War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century

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Jay Winter, Jay Murray Winter, Emmanuel Sivan
Cambridge University Press, Aug 27, 2000 - Architecture - 260 pages
No scholarly consensus exists about how the terms 'memory' and 'collective memory' may most fruitfully inform historical study. Hence there is still much room for reflection and clarification in this branch of cultural history. How war has been remembered collectively is the central question in this volume. War in the twentieth century is a vivid and traumatic phenomenon which has left behind it survivors who engage time and time again in acts of remembrance. Thus this volume, which contains essays by outstanding scholars of twentieth-century history, focuses on the issues raised by the shadow of war in this century. Drawing on material from countries in Europe, and from Israel and the United States, the contributors have adopted a 'social agency' approach which highlights the behaviour, not of whole societies or of ruling groups alone, but of the individuals who do the work of remembrance, who feel they have a duty to remember, and who want to preserve a piece of the past.
 

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Contents

Setting the framework
6
Forms of kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War
40
War death and remembrance in Soviet Russia
61
Agents of memory Spanish Civil War veterans and disabled soldiers
84
Children as war victims in postwar European cinema
104
From survivor to witness voices from the Shoah
125
Landscapes of loss and remembrance the case of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles
142
The Algerian War in French collective memory
161
Private pain and public remembrance in Israel
177
Personal narratives and commemoration
205
Against consolation Walter Benjamin and the refusal to mourn
221
Index
240
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