath to tell the whole truth,

but he was also a visitor from another planet, as the Israeli poet Ka-

Tchetnik put it in the Eichmann trial. These people spoke of things

we could see only through a glass, darkly, but through their voices

we might be able to reach out to those who did not return from the

camps.

Holocaust witnesses took on therefore a liminal, mediating,

semisacred role since the 1970s. They spoke of the dead, and for the

dead, whose voices could somehow be retrieved in the telling of

these terrifying stories. Their words, their acts of remembrance, gave

them a quasi-religious tone, and listening to survivors appeared to

be a kind of laying on of hands, an acceptance of the witness in the

early Christian sense of the term, as a person who testiﬁes to her

faith, even while in danger of dying for it.

Commemorations of War and Holocaust

Once more we return to the linkage between memory and mourn-

ing. But in this contest, the problem which emerged in the 1970s, and

The Setting 31

which continues to bedevil commentators, witnesses, and politi-

cians alike, is how to link the new culture of the witness to commem-

orations of the Second World War. In the Soviet Union, which suf-

fered by far the heaviest toll in terms of loss of life in the war, this

issue hardly came up. Critical works like Vasily Grossman’s Life and

Fate, an account of Stalingrad and of anti-Semitism in wartime

Russia, were suppressed, appearing only after the author’s death.

≥∑

But in the West, it became increasingly di≈cult to separate the war

from the Holocaust.

Here is where o≈cial commemorations—publicly performed

acts of remembrance deﬁned by a politically sanctioned script—

became problematic. As in all forms of collective memory, the char-

acter of the event changed over time. V-E Day and V-J Day came to

jostle with D-Day as moments of solemn recounting of the Second

World War. In Israel Yom Hashoah comes a week before Indepen-

dence Day, and is clearly intended to link the catastrophe of the

Holocaust with the birth of the State of Israel. These commemora-

tive moments were well established in the 1970s. Now they have been

joined by 27 January, the day Auschwitz was liberated by the Red

army. But this linkage of the commemoration of war and Holocaust

brings us to another way in which the Holocaust has informed the

second ‘‘memory boom’’ of the twentieth century and increased the

tensions imbedded in it.

The decision of the German government to build a Holocaust

memorial near the Brandenburg gate in Berlin set o√ a massive

argument. The monument, a stone’s throw from the new Reichstag

and from Hitler’s bunker, is unavoidably part of the story of Ger-

many reborn. Some believe the monument is an essential and prop-

erly placed part of the story; others opposed the location of a com-

memorative monument to victims of the Holocaust within such a

narrative. Placing the monument in the heart of the national capital,

geographically and metaphorically, and focusing on the national

32 war and remembrance

level of notation, locate the Holocaust within a political frame-

work—that of Germany debased by the Nazis and of Germany re-

born today.

The di≈culties were multiple, but among them was the use of a

form of political culture developed in the ﬁrst ‘‘memory boom’’ to

mark a set of events of an entirely di√erent political and moral order.

In the ﬁrst ‘‘memory boom,’’ commemorative projects had trans-

parent political agendas, central to which was the stabilization of new

or older nations and empires in the wake of war. The problem is that

the Holocaust resists this kind of stable encapsulation, or in fact any

encapsulation within a particular system of meaning. To paraphrase

Primo Levi, a set of events about which one cannot in any recogniz-

able manner pose the question of ‘‘why?’’ is also an event about which

it is impossible in any straightforward sense to pose the questions of

historical context or meaning within twentieth-century history.

≥∏

After the First World War, commemorative e√orts aimed to o√er

a message that loss of life in the conﬂict had a meaning, that these

sacriﬁces were redemptive, that they prepared the ground for a bet-

ter world, one in which such staggering loss of life would not recur.

Two decades later those hopes were dashed. The problem of mean-

ing only got worse after the emergence of the Holocaust witness in

the 1970s. What did their testimony tell us about the question as to

whether the Holocaust had any ‘‘meaning’’? Their voices, while poi-

gnant and indelible, did not o√er any ﬁrm answers. Increasingly, the

Holocaust appeared to be an event without a meaning. It was a giant

black hole in the midst of our universe of reason.

≥π

History, Post-Modernism, and

the New Political Order

If the Holocaust had no ‘‘meaning’’ in any conventional sense of the

term, was it possible that theories of Enlightenment or of progress

The Setting 33

were void of sense as well? Here was a point at which the second

‘‘memory boom’’ and philosophical inquiry intersected. Through

the works of the French scholars Jean François Lyotard

≥∫

and Em-

manuel Levinas, a student of the German philosopher Heidegger,

≥Ω

and the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan,

∂≠

a radically subversive

view of reason and rationality emerged in the postwar decades. It is a

perspective which o√ers a critique of earlier linear views of history

and grand narratives of the progress of the human spirit. As Ben-

jamin put it in his seventh thesis on the philosophy of history, etched

on the gravestone erected in his memory in Port Bo, ‘‘there is no

document of civilization which is not at the same time a document

of barbarism.’’ To mediate on the dialectic between the two was a

preoccupation of many of those who broke with the Enlightenment

project and its grand narratives, rooted in a belief in progress and

reason.

∂∞

In parallel, a set of political changes seemed to prove these critics

right. The grand narrative of nation-building, out of which the ﬁrst

memory boom had emerged, bore little resemblance to the political

fault lines of the later twentieth century. Here too we turn from what

I have termed ‘‘construction’’ to the ‘‘adaptation’’ of messages about

memory in political and social discourse. And once more we can see

how new technologies, in particular those associated with computer

technology and the Internet, circulated these ideas in new and pow-

erful ways.

The second memory boom coincided with what Charles Maier

has called the ‘‘end of territoriality.’’

∂≤

His point is that the process of

state-building in Europe spanned the century between 1860 and

1960, after which di√erent political forms were redrawn or more

porous boundaries began to dominate international political life.

The emergence of the European Union is one such development; the

erosion and collapse of the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union was

another. The replacement of war between states in Europe and

34 war and remembrance

beyond by organized violence within states or across their bound-

aries is a third. Corporate globalization further perforated (though

did not eliminate) state borders constructed strenuously over the

course of a century.

With the demise of a certain kind of nationalism in Europe,

symbolized by de Gaulle, and a certain kind of socialism, sym-

bolized by Gorbachev, the pole stars of the political ﬁrmament in

Europe and elsewhere began to fade from view. This led a number of

observers to try to escape from their disorientation through a search

for the elements of national identities that were now in question.

This was the origin of the powerfully original and inﬂuential project

of Pierre Nora to provide an inventory of the French lieux de mém-

oire. In seven learned tomes, he collected the work of over one

hundred leading scholars who catalogued the ways French men and

women constructed their multiple identities. Now we have parallel

ventures in Germany, Italy, and Portugal, with more promised for

the future.

∂≥

Identity Politics and Testimony

This interrogation of identities coincided with other facets of the

memory boom rooted in what we now call identity politics. Here is a

story with European origins but which must be distinguished from

facets of the memory boom elsewhere, and in particular in the

United States. The distinction must be made because Nora’s project

rests on the assumption that identity politics is incompatible with

the French deﬁnition of citizenship. In law, and in academic dis-

course, there are no Arab-Frenchmen or African-Frenchwomen.

They are simply French men or women whose origins do not enter

their (singular) political identity. Nora’s exploration of les lieux de

mémoire is not about ethnic or racial groups within France, but

about Frenchness tout court.

The Setting 35

Elsewhere, what Latin-American scholars term ‘‘living on the

hyphen’’ is not only tolerated, but celebrated.

∂∂

Ethnic identities are

deﬁned by narratives of the past, and in part by narratives of su√er-

ing and survival of subordinate groups within a national polity. Here

is yet another powerful source of the contemporary memory boom.

State-bounded narratives increasingly compete with others of a re-

gional or ethnic kind. On both sides of the Atlantic, in the developed

‘‘north’’ and the developing ‘‘south,’’ many ethnic groups and disen-

franchised minorities have demanded their own right to speak, to

act, and to achieve liberation or self-determination. And those

struggles almost always entail the construction of their own stories,

their own usable past. Collective memory is a term which can no

longer be collapsed into a set of stories formed by or about the state

or about nations as a whole.

Each collective constructs its own narratives of collective re-

membrance. In North America, this phenomenon is at the heart of

identity politics.

∂∑

One clear example is the placement of the Na-

tional Holocaust Memorial on the Mall in Washington. It is, in this

sacred space, both a statement of universal truths, and an expression

of Jewish-American pride. The museum speaks in a grammar living

on the hyphen, the hyphen of ethnic identity. The framework can-

not escape from its location. The redemptive elements in the story

surround it on the Mall. They tell us of the wider struggle for toler-

ance, for freedom of religion, for freedom from persecution; they

locate the Holocaust within the American narrative, itself conﬁg-

ured as a universal.

∂∏

Here we have arrived at the right-hand side of

the hyphen ‘‘Jewish-American.’’ The museum is the bridge between

the two.

There have been many other instances of commemoration as an

expression of the tragic history of persecuted minorities. The AIDS

quilt is one;

∂π

monuments to the struggle for African-American

freedom raise the same point. Recent attempts to represent the

36 war and remembrance

imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World

War express the same set of issues, both unique and universal. Again

the hyphen of identity is strengthened by commemoration.

∂∫

As I have already noted, in Latin America and elsewhere, identity

politics takes on other forms, in particular, the cadences of per-

secuted minorities or political victims. Testimonial literature rescues

histories trampled on by military dictatorships. The stories of cru-

elty and oppression once retold constitute acts of deﬁance; through

the narrator, the voices of the dead and the mutilated can still be

heard. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa

has been a focus for the release of imprisoned memory, in this case

the stories of a majority imprisoned by a minority.

At times, the boundaries between truth and ﬁction become

blurred in such storytelling, whether its setting is a public forum or

an individual memoir. As Doris Sommer has put it, the boundaries

between informing and performing are porous.

∂Ω

But even when the

storyteller goes beyond what can be veriﬁed through other sources,

or even when the witness distorts the past, her voice in Guatemala or

Chile still stands for a generalized sense of oppression. Here is ‘‘mem-

ory’’ understood as a set of narratives, a ‘‘counterhistory that chal-

lenges the false generalizations in exclusionary ‘History,’ ’’ penned by

those trapped in a Eurocentric and imperialist sense of what con-

stitutes the past.

∑≠

This dimension of the ‘‘memory boom’’ has little

purchase with respect to Holocaust testimonies, but it tells us much

about other narratives of oppression.

A∆uence and Remembrance

I have tried to emphasise the multifaceted and eclectic nature of the

two ‘‘memory booms.’’ There have been political, technological, and

philosophical impulses toward privileging the subject of memory in

many discursive ﬁelds. But there is yet another dimension to this

The Setting 37

story to which we must attend. It is more about audiences than about

origins, and while not of fundamental signiﬁcance, it still is part of

the story of why so many people are talking about ‘‘memory’’ today.

In the West, one important precondition of the ‘‘memory boom’’ has

been a∆uence. In a nutshell, rising real incomes and increased ex-

penditure on education since the Second World War have helped

shift to the right the demand curve for cultural commodities.

In the history of this rising demand, higher education has played

a central role. Since the 1960s there has been a rapid expansion in the

population of university-trained people, whose education provided

them with access to and a desire for cultural activities of varying

kinds. In Britain the number of university students expanded very

rapidly after the Robbins report of 1963, granting the right to free

higher education to all who could pass entrance requirements. There

were at least three times as many people studying in institutions of

higher education in 1990 as there were attending thirty years before.

The same upward trend in the size of the tertiary sector of education

may be detected across Europe and in the United States after 1960.

Part of the increase is demographic: the baby boom generation was

coming of age; but there was more at work here than the shadow of

postwar fertility. Systems of higher education di√er markedly, but

even with a host of qualiﬁcations, the international trend is evident.

There were eight times the number of students in higher education

in Germany in 1990 as compared with 1960; in France, six times more

over the same period; in Italy, Belgium, and Denmark, and the

United States, ﬁve times more. Taken together, the 15 member states

of the European Union had 12 million students in higher education

in 1990; there were about 13.5 million such students in the United

States. And the numbers continued to grow throughout the last

decade of the twentieth century.

The student revolt of 1968 was an e√ect, not a cause, of this trend.

In France, student numbers grew more rapidly in 1966–67 than in

38 war and remembrance

1969–70; German growth was about the same before and after the

‘‘troubles,’’ precipitated in part by rising numbers and insu≈cient

resources devoted to them. Changes in higher education had funda-

mental e√ects not only on the skill composition of the labor force,

but also on the stock of cultural capital circulating in society as a

whole.

∑∞

By the 1990s there was a larger population of university-

educated people than ever before. Their demand for cultural prod-

ucts of many di√erent kinds was evident. What might be described

as the industry of culture was in an ideal position for massive

growth. The market was evident. The target population for cultural

products was there; and after two decades of retrenchment, state

support for ‘‘heritage’’ or le patrimoine was there, with greater or

lesser degrees of generosity.

∑≤

The British economic historian Alan Milward has pointed to the

material echoes of these two cultural bywords, ‘‘heritage’’ and ‘‘pa-

trimony.’’ The ‘‘memory boom,’’ he rightly notes, has happened in

part because both the public and the state have the disposable in-

come to pay for it. This is how Milward put it in a review of books on

memory and history in Europe in The Times Literary Supplement:

The media are the hypermarket outlet for the consumption of

memory. Stern moral and methodological rejection of earlier

historical fashions does not alter the reality that this latest fash-

ion, like the earlier ones, is driven by the all-too-positivist forces

of the growth of wealth and incomes. The history of memory

represents that stage of consumption in which the latest prod-

uct, ego-history, is the image of the self not only marketed but

also consumed by the self.

∑≥

There are di√erences among European countries, which may re-

quire us to qualify or modify Milward’s sardonic interpretation. But

in the British and French cases, there is a symmetry between eco-

nomic trends and cultural trends which we ignore at our peril.

Dwelling on memory is a matter of both disposable income and

The Setting 39

leisure time. Milward has a telling point: a∆uence has helped turn

identity into a commodity, to be consumed by everyone in her

(increasingly ample) leisure time. A ‘‘common’’ identity is one shar-

ing a set of narratives about the past. Many of these take the form of

bricks and mortar—ﬁxed cultural capital. Exploiting their attrac-

tiveness, as in Britain’s National Trust stately homes and gardens, the

patrimony or heritage trades became a proﬁtable industry, with

market niches and target consumers. The marketing of memory has

paid o√, in a huge consumer boom in images of the past—in ﬁlms,

books, and articles, and more recently on the Internet and televi-

sion. There is an entire industry devoted to ‘‘blockbuster exhibi-

tions’’ in museums, whose visitors seem to respond more and more

to spectacular shows. History sells, especially as biography or auto-

biography, or in Milward’s (and Pierre Nora’s phrase) ego-history.

∑∂

The British satirical writer Julian Barnes produced a marvelous

reductio ad absurdum of this phenomenon in his futuristic spoof

England, England, published in 1998.

∑∑

Why should tourists have to

travel to consume the icons of British history? Surely it makes more

sense to bring or imitate the lot on the Isle of Wight? But whatever its

potential for humor, the history business has never been more prof-

itable. It would be important, though, to have more precise infor-

mation of the choices cultural consumers make. My hunch is that

over the last two decades, the growth rate in attendance at the Impe-

rial War Museum, the British Museum, and Madame Tussaud’s in

London, for instance, has been greater than the increase in atten-

dance at sporting events or rock concerts. This is a conjecture, but

one worth pursuing in a more rigorous manner.

A∆uence has had another by now commonplace by-product.

One vector of the circulation and dissemination of the ‘‘memory

boom’’ may also be the exteriorization, or expression in public

space, of the interior discourse of psychoanalysis. Just as Woody

Allen has popularized therapy as an addictive way of life, so the