Jay Winter

Jay Winter turned from a professional concentration in social history to an interest in cultural history late in his career. This book, Remembering War, essentially sums up his findings regarding the role of memory in the practices of historical remembrance. He locates the origins of the "memory boom" of the twentieth century and beyond in the responses, public and private, to the destruction and deaths generated by the Great War. He believes it was in many ways the template for historical remembrance associated with Holocaust, and, although he gives it relatively scant attention, for the Vietnam War as well.

Winter's minor problem is his prose, which can be turgid and fitful. What is more troublesome is his insistence on according specialized definitions to commonplace words that in many ways distort their definitions and as a result actually disrupt communication with the reader. That doesn't mean his terminology is without its uses. It has value--perhaps even a great deal of value--in giving us something to fetch hold on with slippery ideas such as "memory," "collective memory," "national memory," "fictive kinship," "remembrance," "historial," and "moral witness."

Otherwise, his greatest contribution, I think, is to note the mutating nature of memory and remembrance. Not only among the witnesses themselves but subsequent generations. All of which goes to make monuments, literature, films, and museums ever changing in regards to the reception of meaning of their contents.… (mere)

War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present by Jay Winter is a study of how our view of war has changed in art and the media. Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, Connecticut. He won an Emmy award as co-producer of the BBC/PBS television series 'The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century and is a founder of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, an international museum of the Great War inaugurated in 1992.

War, for the most part, does not age well. When a country goes to war, it is always for the right reasons. No nation enters an unpopular war to start with but many leave an unpopular war. World War I, for Americans, was fought for high ideals. World War II was also fought to end a threat and self-defense against the Japanese. Korea and Vietnam never gained that popularity. Time changes many ideas of war.

Winter uses various forms of media to examine how war is portrayed. There are three divisions he makes: World War I, 1933-1970, and 1970 to present. There was an interesting break, particularly in the cinema in the 1970s. War films in earlier times like The Sands of Iwo Jima paint a positive example of the war. Later films like Full Metal Jacket and Jarhead paint a different image of war, even though the service branch is the same.

Photography made a change in WWI, although still photography was taken in the 19th century, it was expensive. Starting in WWI Kodak made a vest post camera which puts photography in the hands of the common soldier changed the way war was seen. Newspapers were anxious to but photos from men in the trenches. Later official photographers and censorship limited what the public saw of war. This lockdown seemed to hold for the most part until Abu Ghraib. Digital photography and the internet are much harder to censor.

War changes society and how the artist sees war. Paintings and sculptures have evolved and changed since industrial scale warfare was launched. Gone were the British war poets. The scale of death created a faceless version of war. Nations lost so many people so quickly that mass graves became the norm (although not photographed). Nations created monuments to the unknown soldier. The Vietnam Memorial captures none of the glory of war. Below ground level, it simply lists the names of the dead. Although Anne Franks's face is well known, there is no face for the Holocaust. Modern war created death on a scale that became faceless. Picasso's Guernica is a symbol the horror of war, although faces are present in the painting, they are unrecognizable. War has become the mass production of death.

It was said that after WWI the use of words like honor, glory, and duty carried with them a tone of mockery. Modern War changed mankind. Stiles captures this evolution of change in 20th-century art and media. Although not covered in the book, perhaps there is even a lesson in television. In the television series MASH, Father Mulcahy attempts to write a rally song for the Korean War and ends up writing:

There's no one singing war songs now like people used to do,
No "Over There," no "Praise the Lord," no "Glory Hallelu."
Perhaps at last we've asked ourselves what we should have asked before,
With the pain and death this madness brings, what were we ever singing for?

A well written and researched book that shows how war and the effects of war on soldiers, races, ethnic groups, the military, and civilians. War is not confined to the battlefield. It affects more than those in uniform.… (mere)

History depends on how you look at it, and that is something that changes over time and over place. This book looks at how that has happened in the writing of the seminal event of the 20th Century, World War I -- the Great War. It is a fascinating exploration for those interested in the War. More broadly, it is an important book for those who are interested in history in general, showing vividly how much the interpretation of events can change, depending on who is doing the telling, and when the tale is told.

The authors, one a Frenchman and one an American, cite the dizzying volume of historical work on the Great War, noting that over 50,000 titles are listed in a French-language historical library (the Economist magazine cites 25,000 books and articles: maybe that's just in English). They review this literature longitudinally (over time), by country, and by topic. The national differences are profound: the consensus of anglophone writers is that the war was a tragedy, but the French view is tends towards a war of national survival. And the differences over time are profound as well. In the 20's and 30's, the focus was on the diplomatic and military aspects of the war, with a big contribution from political leaders and generals, pointing out how right they were. After World War Two, the historian's focus on the Great War shifted to social and economic factors, with a significant Marxist influence. And in the last few decades, the focus has shifted to cultural and individual topics, including the way in which the Great War is remembered. This adds up to a highly illuminating look at how the historical idea of the Great War has evolved -- and will doubtless continue to evolve.

But the importance of this book goes beyond an examination of one conflict, no matter how significant. It is a vivid illustration of the fact that writing history is a process of combining selected pieces of evidence to tell selective stories. Those stories depend on who is writing the history, on where they are writing it, and on when -- and why -- it is written. It is too easy for the reader of history to forget that even the most compelling work is a partial view, and that "what really happened" can never really be determined. That's not to say that everything is relative, but in history, most things are.… (mere)