Summary Of Jay Winter's Remembering War

Jay Winter’s book, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century, analyzes the ‘memory boom’, a phenomenon that occurred in consequence of the Great War. It was 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.” (p.12) It was a movement to commemorate all those lost or affected by World War I, in the matter of literature, memorials, photographs, etc. Winter’s primary argument is that the memory boom was constructed by Europeans in need to remember and pay tribute to the victims of war since 1914 and the consequences the war caused. A shown, “War memorials were constructed in every French commune and in almost

I focused my attention on the introduction, chapters one “The Setting: The Great War in the Memory Boom of the Twentieth Century”, chapter two “Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity”, and the conclusion. Winter dives into the world of historical remembrance, collective and traumatic memory whilst demonstrating the diverse forms of

Such as Winter’s main premise, which is to analyze the first memory boom, commencing with the Great War, but he constantly mentions the second memory boom, which includes World War II and onward. Thus weakening his argument since in his introduction Winter is very adamant that he is only going to focus on the Great War. As shown, “The focus is on the long shadow of 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.” (p.12-13) Winter states this in the introduction yet in chapter one he writes about the Nazi trials and Holocaust memorials which are clearly World War II material. I believe it would have been in his best interest to have dedicate a chapter towards the end about the second memory boom instead of having bits and pieces throughout. As for chapter two, I would have liked Winter to have include direct quotes from the soldiers he mentions. For instance, T.E. Lawrence, the leader of the Arab revolt of 1916-18, suffered profound trauma due to rape, war, and deceit. It would have strengthened Winter’s case on how debilitating traumatic memory was, if he had included an excerpt from a letter or a diary entry so the reader could comprehend what was going on in Lawrence’s mind. (p.73-74) Another weakness in this work was that Winter took on too many topics and fails to go in depth, making the