Winter, War and Remembrance in The Twentieth Century

War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century
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 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. More specifically, the traumatic
collective memory resulting from the horors of the First World War,
the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Algerian War is
examined through studies of public forms of remembrance, such as
museums and exhibitions, literature and film, thus demonstrating that
a popular kind of collective memory is still very much alive.
is a Reader in Modern History at the University of
Cambridge and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. His recent
publications include Sites of memory, sites of mourning (1995) and, with
JAY WINTER
Jean-Louis Robert, Capital cities at war: Paris, London,
Berlin,
1914-1919 (1997). He is winner of an Emmy for Outstanding TV

Series 1997.
is Professor of History at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, and is a world authority on Islamic history. His
publications include Radical Islam (1990), The 1948 generation (in
Hebrew, 1991) andMythes Politiques Arabes (1995).
EMMANUEL SIVAN
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern

Warfare
General Editor
Jay Winter Pembroke College, Cambridge
Advisory Editors
Paul Kennedy Yah University
Antoine Prost Universite de Paris-Sorbonne
Emmanuel Sivan The Hebrew University ofJerusalem
In recent years the field of modern history has been enriched by the exploration
of two parallel histories. These are the social and cultural history of armed
conflict, and the impact of military events on social and cultural history.
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare intends to
present the fruits of this growing area of research, reflecting both the colonization of military history by cultural historians, and the reciprocal interest of
military historians in social and cultural history, to the benefit of both. The
series will reflect the latest scholarship in European and non-European events
from the 1850s to the present day.
Titles in the series
1 Sites of memory, sites of mourning
The Great War in European cultural history
Jay Winter
ISBN 0 521 49682 9
2 Capital cities at war: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919
Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert
ISBN 0 521 571715
3 State, society and mobilization in Europe during the First World War
Edited by John Home
ISBN 0 521 56112 4
4 A time of silence
Civil War and the culture of repression in Franco's Spain, 1936-1945
Michael Richards
ISBN 0 521 594014
5 War and remembrance in the twentieth century
Edited by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan
ISBN 0 521 64035 0
War and Remembrance in

the Twentieth Century
Edited by
Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521640350
E> Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan 1999
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1999
First paperback edition 2000
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
War and remembrance in the twentieth century / edited by Jay Winter
and Emmanuel Sivan.
p. cm. (Studies in the social and cultural history of modern warfare: 5)
ISBN 0 521 64035 0 (hardcover)
1. History, Modern - 20th century. 2. Memory.
3. War and society. 4. Civilization, Modern - 20th century.
I. Winter, J. M. II. Sivan, Emmanuel. III. Series.
D421.W36 1999
909.82 -dc21 98-24909 CIP
ISBN-13 978-0-521-64035-0 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-64035-0 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-79436-7 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-79436-6 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2005
Contents
Preface
page vii
Introduction
Setting the framework
JAY WINTER
Pembroke College, Cambridge

EMMANUEL SIVAN
Hebrew University ofJerusalem
Forms of kinship and remembrance in the

aftermath of the Great War
40
JAY WINTER
War, death, and remembrance in Soviet Russia
61
CATHERINE MERRIDALE
University of Bristol
Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War veterans and

disabled soldiers
84
PALOMA AGUILAR
Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, and

Juan March Institute, Madrid
Children as war victims in postwar European cinema
104
PIERRE SORLIN
University of Paris - III
From survivor to witness: voices from the Shoah
125
ANNETTE WIEVIORKA
CNRS, Paris
Landscapes of loss and remembrance: the case
of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles
DOLORES HAYDEN
Yale University
142
Contents
8 The Algerian War in French collective memory
161
ANTOINE PROST
University of Paris - I
9 Private pain and public remembrance in Israel
177
EMMANUEL SIVAN
10 Personal narratives and commemoration
205
SAMUEL HYNES
Princeton University
11 Against consolation: Walter Benjamin and the
refusal to mourn
221
MARTIN JAY
University of California at Berkeley

Index
240
Preface
There is a rough common denominator in this book, fashioned through

discussion among contributors. We all refer in different ways to what
may be termed a 'social agency' approach, which highlights the behaviour not of whole societies or of ruling groups alone, but rather of those
groups and individuals, frequently but not always obscure, who do the
work of remembrance. This interpretation is set out by the editors in the
first chapter, in which many of the conceptual problems in the study of
'collective memory' are addressed. We hasten to add that the contributors to this volume have adopted very different approaches to the
problem of 'social agency', collective memory, and victimhood. These
differences are discussed in the introduction. Our intention is simply to
introduce a rich field of historical inquiry - that of collective memory and to clarify its topography by reference to the experience of war in this
century. No orthodoxy arises here, though a number of questions in
common recur throughout this volume.
Thanks are due to many people and groups whose support and
assistance we are happy to acknowledge. A grant from the Harry Frank
Guggenheim Foundation made this collective investigation possible.
The encouragement, support, and critical participation of Karen
Colvard and James Hester of the Foundation were of the greatest
importance. They joined the contributors and a number of other
scholars at two fruitful meetings in 1995 and 1996 at Pembroke
College, Cambridge and Chinchon, Spain, where these questions were
formulated and some approaches to them thrashed out. We are particularly grateful to the staff of these institutions for providing a congenial environment in which these difficult issues were discussed, and
for the help of the following scholars who also contributed to the
evolution of this project: Susan Bayly, Elisabeth Domansky, Lauri
Harkness, Ira Katznelson, Dori Laub, Jayne Leonard, Tony Robben,
Steve Southwick, and Arthur Waldron.
Emmanuel Sivan
Jay Winter
Introduction
This book arose from the sense of unease the editors have felt over a
number of years about weaknesses in the huge and rapidly growing
historical literature on the subject of 'collective memory'. It seems as if
everyone is talking about this subject. The terms 'memory' and 'collective memory' appear with such frequency and ease that readers may be
under the impression that there is a scholarly consensus about what
these terms mean and how they may be used effectively in historical
study.
Nothing could be further from the truth. There is much discussion,
but very little agreement, as to whether or not there are meaningful links
between individual cognitive psychological processes and the cultural
representations and gestures of groups. How groups 'remember' - or
even if they 'remember' - cannot be extrapolated simply from evidence
on the ways individuals store and retrieve information or images.
Furthermore, the word 'memory' has profoundly different shades of
meaning in different languages. It should not be surprising, therefore,
that historians frequently talk at cross purposes or in complete ignorance
of each other's position in this field.
A good example of the ambiguity of much writing on collective
memory is the work of Pierre Nora, the organizer and inspiration behind
an influential, seven-volume collection of essays on sites of collective
memory, Les lieux de memoire, published between 1984 and 1992. His
programmatic essay presents his point of view on collective memory in
emphatic terms. 'Memory is constantly on our lips', he writes, 'because
it no longer exists.' Or rather it no longer exists in the midst of life.1
Since 'society has banished ritual', and thereby 'renounced memory',2
everyone cries out for artificial or symbolic substitutes for what less
rapidly changing societies have taken for granted. What we have is
1
Pierre Nora (ed.) Realms of memory. The construction of the French past. I. Conflicts and
divisions, trans, by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),
p. 1.
Ibid., p. 6.
1
Introduction
second-order memory: we collect, organize, exhibit, catalogue, but

observe the form and not the substance of memory: 'The trace negates
the sacred but retains its aura.'3
These sites, and their study by historians, reproduce what literature
once did, and now - in Nora's view - no longer can accomplish. Hence
the exploration of these artefacts and phenomena helps to refill 'our
depleted fund of collective memory'. Thus a new kind of 'History offers
profundity to an epoch devoid of it, true stories to an epoch devoid of
real novels.' 'Memory', he concludes, 'has been promoted to the center
of history: thus do we mourn the loss of literature.'4
When Nora argues that society has banished ritual, or claims that it
has no further use for the sacred,5 and that literature is dead, he displays
the weakest links in his position. Anybody observing the difficulties
attendant on the assimilation of Muslims into French society would
scoff at such claims. The sacred hasn't vanished, though few would seek
it primarily in the institutional life of churches and synagogues.
Furthermore, if the claim is that society has banished ritual, and not
that French society has banished ritual, we need to pose the question of
the strength of the claim in other than French contexts. The parochial
character of Nora's argument raises doubts as to its relevance outside
France. It is true that historical legitimacy has been contested terrain
since the revolution of 1789, and, ever since, polemicists have ransacked
the symbolic vocabulary and imagery of French history to espouse one
cause and deride others. But the same is true of German history, and
more recently, of Russian history. What is missing here is an account of
precisely what is French about the exercise Nora conducts.
The Frenchness of the position is its particular kind of cultural
pessimism. Again there are equivalents across the Rhine and elsewhere,
but French pessimism has its own distinctive flavour. Where else would
intelligent commentators equate the decline in the birth rate and the
drop in the number of people speaking the French language with the
decline of Western civilization itself? Are these the unspoken assumptions of a world of French intellectuals who take themselves just a bit too
seriously?
The insularity of the claims made by Nora has another source. The
French government spends more on museums and cultural activities per
capita and as a share of the national budget than does any other Western
country. Why? Is it because the sacred is dead and we need a set of
symbolic substitutes? The explanation may be more mundane. History
sells: it is a popular and money-making trade because it locates family
3
Ibid. p. 9.
Ibid. p. 20.
Ibid. p. 7.
Introduction
stories in bigger, more universal, narratives. The government invests in

this part of the service sector because it pays to do so.
The huge growth of museums at the end of the twentieth century is
also a reflection of another facet of the 'memory business': the contemporary link between grandparents and grandchildren. This link has
spawned a huge market for museums and literature about this turbulent
century. Yes, literature: the same literature which Nora considers dead.
Examples abound: like Jean Rouaud's Champs d'honneur winner of the
Prix Goncourt in 1991,6 or Sebastien Japrisot's moving Un long
dimanche de fiangaille,1 or Pat Barker's fictional trilogy on the Great
War,8 or Sebastian Faulks's powerful Birdsong.9 Today's grandparents
were children after the 1914-18 war, and their stories - family stories are now embedded in history, and fiction, and exhibitions, and
museums, and pilgrimage, in all the stuff of ritual Nora considers as
signs of a loss of 'true' collective memory. The linkage between the
young and the old - now extended substantially with the life span - is so
central to the concept of memory that it is surprising that Nora doesn't
simply urge us to leave our libraries and just look around, at our own
families. A vital, palpable, popular kind of collective memory is, then,
alive. Its obituary, written by Nora, is premature and misleading.
Given the difficulties and ambiguities raised by a work of a major
historian like Pierre Nora, it is evident that that there is much room for
reflection and clarification in this branch of cultural history. This book is
a preliminary step towards that end. It focuses on one particular set of
problems in the field of 'collective memory', namely, the issues raised by
the shadow of war in this century.
How war has been remembered collectively is the central question in
this volume. We investigate this issue in the twentieth-century context,
when the reach of war - geographically and socially - has extended far
beyond that of earlier, non-industrial conflicts. Most of the chapters are
about European experience, though some American and Israeli evidence
is examined too. We have chosen war in this century as a vivid, indeed a
traumatic phenomenon, which has left in its wake survivors who engage
time and again in acts of remembrance. The voluminous records they
have left enable us to put to the test the ambiguities and inner tensions
of our general subject: the contour and character of'collective memory'.
A word or two about coverage is essential. Our aim is to address a set
6
7
8
Jean Rouaud, Champs d'honneur (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990).

Sebastien Japrisot, Un long dimanche defiancailles: roman (Paris: Denoel, 1991).
Pat Barker, Regeneration (New York: Viking, 1991); The eye in the door (New York:
Viking, 1993); The ghost road (New York: Viking, 1995).
Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (London: Hutchinson, 1993).
Introduction
of questions about the nature of 'collective memory' in the context of

twentieth-century warfare. We do not, indeed could not, survey more
than a handful of cases drawn from the documentary history of this
century. We discuss issues related to the First World War, to the Spanish
Civil War, to the Second World War, to the Algerian War, and to the
shadows left by each of these conflicts in Europe, the United States, and
the Middle East. In one volume, little more is possible. If time and space
permitted, it would be valuable to examine other instances, covering the
globe from China to Armenia to Rwanda to Argentina. Our field of
inquiry is limited, and extra-European historians and social scientists
have much to add.
There is one set of problems, specifically European, which we do not
treat directly, not because it is undocumented or unimportant, but
because it is such a special case that it threatens to overshadow all other
cases. There is now a huge literature on Germany and the Holocaust,
and on German approaches to remembering their war between 1939
and 1945 and on the crimes committed during it.10 Such commentaries
collide with a problem so complex that we believe it is unacceptable
simply to lump together the Holocaust and the experience of war in this
century. For the history of the Death Camps is the history of industrial
murder, remote from war of the kind we consider in chapters on Europe
in 1914 to 1918, on Spain in 1936 to 1939, on Algeria in 1954 to 1962,
in the Middle East, and so on. We discuss the problem of mass death in
Russia in the First World War, in the Civil War, in the Gulag, and in the
Second World War, but here too we are remote from the history of the
'Final Solution'.
There is a special danger here. Locating Germany and the Holocaust
within the framework we set out is, on the face of it, a challenging
assignment. But to do so here risks 'historicizing' the Holocaust, making
it one more chapter in the history of warfare, akin to the American
treatment of Indians or the Japanese rape of Nanking. There are
different and violently expressed views on this issue. We would prefer to
leave the subject to a separate volume, since its inclusion presents one
set of risks, while its exclusion presents another.
10
Some recent examples are: Ian Buruma, Wages ofguilt. Memories of war in Germany and
Japan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994); Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (eds.),
Germans and Jews since the Holocaust. The changing situation in West Germany (London:
Holmes & Meier, 1987); Norbert Kampe, 'Normalizing the Holocaust: the recent
historians' debate in the Federal Republic of Germany', Holocaust and Genocide Studies,
2, 1 (1987), pp. 61-80; Mannfred Henningsen, 'The politics of memory: Holocaust
and legitimacy in post-Nazi Germany', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 4, 1 (1989), pp.
15-26; Wolfgang Benz, 'Auschwitz and the Germans: the remembrance of the
Genocide', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 8, 1 (1994), pp. 25-40.
Introduction
We have not ignored these issues entirely. Three of our authors have
addressed them: directly, in the chapter on French survivor-'witnesses';
tangentially, in the chapter on German and Italian post-1945 films; and
indirectly in the discussion of Walter Benjamin's ambiguous treatment
of the 'healing' effects of remembrance; he died, of course, before
Auschwitz, but his ideas have a disturbing relevance to the overall
subject. Remembrance as a means to healing, Benjamin held, may
perpetrate injustice, by covering up crimes and thereby protecting their
perpetrators. But those ultimately responsible for his death and those of
millions of other Jews in Europe were guilty of a crime so enormous as
to demand separate discussion, inquiry, and reflection, and not to be
treated as one story among many. If this book stimulates such research,
and if the framework of theories of 'collective memory' and 'social
agency' proves useful in that inquiry, then the editors and all the
contributors will have realized one of the aims of this book.

Collective remembrance
Collective remembrance is public recollection. It is the act of gathering
bits and pieces of the past, and joining them together in public. The
'public' is the group that produces, expresses, and consumes it. What
they create is not a cluster of individual memories; the whole is greater
than the sum of the parts. Collective memory is constructed through the
action of groups and individuals in the light of day. Passive memory understood as the personal recollections of a silent individual - is not
collective memory, though the way we talk about our own memories is
socially bounded. When people enter the public domain, and comment
about the past - their own personal past, their family past, their national
past, and so on - they bring with them images and gestures derived from
their broader social experience. As Maurice Halbwachs put it, their
memory is 'socially framed'.1 When people come together to remember,
they enter a domain beyond that of individual memory.
The upheavals of this century have tended to separate individual
memories from politically and socially sanctioned official versions of the
past. All political leaders massage the past for their own benefit, but over
the last ninety years many of those in power have done more: they have
massacred it. Milan Kundera tells the story of a photograph of the
political leadership of the Czech socialist republic in 1948. One man in
the photo was later purged. That individual had been removed from the
photograph; all that remained was his hat, in the hands of a surviving
colleague.2 The snapshot - an image of a past event - had been
1
Maurice Halbwachs, On collective memory, trans, by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1992). For recent elaborations, see Iwona Irwin-Zarecki, Frames of
remembrance: the dynamics of collective memory (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1994); and
Peter Burke, 'History as social memory,' in Memory: history, culture and the mind, edited
by Thomas Butler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 97-113.
Milan Kundera, The book of laughter and forgetting (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980),
p. 3.
reconfigured; those who 'remembered' that the hat had once had a man
under it, had to think again.
In many other ways, private and public modes of remembering were
severed in the Soviet period. The lies and distortions were terribly
visible.3 To be sure, there were counter-trends. In some authoritarian
societies, popular theatre and ceremony played a critical role, especially
in bringing women's voices into the chorus of public comment on the
past. Because memory can be gendered, women's testimony arises in
different places than that of men.4 But this distinction should not be
drawn too sharply. The poetry that Nadezdha Mandelstam memorized,
written by her husband Osip Mandelstam, was their joint and precious
possession. She stayed alive, she said, to ensure that his voice was not
silenced.5 Others were not so fortunate.
The circulation of fiction was similarly significant in the dark days of
dictatorship.6 Literature played a critical role in keeping collective
memory alive in a society where the writing of history was a routine
operation dedicated to the glorification of the regime. Not only history,
but the names of towns, roads, and the like became mythologized. New
toponyms, inspired by the Russian revolution, tended to abolish all
diversity, whether regional or cultural. They homogenized the country,
shaping it all in the image of the all-powerful centre. In a word, ideology
replaced memory by imposing the imaginary notion of a uniform Soviet
people. Literature taught otherwise.7
Under Fascism or other repressive regimes, the invasion of everyday
private life by political agents contaminated memories of mundane
events; how to write about family life under such circumstances was a
profound challenge. Where 'normality' ended and the monstrous began
is a question which may never be answered fully. A similar divide
between recollections of the rhythms of daily life under the Nazis private memories - and 'amnesia' about the disappearance of the Jews
has spawned a huge interpretive literature. As Saul Friedlander has
observed, 'the Nazi past is too massive to be forgotten, and too repellent
to be integrated into the "normal" narrative of memory'.8 This dilemma
3
6
7
See the discussion in Alain Brossat, Sonia Combe, Jean-Yves Potel, and Jean-Charles
Szurek (ed.), A I'Est la memoire retrouvee (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990).
Elizabeth R Loftus, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Rachel A. Foster, 'Who remembers what?:
gender differences in memory' Michigan Quarterly Review, 1 (1987), pp. 26, 6 4 - 8 5 .
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against hope, trans, by Max Hayward (New York:
Athenaeum, 1974).
Andrei Plesu, 'Intellectual life under dictatorship' Representations, 49 (1996), pp. 6 1 - 7 1 .
Luisa Passerini (ed.), Memory and totalitarianism, International yearbook of oral history and
life stories, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 'Introduction', p. 13.
Saul Friedlander, Memory, history, and the extermination of the Jews of Europe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 2.
has been the subject of entire libraries; it has also informed painting,
sculpture, architecture, and other facets of the visual arts.
It would be idle to assume that these problems are restricted to
authoritarian regimes. Even the democratic West has had trouble in
reconciling its official versions of the past with the memories of millions
of ordinary people. This is especially true in the case of that other
collective trauma of the twentieth century, that of the two world wars.
Of course, the two histories - that of Fascism and communism on the
one hand, and of warfare on the other - are inextricably mixed. The
shape of 'the short twentieth century'9 emerged from the catastrophe of
the First World War. It is only now in the 1990s, after the collapse of
communism, and at a time when the European state system created in
1919 is being reconfigured, that we are able to see clearly some of the
fundamental features of this brutal century.
Historians have contributed to public conversations about the recent
past. They have helped to organize exhibitions, create museums, and
write both for their colleagues and students, as well as for a wider
public. But it is important to separate any notion of 'collective memory'
from historical knowledge. Collective memory is not what historians say
about the past. These professionals try to provide a documentary record
of events, but in doing so they almost always depart from private
memories. Anyone who has conducted interviews with participants in
public events can attest to that. Collective memory is not historical
memory, though the two usually overlap at many points. Professional
history matters, to be sure, but only to a small population. Collective
remembrance is a set of acts which go beyond the limits of the
professionals. These acts may draw from professional history, but they
do not depend on it.
This is apparent in the uproar that greets some public exhibitions,
presenting a narrative which varies from individual recollection, from
the official version of events, or offends some particular sensibilities.
Collective remembrance is apparently too important a subject to be left
to the historians.
This is evident in the way wars have been remembered in public. In
all combatant countries there has been a proliferation of monuments,
understood as literary, visual, or physical reminders of twentiethcentury warfare. Many are self-serving tributes; most go beyond statesponsored triumphalism to the familial and existential levels where
many of the effects of war on the lives of ordinary people reside.
Here too the dialectic between remembering and forgetting is visible,
9
E. J. Hobsbawm, The age of extremes (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), p. 4.
and is especially salient in non-official forms of collective remembrance.

This book is intended as a contribution to the history of collective
remembrance in the twentieth century. Its focus is on wars, soldiers, and
victims of wars in Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Its
purpose is to examine collective remembrance as the outcome of
agency, as the product of individuals and groups who come together,
not at the behest of the state or any of its subsidiary organizations, but
because they have to speak out.
Why? Here we are at the intersection of private memories, family
memories, and collective memories. The men and women whose activity
we explore in this book lived through war as trauma, understood as an
overwhelming, sustained, and mass experience. Many were in
mourning; most were torn by war from one set of daily rhythms and
were in search of another. Their decisions to act in public - by creating
associations, by writing memoirs, by producing films, by speaking out in
a host of ways - were profoundly personal. But they were not only
private matters, since they existed in a social framework, the framework
of collective action.
This emphasis on agency, on activity, on creativity, highlights a
different approach to the cultural history of this century. We too speak
of 'collective memory', but depart from those who define it as the
property of dominant forces in the state, or of all survivors of war in the
privacy of their lives, or as some facet of the mental furniture of a
population - what the French like to call their mentalites.
Instead, we privilege the term 'collective remembrance'. The primary
advantage of this shift in terminology is the avoidance of generalizations
which simply cannot be true. The 'collective memory' of war is not what
everybody thinks about war; it is a phrase without purchase when we try
to disentangle the behaviour of different groups within the collective.
Some act; others - most others - do not. Through the constant
interrogation of actors and actions, we separate 'collective memory'
from a vague wave of associations which supposedly come over an entire
population when a set of past events is mentioned. Given the centrality
of the experience of war in this century, we can and must do better than
that.
To speak of 'collective remembrance' is to begin that task. Wars,
soldiers, and the victims of war have been remembered in ceremony, in
ritual, in stone, in film, in verse, in art; in effect in a composite of
narratives. All are charged with the weight of the event: twentiethcentury warfare is infused with horror as well as honour; the proper
balance in representing the two is never obvious.
Those who make the effort to remember collectively bring to the task
10
their private memories. They also use language and gestures filled with
social meaning. But the key mid-point, the linkage that binds their
stories and their gestures, between homo psychologicus - the man of
private memory - and homo sociologicus - the man of socially determined
memory - is action. Homo actans is our subject. He or she acts, not all
the time, and not usually through instruction from on high, but as a
participant in a social group constructed for the purpose of commemoration. Their efforts are at the heart of this book.
Many different approaches obtain. But one unifying element persists.
We stand at a mid-point between two extreme and unacceptable positions in this field: between those who argue that private memories are
ineffable and individual, and those who see them as entirely socially
determined, and therefore present whether or not anyone acts on them.
With Blondel, we urge that such approaches are best located in 'the
gallery of useless abstractions'.10 In between is the palpable, messy
activity which produces collective remembrance.
In this as in other areas, agency is arduous. Its opportunity costs time, money, effort - are substantial. And it rarely lasts. Other tasks take
precedence; other issues crowd out the ones leading to public work. And
ageing takes its toll: people fade away, either personally or physically.
The collective remembrance of past warfare, old soldiers, and the
victims of wars is, therefore, a quixotic act. It is both an effort to think
publicly about painful issues in the past and one which is bound to
decompose over time.
This fading away is inevitable. But the effort to create artefacts or
ceremonies in the aftermath of war has been so widespread that it is time
to consider them not as reflections of current political authority or a
general consensus - although some clearly are one or the other, but
rather as a set of profound and evanescent expressions of the force of
civil society itself. The history of collective remembrance of wars in this
century is infused with both sadness and dignity; an understanding of its
contours requires both.
Homo psychologicus
The difficult terrain between individual memories and collective remembrance may be traversed more safely in the light of the findings of two
very different communities of scholars. The first studies cognitive psychology; the second, social psychology and patterns of action. Each has
much to add to our understanding of remembrance as a social activity.
10
As cited by Coser in his introduction to Halbwachs, On collective memory, p.13.
11
Many historians use the term 'memory' as if it were unproblematic.

But here both scientific and historical disputes abound. Decades of
empirical research in cognitive psychology have unearthed sets of
terms and pathways which have a direct bearing on the nature of
individual memory. And since collective remembrance is an activity of
individuals coming together in public to recall the past, historians
would do well to reflect on the findings of cognitive psychologists on
how memory happens.
These findings are much too complex and varied to be discussed in
detail. All we can do here is to provide a stylized and schematic
summary of the major lines of interpretation in this vast and growing
field.11 When relevant, we highlight terms in the scientific literature
which have a bearing on the historical problem we address below.
Social learning
Cognitive psychologists use the term social learning. It is a process to be

distinguished from declarative learning, or learning facts about nature
(which plant is poison ivy) or the human environment (how to tell the
time). Declarative learning is storing away bits of information, such as
how many centimetres are in an inch, or when the Battle of Hastings
took place. Social learning, in contrast, is the assimilation by an
individual of narratives or scripts about himself and his exchanges with
other people. Given the slow pace of child development, and the care
needed at an early age, it is a commonplace to say that we are never the
first people to know who we are.
It should be evident why a student of 'social learning' cannot ignore
the findings of cognitive psychologists. It is true that their experiments
are unavoidably partial and 'unreal', in the sense of being unable to
show the overlap and interaction of individuals and groups. But they
force us to return to the individual, whose sense of the past is both the
beginning and the end of all processes of'social learning'.
11
R Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932); A. Baddeley,

Your memory: a user's manual (London: Penguin, 1992; A. M. Hoffman and H. S.
Hoffman, Archives of memory (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1990),
esp. ch. 1; M. Howe, Introduction to human memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1970);
L.R. Squire, Memory and brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Michael
Schudson, 'Dynamics of distortion in collective memory', in Memory distortion: how
minds, brains and societies reconstruct the past, edited by Michael Schudson (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 353-73; D. J. Schachter, Searching for
memory (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Y. Dudai, The neurobiology of memory (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
12

Memory traces
The process of recollection has a biochemical and a neurological dimension, both of which are still the subject of elementary research. Despite
the sheer complexity of these processes, a number of rudimentary
findings may be identified.
The first is the notion of a memory trace. Most experiences leave longterm memory traces, recorded in our episodic memory system - the system
which encodes 'what happened', that is, events. It is to be distinguished
from systems which record not 'what' but 'that' - mundane, matter-offact events or details about nature or human affairs, grouped under the
rubric of semantic memory. Long-term memory is defined as the retention
for more than one minute of either kind of information. All these traces
differ, though, in their density.
They also differ in accessibility for recognition or for recall. The density
(or weight of a memory) is shaped to a large extent by the dramatic
nature of the experience, its uniqueness, its being reconsidered or
reinterpreted after the fact as a turning point. Density is further
enhanced by the emotional nature of the experience (quite often
dramatic) and its autobiographical nature. Autobiographical memory
appears to be the most enduring kind of memory. For example, combat
experience is particularly dense because it is personal and dramatic.
Harrowing moments are denser still.
Interference
There is no convincing evidence so far of the physical decay or disappearance of long-term memory traces. They seem to be deposited in the
brain in an archeological manner; that is, they are there, even though
other traces are on top of them.
Longitudinal studies have found these traces surviving over six
decades. But some are not immediately available for retrieval. Why?
Because other memory traces create 'layers' deposited on top of the
original one, impeding its direct and immediate recall.
Psychologists refer to this obscuring or eclipsing of a memory trace by
the terms retroactive or proactive interference. An instance of 'retroactive
interference' is when newly encoded memory traces reshape, cover, or
eclipse older memory traces. Proactive interference occurs when early
memories shape our sense of the context or relative importance of later
experiences.
13
Recognition and recall
The nature of interference is not the same with all memory traces. Here
psychologists operate a distinction between 'recognition' and 'recall'.
Recognition is an association, an identification of an issue; recall is its
evaluation, requiring more active effort. Students may recognize the
name 'John Milton', but only some recall the character and significance
of Paradise Lost. For our purposes, the distinction is important, because
recognition of memory traces may survive interference, even when recall
doesn't. This is hardly surprising, since the amount of information
stored up for purposes of recognition is much less than that needed for
recall.
Distortion, reinterpretation, interpolation
Evidence produced so far supports the view that the distortion of

memory traces does not usually happen after the initial encodingIreconstruction of the experience in the memory trace. Distortion precedes
encoding.12
Another way of putting this point is to note that a memory trace is
not an exact replica of an experience, even under the best of circumstances. Memory traces have a telescoping!selective nature. That is, a
number of events or personalities are contracted into one, or some
aspects of an experience are ordered and highlighted. In effect, some
reinterpretation has already been made at this initial stage. It may be
done through schemata or scripts which are either personal ('this is the
story of my life'; or 'I'm always missing opportunities') or borrowed
from the culture or sub-culture of which the individual is a member
('it's hard to be a Jew').
Here we come to an area very familiar to historians. Memory traces
may be interfered with even after encoding, by a process of manipulation, or interpolated learning. Outside influences can persuade us of the
truth of certain notions or the reality of certain events, by advertising,
brain-washing, or propaganda.
The distortion and selection of visual memories is easier than in the
case of verbal ones. But in both, interference operates either by manipulating major so-called 'facts' and/or by introducing key interpretive
terms which have clear-cut resonances for the semantic memory of the
individual and are, of course, culture-dependent. The result is a new
script which integrates pieces of information brought to bear upon the
12
E. R Loftus, Eyewitness testimony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
14
interpretation of the event. As we all know, such new scripts may vary
dramatically from the original memory, let alone the event itself.
Rehearsal
Later access or recall of memories is greatly enhanced by the retelling of

these narratives, either by individuals alone or in public. Conversation is
a fundamental social act; hence the importance for the memory of war
of the oral testimony of survivors. Rehearsal is done by the individual not
by the society, through story-telling or meditation, though individuals
reinforce their personal rehearsals in social events or rituals. Such rituals
provide cues which are essential for triggering the process of recall/
retrieval. While individuals may have their own cues, ritual provides
them with social cues - moments of silence, saluting the flag, and so on.
Some events are sufficiently powerful to be recalled initially without
rehearsal. An earthquake is a good case in point. One hit San Francisco
in 1994. Virtually everybody in the Bay Area had a recollection of the
tremor, and held it passively for a time. This is indeed an exceptional
case, in which a 'passive' collective memory exists, unfiltered through
anyone's active attempt to make people remember it. What made it
more than purely individual was that the media and word of mouth
quickly made it just what each resident experienced at the moment of
the jolt. Here the exception to the rule that collective memory is not
passive memory is accounted for by the fact that the memory trace was
so powerful that no rehearsal was needed initially to recall it. Sooner or
later, though, these passive memories become formulaic - chants, such
as 'where was I when John Kennedy was shot' - or fade away. Then
recall requires rehearsal in public.13
In the retelling of memories, certain elements of the story are highlighted. Psychologists refer to these facets as primacy effects, which
enhance recollection. Salient events are more vividly remembered and
recalled, especially when they are associated with a specific time and
place. This is what is meant by the term 'context dependency'. Context
dependency may be extrinsic or intrinsic. On the one hand, memory traces
may be associated with certain external or 'extrinsic' features originating
outside the individual: smell, colour, sounds. Such memories, on the
other hand, may be linked powerfully with 'intrinsic' aspects of our
mood or personal situation at the time the memory trace was encoded.
A beautiful place may be recalled because of the elation or depression
the visitor brought to it: that is an example of 'intrinsic' context
13
We are grateful to Martin Jay for his comments on this point.
15
dependency. The evocation of a whole world triggered by a French

pastry - Proust's madeleine - is an instance of 'extrinsic' context dependency.
Experiments have shown that 'extrinsic contexts' affect recall but not
recognition. That is, if a student takes an examination requiring recall
rather than simple recognition - interpreting Paradise Lost rather than
knowing the name 'John Milton' - her grade is likely to be improved if
the examination occurs in the room where the class initially studied the
text. But when the test is a simple quiz, a test of recognition, no such
positive enhancement of performance occurs through the location of the
test. This finding may help to explain the importance of ritual in social
learning, since rituals help to produce 'extrinsic contexts' which
enhance the recall of memories at given moments and places.
Trauma
The encoding and revision of scripts are usually voluntary or deliberate
acts; we learn through story-telling and its echoes in our own lives. But
some events are harder to introduce into a script than others. There is a
threshold of density of experience; when passed, that experience is
usually referred to as a trauma or traumatic.
There are many different usages of this term, but for our purposes it is
possibly best to consider the term simply as connoting a serious and
enduring shock. Trauma, in this sense, is identified as latent or delayed
memory, and is especially marked by its sudden recurrence whatever the
individual's will to recall may be. A 'traumatic memory' may be
triggered by extrinsic contexts, that is, similarities of ambience, noise,
smell, mood. For instance, an individual walking through an American
city during a particularly steamy summer may feel the anxiety of jungle
combat, though it is only the heat and humidity which the two contexts
share. What triggers the memory is the traumatic nature of the encoded
experience. Under specific conditions, and occasionally long after the
initial set of 'traumatic events', these extrinsic contexts can produce
overwhelming recall. At this point the memory crowds out everything
else; it is potentially paralytic.14
The work of cognitive psychologists here reinforces the findings of
psychiatrists and neurologists, who have identified biochemical pathways of 'trauma'.15 But, for our purposes, the key element of this
14
15
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative and history (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Steve Southwick of West Haven Veterans Administration Hospital brought this
research to our attention in 1995; see the chapter he co-authored in Daniel Schachter,
16
analysis is that 'traumatic' memories are not a separate category of

remembrance, but simply an extreme phenomenon of processes of
recollection we all share.
Implications for the historical study of memory
The study of how individuals remember is hard enough. Historians

want to go one step further and study how groups of individuals
remember together. It is evident that we need all the help we can get.
For this reason, let us consider the implications of this body of cognitive
psychological research for the history of 'collective memory'.
Social learning
Societies do not learn. Individuals in societies learn, but their learning

has sufficient overlap for us to be able to speak metaphorically of social
learning. It follows that for two or more individuals to hold the same
memory, even if they have experienced the same event, means only that
there is sufficient overlap between their memory traces. For this overlap
to become a social phenomenon, it must be expressed and shared. In
this sense, and in this sense alone, can one speak, again metaphorically,
of 'collective memory'.
Shelf-life
Collective memory has no existence independent of the individual, and

in consequence, 'collective memory' has a shelf-life, after which individuals cease to share and express it. Memory artefacts are produced by
external rehearsal, but they are just that, memory aids. As long as there
are individuals using these aids, whether internally or externally in order
to rehearse their memories, then the process of remembrance is alive. It
may die out or it may be given a new lease on life; at that point, the
'shelf-life' is renewed, but not forever. One example is the way an Israeli
monument created by bereaved parents was adopted thirty years later by
a municipality which wanted to create a locus for civic pride.16 The
'shelf-life' of the monument was renewed thereby, but over time this
usage will fade away too.
Ritual and rehearsal
Latent (and even implicit, fleeting, or overlapping) memories become

active ('flash-bulbs lighting up') in specific times and places. Time is
16
(ed.), Memory distortion: how minds, brains and societies reconstruct the past (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
I. Shamir, Israeli war memorials, PhD thesis,Tel Aviv University, 1995, p. 150.
17
especially connected with 'ritual', which is a series of stylized and

repetitive actions. Spatial memory - which is to be distinguished from
visual memory - is the transformation of latent into active memory
when an individual occupies a site associated with an event or a ritual.
After the passing of these encounters in a particular place and at these
particular moments of social action, most individuals depart and store
the experience as individual memory. Then collective memory ceases,
though it can be revived through a return to the initial framework of
action.
Agency, 'brain-washing', and manipulation
Much attention has been paid to manipulation/reinterpretation of
memory by elites, particularly political/cultural ones, whether at the
moment of the events, or much later. It is important, though, to note
that much 'memory work' goes on spontaneously within civil society,
especially after salient or dramatic events. This work goes on through
exchanges among members of social networks, either those pre-existing
the events or created as a result of them. Agency in the constitution of
social learning about the past is crucial, but it operates from below, not
only from above.
War and remembrance
So far we have considered the implications of this area of research for
the study of historical remembrance in general. But the test of interdisciplinary work is in the concrete results of research in one field,
informed by the insights of another.
Our focus is on a particular problem in a particular time and place:
twentieth-century warfare in Europe, North America, and the Middle
East. Here it is evident that there is much of value to be derived from the
work of colleagues working in allied disciplines. Let us consider a
number of these implications, in the terminology described above.
Warfare is no doubt a time of dramatic, unique experiences, which
leave dense memory traces, individual and social. This is particularly
true in the twentieth century, with mass industrial warfare of conscript
armies. Obviously, because this is contemporary history, many living
witnesses are still around after each and every war and make a particular
contribution to social learning about the past. Hypotheses about agency
can thus be tested with greater accuracy and variety due to the presence
of these living witnesses.
These witnesses may be defined as agents, whether surviving soldiers, members of families of those killed or wounded, surviving civil
18
victims or their relatives, and even people peripherally affected by the

war far from the front lines. Those people are involved in memory
work, that is, public rehearsal of memories, quite often not in order to
create social scripts or schemata for the interpretation of the war. They
act in order to struggle with grief, to fill in the silence, to offer
something symbolically to the dead, for political reasons. In most of
their immediate concerns, they tend to fail. The dead are forgotten;
peace does not last; memorials fade into the landscape. It is a moot
question, at the very least, as to whether healing at the personal level
follows.
This intense activity, in family, survivor, or other networks, rehearses
the memory traces in the case of the agents involved and also transmits
information and scripts about the war to other contemporaries, and
beyond them, to generations born after the war. The scripts are based
upon autobiographical memory, depict dramatic events, are ritualized in
ceremonies, and thus impart many elements of social learning.
Other agents join in. Their activity has other objectives (profit or
other gain, artistic expression), but their efforts overlap with the work of
survivor networks. The difference, though, is that audiences (of a
television series, a play, a book) cannot really be considered a network; it
is extremely difficult to judge the variegated reactions of these consumers. The advantage of survivor networks is that their 'social learning'
may be passed on to later generations. These younger people, uninitiated into the actual experience, carry emotion-laden stories very
effectively. For some, carrying a survivor's narrative can approximate
survivorship itself.
We must be reticent, though, before concluding that most wartime
experience is remembered socially in this way. Much is forgotten, and
necessarily so. The dialectic between the need to remember and the
need to forget and to go on to a less harrowing phase of life has been and
remains an ongoing one.
Different approaches to the question of agency and victimhood are
evident in this book, for the question of who is a victim of war is a
vigorously contested one. At one end is Samuel Hynes, writing about
soldiers' narratives. 'Every narrator', he writes of soldier-writers, 'believes himself to have been to some degree an agent in his personal
war, and agents aren't victims' (p. 219). In the middle are Aguilhar,
telling the story of associations of disabled men, women, and children
in post-Civil War Spain, for example, the Comision de Madres de
Soldados Muertos or Association of Mothers of Dead Soldiers;
Winter, introducing the history of associations of disfigured men after
the 1914-18 war; or Prost - like Hynes, an historian who has served in
19
combat - who surveys Frenchmen who fought in the Second World

War, and notes that 'The most legitimate victims, at the very end of
the war, were the resistants, especially those who had been deported by
the Nazis to the concentration camps' (p. 173). Here agency and
victimhood cohabit. At the other end is Wieviorka, writing of the
survivors of Auschwitz, men like Leon Weliczker-Wells, who opened
the mass graves, extracting anything of value from the corpses. Wieviorka speaks of his testimony at the Eichmann trial (p. 136). His
victimhood is self-evident. But was he an agent? Certainly at the trial;
before then, perhaps, but by telling the story in 1962, he retained a
recognizable human voice. Hynes himself takes a more nuanced view
in an extended discussion of these issues elsewhere. Referring to the
concentration camps, he notes that 'in this brutal world of powerless
suffering it was possible, just possible, to be an agent - by small
assertions of the will in opposting actions and, afterward, by telling.
Because remembering is an action: to bear witness is to oppose.'17
Victimhood and agency have always been and remain in problematic
juxtaposition; they form a duality with different meanings in different
historical settings.
Homo sociologicus
In these introductory remarks, we offer some suggestions as to how
historians can learn from the neighbours. Our fundamental premise is
that the subject of remembrance is so vast that no discipline can claim
absolute authority in this field. For that reason, we turn to sociological
and anthropological reflections on this subject, once again in search of
allies.
Interdisciplinary work requires a clear notion of the limits of each
discipline. For the historian, the insights of cognitive psychology are
striking and suggestive. The problem remains, though, that homo psychologicus lives in isolation from his social setting. No man goes to war
alone. However the conflict develops, it is always a social activity. It is
necessary, therefore, to look beyond cognitive psychology to fully understand processes of remembrance in the aftermath of war.
One way forward is to explore sociological and anthropological
thought on the subject of collective memory. Such work proliferated
from the late nineteenth century. Many of these developments followed
choices made about the carriers of memory, however defined. These
carriers had different origins and functions. First came notions of racial
17
Samuel Hynes, The soldiers' tale. Bearing witness to modern war (London: Allen Lane,
1997), p. 269.
20
memory, in which the 'race' is the carrier and memory is in the 'blood'
or genetic equipment of a social group. Linked to this position, but
distinct from it, were concepts of Geistesgeschichte, or the history of the
spirit of an age, drawn out by elite interpreters of art, philosophy, or
literature.
Against these two positions, a new point of view emerged associated
with Emile Durkheim. His school located memory in the social structure, which provided individuals with the conceptual tools to remember
the past. In the work of Maurice Halbwachs we can see the most
elaborate development of this position.
More recently, historians of mentalites, or the mental furniture of a
social group, have drawn from earlier notions of Geistesgeschichte. These
scholars describe forms of thought and behaviour which are general
within a population, usually a national population. But they abjure the
study of elites, to concentrate on ordinary people. They are the carriers
of a society's unspoken assumptions about time, modes of comportment, and emotion. The carriers of collective memory, thus defined, are
the common people.
Anthropologists, following Roger Bastide, to whom we will return
below, have accepted this position, with some qualifications. Their
contribution is to specify the character of groups in which the people are
organized and the pivotal positions of their leaders, the secondary and
tertiary elites within those societies.
Racial memory
Before proximity to Nazi notions of racial identity contaminated and
discredited concepts of racial memory, there were many scholars and
public figures who developed notions of collective memory understood
as racial inheritance. Some were anti-Semites or anti-immigrants, defending the supposed purity of the host population and its way of life
against an alien wave. But others were simply carriers of nineteenthcentury notions of collective heredity, in which talent or deviance were
traits passed on from generation to generation.
Cultural memory
Some observers flirted with such hereditary notions as the source of
cultural continuities. This kind of cultural genetics was evident in the
writings of people of very different political outlooks. The German
racialist Moeller van den Bruck took it that exotic elements in Botticelli's art came from the eruption of 'an Asiatic karma' which brought to
21
the surface 'primeval Italian forms . . . Not only styles but also life, not
only movement but also people come back.'18
The racial message was embedded in works of art, and those who
could detect the charge therein, those (as it were) with Geiger counters
to register the radioactivity of the object, were poets, philosophers, and
historians. They were men who could take the pulse of their times.
These scientific metaphors were common at the turn of the twentieth
century, especially among the proponents of the school of collective
memory known as Geistesgeschichte, through its outstanding cultural
forms.
How the Geist moves over time was a subject for philosophical, not
biological, inquiry. Conducting it were scholars or artists who could
tease out the living presence of the past in artefacts or writings of a
vanished age. Jacob Burckhardt's comments on classical elements in
Donatello's 'David' are a case in point. Classical influences moved from
ancient to Renaissance Italy, Burkhardt argued, 'by way of an invisible
force, or through inheritance. Indeed one must never wholly forget . . .
that the people of central Italy stem from the ancient population.'19 The
poet Rainer Maria Rilke returned time and again to the theme of blood
inheritance in modes of thought and expression. 'And yet', he wrote in
1903, 'these long-forgotten [sic], dwell within us as disposition, as a
burden on our fate, as blood that courses and as gesture that arises from
the depths of time.'20
The German art historian Aby Warburg went beyond Geistesgeschichte
in a theory of social memory directly concerned with the transmission of
ancient forms and motifs to Renaissance art. The 'task of social
memory', he noted, is 'through renewed contact with the monuments of
the past', to enable 'the sap . . . to rise directly from the subsoil of the
past'.21 The charge is in the object; it is encountered and transmitted
through the creative work of the artist or scholar. Thus the sensitivity of
members of an elite liberates a message embedded in artefacts; then it
becomes accessible to the world at large.
Note the scientistic metaphors: elsewhere Warburg spoke of his work
as that of a ' "seismograph" responding to the tremors of distant earthquakes, or the antenna picking up the wave from distant cultures'.22 He
set up a library as a laboratory of memory. That collection, removed to
London after the Nazi accession to power in 1933, still operates today.
18
19
20
21
E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An intellectual biography. With a memoir on the history of

the library by F. Saxl (Oxford: Phaidon, 1970), p. 240.
As cited in Gombrich, Warburg, p. 239.
Ibid. p. 240; see also his Duino elegies, written between 1912 and 1922. Rainer Maria
Rilke, DuineserElegien (London: Hogarth Press, 1963).
22
As cited in Gombrich, Warburg, p. 250.
Ibid. p. 254.
22
Its purpose, to Warburg, was to serve as 'a collection of documents

relating to the psychology of human expression'. Its aim was to investigate how 'human and pictorial expressions originate; what are the
feelings or points of view, conscious or unconscious, under which they
are stored in the archives of memory? Are there laws to govern their
formation or re-emergence?'23 To this end, all disciplines must be
tapped. This is the essence of Kulturwissenschaft, part positivist, part
romantic meditation on the explosive power of works of art.
The memory of images is social memory to Warburg, in that a work of
art 'derives from a collaboration among individuals and thus is a symbol
that does not allow for the separation of form and content'.24 To
Warburg, art history is the study of style and meaning of creative works
located in specific historical periods. Art described a world view, an
expression of Geistespolitik, or the politics of the spirit of an age.25
Warburg's library covered many fields, but the specific focus of his
own work was on the 'significance of the influence of heathen antiquity
on the European mentality'. He believed that art was 'an inventory of
the emotions of a given epoch'; artists in the Renaissance confronted
Classical art and were stunned by 'the heritage of passionate [that is,
sensual] experience stored in memory-form'. That encounter - frequently laden with fear - was controlled and transformed in the process
of creation. The result is visible to us now as an efflorescence of images
in various media.
This cultural historian of imagery explored 'the historical sum of all
efforts made by man to overcome his fear'26 of primitive emotion. The
scholar registered both the charge released by antique art and the
challenge accepted by later artists to master it. Cultural memory - or
what he termed social memory - is the record of that confrontation
between past and present, that profound dialectic between emotion and
creativity.27
To be sure, Warburg was too sensitive a scholar to ignore the range
of symbols to be found in popular art. He did not limit his gaze to the
works of elite artists alone, but on occasion drew on the art of the
Pueblo Indians, astrological pamphlets, and postage stamps. His
interest extended as well to the iconography of First World War
propaganda. The symbolic language of art was ubiquitous; sometimes
lesser artists disclosed the codes of an age more transparently than did
23
24
25
26
Ibid. p. 222.
Leopold Ettlinger, 'Kunstgeschichte als Geschichte', Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, 16 (1971), pp. 7 - 1 9 .
As cited in Jan. Assmann, 'Collective memory and cultural identity', New German
Critique, 65 (1995), p . 130.
27
Ibid. p. 139.
Assmann,'Collective memory', p. 130.
23
the greater.28 Teasing out the meaning of these codes and comparing
cultural differences between groups were the primary tasks of the
student of 'social memory'.
Collective memory
So far we have moved from racial memory to social memory. The first
adopted biological images, which have had little residue in recent years.
The second explored an idealist universe in which the history of ideas
and creativity over centuries naturally privileged the elites which produced and sponsored art.
Warburg's collection was not limited to great works of art, but the
initial direction of his project was towards the study of cultural history
through masterpieces of what he understood as 'the spirit of the age' in
which they were created. This inevitably elitist approach was challenged
in the period in which Warburg was writing - he died in 1929 - by
another, more populist school of cultural studies. Primarily (but not
exclusively) in France, the focus shifted away from racial memory and
the analysis of great works or art as the embodiment of historical
memory to broader and more inclusive issues and evidence.
Here the work of Emile Durkheim and his school was fundamental.
They located social memory not in race or in works of art but in the
social structure itself. Contrary to the position developed contemporaneously by Henri Bergson, Durkheimians held tenaciously that individual memory was entirely socially determined.29 Durkheim gathered a
group of like-minded scholars around the journal Annee sociologique,
where from 1898 there appeared learned discussions of a decidedly
interdisciplinary kind. Social psychology, demography, geography,
history, and political economy were all invoked as elements of sociological analysis, which in Durkheim's system, superseded them all.
In this system, social facts are external to the individual's mind. The
theory of their organization, institutionalization, and operation is what
Durkheimian sociology was all about. Durkheim offered an analysis of
collective memory diametrically opposed to notions of racial memory
and remote from the elitism of much of the study of great art as the
repository of cultural memory.
The implications of his work for collective memory were elaborated in
28
29
A b y W a r b u r g , 'Italian art a n d international astrology in t h e Palazzo Schifanoia in

F e r r a r a ' , in G e r t Schiff (ed.), German essays on art history ( N e w York: C o n t i n u u m ,
1 9 8 8 ) , p . 3 3 . T h a n k s are d u e to M a r k Russell a n d P e t e r Burke for drawing this
reference to o u r attention, a n d for critical c o m m e n t s o n these p o i n t s .
Terry N . Clark, Prophets and patrons: the French University and the emergence of the social
sciences ( C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . : H a r v a r d University Press, 1 9 7 3 ) , p p . 1 6 8 - 7 0 .
24
the inter-war years by a number of scholars, most notably Maurice

Halbwachs (1877-1945).30 Some of this work was done at Strasbourg,
where he joined a remarkable group of intellectuals committed to interdisciplinary research.31 Among them were the historians Marc Bloch and
Lucien Febvre, co-founders of the journal Annales d'histoire economique et
sociale, on whose editorial board Halbwachs sat. We shall return below to
the historical approach to collective memory which emerged from this
collaboration, but first we need to survey Halbwachs's own contribution.
Halbwachs's work is a critique of individualism in approaches to
memory. Contrary to Bergson, he argued that all individual memory is
socially framed. Collective memory is the sound of voices once heard by
groups of people, afterwards echoing in an individual who was or is part
of that group. It is a form of individual memory, socially constructed
and maintained.32 The duration of collective memory is the duration of
the group (s) producing it. In words echoing the concept of shelf-life
discussed above, he wrote:
Forgetting is explained by the disappearance of these frameworks or a part of
them, either because our attention is no longer able to focus on them or because
it is focused somewhere else . . . But forgetting, or the deformation of certain
recollections, is also explained by the fact that these frameworks change from
one period to another.33
This is a critical element in Halbwachs's approach. Collective

memory is not inscribed in the genes; it is not located in great works of
art; it is imbedded in the social structure, and changes when social
bonds weaken or dissolve, or when new bonds replace them.
Halbwachs held that 'a person remembers only by situating himself
with the viewpoint of one or several groups and one or several currents
of collective thought'. To recollect an event is to recall 'the viewpoint' of
the social group through whose eyes we see the event.34 Collective
memory is thus the matrix of socially positioned individual memories.
This is critical: memory does not exist outside of individuals, but it is
never individual in character.
The collective memory, for its part, encompasses the individual memories while
remaining distinct from them. It evolves according to its own laws, and any
30
31
32
33
34
Ibid. p. 199.
John E. Craig, 'Maurice Halbwachs a Strasbourg', Revue franfaise de sociologie, 20
(1979), pp. 2 7 3 - 9 2 .
Maurice Halbwachs, The collective memory, translated by R I. and V. Y. Ditter (New
York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 24. A new and completely revised edition of La memoire
collective has been published recently, in which Gerard Namer has restored some
material left out of the earlier edition. See Maurice Halbwachs, La memoire collective
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). These changes do not affect our interpretation.
H a l b w a c h s , On collective memory, p . 172.
H a l b w a c h s , The collective memory, p . 3 3 .
25
individual remembrances that may penetrate are transformed within a totality

having no personal consciousness.35
La memoire collective is not the reified memory of the collective - a

notion filled with nationalist and racialist echoes. It is rather the
individual's memory, fashioned by the social bonds of that individual's
life. 'I need only carry in mind', Halbwachs asserted, 'whatever
enables me to gain the group viewpoint, plunge into its milieu and
time, and feel in its midst.'36 Indeed, such 'social frameworks for
memory' are essential prerequisites for individual remembering, since
'it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these
frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act
of recollection'.37
Annales and the history o/mentalites
The influence of Halbwachs on subsequent studies in cultural history
has been real, but muted by another facet of his work. In his rejection
of Bergsonian subjectivity, he returned to the positivist side of
Durkheimian sociology in positing an impossibly strict distinction
between history (objective) and memory (subjective).38 This bifurcation corresponded as well to a certain cavalier attitude of Durkheimian sociology to the study of history, relegated to a subordinate
position rather than a true partnership in the development of the
social sciences.39
That partnership was the foundation stone of a group of historians
and social scientists who came together in the University of Strasbourg
around the journal Annales d'histoire economique et sociale.40 For our
purposes, the major concept produced by this school is histoire des

mentalites, which may be translated loosely as the history of implicit
35
36
37
38
39
40
Ibid. p. 5 1 .
Ibid. p. 118; for an earlier formulation, see On collective memory, p. 5 3 .
Halbwachs, On collective memory, p . 3 8 .
Halbwachs, The collective memory, ch. 2. For a critique of Halbwachs's position, and the
entire notion of 'collective memory', see N o a Gedi and Yigal Elam, 'Collective memory
- w h a t is it?', History & Memory, 8, 1 (1996), pp. 3 0 - 5 0 .
John E. Craig, 'Sociology and related disciplines between the wars: Maurice Halbwachs
and the imperialism of the Durkheimians', in The sociological domain: the Durkheimians,
and the founding of French sociology, edited by Philippe Besnard, pp. 2 6 3 - 8 9 ( C a m bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Jacques Revel, 'Histoire et sciences
sociales: les paradigmes des Annales', Annales. Economies, societes, civilisations, 34, 6
(1979), p . 1364.
Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: a life in history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), ch. 5. See also Andre Burguiere, 'Histoire d'une histoire: la naissance des
Annales', Annales. Economies, societes, civilisations, 34, 6 (1979) pp. 1347-59.
26
collective assumptions, attitudes, and emotions.41 A culture, Salman

Rushdie tells us, is described by its untranslatable words.42 This is one
of them.
In 1941, one of the founders of the Annales, Lucien Febvre, offered
this clarion call for the history of collective emotions:
The historian cannot understand or make others understand the functioning of
the institutions in a given period or the ideas of that period or any other unless
he has that basic standpoint, which I for my part call the psychological
standpoint, which implies the concern to link up all the conditions of existence
of the men of any given period with the meanings the same men gave to their
own ideas.
Febvre complained that we have 'No history of love, just remember
that. We have no history of death. We have no history of pity, or of
cruelty. We have no history of joy.' The research agenda was clear: 'I am
asking for a vast collective investigation to be opened on the fundamental sentiments of man and the forms they take'; in short, on the
history of mentalites.43
The sweep, the daring, the profound desire to destroy the boundaries
between the private and public realms are obvious here. 44 But the
precise nature of the subject was (and is) still puzzling. The Frenchness
of both the terms and the enterprise has been a mystery to many nonFrench scholars. Alphonse Dupront, one of the finest practitioners of
the history of mentalites,45 offered this discussion as a way into defining
the subject:
I prefer to use the term 'the history of collective psychology'. It is not
satisfactory, since it is equivocal: even in French it has the air of only one
discipline, 'collective psychology' . . . and to foreign ears . . . it appears to be a
Gallic secret . . . If we accept the Greek with its indefinite perfection, the term
'the history of the collective psyche' approaches what it entails. And in place of
our strange but necessary expression about 'the analysis of the collective
41
42
43
44
For a classic formulation, see Marc Bloch, 'Memoire collective, traditions et coutumes',
Revue de synthese historique, 1 1 8 - 2 0 (1925), pp. 7 0 - 9 0 .
Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Pan Books, 1992), p. 12.
Peter Burke (ed.), A new kind of history: from the writings of Lucien Febvre, translated by
K. Folka (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 24. For a recent and lucid
discussion of the position, see Roger Chartier, Cultural history: between practices and
representations, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
For an aperitif of this heady approach, see Jacques Le Goff, 'Mentalities: a history of
ambiguities', in Constructing the past. Essays in historical methodology, edited by Jacques
Le Goff and Pierre Nora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For an
appreciation of the implications of Halbwachs's approach for one maverick historian of
mentalites, see Patrick H. Hutton, 'Collective memory and collective mentalities: the
Halbwachs-Aries connection', Historical reflectionsI Reflexions historiques, 15, 2 (1988),
pp. 311-22.
45
Alphonse Dupront, Du Sacre. Croisades et pelerinages. Images et langages (Paris:
Gallimard, 1988).
27
mentality', perhaps a procession of terms will do: the history of values, of

mentalities, of forms, of symbols, of myths, be it in general, or in a particular
civilization.46
Anthropological approaches
For our purposes, the history of the mentalites concept has limitations.
The emphasis on the common people homogenizes them, and also
exaggerates their margin of manoeuvre, which may be shaped by elites
whether primary or secondary. It also blurs the borderline between the
individual and the collective, a problem we have encountered in Durkheim's and Halbwachs's work as well.
A response to this set of issues may be found in the anthropological
work of Roger Bastide, derived from his comparative study of African
populations in Haiti and Brazil from slavery to the present.47 Bastide
accepts that man remembers as part of a social group: individual
memories are rehearsed and located in the past in reference to the
individual memories of other people, that is, those persons who are
significant at different levels for that individual. The intermeshing of
individual memories creates collective remembrance, feeds it, and maintains its continuity. It is through this remembrance that human societies
develop consciousness as to their identity, as located in time. A social
group is composed of individuals who enter into an exchange relationship at the level of consciousness. This is what Bastide calls networks of
complimentarity.
Bastide rejects the notion of collective memory as a reified, separate

entity existing above individuals. Collective memory is the end product
of that exchange relationship - exchange of information, memories,
values - between the individuals who compose the group. Each individual contributes his own memories. The weight of various memories
in this process is by no means equal. The contribution of elites carries
greater weight. Priests in a historically based cult, elders who tell the
history of the tribe are examples of these elite groups. Whoever expresses
Alphonse Dupront, 'Problemes et methodes d'une histoire de la psychologie collective',

Annales. Economies, societes, civilisations, 16, 1 (1961), p. 3, n. 2.
Roger Bastide, The African religions of Brazil. Towards a sociology of the inurpenetration of
civilizations, translated by Helen Sebba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1960); Roger Bastide, 'Memoire collective et sociologie de bricolage', Annee sociologique
21 (1970), pp. 65-108; Roger Bastide, Applied anthropology, translated by Alice L.
Morton (London: Croom Helm, 1971). See also, Nathan Wachtel, 'Remember and
never forget', History and Anthropology, 2 (1986), and L. Valensi, 'From sacred history
to historical memory and back', History and Anthropology, 2 (1986).
28
his memories in the public space leaves a deeper impact than those who
keep (or who are kept) silent.
It follows that the social group locates this exchange relationship
between individual memories in two dimensions. The first is organization: that is, the relative weight of certain individual memories as
compared to others within this network of complimentarity. Organization is shaped by the nature of the group, and particularly by its power
structure. The second dimension is structure, a kind of interpretive code
which endows individual memories with meaning according to the living
tradition of remembrance of that specific group. This tradition may be
passed on through rituals which give it an emotional, behavioural
expression, but it may also be transmitted in a manner both emotional
and rational through school textbooks, stories passed from father to son
or mother to daughter, fiction, poetry, popular legends, and the like.
This interpretive code fits in well with the notion of social scripts/
schemata suggested by cognitive psychologists.
Collective memory here is a matrix of interwoven individual memories. It has no existence without them, but the components of individual
memory intersect and create a kind of pattern with an existence of its
own. Strong colours or a salient location within the pattern represent
the 'organizational dimension', while the overall layout represents
'structure', or the cultural interpretation. To change metaphors, it is
possible to speak of collective memory, a la Bastide, as a sort of choir
singing, or better still, a sing-along. This is a kind of event which is not
very regimented, and in which each participant begins singing at a
different time and using a somewhat different text or melody which he
himself has composed or developed. But he does it according to norms musical, linguistic, literary - accepted by other members of that informal choir. Moreover, when each sings, he hears himself in his inner
ear, but he also hears the collective choir in his external ear. That is, he
hears the product of the collective effort. Certainly, this collective
product may modify or even slant his own singing, almost in spite of
himself.
Bastide emphasizes that the end product is in a state of constant flux,
due to the changing relationships between members of the group.
Hence his use of the term bricolage, borrowed from his colleague,
Claude Levi-Strauss, who meant by it the eclectic and ever-changing
composition of cultural forms.48
Bastide leads us inevitably to the study of civil society. This term
describes the domain between family and the state. It is composed of
48
Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955).
29
voluntary social groups, led by secondary elites. These elites help shape
the process of remembrance, though their freedom of action is limited
by the contribution of individual members of this group. Overall, they
may be as important as the state in the overall processes of remembrance
constantly ongoing in society as a whole.49
Homo agens
The literature we have surveyed is both necessary and incomplete as a
guide to social processes of remembrance with respect to twentiethcentury warfare. What is missing in cognitive psychology is the sense
that experience is intrinsically social; what is missing in the sociological
approach is the appreciation of remembrance as a process, dependent
upon groups of people who act over time. It is this collective enterprise
through which homo agens creates and maintains. If rehearsal is the key
to remembrance, agents count. Among these agents, we have chosen to
concentrate upon those coming from civil society because state agency
and manipulation have been sufficiently well documented. Even in
totalitarian situations, however, state agency does not control individual
or group memory completely.
Civil society, as we have noted, links the family and the state
apparatus. It includes the market place as well as private or corporate
associations. Businessmen, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, producers, distributors, painters, sculptors, photographers all satisfy demands; they
present versions of the past, and do so for a fee. Some times homo actans
is in it for the money; sometimes not.
Artistic expression for the purposes of collective remembrance exists
both within the market place and beyond it. The works of poets,
novelists, painters, and sculptors about war, soldiers, and the victims of
war are well documented. Their work constitutes points of reference for
many social scripts, and have enduring intrinsic qualities. Still, as some
of our essays will show, for example on Europe after the Great War and
Israel during its half-century of warfare, their vision is not imposed on
voluntary groups in society, but tends to be in tune with the sensibilities
many groups develop on their own. It is the activity of these groups,
important but neglected, as major agents of remembrance, which we
study in this book.
We have selected remembrance of war not only because industrialized
war is a central fact of the twentieth century. War is trauma, a situation
49
For a fuller discussion of these and other issues arising from Bastide's work see Noelle
Bourguet, Lucette Valensi, and Nathan Wachtel (eds.), Between memory and history
(Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990).
30
of overwhelming, extreme, and violent pressure with enduring impacts.

It disrupts equilibria and requires an effort to restore them. That effort
(intentionally or not) contributes to processes of remembrance, a point
to which we shall return below.
As the empirical evidence presented in the chapters which follow
shows, that process has four central features.
Multi-faceted negotiation
The state is ever-present, but it is neither ubiquitous nor omnipotent.
Civil society is where many groups try to work out their own strategies
of remembrance alongside the state, sometimes against it. The fact that
such groups do succeed in attracting individuals who after a war may
feel a strong urge to resume their individual lives, is something which
requires explanation.
Remembrance consists of negotiations between a multiplicity of
groups, including the state. Obviously, the partners are not equal.
Repression happens, but counter-voices may be heard. If some voices
are weaker than others, at least in the context of a pluralistic society, this
is not only because they lack resources - or to return to the metaphor of
the choir - they are too far from the microphone. They may also be
weak because of self-censorship due to lack of moral status in the eyes of
others, or due to a low self-image.
Inconsequent intentions; unintended consequences
Groups do not necessarily raise their voice in the choir with the intent of
shaping historical consciousness. They may do so for their own private
reasons: in order to cope with grief, to create a powerful lobby so as to
achieve material gain, for revenge or exoneration. They may or may not
achieve these aims; in fact, some of these aims are beyond reach from
the start: this may be called the 'law of non-consequent intentions',
which is to say, the unlikelihood of the realization of a programme of
action, such as keeping alive the memory of an individual son. The main
unintended consequence of even a quixotic endeavour of this kind is its
contribution to the overall process of remembrance.
The trajectory of shelf-life
Remembrance is by its very nature vulnerable to decay, and hence has
shelf-life. Even under the delayed impact of the extreme conditions of
war, memories do not necessarily endure, if only because there is
31
interference from new memory traces. Constant rehearsal, group action,

ingenuity in mobilizing resources are elements which keep memory
traces alive: that is, they create a relatively more successful process of
remembrance.
Groups of war victims deal with a particularly dense memory trace,
that of autobiographical memory. But even their efforts are not always
successful. Certainly the passage from the generation of victims contemporaneous with the event to the next generation is a very difficult
one, given the inevitable change in social priorities.
Certain memories of war endure, while most others do not. Endurance and persistence require explanation. Forgetting and fade-out are
usually the rule. To advance this argument is to go against the grain of
the idealistic vision of representations as disconnected from social
contexts, from interactions, and material conditions.
The notion of trauma suggests another dimension of'shelf-life'. Some
studies of war victims have adopted a notion of delayed impact to
describe those so overwhelmed by war experiences as to be entirely
unable to register them at the time.50 This numbing is not a full
protection from these injuries to the mind; later on, and involuntarily,
these earlier events may be vividly recalled or re-enacted by sufferers of
what is now known as 'post-traumatic stress disorder'.51 The notion of
shelf-life is perfectly compatible with this topology of recurrent memories. They may flare up at any time, even among those unafflicted with
pathological conditions. A resurgence of memory work after the Eichmann trial in 1961 is a case in point among Jews all over the world (see
chapter 6). The second generation of Japanese Americans gave the
memory of their parents' internment (see chapter 7) not only a new
lease of life but also a vigour lacking in the muted public expression of
these members of the older generation.
It is not only rekindled interest among second or third generations of
the victims which may help prolong shelf-life. As the case of the
descendants of Holocaust survivors in Europe and North America
proves, the availability of new techniques of information technology the video-cassette recorder - enables testimony expressing 'authentic'
autobiographical memory available to large audiences. These are
reached in an audio-visual fashion, which can be revived decades after
the original imprint of the testimony of war victims.
50
51
See Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: explorations in memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995).
For full references see: Daniel Schachter, (ed.), Memory distortion: how minds, brains and
societies reconstruct the past (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
32

The ambiguity of the healing effects
Mourning is an essential part of the story of remembrance of war, but

there is much evidence that it is problematic to consider remembrance
in Freudian terms, as the work of mourning, leading to healing,
reconciliation, and separation of the living from the lost loved-one. Our
story is less optimistic and much less redemptive, as Walter Benjamin
has argued (see chapter 11). Even when some healing occurs, it is at
best healing for a while, and when old age sets in, healing may cease
altogether and wounds reopen. Mourning may never end, and even
when it seems to be completed, it may re-emerge. This form of
mourning is usually termed 'melancholia'.52 One case in point is the
suicide forty years after the Second World War - and decades after the
publication of his apparently healing memoirs - of the Italian writer
Primo Levi. Another case is the suicide in old age of fathers of Israeli
war dead, sometimes using their service revolver to end their lives at the
grave of their sons.
The above generalizations represent what we can say in an introductory
fashion about what our groups of researchers have found in their
empirical work. Future research on homo agens may modify these
findings, but these very palpable situations point out a number of
mechanisms and processes involved. Given the limited number of cases
we present, whatever we learn from them is indicative rather than
conclusive.
In light of the chapters in this book, what are the mechanisms and
processes of remembrance?
Scale
First, activity is above all small scale. Groups of individuals, usually

victimized by war in some way, carrying autobiographic memory, meet
face to face. Even if these individuals are part of a larger whole, they also
have face-to-face points of encounter - as in veterans' organizations.
They constitute 'networks of complimentarity'. Their vision is of necessity narrow even though their implicit concerns - for example, war as
disaster - may be much wider. This brings us back to the two laws of
'unintended consequences' and of 'non-consequent intentions', referred
to above. The groups may wish to do something which concerns their
immediate circle - assistance for traumatized individuals, for example but perforce they may wish to operate on a wider scale. This is evident
52
Jay Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning: the Great War in European cultural history
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 113-14.
33
in many of the cases discussed below, and in particular with regard to

the Japanese American case, and the French-Jewish groups (see chapters 6 and 7).
In the aftermath of the First World War, a huge bureaucracy
handled legitimate claims for compensation for war injury or loss.
These bulky, rationalized, and hierarchical institutions exasperated
survivors, by their inefficiency and their insensitivity to the personal
dimensions of loss. To fill in that empty space, small-scale groups
appeared. They provided the assistance in mourning and mutual help
which no state apparatus offered. The scale of the local action of
these groups was small, giving free range to the expression of
sentiments of loss, and involving essentially egalitarian structures as a
sort of counter-image of the state. The fact that this situation (see
chapter 2) recurs in a much longer conflict, yet in a much smaller
society - that of Israel (see chapter 9) indicates why such mechanisms
proliferate in the twentieth century, with its centralized state and
industrial warfare.
This is not to idealize civil society. Weak social groups may not have a
voice at all; consider the case of the Muslim Harkis in France after the
Algerian War, who lacked both articulation and a capacity for organization. As we have mentioned above, the low self-esteem of conscript
soldiers made their voice somewhat faint. Interpolated social learning also known as distortion - occurs vigorously in state-produced commemoration. But small groups do not have a more balanced view. In any
civil society, there are contested views, diverging more or less radically
about what happened in the past. Each group highlights elements close
to its own traumatized members. German war veterans obscured the
sacrifices of Jewish soldiers in the First World War; Israeli-born veterans
highlighted the losses of their cohort in 1948, while disregarding the
huge sacrifices made by new immigrants during the same war (see
chapter 9). In both cases, it is the nature of the audience of the small
group involved which determines the kind of telescoping or selection in
the process of encoding memory traces. Here is a classic instance of the
social framing of individual memory through reference to what the
group shares.
But silences are not just a matter of who you highlight but also what
you highlight and what you obscure or sanitize. Soldiers' memoirs
recognize degradation but rarely dwell on it. The crimes committed by
comrades are known by all; why elaborate if those for whom the account
was written - namely, fellow soldiers - know this all along? Instead (see
chapter 10), soldiers' stories reinforce the decencies that survive the
indecencies of combat.
34
The nature of warfare
The nature of warfare is a critical determinant of the activity of

remembrance. A succession of wars or other kinds of violent disruptions
presents a different challenge to remembrance in the case of one single
war, however large. The Russian and Israeli instances (chapters 3, 9)
represent such limiting cases of decades of conflict, producing 'retroactive interference' which impinges upon memory traces of earlier
decades of violence. The Russian case is particularly poignant because
many of the upheavals were self-inflicted: civil war, famine, forced
collectivization, purges. Israeli society coped better, perhaps because the
range of options for remembrance was broader in a democratic setting.
But even here the 'primacy effect' of the 1948 war - so powerful in the
1950s and 1960s - is on the wane under the retroactive interference of
memory traces of more recent and more controversial conflicts.
Constraints within civil society
But civil society itself is a limiting factor in the work of remembrance.

Civil society is defined by its position with respect to the state. A
dictatorship or an authoritarian regime may set severe limits to civil
freedom of expression and action, even in the realm of small-scale
remembrance activity, let alone in full-scale action. In Russia (see
chapter 3) even communication within families with regard to their
experience of war and repression was greatly curbed; it could be done
only in a haphazard manner, and in one-on-one situations. Still this case
also shows the inventiveness of a heavily damaged civil society. For
instance, despite the weakness of the Church, which had been the
custodian of the traditions mediating existential issues, like death, civil
society found ways of marshalling these resources. But let us not
exaggerate what civil society can do under such conditions. To a great
extent, the regime won; many memory traces vanished with the physical
disappearance of the victims. Recall today of some aspects of that past
may be well nigh impossible.
In Spain in the 1960s, before the demise of the dictatorship, another
limiting feature of remembrance appeared. This multi-faceted negotiation between social groups arrived at a kind of implicit pact to avoid
confronting the trauma of the Civil War and the repression which
followed. The fear of a return to the polarization of Spanish society in
the 1930s was the core around which the consensus emerged (see
chapter 4). Here silence was a condition of the transition to democracy,
and to its stabilization in the 1980s and 1990s under the Socialists.
Not everyone concurred. Those who wish to break the silence go
against the tide. Some Spanish anarchists insist on doing so anyway.
35
Another instance not examined in this book reinforces the contested

nature of such arrangements to limit open discussion even under conditions of democracy. In South Africa in the 1990s, a 'Truth and
Reconciliation Commission' took evidence from people who had
engaged in violent acts of repression during the apartheid era. An open
admission of guilt is a ticket to amnesty. Families of victims, as well as
political groups such as the Pan African Congress challenged this
arrangement, but did not generate widespread public support.
We return here to the question raised by Walter Benjamin, of how
healing occurs, if at all. Benjamin's complaint was against a kind of
pseudo-healing that screens us off from confronting the deeper trauma
beneath the apparent wound. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a member of
the Commission, argues that public repentance and forgiveness are
essential for healing, both personal and social. Others suspend judgment, or reject this claim altogether. It is critical to note that these
arrangements are not just imposed from on high. Both in Spain and in
South Africa negotiation at all levels occurred, and is still ongoing.
Representations of war
Most of these groups tend to generate representations of war as primarily

traumatic: overwhelming, nasty, and disruptive over a relatively long
period. It is not the case that the evidence we present is selected to show
this outcome. Mixed and dense memory traces appear in many war
narratives and in the ways survivors speak of the event. Elements of
elation, of pride, of camaraderie persist, but negative, disruptive
memory traces exist too. The latter tend to motivate individuals to
repeated rehearsal of memories in order to restore the equilibrium
disrupted by war. In post-1918 Germany, the humiliation of defeat was
the subject of reiteration as the centrepiece of a political movement
dedicated to restoring Germany's national pride. The celebration of the
'war experience', the baptism of fire of a whole generation, took on
sombre and defiant tones since its price was the humiliation of the
Fatherland.
In the case of the more 'positive' memory traces, in victorious wars,
such activity is not as urgently called for. This is why, over time, the
voice of those who rehearse through lamentation is likely to dominate
the chorus of small-scale remembrance more than the voice of those
who celebrate moments of glory or valour. Lamentation, however, is not
at all the same as a critique of war, because the blame can be put
elsewhere: on fate, on the shoulders of the enemy, or of some alien
domestic group, for instance, the 'stab in the back legend' of the 1920s
in Germany.
36
Writers and poets codify images of war while the fighting is still on.
Thereby they enlarge the interpretive codes available in the culture for
the small groups engaged in their separate acts of remembrance. Later
on, these words, verses, stories, may be appropriated by official organizations or by the state, but their origin is within civil society itself. One
instance is the poem 'The silver platter', written in a premonitory mode
by the Israeli writer Nathan Alterman during the mobilization of
December 1947. Fighting had just begun, but Alterman was already
visualizing the disappearance of a whole cohort of young men and
women. Their ethereal bodies, in his vision, would constitute the 'silver
platter' upon which the then unborn state of Israel would be presented
to the Jewish people. Over the next year, while the war continued, the
poem was used by families and comrades of those who were killed. Only
later was it incorporated into the official liturgical code of the Israeli
Memorial Day.53
Representations may be created for entirely commercial reasons.
When Robert Graves wrote Goodbye to all that, a Great War novel/
memoir, he was trying (as he himself said) to cash in on the commercial
success of another war novel/memoir, All quiet on the Western Front, by
Erich Maria Remarque. So did many of the European post-1945 filmmakers discussed in chapter 5.
The success of these filmic efforts is partly a function of their
catching/exploiting the mood of the audiences who viewed them. Still,
an unintended consequence of their work was to provide a set of codes
about war and victimhood. These codes were not passed directly to
individual members of the audience, but were mediated through families, yet another case of a small group. Film-going was still a family
affair in the 1950s. Decades later, some of these films, for instance
Rossellini's, may still appeal to new audiences on video because of their
intrinsic artistic value, while renewing the initial message about survivors of the Second World War.
Soldiers' tales, as described in chapter 10, are expressions of codes
shared by soldiers and reinforced in the telling. The positive, intriguing,
or piquant stories repeated time and again are useful as a counter-weight
against darker images. The result is neither the domination of one
rhetoric nor another: at least in soldiers' stories, told by soldiers and for
soldiers, and made available to others through publication, the outcome
is never certain, but the conflict is not resolved.
Each of these groups presents war through a particular interpretive
code - or 'structure', in Bastide's terms. But these are more often than
53
Dan Meron, MulHa'ach Ha'shotek (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1992).
37
not selected from a range available in the culture. Complete departure

from conventional forms is very rare, as in the case of the secondgeneration Japanese Americans who try to introduce concentration
camp symbols into American history. As such they face heavy odds and
their chances of integration into the American interpretive code remain
in doubt. The case of French soldiers after the Algerian War shows how
difficult it is to innovate. On the contrary, these men had two prior sets
of representations of war - two social 'scripts' - standing in the way of
their own story. The first was the moral crusade of French veterans of
1914 to 1918, whose representation of war was as a crime that must
never be repeated; the second was the image of the maquisard of the
Second World War, disturbingly similar to their enemies in Algeria (see
chapter 8). Because their experience could not be located within either
interpretive network, the range of social action available to them was
severely limited. The Algerian War was not a 'good war'; neither was it
(especially in the countryside) heroic; it was altogether desultory
warfare.
Spatial memory
Artefacts matter: to state that process is crucial is not to deny this point.
They are at one and the same time the product of such processes as well
as 'memory aids' for its later trajectory. Artefacts are what the French
designate as les lieux de memoire.5^ In their absence, as not only in Russia
but also in revolutionary China, memory work is much more arduous.
Artefacts related to place enable the retrieval of dense memory traces,
because they create 'extrinsic context dependency'. It should be noted
that such 'extrinsic contexts', according to experimental psychology,
help 'recall/access', but not 'recognition'. The case of the concentration
camp exhibit in Los Angeles (see chapter 7) is apposite here. The
organizers intended to re-trigger such memories among second generation Japanese Americans. Yet success is not guaranteed.
The history of family pilgrimage after the First World War to the
battlefields is well known (see chapter 2). But other less obvious linkages
are powerful. The French songwriter/performer, Marc Ogeret, offered a
glimpse of this process in his chanson, entitled 'Verdun', written in the
1970s.
I have seen Verdun
I have seen Verdun
I have seen Verdun in the rain . . .
And I, who do not really like
54
Pierre Nora, 'Between memory and history: Les lieux de memoire', Representations, 26
(1989), pp. 7 - 2 5 .
38

That old veterans' line;
Now, I understand it,
I understand it.
Another instance in which spatial memory operates is the tangible

character of war memorials. Those in mourning used them not only for
ceremony, but also for a ritual of separation, wherein touching a name
indicates not only what has been lost, but also what has not been lost.
Visitors to such memorials frequently leave flowers, notes, objects,
which serve as a focus of a ritual exchange. The dead have given
everything; the living, symbolically or tangibly, offer something in
return. The Museum of American History in Washington's Smithsonian
Institution has a large store of such objects left at the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial.55
This is hardly surprising, since the dead aren't present: hence the
need to re-present them. The names are there, and so are the survivors,
whose acts of exchange can only be symbolic at best. But the power of
objects, as well as the power of place, cannot be denied.
The role of the state
The thrust of analysis in this book is towards highlighting the role of

second- and third-order elites within civil society. The social organization of remembrance tends to be decentralized. This claim shifts the
emphasis in this field away from the central organizations of the state,
both from the top downward and sideways. That is to say, away from
state central institutions, and towards civil society groupings, their
leaders and activists.
Nevertheless, the state remains relevant both as the carrier of the
brunt of warfare, whether conventional or counter-insurgency, and as a
major producer and choreographer of commemoration. The key issue is
the tension between these two foci of remembrance.56
Since the Second World War, and the end of decolonization, the
character of military conflict has shifted away from interstate collisions
towards violent contests, usually within the borders of one nation, for
55
56
O n the multiplicity of types of artefacts, see M a y a L i n , A n d r e w Barshay, S t e p h e n

G r e e n b l a t t , T o m L a q u e u r , a n d Stanley Saitowitz, Grounds for remembering.
Monuments,
memorials, texts, Occasional p a p e r s of the D o r e e n B. T o w n s e n d C e n t e r for t h e
H u m a n i t i e s , n o . 3 (Berkeley, California: D o r e e n B. T o w n s e n d C e n t e r for t h e
H u m a n i t i e s , 1 9 9 5 ) ; a n d M a r i t a S t u r k e n , ' T h e Wall, t h e screen a n d t h e image: t h e
V i e t n a m Veterans M e m o r i a l ' , Representations, 3 5 ( 1 9 9 1 ) , p p . 1 1 8 - 4 2 .
O n state versus local affiliations, see Jay W i n t e r , a n d Jean-Louis R o b e r t , Capital cities at
war: Paris, London, Berlin, 19141919 ( C a m b r i d g e : C a m b r i d g e University Press,
1 9 9 7 ) , ch. 1.
39
state power.57 The process of remembrance following such conflicts is

unlikely to vary in character from that associated with public recollection
of earlier conflicts. This is already clear from the comparative study of
conflict instigated by Fundamentalist movements in Shi'ite and Sunni
Islam, in Hinduism and among Sikhs, in Judaism, as well as in Protestantism and Catholicism.58
We may suggest that the dialogue between agents working within civil
society and state institutions, an ongoing process of contestation, is and
is likely to remain one of the permanent features of remembrance. It is
not the geographic location or level of economic development which is
decisive here, but the nature of that complex and enduring social
activity, remembrance.
57
58
M a r t i n van Creveld, The transformation of war ( N e w York: F r e e Press, c. 1 9 9 1 ) .

E . Sivan, ' T h e enclave c u l t u r e ' , in M . M . M a r t y a n d R. S. A p p l e b y (eds.),
Fundamentalism
comprehended
(Chicago: University of C h i c a g o Press, 1 9 9 5 ) ,
p p . 1 1 - 6 3 ; see also chapters 1 6 - 1 9 in t h e s a m e v o l u m e , written jointly b y G. A l m o n d ,
E . Sivan, a n d R . S . Appleby.
Forms of kinship and remembrance in the

aftermath of the Great War
Jay Winter
Agents of remembrance work in the borderlands linking families, civil

society, and the state. There, during and after war, individuals and
groups, mostly obscure, come together to do the work of remembrance.
This entails their creating a space in which the story of their war, in its
local, particular, parochial, familial forms, can be told and retold. The
construction of the narrative - in stone, in ceremony, in other works and
symbols - is itself the process of remembrance. Once completed in this
initial phase, these 'sites of remembrance' are never stable, never fixed.
In the process of composition, they begin to decompose, losing little by
little the force and content of their original meaning and evocative
power. The reason for this transformation is imbedded in the life cycle
of agency itself. Those who join in this activity do so at the cost of other
ventures; when their lives change, and other business calls, the bonds of
such agency begin to fray, and unravel.
I would like to offer an interpretation of one facet of this process of
public recollection of war in the twentieth century. I want to suggest that
an antidote to the use of the term 'collective memory' in a general or
ethereal sense, floating somewhere in the cultural atmosphere of a
period, may be found in the insistence upon the significance of agency
in the work of remembrance of particular groups of survivors, whose
bond is social and experiential. Following anthropologists, these groups
may be termed 'fictive kin', 'adoptive kin', or 'functional kin', as
opposed to those linked by blood bonds or marriage.1 I shall use the
term 'fictive kinship' to denominate such associations.
1
The anthropological literature on this subject is vast and highly contentious. See Meyer
Fortes, Kinship and the social order. The legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan (Chicago: Aldine,
1969), pp. 241, 251, 110, 123, 239. For the distinction between blood kinship, fictive
kinship, andfigurativekinship, see Julian Pitt-Rivers, 'The kith and the kin', in J. Goody
(ed.), The character of kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). For
other approaches to the subject, see Ernest Gellner, 'Ideal language and kinship
structure', Philosophy of Science, 24 (1957), pp. 235-41; Rodney Needham, 'Descent
systems and ideal language', Philosophy of Science, 27 (1960), pp. 96-101; E. Gellner,
'The concept of kinship', Philosophy of Science, 27 (1960), pp. 187-204; Maurice Bloch,
'The moral and tactical meaning of kinship terms', Maw, 6 (1971), pp. 79-87.
40
Kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War
41
In them, the agents of remembrance have formed families of remembrance. They do more than merely describe the space of individual
reflection, homage, and sorrow. That is why they act in concert. But
such groups, such families of remembrance, do less than express what
some scholars, following Halbwachs, call 'collective memory' as the
repository of images and notions common to a social class or to a
national society as a whole. Fictive kin are small-scale agents. That is
why I prefer to use the term 'remembrance' to describe their activity.
Their work is liminal. It occupies the space between individual memory
and the national theatre of collective memory choreographed by social
and political leaders. They flourish at a point between the isolated
individual and the anonymous state; a juncture almost certainly closer
to the individual than to the state.
Some of the people whose work I shall discuss may be described
(following Bastide) as second-order elites. Others are more obscure than
that. All take civil society as their point of departure, though they deal
with the state time and again. In the vast literature on the effects of war,
and on its deepening of the 'exuberance of the state',2 perhaps it is time
to give greater weight to the exuberance of civil society, and to highlight
the tendency of ordinary people to come together and to reflect publicly
on what happened to them, to their loved ones, to their particular world,
when war descended on their lives.
The structure of this chapter is straightforward. I first examine some
processes of remembrance within the structure of family life. I then turn
to the creation and activity of a kind of kinship, 'fictive kinship', whose
members engaged in many kinds of collective remembrance during and
after the First World War.
Families and remembrance
In order to appreciate the work of families of fictive kin in the aftermath
of that war, we must recognize the profound shock to family life that the
upheaval of war brought about. First was the call to arms, leaving many
women, old people, and children with the vital task of taking in the
harvest alone. Then came long years of separation, ended for the lucky
In this chapter, I use the term 'fictive kin' simply as shorthand for a multiplicity of
groups. The term 'fictive' implies 'constructed' and 'created', rather than 'imaginary' or
'untrue'. I prefer it to 'adoptive' since that word carries parental echoes, which do not
decay over time; in addition much of the following discussion is about solidarity of a
fraternal kind. The term 'functional kin' may have more precision, but it has a cold,
perhaps manipulative, element in it too. By sticking to the term 'fictive kin', I want to
convey the sense of social bonds as created and maintained through stories and acts.
Francoise Boc,'L'exuberance de l'etat', Vingtieme slide (1989), pp. 1-12.
42
Jay Winter
ones by a debilitating though non-lethal wound or by demobilization.

For the unlucky, widowhood and orphanhood followed. Perhaps onethird of the men who were killed in the war were married; thus 3 million
widows and between 7 and 10 million orphans were created by the war. 3
That the war was a monumental disaster in family history goes
without saying. But perhaps more surprisingly, despite its devastating
repercussions, the upheaval did not undermine marriage patterns or
fertility trends. The image of a generation of spinsters created by the war
is a myth. Women adjusted their marriage patterns to escape the penury
and marginality of widowhood or spinsterhood. Nuptiality rates were no
lower in the 1920s than before the war. Indeed, there is overwhelming
evidence that the First World War increased the strength of family life,
reinforced the institution of marriage, and created powerful pressures
towards the provision of family allowances along the lines of the separation allowances paid to soldiers' wives while they were on active
service.4 The 1920s were, therefore, a moment when family ties, so
deeply threatened by the death toll of the war, were celebrated as never
before.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the war was remembered initially
and overwhelmingly as an event in family history. In a rush, with the
war, family history and national history came together in unprecedented
ways. To this day, through the study of genealogy, through retelling
family stories, the war is kept alive as a vivid moment in popular history.
This is the source of the huge wave of interest in the 1990s in fiction
located in the First World War. Millions of young people today (1999)
hear tales of their grandparents' early lives, as children during or after
the war, and then read of this epoch in powerful works of narrative art.
Pat Barker's trilogy Regeneration, The eye in the door, and The ghost road5
and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong,6 best-selling and award-winning novels
in Britain, have counterparts in France. Jean Rouaud's Champs d'honneur7 and Sebastian Japrisot's Un long dimanche de fiangailles8 create the
same domestic setting for remembering war. What today's readers find
in this literature is that their family stories are part of a wider code,
3
4
6
7
8
J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British people (London: Macmillan, 1985), ch. 8.
See J. M. Winter and R. Wall (eds.), The upheaval of war: family, work and welfare in
Europe, 19141918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Susan
Pedersen, Family, dependence, and the origins of the welfare state: Britain and France
1914-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Pat Barker, Regeneration (London: Viking, 1991); The eye in the door (London, Viking,
1993); Ghost road (London: Viking, 1995).
Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (London: Hutchinson, 1993).
Jean Rouaud, Champs d'honneur (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990).
Sebastien Japrisot, Un long dimanche de fiancailles (Paris: Denoel, 1991).
43
perhaps even a 'master code' of stories about how we in the twentieth

century got to be where we are.
I want to consider several such accounts of family history to illustrate
this powerful framework of remembrance. The first is the recollection of
rural life in Brittany, written by Pierre Jacquez-Helias, Le cheval d'orgeuil, published in 1975. For him, the war presented a very mundane set
of problems. He remembers being given the clothing his father had
worn while on active service. For this, he (and others)
owed yet another debt to the war, but that one we could have done without. It
was the lice which the soldiers were said to have brought back from the trenches.
Day after day we had to fight a merciless battle against them. It wasn't all that
bad for the boys, who as a rule had close-cropped heads. But the poor little girls
wept every morning while their mothers combed their hair, energetically, over a
white plate. When the black lice fell into it, the girls would crush them one by
one under their thumbnails, 'the little lice-hammers'. We thus inherited our
fathers' woes.
Jacquez-Helias also observed another unexpected effect of the war, this

time with a longer shelf-life. It was a shift in the comportment of the
postwar generation. Before the war it was very rare for family members
to kiss each other in public:
The First World War changed all that. The appalling losses during the first two
years of it, which had decimated most families, the wretched life of the fighters;
the newspapers, which everyone had begun to read and which had fed their
anguish instead of making it easier for them to wait; the soldiers returning on
leave and their departing yet again, with death in the offing - all that encouraged
effusiveness. Once the heroes had returned, the people went on making shows of
affection; it had become a habit.9
How general this change was is impossible to say; all it indicates is the
range of adjustments family members had to make in the aftermath of
war. Subtly, family bonds bore the imprint of war; the emotional
language of everyday life had a hidden agenda after 1914, the indirect
expression of anxiety through gestures of affection which only those who
had gone through the experience of war could decode.
Here we encounter a critical element of story-telling about the Great
War. The war was traumatic, in the sense of being a violent and overwhelming experience. The telling of stories within families, and their
subsequent publication, was a means to convert trauma into misfortune,
to prevent the events of the war from paralysing those who experienced
them and to enable them to pick up again the threads of their lives.
Remembrance through story-telling was, therefore, a path to recovery.
9
Pierre Jacquez-Helias, Le cheval d'orgueil. Memoires d'un Breton du pays bigoudin (Paris:
Plon, 1975), p. 11.
44
Jay Winter
Remembrance - within families and among families - provided a way to

live with the war. Here family narratives, scripts highlighting the disruption of war, whether published or not, played a crucial role. When in
print, they served as documents of collective remembrance.
Some soldiers created such books themselves. In 1919 the Provengal
barrel-maker turned infantryman Louis Barthas put together a travelogue of his time at the front. His family published this book in 1978.10
Other soldiers, turned novelists, adopted this format in deceptively
straightforward ways. Robert Graves's war novel, Goodbye to all that,
published in 1929, starts with the Victorian poet Swinburne staring at
him in his pram in Wimbledon Common in London. Whether or not
this event ever happened is beside the point; it merely serves to show the
familial framework out of which the story of a junior infantry officer in
the Great War unfolds.
Another set of family stories may illustrate this wider social phenomenon.11 In 1991, the Canadian writer David Macfarlane published a
book entitled The danger tree. Memory, war and the search for a family's
past.12 It is a family history, written by a great-nephew of the protagonists, and published a full lifetime after the Armistice. And that is
precisely its point. It tells the life - and death - of an ordinary family,
one that was shattered by war.
Here is the outline of the story. The Goodyear family were among the
staunchest British patriots in Newfoundland, still in 1914 a British
colony. They lived in the town of Grand Falls, founded in 1906 to
service the timber industry, and in particular, the demand for pulp and
newsprint of the London press. Louisa and Josiah Goodyear had seven
children: six boys and a girl. Five joined up, and the youngest, Kate,
became a nurse.
Three of the Goodyear boys were killed in the war. Raymond Goodyear was seventeen at the outbreak of war. Twice he ran away to enlist,
twice he was retrieved by his father. Then he went to a recruiting
meeting at which his father Josiah was the keynote speaker. 'Father, now
can I go?', he publicly demanded, andfinallygot the answer he wanted.
After three months' service in the Newfoundland Regiment, he was
killed by shrapnel near Ypres in October 1916.13
A year later, his brother Stan was killed by a shell while transporting
10
11
12
13
See the manuscripts published by his family of the memoirs of the French infantryman
(and mutineer) Louis Barthas, Les carnets de guerre de Louis Barthas, tonnelier
1914-1918 (Paris: Maspero, 1978).
See Sivan's essay in chapter 9 of this book.
David Macfarlane, The danger tree. Memory, war and the search for a family's past
(Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1991).
Ibid. pp. 104, 107.
45
munitions to his unit near Langemark in Belgium. The third to die was
their elder brother Hedley, who had enlisted while attending the University of Toronto. He joined the Canadian 102nd Battalion, and served
on the Somme in August 1918. On 7 August, he wrote to his mother:
My eye is fixed on tomorrow with hope for mankind and with visions of a new
world . . . A blow will be struck tomorrow which will definitely mark the turn of
the tide . . . I shall strike a blow for freedom, along with thousands of others
who count personal safety as nothing when freedom is at stake.14
The following day his unit did indeed take part in a major battle. In
official accounts, Hedley was among the 110 men of his unit to die in
the encounter. The truth is otherwise. He survived for another week,
only to make one critical mistake. He shared a match with two Australians at night in the trenches near Chaulnes. The light was the last thing
he saw: a sniper shot him through the head. 15
Two other brothers survived. Joe Goodyear suffered a severe thigh
wound, and was invalided back to Newfoundland. So was his brother
Ken, also wounded. They both later re-enlisted and served in Scotland
in the Newfoundland Forestry Corps. All five Goodyear boys in uniform
were casualties of war.
Kate Goodyear also put on a uniform - that of a nurse attending to
wounded men at St Luke's Hospital in Ottawa. Before she knew the fate
of her brothers, she nursed a 19-year old private who had lost a leg.
There was no room for him in the ward, so he was placed in the corridor.
Being unable to sleep, he asked Kate for help. The only place of respite
was a private ward, off limits to the soldier. Kate decided otherwise, and
then had to face the wrath of the matron and superintendent. After the
anticipated dressing-down, this is the explanation she offered:
I have brothers . . . I have brothers overseas. I don't know where or how they
are, and I can't do much to help them. But I'll do what I can wherever I am, and
I'd like to think that someone might do the same for them. So let me tell you. As
long as I am in this hospital, and so long as there's an empty bed, no soldier will
ever spend a night in a hallway. I. Will. Not. Have. It. I shall move them to the
private rooms if I have to carry them up the stairs myself.16
For once, regulations gave way to compassion. This story, retrieved
by a nephew fifty years after the war, was a classic family tale, repeated
at frequent intervals to educate the young and restore - perhaps for a
moment - the atmosphere of what once was.
For Kate Goodyear, and the surviving members of the family, the war
didn't end in 1918. For seventy years, tears welled up in her eyes at
unexpected moments. To her and millions like her, her family was
14
Ibid. p. 203.
15
Ibid. p. 196.
16
Ibid. p. 188.
46
Jay Winter
defined by those absent from it. As her great-nephew put it, on three
birthdays a year, as well as on public days, what was remembered was
nothing . . . what was never to be, after the war was over. The best were gone by
1917 or doomed, and what the world would have been like had they not died is
anybody's guess. The war left their things unfinished: enterprises conceived,
projects initiated, routes surveyed, engagements announced. And that's where it
ended.
The three Goodyears left behind their photographs, one or two letters, a few
often-repeated stories, and an emptiness that steadily compounded itself over
the years. It was a different family after the war. Something was gone from the
heart of it . . . Somehow the wrong combination survived . . . A balance was
never regained. 17
That story - the transformation of a family through war - echoed

through parlours and kitchens on both sides of the ocean. Through
family gatherings, letters, photographs, and stories, the narrative was
passed on. It is a script of sadness, but also of survival. Here story-telling
was at the heart of the work of remembrance.
This narrative, drawn from a set of family stories, was unusual only in
that it was published. Countless others existed only in oral form. Its
author admitted that all he was doing was repeating family stories told
time out of mind. Their recovery, preservation, and publication, were
acts of remembrance.
The title of the memoir is significant. The 'danger tree' was a sniper's
post in no man's land in one corner of Beaumont-Hamel, in the
northern sector of the Somme battlefields. There on 1 July 1916, the
Newfoundland Regiment was slaughtered in futile attacks on German
lines. The land surrounding the 'danger tree' is now sacred ground for
Newfoundlanders, who became Canadians only in 1949. The trench
system has been preserved, and turned into a park of remembrance. The
tree itself is an ossified piece of the landscape, perched dangerously in
front of the Newfoundlanders' advanced position. It is frozen in time,
and in space, just like the stories told and retold in the Goodyear family.
It is a point of reference, enabling them to see what their family was, and
what it lost because of the war. Here family stories and national
monuments are fused; icons enter the common language of narrative,
and remind those of us too young to have known those days how terrible
they were. None of the Goodyear boys killed in the war died in
Beaumont-Hamel. But in a symbolic sense they all did. Their loss is
encapsulated, it is given meaning by the telling of stories.
Trauma is by definition unbounded by the ordinary. Its full force may
not be felt initially, but returns unannounced and devastatingly at odd
17
Ibid. p. 139.
47
moments. Perhaps one of the purposes of such family narratives as that

of the Goodyears is to convert trauma into history, to locate it in time
and in place, to unfreeze the 'danger tree', and let other shoots take its
place.
Kin, 'fictive kin', and patterns of remembrance
The effort to rebuild the lives of the survivors quite naturally was lived
within family units. But one of the striking features of the inter-war
years was the extension of these families in a social rather than a
biological sense. In every combatant country there emerged groups of
people whose business it was to help each other recover from its
traumatic consequences.
Partly this was simply a natural human response to a disaster. And as
in the case of natural disasters, those able to help did so. After the war,
support groups emerged in reaction to the unavoidable tendency for
bureaucrats to see files rather than families, cases rather than people.
The emergence of self-help associations trying to negotiate the passage
to 'normality' for war victims, sometimes against and sometimes alongside the bureaucracy, demonstrates the strength of civil society in the
aftermath of the war.
The disabled
'Fictive kinship' operated both on the sacred and the profane levels.
After the Armistice, there arose a dense network of filiation, an array of
people standing alongside victims of the war trying to help manage
problems large and small. Here is the hidden pre-history of many, more
visible, forms of collective remembrance.
Consider the millions of people living with the disabled veterans of
the war. These were the men and women who saw the war literally
inscribed on the bodies of their loved ones. They were everywhere after
the war, on street corners, in public squares, in churches, and in family
circles. The French textile worker Mime Santerre described her village
in the north of the country:
The agricultural laborers came back as amputees, blind, gassed, or as 'scar
throats', as some were called because of their disfigured, crudely healed faces.
We began to see more and more returning. What a crowd! What a rude shock at
the railway station, where the wives went to meet their husbands, to find them
like that - crippled, sick, despairing that they would be of no use anymore. At
first, we had the impression that all those returning had been injured. It wasn't
until later that those who had escaped without a scratch returned. But, like their
48
Jay Winter
comrades, they were serious, sad, unsmiling; they spoke little. They had lived in
hell for four years and wouldn't forget it.18
Only a fraction of the men wounded in the war were permanently

disabled, but their number was still sufficiently large to provide families
with problems that they could not handle on their own. At that point
families came together, joined by networks of aid and compassion
working to support those struggling under the burdens the war had
imposed on them.
The men with the broken faces
Again, one example of this kind of 'fictive kinship', this joining together
to help families in extremis, may serve to disclose a wider phenomenon.
The wounded came in many forms: psychologically damaged men, men
who suffered from illness contracted during the war; men literally torn
apart. Among those who came back from the war were thousands of
ordinary men afflicted with extraordinary wounds. These were the
gueules cassees, the men with broken faces. How many disfigured veterans
were there? Estimates vary, but at least 12 per cent of all men wounded
suffered from facial wounds. Perhaps one-third of these men (or 4 per
cent of all wounded) were disfigured. Since in Britain, France, and
Germany alone, roughly 7 million men were wounded, about 280,000
disfigured men in these three countries alone returned home after the
First World War.19 Of these men, perhaps one in ten joined associations
devoted to their needs and their cause.20
Men without faces, without recognizable features, could not look in
the mirror. They had literally lost their identities. Many other forms of
identity were lost in the First World War, but for these men with the
broken faces the road back to some semblance of ordinary life was
tortuous indeed. It was only through the formation of groups of
individuals surrounding the disabled men that these people could
escape from a form of remembrance which was paralytic. These men
needed to see that they were not reduced to their wounds or disabilities.
They were men capable of acting with other men and women to resume
their lives. Associative work helped people reduce trauma to handicap,
so as not to let the war further truncate their lives.
A glimpse of how painful and fraught with danger this effort was may
18
19
Serge Grafteaux, Meme Santerre, trans, by L.Tilly (Boston: Schocken, 1982), p. 83.
Sophie Delaporte, 'Les blesses de la face de la grande guerre', Memoire de maitrise,
Universite de Picardie Jules Verne, 1991-2, introduction; and S. Delaporte, 'Les
defigures de la grande guerre', Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 175 (1994),
pp. 103-21.
20
I am grateful to Antoine Prost for his comments on this subject.
49
be found in the work of one woman who helped the gueules cassees.
Henriette Remi was a French nurse who learned of the fate of these men
during the war. She visited a friend in the spring of 1918, an officer who
had in his care a man with no face:
He has only one leg; his right arm is covered by bandages. His mouth is
completely distorted by an ugly scar which descends below his chin. All that is
left of his nose are two enormous nostrils, two black holes which trap our gaze,
and make us wonder for what this man has suffered? . . . All that is left of his
face are his eyes, covered by a veil; his eyes seem to see . . .
The wounded man talks of home, where his mother and sister live:
I cannot see them, it is true, but they will see me. Yes, they will see me! And they
will care for me. They will help me pass the time. You know, time passes terribly
slowly in hospital. My sister is a teacher, she will read to me. My mother's eyes
are weak; she can hardly read; she sewed too much when we were kids; she had
to provide for us; my father died when we were little.
The authorities at the hospital did not encourage family visits; they were
potentially traumatic. But the time had come when this veteran would
return to his family. He asks Remi if they will recognize him. Certainly,
was her hesitant answer, hoping that if their eyes did not find the man,
their hearts would. Then the sister comes:
A young woman, fresh, pretty, approaches quickly; she searches in the crowd for
her brother. All at once, her face pales, an expression of terror forms; her eyes
grow in fright, she raises her arms as if pushing away a vision of horror, and
murmurs, 'My God . . . it's he.' A little further away, a woman in black, a bit
bent, advances timidly, searching with an expectant smile. And in an instant,
those poor tired eyes grow terrified, those tired hands raised in fear, and from
this mother's heart comes the cry: 'My God . . . it's he.'21
For this family, after the first shock of recognition, the long journey
towards recovery began. But others were not so fortunate. One of the
men Henriette Remi tried to help was a Monsieur Laze. He had been a
teacher, and while recuperating, he looked forward to a visit in hospital
from his wife and son. He was blind, but wanted to embrace his small
son, Gerard, who had followed his father around on his last leave before
being injured. On Gerard's first visit to the hospital, he asked the nurse
if he could see his father, but was told not today; the next day his father
would come to him on a home visit. Sister Henriette agreed to accompany him on the journey home. On the train, a child saw Laze and asked
his mother, 'what's wrong with that man?' Laze replied: 'Have a good
look, little one, and don't ever forget that this is war, this and nothing
21
Henriette Remi, Homines sans visage (Lausanne: S.P.E.S., 1942), pp. 21-3. I am
grateful to Sophie Delaporte for providing me with a copy of this remarkable memoir.
50
Jay Winter
else.' At his village, he took his habitual route home. At the door, his
wife welcomes him and calls their son.
Then the boy uttered a piercing cry: the boy shook. His father was shaken too,
and stared at the floor. And Gerard turned and ran, much faster than he had
come, crying in a loud voice: 'That's not Papa.' Laze was desolate. His wife said:
'You've gone too fast; one must take precautions.'
At the other end of the garden, Gerard continued to say 'That's not
Papa.' Henriette tried to help.
I approached him slowly, but Gerard didn't want to see me. He was shaking;
better to leave him to his mother. He hid in her skirts.
Laze was rooted to the spot. He took his head in his hands and said: 'Imbecile,
imbecile! But how could I have known how horrible I am. Someone should have
told me!'
Henriette agreed: 'Despair, shame, impotence shook me. Yes, he was
right. At the hospital we had but one desire: to make them believe that
they were not terrifying, and now look at the result.'
Henriette took Laze back to the hospital. Everyone told him the child
would forget. He refused to believe it. He told Henriette:
Having once been a man, having once understood the meaning of this word and
wanting nothing more than just to be a man, I am now an object of terror to my
own son, a daily burden to my wife, a shameful thing to all humanity.
Another attempt to return home; another failure: again his son cries,
'That's not Papa.' Laze recoiled. 'It's finished. It's too late. I terrify him.' That
night, back in hospital, Laze committed suicide. He opened the veins in his
wrist with his penknife.22
This terrible story brings us to a critical feature of what I have called
'fictive kinship' in the aftermath of the Great War. The war provided
challenges too heavy for most individuals or families to bear on their
own. There were two alternatives open to them: to rely on the state for
help; or to create associations which would demand recognition, assistance, and respect for those disabled in the service of the nation. Given
the financial constraints under which states operated after the war, and
the inevitable headaches of bureaucratic procedure, associative action
was the only way out of despair and penury for millions of families after
the Armistice.
Lacking an identity easily reconstructed in civilian life, many disabled
men and their companions succeeded in forming a new identity, a
corporate one through their own associations. Let us again consider the
gueules cassees. The Union of Disfigured Men (later the National Federation of Trepanned and Disfigured Men) was but one of a host of
22
R6mi, Hommes, pp. 89-109.
51
veterans' associations in postwar France. But it remained separate from

the larger organizations of veterans or of wounded men. The disfigured
had special problems of sociability, which only their own association
could address.23
The idea to form such an association was hatched by two disfigured
men, who had met at the Val-de-Grace military hospital in Paris, and
invited all those they knew there to join together. Their first meeting was
on 21 June 1921, four years after other, inclusive groups of veterans
began to create their own associations.24 Like all other such associations,
they had their own newspaper. Their leader was a disfigured officer,
Colonel Picot, aged fifty-nine in 1921, the father of the organization,
and a towering figure in the veterans' movement as a whole. He always
affirmed the special character of the association, drawing upon men who
had formed strong bonds during their long stays in hospital. They met
at a banquet twice a year, and drew on each other's strength to meet the
terrible problems they had to face. In 1927 their association opened a
country house for its members at Moussy-le-Vieux in the Department
of the Seine-et-Marne, where disfigured men could rest without fear of
encounters with a still uncomfortable public.25 This chateau with 100
acres of land, 40 kilometres from Paris, would not be a place of
suffering, but of rest and celebration. As Colonel Picot put it, it would
be 'a place worthy of them, a chateau like those acquired by the men
who got rich when we lost our faces'. Some men came for short stays;
others for good. Their families were welcome too. All were invited to
join in farming; even those who thought they were unemployable were
put to work. In 1934, a second home opened in the south of France, at
Le Coudon, near the port of Toulon. There Colonel Picot died in
1938.26
This one case was not an isolated one. The proliferation of this form
of fictive kinship, lived out in the life of associations built on remembrance is one of the key features of the social history of the inter-war
years. These groups had a 'collective memory', but it was not shared by
the larger collective, the state. The 'collective memory' of these men and
women was theirs and theirs alone. They had to wrest from the state
what we might think they deserved by right: decent pensions and
assistance in rebuilding their lives.
23
24
25
Antoine Prost, Les anciens combattants et la societe francaise 19141939 (Paris: Presses de
la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), II, p . 52.
J. M. Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning. The Great War in European cultural
history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p . 36.
26
D e l a p o r t e , ' L e s blesses', ch. 2.
Ibid. pp. 2 0 0 - 1 3 .
52
Jay Winter
Helping the orphans
It would be a mistake, though, to characterize fictive kinship as entirely

a struggle of state versus civil society. There were many who worked
through state institutions to help the victims of war. Among the most
prominent were teachers. Their job was to stand in for the millions of
missing fathers, to present their orphan sons with a sense of their own
worth, of hope for the future, a future which - to a degree - their absent
fathers had earned for them by their sacrifice. In this effort, such
teachers were not hostile to the state. They brought to these young
victims of war a sense that they were not abandoned.
One example of how this happened is that of the Algerian-born writer
Albert Camus. Camus's father Lucien was wounded in 1914 during the
Battle of the Marne, when his son Albert was eleven months old. Lucien
Camus was evacuated to a hospital at Saint-Brieuc in Brittany, from
which he wrote to his wife reassuringly that he was recovering. Four
weeks later, he was dead. Catherine Camus received the official notification, followed by shell fragments removed from her husband's body. For
the family, these relics were all that remained of Lucien Camus.
She took her two small children and moved in with her mother in the
Belcourt district of Algiers. Already deaf and illiterate, though able to
lip-read, Catherine's speech became twisted and more limited. She
worked in a cartridge factory during the war, and thereafter, lived a
passive life of laundry work and obedience to her mother. A full four
years after her husband's death, she began to receive a widow's pension.
No one at home could write to fill out the form, so the claim was made
only when a neighbour helped. 27
Catherine Camus's young son Albert grew up in this household, with
the shadow of the absent father a constant companion. His mother was
a benign cipher to the boy, but his father was simply unknown. There
were no household documents, since no one could read; there were very
few family stories, and only one or two pictures. A postcard or two, and
the bits of metal that had killed him.
Throughout his life, Albert Camus searched to find who his father
had been. In 1953, at the age of forty, he made a pilgrimage to the
cemetery in Brittany where his father lay. He found the grave, in the first
row of the military section of the Saint Michel cemetery. There he read
the date:
'1885-1914', and automatically did the arithmetic: twenty-nine years. Suddenly
he was struck by an idea that shook his very being. He was forty years old. The
27
Herbert R. Lottman, Albert Camus. A biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,

1979), chs. 1-2.
53
man buried under that slab, who had been his father, was younger than he.
And the wave of tenderness and pity that at once filled his heart was not the
stirring of the soul that leads the son to the memory of the vanished father, but
the overwhelming compassion that a grown man feels for an unjustly murdered
child - something here was not in the natural order, and, in truth, there was no
order but only madness and chaos when the son was older than the father.
Wandering around the cemetery, he saw other graves and 'realized from
the dates that this soil was strewn with children who had been the
fathers of greying men who thought they were living in this present
time'. He puzzled over who this missing father was, this 'younger
father'.
In a family where they spoke little, where no one read or wrote, with an unhappy
and listless mother, who would have informed him about this young and pitiable
father? No one had known him but his mother and she had forgotten him. Of
that he was sure. And he died unknown on this earth where he had fleetingly
passed, like a stranger.28
Could the son still discover the secret of this 'stranger's' life? All the
son saw was the shadow of his father, like the 'light ash of a butterfly
wing incinerated in a forest fire'.29 But even at the age of forty, this
orphan of the war 'needed someone to show him the way'.30 Without a
father, he lacked a sense of heritage, of a past. He had 'never known
those moments when a father would call his son, after waiting for him to
reach the age of listening, to tell him the family's secret, or a sorrow of
long ago, or the experience of his life'. Consequently, he - the son - had
had to become 'the first man', and 'without memories and without faith'
enter 'the world of the men of his time and its dreadful and exalted
history'.31
The 'dead stranger of Saint-Brieuc',32 the fallen soldier and father
'consumed in a cosmic fire' was like millions of others. The war had
created hundreds of 'new orphans each day, Arab and French' who
'awakened in every corner of Algeria, sons and daughters without
fathers who would now have to learn to live without guidance and
without heritage'.33
What rescued this orphan from despair? Almost certainly the bond he
formed with one of his teachers, a veteran lucky enough to come back
unscathed. Louis Germain, who taught Camus from the age of nine,
was the most formative influence in his life. This former soldier was able
to give Camus and his peers the sense that what they thought and felt
mattered and that the world was there to be discovered. Germain also
28
Albert Camus, The first man, trans. David Hapgood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
29
Ibid. p. 314.
Ibid. pp. 7 3 , 70.
33
1995), pp. 25-8.
30
Ibid. p. 297.
31
Ibid. pp. 195, 197.
32
Ibid. p . 82.
54
Jay Winter
felt a special responsibility for war orphans like Camus. At the end of
each term the teacher took up his copy of a war memoir, The cross of
wood by Dorgeles. There he read of the war and 'of a special kind of
men, dressed in heavy cloth stiff with mud, who spoke a strange
language and lived in holes under a ceiling of shells and flares and
bullets'. Camus 'just listened with all his heart to a story that his teacher
read with all his heart', a story of the war 'that cast its shadow over
everything in the children's world'.34
Germain helped to persuade Camus's mother and grandmother to
forego his wages so that he could study for a scholarship enabling him to
go to the lycee (or secondary school). They remained life-long friends.
Years later, Germain gave his gnarled copy of Dorgeles's novel to
Camus, who (the teacher said) had earned it by the tears he had shed
while the book was read aloud in a class in Algiers in 1922.35
Camus was fortunate. He had had a surrogate father, a man who had
suffered in the trenches, and who had retained the view that the
'generation of fire', the men of 1914, had a duty to raise the sons of their
fallen comrades. He gave his pupil Camus the belief that he could be
more than a stranger, that he could find his way in a world disfigured by
violence.
Commemoration and fictive kinship
The story of the Goodyear family, of surrogate fathers like Louis

Germain, of nurses like Henriette Remi, tell us much about forms of
kinship and forms of remembrance of the Great War. Above all, these
stories fill in the space between the war and the efflorescence of
commemorative statues and ceremonies that have embodied the 'collective memory' of the Great War. No doubt, war memorials carry
powerful collective messages, but they must be seen not only as projects
with a life-history of their own, but also as outcomes of earlier projects,
of earlier and ongoing efforts to tell the story of the war and its victims.
When the Cenotaph in London was unveiled on 19 July 1919, it
elicited an overwhelming public response. The British Cabinet commissioned the architect Edwin Lutyens to build a temporary Cenotaph for a
victory parade down Whitehall in London. They were astonished at the
outpouring of public feeling surrounding the monument. Perhaps one
million people made a pilgrimage to the spot in 1919 alone.36 The
34
36
35
Ibid. pp. 147, 148.
Ibid. p. 149.
David Lloyd, 'Pilgrimage in the aftermath of the Great War in Britain and the
Dominions,' PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1994.
55
temporary catafalque was turned into a permanent - the permanent monument of mourning.
This one instance encapsulated events which occurred in many
obscure corners of Britain and other combatant countries in the
following years. War memorials were constructed by local committees
composed in various ways of notables, ex-servicemen, and the families
of the dead. They offered the town, village, or quartier a very simple and
very powerful narrative of the war, inscribed in the list of names of the
dead. These men took up arms, they say; they left the town, never to
return. That is all. Inscriptions vary, but the style is overwhelmingly
sombre and un-celebratory. In small towns, the faces of the mourners
were very familiar. On Armistice Day, when townspeople gathered to
pay tribute to the dead, they were also joining together, at least for a few
moments, with the survivors.
Thanks to the work of a wide array of historians, the iconography and
social geography of the war memorials of the 1914-18 conflict are
relatively well established.37 What I want to emphasize in this chapter is
how these forms of official commemoration rested on a rich undergrowth of unofficial activity, which antedated these statues and carried
on long after they were unveiled. If we want to appreciate what those
who survived the war brought to these monuments when they passed
them, either on Armistice Day or on any ordinary day, we would do well
to look beyond them to the small groups of people, whether linked by
blood or experience, who dealt with the more obscure, but no less
important legacies of the war.
The gathering together of such groups took place in many forms. For
37
For Britain and the Dominions, see the work of Ken Inglis: 'A sacred place: the making
of the Australian War Memorial', War & Society, 3, 2 (1985), pp. 99-127; 'War
memorials: ten questions for historians, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 167
(1992), pp. 5-22; 'World War One memorials in Australia', Guerres mondiales et conflits
contemporains, 167 (1992), pp. 51-8; 'The homecoming: the war memorial movement
in Cambridge, England', Journal of Contemporary History, 27, 4 (1992), pp. 583-606;
'The right stuff, Eureka Street, 4 (1994), pp. 23-7; 'Entombing unknown soldiers:
from London and Paris to Baghdad', History & Memory, 5 (1993), pp. 7-31. For
France, see Antoine Prost, 'Les monuments aux morts', in P. Nora (ed.), Les lieux de
memoire. I. La Republique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 195-225; and Annette Becker,
Les Monuments aux morts (Paris: Errance, 1989, and La guerre et lafoi. De la mort a la
memoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994). For Germany, George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers.
Reshaping the memory of the world wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and
(in advance of his definitive study of German war memorials) Reinhart Koselleck,
'Kriegerdenkmale als Identitatsstiftungen der Uberlebenden', in Odo Marquard and
Karlheinz Stierle (eds.), Identitat (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1979), pp. 237-76;
'Der Einfluss der beiden Weltkriege auf das soziale Bewusstsein', in Wolfram Wette
(ed.), Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes. Bine Militdrgeschichte von unun (Munich: Piper,
1992), pp. 324-43; and 'Bilderverbot. Welches Totengedenken?', Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 April 1993.
56
Jay Winter
those adhering to conventional forms of religious belief, the churches

offered consolation. Others tried to bring the dead back to their homes
through seances, frowned on by the churches, but popular nonetheless.
Groups of spiritualists, either family members or fictive kin, met in a
domestic setting where a medium 'reunited' families with the spirits of
the dead. Here the deceased hinted at the story of their lives after death,
and offered the living consolation. In a nutshell, their message was very
simple: It's all right, the dead reassured the living; I'm safe and well. You
can go on living.38 And that is what they did, not in national units, or
large collectives, but through local affiliations and in the rhythms of
their daily lives.
The extended family of Kdthe Kollwitz
One final story may help to uncover some of the essential features of
this, the hidden face of remembrance after the Great War. Peter
Kollwitz, the 18-year-old elder son of the Berlin lithographer and
sculptress Kathe Kollwitz, volunteered for military service on 4 August
1914. He was one of approximately 140,000 German men out of 4
million men mobilized who joined up voluntarily early in the war. These
idealistic youths - overwhelmingly students or in middle-class occupations - have been taken to be representative of 'war enthusiasm' in the
nation as a whole. In fact, that 'enthusiasm' was strictly limited to a few
days and a narrow part of the population.39 But among Peter's circle, it
was real enough.
The sight of troops marching off to the war convinced Peter that he
had to join up before the reserves were mobilized. 'My fatherland does
not need my year yet', he told his sceptical father, a Berlin physician
working in a poor working-class neighbourhood, 'but it needs me? Peter
enlisted his mother's aid in getting his father to agree. He did, and Peter
joined up, alongside his closest friends and classmates.
This acceptance of the principle of sacrifice by the youth of Berlin
initially made some sense to Kathe Kollwitz. Throughout her life, her
Protestant belief in a 'calling' infused both her notion of what she must
do as an artist and how to serve the people of her country. Peter's
decision to volunteer for the army fitted in to that framework. But as
soon as the first news of battle and casualties reached Berlin, she began
to see that it was 'vile', 'idiotic', and 'harebrained' that these young
men, at the beginning of their lives, were going off to war.
38
39
For details see Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, ch. 3.

Jeffrey Verhey, 'The myth of the "Spirit of 1914" in Germany, 1914-1945',
unpublished manuscript, ch. 3.
57
Peter Kollwitz left home on 5 October 1914. He said farewell to his

mother on 12 October. Ten days later he was dead. He was killed in
Belgium in a field about 20 kilometres northeast of Ypres. One of the
friends with whom Peter had enlisted brought the news of his death to
the family.
For the next thirty years, Kathe Kollwitz grieved for her son. That
story has been told.40 For our purposes, I want to concentrate on one
related theme. Emmanuel Sivan has shown in chapter 9 of this book
how Israeli families created kinship bonds among the the friends of their
fallen sons, friends with whom they had served and who were lucky
enough to come back alive. In a very different context, Kathe Kollwitz
and her family did the same.
Ritual attended this kind of bonding. The Kollwitzes left Peter's room
intact. They put flowers on the chair next to his bed, and tried to
conjure up his spirit in the room. Friends came by and read letters and
texts there with the bereaved parents. They put a Christmas tree behind
the bed, with eighteen candles, for each of Peter's years. On subsequent
Christmases and New Years, additional candles were added, to mark the
age he would have reached had he been alive. Birthdays were marked
there. This was a sacred space both for the family and for those who had
joined in these acts of remembrance.41
Such gestures were not just extensions of traditional forms of family
gatherings. They were there because the process of healing was so
difficult, so slow. Kathe Kollwitz used to sit in her son's room and try to
commune with him. At times she drew strength from this effort; at times
she believed that 'I walk in twilight, only rarely stars, the sun has long
since set completely.^2 The black sun, the aura of depression, was a
constant companion.43
Some comfort came from Peter's friends; among them she found
some solace. She corresponded with them, welcomed their visits. To
them she was 'Mother Kathe' or 'Mother Kollwitz'. 'I must retain my
feeling of connection to the boys', is the way she put it on 9 October
1916;44 they were part of her household, part of her life.
This informal 'adoption' of those familiar young men who had shared
Peter's fate, both the living and the dead, marked Kollwitz's life. It also
became the centrepiece of her commemorative art. Before the First
40
41
42
43
44
W i n t e r , Sites of memory, sites of mourning, ch. 4 .

See t h e i m p o r t a n t article b y Regina Schulte, ' K a t h e Kollwitz's sacrifice', History
Workshop Journal, 4 1 ( 1 9 9 6 ) , p p . 1 9 3 - 2 2 1 .
K a t h e Kollwitz, Die Tagebucher, ed. Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz (Berlin, 1 9 8 9 ) , p p . 3 6 8 - 9 .
Julia Kristeva, Black sun. Depression and melancholy, trans. L . S. Roudiez ( N e w York:
C o l u m b i a University Press, 1989).
Kollwitz, Die Tagebucher, p . 2 7 8 .
58
Jay Winter
World War, her art encompassed many subjects. Prominent among

them were historical and epic themes - peasant uprisings, great sweeps
of protest and its suppression. After 1914, images of historical tragedy
receded; images of family tragedy loomed large. Her art became more
maternal, more familial. In effect, the collective of suffering portrayed in
her drawings, etchings, and sculptures had collapsed inward.
From early on in the war Kathe Kollwitz was determined to create a
war memorial for her son and for his generation of friends. Initially her
idea was to form a single family circle in stone. Her early sketches show
two parents holding their dead son; over time, the son became detached
from the parents and ultimately he disappeared. Part of the meaning of
this shift in iconography from a nuclear family to an extended family, is
located in the process of mourning, in the slow and terrible effort to let
her son go. But part of the meaning is to be found in Kollwitz's
commitment to gather to her family those young men who had had to
endure the war at its worst.
On 25 June 1919 she wrote hopefully: 'If I live to see Peter's work [the
memorial sculpture] completed and good, commemorating him and his
friends on a beautiful site, then perhaps Germany is past the worst.'45
On 13 October 1925, she described the project as one in which 'The
mother should kneel and gaze out over the many graves. She spreads out
her arms over all her sons.'46 Seven years later the memorial was
inaugurated in the German military cemetery at Roggevelde. The
sculpture is of Kathe and Hans Kollwitz, on their knees, in front of a
field of graves, including that of their son. The mother's arms are not
extended, but wrapped around her own body, as are her husband's
around his. It is a profound statement about individual grief for a
collective catastrophe. The parents mourn for this 'flock of children',
this ill-starred generation, whose elders could not prevent the disaster
which had enveloped them.
It is only with difficulty that the visitor can find the plaque on which
the name of Peter Kollwitz is written. He has become one among many,
a child mourned by the parents of a family which once was very large,
but is now reduced to two old people unable even to support each other
in their separate grief. All they can do is beg on their knees for
forgiveness, and offer their love and their grief, fixed in stone forever.
At this point we are on the border between metaphor and lived
experience. To say that at Roggevelde these were Kathe Kollwitz's lost
sons is, on one level, poetic licence. But on another level, her gathering
of her son's generation into her family was an essential element in her
45
Ibid. p. 428.
46
Ibid. p. 603.
59
effort to express the 'meaning' of the war for her whole generation. One
family's loss was terrible; how much more terrible the loss of so many
young men, so much promise, so much hope. Like the Goodyears, hers
was a family which was defined by those who weren't there. There were
millions of them in the aftermath of The First World War.
Conclusion
This chapter has tried to illustrate the need to approach the history of
war and remembrance of war from the angle of small-scale, locally
rooted social action. Many of these phenomena were family-based, but
others were among people whose ties were based on experience rather
than marriage or filiation.
I have used the term 'fictive kinship' to characterize these associations.
They arose during the war itself. From 1914 on, I argue, kinship bonds
widened, through a process of informal or figurative 'adoption'. The
locus dassicus of such work was that of the Red Cross, which operated in
every combatant country not only to ensure fair treatment of prisoners,
but also to find out what happened to the millions of men who simply
went missing in battle. Parallel to the Red Cross, many confessional
groups worked to help those stricken by the war. The Protestant
voluntary tradition came into its own in this effort, but Jewish and
Catholic groups also worked to ease the plight of widows, orphans, and
aged parents who had lost their sons in the war. Men who suffered
mutilation or illness during the war needed long-term help, and joined
in the wider population of victims of war who created and were served
by such organizations. Many of these groups were supported by the
state; others tried to compensate for the shortcomings of central authorities, frequently too mean or preoccupied to provide adequately for
those whose circumstances were reduced by the war.
All these groups were agents of remembrance. Their activity antedated public commemoration and continued long after the ceremonies
were over. Yes, on 11 November these groups joined the nation, the
wider collective. But that was not their origin, nor their centre of
gravity.
I have insisted that remembrance is an activity of agents who freely
congregate on the borderline between the private and the public,
between families, civil society, and the state. Their work is the subject of
this chapter. As we have noted in the introduction, it may be helpful to
adopt Bastide's approach to the 'organization of memory' at this point.
Remembrance, he posits, is an activity, built up arduously through
exchange relationships of a concrete kind. The 'collective' thus formed
60
Jay Winter
is never independent of the individuals who create it by their own

efforts.47
This form of small-scale collective memory - the thought-process of
kinship, both fictive and filial - was both powerful and brittle. At the
time, it gave men and women a way to live on after the horrors of war.
But as those agents of remembrance grew tired or old, developed other
lives, moved away, or died, then the activity - the glue - which held
together these cells of remembrance atrophied and lost its hold on them.
What has remained to this day are the traces of their work and the
envelope in which they operated: the national framework which was but
a thin cover over a host of associative forms arduously constructed over
years by thousands of people, mostly obscure. Today we see the
'collective memory' in national ceremonies; but in the decades after the
Armistice of 1918, there were other, locally based collectives engaged in
remembrance. They have vanished, but it would be foolish to merge
these activities in some state-bounded space of hegemony or domination. What these people did was much smaller and much greater than
that.
47
See chapter 1 in this book.
War, death, and remembrance

in Soviet Russia
Catherine Merridale
Modern warfare is a potent generator of memories. The involvement of

every citizen, the unaccustomed collectivities, the emergencies and
shock, the loss, the private totems and shared superstitions leave
indelible printsl on the imagination. Total war, whether experienced as a
combatant or as a civilian, is an almost uniquely vivid story in the life of
any individual. But personal memory is only a part of the social process
of remembering. Indeed, it can come to appear irrelevant or even
subversive to national projects of commemoration. Even in democracies,
the corporate, usually national, use of images of war is only loosely
linked to the reality which people remember. Conversely, too, the
individuals who file past the eternal flame may well rehearse in their
silence memories and stories which have little to do with the ceremonial
which has provided the occasion for their presence. The state and the
individual interact, their exchange mediated, in democracies, by voluntary groups such as veterans' societies, local charities, widows' and
orphans' groups. The process, a contest between competing images and
claims, is complex, its outcomes - the image and historical memory of
the war - provisional. The war generation will die, individual memories
- painful, exciting, unresolved - will be lost, but the story of the war will
remain collective property, open to periodic reassessment with each
change of government.
How do these observations apply in an authoritarian single-party state
like the former Soviet Union? What happens when the public expression
of individual memory is censored? How does commemoration work
where there can be no voluntary associations of veterans independent of
Some of the material presented in this paper appeared in History Workshop Journal in
October 1996 (issue 42, pp. 1-18). I am grateful to the editors of the journal for
permission to use it here. An earlier version of the same paper was presented to Bristol
University's Critical Theory Seminar in March 1996, and I would like to thank the
organizers and all the participants for their comments. I would also like to thank Jay
Winter and Emmanuel Sivan for their invitation to think about this material, the Harry
Frank Guggenheim Foundation for its support in the organization and funding of two
workshops on the subject, and Dori Laub for his support and advice.
61
62
Catherine Merridale
state control and funding? What occurs when the regime collapses and
memories are released? This chapter explores some of these themes. Its
starting point is the Second World War, the Great Patriotic War of
1941-5, an event, or series of events, commemorated with elaborate
official ceremony. The style of this commemoration recalled other
nations' acts of remembrance; the same images were used, the same
exclusions made, the same goal of patriotic affirmation served. What
was unique about the Soviet case was not, arguably, the commemoration
of the war in question but the silences which lay behind it, the unspoken
grief for the millions - victims of other wars, and of repression, famine,
and industrial disaster - whose loss was scarcely acknowledged until the
final years of Communist rule.
It is sometimes suggested that the iteration of one kind of memory
involves the forgetting of others.1 Memorials may commemorate a
version of events, but it is an exclusive one. Much that is left out, runs
the argument, is ceremonially or architecturally forgotten. But is it? In
the Soviet case, the exclusions were clear enough. Great Patriotic War
memorials and histories recalled the young, handsome, innocent
soldier, the victim who fell in battle repelling the Nazi invader. In so
doing, they excluded the older men and boys, the women, the victims
of disease, accident, and of mass executions carried out by their own
side. They excluded, too, the people who fell behind the lines,
including innumerable victims of continued police repression. Those
who fell in the winter war against Finland were virtually ignored. For
years, too, the true cost of the Great Patriotic War, in human and
other terms, was concealed. Stalin admitted to 7 million Soviet war
dead, Khrushchev to 20 million. One of the tasks of recent historical
research has been to unearth more accurate statistics. It now appears
likely that 26 million Soviet deaths can be attributed to the war, and
some Russian historians have inflated the figure to 37 and even to 40
million.2
The story of exclusion can be extended beyond the Great Patriotic
War in either direction. Most First World War graves are hardly marked
1
See, for example, Michael Ignatieff, 'Soviet war memorials' History Workshop Journal, 17
(Spring 1984), pp. 157-63; George L. Mosse, Fallen soldiers (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990).
The highest serious figure has been given by V. I. Kozlov {Istoriya SSSR, 2 (1989),
p. 133), who calculated that the population deficit in 1945 was between 45 and 48
million, suggesting that approximately 38 million excess deaths occurred between 1939
and 1945. Other Russian calculations are rather lower, and correspond more closely to
the estimates of Western demographers such as Alain Blum. E. Andreev, L. Darskii, and
T. Khar'kova, for example, suggest a total of 26 million. 'Otsenka lyudskikh poter7 v
period velikoi otechestvennoi voiny', Vestnik statistiki, 10 (1990).
63
today. The 'fraternal grave' of 300 Russian troops who fell defending
Moscow at the battle of Borodino in 1812 was surreptitiously moved in
1953 to make way for the development of apartment blocks along
Kutuzovskii Prospekt.4 More recently, the boys who fell in the early
months of the Afghan War from 1979 also received scant commemoration. Many were buried separately, the cause of death left vague in the
epitaph, a civilian photograph attached to the headstone, in order to
conceal the scale of Soviet military losses.5 Such concealment in these
and other cases contrasts with the patriotic importance deliberately
assigned to the war of 1941-5. Depending upon circumstances and its
own perception of raison d'etat, the Soviet state was as skilled at
destroying the material basis of collective memory as it was eager to
commemorate the selected fallen of Mother Russia in concrete and
stone.
Historians have understandably focused on this attempted destruction of social memory, linking it with starker instances of censorship
and denial. The issue even became front-page news, briefly, when the
Communist Party Central Committee's last rehabilitation campaign
was at its height in 1988. This focus on official denial, however, has
diverted attention away from the fact that private and personal stories
were often obstinately preserved. Proscribed memories - tales of arrest,
disappearances, lost parents, orphans - survived, despite the odds,
through the Stalin years and the later period of stagnation under
Brezhnev. They were kept alive as family secrets, private narratives
rehearsed in kitchens, out at the dacha on long summer evenings, in
whispers at the funerals of each survivor as they died. How and why
did memories survive? How, more troublingly, did people acquiesce in
official distortions while simultaneously repeating their own stories to
friends and children?
In searching for answers to these questions, the literature on trauma
and collective memory has much to offer.6 But the bulk of the evidence
on which it is based has been drawn from work with survivors of the
Holocaust. Here, simultaneous knowing and not knowing is well documented. But recollection took place against a background of the wide
public acknowledgement, to say nothing of physical commemoration, of
3
I. A. Kremleva, Pokhoronno-pominal'nye obychai i obryady (Moscow: Institut etnologii i

antropologii RAN, 1993), p. 35.
Timothy J. Colton, Moscow. Governing the Socialist metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 338.
Svetlana Alexsiyevich, Zinky boys: Soviet voices from a forgotten war (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1992), p. 15.
I discussed these issues in more depth in the article 'Death and memory in modern
Russia', History Workshop Journal, 42 (October 1996), pp. 1-18.
64
Catherine Merridale
some of the key events. In this sense, refusal to discuss personal

memories of the Holocaust has been accurately described as 'silence', a
marked contrast to the 'secrets' which Russians rehearsed in the long
years of repression.7 Virtually every Soviet family had 'secrets' of some
kind. The first fifty years of the twentieth century in the Soviet Union
were marked by a succession of disasters, each accompanied by largescale population losses. The state publicly denied much of the mortality,
but official records were nonetheless preserved, and these tell a tale of
repeated demographic catastrophe.8 Assessments of the scale of losses at
each stage vary according to the individual demographer's assumptions
about such issues as migration, fertility, and infant mortality, but a
reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for
the whole period somewhere around 60 million. Between 23 and 26
million people died prematurely in what would become the USSR
between 1914 and 1922. Collectivization, the famine, and the purges the Stalinist revolution from above - resulted in about 10 million further
excess deaths, of which political executions probably accounted for
roughly l | million. Finally, the war years 1939 to 1945 saw in excess of
26 million premature deaths, some in combat, some related directly to
war, but many also products of a continuing campaign of state repression. Even families which saw little in the way of combat or terror were
likely to have suffered in the succession of famines and outbreaks of
epidemic disease which characterized the period of Soviet statebuilding.
Losses on this scale defy attempts to picture the reality which they
catalogue. Even disasters familiar to West Europeans assumed incalculably greater proportions in the East. For example, the First World War
was more costly, in terms of human lives, for the Russians than for the
Western European powers because of the large number of men they
fielded. It was followed, moreover, by a vicious civil war in which further
millions perished. Both wars were accompanied by massive movements
of population. As Lorimer put it in 1946, 'during the years 1915-23,
the Russian people underwent the most cataclysmic changes since the
Mongol invasion in the early thirteenth century'.9
The civil war was followed almost immediately by a severe famine.
7
8
I am grateful to Dori Laub for pointing out this distinction, and for directing my
attention to the work of Daniel Bar-On.
The most complete of the current surveys of the demographic literature is Alain Blum,
Naitre, vivre et mourir en URSS, 19171991, Paris, 1994. For a survey of the current
state of the debate about numbers, see R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G.
Wheatcroft, The economic transformation of the Soviet Union, 19131945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Cited in Davies, Harrison, and Wheatcroft, Economic transformation, p. 60.
65
This was most destructive in southern Russia, and especially the Volga
region and Ukraine. Total mortality in these regions is estimated at
between l | and 4 million. The picture is complicated by infanticide,
which was not new, and also by cannibalism, which had not been
reported on such a scale before. The authors of a contemporary study of
the famine admitted, for example, that cannibalism in any form was
virtually unknown in 1891, when hunger had been almost as severe.10
But in 1921, possibly, according to the same source, because of the
brutalizing effects of the First World War, cases where dead bodies were
consumed by survivors, even if graveyards had to be robbed, ran to
several thousand. The murder and eating of neighbours, and especially
of children, although less common, was also widely reported. With
careful Bolshevik rationality, the authors explained that such behaviour
was a desperate last resort, and that the guilty seldom survived to
acquire a taste for human flesh.11 Rather than making a sensation out of
these cases, readers were told, they should look for parallels with this
behaviour among animals, many species of which, 'and especially
rabbits', consume their young at times of food shortage.12 What the
survivors were to make of their unspeakable memories was not discussed. Still less attention, moreover, would be given to the succession
of disasters which followed. The famine of 1932-3, indeed, was officially denied at the time. The open commemoration of the eight or more
million who died would be left to exiles forfiftyyears.
By 1939, then, the Soviet Union had already sustained proportionately more excess deaths than any other industrializing European
society. Most were far from heroic, material neither for patriotic monuments nor state-building mythologies. As we have noted, such was the
official concern about the scale of loss that statistics about it were
concealed and the reality of mass death publicly denied. The first census
conducted under Stalinist rule, that of 1937, was suppressed before a
line of its conclusions had been published.13 Denial was not merely the
work of the state, however. Every individual with a personal memory of
loss, every witness, in some measure colluded in the process. It has been
suggested that mass death brutalizes its witnesses, that they become
hardened to violence.14 The Soviet case is more confusing, however. For
the victims collaborated with an apparently brutal suppression of
10
11
13
14
L. A. and L. M. Vasilevskii, Kniga o golode (Petrograd, 1922).

12
Ibid. pp. 175-8.
Ibid. p. 182.
See Catherine Merridale, 'The 1937 census and the limits of Stalinist rule', The
Historical Journal, 39, no. 1 (1996), pp. 225-40.
Mosse, Fallen soldiers, pp. 159-60.
66
Catherine Merridale
mourning while simultaneously preserving their private memories for

years afterwards.
How did people cope with loss on this scale? What was its impact? In
other societies a natural response would have been to turn to the
traditional comforts of religion and ritual, public or private. But here
again, the Soviet case was exceptional. The violence of the Stalin era
was compounded by a parallel and simultaneous assault upon religious
practices of all kinds, including those surrounding death. The impact of
this attack on Russian mentalities can be understood only by considering the importance of tradition in the years before Stalinism. Even for
a pre-industrial society, Russia was richly endowed with superstition,
custom, and ritual when it came to the treatment of death and bereavement.15 Beliefs about the relationship between the body and the soul,
and even about the condition of the corpse itself, incorporated preChristian influences, accretions from traditional folklore and adapted
orthodox ideas and language. Superstitions which had persisted for
centuries were widely held, affecting practices across European Russia.
The rapid violation of these would have been shocking on its own. But
their more or less enforced abandonment at a time of widespread
violence compounded a major social catastrophe.
In the light of what was about to happen, two principal sets of issues
stand out as particularly important. First, the body itself was treated
with careful reverence - washed, dressed in special garments, laid in its
coffin with an assortment of possessions and tokens to ease its passage
to the 'other side'. Second, the place of burial acquired a lasting
importance. The holding of ritual meals at the graveside, regular visits
to the plot, the tending and decoration of graves - these are traditions
which still survive. Family members might converse with the deceased
by the grave; sometimes messages were sent in the keeping of the
recently dead for those who had gone long before. A sense of continuity
was preserved at the burial site. Cremation, which the Bolsheviks
attempted to introduce in the 1920s, was entirely alien to Russian
funerary culture. The practice disappeared, indeed, more or less at the
same time as Christianity arrived in Kiev.
Fear of and respect for death were manifested through ghost stories
and the belief that potentially vengeful spirits must be appeased. The
purpose of many of the more elaborate aspects of funerary ritual was to
circumvent the possibility of haunting or other revenge. At the moment
of death, for example, doors were locked and a window opened to allow
the spirit to leave by an unfamiliar route, thus making its return to the
15
See G. A. Nosova, 'Traditsionnyi obryady russkikh: krestiny, pokhoronny, pominki',

Rossiiskii etnograf, 6 (1993), p. 5.
67
house more difficult.16 The soap with which the corpse had been
washed was buried in an uncultivated corner of the yard, and the water
disposed of outside the house. Body and spirit were hardly separate violations of a corpse could result in an angry haunting.17 Whether
individuals fully believed in these superstitions is at one level unimportant; their persistence indicates that they were at least effective as
strategies for allaying the collective anxiety about death in a highmortality world.
How did the Bolsheviks deal with death? Their ideology was officially
atheist. Unease about death, however, is universal. Before the Revolution, 'red' funerals, with their processions of workers, red banners, and
hortatory speeches in place of religious imagery, had been arranged for
individual Marxist heroes.18 These were exceptions, however. The
creation of a state ritual was a matter for the post-revolutionary leadership, but one which they confronted within hours of the seizure of
power. An early task for the new government was to bury the 238 heroes
who had died in the struggle for Moscow. Here, perhaps, lies the origin
of official amnesia about the First World War. For Bolshevik ceremonial
appropriated martial imagery, stripped it of its imperial and religious
trappings, and pressed it into service for the fallen of the people's
revolution. Red Square, which only four years before had seen celebrations for 300 years of the Romanov dynasty, now hosted its first mass
rally for the new regime.19 Every factory, office, and theatre in the city
was closed for the occasion. Open coffins were carried through the city
to their burial place in the Kremlin wall. The choice of ceremony, even
the choice of music and the presence of keening women, combined the
old and familiar with elements of Communist state theatre. The addition of military guards and political slogans, neatly replacing the trappings of traditional religion, was intended at this stage to honour the fact
that the 'heroes' had died fighting. This war, the revolutionary struggle,
had symbolically to supersede the sacrifices made on behalf of Tsarism
since 1914. Selection and censorship had begun at once.
The hero's funeral, repeated several times in the next three years,20
16
17
18
19
20
Details from D. K. Zelenin, Vostochnoslavyanskaya etnografiya (Moscow, 1926;

reprinted 1991).
Elaborate ghost-rituals survived in rural Siberia into the twentieth century. See M. M.
Gromyko, Dokhristyanskie verovaniya v bytu sibirskikh krest'yan XVIIIXIX
vv.
(Moscow, 1967).
On this, see N. S. Polishchuk, 'Obryad kak sotsial'noe yavlenie', Sovetskaya etnografiya,
6 (1991), pp. 25-39.
My description of the funeral is based on accounts reproduced in A. Abramov, U
kremlevskoi steny (Moscow, 1984).
Notably at the funerals of the assassinated Bolshevik, Zagorskii, and of Ya. M. Sverdlov,
the first general secretary of the Party.
68
Catherine Merridale
would reach its high point in the public obsequies for Lenin in 1924. In
its seventh year, the new regime had yet to perfect the atheist funeral;
Lenin deserved the deepest solemnities, but Communism, with its
simple slogans and direct messages of equality and consumption, could
provide little that did not smack of bathos. The choice of music, for
example, was problematic. The heroes of 1917 were buried to the
strains of the Internationale - less than two weeks after the Revolution
little else seemed appropriate. But the commission which met to
organize the ceremony for Lenin's interment included men whose tastes
had been formed in Western Europe. They reached instinctively for the
requiem masses of Verdi and Mozart, to say nothing of the heroic
romanticism of Wagner's Gotterddmmerung. Memoranda flew from the
commission to the office of Lunacharskii, Commissar for Education. It
was the latter who discarded all the religious music, rejected Wagner on
aesthetic grounds, and opted for Chopin and Beethoven interleaved
with frequent repeats of the Internationale,.21
Lenin's funeral and the embalming of his corpse raise questions which
reach beyond the scope of this chapter. Here it is enough to note that it
provided the occasion for the most spectacular public ritual of the
Revolution's first decade, and indeed possibly also of the entire pre-war
period. Its cost, at a time of economic stringency, was considerable. 22
Red Square itself was refurbished, numerous small buildings, and even a
tram line, were removed, and a temporary mausoleum constructed. The
military demonstration which accompanied the ceremony was rigorous
to the point of barbarism - 162 soldiers suffered frostbite standing to
attention along the route of the cortege. 23 But the official object was
achieved. Lenin's funeral was treated as a moment to renew one's
allegiance to the new regime; from the premature death of the hero
would flow new life in the form of a new world order. The leader's body,
like that of a pre-revolutionary saint, would not corrupt. Preserved in his
perspex coffin, moreover, the dead hero watched - albeit impotently over the regime he had created. His death, like those of other heroes,
glorified the collective enterprise of building socialism. Such a sense of
purpose assuaged the grief which, bereft of any sense of a compensatory
afterlife, could otherwise only mourn, and even seek to avenge, the
senseless obliteration of life.
If Bolshevism appropriated some of the symbolism and ritual of pre21
22
23
The papers relating to Lenin's funerals are in the Lenin fond at RTsKhlDNI, fond 16,
opis 1, delo 105.
F o r a lavish a c c o u n t of t h e building of t h e L e n i n m a u s o l e u m , see N . N . Stoyanov,
Arkhitektura mavzoleya Lenina (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1950).
R T s K h l D N I , fond 16, opis 1, delo 91.
69
revolutionary Russia for its leaders, however, in practice the deaths of

common people were treated with less reverence. A regime which
originally attempted to maintain the Provisional Government's ban on
the death penalty for both civilian and military offences soon found itself
presiding over summary executions running at scores or even hundreds
a day.24 Eye-witnesses recalled piles of bodies littering the streets of
provincial cities, the nightly echo of rifle fire. As Lenin put it, 'no
revolutionary government can do without the death penalty, and the
essence of the question is only against what class will the weapon of the
death penalty be directed'.25 Some of the killings were intended to have
a deterrent effect. In 1922, for example, Lenin called for the religious
protesters of the city of Shua to be punished 'so brutally that they will
remember it for decades to come'.26 The first official victim of the death
penalty administered by Soviet justice was Aleksei Shchastny, Admiral
of the Baltic fleet, executed for treason in June 1918.27
The bulk of the political killings of the early Soviet period received little
publicity, however, especially those which did not involve prominent
figures or elaborate trials. Public, theatrical, execution was not a staple of
a regime which preferred to despatch its many enemies with a swift bullet
rather than risk the spectacle - and possible focus for revolt - of an
overcrowded public gallows.28 By the 1930s, indeed, by which time
techniques for removing opponents had become routine, individuals who
were purged simply disappeared. Although recent testimonies, for
example from Belarus, speak of people kept awake at night by the sound
of rifle or revolver fire, most of the Great Purge killings of 1937-8 took
place in secret. Even prominent figures from the revolutionary era Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others - were killed in cellars or
remote wooded compounds away from public view. Purge victims were
often shot in the back of the neck, a method of execution which spared
the executioner from eye contact with his target and, apparently, minimized the post-mortem spilling of blood. Their human bodies, several
24
25
26
27
28
T h e death penalty was abolished after the February Revolution. It was formally
reinstated in September 1918, b u t had in practice been revived from as early as March.
See G e r P. van den Berg, ' T h e Soviet Union and the death penalty', Soviet Studies, 3 5 ,
2 (April 1983), p. 155.
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, fifth edn, vol. 3 9 , pp. 1 8 3 - 4 .
O n this remark, and the literature about it, see van den Berg, ' T h e Soviet Union and
the death penalty', pp. 156 and 168.
Ibid. p. 155.
A comparison might b e made here between the use of the guillotine in the case of Louis
XVI's execution - the deliberate distancing of the crowd from the m o m e n t of death and the more elaborate secrecy, or at least, the absence of publicity or ceremony, in the
bulk of Soviet executions. For Louis's execution, see Richard Sennett, Flesh and stone:
the body and the city in Western civilization (London: F a b e r & Faber, 1994).
70
Catherine Merridale
million of them over the whole Soviet period, simply disappeared.29 Of

the remaining victims of Stalinism, many died in complete isolation from
society, starving or perishing from cold in the labour camps of the far
north and east. The scale of the political killings was nearly always
downplayed. The dictatorship of the proletariat could be baptized lightly
with the blood of martyrs, but there was nothing to be gained from
advertising its total immersion in that of its real and imagined opponents.
The Civil War provided many seminal images for the new state, and
references to its heroes echoed a decade later in the martial language of
Stalinist industrialization. While military metaphors and the language of
emergency and heroism were retained, however, the enemy featured in
extreme, almost dreamlike, burlesque. A desire to deny even the basic
humanity of alleged criminals was reflected in their depiction in the
press as spiders, rats, pigs, vultures, dogs, hyenas. The official images
were carefully censored. Ex-combatants of the Civil War were known to
be racked by nightmares of slaughter and mutilation, their nerves
shattered, their bodies incapable of work.30 But while the medical and
Party journals discussed the problem from a clinical point of view, scant
public acknowledgement was made of the scenes which had driven them
to such a pass.
The Civil War was an extreme crisis; the reverent disposal of corpses
could hardly have been a high priority. But even behind the lines, longheld burial customs were under pressure from the moment Soviet power
was declared. The Bolshevik Party correctly recognized that institutions
such as the Orthodox Church would resist its officials and subvert
attempts to divert resources away from religious establishments. But the
attack on organized religion which followed the Revolution was not
solely aimed at the institutional power of the priesthood. Popular
religion, custom, and folklore all posed an ideological challenge. Funerals provided ideal opportunities for the parade of superstition, the
collective indulgence of religious belief and for group speculation about
the benefits or costs of the new political order. The traditional funeral,
and the customary rites of memorial during Lent and after Easter, were
objects of particular concern to militant atheists in the Bolshevik Party;
but they were also the least susceptible of religious rituals to violent
suppression. As late as the 1960s, by which time the majority of other
rites of passage (such as marriage and the naming of children) had
29
30
T h e public r e o p e n i n g of mass graves, for example those at B u t o v o n e a r M o s c o w a n d

Levashovo near St P e t e r s b u r g , b e g a n in t h e late 1980s. U p to t h e n , their existence was
a m a t t e r of general b u t secret knowledge, u n c o n f i r m e d a n d largely undiscussed.
A survey cataloguing s o m e of this d a m a g e was published in t h e Party journal,
Bd'shevik, 21-2 (1925), pp. 61-74.
71
acquired an almost universally accepted secular ritual, burial remained a

predominantly religious affair.31 Even the Bolsheviks, so heavy-handed
in their treatment of many survivals of traditional Russia, were aware
that death and burial were more than usually sensitive.32 But this
awareness did not prevent them, in the Revolution's early years, from
attempting to eradicate what they saw as offensive elements of the
'cult'.
A number of arguments were used in the attack on traditional
practices. The most persuasive, arguably, was based on considerations
of public health. It was no coincidence that the first Soviet decree on
cemeteries was passed at the height of the typhus epidemic of
1918-19. 33 Cemeteries near the centres of increasingly overcrowded
cities posed a threat to ground water; excessively shallow graves - often
the result of the successive interment of several bodies in the same plot could even result in the exposure of bones and rotting human remains.
Meanwhile, the Bolshevik policy of closing churches left traditional
cemeteries untended and raised questions about the future use of the
space. The proposed solution to these problems, neatly including an
anti-religious element, was to introduce the practice of secular, scientific
cremation.34
One problem with this innovation, which it shared with other 'invented' ceremonies, was that the atheist ritual lacked dignity. 'The
needs of individuals for emotional expression were not only ignored',
observed an otherwise sympathetic commentator, 'but individual sensibilities were often violated.'35 The official instructions for cremations
called for 'order' in the cremation, 'complete silence, no smoking,
shouting, or spitting on the floor'. A list of documents was required
before cremation could take place; ashes, similarly, could not be
collected without the appropriate form. 'Ashes cannot be kept in the
house', concluded the directive, 'but every other way of dispersing them
- scattering them in the mountains, dropping them from aeroplanes,
keeping them in institutes and museums - is permitted. They may only
be taken abroad with the appropriate documentation.'36 This brutalism
was not the main problem with crematoria, however. Far more impor31
32
33
34
35
A. I. Kvardakov, 'Religioznye perezhitki soznanii i b y t u sel'skogo naseleniya i p u t i ikh

preodoleniya', Aftoreferat dissertatsii (Novosibirsk, 1 9 6 9 ) , p . 12.
Christel L a n e , The rites ofrulers ( C a m b r i d g e : C a m b r i d g e University Press, 1 9 8 1 ) , p . 82.
T h e first decree o n cemeteries was passed o n 7 D e c e m b e r 1 9 1 8 , a n d it a t t e m p t e d to
control 'private enterprise' a n d 'small family c o n c e r n s ' in t h e burial business. G A R F ,
fond 4 8 2 , opis 4, delo 3 1 , p . 4 0 .
F o r the hygienic a r g u m e n t s , see V. Lazarev's a c c o u n t of t h e 1923 exhibition of
crematoria a n d cremation in Sotsialisticheskaya gigieniya, 3 - 4 ( 1 9 2 3 ) , p . 175.
36
L a n e , Rites ofrulers, p . 6 2 .
GARF, fond 5 2 6 3 , opis 1, delo 12, p p . 7 - 8 .
72
Catherine Merridale
tant was the fact that the physical destruction of the corpse violated a
deep taboo. The Orthodox Church required that bodies decompose
naturally, a process which was deemed to parallel the soul's gradual
detachment from the world of the flesh.37 Traditionally, too, the spirit of
the dead person did not leave his or her relatives at once; the commemorative services which were held forty days and a year after death were
survivals from an older tradition of appeasing the courts of Heaven and
even exorcizing the earth-bound spirits of the dead. Cremation required
the premature annihilation of human remains, and also deprived the
survivors of the possibility of revisiting the grave with the traditional
gifts of food deemed necessary to forestall misfortune.
The introduction of cremation had, therefore, to be backed up by the
suppression of cemeteries. Here again, careful regulations set out the
procedure by which grave ornaments and lead could be removed and
turned over to government use. A watch on such cemeteries was needed
to prevent hasty (and thus unhygienic) burials from taking place even
after official closure. The task fell to the secret police, who also
monitored the activities of wandering priests and sectarian groups.38
Procedures and regulations were prescribed to prevent unnecessary
violence and the abuse of local believers, but in fact over-zealous officials
could expect little in the way of reproof if they exceeded their tasks.
Cases of so-called proizvol, arbitrariness, which could include the
banning of prayers for the dying and religious funerals, were seldom
investigated.39 The priority at this stage was to break the universal grip
of religion. Crematoria, which never superseded graveyards in the
popular mind, were publicized as the socialist alternative to burial. The
contrast between the meagre ritual there provided, the rapid disposal of
physical remains, and the traditional pomp surrounding Lenin's corpse
could hardly have been greater.
Even for those who died peacefully, then, Soviet power brought
changes, many of which made mourning more difficult for those who
survived. For the families of those who died violently, and for the
victims of famine, the processes of loss and mourning were disrupted
beyond recognition. Written records from the famine regions, for
example, stressed the appalling casualness and haste of disposal. Bodies
37
38
39
M o n a k h a Mitrofana, Zagrobnaya Zhizn', kak zhivut nashi umershie, kak budem zhit' i my
posle smerti (St P e t e r s b u r g , 1 9 8 7 ) .
Ibid. p p . 1 - 5 .
A petition sent t o Kalinin in 1930 c o m p l a i n i n g a b o u t such practices, a n d n o t i n g
instances of suicide in t h e face of repression a n d uncertainty, m e t with t h e reply t h a t
' C o m r a d e Kalinin is n o t in the least interested in t h e question of religion in this
instance. H e merely w a n t s to k n o w w h a t violations of t h e law took place.' G A R F , j
5 2 6 3 , opis 1, delo 7, 12, 7 2 - 8 .
73
were piled up on carts and in morgues and buried by the score - if there
was anyone available to bury them - in communal pits. Sometimes the
dying were loaded on to the mortuary carts with the dead to save a
second tour of the village. Memoirs describe the looting of bodies, thefts
of clothing. From the early 1920s onwards, moreover, reports of
cannibalism, and especially the hasty butchering of corpses, accompanied every food crisis. During the siege of Leningrad, for example,
stories were told of putrefying corpses being used as food, and even of
the butchering of bodies lying in a hospital yard. 'It was an hour or so
sometimes and body parts would be taken', a survivor recalled in
1986.40
Beyond death, there was also little or no formal remembrance for the
millions who died in the unacknowledged catastrophes of the Stalin era.
As many have observed, the social recognition of violent death is a
crucial stage in the process by which the bereaved come to terms with
loss individually and as members of society as a whole.41 Remembrance
involves the conferring of a certain status on the bereaved, the construction of dignified narratives to explain the necessity and value of the
losses.42 The Soviet Union was not the only state to obstruct this
process. The fallen of 1920s civil-war Ireland have become almost
invisible in social terms, as, for a time, did slaves who perished without
record in the days before civil rights. Where Soviet Russia differed from
most other cases, however, was that many memories did not merely rot
but were actively suppressed. Millions of manilla files were preserved in
the miles of underground corridors beneath ministry buildings, but the
public had no access to them, and scant awareness of their existence, let
alone their true extent.43
As far as the public was concerned, historical, and even personal
records, were distorted throughout the Soviet period. Even war deaths,
as we have noted, were recorded selectively. Other losses, as we also saw,
were denied and evidence of them locked away so securely that people
came to think that it had been destroyed. The state was clearly the
instigator of this process of deceit. But it was not the only actor in the
40
41
42
43
William C. Moskoff, The bread of affliction: the food supply crisis in the USSR during
World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p . 197.
For a recent exposition of this, see Jay Winter's introduction to his Sites of memory, sites
of mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Mosse's idea of the 'myth of the war experience' stresses the nationalistic purpose
behind this process (p. 7); Winter places more emphasis on the collective 'transcendence' of grief.
For a discussion of the files, see Stephen Kotkin's 'Terror, rehabilitation, and historical
memory. An interview with Dmitrii Iurasov', Russian Review, 51 (April 1992), p. 238.
According to Iurasov, who worked in a n u m b e r of archives, there were 2 | million files in
store at the Supreme C o u r t alone.
74
Catherine Merridale
process of memory destruction. In many cases the circumstances were

such as to encourage individuals to collaborate actively in the suppression of documents and other items. The example of the 1933 famine
illustrates this process at work. Reports from the area suggested that
although food was critically scarce everywhere and prices high, starvation itself was uneven. Some villages were virtually wiped out while
others, though suffering, survived. At the same time, refugees from
famine areas were to be found at rail heads across Southern Russia and
the Ukraine. Under these circumstances, the denial of mass death the very word starvation was banned in 1932 - cannot have convinced
many people. But there was no public outcry against this blatant
official concealment. Part of the reason for the silence was the habit of
collusion which fifteen years of Soviet power had begun to instil.
Organized political opposition was no trivial crime by 1933. Speaking
out, moreover, would bring few rewards in a political system where the
possibility of alternative forms of government, or even of finding
different personnel, had dwindled to nothing. It was on this basis that
official lies about the famine paid off. The suppression of mortality
data four years later, in the 1937 census, was effected without
protest. 44
Repression, however, or the threat of it, was not the only reason for
the people's silence. For those who had suffered most directly, silence
may have been preferable to repeating a story which could not publicly
be acknowledged. Because there was no chance of healing recognition,
the rehearsal of the experience would have brought only further suffering, material as well as psychological. Many had fled the countryside,
moreover, to avoid further harm. Their guilt, as survivors, would have
been reinforced by their desire to forget in order to begin a new life.
Survivors have recalled in interview how they lied about their origins to
escape the discrimination reserved for 'former' people and their children. 45 Finally, untold numbers benefited directly from the famine. 46
Some appropriated land or chattels; some, more grimly, were known to
have looted the dead. Those who resettled abandoned villages, however
innocently, would also have had good reason to be silent about the
44
45
46
O n t h e denial of the famine a n d suppression of the 1937 c e n s u s , see M e r r i d a l e , ' T h e

1937 C e n s u s ' .
T h i s material is b a s e d o n t h e a u t h o r ' s c u r r e n t interview project, which involves
r e c o r d e d discussions a n d interviews with survivors of t h e p u r g e s , famines, a n d w a r s of
t h e first half of t h e twentieth c e n t u r y in Russia. T h e research h a s b e e n funded b y t h e
E S R C , a n d a b o o k developing its findings will b e published b y G r a n t a in 2 0 0 0 .
O n the appropriation of g o o d s , a n d m o r e generally o n t h e exploitation of collectivization b y s o m e p e a s a n t s , see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's peasants: resistance and survival in
the Russian village after collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
especially chapter 9.
75
recent past.47 For all these reasons, the suppression of public discussion
was not simply an act of violence perpetrated by the state. Private
memories were preserved, though partially. But a sense of collective
understanding, a social memory, developed only episodically and lacked
immediate political impact.48
The same kinds of observation could be made about the purges. For
most relatives of the arrested, it was actively dangerous to preserve
material evidence of the existence of repressed enemies of the people.
The work of destruction began with the individual. Photographs would
be destroyed, or the faces of the deceased mutilated and erased. Manuscripts were burned, as were letters, keepsakes, and diaries. These acts,
which took some time and would have forced a certain amount of
reflection on the part of the mourner, might be portrayed as a kind of
anti-commemoration, a process which aided mourning in its early
stages. But they were also, crucially, violations of memory. Private
narratives were sometimes, as we have seen, preserved within families.
But the scale of the losses, the breadth of the disaster, could not have
been apparent to the majority of people. Many were not even certain
that their relative was dead. Such information was seldom officially
given. At the time of the Great Purge of 1937-8, relatives who inquired
would be told that a victim had been sentenced to 'ten years' imprisonment without right of correspondence', the inscrutable official euphemism employed when a person had been shot. As late as the 1980s,
most survivors might only have received 'incomprehensible pieces of
paper testifying to rehabilitation, and another piece of paper with false
information about dates and places of death. Some people had no
information of any kind.'49 It was only after 1991 that individuals were
able to ask for, and receive, the bare statement that their relative had
been shot, together with the date. Many have yet to discover where the
bodies lie.
Personal grief had no wider framework, no mirror in which to observe
itself gradually diminishing. In this sense, the official denial of loss
compounded initial acts of state brutality. To make matters worse, the
widows or children of purge victims might well be obliged to denounce
their disgraced relative, and this not once, but repeatedly in everything
they did for the rest of their lives. A complex pattern of survivor-guilt
emerged from interviews I conducted with such people in 1997. Many
47
48
49
S o m e of these observations are based o n interviews with famine survivors c o n d u c t e d by

t h e a u t h o r in M o s c o w in 1 9 9 5 .
Exiles were m o r e readily able to establish a c o n n e c t e d story, t h e classic case in p o i n t
b e i n g the Ukrainian c o m m u n i t y in C a n a d a .
K o t k i n , 'Terror, rehabilitation, a n d historical m e m o r y ' , p . 2 5 9 .
76
Catherine Merridale
argued vigorously for their own innocence, citing precise clauses of the
criminal law and constitution, while allowing for the possibility that
many other victims of Stalinism were guilty at some level and even guilty
as charged. Many continued to buy into the Stalinist dream, and even to
be active Communists (if they were permitted to be Party members),
thereby closing off the possibility of seeing their victimhood as part of a
larger state crime. For these people, the revelations of the Khrushchev
thaw in the 1960s offered little comfort. They continued to hide their
own pasts and to deny their membership in a community of victims.
None could have predicted, as they embarked on this lifetime of denial,
that its end would be the springtime of glasnost and the fall of
Communism itself.
Ostensibly, the war was a different story. Public commemoration of
the Great Patriotic War was ubiquitous in the Soviet Union. But it was
also selective. The overwhelming repetition of some memories, the
pointed exclusion of others, was conceived as a form of censorship as
powerful as any blanket official denial. Certain kinds of pain, including,
for example, a child's sense of the strangeness of step-parents or the
specific grief of Jewish Holocaust survivors, were censored out of public
discussion.50 But was this selectivity effective? Memories do not disappear within a generation. War mourning was specific, it required a
channelling or sublimation of other griefs. And if wartime losses could
be concentrated into the public commemoration of the unknown soldier
- male, white, a fallen combatant - so, indirectly, could those which had
preceded the war itself. The war was a catastrophe without parallel. As
well as serving as a totem in its own right, it was used, by the state and
by individuals who had enjoyed no opportunity to reconcile themselves
to the pain of the 1930s, as a healing fire. The 1930s was a decade of
unspeakable private pain on a mass scale. The war, terrible though it
was, and damaging even to survivors, was a collective triumph, and the
recollection of it still brings a smile of remembered comradeship to the
people who speak of it. For those who survived, it was probably the
most vivid set of episodes they would ever know, and sharing the
memory with others was - and remains - a psychological imperative.51
Arguably, too, commemoration and the re-enactment of national soli50
51
Step-mothers in particular were identified as a group which should no longer be seen in

a negative light, and folk tales were amended accordingly at the end of the 1940s. T h e
identification of Jews as the special victims of Nazi violence was played down in favour
of a more generalized story of atrocities aimed at the whole Soviet people.
For accounts of shared commemoration, see Svetlana Aleksiyevich, War's unwomanly
face, translated by Keith H a m m o n d and Lyudmila Lezhneva (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1988), which is composed of interviews with woman survivors and veterans
living in Belarus.
77
darity enabled individuals to transcend earlier griefs which had few

other outlets. The woman whose husband had disappeared in 1937
(and who had nonetheless given all her energies to the war effort for five
years) could bring her grief, if not a story about it, to the solemn
meetings in May every year as easily as her neighbour, the war widow.52
To assert that alternative, unofficial memories survived and were
brought to remembrance ceremonies and memorials it is not necessary
to deny the validity of the argument that state-sponsored commemoration aimed to rewrite the national story. Invented tradition to some
extent fed upon the past at the same time as it sought to overshadow
it.53 State-sponsored ceremonial sank hungry roots into the deep well of
historic pain and loss. Obviously, Soviet military parades were designed
to overwhelm, to drown individual memory in the clamour of patriotic
ceremonial. Observers became participants despite themselves as the
martial music played and the tanks rolled by. But at the same time, the
very crudeness of the ceremony, so effective as a shaper of crowds,
guaranteed that alternative memories would survive. The groups which
were excluded or overlooked were so numerous that they could not fail
to muster some kind of counter-memory in the very shadow of the
official story. Most obviously, men suffered disproportionately in each of
the Soviet Union's wars. Twenty million more women were alive than
men after 1945.54 Soviet remembrance, like most of its genre, was
oppressively masculine, from the parades of weaponry to the goosestepping youths and the veterans on the stands. But the majority of the
population, and, above all, of those who grieved and remembered, was
female.
These women were not all isolated widows. After a war in which many
had found themselves in sole charge of their families, where the men had
vanished, they did not need formal associations to unite them at the
local level. Despite the considerable disruption of the family involved in
collectivization,55 networks older than Communism still linked village
women and their daughters, while new kinships of grief bound women
who had previously been scattered within towns and cities.56 Many
women, even girls in their teens, were united further by their direct
52
C o m p a r a b l e examples from o t h e r socialist societies are described in R u b i e S. Watson
(ed.), Memory, history and opposition under state socialism (Santa Fe: School of American
53
54
Research A d v a n c e d Press, 1994).

I would see t h e process as far m o r e contested a n d a m b i g u o u s t h a n Ignatieff suggested
in 1984 ('Soviet w a r m e m o r i a l s ' ) . However, h e was writing before glasnost a n d also at a
t i m e w h e n t h e w a r veterans were younger a n d the w a r twelve years m o r e recent.
O n t h e l o n g - t e r m d e m o g r a p h i c i m p a c t of t h e war, see B l u m , Naitre, vivre et mourir en
URSS.
55
56
See Fitzpatrick, Stalin's peasants, especially p p . 2 2 0 - 4 .

F o r a c c o u n t s of similar networks after t h e Afghan war, see Alexsiyevich, Zinky
boys.
78
Catherine Merridale
experience of military service, including combat. And those who survived were not consigned to the domestic (and therefore isolating)
spheres of child-rearing and household management after the war
ended. Most had to take over the work of their lost men, hard physical
labour which perpetuated the associations and networks of wartime. 'In
every other hut or so', recalled one village woman, 'there was a widow or
a soldier's wife. We were left without men. Without horses - they were
taken for the army, too. And after the war . . . the village women took the
place of men and horses.'57
What can this larger section of the Soviet people have thought as it
watched parades in honour of the very militarism which had killed their
men? At one level, commemoration of the war was a near-sacramental
act, militarism was not identified with loss, but with triumph, and the
women who witnessed parades were proud to be associated with victory
in any shape. But this adoring commemoration was also shot with
paradox: angry memories conflicted with loyalty to the cause for which
the men had died, bitterness mixed more or less equally with the
limitless patriotism and respect for the uniformed men who claimed still
to be protecting the motherland. 'My neighbour Vasil came in with his
medals and other decorations', recalled a widow of a Victory Day
parade. 'People were greeting him and the chairman of the collective
farm seated him beside himself on the podium. But my Ivan and my son
- one of them lying in Romania, the other in Voronezh. So wasn't it my
day as well?'58 Despite the pain, however, many individuals were proud
to associate with the heroic and patriotic images of war. Most women
veterans, for instance, appeared content to disregard their femininity
and the specific stories which it implied, proud to be seen as the equals
and even the near-equivalents of male soldiers.59
As far as personal loss and memory were concerned, individual
experiences varied widely. Some mourners brought specific, completed
personal stories to the remembrance ceremonies, details of the date and
place of their husband's death, possibly even memories of a grave once
visited. 'I've forgotten what happened yesterday', recalled one widow,
'but I remember the war. How I brought him home, how I buried him
... How I wanted to kiss him for the last time, but the coffin was made
of zinc, so I kissed the place where his face would have been.'60 But
these women, in some respects, were the lucky ones. Many others never
knew what had happened to relatives or partners. In these circumstances, commemoration was a poignant event. One old woman, 'long
past seventy', was to be seen wandering the Victory Day parade in the
57
59
58
Aleksiyevich, War's unwomanly face, p. 206.
Ibid. p. 207.
60
Ibid. pp. 50 and 120, for example.
Ibid. p. 179.
79
1980s with a worn-out placard round her neck which read, 'Looking for
Thomas Vladimirovich Kulnev, reported missing in besieged Leningrad in 1942.'61 For her, as for many others, remembrance was more
complicated than official ceremony allowed. Whatever the individual
memory, moreover, when the parade was over, and the tea was
poured, the stories, individual and family-based, would also flow. Here
again, remembrance took many forms. Men, typically, recounted their
stories in the yard, on benches in city parks, or around the stove in
winter hazes of tobacco smoke. Women talked separately, usually in
the kitchen, and their stories had a different, often more personal, tone
and content.62
Any list of excluded categories is likely in itself to be partial and thus
misleading. There were many types of loss which official commemoration overlooked. But if gender was one of the more important sources of
alternative perception, nationality was surely another. The absurdity of
Mother Russia's monumental presence as a memorial outside the
Ukrainian city of Kiev has been pointed out elsewhere.63 Great Russian
patriotism tended to conflate national and ethnic differences, although
gestures of recognition for certain nationalities were made at the
expense of others. Some members of ethnic minorities acquiesced in
this incorporation. Identities were not fixed in the early Soviet period.64
And to some extent the very excesses of Nazi brutality indeed united the
Soviet people in a common cause. But the Russian focus of remembrance, and the unknown soldier's assumed Slavic ethnicity, were not
consistently acceptable to those who grieved.
The paradoxical, contested nature of remembrance in Russia continues to be apparent. The war is not mere history yet. Throughout the
Soviet period, it remained a matter of the deepest reverence and a focus
for genuine grief.65 Survivors still invest remembrance with nearreligious significance. But with the fall of Communism came a discrediting of the Stalinist political style, a rejection of the language of
sacrifice and deference. Youth culture had little time for the past.
Evasions of national service became more open, and young men trained
in Moscow's suburbs not to fight for their country but to defend their
gang. The fiftieth-anniversary commemoration ceremonies in Moscow
in May 1995 were surprisingly low key. The veterans themselves com61
62
63
64
65
Ibid. p . 8 1 .
T h e s e observations are largely based o n m y own interviews, conducted in 1994 a n d
1995. However, t h e specific patterns of female recollection are confirmed by
Alexsiyevich in both t h e works of oral history already cited.
Ignatieff,'Soviet w a r memorials', p . 158.
See Merridale, 'The 1937 census', pp. 232-3.
Ignatieff,'Soviet w a r memorials', pp. 1 6 0 - 1 .
80
Catherine Merridale
plained about the plastic medals with which they were issued, the poorquality chocolate, the lack of sausage.66 Meanwhile, the Chechen crisis
continued its challenge to Russian military claims. It was in 1996, as the
election approached, that militarism resumed its accustomed place. The
war commemorations in May of that year were more elaborate, if more
troubled by fears of terrorism, than those of the previous spring.67
Stalin's war, with its victorious military imagery and underlying story of
continued national danger, was used in an attempt to redeem Boris
Yeltsin, just as twenty years before it had been used to rejuvenate Leonid
Brezhnev.
For those whose prime concern is the immediate rebuilding of the
Russian state, this abuse of history can appear to be a diversion. Young
people, and not only the young, have argued that too much interest in
the past is unhealthy. They stress this line with even greater vigour
when the focus shifts from the war to the excesses of Stalin's terror.
Their argument runs that the last survivors will soon be dead, and that
the old hatreds are best left to die with them. The case was made
frequently in the late 1980s, at the height of the rehabilitation campaigns. On the other hand, for those with memories of loss, the
commemoration of Stalin's victims is no less important than the
remembrance of war. When the Memorial society mounted a commemorative exhibition about the victims of repression, a million
visitors attended it in a week. Thousands wrote to Iurasov, one of the
organizers, soon after. 'All wanted to talk about their tragedies', he
recalled.68 Memorial's volunteers worked to recover as much information as possible about every person who had disappeared during the
Soviet period. The society also undertook the construction of physical
monuments to the repressed, the most famous of which now occupies
a central position in Lyubyanka Square. But despite the support for its
activities, a vocal section of the population has consistently maintained
that the opening of old wounds can only cause pain and divert
attention away from present tasks.
Who is right? The question has no final answer. One can look to the
experience of postwar Germany and Eastern Europe since 1989 to draw
comparisons, but each case has a number of special features which make
generalization difficult. What is clear from Eastern Europe, including
the Czech republic and former East Germany, is that witch hunts, the
66
67
68
Observations collected b y the a u t h o r in M o s c o w in 1 9 9 5 . I personally tested t h e

chocolate.
T h e residential area a r o u n d the victory m o n u m e n t at t h e e n d of K u t u z o v P r o s p e k t was
at o n e p o i n t scheduled for evacuation, for example.
K o t k i n , 'Terror, rehabilitation, a n d historical m e m o r y ' , p p . 2 5 8 - 9 .
81
search for collaborators, are dangerous and partially counter-productive

affairs.69 In the case of post-Soviet Russia, furthermore, virtually every
living citizen over the age of forty, and many who are younger, bears
some responsibility for collusion, however passive and unwilling. The
boundary between victims and perpetrators is too fluid to be certain
about the criteria for innocence.
But witch hunts and mourning are separate processes. Where
mourning is concerned, Russia may have something to learn from
postwar Germany. The problem there, as in Russia, was the question of
collusion. Even for Holocaust survivors, guilt and uncomfortable memories of missed opportunities made commemoration problematic. But
for the mass of the German population, even those who were not active
Nazis, overwhelming guilt, together with unvoiced fears about collaboration and responsibility, made the Holocaust and the excesses of
Nazi domestic policy into almost taboo subjects outside the prescribed
curriculum of the schoolroom until well into the 1960s.70 Psychologists
working with German civilians and with former Nazis have noted the
unwillingness of individuals to discuss their personal role in past events,
an unwillingness often only breached with the approach of their own
deaths.71 Here, as in Stalin's Russia, censorship about sensitive matters
was not merely imposed from above.
As we have noted, a crucial difference between the two catastrophes
has been that on some issues at least the Russian silence was preserved
only in public. Holocaust survivors protected themselves and their
children in a relatively stable postwar world by avoiding the subject of
their trauma. In a society where repression continued and the political
danger was omnipresent, Soviet parents attempted to warn and protect
their children by initiating them into family secrets. How much they told
them, however, what words they found for personal trauma, remains
unclear. More research is needed here to find points of comparison and
contrast.
In Russia as in Germany, later generations have tried to escape the
legacy of the past by attempting to ignore it. But evasion is not so easily
secured. Psychologists have noted that the pathways through which
secrets or deliberate silence can emerge include depression and other
psychological disabilities such as anxiety. In Russia, enhanced rates of
suicide, notable especially among males, may be linked at least in part to
69
70
71
For some thoughts on the recent round of trials, see Timothy Garton Ash, ' " N e o pagan" Poland', New York Review of Books, 4 3 , no. 1 (January 1996), pp. 1 0 - 1 4 .
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The inability to mourn: principles of collective
behavior (New York: Grove Press, 1975).
For examples, see Barbara Heimannsberg and Christoph J. Schmidt, The collective
silence: German identity and the legacy of shame (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993).
82
Catherine Merridale
the undiscussed stresses of a prolonged and large-scale series of

traumas.72 The people affected come from generations who knew little
or nothing of large-scale suffering at first hand, but whose lives were
marked by the silences and undiscussed distinctiveness of their parents.
In this, as in other ways, the comparison with Germany is not a
question, Nolte-style, of reducing the magnitude of either disaster by
relativizing both.73 We should beware of applying the findings of one
group to another, observing all the time that the conditions each
experienced were unique, the historical, social, and cultural settings very
different. But if the argument about trauma has validity for one catastrophe, it is at least possible that it applies to others. For contemporary
Russia, the consequences, if it does, are profound.
Some of these consequences have policy implications. In the first
place, Russian attitudes to death and to the value of life have probably
been affected, in the medium term, by repeated exposure to unmourned, unvalued death. What others have described as the brutalization of society74 may have some applicability to Russia, though
distinctions need to be made between those directly exposed to violence
and those who experienced it at second hand or as children. More
directly, faith in the state as the provider of care and advice on matters
relating to health, hygiene, life, and death is likely to have taken a longterm beating. At every turn this century, ordinary people have looked to
each other, to their friends, for the support and even the basic information which the state denied them. The consequences for any government
interested in combating smoking, alcohol abuse, and even poor driving
are obvious. But finally, and more controversially, it may be that there is,
in the end, no avoiding the painful task of witnessing, of reliving, in
diminished form, the traumas of Stalinism. If the psychoanalytic argument about the long-term legacy of trauma is correct, they are present
no matter how deliberately one attempts to ignore them.
If mourning cannot be avoided, then commemoration may yet have a
crucial and even healing role to play. The political and civic uses of
memory remain controversial. But the public's need to remember may
transcend political expediency. Clearly, the Soviet state was adept at
devising patriotic ceremonial commemorations of the Great Patriotic
72
73
74
T h e full explanation for the increase in Russian death rates, including, b u t not
exclusively, death from suicide, remains unclear. See Judith Shapiro, ' T h e Russian
mortality crisis and its causes' in Anders Aslund (ed.), Russian economic reform at risk
(London: Pinter, 1995).
O n the Nolte controversy, see Norbert Karnpe, 'Normalising the Holocaust? T h e
recent historians' debate in the Federal Republic of Germany', Holocaust and Genocide
Studies, 2 (1987).
Mosse, Fallen soldiers, pp. 1 5 9 - 6 8 .
83
War. But while they served some of the interests of the Soviet regime,
these acts of remembrance were not fakes. As a commentator observes,
'it is impossible, in the long run, to impose ritual on unwilling people
without destroying the ritual in the process'.75 The commemoration of
Soviet Russia's other fallen, however, will be harder to establish. The
ceremonies and words, even the physical monuments, will have to be
invented, if they are to be created at all. Nonetheless, as we have seen, a
vocal group insists that memorials be built and invested with reverence.
'While humankind survives', concluded one of the Memorial society's
founders, 'it must preserve the memory of its forebearers [sic], to remain
human and to avoid becoming ... people without memory, whom it is
easier to make slaves.'76
75
76
L a n e , Rites of rulers, p . 5 7 .
K o t k i n , 'Terror, rehabilitation, a n d historical m e m o r y ' , p . 2 6 2 .
Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War

veterans and disabled soldiers
Paloma Aguilar
But in the black corners

in the blackest ones, they lie down
to weep for the fallen,
mothers who gave them milk,
sisters who bathed them,
brides once of snow
but now in the black of mourning,
and now with fever;
dazed widows,
shattered women,
letters and photographs
which portray them as they were,
there, eyes bursting
from seeing them so much and so little,
from so many silent tears,
from so much absent beauty.1
The traumatic collective memory that most Spaniards have, even today,
of the Civil War is explained not only by the events of the war of 1936 to
1939, but also by the experience of millions of Spaniards in the aftermath of the conflict itself.2 During the last weeks of the war as many as
half a million Spaniards on the losing side fled to escape the justifiably
feared repression of the victors. Most of the exiles who crossed the
French border were confined in appalling conditions in refugee camps
in the south of the country. Some managed to escape the German
invasion of France and went on to Latin America, and above all Mexico.
Yet many Republican veterans remained in France and joined the
Resistance, so suffering a second experience of war even before they had
1
From the poem 'Llamo a la Juventud' (1937) by Miguel Hernandez, poet and
combatant on the Republican side in the Civil War, who died in a Francoist prison
shortly after the end of the war. Miguel Hernandez, Poemas sociales de guerra y de muerte
(Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1977).
I would like to thank Justin Byrne for the revision of the English version of this essay.
84
Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War veterans
85
had time to recover from the first. Two decades after the end of the Civil
War, some 300,000 Republicans remained in exile.3
The fate of those who stayed in Spain after the end of the war was no
less dramatic. Thousands were executed for their real or alleged activities during the Second Republic or the war itself, victims of the
immense wave of repression unleashed by the victors. Hundreds of
thousands were imprisoned for political motives, sacked from their jobs,
or had their property confiscated, measures sanctioned by legislation
introduced during or after the war by the Francoist dictatorship.
Over and above all these individual and collective tragedies, the
fratricidal dimension inherent in a civil war only heightened the traumatic nature of this particular conflict. When the echoes of the battle
had faded, and the wartime propaganda ebbed, the time came for the
Spaniards to confront the most traumatic elements of the war. It was
then that most people, and especially those who had lost family
members, inevitably began to reflect on the sense and purpose of the
deaths, injuries, and sickness, the destruction, famine, and fear brought
about by the war. Before the Nationalist side had had time to begin to
question the sense and purpose of such a destructive conflict, the regime
initiated an extensive and intensive programme of monument-building,4
street-naming, and commemorations,5 in honour of their own fallen,
that is, the soldiers and civilians killed on the Nationalist side alone.6
3
On these peoples' lives, the most complete archive on the Spanish exiles in general, and
the disabled veterans in particular, is held by the Fundacion Universitaria Espanola
(FUE) in Madrid. I was grateful for the opportunity to consult these records.
The most famous of these monuments, is the Valle de los Caidos (the Valley of the
Fallen), an immense church and mausoleum built to commemorate the Nationalist
victims of the Civil War (for a history and study of the symbolism of this monument see
Paloma Aguilar, 'Collective memory of the Spanish Civil War: the case of political
amnesty in the Spanish transition to democracy', Working Paper CEACS, no. 185
(Madrid: Institute Juan March, 1996). Monuments and inscriptions were erected in
every Spanish village in this period. Most Catholic churches, for example, built war
memorials listing the local men and women who had died fighting on the Nationalist
side, many of which still stand today. Since the return to democracy, some of these
memorials have been taken down or replaced by others which also pay tribute to the
Republican dead. In some places this gesture of reconciliation proved very divisive,
provoking bitter confrontations within the local community.
The most important of these was the 'Victory Parade' {Desfile de la Victoria) held each
year between April and May (the official 'Victory Day' was 1 April) from 1939 to 1976.
As its name suggests, this did not celebrate the end of the Civil War, but the victory of
one half of Spanish society over the other. The last time this parade took place, less than
six months after Franco's death, the salute was taken by King Juan Carlos I.
One sector of society continued to suffer the physical consequences of the war even after
this was over. These were the peasants, above all children, who were maimed or killed by
the unexploded mines and bombs left all over Spain. The victims were totally neglected
by the regime, receiving none of the honours and benefits accorded to the nationalist
war veterans.
86
Pahma Aguilar
Although mourning is never a simple or easy process, in this case it

was much easier for the victors than for the vanquished in the conflict.
Not only did the former enjoy considerable support from the regime,
but they were also given the opportunity to express their grief through a
variety of different channels. A number of agencies were created after
the war to provide material and psychological assistance to the Nationalist veterans, their families (mainly widows and orphans), and the
disabled. In short, most of those on the Nationalist side who had
suffered in one way or another the terrible consequences of the Civil
War received material benefits from the regime. Moreover, they were
able to create private agencies, or benefit from the official ones, and so
participate in the joint elaboration of the memory of the war and thus
achieve some form of moral and psychological relief.
The Franco regime was too vindictive ever to forgive the vanquished,
or even show them any mercy. Not only were they the object of fierce
institutionalized repression during the early years of the dictatorship,
but for almost forty years, until Franco's death in 1975, they were also
denied the material and moral assistance accorded to the victors. Even
after the return to democracy, some years passed before the Republican
veterans were granted full equality with their Nationalist counterparts.
This came too late for as many as 50 per cent of those who had fought
on the losing side, who were by then either dead or living in exile from
which they would never return.
One of the groups which suffered the consequences of the war most
directly was the war wounded. At a rough estimate, some 80,000
veterans on the two sides were left permanently disabled. At least half of
these had fought in the government forces. The majority of these
Republican veterans remained in Spain at the end of the war, where
many were imprisoned in concentration or work camps or purged from
the jobs they had held before the war. Many, in any event, were no
longer capable of work. An unknown number of the Republican disabled
went into exile, above all in France.7 Although, the situation of the
Republican disabled in exile was far from easy, it was certainly very
different to that of their counterparts in Spain. A third group of disabled
veterans consisted of those who had fought on the victorious Nationalist
side. They enjoyed the protection and some privileges from the new
regime, and showed no sympathy for those Republicans who had shared
their fate. When Franco died in 1975, there were three different main
associations of disabled veterans: the Nationalist one, the organization
7
The Republican Disabled League in France, at its peak had a membership of some
3,000; Antonio Trabal, Breve historia de la Liga de Mutilados e Invalidos de Guerra de
Espana (19361939) en France (Barcelona: Creaciones Graficas Fernando, 1986), p. 22.
87
of the Republican disabled inside Spain (which was still illegal), and that
of the Republicans in exile. Each of these groups had very different
memories of the Civil War. Whilst this is only to be expected in the case
of the Nationalists and the Republicans, it is perhaps more surprising
with respect to the two Republican groups. Here it will be argued that
their different perceptions of the past reflected their distinct experiences
in the postwar period.
Disabled veterans' associations during the Civil War
Less than a year into the war, disabled Republican veterans began to
mobilize independently from the state and the official institutions. Even
though neither their personal situation nor the political climate favoured
collective action of this type, after a considerable struggle they managed
to create the Liga de Mutilados e Invalidos de la Guerra de Espafia
(LMIGE) or League of the Wounded and Disabled of the War in Spain.
The first preparatory meeting of the LMIGE took place in Madrid in
May 1937. Over a year later, in August 1938, it held its first Congress in
Valencia, where the Republican government had moved to escape the
Francoist offensive against Madrid. This congress brought together
representatives of the local branches of the LMIGE that had been set up
in different parts of Republican Spain. At the same time, a separate
organization, the Asociacion de Invalidos de Cataluna or Association of
the Disabled of Catalonia, had been created in that region in the northeast of the country, by then virtually isolated from the rest of Republican
Spain.
During the first few months of the conflict, the only provision for the
disabled was the legislation that had existed before the outbreak of war.
In theory at least, this guaranteed them a disability allowance. Whilst it
is impossible to judge the extent to which this weak and fragmented
government was in fact able to meet its obligations, given the scant
resources available and the lack of global coordination within the
administration, it is highly unlikely that the disabled veterans received
any significant economic assistance from the state. In any event, the
leaders of the LMIGE considered that it was necessary to organize their
members for a number of explicit purposes, at the same time stressing
that they did not want to be a burden on the state. This point was
repeatedly emphasized in the pages of the LMIGE's official newspaper,
Mutilado {The War-wounded), fourteen issues of which were published
between July 1938 and February 1939.
On the one hand, the LMIGE emphasized its commitment to the
Republican war effort, and its desire to contribute to this, above all
88
Pahma Aguilar
through activities carried out behind the front. In the first issue of
Mutilado one of the LMIGE's members described the organization's
aims in the following terms: 'It is the disabled veteran who creates his
League not only to dispose of an organization which concerns itself with
obtaining medical material, educating him, or making him a useful man
in the production and the reconstruction of Spain, but also to participate actively in the mobilization of the entire people against the
invader.'8 Whilst this type of discourse evidently responded to the
requirements of wartime propaganda, it also reflected the real need the
disabled experienced to feel that they were 'useful' human beings, that
they had some role to play in what was a critical situation. The
LMIGE's members were not only well aware of the terrible consequence
that a Republican defeat would have for them, but also felt an urgent
and heartfelt need to justify to themselves the terrible wounds they had
received. Thus, they were seeking a means of coping with their new and
traumatic personal circumstances, and did so by identifying a practical
and important task in which they could immerse themselves.
During the war itself, the tragic dimension of the LMIGE's discourse,
which would become dominant after the end of the conflict, was
matched by the emphasis given to these veterans' heroism. Thus, one of
the LMIGE members wrote that the disabled veterans were
a symbol of the piercing shrapnel which stabs without compassion in the flesh of
men who suffer with the proud arrogance of those who know their duty, the
blows of the beast which tears off part of their body, which destroys their virility,
which destroys their lean and manly figure, turning it into a useless piece of
meat, a horrendous marionette in a grotesque puppet show. The disabled
veteran is undeniably the true martyr of the war.9
These lines reveal the tragedy which, despite the rhetoric of wartime
propaganda, these victims were experiencing. The only possible psychological consolation for their wounds was the social recognition of their
bravery and sacrifice. Thus they also asked for support: 'Republican
Spain has the moral obligation to give the disabled the succour of a
mother . . . The disabled of this war of independence should occupy the
place of honour in the hearts of the Spanish people. Whilst the dead
deserve all our respect, the disabled deserve all our affection.'10
On the other hand, the LMIGE also had a number of more immediate
and practical objectives. It campaigned for the state to provide special
schools for disabled veterans, as well as the artificial limbs they needed if
they were to be able to lead some kind of normal life. It is very difficult
to know how much was achieved in this respect, or the source of the
money spent on providing these services. In 1939 the Republican
8
Mutilado, 1, 31 July 1938, p. 8.
Ibid. p. 3.
10
Ibid. p. 3.
89
government approved laws instituting positive discrimination in favour

of disabled veterans for some low-ranking civil service posts. Equally,
some public institutions made special provision for the war wounded;
the Ministry of Education, for example, gave occasional grants to the
LMIGE for training courses for its members.
The LMIGE did not rely exclusively on official support, but also
developed its own sources of income. All members, for example, had to
pay dues, and it seems likely that some money was obtained from the
sale of Mutilado. The organization also set out to raise money from the
general public. In 1938, for example, it launched a national subscription
for disabled veterans. 'All Spanish anti-fascists' were called upon to
contribute to the fund, which was to be spent on 'reeducation in order
to continue the struggle in the war today and in peace tomorrow, and for
this we need training schools and orthopaedic devices to substitute the
amputated limbs'.11 Emotive advertisements appealing for donations
were placed in the Republican press: 'Anti-fascist. Your duty is to
collaborate with the subscription in favour of the disabled veterans';
'The disabled veterans need your financial support. Can you refuse it?
Collaborate in the national subscription in favour of the disabled
veterans'; 'The disabled veterans defended you from the invader. Now
you must show consideration for them by contributing to the national
subscription in favour of the disabled veterans.'12
The LMIGE, therefore, combined the pursuit of practical objectives,
such as raising money to provide special schools or artificial limbs, with
wider psychological aims, such as campaigning for public recognition of
these veterans' 'generous sacrifice' in defence of the 'nation'. Over and
above all this, the members of the LMIGE felt an urgent need to give
some meaning to the mutilation they had suffered, as well as to begin to
face up to this and to create a shared interpretation of the past, a
memory that might console them in the future. However, the vindictive
attitude adopted by victors at the end of the war effectively destroyed
these early achievements of the Republican disabled veterans.
The disabled veterans and civilians on the Nationalist side faced the
same physical and psychological problems as their Republican counterparts. However, they benefited from the support of a more efficient
government, as well as that of a very prominent general who had himself
been disabled in a previous armed conflict. This was the founder of the
Spanish Foreign Legion, General Millan-Astray, who had been seriously
injured at least three times during the Spanish colonial wars in
Morocco. According to the apocryphal biography that a fellow Francoist
11
12
The Republican ABC, 20 April 1938, p. 7.

The Republican ABC, 20 April 1938, p. 3; 22 April 1938, pp. 3 and 4.
90
Paloma Aguilar
general wrote of Millan-Astray, at the end of 1937 Franco himself

charged him with the task of organizing an association for disabled
veterans. He set to work immediately, founding in the early 1938 the
Benemerito Cuerpo de Mutilados de Guerra por la Patria or Honourable Corps of Disabled in the War for the Homeland. Whether or not
the alleged conversation between Franco and Millan-Astray ever took
place, it seems clear that the creation of an agency for the disabled
Nationalist veterans responded to an official, rather than private, initiative.
Millan-Astray was well aware that if his veterans were to obtain the
assistance they required, it was crucial that a solid organization should
be created whilst the war was still on. He realized that when the needs of
wartime propaganda had passed, it was all too likely that 'the enthusiasm for those who fell injured would begin to dwindle, and the
sympathy inspired by their sufferings and lost limbs would begin to
fade'. He feared the possibility that 'society might come to hate them, or
even refuse them assistance and treat them as an onerous burden,
considering them to be no longer of any use, as a source of sorrow'. 13
The Honourable Corps was officially created through a law passed in
April 1938, but some years passed before the organization could claim
to include the majority of the disabled Francoist veterans. In the 1950s,
official sources claimed that some 20,000 disabled veterans were
working for a living. The pre-war Corps for Disabled Persons was
disbanded and its former members (who numbered over a thousand)
were incorporated into the ranks of the Honourable Corps. As a result
of this merger, the organization came to have a membership of some
54,000 members.
The Republican veterans in the postwar period

Throughout the Franco dictatorship, the vanquished who remained in
Spain, their families, the widows and orphans, as well as the disabled
(whether from wounds received on the battlefield or from bombing
behind the lines), were not only subject to legal persecution but were
also denied the opportunity to express their grief in public; nor were
they able to commemorate their victims, or organize to elaborate a
collective memory that might alleviate their anguish. Besides being
forced to live under a hated dictatorship that never considered them to
be equal citizens, the disabled Republican veterans were prevented from
mourning their dead relatives and friends.
13
Carlos de Silva, General Millan Astray (El Legionario) (Barcelona: Ediciones AHR,
1956), p. 207.
91
As a result of this explicit discrimination and repression, the disabled

Republican veterans were unable to establish any private agency in
Spain, and their achievements during the war itself were totally destroyed. They vanished as an organized group, only emerging from this
enforced obscurity and dispersal in the late 1960s, when a few of their
number embarked on the arduous task of reconstructing a formal
association.
Thus, this heterogeneous group endured something even more
complex than the 'post-traumatic stress syndrome' so commonly suffered by war veterans. The Republican veterans experienced what might
be labelled 'delayed mourning', meaning that, in most cases, their
memory of the war remained untouched, frozen, and was not relieved
by the process of exposure helping to overcome the nightmare. Coming
on top of their experience of the war itself, their defeat in this, the
postwar repression, the state of fear in which they lived, and their
inability to mourn their dead properly, the burden of the past must have
been almost unbearable for the vanquished in general, and for those
who had lost family members in particular. The disabled veterans, in
turn, faced the additional tribulation of being handicapped and without
pension rights, at the same time as their disabilities and their Republican
past combined to make it especially difficult for them to find work.14
Research carried out by psychologists suggests that it is very difficult
for war veterans to recover from 'post-traumatic stress syndrome'
without adequate medical diagnosis and treatment. That is, that their
condition 'does not improve spontaneously (at least this is true in many
cases) with the passage of time', but that it must be treated 'as soon as
possible, even in the same geographic area as the battle'.15 None of the
Republican veterans enjoyed any such treatment. In fact, most of them
had no access to any form of psychological therapy. Even those who did,
namely the exiles, could not be treated 'in the same geographic area';
hence they could not benefit from the kind of help that has proved
crucial for treating this mental disorder. 'Social and psychological
support received during and after the trauma' has also been shown to
play an important role in the successful treatment of people affected by
traumatic war experiences. For obvious reasons, no support of this kind
was available to those Republican veterans who remained in Spain.
14
15
It was paradoxical that whilst the veterans of the Division Azul, the force of Spanish
volunteers who fought alongside the Nazis in the Soviet Union during the Second
World War, received pensions from Social Democratic German governments, the
veterans of the Republican army received no pension in Spain.
Pas Corral, Enrique Echeburua, Belen Sarasua, and Irena Zubizarreta, 'Estres
postraumatico en excombatientes y en victimas de agresiones sexuales: nuevas
perspectivas terapeuticas,' Boletin de Psicologia, 135 (1992), pp. 7-24.
92
Paloma Aguilar
'Post-traumatic stress syndrome', finally, is also particularly prevalent

amongst those who are seriously wounded in battle, as well as amongst
those who have simply experienced combat, witnessed extreme violence,
or suffered the death of family or friends.
Other factors which contribute to the intensity of the syndrome is the
age at which the trauma is experienced. A study of 250 survivors of war,
including a number of Republicans exiled in France, carried out in the
late 1960s showed that many were still suffering the consequences of
war traumas. Some 37 per cent of women and 28 per cent of men were
found to suffer from chronic depression, as were 46 per cent of all those
aged twenty or under at the time of their war experience. Psychologists
also found extreme levels of irritability in 83 per cent of the cases
studied, and that 45 per cent of survivors suffered from serious sexual
disorders. Finally, psychosomatic conditions were identified in 85 per
cent of survivors, and suicide was not unknown. This is the hidden face
of war, the uncomfortable legacy of psychological instability and physical ill health from which so many 'survivors' never recover.16
The absence of proper mourning, and the negative consequences this
would later have, are also explained by the fact that the fundamental
priority for most Republicans and their families was survival.17 Given
the terrible conditions existing in postwar Spain in general (widespread
famine, illness, destruction), and facing the vanquished in particular
(repression, unemployment, fear), they could do little more than
attempt to assure their most basic needs. The Mitscherlichs have
described a very similar process in postwar Germany. They show how
the Germans invested all their physical and mental energy in the
reconstruction of their country. Absorbed in this task, they were largely
In the light of these figures, the author of the study, himself a Republican and survivor
of the Civil War, declared that 'tolerance and love of one's country must prevent
another tragedy of the type now being commemorated, and concord and dialogue must
be the only weapons brought to bear to settle our differences' (Francisco Fernandez
Urraca, 'En torno al exilio de Espana en 1939', Cuademos Republicanos, 1, 1 (1989), p.
40). This was the main lesson most Spaniards drew from the Civil War. As will be seen
below, this lesson was studiously applied during the transition to democracy, both by
the Spanish people in general and the political elites in particular (Paloma Aguilar,
Memoriay olvido de la Guerra CivilEspafiola (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1996)).
The journalist Carlos Elordi has recently published a book based on ordinary people's
accounts of their very different experiences of the Francoist dictatorship. One of the
testimonies is that of a man born into a 'vanquished' family, some of whom suffered
severely from the repression of the postwar years. Nevertheless, he describes the silence
and the need to forget the past that predominated within the family, affirming that 'we
spoke very little about this at home. There all that mattered was to get on' (Carlos
Elordi, Antes que el tiempo muera en nuestros brazos. Recuerdos y reflexiones de quienes
vivieron con Franco (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1996), p. 157).
93
able to overlook their very uncomfortable memories of the past and to

elude the mourning process.
Finally, many of the vanquished who stayed in Spain remained silent
in order to protect their families, and above all their children. Parents
did not want their children to be marginalized or repressed by the
regime in consequence of their own political affinities. They also feared
that their children might repeat outside the relative safety of the home
what they heard of their parents' experiences in the war, or their
criticism of the dictatorship.18 A large number of autobiographical
accounts of growing up in Republican families in this period testify to
the almost unbroken silence which surrounded the past. This climate of
fear and discretion, which deterred many of the vanquished from
speaking about the past, made it even more difficult to recover from
post-traumatic stress syndrome. It meant that the vanquished could not
benefit from the 'exposure therapy' which research has shown to be one
of the most effective ways of treating this syndrome. Essentially this
therapy encourages the patient to talk about what happened, to verbalize
his or her traumatic experiences and work through these memories with
relatives and friends. Evidently, very few of the vanquished were in a
position to do this in postwar Spain, and then only within the family and
amongst their closest and most trustworthy friends.
The plight of los topos or 'moles' who came to light (sometimes
literally) during the transition was the most dramatic example of the
silence and invisibility of the vanquished. These were men who went
into hiding at the end of the Civil War from which they only emerged
after Franco's death in 1975. They usually hid in caves or small rooms
in the family home, which only their wives, and in some cases their
children, knew about, whilst their wider family and neighbours believed
that they had died or gone into exile. In some cases, their wives had
spent years in mourning to complete the subterfuge.19
The vanquished Republican exiles faced a very different situation.
Certainly many of them suffered the further trauma of the Second
18
19
Some Republican families, of course, did socialize their children in liberal and antiFrancoist values, although this does not necessarily mean that they also passed on their
family history. These non-, even anti-official values were largely transmitted through a
small number of liberal schools, books, and pamphlets, and in private conversations.
Nevertheless, many important leaders of the democratic opposition came from
Francoist rather than Republican families; in these cases, their democratic socialization
usually took place whilst at university, where they came into contact with certain
influential texts and academics. For an exhaustive study of this process, see Jose M.
Maravall, Dictadura y disentimiento politico (Madrid: Alfagura, 1978). For the slow but
nonetheless solid reconstruction of civil society in Spain, see Victor Perez-Diaz, La
primacia de la sociedad civil (Madrid: Alianza Universidad,1993).
Jesus Torbado Los topos (Barcelona: Planeta, 1977).
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Pahma Aguilar
World War, in which large numbers lost their lives serving with the
Allied forces or in the Nazi concentration camps to which they were
deported from France. However, in direct contrast to the Republicans
who remained in Spain, the exiles who survived the world war now
found themselves on the winning side. This put them in a comparatively
privileged position. On the one hand, they received material assistance
from agencies such as the Spanish Refugee Aid, the International Relief
Rescue Committee, or the Service Sociale d'Aide aux Emigrants, as well
as from a number of national governments; the French government, for
example, awarded pensions to Republicans with a 'political refugee
card'. On the other hand, these veterans were able to create their own
organizations, to participate in the re-elaboration of their shared
memory of the past, to openly commemorate and grieve their dead, as
well as to express the hostility and anger they felt towards the Spanish
dictatorship.
This is not to suggest, however, that life was easy for the Republicans
who fled Spain at the end of the Civil War. Indeed, there can be little
doubt as to the hardship they experienced, above all when they first
went into exile. Numerous contemporary accounts testify to the miserable conditions in the refugee camps set up in southern France at the
end of the Civil War. Here they had to endure appalling accommodation, food that was nearly always scarce and all too often inedible, the
despotism of the French authorities, and a generally very unhealthy
psychological climate.
A few years ago, Eulalio Ferrer published his diary covering the time
he spent as an adolescent, and in the company of his father, in a number
of these refugee camps. One of the most interesting aspects of this firsthand account of life in the camps is his description of a common mental
condition which the inmates christened arenitis.20 These were the delusions of the men living in the sand on the beaches on which most
camps had been set up. According to Ferrer, who described the
symptoms seen in a number of cases, most of the people suffering from
arenitis were convinced that their families were about to come and take
them to Latin America. They talked about this all the time, generally to
themselves. In some cases, they even drowned themselves when, fully
dressed and carrying their suitcase in one hand, they walked into the sea
to take the boat which they imagined was moored there to take them to
America. Ferrer also described the terrible state of the disabled veterans,
reporting that some asked the camp doctors to put them out of their
20
Eulalio Ferrer, Entre alambradas (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1988), pp. 49, 94, 121, 129-30,
147, 151, 153, 165, and 182.
95
misery, whilst another, who had lost a hand and a leg in the fighting,
committed suicide in the camp hospital.21
Ferrer is one of the survivors who puts most emphasis on the brutality
and senselessness of war. He appears to have an almost obsessive
interest in the legacy of the conflict, the madness, fear, violence, anxiety,
nightmares.22 At one point he writes that 'ours was a loathsome and
brutal war. Not only because of the people who died in it, but also for
the legacy of terror that it left in so many. In some this comes out in their
dreams, but for so many this can be seen in their day-to-day behaviour.
They were delirious men, who said and did the strangest things. Many
people found this delirium amusing, but the overall impression is
painful and distressing.'23 Later in his diary, Ferrer writes that it was
through the war that 'I discovered for the first time what a pistol was
and the extreme violence and barbarism, which I will never forget, of a
civil war'.24 This survivor has much stronger memories of the traumatic
rather than the epic nature of the conflict, and draws from this the
lesson that 'never again' shall Spain suffer a civil war.25
It was precisely in these camps that the refugees began their mourning
for the Republican war victims. Ferrer recounts the way in which the
Republican refugees took advantage of a number of symbolic dates to
pay homage to their dead. A month after the end of the war, banners
proclaiming: 'We honour through our remembrance the martyrs for
Spain' were hung on many barracks on International Labour Day (1
May). The Republicans marked Bastille Day by writing the message 'We
honour our fallen' in stones on the sand.26 Just a few days later, on the
third anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, a number of
sculptures were created in sand on the beach bearing the words 'a
tribute to the fallen', whilst the refugees kept a minute's silence in
honour of their dead.27
Associations of Nationalist and Republican veterans
and disabled soldiers
Some years after its foundation in April 1938, the association of disabled
Nationalist veterans was renamed the Honourable Corps of Disabled
Gentlemen (Benemerito Cuerpo de Caballeros Mutilados). By then, the
Francoist regime had already passed a large number of laws and regula21
22
23
27
Ibid. p. 94.
See, among many examples, Ferrer, Entre alambradas, pp. 4 9 , 94, 1 2 1 , 1 2 9 - 3 0 , 147,
151, 153, 165, and 182.
24
25
26
Ibid. p. 4 3 .
Ibid. p. 115.
Ibid. p . 115.
Ibid. p . 106.
Ibid. p. 1 1 2 - 1 3 .
96
Paloma Aguilar
tions granting these Nationalist veterans social protection, economic

benefits, and a number of other privileges and rewards.28 Thirty per
cent of low- and middle-ranking civil service posts were reserved for
disabled veterans, and suitable jobs found for those capable of working.
Pensions were also provided for people caring for those disabled
veterans totally incapable of work. Both groups enjoyed other benefits
such as almost entirely free medical treatment, artificial limbs, and
major reductions on public transport.29
Further legislation was later passed widening the scope of these early
measures. The 1938 law, for example, only applied to those blind or
mentally ill veterans who had also been physically wounded by the
enemy. As a result, none of the Nationalist veterans who had gone mad
as a consequence of their experience of the tragedies and horrors of war
enjoyed the benefits accorded to their physically disabled colleagues.
The Francoist authorities were evidently reluctant to admit to the
existence of these men, since they did not fit the heroic vision of the
conflict propagated by the regime. Only in 1945 were these two groups
of war victims incorporated into the 'Honourable Corps', and hence
granted the same benefits and privileges as the physically disabled.30
On the other hand, many of the unwounded Nationalist veterans,
especially those who joined the army during the conflict to serve as
junior officers, created their own organizations in the postwar period.
The most important of these was, and remains today, the Hermandad
de Alfereces Provisionales or Brotherhood of Provisional Subalterns.
This was created in 1958 by men who, although not originally professional soldiers, decided to remain in the army after the war and pursue a
military career. The existence of large numbers of these men, whose
social origins were quite different to those of most traditional officers,
led to important changes within the army.31 In contrast to the professional soldiers from the pre-war period, their formative military experience had been the war itself, something which had an enduring
influence on their understanding of both politics and the role of the
armed forces. They had a much more orthodox ideology than the armed
forces as a whole, and created the Brotherhood in part to serve as a
28
29
30
31
Similar benefits were provided for other groups of Nationalist war victims, including
the widows and orphans of Nationalist servicemen, as well as people imprisoned by the
Republicans during the war.
Almost fifty years after the end of the Civil War, underground train walls still had the
signs Asiento Reservado para Caballeros Mutilados or 'Seat Reserved for Disabled M e n ' .
This delay had far more serious consequences for the mentally ill than for the blind
veterans, since a unique and highly successful organization was created for the latter
during the war itself.
Julio Busquets, 'Las alfereces provisionales hasta la creacion de la hermandad
( 1 9 3 7 - 1 9 5 8 ) ' , Historia 16, 19 (1986), pp. 4 4 - 5 5 .
97
pressure group to oppose any moves towards liberalizing the Francoist

regime. Their particular way of commemorating their fallen brothers in
arms largely consisted of defending the 'essence' of the 'spirit of 18 July'
{espiritu del 18 dejulio), that is, the ideals supposedly represented by the
coup d'etat that sparked off the Civil War. Their distinctive identity was
also reflected in their construction of special memorials to their own
fallen in the war.
Other veterans' associations were founded with similar goals. The
veterans of the Fourth Division of Navarre in Catalonia, for example,
raised money to erect war memorials on the sites of a number of battles.
The mere existence of all these private veterans' organizations, which
created their own places of mourning, shows that even the many official
initiatives to commemorate the Nationalist fallen were insufficient to
meet the emotional needs of the survivors: despite the construction of
the pharaonic 'Valley of the Fallen' and an incalculable number of war
memorials and inscriptions in churches and cemeteries all over Spain,
many people felt the need to participate in more modest and personal
forms of remembrance in an attempt to relieve their pain.
As for the Republican disabled veterans who remained in Spain, on
29 March 1939, three days before the war officially ended, the LMIGE's
headquarters was closed down and its bank account confiscated by the
new political authorities. The National Committee that had been
elected in the Valencia Congress in 1938 met Millan-Astray, the president of the 'Honourable Corps', in an attempt to secure for the
Republican disabled veterans the same pension rights and privileges as
those enjoyed by their Nationalist counterparts. In this they were
completely unsuccessful, Millan-Astray reportedly declaring that the
only disabled veterans worthy of help were those who had fought on the
Nationalist side.32
Three decades went by before a few disabled Republican veterans
attempted to reorganize the LMIGE inside Spain. Inevitably they had to
work in hiding. Their first task, and one which would prove extremely
difficult, was to try to locate their comrades scattered all over Spain. At
the same time, secret meetings were held in various small churches in
Madrid at which they defined their strategy. Despite their failure to
obtain official authorization for their association, they continued organizing and entered into contact with some of the procuradores familiares
32
According to the official history of the LMIGE, Millan-Astray rejected its demands
declaring that: 'You are no more than depraved beings who, in pursuit of absurd ideals,
have lost some arms and legs. But in Franco's Spain the only help that you can expect is
that obtained by appealing door-to-door for holy charity ' (Pedro Vega, Historia de la
Liga deMutilados (LMIGE) (Madrid: M. C. Martinez, 1981), p. 30.
98
Paloma Aguilar
or 'family representatives' in the Cortes who had shown themselves

most inclined to consider opening up the regime and ending the
discrimination against the vanquished in the Civil War.33 These procuradores were the principal source of all the reconciliatory measures
proposed in the Cortes, including a number of initiatives to have the
Republican servicemen and civilians who had been purged at the end of
the war readmitted to their pre-war jobs. Significantly, all moves in this
direction failed. And so too did their numerous attempts to win government approval for proposals to provide economic assistance to the
disabled Republican veterans.
Thus, while the Nationalist disabled were treated as heroes and
enjoyed the title of 'gentlemen', even in the 1960s the Republican
disabled veterans were often treated with contempt and, in many cases,
forced to beg for a living. Despite this, however, they displayed little
bitterness or desire for revenge. Rather they strove for reconciliation and
mutual respect and tolerance; after Franco's death, members of the
LMIGE even claimed that on a number of occasions they had attempted
to form a single organization of disabled veterans, by merging not only
with the exiled veterans, but also with the Nationalist disabled. This was
one of the many differences between the reconstituted League in France
and the LMIGE: the exiles were totally opposed to any talk of unification with the Nationalist association, or what they described as 'false'
and 'negative' unity.34 They argued that the Disabled Gentlemen had
never called on the Francoist regime to show any mercy towards their
Republican counterparts, or shown any interest in the idea of a joint
association.
Even before the end of the Second World War, the disabled Republican veterans in France had begun to work on rebuilding the organization that had existed in Spain during the Civil War. The German
occupation forced the exiles to discontinue their activities, but on the
overthrow of the Vichy regime they rapidly set to work again. A first
meeting was held in Toulouse in July 1945; four months later they met
to approve new statutes; and the formally reconstituted League-in-exile
held its first Congress in early 1947. Here the organization's leaders
declared that, besides campaigning and providing assistance to its
members, one of their principal objectives was to denounce the Francoist regime and its responsibility for the Spanish tragedy. A common
33
34
T h e procuradores familiares were the only elected members of the Francoist Cortes
(though elected on a family franchise rather than through universal suffrage), and,
along with the local councils the most representative body in the entire institutional
apparatus of the dictatorship.
Trabal, Breve historia, p. 150.
99
feature of mourning processes is the attribution of responsibility for the

tragedy to a well-defined enemy; this helps to externalize the victims'
anger and establish a target for present and future action. In this case,
the exiles' target was the Francoist regime, and the organization's first
priority the destruction of this regime; only then would their wounds be
healed.
The exiles' obsession with this goal prevented them from favouring
any action which, in their view at least, might have helped to postpone
the overthrow of the dictatorship. This explains why the exiles opposed
the attempts made by the Republican disabled inside Spain to secure
from the regime some of the benefits enjoyed by their Nationalist
counterparts. The exiles considered that all their efforts should be
devoted to overthrowing the dictatorship, and that any contact with it
constituted an intolerable act of submission. The disabled Republicans
in Spain had a very different perception of the situation. They never
received any of the material benefits available to the exiles; many were
purged from their jobs and/or imprisoned, often with long sentences;
and few knew anything but hardship. In these circumstances, their
priorities were understandably different to their comrades in exile. They
were more concerned with their own economic situation than with the
nature of the political regime. Whilst this did not mean that they
accepted the dictatorship, they could not afford to adopt a maximalist
position, as did the exiles. Given their own personal difficulties, and
faced by a repressive and relatively stable regime, all they could do was
to try and advance some practical and unthreatening demands.
The two groups' different experiences in the postwar period help to
explain their very different attitude towards politics, as well as their
distinct memories and interpretations of the Civil War. This confirms
that 'subsequent information may profoundly alter or affect memory'.35
Equally, further traumatic experiences may also contribute to the
reinterpretation of earlier memories. Thus, it can be suggested that
these two groups assigned different meanings to and drew different
lessons from their Civil War experience as a consequence of later events.
One of the arguments that the LMIGE in Spain used in its attempts
to obtain material assistance from the Francoist regime was that many of
the Republican veterans were victims of a 'geographical accident'; that
is, that many of them had not fought in the Republican army by choice,
or for ideological reasons, but because they had been caught in government-held territory at the outbreak of war. The exiles, however, totally
rejected this line of argument. They maintained that all the members of
35
Alice M. Hoffman and Howard S. Hoffman, Archives of memory (Lexington, Ky.:

University of Kentucky Press, 1990), p. 130.
100
Paloma Aguilar
their association had fought in the Civil War out of deep political
commitment, and considered the use the disabled Republicans inside
Spain made of this argument as a betrayal of the Second Republic and a
capitulation to the Francoist regime. In fact, it is certainly true that
many of those who fought on both sides had been forced to enlist.
Moreover, the LMIGE's use of the 'geographical accident' argument
during the dictatorship was not merely opportunistic, since the organization continued to adhere to it even after Franco's death. Thus, the
LMIGE's official history, published some years after the return to
democracy, emphasized the ideological pluralism of its membership,
composed of Republicans and Monarchists, Communists and Falangists, Catholics and anarchists.36 Finally, in direct contrast to the exiles,
the LMIGE emphasized its political neutrality; it had been formed
exclusively 'to secure from the state our rights of association and a
dignified pension which will allow us to keep our families, but never for
political purposes'.37
It is possible that the disabled veterans in exile passed through a
similar process to that experienced by many Jewish survivors of Nazi
concentration camps. Many autobiographical accounts and a vast body
of literature testify to the enormous burden of guilt they carried with
them for having survived the horror whilst so many died, and the great
distress this caused them. The exiles may have felt something similar,
since they had been able to flee Spain, and so escape the evils of the
Francoist regime in the postwar period: death penalties, imprisonment,
repression, the lack of liberty, famine. They knew that despite all their
unsatisfied dreams and aspirations, their situation was in many ways
more comfortable than that of their counterparts inside Spain. In fact,
in the book they later published they felt the need to try and justify their
failure to give all but very limited help to the disabled in Spain, claiming
that the LMIGE did not wish to cooperate with them.
The Republican veterans after Franco
During the two first decades of the Francoist dictatorship, the regime's
principal if nonetheless very precarious source of legitimacy was its
victory in the Civil War. It was for this reason that official rhetoric was
full of references to the conflict. Later, however, major economic
development in the 1960s brought the regime further, more substantial,
sources of legitimacy in the form of prosperity and social mobility.
These structural changes, together with the passage of time, made it
36
Vega, Historia, 82.
37
Ibid. p.88.
101
possible for younger generations in the political elite to modify the by

then out-dated rhetoric of the war years. At the same time, the most
active groups within Spanish civil society, above all workers and students, were beginning to thwart the regime's efforts to control them and
emerged from apparent passivity to engage in clandestine political
activity and public protest. One of the most important demands shared
by the numerous, though often weak and fragmented, social movements
which opposed the dictatorship was a full amnesty for all political
prisoners. This demand was conceived as a step towards reconciliation,
in that it would place the victors and vanquished in the Civil War on an
equal footing. Broadly speaking, most political prisoners in Spain could
be considered the ideological heirs of the vanquished, who, almost forty
years after the end of the war, were finally transformed into victors with
the return of democracy.
In October 1977 a full amnesty was approved as the result of the
consensus reached by the main political parties represented in the first
democratic parliament. Two groups, however, were excluded from this
otherwise generous and wide-ranging bill. One was the Republican
veterans of the Civil War, who were still prohibited from membership of
the armed forces. This meant that they were denied the economic
benefits (and above all pension rights) enjoyed by the Nationalist
veterans, as well as their symbolic rehabilitation so many years after the
end of the war. The democratic political forces were forced to accept
this exception from the amnesty because those who had the greatest
potential to put an end to democracy, and who for this reason could not
be offended - the armed forces - strongly opposed this gesture of
reconciliation. The military rejected any step which challenged their
own heroic memory of the Civil War, as the incorporation of the
Republican veterans into their ranks would certainly have done.
Other groups of Republican war victims, the disabled veterans and
the war widows, also had to wait a number of years before obtaining
rights equal to those of their Nationalist counterparts. It was only in
1981, after a number of pension reforms had left their status unaltered,
that they were put on an equal footing with the victors in the war.
Nevertheless, even after this step towards reconciliation, the different
organizations of disabled veterans did not merge. Even now, there are
three different associations of war veterans: the two Republican organizations and the successor of the Nationalist one. After the return to
democracy, the Nationalist Honourable Corps of Disabled Gentlemen
was rechristened the Asociacion Cultural de Invalidos Militares de
Espana (ACIME), the Cultural Association of Spanish Disabled Soldiers. All disabled servicemen now automatically belong to it; hence it
102
Pabma Aguilar
will survive. In contrast, both the LMIGE and the League in France are
destined to disappear as their members die.
The different collective memories of these two associations of Republican disabled veterans are evident from a reading of their official
histories. Both books serve as a means of mourning their dead and
expressing their grief for all they have suffered. Significantly, however,
the way in which they recall the war and the dictatorship are very
different. The League-in-exile declares that the Nationalist role in the
Civil War constitutes an 'unforgettable' and 'unforgivable' crime. It
repeatedly emphasizes that 'nothing can make up for the forty years of
misery and suffering', and that the Francoists alone must bear all
responsibility for the war. The exiles appear to be obsessed by the fear of
being forgotten, and the demand that the authorities should pay public
homage to their fallen. They themselves acknowledge that whilst they
have not called for a purge of the administration inherited from the
dictatorship, they are very reluctant to forgive and forget.
In striking contrast, the LMIGE speaks in terms of reconciliation and
forgiveness, the need to recognize that both sides must accept their
share of the blame for the atrocities committed during the war. This
spirit inspired the joint meeting of the LMIGE and the Nationalist
Honourable Corps in July 1977, when the presidents of the two
organizations embraced each other as a symbol of reconciliation.
According to the LMIGE, 'this was the embrace of the two Spains that
previously faced each other in confrontation, but are now committed to
furthering democratic coexistence'. Both organizations agreed that they
had all suffered equally, that 'a civil war is always a fraud'.38 They
insisted that the war was a fratricidal conflict, and that the time had
come to transcend the trauma it had left.
These very different visions of the past reflect these two groups' very
different experiences in the postwar period. The way each group
thought about the past was strongly influenced by the fact that for forty
years they lived in different countries, with different opportunities to
mourn their dead and deal with their war traumas. The exiles' obsessive
commitment to destroying the dictatorship, in order to be able to return
to Spain, modified their priorities and agenda for collective action. On
the other hand, in the absence of personal contact with the victors, they
maintained a distorted memory of them which was rooted in their
experience of the war. This frozen and demonic image prevented the
exiles from accepting the idea of reconciliation with the Nationalists and
their heirs. When the exiles stated that the Nationalists alone were
38
Ibid. 121.
103
responsible for the horrors of the Civil War, they were also blaming
them for all the years they spent in exile, that is, their most evident
trauma from the postwar period.
The agenda of the Republican disabled inside Spain was also shaped
by their experience after the war, namely the appalling hardships and
personal insecurity they faced. Thus, when they began to rebuild the
LMIGE in the mid-1960s, they had little interest in political objectives
but concentrated on securing very practical, essentially economic,
demands. Despite the brutal and widespread repression they had faced
in the immediate postwar period, this group had to live alongside the
winners; this contact gave it the opportunity to modify the distorted
image of the enemy that all wars create. This helps explain why the
LMIGE now has a better relationship with the ACIME than the
League-in-exile.
The political lesson drawn from the Civil War by nearly all Spaniards,
whether of Republican or Nationalist extraction, is 'never again'. In
applying this lesson, parties on both the Right and Left had to make
concessions: the Right accepted the legalization of the Communist
party, while the Left abandoned its Republican aspirations and admitted
the legitimacy of the monarchy. The old Republicans in exile, outside
Spain, rejected the Left's concessions as a sell-out.
During this same transition period, both Right and Left agreed that
the bitterest aspects of the past should not be aired in public debate.
The memory of the Civil War was only used, and then only implicitly, to
facilitate the many social and political agreements and pacts made
during this period. The principal inspiration for the consensus politics
(in part based on this silencing of the past) seen during the transition to
democracy was the almost obsessive desire to avoid a repetition of the
war or the failings of the Second Republic, and above all the widespread
social and political confrontations that had marked the period. In
conclusion, therefore, whilst we do find different episodic memories of
the past, there was also a common lesson derived from this. And it was
this which constituted the main inspiration for the transition to democracy.
That process was not distinct from these attempts to create a 'collective memory' of disabled veterans. They, the men who bore the marks of
war on their bodies and in their minds, showed viscerally what was
meant by the phrase 'never again'. The status of Republican exiles,
Republicans in Spain, or Nationalist veterans naturally shaped their
construction of a 'social framework of memory', in Halbwachs's terms.
But their common denominator was a belief in the need to point to a
future for Spain not disfigured by the traumas of their own generation.
Children as war victims in postwar

European cinema
Pierre Sorlin
The victims during the First World War were chiefly but not exclusively
men obliged to fight and die for what turned out, very soon after the
peace treaty, to have been a bad affair. What people remembered was
straightforward and very sad: five years spent on the front line had
marked the end of the civilized values for which soldiers, in all countries,
had mobilized to defend. In their memoirs, in their poems, novels,
drawings, or paintings, the survivors did not indulge in moral or
patriotic reflections, they attempted to convey the rebarbative reality of
the trenches and to produce stories likely to make everybody understand
that they went through an ordeal that was like hell.
Things were not as clear cut in the Second World War, so that the
memory of the conflict was much more ambivalent. To begin with, the
unprecedented extent of casualties and destruction was seen as typical
of a modernization process which was ruthlessly sweeping away the
systems and societies of the past. By turning armed forces into machines
for slaughter, modern warfare tended to annihilate, even in the societies
which had successfully waged it, any sense that the combat had been
fought, or should have been fought, for the defence of a community.
Not surprisingly, emphasis was put on the killing of harmless people,
especially of children - that is to say, of their own future - whom
societies should have tried to protect.
However, during the same war, almost everybody, including innocent
victims, realized that there were reasons for fighting. Many people had a
clear, even if mistaken, idea of why they had to endure what they were
enduring. The Second World War did not mirror the senseless slaughter
lamented by the sufferers of the first; it was an ideological war, fought
for ideological aims and even the weakest, women and children, contributed to prolonging it. It is upon these ambivalent bases that the
remembrances of the Second World War were built.
104
Children as war victims in European cinema
105
Memory and images

Individual memory, our memory, is both the recollection of actual
experiences and the recording of information learned from friends,
picked up in conversations, or read in books. Being taken in a battle or a
bombing is a pure state of affairs, a complex of feelings, fears, and hopes
endured from the standpoint of one person. It is only afterwards that
memory defines events by attributing a meaning to the state of affairs, by
means of descriptions - usually linguistic, but also graphic - as well as
through purely corporal reactions. Memory is thus a process of negotiation between individuals and the groups to which they belong. Trying to
'explore' personal memories is almost hopeless, even when people have
written their memoirs, for all remembrances are shaped by a complex of
data and ideas which includes rumour, lessons taught at school, monuments, and media. What is more, all kinds of remembrance are neither
monolithically installed nor everywhere believed. They are in a constant
state of rearrangement under the pressure of competing sources of
information often in conflict with each other: produced in the course of
these struggles, remembrances can always be questioned.
It is one of the tasks of historians to examine how societies, during a
given period, select the 'historical' data, the data related to the past,
which will be shared by their members and will frame individual
memories. Beside facts, feelings have also to be taken into account since
emotional norms and sanctioned affects contribute, as much as events,
to reinforcing memories. For practical reasons, sentiments are often
repressed during tragic epochs such as wars. In his memoirs the Austrian
philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who was mobilized in the Wehrmacht,
honestly acknowledges that, throughout the hostilities, he did not pay
much attention to the talk about the saddest aspects of the conflict: 'the
words came and went, apparently without effect' and it was later that he
began to ponder the atrocities of Nazism and to confront his factual
recordings with this new awareness.1 Of course people bemoaned their
relatives or friends who had been killed, but it was only after the war
that it became possible to mourn the whole period and the damage it
had caused.
General grief, grief about one's country, about a lost generation or a
group of the dead is an abstract feeling, a representation in which things
that people have seen or gone through can be subsumed. Reconstructing
this grief is haphazard but it is documented by what people wanted to
read, by the songs they wanted to sing and the films they wanted to
1
Killing the Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 192.
106
Pierre Sorlin
watch. These sources have their limitations. They are imaginary products which reduce to a few images long hours of misery or struggle and
offer a synthesis of tragic events all the more unreal in that it has been
performed by professionals used to mimicking all sorts of emotions.
These shortcomings must be neither overvalued nor underrated. While
being aware of the fact that novels or films do not tell the truth, readers
and spectators feel strongly affected because, by restricting big conflagrations to a limited environment, by transferring from the social to the
individual, fiction offers a clear, simple view on difficult problems and
helps the public to understand or perceive what would be less obvious if
the infinite complexity of 'the real' was taken into account. Fiction,
which has no precise purpose (apart from being popular) and does not
prescribe any specific behaviour, contributes to bridging the gap
between personal experiences and accepted knowledge.
In an attempt to characterize the way in which Western European
societies2 grieved for child victims of war I shall use a few literary texts
but shall focus mostly on films, for three main reasons. Firstly, the
impact of films is easier to evaluate, at least roughly, than the impact of
books. During the fifteen years following the end of the war, eighty-five
films dealing with the conflict or its immediate aftermath were shot in
Britain while 225 war films were screened in the cinemas of the German
Federal Republic. Nicholas Pronay rightly notes that the hostilities were
seldom absent from the screen for more than two or three months, at a
time when the cinema was still the main form of entertainment in
Europe.3 Cinema was all the more important because, in the years that
followed the war, apart from a few texts that we shall examine later,
novels, radio plays - which were a very significant literary expression of
the period - and theatrical plays did not expand on the effects of the
conflict. It is true that there was a flood of diaries, memoirs, and
autobiographical accounts written by resistants, soldiers, and survivors of
the concentration camps, the most remarkable of which was Primo
Levi's Se questo e un uomo {If this is a man, 1947). But the civilians, and
especially the children, took no part in this production because what
they could have told was too basic. As for novelists and playwrights they
2
Why only Western European societies? First because, for linguistic reasons, I do not
know the Eastern cinematographies as well as their Western counterparts. But also
because the memory of the 'Great Patriotic War' was soon ritualized in the socialist
countries, the fight against Nazism was given epical colours and Stalin was made its
hero. Changes occurred after Khrushchev's 'Secret Speech' but the most important
films of the new era, especially Tarkovskii's Ivan's childhood (1962), belong to a period
which I do not want to consider in this chapter.
'The British post-bellum cinema', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 8, 1
(1988), pp. 39-54.
107
were more preoccupied by big issues than by trivialities. They wrote

epics, like Theodor Plievier's Stalingrad, or reflections on ethics and
politics. In what was considered the most eloquent depiction of the
problems faced by a soldier returning from the front, Eine Stimme hebt
an {A voice is lifted up, 1950), the German novelist Gerd Gaiser, who was
awarded major literary prizes and met with a favourable response in the
press, was content to explain how his character regained moral composure and did not care about trifles such as food, injuries, or lodging;
while Evelyn Waugh's war trilogy Sword of honour and C. P. Snow's
Strangers and brothers series were uniquely concerned with the ethical
dilemmas of leading personalities. There were of course exceptions
which we shall meet later but, as a whole, literature paid little attention
to the weak.
The third point I want to stress is that films are important for
historians because they provide spectators with images which, very
often, substitute for actual memories, creating a contrived but very
effective idea of the past. In their research into the recollection of the
Second World War in Australia, historians have frequently encountered
this 'metahistory', borrowed from screenings, which blurs actual reminiscences and, more importantly, is common to many people. Interviewing Australian women about the home front, Kate Dorian-Smith
met a complex, permanently shifting interchange between the individual
experience of the interviewees, history as it was told in books, and a
popular television series, The Sullivans, which validated and perhaps
even came to stand for the women's own memories of the period.
Similarly, Annette Hamilton noted that scenes obviously inspired by the
famous film The bridge on the River Kwai could be found in the recollections told by Australian POWs who had worked on the construction of
the Thailand railway.4 In the long run, the representations popularized
by films matter as much as the actual facts. As a German filmmaker,
Edgar Reitz, has pointed it out, films are vehicles for memory work
(Erinnerungsarbeit) because 'the images stored up in our memories are
the actual substance of history'.5
Reitz's most famous production, the television serial Heimat (1982)
deals extensively with the life and pains of the inhabitants of a small
village during and after the war.6 Since 1945, countless films have
evoked the same period but I shall be content with considering the
4
Kate Dorian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (ed.), Memory and history in twentieth century
Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995).
'The Camera is not a Clock' in Eric Rentschler (ed.), West German filmmakers on film:
visions and voices (New York: Methuen, 1988), pp. 137-8.
On Heimat see Anton Kaes, From 'Hitler' to 'Heimat'. The return of history in film
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 161ff.
108
Pierre Sorlin
fifteen years that followed the end of the conflict. Born in the initial
decades of the century, 7 the filmmakers who worked in the middle of the
century had witnessed the war, had usually been mobilized, and had
gone through terrible experiences. Having lost many friends and relatives, they were keen on questioning the fate of their contemporaries in
order to understand why the conflict had ended as it did. Theirs was not
the generation of innocent victims which was born in the 1930s and
early 1940s. The eldest pitied the young for what they had suffered, but
to what extent were they able to understand them? We must bear in
mind the fact that cinematic images are contrived by middle-class adults
who, unwittingly, emphasize the reactions of their social circle and age
groups, and forget or misinterpret the concerns of other groups.
Europe reached a watershed in the early 1960s not only because her
economy entered a decade of exceptional growth but also because new
movements, namely the Angry young men, the French New wave, and
the New German cinema, reoriented her intellectual life. The younger
filmmakers had not suffered as much as the previous generation during
the conflict and, with the passing of time, they could stand back and
judge events more calmly. The most popular films related to the Second
World War, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour and Rainer Werner
Fassbinder's Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The marriage of Maria Braun) did
not attempt to reconstruct the past but questioned the very building of
memory. While acknowledging the horrors of war, Resnais and Fassbinder did not conceal its liberating aspects: their main characters were
women who defied opinion in a manner inconceivable before the
hostilities. A controversial Danish film, Pale Kjaerulff-Schmidt's Der var
engang en krig (Once there was a war, 1966), put on stage a fifteen-yearold boy, Tim, who took advantage of the trouble provoked by the
German occupation in Copenhagen to lead a difficult but emotionally
exciting life. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, novels and films played
an important part in the debate about the consequences of the Second
World War and the changes it had introduced. In particular, they
expressed doubts about the supposed togetherness created by war and
stressed the fact that the period's homogenizations were superficial and
short lived. Innocent eyes, like those of children, were very convenient
to observe the perpetuation of domestic frictions amidst bombings. Far
from describing victimized infants as was the case previously, novels
(Henry Green's Caught, David Lodge's Out of the shelter) and films
(Hope and glory, An awfully big adventure) illustrated the indifference of
children to whom war was a time when they escaped adult control and a
7
Between 1906 (Rossellini, Radvanyi) and 1919 (Clement, Wicki).
109
wonderful experience, both deeply erotic, in a class-crossing way, and

brilliantly aesthetic. This, of course, is highly interesting but it has to do
with the reinterpretation of the conflict, in the context of a reconstructed
Europe, not with the creation of a memory and, for that reason, I shall
stop at the end of the 1950s.8
Children weeping among ruins
In films, childhood was an invention of the 1940s. Previously, few films
had taken kids as their protagonists and, most of the time, boys or girls
were mere pretexts, useful to idealize the nuclear family and legitimate
the male domination. Being vulnerable, children were fit to illustrate the
ghastliness of a total war and it was not rare to notice, spread across
films whose characters were adults, children killed during bombings or
escaping from a dust-filled shelter to watch tall buildings blazing amid
crashes and sirens. The Germans have coined a word, Trilmmerfilme,
ruin-films, to point out the films in which wounded or mutilated people
roam amidst collapsed houses.9 These pictures are important for historians because they are often packed with accidental information. Getting
out of his home, Joe Kirby, the fifteen-year-old main character of
Charles Crichton's Hue and cry (1947) is shrouded in the clatter of an
air-raid; he does not look afraid, and the camera, which follows him,
discloses very soon a young boy who is producing with his mouth, his
nose, his hands, the sounds of explosions. Side-effects of bombings,
recurring fears or traumas like the obsession which affects this kid are
often neglected and it is useful to have them evoked in films.10 Hue and
cry as well as Gerhardt Lamprecht's Irgendwo in Berlin {Somewhere in
Berlin, 1947), have destroyed cities, London or Berlin, as their background and throughout the film young people go over large rubble-filled
areas bordered by bombed-out buildings and even, sometimes, help to
excavate and try to make the best of the squalor of ruins.11
I give the original title with the English title in brackets; when the film has not been
distributed in an English-speaking country, I give the translation of the title in square
brackets.
Manfred Bartel, So war es wirklich. Der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm. (Munich/Berlin:
Herbing, 1986); Deutsches Filmmuseum, Zwischen Gestern und Morgen. Westdeutscher
Nachkriegsfilm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1986), pp. 4 6 - 6 2 ;
Ursula Bessen, Triimmer und Traume. Nachkriegszeit und fiinfziger Jahre auf Zelluloid
(Bochum: Brokmeyer, 1989).
An aspect of war films tackled by Robert Murphy, Realism and tinsel. Cinema and society
in Britain, 1939-1948 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 162ff.
Wolfgang Becker and Norbert Scholl, In Jenen Tagen. Wie der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm die
Vergangenheit bewaltigte (Opladen: Leske, 1995), pp. 65ff.
110
Pierre Sorlin
However, the documentary aspect of feature films is not what matters.

In many cases, the images have a strong emotional impact, all the more
powerful that the evocation is direct and unemphatic. The international
fame of Rossellini, in the late 1940s, was largely due to the fact that he
depicted in full the horrors of war but did so with restraint. There is in
particular an unforgettable sequence in Paisd (Paisan, 1946) which lasts
only thirty-five seconds but which is very impressive. In December
1944, partisans and American agents dropped behind the lines, who
have taken refuge in the marshes of the Po delta, get some food from a
farmhouse, Casal Madalena. Here is the above-mentioned sequence,
which is made of only six shots:
At twilight, two American soldiers, filmed in medium shot, are
walking. The cries of a baby can be heard in the distance.
A long shot reveals a few corpses lying alongside the bank, outside
Casal Madalena. A weeping child and a dog wander among the dead
bodies.
The soldiers stop, horrified.
A slow tracking-shot, starting from the framing of the previous shot,
follows the baby who goes along the bank.
The soldiers leave the place.
The tracking-shot goes on and moves away from the baby who is now
motionless; the cries fade away.
The poor orphan has been abandoned twice. First by the Americans.
What could they do? Their situation is desperate, they are entirely
surrounded by the Germans, and they will soon be captured by the
enemy; their pity would be useless. But the child has also been abandoned by the spectators; the three shots showing the corpses and the
baby are much too wide to represent the point of view of the Americans;
they are the point of view of the public which stands outside the scene
and whose experience of the soldiers' revulsion is merely that of
knowledge. Spectators cannot do anything for the baby. Let us recall
that the film was released in 1946, at a time when there were many war
orphans and when people were so upset by their own problems that they
could not care for the abandoned babies.
The fate of children without parents was surely a serious concern in
the postwar period since it returned obsessively in all the cinematographies, even in the British cinema with Dan Birt's No room at the inn
(1948), a critical evocation12 of English children evacuated to Scotland,
Note that the script was written by Dylan Thomas.
111
forced to live in filth, fed only scraps, who arouse no sympathy or pity in
an indifferent local community.13 Dan Birt exposed openly what was
latent in Paisa: in his film, the children were neglected, even threatened
by the grown-ups and one of them, the little Mary was obliged to
mobilize her companions against the adults.
No room at the inn was rather traditional inasmuch as it told a finite
story, from the departure of the children until their final success, and
closed on a happy ending. A few Italian filmmakers, namely Rossellini
and De Sica, were much more audacious, since they depicted totally
abandoned children obliged to fight to survive. One episode, in Paisa, is
focused on a little boy, Pasquale, who has no family and lives by stealing
in the streets of Naples. Encountering a drunken black American soldier
Pasquale robs him of his shoes to sell them; later the American finds the
kid, who takes him to his shelter, a shantytown crammed with women
and children dressed in rags. Pasquale is extremely convincing in his
part of a prematurely grown-up boy, quick to evaluate the commercial
value of objects, and the last sequence in the shacks is very impressive
but here again the end is excessively optimistic: the soldier drops the
boots and leaves. The approach was fairly different in De Sica's Sciuscia
(Shoeshine, 1946) and Rossellini's Germania anno zero (Germany, year
zero, 1947). Here the children, who have to cope alone with an hostile
environment, are also obliged to reckon with the adults. Like Pasquale,
De Sica's two characters, who live in Rome, are involved in the black
market; allied soldiers do not pay them, or pay them badly, for cleaning
their shoes and they must deal in contraband; a gang uses them to help
rob a well-off lady of all her money but they are easily spotted by the
lady and the police sends them to a reformatory where they are treated
as hardened criminals. Rossellini's Germania anno zero takes place in
Berlin. Edmund, who is only thirteen years old, has to support an
invalid father, a brother obliged to hide to avoid denazification, and a
sister. Adults employ him to sell superfluous objects to the allies but get
most of the money he brings them back. Repeatedly, Rossellini shows
the young boy cheated by grown-ups and he does it in his sober,
impressive manner. For instance, a neighbour has instructed him to sell
a scale worth 300 marks:
13
The selfishness of the local community which does not care for the orphans is also the
theme of Luigi Zampa's Campane a martello {Children of chance, 1950) but this Italian
film, unlike its British counterpart, does not set the children against the village. It is the
priest who faces the villagers and moves them. It would be interesting to see how often
the fate of war victims was used for a political purpose - in this case to emphasize the
positive role of the Church.
112
Pierre Sorlin
A long shot of a street allows Edmund to enter the field; he meets

other children and argues with them since they do not want to let him
'work' on their territory. A man enters in the background.
Medium shot of Edmund with the man. The shot is framed to the
dimensions of the man, which makes the boy look small and powerless. The man takes the scale to examine it but keeps it and gives
Edmund two tin cans.
Long shot; while the man goes away Edmund protests. On the screen
the distance between the frail boy and the man looks impassable and
Edmund's position conveys the stress and anger that he is feeling.
Of course, when Edmund goes back home, the neighbour rebukes him
and takes the two tin cans: the boy has wasted his day for nothing.
Making spectators weep over the misfortunes of harmless kids is a
worn-out trick abundantly used in tear-jerkers. However, children are
seldom the protagonists of the novels, plays, or films which depict them;
on the contrary, they may have the part of the classic victim because
they are unable to play an important role. Postwar films broke new
ground in the field of fiction by putting the emphasis on youth and by
running the risk of having recourse to juveniles who were not even
amateur actors and who seldom made a career in cinema.14 This led
them to observe some conventions. In order to justify the loneliness and
hopelessness of their characters, they stressed the dramatic effects of the
war. The mother of Hooker, one of the three adolescents who are the
main characters of Basil Dearden's / believe in you (1952), explains at
length that her son was a nice, clean boy until his father was killed in
1941. The background of ruins and debris, the environment of blackmarketeers and allied soldiers, the atmosphere of fear and insecurity
were not merely an affectation of realism, they were necessary to make it
plain that the circumstances were exceptional and were the result of the
conflict. As they were not professional, the young actors could not
remember long lines and their dialogues were necessarily short. But it is
quite obvious that they enjoyed playing and the filmmakers took advantage of their enthusiasm: the striking manner of the actors, their
presence and self-assurance are impressive. Loose clothes, too wide for
frail bodies, rags, fanciful headgear like the garrison cap worn by
Pasquale, produced odd-looking, shabby figures and insistent close-ups
of silent, pensive faces created an impression of profound sadness.
These films were dark enough to engage their public in mourning, they
were a direct way of experiencing various emotions, of a kind repeatedly
14
The few exceptions were Henry Fowler {Hue and cry, I believe in you), Franco
Interlenghi (Sciuscia), and Brigitte Fossey (Lesjeux interdits).
113
encountered in daily life, all through the medium of sight; they did not
communicate ideas marked by words but raised sentiments and feelings
affecting the disposition of the spectators' minds. Emotionally intense
and expressive images helped people mourn. What is more, since these
pictures were fictional and featured children - that is to say visibly,
weak, easily hurt beings - there could be no conflict between what the
public watched on the silver screen and what it actually experienced:
films were exceptionally well fitted to adapting their spectators' feelings
to a very difficult situation.15
What did they die for?
The archetypal photograph of the First World War is of a soldier on
watch in a trench. For the Second World War, it is of a baby drifting in
the streets of a destroyed city. However, where Germany is concerned,
another picture has to be evoked; it is a newsreel, shot in March 1945,
which shows Hitler, wasted with age and worries, reviewing a squad of
fifteen-year-old soldiers. Children were not only civilian victims but
military victims as well in the conflict. The story is a complicated one; it
has never been fully explored by historians and it is always mixed with
folk-tales. All countries have their legends about young drummers who
were killed while leading a charge or murdered by the enemy because
they gave the alert instead of keeping silent. The mobilization of young
boys, in 1944 to 1945, was a reality, but it was also a myth which helped
people to ponder the meaning of the conflict.
Two boys, one fourteen and the other fifteen years of age, carry a
message from a group of partisans to another group. For them it is a
play but the Fascists capture and shoot them: does not that illustrate the
ambiguity of resistance, asked Beppe Fenoglio in Una questione
privata?16 But his book was written at the end of the 1950s and, fifteen
years before, Rossellini had given a totally different answer. His most
famous film, Roma cittd aperta {Rome, open city), which was released as
early as September 1945, was a political plea for Italy which met with an
enthusiastic response in the United States and contributed to redeeming
the Italians in the eyes of the Americans. The film depicts a Rome
entirely mobilized against the German occupiers under the joint direction of a Communist and a priest. All social classes, from well-off
traders to workers, contribute to the fight. There are no children among
15
16
Eric Santer, Stranded objects: mourning, memory and film in postwar Germany (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1990).
A private question written in 1959-60, published after Fenoglio's death (Turin: Einaudi,
1963); see pp. 141ff.
114
Pierre Sorlin
the main characters, but kids do not stop appearing in the background
and their determination is as strong as the adults'. Using words which
sound odd in his mouth, a twelve-year-old boy insists that 'we have to
close ranks against the common enemy'. The kids are organized like a
small army, with a chief who is both the theoretician and the strategist
and a second-in-command. Having collected bombs and submachineguns, they can be very efficient, as when they blow up a train but they
can also be dangerous when, unconscious of possible reprisals, they
threaten to throw a bomb onto a German squad. On the whole, the film
is extremely dramatic; it depicts the secret combat of the resistants as
well as the investigations which lead the Germans to arrest and execute
the leaders, and the public cannot but feel puzzled by the insidious
presence of the children. Of course these boys reinforce the idea that
every Italian was engaged in the resistance. But how can we account for
the half-farcical part that they play and for the fact that, unlike the
adults, they look invulnerable? We shall tackle the question later, in a
comparison with other texts and films, but we may already stress the
equivocation that children introduce in the movie.
If many Italian children carried messages, food, and even weapons to
the partisans, very few were actively engaged in resistance. On the other
hand, there was a limited but really active group of resistants to Nazism
in German universities. Three German films evoked die weisse Rose, the
White Rose, as the students called their ring, but these pictures were all
shot after 1970. In the 1950s, the few films dealing with opposition to
Hitler were devoted to officers who thought that they could no longer
obey the Fiihrer, especially to the failed plot of 20 July 1944.17 If
militarized youth was also displayed on the silver screen, it was when it
fought against the allies. The theme must have been extremely important since it was represented three times in twelve years by Hans
Muller's Undfinden dereinst wir uns wieder {And should we ever meet again,
1947), Laszlo Benedek's Kinder, Mutter und ein General {Children,
mothers and a general, 1954), and Bernhard Wicki's Die Briicke {The
bridge, 1959). There were significant differences between these films. In

the first two movies the boys have been transferred from their home to
an evacuation camp; in the third they live in their home town until they
are mobilized. In Undfindendereinst wir uns wieder the young, sent for
safety to Westfalia where they could await the arrival of the Americans,
choose, in April 1945, to go and defend Berlin against the Russians. The
17
On the representation of recent German history on film in the 1950s see Barbel
Westermann, Nationale Identitiit im Spielfilm der fiinfziger Jahre (Friburg am Mein: Peter
Lang, 1990), pp. 73ff. and Wolfgang Becker and Norbert Scholl, In Jenen Tagen,
pp. 79ff.
115
boys featuring in Kinder, Mutter und ein General have not been taken far
from the eastern front; they are well aware of the situation and feel very
scared for their mothers and family who are staying with them. The
schoolboys of Die Briicke leave an almost normal life in a small town of
Western Germany and, once mobilized, resist the American advance. In
other words, in 1947 fighting Communism was a good excuse; in 1954
protecting one's family against the Reds was a reasonable explanation;
in 1959 resisting an enemy, even tomorrow's best ally, was honourable.
However many similarities, namely identical characters, identical situations, identical actors,18 link the three films. In all of them the boys take
their own decision; the refugees break out of their evacuation camps and
the students of Die Briicke resolve to protect a bridge. Trying to cross
Germany and reach Berlin in April 1945 is a foolish task and can only
result in haphazard casualties; when they are given uniforms the boys of
Kinder, Mutter und ein General look like dislocated puppets; as for the
defenders of the bridge, once they have successfully resisted the Americans and four of them have been killed, the survivors are told that they
should never have protected a structure meant to be blown up. In the
three films most adults seem irresponsible and unconscious of the frailty
of adolescents: a teacher incites his pupils to go to Berlin, a general
agrees to enlist small boys, a commander exhorts his smooth-cheeked
recruits to be ready for the final sacrifice. However a minority of adults
is less inconsiderate: the mothers do their best to save their kids and, in
Undfinden dereinst wir uns wieder as well as in Die Briicke, a teacher tries
to convince the boys that their commitment is meaningless.

There is something very puzzling in this sequence of films treating the
same problem in similar terms. How do filmmakers account for the
sacrifice of children torn between contradictory advice? The sense of
duty is often mentioned by the boys, who say that they are ready to die a
hero's death for the country. But, behind a rhetoric often borrowed from
adults, it seems to me that the filmmakers, themselves adults, have in
mind something else. It is striking that none of the films makes the
slightest allusion to Nazism: the Germans fight for Germany and it is
also for Germany that the young want to enlist. Still, given their age,
since all these boys have gone through Hitlerjugend, theirs should be
political motivations. Here, as in Roma cittd a aperta, avowed reasons are
purely patriotic. Faced with adults who profess contradictory opinions,
the young react instinctively, in a way which is both honourable and illadvised. This vision of youth in war has been well expressed by Cesare
Pavese in his novel La casa in collina {The house on the hill, 1949). One
18
Bernard Wicki, who played the part of the general in Kinder, Mutter und ein General,
directed Die Briicke.
116
Pierre Sorlin
morning the main character goes to the house where the resistants were
hiding:
Half-way down the hill I met Dino [a twelve-year-old boy]. He was climbing up
with his hands in pockets. He didn't look frightened.
'The Germans came in this morning in a car', he said; 'they punched Nando,
they were trying to kill him.'
'Where is your mother?'
Cate had been taken too. And old Gregorio. All of them ... They had beaten
Nando up in the cellar. You could hear his cries. His mother had told him to
hide but he had wanted to stay behind with the others, jump up into the car as
well. He had rushed forward but the Germans had stopped him.19
Like Marcello in Rossellini's film and like the German youngsters,

Nando is unaware of danger. But, in Italy, youth had been on the 'right'
side; it was not necessary to mourn them; hence the boys could go
unhurt throughout the war. The German case was more embarrassing.
The three films under scrutiny must be connected to the debate over
moral resistance to Nazism which took place in the late 1940s. Journalists and politicians insisted that it was necessary to distinguish the
German soldiers, who had behaved like gallant warriors, from the Nazis.
A bright columnist, Alfred Andersch, piled up papers, talks, and
pamphlets in which he opposed 'the astonishing acts of valour by young
Germans in the war' to the misdeeds of 'older Germans'.20 Films had
their share in these polemics, they stressed the bravery of the young,
bemoaned their tragic fate, and made clear references to the rashness of
youth. According to the version of the last months of the war that they
offered, getting involved in a hopeless battle had been estimable but
ineffective. Nobody had to be blamed; only foolhardiness had led the
boys to lose their lives. Repeatedly, film directors invited their spectators
to grieve but made them understand that no remorse had to colour
mourning.
A way to hope
The final shot of Roma cittd aperta is open to various interpretations.
The last sequence, which depicts the execution of the priest, Don Piedro,
is first filmed in a detached manner, but the children arrive21 and the
The house on the hill (English translation, New York: Walker, 1961), pp. 135-6. Note
that the same situation is depicted in Roma cittd aperta. There is no need to look for
influences; the German car which arrives at dawn and arrests everybody was a
traumatic memory shared by many Italians.
Deutsche Literatur in der Entscheidung, 1948 (in Gerd Hoffmans (ed.), Das Alfred
Andersch Lesebuch, Zurich: Fink, 1979), pp. 15ff.
How have they been informed, since everything has been kept secret by the Germans?
117
end of the sequence is seen from their point of view, in a very moving
way. Once the priest has been shot, the kids go down towards Rome,
which can be seen in the background. This image was chosen because it
is visually very effective and, for the cinematographers, it had no precise
meaning. It can be read as the end of active resistance: the leaders have
been eliminated, the only thing to do is go back home. But it may also
be understood as an act of faith: it is the task of the new generation to
rebuild Italy. In postwar films dealing with children, sorrow and hope
are often interwoven. Out of the ruins, a future can arise, thanks to the
children. We have noted above the relationship between infancy and war
rubble. Children, in Hue and cry, lead a life of their own, independent of
their parents; among destroyed buildings they have colonized broken
houses and redecorated collapsed walls. Two other films which emphasize the rebirth through youth, a Hungarian movie, Geza Radvanyi's
Valahol Europavan {Somewhere in Europe, 1947) and Rene Clement's Les
jeux interdits {Forbidden games, 1952), begin with an air raid. Expressive
sharp sounds accompanied by a rapid succession of short, violent
images give an impression of the end of the world. In the former film, a
boy comes out of the debris, in the latter, a girl. With them, life has
escaped, but they are orphans and they will have to confront a universe
which has not been built for people of their age.
What strikes us in these pictures which are, in many respects, rather
disparate, is the emphasis put on death. Both films use images already
shown in others. Les jeux interdits lingers upon Paulette, the five-year-old
French girl, moving away from the corpses of her parents and roaming
with the dead body of her pet dog in her arms. Valahol Europavan
depicts a gang of orphans who wander through the country, are obliged
to steal, to defend themselves, and to fight a world which is afraid of
them. Death in all its forms, hunger, wounds, attacks by other gangs, is
for them a permanent threat which has also become a ritual: when they
find refuge in an isolated castle, their first idea is to kill the owner, in
order to assert their right to stay. But these films are not merely pitiful
descriptions; what distinguishes them from contemporary films which
were content with mourning is that they try to find a way towards the
future.
The children have gone through an ordeal and, if they want to live,
they have to overcome it. Paulette has no material problem, but the
peasant family which has adopted her does not understand that she is
trying to make sense of the loss of her parents. Her games, forbidden by
the grown-ups, displace routine observances, religion, church attenIt is one of the many inconsistencies of afilmwhose script was written in a hurry. The
story is poor but the emotional quality is outstanding.
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Pierre Sorlin
dance, and even funerals, to bridge the gap between death and life. The
story is not based on any direct observation; it is a fantasy, open to
criticism in its portrayal of childhood but interesting inasmuch as it tries
to attract spectators' attention to the trauma suffered by children and to
the difficulty adults have in taking it into account.
Without focusing on any precise issue like the urge to come to grips
with death, Valahol Europdvan was much more ambitious than Les jeux
interdits. It tackled gravely questions which were also treated, but more
lightly, in Hue and cry. Both stories evolve along similar lines: a group of
adolescents is obliged to face nasty grown-ups and strengthens its unity
in the struggle. In the English film, war, which has destroyed the
traditional boundaries between urban districts, has induced young
people from different areas to know each other and to create an informal
network. Thanks to its young actors, the film throbs with vitality and
uses the architecture of bombed London to great dramatic effect. The
children of the Hungarian film find it difficult to live in harmony in the
castle but the inhabitants of nearby villages, by assaulting their refuge,
force them to get organized. Hardship transforms a mere shelter into a
home where friendship will blossom. The two filmmakers have used
contrasting cinematic devices to reach the same conclusion. Radvanyi
has selected a few children and has filmed them closely, underlining
thus the importance of a smile, a grimace, or a shout. In Hue and cry, the
sequence that sticks in the mind comes at the end. It develops when Joe
Kirby, the main character, summons boys of all London districts to a
half-destroyed dockland where their enemies are hidden. Riding bicycles
or delivery tricycles, requisitioning taxis and lorries, running, jumping,
almost flying, hundreds of children cross a dead London, reviving a
sleeping city. The Hungarian as well as the English films finish with an
operation of self-assertion by the vital forces of youth which destroy the
old order by the simple act of demonstrating that groups of kids are
stronger than war.
A conflict of generations?
During the fight against their countrymen one of the children of Valahol
Europaban has been fatally wounded. His fellows take him to the village
where their older friend, the owner of the castle, addresses the inhabitants. Why is it, he asks, that adults launch wars in which their children
will be killed? Rhetorical though it is, this talk sums up what we have
found in almost all the films mentioned in this chapter, that is to say, an
open conflict between successive generations.
Prolonging feminist theories about the way in which films reveal the
119
mechanisms of pleasure and trouble at work in male-dominated societies, Marcia Landi has explored the traces of male insecurity that can be
spotted in postwar films, and she has shown that they are often provoked
by 'the disruptive character of youth'.22 Many pieces of evidence document her assumption. After 1945, in countries like Germany, Britain,
and even Italy women outnumbered men. Since many households were
headed by widows or unmarried mothers and since children, having an
important part in the household economy, were obliged to barter, to
beg, often to steal, families suffered from dramatic crises caused by
absent or enfeebled fathers. A direct, gripping testimony can be found in
the letters that Heinrich Boll, released from a POW camp in September
1945 after seven years of service, sent to his friend Ernst-Adolph
Kunz.23 These letters reveal a disheartened man; on 15 October 1946,
Boll wrote: 'Life is terrible. I am often torn apart by anxiety, anguish
and misery', because he was unable to find a permanent job and could
only survive thanks to casual, temporary work. Meanwhile, a young
playwright, Wolfgang Borchert, was writing a radio-play, Draussen vor
der Tilr {On the other side of the door)24 which, staged in the most
important theatres of Western Germany, was the only success of a

postwar playwright. The play tells of the plight of a returning unwanted
soldier, who finds that there is no room for him, that those of the home
front, including his own family, have arranged a new life and do not care
about what he has gone through.
It was thus commonly said that the youngest generation had got rid of
its fathers. In a short story by Wolfgang Borchert, An diesem Dienstag
{This very Tuesday), a young girl unexpectedly writes ten times in her
exercise book, in capital letters: IN WAR, ALL FATHERS ARE
SOLDIERS,25 which means that they no longer matter. A journalist
and a professor, who had also been in the Resistance, Werner Krauss,
went so far as to assert that the young had 'put an end to the bond
between generations' and that the sons were now attacking their progenitors.26 Historians would be naive if they believed that the evidence
22
23
24
25
26
British genres. Cinema and society, 19301960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), pp. 1 7 8 - 9 and 440ff.
Herbert Hoven (ed.), Die Hoffnung ist wie ein wildes Tier. Der Briefwechsel zwischen
Heinrich Boll und Emst-Adolph Kunz, 1945-1953 (Cologne: Kiepebheuer and Witschen,
1995).
Gesamtwerke (Hamburg: Rowholt, 1949), pp. 117ff.
' A m diesen Dienstag, safi Ulla abends u n d malte in ihr Schreibheft mit grofien
Buchstaben: I M K R I E G S I N D A L L E VATER SOLDAT. Zehnmal schrieb sie das'
(ibid. p. 213).
Such was the title of one of his papers, ' D a s Ende der Generationgemeinschaft', 1947,
reprinted in Literaturtheorie, Philosophic und Politik (Berlin: Naumann, 1984,
pp. 399-409).
120
Pierre Sorlin
given by direct witnesses constitutes a reliable description of reality.

Successive age groups are always more or less in opposition and the idea
of a dramatic conflict arising after 1945 was more an ideological
conviction than an accurate account of what was actually happening.
But the rhetorical and imaginative power of this sad vision of things has
coloured a good many books and films.
Italo Calvino's Ultimo viene il corvo {The crow comes last, 1949) tells the
story of a boy, 'a mountaineer with an apple face' who, being a very
good shot, is welcomed by a group of partisans.27 One morning, having
spotted a German hidden behind a rock, the boy watches him and
shoots every time he wants to leave. Finally the soldier, scared out of his
wits, moves and is killed. One cannot but feel uneasy when reading the
tale. The boy has no political idea, he does not even hate the Germans,
and he is only keen on taking a potshot. What is more, the duel is unfair,
the kid is content with being vigilant while the soldier gets more and
more nervous. Here, it is the youth who is dangerous and the adult who
is a victim.
Behind a seeming compassion, many films or novels disclose an
atmosphere of panic about the young. In the postwar era the adolescents' marginal status between child and adult had made them both
objects of pity and anxiety. At a time when children could ignore the law
of the adults, steal, and even kill, all the structures of authority were
threatened. Films have to be questioned like artefacts which historians
know to be partially inaccurate but which disclose purely emotional
reactions. Sometimes, a short scene, not important for the story, reveals
a latent hostility, for instance when an adult, in / believe in you, bullies
and throws to the ground Hooker, a difficult but nice boy. Even when
they offer a coherent, logical point of view, films may be totally biased.
Under the pretext of providing an objective account of the aftermath of
war a British documentary, J. Lee and I. Dalrymple's Children on trial
(1946), drew an impressive portrait of criminals-to-be and made it clear
that, once they had gone beyond any control, youngsters could be very
harmful.
Rossellini's Germania anno zero is the movie which best exemplifies
the ambivalence of youth. Spectators should feel sorry for Edmund,
who has lost everything and has no future. Defenceless though he is, the
boy is able to define his private law, which makes him as powerful as an
adult, and allows him to murder his father. What are his motives? Does
he pity the old man who will be sent to a hospice where nobody will care
for him? Does he consider that non-active people have to be eliminated
27
English translation in Adam An afternoon and other stories (London: Seeker & Warburg,
1983), pp. 68ff.
121
in a city which has become a hell? Does he want to punish the generation
which accepted Hitler and a total war? Rossellini is more attentive to
facts than to intentions and his sober shooting is particularly effective in
the scene of poisoning. In this sequence, the filmmaker differentiates
between two spaces, the room where the father lies on his bed and the
kitchen where Edmund is making his preparations. The father's chat
unifies both spaces and gives the sequence a flavour of quiet domestic
life; there is nothing thrilling in the scene since Edmund acts in perfect
cold blood. The final shot is focused on Edmund who, having put the
poison into the tea-pot, enters the room, fills the tea-pot with boiling
water and, calmly, brings it to his father. When the father offers to give
some tea to his eldest son, Edmund, as cool as if nothing were
happening, says: 'No, Papa, I made it just for you', which makes the
father remark: 'You have got a good heart'. There is something very
chilling in the simplicity of a domestic routine which is also an execution.
Fear can be measured by the reaction it provokes and the reaction was
often harsh in postwar films. Edmund was punished by the filmmaker,
who made him commit suicide. There was nothing inevitable in this
conclusion since, in the film, the situation is neither improving nor
worsening after the murder, with people still wandering throughout the
ruins and trying to get some food. Edmund, who has done what he
found it necessary to do, should wait for better days so that his death is
nothing but a sanction. The harshness of some filmmakers against their
protagonists was amazing. David Macdonald's Good-time girl (1948)
seems to have been shot only to chastise a young lady. The good time
was the war years. Escaping from her family, Gwen, sharp, caustic, and
independent beyond her age, takes advantage of the liberties allowed by
the conflict. Indulging in theft and sexual licence, going around with
crooks and bad soldiers, she is eventually involved in manslaughter and
sent to jail.
Stylistically, Rossellini and Macdonald are miles apart. But their films
are based on an identical scheme: when families, which are of vital
importance, no longer look after them, children, deprived of guidelines,
become outlaws. But the films, however suspicious of youth they are, are
not one-sided. We have already noted that Edmund, like many other
kids, is also a victim, exploited by adults. There is even more. One day,
Edmund's father makes a long confession; he mentions all that has been
lost under Hitler: 'I should have protested, but I was too weak, like so
many of my generation. We saw disaster coming and we didn't stop it
and now we are suffering the consequences. Today we are paying for our
mistakes, all of us! But we have to recognize our guilt.'
122
Pierre Sorlin
The conflict of generations, as depicted in fiction, developed around a

mutual distrust and a mutual hostility. Joseph von Baky's Und iiber uns
der Himmel {And above us the sky, 1947) cleverly set the terms of the
debate. A father and his young son return from the war and try to adapt
to a devastated world. The son had lost his sight, but he is cured and a
skilful scene shows him seeing, discovering what has become of his
father, now a black-marketeer. It is the look of the son at his father
which is unbearable. Once he has got over the shock, the son tries to
argue with the father but theirs is a dialogue of the deaf, principles
against hunger and vice versa. There is a dramatic paradox here: the son
referred to a code taught by his father but that his father no longer
admitted. Of course, the dilemma was much too simple, as is often the
case in stories. But the film suggests that, behind the conflict of generations lay something else - something that we should now try to clarify.
The discovery of childhood
In this chapter, I have treated the films made in several countries as a
unique genre. Cinema was then extremely popular. Unfortunately we
lack the pieces of evidence necessary to answer four basic questions: how
often did people go to the cinema, what did they see, what did they think,
and how, if at all, did they communicate between themselves. The only
thing we may take for granted is that, because of the disarray provoked by
the war, film production was limited so that most of the pictures I have
mentioned circulated throughout Europe and were seen by most cinemagoers. If we except the mobilization of boys, which was specific to the
defeated countries, no significant differences can be noted in the themes
and issues tackled by various national studios. It may be assumed that
societies turned upside down by the war used the cinema at the same
time to face the urgent problem of moral and material reconstruction,
and to avoid it. The only puzzle is the silence of France, which contributed only one film to the debate. Frenchmen are used to ignoring their
contemporary history; it took them three decades to dare to make films
on Vichy and the German occupation and little has been shot on the
Vietnam War, on the Algerian War, or on May 1968. However youth was
not a highly controversial matter like, for instance, collaboration or
resistance. Why was it ignored? The point is, I think, that despite her
symbolical intervention on the allied side, France was not a nation in
arms from 1940 to 1945. Therefore, Frenchmen did not experience the
contradiction between the absurdity of the conflict and the necessity of
fighting which made it so difficult for the other Europeans, defeated or
victorious, to understand what they had gone through.
123
Being attended by all age groups and social classes, cinema was
important during the postwar era because it was able to represent vividly
and realistically what people had endured and we have seen that, until
the late 1950s, cinema-goers were regularly offered war films. Since
then, television has drastically changed the function of audiovisual
media by introducing immediate, direct comments about events. In the
1940s and 1950s, only a department of state could afford a series like
Why we fight; private companies were more anxious to entertain their
public by producing fiction than to inform it. But many filmmakers were
obsessed by what was before their very eyes. De Sica spent much time
observing shoe-shine boys in the streets of Rome; Macdonald insisted
that Good-time girl was 'based on a true story'; Radvanyi reproduced in
Valahol Europdvan scenes he had actually watched. Apart from De Sica
and Rossellini the directors interested in the aftermath of war were
second-rate artists whose names have long been forgotten. Since they
were keen on giving a fair account and cared little about aesthetics, their
works were illustrated discourses conveyed via contrived stories and
interpreted by actors so that, in many instances, they lacked coherence.
But what matters, and what makes these films worth studying, is that
European audiences appreciated them.
A very powerful image was necessary to represent all the civilians
involved in the hostilities, as opposed to warriors, and children were fit
for that purpose since they belonged to the same period and would soon
be what adults had become before them. Mourning over them was thus
an indirect manner of mourning the whole society. The conviction that
the Second World War had been an ordeal for youth was so generally
accepted that the images offered by films like Paisd or Sciuscia were and
are still likely to impress every viewer. Far from merely documenting a
dramatic aspect of the conflict, films had a soothing function: the
depiction of adolescent victims of war helped to expose painful or
frightening emotional realities and made them less threatening.
Understanding why films tended to magnify the sufferings of the
youngest is not difficult. But how is it that a cinema built around such a
pitiful vision was also critical about the part played by children during
and after the war? The answer is probably to be found in the fact that
youth was a metaphor for the entire society. Adults, especially in the
defeated countries, used children to deal with problems which, otherwise, would have been hushed up. By hiding behind their fighting boys,
adults could debate the reasons which had led their respective countries
to prolong the combat and, by indirectly accusing the young, they
passed over their own responsibility.
Films contributed to camouflaging unbearable tensions; they substi-
124
Pierre Sorlin
tuted suffering for guilt and contributed, together with other media, to
developing the legend of a generation conflict. This fable is one of the
most worrying aspects of the postwar cinema. It could have been
another subterfuge if we consider that the fear of children served to
cover a lack of real care for youth during the hostilities. But, without
being able to prove it, I believe that something more important
happened at that time. Up to that date, children had no place in fiction;
they were always seen through the eyes of adults, their fate was
subordinated to the concerns of their parents. In the wake of the war,
kids were introduced to the silver screen and, without having had any
training, they did very well. Much has been said about the irruption of
teenagers upon the market during the years of the economic boom. Did
they come from nowhere? As images, surely not. The ambiguous, halfhypocritical mourning of the grown-ups installed the young in fiction
and obliged adults to look at them. If attention to adolescence has come
to define much of European societies today, it is, to a large extent, an
aftermath of the Second World War.
From survivor to witness: voices

from the Shoah
Annette Wieviorka
'Good people, do not forget, good people, tell the story, good people,
write!'1 declared the renowned historian Simon Dubnov to his companions before his death on 8 December 1941 in Riga, killed by a
Lithuanian policeman during the liquidation of the ghetto. It was the
last appeal of an old man. This story may be apocryphal. But Dubnov
was not alone among those who, during the Holocaust, as well as
throughout the fifty years following the destruction of the Jews of
Europe, tried to tell the story because to do so was an act of duty, the
duty to remember.
We thus have at our disposal today a mass of testimony - perhaps in
volume greater than that related to any other historical event. No single
scholar can master it all: books, newspapers, audio and video recordings,
alongside evidence produced privately or for personal reasons. Some are
part of legal proceedings; others are pedagogic in character, related to
visits of survivors or their relatives to schools. There are large-scale
inquiries, frequently originating in efforts to establish a data base or oral
archive.
This kind of testimony stands at the intersection of the individual
and society. It affirms that every individual, every single life, each
experience of the Shoah was irreducible and unique.2 But this affirmation is in the language of the time in which the evidence is registered,
necessarily creating multiple voices in the chorus of witnesses of
genocide.
Translated by Jay Winter.
1
Cited by Pierre Vidal-Naquet in 'Simon Doubnov: l'homme memoire', preface to
Simon Doubnov, Histoire moderne du peuple juif, trans, by S. Jankelevitch (Paris: Cerf,
1994), p. v.
2
[Eds.: We use the Hebrew term 'Shoah' and not the English term 'Holocaust', since
'Shoah', a Biblical term which originally meant a major calamity (natural or manmade), has no associations with ritual purification, the Greek meaning of 'Holocaust'.
There was absolutely nothing about ritual or purification about the Nazi extermination
of the Jews.]
125
126
Annette Wieviorka
Testimony about a vanished world
Everybody wrote ... journalists and writers, of course, but also teachers, social
workers, young people, even children. Most wrote in journals in which the tragic
events of this epoch are glimpsed through the prism of the experience of
individual lives. There are so many of these writings, but the vast majority will
be destroyed with the extermination of the Jews of Warsaw.3
Thus wrote the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum who was instrumental
in setting up in the Warsaw ghetto an entire organization dedicated to
the establishment of a systematic archive of every single document
about the ghetto. This project was entitled 'Oneg Shabbat', the Hebrew
phrase for the cultural pleasures of the day of rest. Ringelblum was
absolutely convinced - with reason as it turned out - that it would be
preserved. The source of his project was clear: the shared belief in the
urgent necessity that someday the history of these times would be
written. It was a belief shared by historians like Dubnov and Ringelblum, and also Ignacy Schiper, killed at Majdanek. Schiper told
Alexander Donat that:
everything depends on those who will transmit our testament to the generations
to come, to those who will write the history of this epoch. History is written
generally by the victors. All that we know of vanished races is what their killers
have wanted to say about them. If our killers will win the war, if they will write
its history, our annihilation will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages
of world history, and future generations will render homage to the courage of
these Crusaders. Every one of their words will have the significance of the
Gospels. They could also decide to blot us out completely from the memory of
the world, as if we had never existed, as if there had never been Polish Jewry, the
Warsaw ghetto, and Majdanek ...
But, if we will be those who write the history of this period of tears and blood
- and I am sure that we will do so - then who will believe us? No one will want
to believe us, since the disaster is the disaster of the whole civilized world.
We will have the thankless task of proving to a world which will refuse to
listen, that we are Abel, the murdered brother.4
To the official archives of the ghettos, and principally in Warsaw5 and
Lodz, other chronicles were added, such as that edited by Emmanuel
Ringelblum in Warsaw,6 or that of the Lodz ghetto, a collective news3
Emmanuel Ringelblum, Chronique du ghetto de Varsovie (Paris: Robert Lafont, 1980),

p. 21. For the English translation, see Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw ghetto, edited
and translated by Jacob Sloan (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958).
A. Donat, The Holocaust kingdom, as cited by Rachel Ertel, Dans la langue de personne.
Poesie yiddish de I'antiantissement (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 23.
The archives of Oneg Shabbat were buried in three separate lots, each encased in a milk
bucket.
Ringelblum, Chronique.
From survivor to witness
127
paper, edited by a range of people of different ages, education, and

origin.7 Between ten and fifteen intellectuals worked openly in the
department of the archives of the ghetto, while clandestinely building up
the secret chronicle.
But personal diaries remain the most vivid documents of the need to
preserve the traces of events which defy the imagination. These diaries
are by no means uniform. Some are written in a lapidary style, in which
events and facts are noted. Thus, Adam Czerniakow, head of the Jewish
Council (Judenrat) in Warsaw, always carried little notebooks in which
he jotted things down, with an occasional reflective comment or citation.
Most - though not all - such documents are a bit like telegraphy,
without literary embellishment. Czerniakow's notebooks were spirited
out of the ghetto by his widow. They were published much later, only in
the 1980s, in English and Hebrew.8 In the immediate postwar period,
only the 'heroes' were celebrated, and the Jewish Councils were definitely not heroic: they were stigmatized as collaborators. In this context,
the publication of Czerniakow's notebooks drew very little notice.
Other diaries and notebooks were also published in English and
French. There were the Warsaw ghetto diaries of Chaim Kaplan,9
Abraham Lewin,10 and Mary Berg.11 Among thirty or so notebooks
written in Auschwitz-Birkenau, three are extant: those of Leib Langfus,
Zalman Lewental, and Zalman Gradowski.12
The publication of these works at diverse dates interested only a very
small public. None was a best-seller. The exception was John Hersey's
The wall, based in part on the archives of 'Oneg Shabbat', whose
principal character was precisely the ghetto chronicler. Hersey's book
was indeed widely read and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic.
The transformation of the story into literature facilitated its transmission. This was the view of a number of those writing during the
7
10
11
12
This chronicle was a collection of texts - stories, news, and so on - published in the
United States under the title The chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944, ed.
L. Dobrosyscki (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) and in Lodz Ghetto. Inside a
community under siege, ed. A. Edelson and R. Lapides (New York: Penguin Books,
1989).
The Warsaw diary of Adam Czerniakow, ed. R. Hilberg, S. Staron, and J. Kermisz (New
York: Stein and Day, 1982).
Chaim A. Kaplan, Chronique d'une agonie. Journal du ghetto de Varsovie, decouvert et
presente par Abraham I. Katsch avec une preface par Jean Bhch-Michel (Paris: CalmannLevy, 1966).
Abraham Lewin, Journal du ghetto de Varsovie. Une coupe de larmes, ed. Abraham
Polonsky (Paris: Plon, 1990).
Mary Berg, La Ghetto de Varsovie, ed. S. L. Schneiderman (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947).
These texts are in Bernard Mark, Des voix dans la nuit: la resistance juive a AuschwitzBirkenau; preface by Elie Wiesel; trans, from Yiddish by Esther and Joseph Friedmann
and by Liliane Princet (Paris: Plon, c. 1982).
128
Annette Wieviorka
catastrophe. Abraham Cytryn was one of them. He was born in 1927

and grew up in the Lodz ghetto. He wanted to write down facets of the
life of the ghetto through news, short stories, poems.13 Simha Guterman
wanted to write a book, and not just personal testimony. It was
discovered by accident in 1978 by two Polish masons in Lodz in a bottle
hidden under the stairs of a house. It is an account written in January to
March 1942 about the city of Plock from the outbreak of the war in
1939 until the liquidation of the ghetto in March 1941. The narrative is
'a text, constructed, divided into chapters, organized around key people
and scenes. A book for the living, the ultimate act of resistance in the
face of forgetting and death. He wrote so that one day, perhaps, in a
world he would never see, others would discover his suffering and that
of his people.'14
Am I a murderer? by Carel Perechodnik, is in the same category.15
After the liquidation of the ghetto of Otwock, Perechodnik was hidden
in the 'Aryan' quarter of Warsaw. There he wrote a book - a 'second
child' - dedicated to the memory of his two-year-old daughter, whom he
himself had brought to the Umschlagplatz, the point of deportation, in
his role as a member of the Jewish police of the ghetto. This is what he
said: 'Since our daughter is not longer alive, I shall care for this second
child whom I will protect until that day when no force can kill her ... I
sense immortality in me; since I have created an immortal work, I have
been immortalized.' Here the mission is clear. It is a protest against
death and a desire to leave a trace that life had once existed here. But
this is the only confession we have of a Jewish policeman, full of
violence, cynicism, cruelty, psychological insights, all born out of the
author's certainty that he would not survive.
Many bore witness precisely because so many more could never do so.
Primo Levi observed that we have no evidence of those inmates who were
functionaries in the camps.16 Nathan Beyrak, who directed one of the
attempts to interview concentration camp inmates who had survived and
were in Israel, remarked, 'we haven't managed to interview people who
belonged to the Jewish police, or those who were not particularly nice'.17
13
14
15
16
17
Abraham Cytryn, Recits du ghetto de Lodz (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).

Nicole Lapierre, in Simha Guterman, Le livre retrouve (Paris: Plon, 1991), p. 19.
Carel Perechodnik, Suis-je un meurtrier? (Paris: Liana Levi, 1995). Published in English
translation as, Am I a murderer?: testament of a Jewish ghetto policeman, edited and
translated by Frank Fox (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, c. 1996).
Primo Levi, Les naufrages et les rescapes. Quarante ans apr'es Auschwitz (Paris: Gallimard,
1989), p. 18.
Nathan Beyrak, 'To rescue the individual out of the mass number: intimacy as a central
concept in oral history', in Maurice Cling and Yannis Thanassekos (eds.), Ces visages
qui nous parlent (Brussels: Fondation Auschwitz et Fondation pour la Memoire de la
Deportation, 1995), p. 141.
129
It is apparent that the first accounts, those of the period of the

ghettos, the extermination, were the accounts of people who did not
survive. They shared the same wish: that the people whom the Nazis
wanted to remove from the face of the earth would not be removed from
history.
The aftermath
Accounts of the Shoah continued to appear well after the defeat of the
Nazis. Two forms predominated. The first was in Yiddish poetry, 'a
kind of account of the human voice uttering what is irreducibly human',
writes Rachel Ertel.18 But also, there was the appearance of edited
memorial volumes, 'Yizkor books',19 discussed in the Israeli context by
Emmanuel Sivan in chapter 9.
From the moment of Germany's defeat, historical committees tried to
retrieve the accounts of survivors and to establish a chronology of the
massacre. The editors quickly moved back to the history of life before
genocide. And inevitably so, since the term 'genocide' entailed not
primarily an astronomical number of victims, but the destruction of an
entire world. It wasn't solely the professional chronicler - rabbi or
erudite Talmudic scholar - who started to write. Everybody did.
'Everyone wrote', noted Ringelblum with respect to the Warsaw ghetto.
And after the liberation, all the survivors wrote. Their having lived in
Jewish communities, their having escaped from the genocide was
enough to legitimate their evidence, both oral and written. These
accounts were gathered together in works designated 'Yizkor books',
thereby locating them at the intersection of two traditions: that of the
martyrology of communities - Memorbuch - and that of Jewish historiography of the post-1918 period.
The term used for genocide in these books is the dritter hurban, the
third destruction, 2,000 years after the second destruction of the
Temple. This third catastrophe had created a new situation - the
destruction not only of a community, but also the annihilation of a
collective, a culture, a way of life, what they termed Yiddishkeit. All the
tools of recovery had been smashed: a language, a history, a physical
space, a network of sociability, indeed, all the forms of what Halbwachs
termed the social framework of memory. These books of collective
18
19
Ertel, Dans la langue de personne, p. 28.

On 'Yizkor books', see Annette Wieviorka and Itzhok Noborski, Les livres de souvenir.
Memoriaux juifs en Pologne (Paris: Archives-Gallimard, 1983); Jack Kugelmass and
Jonathan Boyarin (eds.), From a ruined garden. The memorial books of Polish Jewry (New
York: Schocken Books, 1983).
130
Annette Wieviorka
memory had as their aim the resurrection of a vanished universe. They

traced by tales and photographs the outline of what had been lost, and
thereby did the work of collective mourning for a catastrophic loss.
These works directly engage in the construction of collective memory.
This is what gives over 400 such books their homogeneity. They, the
surviving collective, sketched the lived experience, sometimes turned
into myth, of a vanished collective. They reached out to a reservoir of
knowledge, gestures, habits, forms of organization, which have meaning
only because the older generations, passed away in their time, had
transmitted their culture, their patrimoine, to new generations.
To be sure, the survivors had their own private cultural lives, in which
Yiddish played a central part. But there was so much that had been lost
of their collective culture that the notion of transmission of their codes
of behaviour and modes of life to a new generation became very
problematic. It is in this sense that these authors tried to save the dead
from oblivion. Memorial books, with their portraits and litany of names,
retrieved the dead from oblivion. Their authors and editors created a
Covenant not with God, but between the living and the dead. Through
these artefacts of remembrance, the recovery of the vanished face of
individuality led to the retrieval of the collective and its culture.
These Yizkor books faded from the memory even of the descendants
of their authors. Part of their aim of generational transmission, therefore, has not been realized. The grandchildren of the victims grew up
largely blind to their grandparents' fate. Jews without a heritage, 'imaginary Jews' in Alain Finkelkraut's phrase,20 they sensed that the
cultural transmission of generations had been reduced to the ashes of
the crematoria. The links between generations had been broken, either
through the death of the grandparents, or through their mute survival.
The grandparents spoke French poorly; the grandchildren were ignorant
of Yiddish. In these Yizkor books, that indissoluble bond between those
born before and after genocide was reaffirmed. But nonetheless something had been destroyed, which precluded the revival of a collective
identity. Amnesia was a reality for those who stumbled on the edge of
the void created by genocide. It was for this reason that Yizkor books
remained unvisited cemeteries.
Yizkor books highlight vividly the problem of the language of testimony. This was a problem the poet Avram Sutzkever wrestled with en
20
Alan Finkelkraut, Le Juif imaginaire (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983). See also Henri Raczymow,
'Fin du peuple ashkenaz', in Jean Baumgarter, Rachel Ertel, Itzhak Niborski, and
Annette Wieviorka (eds.), Mille arts de cultures ashkenaz (Paris: Lian Levi, 1994), and
Nicole Lapierre, La silence de la memoire. A la recherche des Juifs de Plock (Paris: Plon,
1989).
131
route to testifying at the Nuremberg trials.21 He was the sole survivor of

the Shoah to testify at the trials. His testimony was in Russian. The issue
here is not primarily one of the linguistic skill of the witness. It is more a
question of his point of view: where does he come from? Of what
precisely does he speak? Is he there to tell of the world of the concentration camps? Or of the death of a people? Xavier Leon-Dufour, in a study
of the uses of the word 'witness' in the New Testament, observes that
'the true witness is the witness of blood'; as in Revelation, it is testimony
after which blood is spilled. 'The witness is forever tied to the destiny of
that which he witnesses.'22
In this context, consider the remark of Rachel Ertel about Yiddish. It
is, she argues,
the only language which shared the fate of its speakers. Even if it survives in
pockets here and there, it died in Auschwitz, in Majdanek, in Treblinka and in
Sobibor with the people who spoke it. Yiddish writers and poets are the only
ones who speak at one and the same time of the death of their people and the
death of their language. They write in an unhearing world, fully aware of being
without connection, of writing in a language of no one. The death of a language
is irreversible. If the literature of the Shoah is like none other, as Elie Wiesel
said, it is not because it is more authentic than any other, but because it speaks
of a double disappearance.23
It was in this spirit that Elie Wiesel wrote his first book, ten years after
his liberation from Buchenwald. And the world was silent, published in
French, later became, in a very different form, Night. For this man, one
of the pioneers of the literature of witness, Yiddish remains the only
language through which one must speak of the Shoah:
We need to emphasize the fact that in no other language can we evoke it. The
literature of annihilation without Yiddish is a literature without a soul. I know
that much is written in other languages, but they are not comparable. The most
authentic testimonies of the Shoah, in prose and in poetry, are in Yiddish. Is it
because most of those killed spoke that language and lived their lives through it?
As for me, I know only one thing: if I had not written my first book in
Yiddish, if my memories were not in Yiddish, my other books would have
foundered in muteness.24
Wiesel's book had a cathartic function. As Ertel noted, 'it gave him a
voice, for he had to escape not only from physical extermination but also
21
22
23
24
See his memoir Oil gitent les etoiles (Paris: Seuil, 1988), and his article 'Le ghetto de
Vilna', in Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman (eds.), Le livre noir (Paris: Actes-Sud,
1995), pp. 4 9 9 - 5 9 0 .
Xavier Leon-Dufour, Dictionnaire du Nouveau Testament (Paris: Seuil, 1996).
Rachel Ertel, 'Ecrit en yiddish', in Michael de Saint-Cheron (ed.), Autour de Elie Wiesel
(Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), pp. 2 1 - 4 1 .
Elie Wiesel, 'Rand Makhhoves vegn Yiddish', in Di Goldene Keyt, 98 (1987), p. 26, as
cited in Ertel, 'Ecrit en yiddish', p. 2 3 .
132
Annette Wieviorka
from the death of his language'.25 His ability to write in French of this
world of which he was one of the few survivors probably explains his role
as a leader of the effort to retrieve the collective memory of the world he
lost. All his points of reference are imbedded in the Yiddish world that
was destroyed. He has translated them into another language, and
thereby has reached his readers.
No one can deny that there is a memory of the Shoah transmitted to
us by the survivors of that Yiddish world. But this collective memory is,
as it were, sealed-off, unable to invigorate society at large. Some of the
survivors felt that their memory was one their neighbours and colleagues
were neither able nor willing to share. The historian Jacob Shatzky was
born in Warsaw in 1893, and fought in Pilsudski's Polish Legion in the
First World War. He was a Polish delegate to the Paris Peace Conference
in 1919. In 1922 he submitted his thesis on 'The Jewish question in the
Kingdom of Poland during the period of Paskiewicz (1831-1861)'. In
1925 he left Poland for New York, where he founded the American
branch of YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute. Later this organization
would receive the bulk of the archives and library of the original YIVO,
located in Vilna. Between 1947 and 1953, Shatzky published three
volumes of his history of the Jews of Warsaw, bringing the story up to
1897. This was a monumental achievement, but one Shatzky could not
complete. Why? Because of his despair over the decline of the secular
Jewish culture rooted in the Yiddish language. In 1947, he wrote to his
wife while on a lecture tour of Brazil: 'The Jews are far from Yiddish
culture, or culture of any kind. They are for Palestine or for the Soviets.
The dream of a Yiddish culture in the United States has vanished, and I
see all too clearly how futile my life has become.' This blocked his
research, as he noted at the 29th annual YIVO conference in 1955:
What meaning does research have on the subject of the ancient communities of
Europe? Detailed study of political and economic themes has lost all relevance.
There is no part of that heritage which can be transmitted there to Jews living
today. Only intellectual history remains, the study of Jewish culture in the
broadest sense of the term.
But above all, the completion of his third volume of the history of the
Jews of Warsaw had broken him: 'Why am I working like a slave? Why
do I work and on what do I write? My people are dead. My subject is a
dead subject, and I am tired to death.' After suffering depression in
1954-5 Shatzky died of a heart attack the following year, without
having completed his fourth volume.26
25
26
Ertel, 'Ecrit en yiddish', p . 2 7 .

R o b e r t M o s e s Shapiro, 'Jacob Shatzky, historian of Warsaw Jewry', Polin, 3 ( 1 9 8 8 ) ,
pp. 200-13.
133
Shatzky's reflections touch on two problems. The first is the difficulty

of writing about a vanished world. Certainly the Jews of Poland were
gone, but along with them went a social framework in which their lives
were inscribed. After the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the whole area had
been demolished. Both the Jews of Warsaw and Jewish Warsaw were
gone. The same was true, to different degrees, throughout Central and
Eastern Europe. How then was it possible for an historian to establish a
link between that world and his own? 'In this world, there are no more
Jews. This people no longer exists. It will never be again', wrote Marek
Edelman, the sole survivor of the leadership of the Warsaw ghetto
uprising, of the victims of the Shoah.27
In the immediate postwar decade, the survivors did not emerge as a
collective. This was true wherever they landed. Their associations were
simply foci for sociability and mutual aid. Any efforts to engage in
collective remembrance in public were fruitless. Plans to erect a memorial in New York got nowhere in the 1940s and 1950s.28 The exception
was in Paris, where in 1956 the tomb of the unknown Jewish martyr was
dedicated, at about the same time as the Knesset set up Yad Vashem, the
Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.29 The Paris monument remained the
only one of its kind for some time.
Consequently, individual memory inscribed in a closed ethnic group,
and constructed in terms of family stories, took the place of collective
remembrance. Such individual efforts of retrieval went against the grain
of the time; they had hardly any political echoes. It was only when
political conditions changed in the 1960s and 1970s that the collective
remembrance of the Hurban could become not a private matter but a
social phenomenon of great significance.
The emergence of the witness
The Eichmann trial was a critical moment in the emergence of the
collective memory of the Shoah in France, in the United States, as well
as in Israel. With the Eichmann trial we enter a new period, one in
which the memory of genocide became a fundamental part of Jewish
identity, and in which that identity demanded public recognition.
This was the intention of those running the trial. Little was left to
chance. For Israel, there were both domestic and international consid27
28
29
As cited in J. M . Rymkiewicz, Umschlagplatz. La demiere gare (Paris: Laffont, 1990).

Rochelle G. Saidel, Never too late to remember. The politics behind New York City's
Holocaust Museum (New York: Holmes & Maier, 1996).
Annette Wieviorka, 'Un lieu de memoire et d'histoire: Le Memorial du martyr juif
inconnu', in Foulek Ringelheim (ed.), Les Juifs entre la memoire et I'oubli (Brussels:
Complexe, 1987), pp. 107-32.
134
Annette Wieviorka
erations behind the decision to seize Eichmann and bring him to trial.
The world had to be reminded of the Nazis' objective and of the silence
or indifference of the world when they tried to realize it. The world had
to be made to feel shame. Support for the Jewish state had to follow
from this fact. But in addition, it was necessary to educate a young
generation, to give them a history lesson. Here we see for the first time
the combination of teaching and transmission, a combination that has
dominated forms of collective remembrance ever since. It is present in
educational programmes, in the erection of museums and memorials
destined for the young, in the construction of film and sound archives
out of which multimedia tools have been made.
It all started in the Eichmann trial. For the prosecutor, Gideon
Hausner, a trial is not only a forum for dispensing justice: 'every trial
contains the possibility of a return to order, of a hope of an example
being set. It tells a story, draws a moral.' To tell this story, to draw out its
implications, Hausner decided to construct the trial on eye-witness
testimony. It was his decision to do so, and not that of the survivors to
be heard. Sufficient time had passed after the events of the Shoah to give
the survivors a forum. And now there were other supports for their
testimony: radio and television made possible the diffusion of words and
images without the need for the written page.
For Gideon Hausner, the foil, the alternative to be avoided, was the
Nuremberg trials. There the American prosecutor, Justice Robert
Jackson, conducted his case on the basis of documents, supported by a
minimum of testimony. Certainly Hausner saw the force of documentary evidence: the case against Eichmann was buttressed by a formidable
dossier of documents. 'Written proof is irreplaceable', noted Hausner.
'Its eloquence is there, in black and white. It was no longer necessary to
rely on the memory of a witness who had aged a decade since these
events. The defense lawyers can't unsettle a document as they can a
witness. The document speaks quietly: it doesn't explode, but it refuses
to go away.' It is true that the Nuremberg trial was conducted efficiently,
but 'it didn't touch the heart of men'. After all, the point was not just to
get a guilty verdict. There was enough documentary evidence 'to convict
Eichmann ten times over'. There had to be more than a verdict, there
must be the public expression, the 'telling in letters of fire of a national
disaster, a human disaster without proportions'. Only through living
voices could this be done. This is why Hausner decided to rest his case
on 'two pillars and not on one alone: on documentary proof and on the
depositions of witnesses'.30
30
Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (New York: Holocaust Library, 1968), p. 382. All
references are to the French edition.
135
For Hausner, as much as for those collecting video testimony in later

years,
the only way to touch the truth is to call as many survivors as possible to the bar
and to ask of each a small fragment of what they had lived. The narrative of a
certain chain of events presented by one sole witness is insufficiently tangible to
be visualized. But, taken together, successive depositions of very different
people who lived through very different experiences created an image sufficiently
eloquent to be registered. In this manner I hoped to give to the phantom of the
past an additional dimension, that of the real.31
This is why Hausner sought out new witnesses, who would enable him
to establish diverse facets of the process of extermination. 'Above all, I
wanted people to tell what they had seen with their own eyes and lived in
their own flesh.'
Gideon Hausner tells how he worked with Michel Goldman, a police
investigator and a survivor, to choose those who would testify. They
read through hundreds of recordings made of survivors' testimony for
the Yad Vashem oral archive, under the direction of one of the leaders of
the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Rachel Auerbach. It is not the case that
those who spoke at the Eichmann trial did so for the first time. They
were chosen in the light of their already recorded or written testimony.
Then Hausner went over the ground with these witnesses, and chose
those he wanted to appear at a trial with huge media coverage. It was a
casting operation for a media event.
Not surprisingly, many were reticent about appearing and speaking.
'This hesitation to testify', Hausner noted,
was due in part to a deliberate effort to forget events which, whatever they did,
followed them in their dreams. They did not want to relive them. But there was
another, still stronger, reason: they were afraid that no one would believe them.
The day the survivors emerged from the forests, the camps, the hideouts, they
experienced a need to tell their story. But when they started to speak of things so
unheard of, so much beyond comprehension, the person to whom they spoke
had a moment of doubt and astonishment. Often, this sense of estrangement
existed only in the imagination of the speaker; but for many of these people, still
injured and sensitive to the slightest nuance, that was enough to send them into
a protective silence. They buried in their hearts everything they knew, and
decided never to speak of it.
Such a reticence to bear witness was not universal. A large number of

volunteers came to offer their stories. In effect, Hausner's choice was
sociological: 'I wanted', he wrote in his memoirs,
to make known what happened in all corners of the Nazi occupation and I
wanted that that [sic] story be told by a range of people - professors, housewives,
artisans, writers, farmers, businessmen, doctors, civil servants, labourers. That
31
Ibid. p. 384.
136
Annette Wieviorka
was the source of the diversity of testimony. They came from every social group,
demonstrating that the catastrophe had fallen on the entire nation.32
How was it possible to avoid errors in the evidence 'of people who
were asked to tell of facts twenty years old'? To handle this problem,
Hausner chose 'to call people who had put their recollections in writing
in Yad Vashem or who had collected their own memoirs, published or
not, since their memories would be more easily refreshed from their
notes'. In truth, this was not the case. The story told became the
memory itself. As Primo Levi has noted: 'after 40 years or so, I tell all
that through what I have written: my writings play for me the role of
artificial memory'.33
Among those who gave evidence was Leon Wieliczker-Wells. He came
from the United States, where he had lived since 1949 as a distinguished
scientist. Wells had been among the detachment whose job was to open
the mass graves, to sort out the bodies, to put them in pyres, to burn
them, to grind down the bones, and to extract anything of value in the
remains. This was not the first time he had testified. He had appeared at
the Polish war crimes trials in Lodz in 1946.34
For the historian, the value of the written text is incomparable. But
the physical presence of this witness, 'the strangest man whom I had
ever seen in my life', according to the Israeli poet Haim Gouri, who
covered the trial as a journalist was more striking. Wells's comportment,
the tone of his voice, added to his factual testimony. He spoke in a
heavily accented English, Gouri recalled. It was a language without
adjectives, 'as if he really was somewhere else and the man who spoke at
that moment was but the spokesman of the man belonging to death
commando 1005'.35
George Wellers testified too - as he had done in his memoirs written
upon his return from Auschwitz - about the arrival at the transit camp at
Drancy of the Jewish children deported after the round-up in Paris of 16
and 17 July 1942. These children had been held in the 'Velodrome
d'hiver', a hall for sporting events, then moved to camps at Loiret,
Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande. They were separated from their
mothers before being sent to Drancy for further deportation. There
again, though the words were the same, the juridical framework, radio,
television amplified the evidence, and gave to it a much more powerful
resonance than that of a book of modest circulation.
32
33
34
35
Ibid. p. 3 8 9 .
Primo Levi, Le devoir de memoire. Entretien avec Anna Bravo et Federico Cereja (Paris:
Mille et une nuits, 1995), p. 2 2 .
See Leon W. Wells, Pour que la terre se souvienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 1962), and in
English L. W. Wells, The death brigade. The Janowska road ( N e w York: Holocaust
Library, c. 1978).
H a i m Gouri, La cage de verre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964), p. 50.
137
The final example is one repeatedly used in television accounts of the

Eichmann trial. It is the testimony of KaTzetnik, whose real name was
Yehiel Dinour. He too wrote memoirs immediately after the war. They
were published in Yiddish, and then became a best-seller in the United
States under the title The girl's house. After appearing briefly at the trial,
the witness fainted and later withdrew from public life. His absence is a
part of the film record of the trial shown time and again in later years.
The Eichmann trial marked the emergence of the existential witness,
the man of memory who embodies the past and demonstrates that it is
present still. These people helped turn the genocide into a succession of
individual experiences with which people today could identify. We have
moved beyond the time of Nuremberg, with its exposure of the tyrants,
their supporters, the criminals beyond the law and their plans for war, to
another period, when the searchlight is fixed on the victims. If Nuremberg was about writing the history of this terrible period - albeit an
imperfect history - then after the Eichmann trial, the task was different:
to constitute a collective memory. The diverse functions of the witness
needed in the Eichmann trial changed thereafter. They became witnesses in another sense, not discussed during the trial itself.
The era of the witness

At the end of the 1970s, there began a massive effort to collect
individual testimony in audiovisual form. One source of this interest was
entirely banal: the stage-managed and commercial exposure first on
radio and then on television of people speaking of their psychological
and personal problems. By the 1990s programmes appeared in Europe
as well where individuals spoke about their anguish to strangers in a
television audience. This insertion of private meditations in public space
marks the emergence of what the sociologist Dominique Mehl called the
'television of intimacy'.
At the end of the 1970s, after the broadcast of the dramatized
television series Holocaust, there began the systematic taping of the
memories of all American 'survivors'. Now the term had a normative as
well as a descriptive sense. The first centre for these records was at Yale
University. By 1995 the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies had 3,600 such individual tapes, incorporating nearly 10,000
hours of interviews conducted in America, Greece, Bolivia, Slovakia,
France, Germany, Israel, Argentina, Serbia, Poland, Byelorussia, and
the Ukraine.
Other initiatives followed. Museums, memorials, and commemorative
associations have begun similar work. The most ambitious is Steven
138
Annette Wieviorka
Spielberg's Visual History of the Shoah Foundation. In 1995 alone this

foundation collected 20,000 testimonies; 50,000 interviews, covering
hundreds of thousands of hours of evidence, will be collected by the year
2000. These voices will be available to anyone with a computer, and
especially to young people whose interest can be focused by an index of
subjects and themes. Multimedia linkages will make it possible to add
much more information to each testimony. How far we are from the
clandestine writings in the ghettos themselves, written in a vanishing
language, frequently hidden underground, and the survival of which was
a matter of chance. Now that the process of transmission has been
revolutionized by computers, what image of the Shoah will be formed
by the young? Today it is difficult to say.
In place of the needs of war crimes trials and the demands of the
prosecutor, today we have the social imperatives of collective memory.
The survivors must still perform an act of remembrance. They are still
summoned to tell the story, to preserve for history their evidence for the
generations to come after their deaths. 'To be deported and a witness' is
the way it was put in a colloquium addressed by Anne-Lise Stern,
survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and psychoanalyst.
The nature of testimony itself has changed. There is no longer an
internal logic which impels the survivor of the deportations to tell her
story in front of a camera. Now what matters is a social imperative. The
collapse of Communism made it much easier for survivors and others to
visit the sites of extermination and imprisonment. The young come to
Auschwitz and other sites more and more in the presence of those who
had been deported to them. Now recognition of what happened can
occur in the presence of the 'real', the real location of the crematoria,
the real person who had been deported. Now the witness is less the
bearer of knowledge about the destruction of the Jews, than a man or
woman who embodies an experience. Here the witness resembles the
model of the early Apostles who brought the word of the Gospels to the
people. And the young who hear the story from the survivors, they
themselves will become 'witnesses', apostles of a story they too can
spread after the first 'witnesses' have vanished from the earth.
What impels these arduous efforts to collect video testimonies by the
tens of thousands? On the one hand, there is a professional question of
preserving a record of contemporary history on a theme of universal
importance. This is part of the impulse behind the creation of the
Holocaust Museum in Washington. On the other hand, there is the
desire to draw the individual survivor out of the mass, to give to simple
people the platform, to preserve the words of those unwilling or unable
to write down their story. At this point we hear echoes of the effort of
139
those who created the Yizkor books. We also hear the voice of those like
the Israeli author and concentration camp survivor Aron Applefeld, who
has noted, 'Literature says: "let's give him a place; put a cup of coffee in
his hand" ... The strength of literature lies in its ability to convey
intimacy ... the kind of intimacy that touches your own.'36 Nathan
Beyrak, director of the Israeli branch of the Fortunoff Archives concurs:
the concept of intimacy is the central theme of the work in which he and
thousands of others are engaged.37
Two facets of this effort are worth noting. The first is a constant in
Jewish remembrance of the Shoah: the need to give a name, a face, a
story to each of the victims of mass murder. This was the impulse
behind earlier memorial books, as well as Serge Klarsfeld's 1978
publication Le Memorial des Juifs en France, in which are inscribed the
names and details of Jewish men, women, and children deported during
the war. Here we are dealing with the dead; but the second facet of
Holocaust testimonies in recent years concerns the living. In video
archives, the survivors appear, though frequently in quest of their loved
ones who perished in the war. As Nathan Beyrak put it:
I have no details of the murder of my relatives, my grandmother and her
mother, sons and daughters - my mother's two brothers and sister - which
probably took place in the death pits near Slonim. I always felt compelled to
know, to learn the most intimate details of what they experienced, moment by
moment. I think the nearest I go to satisfying this curiosity was when I taped the
testimony of a man who was taken to the very same death pits, possibly together
with my family, and described the experience in great detail. Unlike my relatives,
he fell into the pits without being hit by a bullet, and later managed to climb
out.38
This notion of intimacy is at the heart of the movement to collect

testimony and is evident too in the appearance of survivors in television
interviews. Dominique Mehl notes that this phenomenon arises out of
'the crisis of expertise and the questioning of the pedagogic credentials
of scholars and specialists'. When an instructor brings a survivor or a
filmed interview of a survivor to a class, it is an admission of the
teacher's incapacity to bring to his students a narrative of genocide.
Instead of a written or spoken narrative, he prefers to present a discourse
based on the emotions and the voice of witnesses. The technique of
filming is the same as in television broadcasts and in video archives of
deportees: 'The film director lies in wait for postures which reveal
emotion. A look, a gesture, hand movements are signals to the techni36
37
38
Aron Appelfeld, Beyond despair: three lectures and a conversation with Philip Roth, trans.
Jeffrey M . Green (New York: F r o m m International, c. 1994).
Beyrak, 'To rescue the individual'.
Ibid.
140
Annette Wieviorka
cian. In intimate broadcasting, the eye of the camera searches for the eye
of the witness.'39
The act of testifying before the camera, and of then being able to
show the cassette to his grandchildren, assumes great importance to the
survivor. 'For many of us', noted Primo Levi, 'to be interviewed was a
unique and memorable occasion, the event for which one had waited
since liberation, and which even gave meaning to our liberation.'40 To
speak of what had been his life during the Shoah validated an experience
which, to many survivors, soon after the liberation appeared so unreal
that they feared no one would believe their account of what indeed had
happened.
The more that experience is brought into the public space through
trials, through the appearance of survivors in schools, or still more on
television, the greater the chances that survivors would 'complete the
formation of a social identity' which requires notice, that is to say, the
sanction of society itself. At this point a mode of being - that of the
survivor - requires socialization in order to become a constituent part of
the personality of the survivor and a sign of his individuality. The
alternative, Mehl argues, is that the experience becomes 'a sign of
stigma or oddity. Recognition [in a literal sense] by society legitimates
one's right to take on and to claim a specific identity, because visibility is
a prerequisite for the location of a personality in the world.'
This assertion of identity through testimony is problematic when the
historical narrative fragments into a series of individual stories. Here we
confront, in the words of Richard Sennett, 'an ideology of intimacy:
social relations take on reality and credibility only when located in
individual psychology, thereby transforming all political categories into
psychological ones'.41 In effect, the witness speaks from the heart and
not from reason. He invites compassion, pity, indignation, even revolt.
The witness and his hearer form a 'compassionate pact', similar to the
'autobiographical pact' between the author of an autobiography and his
readers.42
Thus, Nazism and the Shoah are only present because they devastated
the lives of individuals, individuals who have triumphed over death. The
witnesses are there to testify, and they speak of the future by invoking
their children and more often their grandchildren. Yet the witness never
highlights this issue when, in his retirement, he makes the rounds of
schools in the United States or in France to offer his testimony. The
39
40
41
42
D o m i n i q u e M e h l , La television de Vintimite (Paris: Seuil, 1 9 9 6 ) , p p . 11 - 1 2 , 1 3 , 2 8 .

Levi, Le devoir de memoire, p . 7 5 .
As cited in M e h l , La television, p . 154.
Philippe Lejeune, Lapacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
141
witness always gives to his story a finality, a significance which goes

beyond it.
That significance changes over time. In the immediate postwar
period, as we have noted above, it was to prevent the rebirth of a
Germany 'intrinsically Nazi'. Today it is to fight against the negation of
the Shoah and against the resurgence of 'Fascism'. At times the struggle
against other 'genocides' is evoked. In other ways the story becomes
stereotyped, brought into line with conventional political messages
superimposed on the testimony.
Anyone offering testimony tries to construct, perhaps to reconstruct,
it freely and with a meaning she herself assigns to it. But those who are
in the business of retrieving, storing, and preserving in large collections
such testimonies would do well to reflect on some of the possible flawed
uses of this vast array of testimonies offered by the survivors of the
Shoah. Among such problematic uses are the conversion of the political
into the solely psychological, and the isolation of individual voices, the
partitioning into one-person units of the collective memory of the
survivors, whose testimony, one at a time, or taken as a whole, is said to
constitute the 'true' history of the catastrophe.
Landscapes of loss and remembrance: the

case of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles
Dolores Hayden
How many people are buried here?

Question from reporter at site of camp cemetery,
Manzanar, California, 1973
A whole generation. A whole generation of Japanese who are now so

frightened they will not talk.
Reply by former camp inmate1
War disrupts and reconfigures attachments to cultural landscapes on an

unprecedented scale. The process of mourning for the losses of war
often involves memories of treasured places, and human connections
within those places. Mourning also involves memories of hated or feared
places such as the front line or the concentration camp. This essay
explores the ways in which cultural landscape history can be used to
frame the connections between places, memories, and public history. It
looks at the possibilities of individual and community-based spatial
histories for processes of collective remembrance. It focuses in particular
on how spatial histories have been used in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles,
first, by former inmates of War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps as
part of an exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum, and
second, in historic preservation and public art for the First Street
Historic District (of which the museum is part).
The production of space
Every society in history has produced a distinctive social space that
meets its intertwined requirements for economic production and social
reproduction. Space is a material product of the political economy. As
Henri Lefebvre has written, 'Space is permeated with social relations; it
is not only supported by social relations but it is also producing and
produced by social relations.'2
1
2
Arthur A. Hansen, 'Oral history and the Japanese American evacuation', Journal of
American History, 82 (Sept. 1995), p. 628.
Henri Lefebvre, The production of space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, and
Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 286.
142
Landscapes of loss
143
The social activities of inhabiting, naming, occupying, and appropriating make spaces into places. People make connections to places
that are critical to their well-being or distress, and 'place attachment'
has been described as a psychological bonding process analogous to an
infant's attachment to parental figures.3 Place attachment includes
biological, social, material, and ideological dimensions, as individuals
develop ties to kin and community, own or rent land, and participate in
public life as residents of a particular community. How might the
production of space and the process of place attachment be affected by
war?
In wartime, the production of space often proceeds at an extremely
rapid pace. War requires that societies gear up for armed offence and
defence; arrange to feed and house bureaucrats, war workers, and
combatants; intern prisoners; bury the dead, organize displaced civilians; and manage occupied territories. All of these activities involve
rapid spatial change. Territorial constraints already existing in society
may be intensified or lessened by the requirements of production and
reproduction in the new spatial circumstances of war. Occupational and
residential segregation may be tightened, or loosened, depending on the
need for a wartime labour force and its location.4 Intersecting patterns
of segregation by race, ethnicity, class, age, and gender, are sometimes
transformed in the crisis.
As the production of built space increases in intensity and scale
during wartime, conflicts over territory are constant. Wartime changes
the process of social reproduction rapidly, and introduces new barriers
and incentives in the use of all kinds of space, from private to public.
The space of social reproduction ranges over different scales, including
the space in and around the body (biological reproduction), the space of
housing (the reproduction of the labour force), and the public space of
the city and the nation (the reproduction of social relations). To look at
just one example, changes in housing and the reproduction of the labour
force might include the establishment of concentration camps and the
related destruction of residential neighbourhoods. A spatial history of
this process would involve many aspects of the upheaval, from the first
plans for forced relocation, to the development of camps, to the physical
circumstances of exile, and, perhaps, of return.
Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low (eds.), Place attachment (New York: Plenum
Publishing, 1992); Peter Marris, Loss and change, rev. edn (London: Routledge and
KeganPaul, 1986).
Margaret Crawford, 'Daily life on the home front: women, blacks, and the struggle for
public housing', in Donald Albrecht (ed.), World War II and the American Dream: how
wartime building changed a nation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 90-143.
144
Dolores Hayden
Place and memory

Paradoxically, in times of anxiety and fluctuation, place-bound identities
often become more rather than less important - homeland, neighbourhood, and hearth seem more precious when groups are forced to leave
them behind. Memory also becomes more important when losses
accumulate. The inability to forget traumatic experiences may become
as much of a problem as wanting to remember positive ones. For the
victims, experiences of being caged in concentration camps might be
juxtaposed with memories of houses, gardens, businesses, and neighbourhoods now lost, amplifying the pain.
Because place attachment encapsulates the human ability to connect
with the cultural landscape, and people perceive places with all five
senses, the encoding of long-term memory connected to places is
particularly strong.5 Many different societies have used historic places to
help citizens define their public pasts. Places trigger memories for
insiders, who have shared a common past, and at the same time places
often can represent shared pasts to outsiders who might be interested in
knowing about them in the present. Places also permit people who have
lived in them to re-experience their pasts while simultaneously experiencing the place in the present. They may stimulate individual memory
while mirroring current circumstances.
Commemorations of war sponsored by the state or by wealthy patrons
often attempt to solidify place memory through architectural designs
such as the Trench of the Bayonets, from the First World War (oddly
enough, not located over the real trench it commemorates)6 or the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The architect of the Holocaust
Museum, James Ingo Freed, has been praised for his use of narrative
architectural elements within a brand new building to evoke the past.
But spending a lot of money on architecture does not guarantee an
evocative place. An expensive building or sculptural monument may
have little ability to trigger place memory, if it lacks much connection to
the context of everyday life during the war or in the present. Humble,
battered buildings and natural landscapes often evoke more direct
responses than elaborate structures because they are closer to the
experiences of most people.
Body memory is also difficult to evoke in a museum context. It
5
Alan Baddeley, Your memory: a user's guide, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994;
Edward Casey, Remembering: a phenomenological study (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 1987), pp. 186-7.
Jay M. Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), pp. 99-102.
Landscapes of loss
145
connects people into places because the shared experience of dwellings,

public spaces, and workplaces, and the paths travelled between home
and work, give body memory its social component, modified by the
postures of gender, race, and class. In a munitions factory, a foxhole, or
a fighter bomber, people acquire the characteristic postures of certain
occupations. Philosopher Edward Casey argues that body memory
'moves us directly into place, whose very immobility contributes to its
distinct potency in matters of memory.' He suggests that 'What is
contained in place is on its way to being well remembered.'7 Thus one
particular place can trigger an avalanche of specific memories - an effect
exploited in the famous scene in the post-Second World Warfilm,The
best years of our lives, when the veteran air ace climbs up again into the
cockpit of his old aircraft, now located in a scrapyard, and relives his
war. Recalled to the present, he asks for, and gets, a job in the scrapyard.
The authors of the chapters in this book have agreed to move beyond
looking at physical 'sites of memory' and exhibits of artefacts to study
the process of remembrance and identify its agents in civil society.8 An
emphasis on process leads to the question of how projects of remembrance can be designed to use place memory effectively. Some projects
might involve the participation of victims in reliving spatial histories, but
of course, this could mean re-experiencing the trauma rather than
exorcizing it. Activities designed to trigger place memory for individuals
are best organized in the context of a supportive community process of
both personal and public remembrance.
In any such process, there are bound to be conflicts between victims
and observers, between insiders and outsiders, between members of
older and younger generations, as well as between various individuals.
Public discussion of the forced exclusion and incarceration of persons of
Japanese ancestry during the Second World War is now reaching a
climax after three and a half decades of silence and about fifteen to
twenty years of the redress movement. Oral histories of the victims have
been developed to the point that this may be the best-documented
subject for oral history in American archives.9 Now some of the spatial
components of the experience are being explored and recorded in new
ways at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo in Los
7
8
Casey, Remembering, pp. 214-15.

For recent reviews of the 'memory' scholarship see David Glassberg, 'Public history and
the study of memory', The Public Historian, 18 (Spring 1996), pp. 7-23; James Fentress
and Chris Wickham, Social memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); 'Collective memory and
remembering' special issue, The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative
Human Cognition, University of California, San Diego, 9 (January 1987).
Hansen, 'Oral history', pp. 625-39.
146
Dolores Hayden
Angeles. These projects are rooted in a sophisticated understanding of

the Japanese American community before, during, and after wartime.
They offer the possibility of reconnecting important spatial memories
for the culture as a whole, as well as for the victims.
Japanese Americans in Little Tokyo
Close to City Hall, in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, stands Little
Tokyo, a district that has been home to Japanese immigrants to the
United States since the late nineteenth century. By 1915 there were over
7,000 Japanese Americans in Los Angeles, the largest Japanese settlement in mainland United States, a distinction it retains today. By 1930,
35,000 persons of Japanese descent lived in Los Angeles County, most
of them close to Little Tokyo.10 They ran grocery and produce shops,
sold bamboo, cultivated vineyards, citrus groves, and commercial flower
fields, and owned labour-contracting firms, clothing stores, boarding
houses, billiard parlours, cafes, nurseries, florists, and a local newspaper.
Smaller Japanese American communities developed in Boyle Heights,
West Los Angeles (Sawtelle), Hollywood, and Gardena, but Little
Tokyo was the centre which pulled these residents together, a place for
community and connection. Little Tokyo also drew Japanese Americans
working in the fishing industry on Santa Monica Beach or Terminal
Island near San Pedro, as well as families working in agriculture in the
San Fernando valley. There Japanese Americans of all classes and
occupations could attend religious services, learn traditional sports, or
take classes in kimono etiquette and flower arranging. There, too, Nisei
Week parades transformed the city streets with Japanese pattern and
colour, starting in 1934.
During the Second World War, Japanese Americans lost Little Tokyo
completely. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December
1941, selected Japanese American community leaders were arrested and
interned in Department of Justice camps. By 19 February 1942, Executive Order 9066 authorized the forced exclusion and incarceration of all
West-coast Japanese Americans, 40,000 Issei (first-generation immi10
Ichiro Mike Murase, Little Tokyo: one hundred years in pictures (Los Angeles: Visual
Communications, 1983), p. 11; William M. Mason and John A. McKinstry, The
Japanese of Los Angeles, 18691920 (Los Angeles: County of Los Angeles, Museum of
Natural History, 1969); Carey MeWilliams, Southern California: an island on the land
(Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1983); John Modell, The economics and politics
of racial accommodation: the Japanese of Los Angeles, 19001942 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1977); Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: the world of the first generation Japanese
as, 1885-1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988).
Landscapes of loss
147
grants) and 70,000 Nisei (second-generation immigrants, many of

whom had never been to Japan). No similar action was taken against
Italian Americans or German Americans. Executive Order 9066 followed the pattern of earlier anti-Japanese legislation. (California in 1913
passed the Alien Land Law which kept Issei from owning land. The
federal government in 1924 ended all new Japanese immigration to the
United States.) Executive Order 9066 was publicized in haste and
resulted in frantic packing. Many families lost businesses and homes, as
well as personal property. All persons of Japanese ancestry were forced
to wear white tags with family identification numbers and assemble for
transportation with limited baggage, often bundles hastily wrapped in
sheets.11
Under the direction of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), Westcoast residents affected by 9066 were forcibly moved twice. First came
relocation to fifteen so-called 'assembly centres'. Little Tokyo residents
were assigned to the Santa Anita Racetrack, where horse stables provided inadequate temporary quarters for 18,709 people between 7 May
and 27 October 1942.12 Then the detainees were moved to so-called
'relocation centres', ten crudely built prison camps. Eight occupied
unirrigated desert sites - Manzanar and Tule Lake, California; Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; Poston and Gila River, Arizona; Heart
Mountain, Wyoming; and Granada, Colorado. Two were situated in
undrained swamps - Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas. (There were also
internment camps run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service of
the Department of Justice which interned aliens and people considered
political organizers or troublemakers.) Travelling to these destinations
by slow trains which took up to ten days, with blackout shades covering
the windows, the exiled ethnic Japanese were occasionally let out to
stretch on station platforms patrolled by armed guards.
This mass incarceration was described by the United States government in language designed to obscure the identity of the people affected
1:
Donald Teruo Hata and Nadine Ishitani Hata, Japanese Americans and World War II:
exclusion, internment, and redress, 2nd edn (Wheeling, 111.: Harlan Davidson, 1975);
Roger Daniels, Prisoners without trial: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1993); Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano,
Japanese Americans: from relocation to redress, rev. edn (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1991).
12
Murase, Little Tokyo, p. 16. Also see Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and
Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988);
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a different shore: a history of Asian Americans (New York:
Penguin, 1990); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: an interpretative history (Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1991); Gary Y Okihiro and Joan Myers, Whispered silences: Japanese
Americans and World War II (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press,
1996).
148
Dolores Hayden
by 9066, the processes people were subjected to, and the places they
were forced to reside. Government documents spoke of 'non-aliens' as
opposed to citizens, and discussed their 'evacuation' rather than forced
removal and incarceration. These euphemisms Raymond Okamura has
compared to the 'emigration and evacuation' rhetoric used by the Third
Reich for the Jewish population, although the WRA camps were not the
death camps of Hitler's 'final solution'.13 The WRA, with unwarranted
cheerfulness, referred to 'colonists' or 'residents' in 'relocation centres',
and provided addresses such as block number, barrack number, apartment number, when in reality there were no apartments, since entire
families had one minimal room with no bathroom or kitchen.
Upon arrival at the camps, families were crowded into military
barracks hastily built of wood and tar paper, partitioned with blankets,
lit by kerosene lamps. The compounds provided almost no privacy.
There were communal kitchens, dining halls, laundries, and latrines. At
the barbed wire perimeter of each camp were guard towers, manned by
guards with guns and searchlights. On occasion, internees were shot - in
December 1942, a riot at Manzanar resulted in the deaths of two
residents by military police gunfire.
Japanese Americans were at first forbidden cameras to document the
spatial dimensions of their incarceration. A number of talented exiled
artists, including Mine Okubo, Hisako Hibi, and Henry Sugimoto,
created drawings and paintings of the places.14 A few managed to sneak
in lenses to build box cameras or even film equipment to make home
movies. (Outsiders could photograph camp conditions - illustration 1 is
by Dorothea Lange, who worked at Manzanar.15) Japanese American
writers and poets also created poignant accounts of their incarceration.16 Many exiles occupied their time making furniture, building
better walls and windows, and creating small gardens.17 Despite the
high level of skill many possessed in commercial agriculture and horti13
14
Raymond Y. Okamura, 'The American concentration camps: a cover-up through

euphemistic terminology', Journal of Ethnic Studies, 10 (Fall 1982),pp. 95-109.
The view from within: Japanese American art from the internment camps, 19421945 (Los
Angeles: Japanese American National Museum and the Wight Art Gallery, University
of California, Los Angeles, 1992); Deborah Gesensway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond
words: images from America's concentration camps (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
15
16
17
1987).
Maisie and Richard Conrat, Executive order 9066 (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American
Studies Center, 1990).
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (New York:
Bantam, 1973); Lawson Fusao Inada, Legends from camp (Minneapolis: Coffee House
Press, 1992).
Deanna Matsumoto, 'The built environment of America's concentration camps:
1942-45', unpublished paper, 24 May 1990; Kenneth Helphand, 'Defiant gardens',
Journal of Garden History, 17 (April-June 1977), pp. 101-21.
Landscapes of loss
149
1. War Relocation Authority Center, Manzanar, California, 3 July 1942,

photograph by Dorothea Lange, National Archives #210-G10-C839
2. First Street, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, showing reassembled barracks building from Heart Mountain, Wyoming, with contemporary addition, guard tower,
and fence; part of exhibit, 'America's Concentration Camps', 1995-6, Japanese
American National Museum, photograph by Dolores Hayden
150
Dolores Hayden
culture, the sites of the camps were so barren that skill did not always
bring success in the dust or the swamp.
Much discussion of citizenship and civil rights went on. WRA authorities wanted 'Loyalty Oaths' signed by their victims. There were many
who counselled quiet accommodation to the usurpation of their civil
rights and tried to present themselves as '200 per cent American', and
others who resisted.18 Some accounts of the internal struggles have been
written; others are in progress. At this point one can be sure that some
incarcerated American citizens of Japanese ancestry sued in court for
their civil rights and that others among the incarcerated thought that
their hope for the future might lie with the Japanese.19 The formation of
the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a much-decorated Nisei unit
serving in Italy, publicized Japanese American patriotism in 1944.
By 1945, the exiled were on their way back to their old neighbourhoods. But, of course, war had totally reorganized the uses and ownership of those spaces. During the war, the empty buildings of Little
Tokyo in Los Angeles became 'Bronzeville', home to African Americans
from the South who had migrated there in search of wartime jobs in
booming defence industries. The Japanese Union Church became a
black community centre. Jazz clubs thrived where small Japanese American businesses had once flourished.
Because many former businesses run by the first-generation immigrants had been devastated, many younger members of the community
needed to obtain employment elsewhere. While younger Japanese
Americans dispersed in the search for jobs, Little Tokyo remained the
best location for the elderly, for cultural organizations, and for stores
emphasizing traditional Japanese products. Public history was not a
priority or even a possibility for many years. As one resident put it, 'It
wasn't to our advantage to be a visible minority in the past.' Most
Japanese Americans turned away from remembering the loss of Little
Tokyo and the humiliating experience of the internment camps. Silence
prevailed. The late Amy Uno Ishii said: 'Women, if they've been raped,
don't go around talking about it ... This is exactly the kind of feeling
that we as evacuees, victims of circumstances, had at the time of
18
Edward H. Spicer, Asael T. Hansen, Katherine Luomala, and Marvin K. Opler,

Impounded people: Japanese Americans in the relocation centers (Tucson: University of
19
Arizona Press, 1969). The authors were anthropologists employed by the WRA to write
this report in 1946.
Peter Irons (ed.), Justice delayed: the record of the Japanese American internment cases
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989) records the legal battles. Brian Masaru
Hayashi is at work on a study of the spectrum of 'Japamst' and 'Americanist' views
among residents.
Landscapes of loss
151
evacuation. A lot of Nisei and Issei are actually ashamed ... that they
were in a concentration camp.'20
Networks and the process of remembrance
In 1969, Sue Kunitomi Embrey and a group known as the Manzanar
Committee organized pilgrimages for victims and their descendants to
the site of the camp, and began to explore the possibility of preserving
the remains of the Manzanar camp. (The state designated it as a
California Registered Historical Landmark in 1973.) By 1976, a national redress movement was well under way, and as part of the
Bicentennial, President Ford apologized to Japanese Americans, revoking 9066. A campaign for financial restitution culminated a dozen
years later when President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, and in
1990 cheques for $20,000 arrived for survivors, along with a written
letter of apology signed by President Bush. Political scientist Leslie T.
Hatamiya has analysed the legislative process undertaken by various
congressmen and senators of Japanese American backgrounds, as well
as the lobbying activities of citizens groups, including the Japanese
American Community League (JACL), which resulted in passage of the
act and the necessary appropriations. It was a complex process, and
Hatamiya has shown that 'skillful leadership, lack of coherent opposition, and a moral appeal to "right a wrong"' all contributed to this civil
rights legislation.21
By 1990, the Census recorded 866,160 persons of Japanese American
background (about 60 per cent native born). Japanese Americans are
about 0.34 per cent of the total United States population. They are
scattered across the country but still concentrated on the West coast.
Sometimes called a 'Model Minority', Japanese Americans have higher
incomes and lower unemployment rates than African Americans, Hispanics, or Chinese Americans, but are still twice as likely to be poor as
non-Hispanic whites.22
When, in the 1980s, the Presidential Commission on the Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians held hearings and authorized
reparations to victims, many witnesses came forward to testify about
their experiences and the entire Japanese American community had to
deal with the bitter past in a public way. Several younger Japanese
Americans commented: 'These hearings took place during a time when
20
21
22
Hansen, 'Oral history', pp. 6 2 7 - 8 .

Leslie T. Hatamiya, Righting a wrong: Japanese Americans and the passage of the Civil
Liberties Act of 1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
Hatamiya, Righting, pp. 5 3 - 5 .
152
Dolores Hayden
many of the Issei generation were passing away and many Nisei were
nearing retirement age. Increased sentiment has grown to preserve their
history ... The physical structures of Little Tokyo were the place from
which the reality of the experience sprang, a way for the "stories" to be
validated and grounded in reality.'23 As a result of public discussion
among several generations of Japanese Americans, two goals emerged as
part of a larger strategy of affirming ethnic identity and the importance
of public history: creating a Japanese American National Museum, and
preserving some remaining pre-war buildings in Little Tokyo in Los
Angeles.
The Japanese American National Museum
On 15 May 1992, the Japanese American National Museum opened its
doors in a former Buddhist temple in Little Tokyo. The building
includes a Legacy Center where visitors can engage in interactive
programs about ethnic history. They can learn how to request files from
the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act, or
obtain more information about WRA camps where they or their relatives
and friends spent time. Visitors can also learn how to develop a family
tree. Artists and writers of many different ethnic backgrounds read or
perform their work in the museum on a regular basis. The museum
seems to have benefited from the long years of organizing done in the
redress movement: it enjoys broad support from Japanese Americans,
and forms coalitions with other ethnic museums and arts groups readily.
In the autumn of 1994, curator Karen Ishizuka created a remarkable
exhibition for the museum, entitled 'America's Concentration
Camps'.24 Ishizuka's career began in gerontology, moved to visual
anthropology, and then on to curating and documentary filmmaking.
The opening of her exhibit was preceded by a strange construction that
appeared on the corner of First Street and Central Avenue, opposite the
museum and adjacent to the historic district (illustration 2). First a
fence, then a military watchtower, and finally a ragged tar-paper
barracks went up. This latter building, sheathed in rough black paper
and wooden battens, balanced on rough concrete blocks, had a weathered appearance that suggested it was neither warm nor dry. It was a
WRA camp dormitory.
23
24
Christopher Doi, T o m Fujita, Lewis Kawahara, Brian Niiya, and Karen U m e m o t o ,

'Little Tokyo redevelopment: T h e N o r t h Side of First Street', unpublished paper, 20
June 1986, p . 3 1 .
James Hirabayashi, '"Concentration c a m p " or "Relocation center": what's in a name?'
Japanese American National Museum Quarterly, 9 ( O c t . - D e c . 1994), pp. 5 - 1 0 .
Landscapes of loss
153
It was not a complete structure, but enclosed space on three sides, a

gigantic billboard to the city of Los Angeles announcing that the lost
world of the camp experience had been temporarily returned to the city.
By bringing the physical structure to the city, Ishizuka was declaring
that everyone would now have to deal with this place and its existence in
a public way. Ishizuka had developed a process of remembrance integral
to this act: the museum recruited formerly incarcerated persons and
their children who travelled to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, site of one of
the WRA camps, to disassemble a surviving barracks given to the
museum. They brought the building back to Los Angeles, reliving the
journeys of many years before, and reassembled it next to the museum.
Many former inmates agreed to serve as docents, bringing visitors to the
remnant of the building and leading tours about its history. Pilgrimages
to the actual incarceration sites continued to be sponsored by the
museum as well.
The main exhibit was in the museum itself, and here Ishizuka created
other activities involving spatial memories. In the exhibit, designed by
Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the ten WRA camps and the one family
camp run by the Justice Department were represented by eleven long
tables covered with detailed site plans. When formerly incarcerated
persons arrived at the opening, they were asked to name their barracks,
and given a small scale model of the building to place on the site plan.
During several hours, each camp became three dimensional, as survivors
placed the missing buildings on the plan, and row upon row of bleak
structures, miniatures of the building from Heart Mountain across the
street, formed the model of the whole camp. (Non-inmates watched the
process of forming the whole from the individual parts.)
Former inmates were also asked if they would like to be photographed
in front of a large photograph or a model of their camp. Most said yes.
Their images, and their handwritten testimony of their memories of the
places, began to fill 'Camp Albums', loose-leaf notebooks organized by
site. Here the scale of the tragedy becomes clear as thousands and
thousands of individual faces, names, camp addresses, current addresses, and phone numbers appear. Over and over again, survivors
wrote that they had materials they would like to donate to the museum.
Again, the books form the whole from the parts. (As Hanna Krall
observed about an exhibit of photographs of Polish Jews, 'You can't have
compassion for millions, for all those zeroes. The best thing we can do is
to give back individual faces to all these people.'25) Abstraction cannot
25
Jane Perlez, 'Poland turns out for glimpse of a lost world', New York Times, 19 May
1996, p. 8.
154
Dolores Hayden
convey the losses as well as faces, in this case, tens of thousands of

Japanese American faces.
Robert Y. Hasuike built a model of a barracks at Manzanar, the size of
a large doll's-house, about 6 feet long, now located in the lobby of the
museum, to show the typical improvements made to barracks over the
years by many residents - partitions, furniture, closets, installed to make
the environment more bearable. Something strong within, a new, awardwinning documentary film was made by Ishizuka (producer/writer) and
Robert A. Nakamura (director/editor), composed of footage from home
movies taken by both victims and sympathizers who filmed the forced
removal. (It was shown at the museum and internationally, one of three
films based on home-movie footage they have made.) Artist Nobuho
Nagasawa created a replica of the bronze camera constructed by photographer Toyo Miyatake, a Little Tokyo commercial photographer sent to
Manzanar, who carried a forbidden lens in his baggage. He took pictures
of the camp, and at night his photographs are shown as slides on the
exterior wall of the museum.
All of these visual and spatial representations of the camps, and the
written and oral discussions of the experience, created wide interest in
the city of Los Angeles and in the nation. People from many different
backgrounds attended the exhibit and filled comment books labelled
'THIS TOO IS OUR STORY' with their connection to the forced
removal of Japanese Americans. One wrote: 'Very interesting and
moving, never again, such racisms', and identified himself as the son of
a Holocaust survivor. Some were younger-generation Japanese Americans who had never fully understood what their parents and grandparents had endured:
Mom, Dad and Nanny - I never really understood camp life. You spoke of it so
much as I was growing up. I can fully understand your experience. However I
cannot even begin to imagine your feelings and hardships. Now that I am a
mother, I can't fathom my children enduring this. Nanny, this must have been
so painful. My biggest breakthrough in this museum was [what] someone wrote
of my uncle who drowned in Heart Mountain. He was only 13. It all hit me on
really how you must have went through [sic]. I am so proud of your strength ...
I visit here on my birthday. What a special gift to myself.
Another man simply noted, 'I cried.' 26 (I saw no negative comments on
the exhibit in the comment book.)
The Japanese American National Museum has become an important
agent for a widening set of processes of remembrance, first focused on
26
From the comment book, 'This too is our story', Japanese American National
Museum, undated, 'son of Dachau survivor', Lynn Shibata Goodman, Sacramento,
Calif.; 'Robert'.
Landscapes of loss
155
the particular experiences of the victims but now generalized to larger

questions of cultural landscape history and civil rights. It shows how the
memories of places can be used to stimulate a process of remembrance
which begins in a personal way but links private memory to public
history and politics. The written materials accompanying the exhibit
emphasize these connections: 'The lesson here is that the abrogation of
rights for any citizen is an abrogation of rights for all citizens.'27
In the museum's comment books are testimonies from Americans
who agree: native Americans whose ancestors lost their lands; Mexican
Americans whose grandparents were repatriated to Mexico during the
depression years, who lost the barrio of Chavez Ravine to urban renewal
in the 1950s, or who fear Proposition 187 denying any social services to
illegal immigrants; and African Americans who wrote about residential
segregation in South Central Los Angeles. Most of all, the public space
next to the chain-link fence and the guard tower, outside the transported
barracks across from the museum, invited informal, contemporary
conversations about civil rights and the conflicted ethnic territories of
the city. These went on, one or two at a time, night and day, whether the
museum was open or closed, until the barracks was removed in the
summer of 1996, augmenting the attendance at the exhibit of approximately 51,000 official visitors. As John J. Miyauchi notes, the museum
provides a place where 'old people can go to remember; where young
people can go to learn, lest they grow up in ignorance of their own past;
it will be a place to teach other people about the Japanese American
people.' Another resident put it even more simply, calling the museum
'the family album of the Japanese American community'.28
Context: the First Street Historic District
The presence of the museum in the First Street Historic District
activates a whole urban block. At the same time as the museum has
developed, the historic district has emerged as the result of work over
many years by hundreds of residents and dozens of organizations,
including a group of Japanese American Second World War veterans,
the Little Tokyo Citizens' Development Advisory Committee, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, the Los Angeles
Conservancy, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency
27
28
H i r a b a y a s h i , ' " C o n c e n t r a t i o n c a m p " ' , p . 8.

J o h n J. M i y a u c h i , 'We're h e r e ' , b r o c h u r e of the Japanese A m e r i c a n N a t i o n a l M u s e u m ,
quoted in Cultural and ethnic diversity in historic preservation, Information series No. 65
(Washington D.C.: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1992), p. 19; 'Things that
make us unique and yet so American', L.A. Architect (June 1992): p. 11.
156
Dolores Hayden
(CRA), and The Power of Place. This is an important urban area whose
historic significance is finally recognized. In 1976 and 1977, a county
survey had deemed the area ineligible for National Register status, and
in 1986 the California state historic preservation officer deemed it of
state rather than national importance. Times change - in 1993, the
National Park Service nominated it for National Landmark Status. The
rescue of the district is particularly significant since it began during a
time when much demolition had occurred and bitterness about the past
existed. Little of thriving, pre-war Little Tokyo remained to reflect the
demand for public history expressed in the 1980s. Urban renewal had
taken its toll, as well as incarceration.
The city demolished part of First Street for a new police station in
1950 and relocated a thousand people. Then the Community Redevelopment Agency began a redevelopment project in Little Tokyo in 1970
and introduced many high-rise projects which created dramatic conflicts
of scale as commercial investment from both Japan and the United
States overlaid the pre-war blocks of modest housing and small businesses. With the new buildings came higher rents that forced many
small shops to close and poorer tenants to move. Redevelopment in the
1970s and early 1980s made any type of preservation difficult to
negotiate.29 The showdown between the community and the CRA
finally occurred in the mid-1980s with the remaining buildings on the
North Side of First Street. The CRA proposed a major office development right behind them, and co-sponsored an architectural competition
with the Museum of Contemporary Art for the design, although many
members of the Japanese American community felt cut off from this
process. In October 1986, through the combined efforts of the Little
Tokyo Citizens' Development Advisory Committee and the Los Angeles
Conservancy, thirteen buildings on the north side of First Street,
between San Pedro Street and Central Avenue, were nominated as a
National Register Historic District.
The preserved block reflects the scale of the neighbourhood in the
1920s and 1930s. At the San Pedro end stands the Union Church, a
Japanese American church built in a neoclassical style in 1923, resulting
from the merger of three Christian Japanese congregations. For many
years it served as a social and community centre. It was also used as an
assembly centre for the forced removal to the camps. At the opposite
end, on Central Avenue, stands the former Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist
Temple, a brick building from 1925 planned with some commercial
29
Mike Davis, 'The infinite game: redeveloping downtown L.A.', in Diane Ghirardo
(ed.), Out of site: a social criticism of architecture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), pp. 77-113.
Landscapes of loss
157
space on First Street to generate revenue for the congregation. It, too,
was an assembly centre for the victims, and now houses the museum.
Between the two was the San Pedro Firm Building, constructed in
1924 by shareholders from the Southern California Flower Market.
Among its tenants was the courageous photographer, Toyo Miyatake,
who smuggled a camera lens into the Manzanar detention camp to
document conditions. Also in the block was the Kawasaki Building, the
only continuously Japanese American owned building in the district,
built on land purchased by Yajusiro Kawasaki in the name of his three
American-born daughters in 1933. In the same building was the Futaba
Nisei Beauty Shop. Fugetsu-do, a Japanese confectionery store, sold
traditional bean cake and rice-paste candy next door. Then came the
Asahi Shoe store, specializing in small sizes and Japanese footgear. In
the same building was Moon Fish. The Dai Maru Hotel was once
Tokyo Baths. A noodle shop and a Japanese restaurant rented the
commercial space attached to the Temple. A German American blacksmith's building and a Chinese restaurant completed the block.
In 1989, Susan Sztaray, a UCLA graduate student in Urban Planning, fluent in Japanese, worked with me and an organization I founded
called The Power of Place, which organized public history and public
art projects in Los Angeles.30 Sztaray's 'A proposal for public art: Little
Tokyo's Historic District' drew on the rich historical research provided
for the National Register nomination to suggest the possibilities of
public art contributing to spatial memory here.31 She recognized that
retaining the existing small-scale businesses in this historic block posed
a difficult economic problem, since the scale of real-estate development
usually promoted by the CRA was not supportive of old-fashioned
family businesses. Certainly it would be preferable to support the
survival of these traditional shops, as a living dimension of the cultural
landscape, than to rely on public art to recall recently lost businesses.
However, effective public art might call attention to both the history of
small businesses on the street and the distinctiveness of businesses that
were surviving, despite the years of clearance and large-scale redevelopment in surrounding blocks.
Sztaray proposed that public art be created in the form of a new
sidewalk to unify the block and represent the commercial and political
history it embodied. Using Japanese publications similar to Chamber of
30
31
Dolores Hayden, The power of place: urban landscapes as public history (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1995) contains an account of this larger work in the city.
Susan Sztaray, 'A proposal for public art: Little Tokyo's historic district', unpublished
paper, 12March 1989. She is also the author of Little Tokyo: a walking tour sponsored by
the Los Angeles Conservancy (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Conservancy, 1992).
158
Dolores Hayden
Commerce directories, she traced the histories of the small businesses in

the block and illustrated their specialized Japanese products such as
sweets or kimonos. Upon her graduation, Sztaray worked on the
proposal with planner Gloria Uchida at the CRA. By 1990 the CRA had
formed a Little Tokyo First Street public art initiative, based on
Sztaray's detailed programme. A competition was held. Artist Sheila de
Bretteville submitted the winning proposal, and was asked to work in
collaboration with two Japanese American artists, Sonya Ishii and
Nobuho Nagasawa. De Bretteville's design for a new terrazzo and
concrete sidewalk wrapping the block, combines residents' personal
statements about remembering Little Tokyo with the names of the small
businesses that had flourished there, and the imagery of traditional
Japanese wrapped bundles. The sidewalk, Omoide no Shotokyo (Memories of Little Tokyo), was constructed in July 1996. It carries memories
of Executive Order 9066 and of many layers of neighbourhood activity,
before and after 9066, in both English and Japanese.
Beyond silence, after remembrance: insiders
and outsiders
Breaking decades of silence to create resonant public history in Little
Tokyo has involved all kinds of organizations as well as individuals from
school teachers to US presidents, civil rights lawyers to artists, anthropologists to poets. Amy Uyematsu writes in 'The shaping of pine':
I was forced into desert camps
where you didn't hear me counting what was stolen
and afterwards when I returned in silence
you even praised me
I am talking now, inside our silence,
after forty years of waiting
a nisei mother's public statement
the poems which could not be thrown away
and the grandfather who could never
take me back to Manzanar
where he rebuilt his garden
loud with sand, rock, and pine
I am talking to us now.32
In Little Tokyo itself, the sensitive planning done by Susan Sztaray and
Gloria Uchida, and the public art by Sheila de Bretteville, Sonya Ishii,
Amy Uyematsu, 30 miles from J-Town (Story Line Press, Ashland, Oreg., 1992), p. 41.
Landscapes of loss
159
and Nobuho Nagasawa, reach out to a wide audience by making the

connections between urban physical history in the block of storefronts
and individuals' particular memories of that block. But there is a limit to
how much planners or artists who do not have access to large numbers
of camp survivors can do. Karen Ishizuka's access to thousands of
victims, and her insights about how to link the private world of place
memory with public processes of remembrance, make her work particularly unusual for its breadth and depth of spatial history.
Ishizuka is above all a process-oriented person, and she has said,
'Rather than authorities, we at the Museum are catalysts. We seek to
join you and ask you to join us in the ongoing process of coming to grips
with the incarceration, learning more about its many issues and
nuances, and applying its lessons now and in the future.'33 She has
choreographed performative exercises (such as pilgrimages to disassemble the camp building, or rituals of survivors rebuilding the site
models at the opening of the exhibit) that use place memory in a unique
way. She has also orchestrated the participants' use of models of
buildings, home movies, and personal spatial histories to explore the
larger issues of political oppression and make them tangible. She makes
these abstractions more bearable for the participants who have been
victims, because of her emphasis on their courage, dignity, and community building efforts. At the same time, she educates the rest of us,
who will find it hard to forget, once having seen such poignant spatial
representations.
Is it possible to transfer some of the techniques developed in Little
Tokyo to deal with the Japanese Americans' cultural landscape of war,
forced removal, incarceration, and redress to other contexts? The
curators, planners, and artists creating these projects have recognized
the delicate relationships between people and places, and dealt with the
complex character of place attachments. Are they distinctively gendered
projects? They do build on and extend women's traditional roles in
maintaining ties to kin and community. They emphasize social and
spatial connectedness. The process of remembrance here involves far
more active participation than costly commemorations that rely on a
single monumental building or sculpture. And these projects are much
33
Karen L. Ishizuka, 'From the Curator of "America's concentration camps: remembering the Japanese American experience'", Japanese American National Museum
Quarterly, 9 (Oct.-Dec. 1994), p. 2. Two reviews of the exhibit are David Yoo,
'Captivating memories: museology, concentration camps, and Japanese American
history', American Quarterly, 48 (December 1996), pp. 680-99; Lon Yuki Kurashige,
'America's concentration camps: remembering the Japanese American experience',
Journal of American History, 83 (June 1996), pp. 160-2. The exhibit will be at the Ellis
Island Immigration Museum from 30th March 1998 to 8 January 1999.
160
Dolores Hayden
more subtle than others that simply rebuild a building or a neighbourhood destroyed by war, brick by brick. (To recreate a physical place
without new representations of peoples' traumatic experiences of it may
simply constitute denial.) The projects in Little Tokyo reweave the past
and the present, the social and the spatial. They address the possibilities
of healing, as personal memories of loss are braided in new public
activities of remembrance, redress, and resistance.
Acknowledgements
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation has sponsored two conferences discussing 'War, victimhood, resistance, and remembrance.' I
would like to thank the foundation, and the conference leaders, Jay
Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, for suggesting that I write this paper, and
Gail Dubrow, Peter Marris, Sibyl Harwood, Karen Ishizuka, and Diane
Okawahira for their advice.
The Algerian War in French collective

memory
Antoine Prost
From November 1954 to March 1962 French troops fought in Algeria,

in order to keep Algeria a part of France. This was a conflict which, in
France, was not officially termed a war at all. The end result was the
independence of Algeria under the control of the FLN (National
Liberation Front), and the departure for France of 1 million French
people who thought life would be impossible in Algeria under the new
regime.
This war was arguably the longest war of decolonization, and
although French forces undoubtedly were better equipped and more
numerous than the Algerian fellaghas, it still cost 35,000 French soldiers
their lives. However, it has disappeared from collective memory. No
agency of remembrance did work to commemorate the memories of this
war. Jean-Pierre Rioux pointed out this fact effectively in a paper
published in 1990: 'Since 1962', he wrote, 'there is no French national
memory of the Algerian conflict; this un-named war never received the
honours of memory.'1 This chapter deals with the reasons why in France
there is no public memory of the Algerian War.
The Algerian War
Algeria was an integral part of France. During the Second World War,
de Gaulle's provisional government moved from London to Algiers,
where it was on French territory. It was divided into three departements
and had roughly the same administration as others in metropolitan
France. When needed, bureaucrats and teachers were appointed to
Algerian selection boards and schools as well as to metropolitan ones by
committees in the central administration. Many civil servants began
their career there and later went back to France.
1
Jean-Pierre Rioux, 'La flamme et les buchers', in Jean-Pierre Rioux (ed.), La guerre
d'Algerie et les Franfais (Paris: Fayard, 1990), p. 499. This important book arose out of a
colloquium organized by the Institut d'histoire du temps present, 15-18 December
1988.
161
162
Antoine Prost
During the early 1950s, approximately one out of a million people

living in Algeria were French full citizens; they were termed the Pieds
noirs. They were settlers, workers in the public services, teachers,
merchants, and so on. Some of them were wealthy and arrogant colons,
but many of them were lower-middle-class people, very ordinary people.
Their families had migrated to North Africa during the nineteenth
century or later. Some came for political reasons, after the Paris
Commune for instance, or for reasons of national sentiment, as in the
case of Alsatians arriving after German annexation in 1871. Some of
them had Spanish or Italian origins, but it did not matter much, because
they were all French-speaking people and they had exactly the same
rights as people living in France. They participated in the legislative
elections as French citizens and sent MPs to Paris.
Alongside the Pieds noirs, there were nine million people who were
termed 'Frenchmen of North African origin'. These natives spoke
Arabic or Berber rather than French, and only about one in five had
been to school. Most of them were Muslims. They understood French
and spoke a kind of French. Some of them were fully educated and
constituted a native elite: there were native lawyers, doctors, chemists,
teachers, civil servants. However, even this elite was not given equal
citizenship; for local affairs, the local council was composed of two
parts, one elected by the Pieds noirs, the other by the native-born. For
the national legislative elections, the voters were similarly divided in two
parts, electing the same number of MPs. But since the government
illegally manipulated the results of the native electoral college, this dual
regime gave full power to the Pieds noirs. Attempts to reform this
inegalitarian and undemocratic system had been tried, but they had
been unsuccessful. The Pieds noirs opposed them in order to preserve
their own control of public affairs and their social superiority. Here are
the main sources of the emergence of an Algerian nationalist movement.
It was heavily repressed and had no hope of achieving its political goals
except by violent confrontation with the French police and army.
The Algerian War began in November 1954, when small groups of
Algerian partisans made attacks on several areas of the Algerian countryside and killed eight people.2 For French public opinion, the appropriate
policy was to send police forces to Algeria and to maintain order.
However, the nationalist rebellion expanded, and it was necessary to
2
The best history of the war remains Bernard Droz and Evelyne Lever, Histoire de la
guerre d'Algerie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982). A much shorter account is given by the
well-known specialist, Charles-Robert Ageron, in his article 'Guerre d'Algerie', in JeanFrancois Sirinelli (ed.), Dictionnaire historique de la vie politique francaise au XX siecle
(Paris: PUF, 1995), pp. 462-70.
The Algerian War in French collective memory
163
send military units into Algeria in 1955. The legislative election of

January 1956 was won by a socialist-radical coalition after a campaign
for ending the Algerian War. The socialist Guy Mollet, the leader of the
party, had said that he would make peace in Algeria. But he went to
Algiers and was confronted by a Piednoir demonstration which impressed
him so much that he changed his policy and gave 'pacification' priority
over 'negotiation'. Hence, he decided to send conscripts to Algeria.
From 1956 until the end of the war, in 1962, there were permanently
500,000 young conscript soldiers from France in Algeria. These conscripts were not as strongly committed to the cause of French Algeria as
were the officers. Active officers were convinced that the Algerian
rebellion was a Communist one, inspired and supported by Nasser. They
applauded the Suez expedition in November 1956 and opposed any
French government which they supposed eager to negotiate with the
FLN. Hence the upheaval of 13 May 1958, which led to de Gaulle's
coming back to power and to the advent of the Fifth Republic.
However successful, the military conflict against the FLN did not
open the way to a political solution. De Gaulle progressively withdrew
from his policy of keeping Algeria French. He moved to the policy of
self-determination (September 1959), and later to negotiations with the
FLN which resulted in the Evian treaty (18 March 1962) and to the
recognition of an independent Algerian republic.
To French public opinion, the Algerian War was a much more
important matter than the Vietnamese War which had ended with the
Geneva agreement of 1954. First, Vietnam was quite far from France,
and French vital interests were not at stake there; very few people from
France were living there, and French people with family in Algeria were
much more numerous than those with kin in Vietnam. Algeria was just
the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, and it was viewed as a part of
France; it was impossible not to help the Pieds noirs, these not-so-distant
cousins, against the threat of the Algerian 'rebels' who were fighting for
a new Algeria, free from colonial - that is, French - control.
However, French public opinion was reluctant to support fully the
Pieds noirs' stance in Algeria; in a confused manner, French people felt
that the Pieds noirs were responsible for the Algerian situation and that
'French Algeria' was very difficult to maintain. Defending the status quo
would lead to a deadlock but no alternative policy was clearly conceivable; hence, from very early on, there emerged, amid the perplexities
and hesitations of public opinion, the thought that negotiations with the
FLN would necessarily occur.3
3
Charles-Robert Ageron, 'L'opinion frangaise a travers les sondages', in Rioux (ed.), La

guerre d'Algerie et les Franfais, pp. 25-44.
164
Antoine Prost
There was a second reason why French opinion, although indecisive,

was concerned with the Algerian conflict much more than with the
Vietnamese one. The Vietnam War had been fought by an expeditionary
force, including many troops from the French Empire, and Moroccan
and Algerian Muslim soldiers; only volunteers had gone from metropolitan France to the Vietnamese battlefields. General Giap's army was
actually an army, with guns and heavy weapons; against it, the French
army had fought a war similar to ordinary wars, with battles such as that
of Dien Bien Phu, with winners and losers. On the contrary, the
Algerian War was fought by conscripts from France against small groups
of rebels, and not against an army. The FLN fellaghas never became an
army, with heavy weapons and large battalions. The 'un-named' war
was termed an 'operation to maintain public order'. It consisted of a
succession of small-scale fights with dozens of rebels, not battles in the
full meaning of the word. Rather than a war, it was a series of guerrilla
clashes.
Actually, in Algeria the crucial issue was to keep a tight control of the
Muslim civil population, an objective which made it necessary to have
French troops in almost every village. For this quadrillage, a huge
number of soldiers was needed. The French government sent to Algeria
the whole of the conscript army, month after month, and for the entire
span of their military service, which was lengthened from eighteen to
twenty-four, and later to twenty-seven, months.
During the six years which the war lasted, there were permanently
nearly 500,000 soldiers from France in Algeria. In total, almost 3
million young Frenchmen crossed the Mediterranean Sea to campaign
in the Algerian djebels, far from their family and their loved ones. They
belonged to all sections of French society: they were white-collar
workers, workers, peasants, students; they had postponed their personal
projects, left their jobs, their young brides, or their fiancees, sometimes
newborn children. They suffered losses, injuries, separation from their
families, and so on. Inevitably millions of French people worried about
their fate.
This is the context in which to place France's very strong concern for
the Algerian War. Many highly emotional issues were intermingled:
considerations of national prestige, solidarity with the Pieds noirs, worry
for sons, husbands, and friends fighting in Algerian djebels. These
reasons made it difficult to envisage either an independent Algeria or a
never-ending war.
It seemed to French public opinion that only a few activists were
involved in the rebellion on the fellaghas' side, and it was inconceivable
that a powerful army would be unable to win a war against so weak an
165
enemy. But it was clear too that it was impossible to maintain the
privilege of the Pieds noirs. Time was needed for the idea to surface that
there was no alternative to entering into discussions with the FLN,
leading to an independent Algeria. Potentially, ex-soldiers and Pieds
noirs had the possibility to present themselves as victims of the Algerian
War. We will discuss later the reasons why they did not fulfil this
prospect.
Let us begin briefly with a third group of potential victims, of whom
we have not spoken: the harkis. The harkis were soldiers from the native
Muslim community of Algeria, enrolled as complementary forces to
supplement the French army. They did not form regular units enrolled
in the French army; they rather formed a kind of civil militia with light
weapons for night patrols around the villages. The harkis helped the
French army to flood the countryside, in the tactic they called quadAt the end of the war, the harkis were in a critical position. They were
volunteers, committed to the French and the perpetuation of colonial
domination. They were deemed traitors by the FLN, and it was clear
that many of them would be murdered after independence. Actually,
between 55,000 and 75,000 of them were killed.
Notwithstanding contrary orders, some officers thought it was impossible to abandon them when they left Algeria, and approximately 85,000
of them came to France.4 Unfortunately, it was difficult to integrate
them into French society. They had no family in France, no relations;
most of them were unskilled, and only some of them were educated,
French-speaking people. When in France, they were put in camps.
Progressively, their conditions of living and housing became better, their
children went to French primary schools, they found casual employment.
But the difference between them and Algerian immigrants was not
evident, and in France they encountered the same difficulties as immigrants in renting a flat or finding a job. They were perceived as a burden
to the army and to French society as a whole. They did not even form a
sub-sections of veterans' associations. They remained second-class
Frenchmen. They did not count in the public debate until recent years,
when mass unemployment precipitated nationalist, racist, or xenophobic movements. Then, the sons and daughters of the harkis, more
educated than their parents, no longer saw being unemployed and
socially excluded as acceptable, suffering at one and the same time for
their fathers' commitment to France and their own Algerian origin.
4
Benjamin Stora, La gangrene et I'oubli, la memoire de la guerre d'Algerie (Paris: La
Decouverte, 1992), pp. 200-3 and p. 261.
166
Antoine Prost
Some of them joined in violent demonstrations in several small towns of

southern France. They won some improvements, but they were insufficiently numerous to create more than local difficulties.
Much more puzzling is the case of the other two groups: neither the
Pieds noirs nor the ex-soldiers found ways to commemorate collectively
their experience and their losses. They never formed a community of
victims. Why?
The Pieds noirs: a restricted memory
The first reason was the division of these two groups. Had they united
their forces, they could have been more successful. But the fact is that
they were divided. The relationship between the ex-soldiers and the
Pieds noirs had been ambiguous during the war. A recent study in oral
history among ex-non-commissioned officers shows the resentment of
these young Frenchmen from France against the Pieds noirs. Although
they came to fight the Algerian rebellion and protect the Pieds noirs at
great personal risk, they were not given a very warm welcome by the
Pieds noirs. They felt that the Pieds noirs thought it was natural that
French soldiers would protect them, and that the locals did not value
highly enough the sacrifices they had made.
Small anecdotes still vivid in these ex-officers' memories illuminate
their sense of frustration and deception. One of them says they were
never invited to dance with the daughters of the Pieds noirs.5 Another
remembers that once a Pied noir settler asked him to pay for a glass of
water. A poll among 533 soldiers coming back to France in 1959
presented similar evidence. Such little incidents, and their significance
to French soldiers, are revealing. They help account for the fact that in
this 1959 poll 61 per cent of the respondents expressed more antipathy
against the Pieds noirs than against the 'Arabs'.6
On the other hand, the Pieds noirs resented the distinction made by
many non-commissioned officers and conscript soldiers from the other
side of the Mediterranean Sea between the interests of France as a
nation-state and the interests of the Pieds noirs. They found that at times
the French army did not share their point of view. This friction turned
into open opposition when renegade French army officers formed a
clandestine organization, the OAS (Secret Army Organization), dedi5
Benoit Kaplan, 'Une generation d'eleves des Grandes Ecoles en Algerie. Memoire d'une
guerre', memoire de maitrise d'histoire, Universite de Paris I, 1994, published as winner
of a prize: Federation de l'Education Nationale, Cahiers du Centre federal, no. 18
(November 1996), p. 110.
'De jeunes militants dans le contingent: l'enquete des organisations de jeunesse de
1959-1960', in Rioux (ed.), La guerre d'Algerie etles Franfais, p. 90.
167
cated to keeping Algeria French. The OAS directly confronted the

army, and so did the Pieds noirs. French soldiers opened fire on Pieds
noirs demonstrating against the French government; several demonstrators were killed. The fusillade on the rue d'Isly in Algiers on 26 March
1962 was the climax of this kind of internal war. In the light of such
events, one can understand why it was very difficult for ex-soldiers and
Pieds noirs to constitute any kind of community after the war, let alone
act as a 'fictive kinship group'.
The one million Pieds noirs living in Algeria were full French citizens.
After independence, most of them had the right to live in Algeria, with
joint Algerian and French nationalities. However, there was a clear and
overwhelming consensus within Algerian public opinion and among
officials that their only choice was between leaving or being killed. They
chose to go - for some to return - to France, abandoning in Algeria
everything they could not take with them.7 They lost their land and
property, their houses, their furniture, and sometimes their savings. As
they were numerous and had suffered heavy material losses, they had
grounds to claim reparations from the French state.
After a few months in France, the Pieds noirs formed specific associations of rapatries (people returning to their homeland) in order to
express their demands for compensation from the state. The main
association, with perhaps 200,000 members in the late 1980s, is the
ANFANOMA (National association of Frenchmen from North Africa,
from overseas and of their friends). This organization had been founded
in 1956 after Tunisia and Morocco had declared independence. After
1962, it was there for the Pieds noirs. Many other associations were
formed in later years: RECOURS (Rallying point and unitary coordination of rapatries); and FURR (Federation for the unity of rapatries,
refugees and their friends), among others.8
These associations operated as pressure groups urging Parliament and
the government to pass laws to compensate rapatries for all that they had
lost. But, as such indemnification would have been costly, the government was very reluctant to do so. The law of indemnification was passed
only in 1970, after the events of May 1968. Payments were spaced
over a long period after claimants submitted documentation often
7
8
930,000 Pieds noirs came to France from Algiers in 1962. See Stora, La gangrene et
I'oubli, p. 256.
See Joelle Hureau, 'Associations et souvenir chez les Francais rapatries d'Algerie', in
Rioux (ed.), La guerre d'Algerie et les Franfais, pp. 517-25. As these associations' names
are meaningful in French, let me explain their acronyms. ANFANOMA means
Association Nationale des Francais d'Afrique du Nord d'Outre-Mer et leurs Amis;
RECOURS means Rassemblement et Coordination Unitaire des Rapatries et des
Spolies; FURR means Federation pour l'Unite des Rapatries, Refugies et de leurs amis.
168
Antoine Prost
difficult to obtain. This unsatisfactory and deceptive law was modified

in 1974 and further improved in 1987, but many Pieds noirs still believe
that they have never been compensated for the losses they suffered.
The Pieds noirs movement was and still is weakened by political
rivalries. Many associations opposed the Gaullists in the presidential or
legislative elections, since de Gaulle remains in their opinion the man
who abandoned and betrayed them. RECOURS alone supported
Jacques Chirac. The resentment against the Gaullists, responsible for
the Algerian disaster, opened the way for more radical tendencies. The
nationalist Front National of J.-M. le Pen is very active in some
associations such as the JPN (Young Pieds noirs). By and large, as the
Pieds noirs were not united politically, the associations they founded are
politically diverse.
However, claiming benefits is only one of the functions of these
associations; they have cultural and emotional aims too. Besides the
major associations, there are smaller ones grounded on local affinities of
origin or of destination - Pieds noirs from the city of Jemmapes, or of
Beni-Saf, or living in the Val d'Oise departement for instance. Other
associations have cultural objectives, keeping alive songs, folklore, and
theatre. There is a Pieds noir culture, with its jokes, its tales, its particular
argot, its traditions. The memory of lost Algeria is still alive in these
small local groups, as it is alive in the very large families where cousins,
aunts, uncles, and their kin meet together regularly for baptisms,
weddings, funerals, or sometimes for birthdays or feasts.
This Pieds noirs memory is built on the divide between before and
after.9 What matters are the good memories of Algeria before the war.
These are memories of particular places: the landscape, the orange trees
and the vineyards, the light and warmth of the sun, the aromas of the
market places and of the wine cellars. Memories of a homeland where
life was simple, easy, and cheap. Memories of a kind of community with
the 'Arabs': the children playing football together, with their parents on
good terms in business or in the neighbourhood. It conjured up a kind
of sociability which made it impossible to understand why the story
ended in a tragic way. The memory of the loss of their Algeria is that of a
paradise lost, from which their exclusion remains an inexplicable misfortune. This nostalgic reverie is still strong and vivid among the Pieds
noirs.
However, it is not a set of memories expressed or directed to French

society as a whole. They never argued that France had a 'duty of
9
See the excellent analysis of some Pied noirs' interviews by Anne Roche, 'La perte et la
parole: temoignages oraux de pieds noirs', in Rioux (ed.), La guerre d'Algerie et les
Franfais, pp. 526-37.
169
remembrance' about lost Algeria; it is only 'their' memory, a memory

restricted to the initiate population.
What are the reasons for this restriction? A first reason is the physcial
location of the Pieds noirs: they did not form homogeneous communities.
Most of them migrated to southern France where the land, the climate,
and the kind of agriculture were similar to that of Algeria; others went to
the Paris region or elsewhere. But, even in the Garonne valley or in
Provence, they never built new villages or settlements. They were living
amongst a long-settled population, and had to cope with local customs
and get along with native-born people. More than this, they wanted to
become Frenchmen like anyone else, not to distinguish themselves from
the population at large. After 1962, they worked passionately to be
integrated into French society.
This was no simple task, for they had to find jobs and homes, to form
new friendships and bonds within their neighbourhood. Many of them
had no money, no support. They helped one another very frequently, but
their success depended upon their constant effort and the fortuitous
conditions of a booming economy. Working so hard to become integrated
into the French community prevented them from claiming that they were
victims of this very community. These aims were contradictory.
From this point of view, their cultural institutions or traditions, such
as theatrical companies, choirs, and so on, can be seen as a means of
integration, for other groups, from various provinces of France, of from
various countries, have similar activities. These ethnic associations are
more integrative than distinctive. Hence it is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that the Pieds noirs are a progressively vanishing community.
Their cultural difference remains, but it does not operate as a framework
for a kind of outward political or social movement. Their restricted
memory is for internal use only.
On that point, two qualifications must be made. One could ask
whether hostility to immigrants in contemporary France is fed by the
Pieds noirs' trauma. Possibly, some Pieds noirs think that since they had
been forced to quit their beloved country and their familial environment
thirty-five years ago, now they want to keep this country as their own.
One can understand their propensity to take an active part in the
nationalist movements such as the Front national of J.-M. le Pen,
himself a former activist in the cause of French Algeria.
A second qualification concerns Jewish Pieds noirs. Was not the new
strong Jewish identity of French Sephardi Jews, whose fathers were not
threatened by the Nazi genocide, a kind of substitute for an alternative
identity, that of victims of Algerian independence, a population in exile,
forced to leave their homes and go to metropolitan France? These
170
Antoine Prost
victims could choose their victimizers. Supporting this statement, one

could underline the double relationship between the Pieds noirs and the
Jews of Israel, and between the Algerians and the Palestinians.
The ex-soldiers: an impossible memory
The second group of potential victims of the Algerian War were the exsoldiers. Like the Pieds noirs, although for different reasons, they too
were unable to convert personal memories of that war into a collective
memory. First, they were deeply divided politically. Their veterans'
association, the FNACA (National Federation of Andens Combattants of
Algeria), was controlled by the French Communist Party. This made it
impossible for more conservative veterans to enrol in that association.
Hence the Rightist association of andens combattants of the First and
Second World Wars, the UNC (National union of combatants) organized a particular sub-section for Algerian veterans. These two associations opposed each other on every issue, especially on symbolic ones.
Therefore it was impossible, for instance, to find an agreement on the
date on which to commemorate the end of the war. It would make sense
for people of this forgotten generation who participated in the Algerian
War to have a day in the year devoted to rituals of remembrance,
parades, talks, banquets, and so on. However, for one ex-soldiers'
association, the Leftist FNACA, the appropriate day is 19 March, which
is not exactly the date of the treaty between France and the FLN (18
March), but the day when the struggle ceased; for the rightist association, this is unacceptable, for this treaty is considered as a kind of
betrayal. They tried to make 16 October the date for commemoration
because on that day, in 1977, one unknown soldier of the Algerian War
was buried in the cemetery of Notre-Dame de Lorette.10 This conflict
over dates made commemoration impossible. Commemoration enforces
unity but it first needs some unity.
The second reason is more profound. This war was meaningless for
the soldiers who fought it. The conscripts hated it. Armand Fremond, a
geographer who himself went to Algeria as a non-commissioned officer,
underlines this point. The untranslatable slogan: 'La quille, bordel!' was
the strongest, the most profound, and the most popular epithet of this
period. 'Said with anger, violence or derision, it sums up fairly well the
attitude of nearly all the conscripts. They did not accept the task they
had to fulfil, even when they did their duty. The death of every one of
them was seen as a double scandal: dead aged twenty; dead for
10
See Claude Liauzu, 'Le contingent entre silence et discours ancien combattant', in
Rioux (ed.), Laguerre d'Algerie etlesFran$ais, pp. 509-16.
171
nothing.'11 They never thought that French national interests were at

stake: the Algerian War was not the beginning of something; only the
end of colonial times. It was a closure, not an opening.
A final reason is probably the most important of all: it arises out of the
absence of a generally accepted sense of the legitimacy of the Algerian
War itself. This war was not legitimate from many points of view. The
French army committed many crimes, including torture and killings in
Algeria. One of the best-known cases was that of Maurice Audin, a
junior lecturer in mathematics at Algiers University, who was a Communist. He was arrested by French paratroops, led to the villa Susini, the
well-known headquarters of the investigation section of the army,
tortured by French officers whose names are known, and finally killed.
Torture was an ordinary practice, and one general, General Paris de la
Bollardiere, was dismissed for not accepting it. These facts were covered
by an amnesty; hence they have not been discussed in the courts. It is
possible to charge Mr Papon for the role he played as general secretary
of the Gironde prefecture in 1942-3 in the deportation of Jews, but not
for what he did when he was prefect in Constantine during the Algerian
War, or later in October 1961 when he was responsible as the Prefect of
Police in Paris for the killing of hundreds of Algerians demonstrating in
the street against an illegal curfew.
Papon's case is interesting because it leads to my central point: the
link between the non-remembrance of the Algerian War and the remembrance of the Second World War. On the one hand, the illegitimacy of
the Algerian War was due to the methods and practices of French army.
But on the other hand, the entire war was illegitimate in itself; its goals
were not acceptable. Opposing Algerian independence was not legitimate, as the United Nations said openly. The Algerian people had the
right to become an independent nation-state. The French government
claimed that Algeria was France, and a part of the French nation
supported that position. They said that this war was not a war, but only
an operation to maintain order, with the legal consequence of excluding
ex-soldiers of that non-war from war benefits. However, in their soul
and conscience, most French people knew perfectly well that the kind of
domination imposed on the Algerian people had to come to an end.
Confusedly, French society did not feel that this war was a fully
legitimate war. This lack of legitimacy was rooted in the obvious,
although impossible, comparison between the Algerian situation and
that of France occupied by the German army from 1940 to 1944.
Undoubtedly, there is a myriad of differences between those two
11
Armand Fremont, 'Le contingent: temoignage et reflexion', in Rioux (ed.), La guerre

d'Algerie, p. 84.
172
Antoine Prost
historical situations. But there are similarities too. French soldiers

fighting the fellaghas: were they entirely different from German soldiers
fighting the resistants} Were their methods so different? The debate over
torture posed the question anyway: was the villa Susini different from
the Gestapo's cellars? It was impossible to avoid the parallel; even if
confronted openly, such a debate would have been devastating.
However, French soldiers in Algeria still had the question in mind.
Some of the ex-officers interviewed by B. Kaplan say it openly: 'We were
doing quadrillage as the Germans did. Others [the fellaghas] were fighting
guerrillas as the maquis were. We knew that very well; we had seen the
maquis, we had seen the Germans. It was memories of our childhood.
And we were the Germans, with our heavy weapons. They, they were
the maquis, and we were the German occupation troops.'12 For these
soldiers, the Algerian War was and remained a dirty war; the indisputable legitimacy of the Resistance against the Nazis undermined the
legitimacy of the Algerian War.
Hence, as B. Stora has suggested, the soldier's memory of the war
remained a merely private memory. 'Soldiers without victory, without
good causes, and without enthusiasm cannot become positive figures.'13
Many books were published about the war - more than one thousand
reflecting every angle of opinion. However, most of them were only
narratives of individual experience, given and read as such. There was
no collective work of remembrance, and the memory of the Algerian
War was submerged by that of other events. This un-named war was
and still is an un-remembered war. And for the same reasons.
The Second World War: resistance and national unity
This is precisely what makes the memory of the Second World War a
necessary memory. The principle of legitimacy is fully alive here: it
works to support and deepen the memory of this war. However, such
principles tend to bend memories in some respects.
The victims were many. Prisoners of war, for instance, numbered
1,800,000 in 1940. No doubt they were victims of the war, but not
entirely legitimate ones. They had not fought enough. According to the
military system of values which was shared by the older cohorts among
12
13
Kaplan, 'Une generation d'eleves', pp. 176 ff. Many years later, Claude Bourdet who
had been one of the leaders of the resistance movement 'Combat' and an ex-deportee to
Buchenwald, stated the point: 'I saw what the Nazis did. Was it worth it to defeat the
Nazis by doing the same things as they did?' Cited in Stora, La gangrene et I'oubli,
p. 110.
'Des soldats sans victoire, sans cause juste ou sans enthousiasme ne peuvent devenir
desfigurespositives', Liauzu, 'Le contingent entre silence', p. 515.
173
the French population, mainly by First World War veterans, surrendering was shameful.14 The POWs were not welcomed by the existing
associations of anciens combattants de '14, which contested their status as
combatants. Was not surrendering the opposite of fighting? Hence the
POWs were obliged to create their own association in order to claim
benefits. They meaningfully entitled it the 'Federation of combatant
prisoners'.15 It is now the largest association of veterans (300,000
members) and it succeeded in making the prisoners legitimate victims of
the war. But when it achieved this goal, it was too late: the individual
prisoners had succeeded too in achieving their own goals - to recover
their civilian condition, their occupation, and their family life. The time
when the ex-prisoners were accepted by French society as legitimate
victims of the war was the time when they ceased suffering the consequences of the war. They did not constitute or perpetuate a sense of
the kinship of victims of war.
The most legitimate victims, at the very end of the war, were the
resistants, especially those who had been deported by the Nazis to the
concentration camps. The predominant legitimacy of having fought the
Nazis had many consequences. The major crime was collaboration with
the Nazis: this was the main focus for the work of memory. Petain and
the Vichy officials were tried for having offered aid and assistance to the
enemy. Otherwise, their judgment would have been a political, not a
national event. Hence the original features of the Epuration - the
cleansing of collaborators - in France.
Some people have argued recently that the Epuration in France was
relatively mild. They are wrong: on the contrary, France had a very
broad and tough Epuration. The civil courts opened more than 300,000
files for inquiry; 150,000 cases were judged; more than 25,000 civil
servants were punished; nearly 10,000 people were executed.16
However, it is true that the main point was whether the person
charged had had some kind of relation with the Germans or not. When
the general secretary of the anti-Jewish office, Xavier Vallat, was prosecuted before the High Court, he said in his defence that he was proud
that his own anti-Semitism was purely French and existed long before
the Nazi regime. In the circumstances of 1945, being an anti-Semite
14
15
16
Antoine Prost, In the wake of war: 'les Anciens Combattants' and French society
(Providence/Oxford: Berg publishers, 1992).
Christophe Lewin, Le retour des prisonniers de guerre francais (Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne, 1986), tells the story of the formation of the Federation nationale des
combattants prisonniers de guerre.
Henry Rousso, 'L'Epuration, une histoire inachevee', Vingtieme siecle, revue d'histoire,
no. 35 (January-March 1992), pp. 78-105; Francois Rouquet, L'Epuration dans
I'administration francaise (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1993).
174
Antoine Prost
through personal initiative was less culpable than being one in response
to Nazi orders.
This paradox is still alive. Paul Touvier was sentenced in 1994 for
having sent to death seven Jews in 1944. According to French law, it is
impossible to try someone fifty years after the deed, except in the case of
crimes against humanity. But the definition of such a crime implies
collaboration with the Nazi genocide. Hence the court justified its
pronouncement stating that Touvier had obeyed Nazi orders, although
it was perfectly evident in the proceedings that the Gestapo had nothing
to do with these seven murders, which were the sole responsibility of
Touvier himself. A just sentence is founded on an unjust argument.17
Conceived on these premises, the Epuration had the function of
uniting the French people: the evil was outside. That made it impossible
to face the fact that this war had been a civil war in some respects. The
work of remembrance was made of lies, pious lies, well-meaning lies,
but lies nonetheless. For instance, let us consider the case of Jean Zay.
He was a very young and brilliant, talented politician, and the Minister
of Education from 1936 to the war. He was murdered by the French
miliciens (French collaborationist police) on 20 June 1944, because he
was a freemason, a left-wing member of the hated Radical party, a
minister of the Popular Front and supposedly a Jew. On his gravestone,
one reads: 'killed by the enemies of France'. Before the door of the high
school which has been named after him, there is written: 'victim of Nazi
barbarity'. Both statements are wrong: the right one would have to be:
'victim of Frenchmen who thought themselves more French than he
was'. The work of remembrance has tried to hide the fact that
Frenchmen murdered other Frenchmen. Remembering was a way of
preserving this kind of secret. The victims were rightly identified; the
executioners were not.
Eight years later, it became somewhat difficult to preserve this
hypocrisy. In 1953, the Court of Bordeaux had to judge the German SS
soldiers who had burnt the little village of Oradour, near Limoges, in
June 1944, burning inside the church most of the inhabitants of this
village, including women and children. This martyred village was and is
a strong symbol. It was a good case for remembering: the victims were
French, and the executioners German. Unfortunately, it appeared that
among the SS soldiers prosecuted, fourteen out of twenty-one were not
Germans, but Alsatians, conscripted into the German army. Undoubtedly, they had contributed as much as the purely German soldiers to the
slaughter. Meanwhile, Alsace was now part of France again, and there
17
See Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, 'Touvier: le dernier proces de l'Epuration', in
Vichy, un passe qui ne passe pas (Paris: Fayard, 1994), pp. 109-72.
175
was an outcry in that part of France when it became clear that the
Alsatians were guilty and would be sentenced. The government suspended the proceedings and found a compromise: they were sentenced
first and immediately received full pardons.18
This attitude toward resistance and collaboration had two consequences for ensuring that the Algerian War would be un-remembered.
As noted above, the legitimacy of the resistance made the fellaghas' fight
somewhat justified, and undermined the legitimacy of the war on the
French side. Furthermore, the incapacity to face what had been a kind
of civil war inside the world war made it quite difficult to acknowledge
that part of evil which was in the behaviour of the French army, if not of
all French soldiers in Algeria. The distinction has to be made, for
torture is spontaneously spoken of by many veterans of the Algerian
War, although no one says he was actually involved in the torture
business. Everybody knows something which nobody did.
The emphasis put, after the world war, on fighting the Nazis as the
basic principle of remembrance had a second consequence: only those
who had actually fought the Nazis were real, legitimate victims. Those
who had not, were not worth remembering.
Such was the case of the few Jews (2,500 out of 75,000) coming back
from the concentration camps. As they had not been deported for
fighting the Germans, but 'only' for being Jews, they were not true
victims. This point is widely documented. For instance, former minister
Simone Veil (then aged 16) was evacuated from her camp to Birkenau at
the end of the war. A few days after entering Birkenau, she heard voices
speaking French in a shed. She entered and tried to take part in the
conversation. After she had said she was a racial deportee, something
was broken; she felt the political deportees despised her and she gave
up.19 Another example of that attitude is to be found in the main
agencies of remembrance, the associations of ex-deportees. They accepted as members only Resistance deportees, not racial ones. There
were painfully few racial deportees who had come back from the camps.
The survivors were obsessed with reintegrating into the French community, and as many of them were ill and depressed, they did not
succeed in making themselves a community of legitimate victims. They
were not seen as a distinctive group. More books about the deportation
of the Jews were published between 1945 and 1950 than during the
18
19
Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy de 1944 a nos jours (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987).
See also 'La Seconde Guerre mondiale dans la memoire des droites frangaises', in JeanFrangois Sirinelli, Histoire des droites en France, vol. II: Cultures (Paris: Gallimard,
1992), pp. 549-620.
See Annette Wieviorka, Deportation et genocide, entre la memoire et I'oubli (Paris: Plon,
1992), p. 249.
176
Antoine Prost
twenty-five following years, but they were not read. As Annette Wieviorka put it, Buchenwald hid Auschwitz.
Things changed one generation later, around 1968 to 1970. There
were many reasons for this change: the Middle Eastern wars and the
Eichmann trial; the coming to the fore of the generation of deportees'
children, such as Serge Klarsfeld; a new intellectual mood, inspired by
1968-1970 and the Foucauldian spirit of demystification. Undoubtedly,
some agencies of remembrance were at work, as Annette Wieviorka's
essay in this volume attests. The results are clear: the issue of genocide
has become the crucial one for the memory of the Second World War.
The specifically French question of collaboration with the enemy has
been replaced by that of co-operation in genocide.
Thus there has emerged progressively, forty years after the war, a
community of victims of genocide. This community was constructed
less by the victims themselves, survivors of the camps, but by their
families and sometimes by people whose family had not been threatened
by the Nazi genocide.
And here we have to cope again with the Pieds noirs: the Sephardi Jews
from Algeria contrast their condition to that of the victims of genocide.
The Ashkenazi Jews deported from France to the death camps have a
legitimacy as war victims which the Algerian Jews never had as victims
of the Algerian War. Here is another link between the very weak
collective remembrance of the Algerian War and the much stronger
remembrance in France of the Second World War. One could not win
on every table: the memories of the resistance occluded, indeed precluded, remembrance of the Algerian War. The memories of the good,
noble war, hid the memories of the dirty one, which remains un-named.
Here we see how the social framing of individual memories is a
decisive element. Individuals can form groups with the aim of transforming their collective memories into social action only when these
memories are compatible with social norms and values accepted by the
larger community. On the contrary, it is as implausible for ex-soldiers as
it is for the Pieds noirs to claim their rights as victims of war. The war
itself lacked the legitimacy necessary for this claim.
Victims are victims only when being in no sense guilty of complicity in
their suffering. Suffering and losses are necessary but not sufficient
conditions for victimhood. Innocence is needed too.
Private pain and public remembrance

in Israel
Emmanuel Sivan
Even my loves are measured by wars:

I am saying this happened after the Second
World War. I'll never say
before the peace '45-'48 or during
the peace '56-'61O7.
Yehuda Amichai1
A budding Israeli novelist, Amos Oz, in the introduction to a 1968

booklet commemorating his cousin, fallen in the Six Day War, describes
a meeting of friends and relatives during the ritual week of mourning:
Words. Commonplace words and unforgettable words. Tearful words. And also
unspoken words . . . and between the words - silences. It is impossible,
ineffable. We cannot explain. There were things, moments, deeds; yet we're
unable to name them. There once was a boy in Jerusalem, we loved him, we still
love him, we cannot let go of him. How little we can say about him. We
remember moments, laughs, conversations. Beloved smithereens of never-toreturn days.
They talk in confusion. Cutting into each other's words, repeating themselves.
Dazed by the dazzling sword of death . . . Here, now, what can we say. Now
there will be a commemorative booklet.2
Oz takes us into an intimate, typically Israeli scene, a sort of vigil; a

wake in which comrades-in-arms, friends, and family gather and recollect, tell stories, sing songs of praise and lamentation, one after another.
Together they conspire somehow to keep the beloved man around a
little longer, fixing him vividly in language, before memory fades. Oz
depicts an act of remembrance, part of a process of coping with death,
interlaced with a rehearsal of memory traces. Unlike wakes in other
1
2
Y. Amichai, The great tranquility, trans.G. Abramson (New York : Harper & Row, 1983),
p. 31.
Yizkor- Yigal Wilk (Jerusalem: privately printed, 1968), pp. 4-5.
177
178
Emmanuel Sivan
cultures, the Israeli one is likely to end up in a written and edited

product. The memory artefact produced thereby - the commemoration
{Yizkor) book (or booklet) is presented as a virtually inevitable product;
as though the mourners were programmed by their society to express
their grief thus while also creating an artefact, several specimens of
which are to be found in virtually any Jewish-Israeli home (ultraOrthodox ones excepted).
The therapeutic potential of the activity primes it all - as evidenced
with particular poignancy in letters to the dead soldier (by mother, wife,
etc.), or excerpts from diaries of family and friends, included in the
booklets, which ponder the question of coping with grief. Yet almost as
important is the remembrance aspect of this activity. It is best encapsulated in a terse poem contributed by a farmer to a book in memory of his
son (and five of his comrades) killed in the Lebanon war (June 1982):
You also were felled.
It's spring, Memorial Day approaches,
almost two years to your death,
the passing time doesn't blunt the pain
your twenty years erased
as though they had never existed.
Only your name
drawn in the cement path, in our yard,
testifies you had been on the earth.3
One notes indeed a nagging fear running through all the generations
participating in the production of this folk historiography - namely, the
fear that memory, personal, familial, and particularly social, is fallible,
that the fallen may very easily be forgotten, unless some rearguard battle
against forgetfulness is fought. 'Why write about him? For whom? For
what?' notes another bereaved father, one of the heads of the Israeli
intelligence service, in his diary, soon after the 1948 war.
I do not want this figure to sink like a stone in the Sea of Galilee, leaving a few
ripples and that's all. He was my son and thus, thanks to kinship, I may have
understood this unique human being better than others. I've learnt from
experience that one cannot sketch out an authentic description of a great figure
without an intimate affinity. This affinity suggests, nay even commands me, to
try to do just that for my son.4
Both fathers echo the conviction that to forget is all too human.
Indeed did not William James suggest that forgetting may well be
essential to the health and vitality of the mind? The upshot is that the
perpetuation of memory requires 'memory work', or remembrance. And
3
4
R. Rosental, Sayeret Beaufort (Tel Aviv: privately printed, 1983), p. 41.

S.Avigur, 'Im Gur (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1981), p. 181.
Private pain and public remembrance in Israel
179
in this particular case, memory work is intertwined with grief work. Fear
of oblivion propels these two fathers, among a multitude of other
relatives and friends, towards an effort against the tide of oblivion; that
effort is bereaved commemoration.
The singularity of the Israeli case, due perhaps to the fact of its being
a small, democratic society, is that the bulk of the effort is carried out
through spontaneous activity of civil society rather than by the state.
Parents, relatives, friends, army comrades - separately or together,
usually in ad hoc groupings - but also sports clubs, youth movements,
kibbutzim, schools, and the like, produce the booklets which have been
dedicated to about one in two of all fallen soldiers.
This form of commemoration through civil society is even more
popular than monuments. The booklets still occupy pride of place in the
library of most Israeli homes. It is thanks to these books that the children
born after a war (or too young when it takes place) are exposed to the
war experience and its human costs. Moreover, this folk literature
constitutes a unique attempt to catch and preserve the individuality of
the fallen, going beyond the mere mention of their names (and the
circumstances of their deaths). Each soldier - or group of soldiers
(members of the same kibbutz, graduates of the same high school,
members of the same platoon, etc.) - has many pages consecrated to
him; his biography is composed by family, friends, teachers, or comrades-in-arms, often illustrated with photos; parts of diaries or letters
are published; other creative mementoes, such as drawings, add their
own singular touch.
Booklets are not costly (in money terms, albeit not in terms of time and
effort). Yet even monuments, a much more onerous artefact to produce,
are due, in virtually half of the cases, to the initiative of cells of civil
society with no, or little, help by public subsidy. The same goes for other
artefacts generated by remembrance: concerts or sporting matches held
on the anniversary day of death, library inaugurations, scholarships
granted, or Torah scrolls consecrated. All these practices can be traced
back to a voluntary grouping, whether permanent or evanescent. Like the
booklets, they attempt to commemorate the fallen in their individuality
(vocations, hobbies, beliefs) - thereby constituting yet another effort
against the current, in the age of mass, industrialized warfare.
Hence, perhaps, the deep sense of loss that the booklets (and even
monuments) evince. There is little triumphalism in their mood, even in
the wake of the 1967 war. As such, their long-term, unintended
contribution has been to put in relief the human price of war and thus
mitigate the tendency towards its glorification which five decades of
warfare might have produced in Israel.
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Another unintended, perhaps ironical, consequence of that plethora

of initiatives was that whole generations of the fallen (1948, 1967, 1973,
and 1982) were implanted in collective memory. The myth of the Israeli
Fallen Soldier was rooted there; less due to official commemoration
than to efforts of civil society of its own will and on its own terms. The
irony of this consequence arises from the fact that it is intertwined with
non-consequent intentions, those of grieving relatives and friends. The
individual soldiers who died - the objects of all this intense activity - are
or ultimately would be forgotten beyond their immediate circle, with the
exception of a few dozen emblematic war heroes or particularly gifted
individuals (poets, musicians, scientists). What remains is the memory
trace - the price paid by ordinary people for the state's existence. The
myth of the fallen soldier became from 1948 onwards an integral part of
the Zionist-Israeli foundation myth. This narrative merged with the two
former ones: the historical right of the Jewish people to the land and the
pre-1947 pioneering effort.
The act of memory retention as well as the density of the recall may
have been facilitated by the emotional nature of the event(s) and their
unique characteristics; all the more so as they are linked to and etched
on autobiographic memory.
This etching is why the moment of death or discovery of the body (for
comrades-in-arms) or the moment of being notified (for parents and
others) is so traumatic and, hence, saliently recurs in their accounts.
The blow delivered by notification was not much cushioned by the fact
that it was usually done in person by army representatives accompanied
by a doctor. That traumatic moment was certainly emotional, but it was
also a unique event; for parents to bury grown-up sons is a rare
phenomenon in the modern age with the lengthening life span. It is rare
and particularly wrenching due to a long period of attachment suddenly
smashed, parenthood status suddenly ended, and the rising fear of
impending ageing alone, with no children or grandchildren as solace
and assurance of continuity. This applies to parents (and relatives);
among comrades and friends who usually encounter for the first time
the death of a young man of their age-group, and a well-liked one on top
of that, one detects - through the private Yizkor books - the syndromes
familiar to us from the two world wars' experience: guilt feelings at the
fact of one's survival, anger and hatred towards the enemy, and thirst for
vengeance. In the case of comrades-in-arms, who may have been
suffering from cumulative fatigue, stupor, and dullness of feeling due to
combat conditions, the sudden and violent disappearance of someone
close shattered the dullness and created a gaping wound.
Again, personal experience (whether direct or mediated) is etched on
181
autobiographic memory and rehearsed. At times this happens internally;

at others, in public - in preparatory meetings during the planning of the
Yizkor book (or other artefacts). It also occurs later in the yearly
meeting of relatives and friends talking about the dead soldier (or group
of soldiers).
Such meetings are an Israeli civic, secular ritual. They also gave birth
to a widely popular Yizkor book, Comrades talking about Jimmy (Tel
Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1955), which spawned many imitations.
The conversation, whether transcribed or tape-recorded, has the quality
of overlapping voices, a quality caught so well by Oz. Yet the conversation also creates a dramatic story, or a sort of song created and shared by
the chorus of memory. As Jerome Bruner has suggested,5 this story with
many loose ends enables the mourners - and beyond them the 'community of memory' to encompass contradictory feelings and story lines
with no need for the resolution that an expository representation would
have required.
In order to understand the mechanisms involved in these forms of
civil society commemoration and its social impact, we shall concentrate
upon Israel's two major wars: the Independence War (1948), which was
by far the bloodiest (5,900 war dead or one-third of Israel's total
fatalities during a half-century of conflict); and the Yom Kippur War
(1973), the second most costly (2,660 dead) and by far the most
intensive (three weeks versus fifteen months of the War of Independence).
II
It was 1948 which created the 'booklets of commemoration' and some
lesser forms of remembrance. Commemoration during the Yishuv
period (1882-1947), when there was low intensity conflict with the
Arabs, was largely official and institutional. Large-scale commemorative
activity by civil society appeared during the 1948 war, and continued
virtually unabated for the following five to seven years. It then levelled
off, but never died. Some books about soldiers killed in 1948 have been
published even in the 1990s. Revised versions of commemorative booklets have also appeared, prepared by siblings after their parents' deaths,
which contain shocking stories on the circumstances of death, which
they had censored in the 1950s so as not to exacerbate the parents' grief.
The shock of 1948 was due not only to the scale of casualties (1 per
cent of the Jewish population of Palestine), but also to its distribution: in
5
J. Bruner, Acts of meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
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Emmanuel Sivan
the most heavily hit age-group (19 to 21 years old) more than 8 per cent
of the males were killed. Furthermore, the overall figure showed a
quantum leap in the number of losses suffered by the Yishuv during the
seventy years preceding the war. Even if one adds to those killed in
violent conflicts with the Arabs (about 800 until 1947), the Yishuv
volunteers killed in the ranks of the British army during the Second
World War, the total is only a quarter of those lost in the War of
Independence. The 1948 war still casts a heavy shadow over the life of
the nation, especially in the realm of collective memory and social
imagination.
The emergence of the 'booklets of commemoration' highlights the
Israeli cult of the fallen and the centrality of the 1948 experience.
Patterns of this cult were shaped in the years just after the War of
Independence and spread throughout society, helped by the impact of
some Yizkor books which became best-sellers. While the genre underwent various changes, most characteristics of this 'literature of commemoration' - as it is termed in Hebrew - have remained constant. It is
still the most authentic expression of the way civil society deals with the
human losses resulting from the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This literature records reactions to the death of a soldier as shock,
leading to expressions of loss and grief, among his relatives and friends.
The first phase is individual and intimate. How do these feelings
coalesce into commemoration as a social act, celebrated in public? (We
are not referring here to those patterns of commemoration which
remain in the private domain, such as hanging a picture of the dead son
on the wall of the parental home or keeping his room as it was; our
subject is public recollection.)
The conventional psychological study of mourning6 locates this
linkage of the private and the public, of intimate feeling and public
behaviour, in the conventional 'third stage' of the grieving process,
following disorientation and self-imposed isolation. The bereaved tries
to recuperate, learning to distance themselves slowly from the dead, and
to reactivate (or relearn) social norms of behaviour. Commemoration
may serve the bereaved in two senses: first, as a social activity which
requires cooperation with others, including those who share, in differing
degrees, their sense of grief, providing them with social backing predicated upon affective sympathy. Secondly, commemoration may represent the objectification of the dead - in a monument or a booklet - and
may help the mourners to distance themselves from them and to form
G. Gorer, Death, grief and mourning (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965).
183
new relationships, while neither repressing their love for the dead nor
denying the very fact of their demise.
If commemoration is part and parcel of an effort to rehabilitate the
bereaved, it is a rehabilitation of a special kind, in that it intends to
contribute to society at large while at the same time endowing the death
in question with meaning. It does not seek to divert one's mind from the
dear departed or to provide substitutes for them (in activities, new
relationships, etc.). It rather endeavours, by objectifying their individuality, to transfer their memory to a wider social circle. What they have
represented for their intimates is sought to be transmitted to others,
from an in-group into out-group(s). A personal-familial memory may be
integrated thereby into a collective memory.
It is no coincidence that most 'booklets of commemoration' appear
on the first anniversary of the soldier's death. The Jewish traditional
calendar of bereavement - followed even by most secularized Israelis dovetails with the conventional insights of psychology. There is the
practice of mourning in the week after death, the rest of the first month,
then the following eleven months, corresponding roughly to the three
stages of the grieving period during which there is a lessening of the
rigour of ritual obligations and a growing integration of the bereaved
into the normal life of the community. The first anniversary is the ideal
point for the completion of a rite of passage - or rather near-completion
- for future anniversaries may enable the bereaved to deal with the
lingering sense of loss. (Half of the booklets on the 1948 war appeared
on the second to fifth anniversaries; the majority of private monuments
were erected during these years.)
In order to objectify the private memories of the bereaved, and thus
contribute to collective memory, a vast amount of social activity is
called for: preparatory conversations, the establishment of an informal
committee, fund-raising (rather limited in scale in the case of most
booklets), the collection of documents, the soliciting of articles, and
the writing down of oral testimonials (sometimes at a special gathering). If one counts copy-editing, typing, production, and distribution
(usually to a privately drawn-up list of addresses), each booklet
involves the help of at least a dozen people, all associated in some way
with the fallen soldier, shocked by his sudden violent and untimely
death, and trying, according to their varying degrees of intimacy with
the departed, to cope with their sense of loss, while attempting through this very social activity of writing and publishing - to enlarge
the social circle for which his death may have meaning. The dynamics
of the support group and of group therapy are quite evident in these
booklets, especially the reliance of parents on the help of comrades-in-
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arms (or friends) of their sons, and the collaboration between parents
whose sons fell in the same battle.
Interviews conducted many years later with editors of commemorative books, as well as remarks interspersed in the booklets themselves,
indicate that the idea of commemoration was usually broached during
the first month after death (sometimes during the first week), that is,
prior to the ritual visitation of the tomb, which in the Jewish bereavement process marks the end of the first year. The decision to edit and to
publish is taken either at that stage or during the months immediately
after. The book form was and is, more often than not, the only or, if
there were later moves to have a multiple commemoration, the first
option discussed. The idea is usually first discussed at the moment when
the definitiveness of the soldier's death pervades the mind: the traumatic
moment of viewing his body or - more typically - when the parent or
friends stop writing in their diary, 'I still cannot believe he is dead.'
The guilt feeling among comrades-in-arms born out of their survival,
due to sheer chance, is present in a different guise in the parents'
generation. (Very few grandparents were involved in 1948, for they were
not numerous in Yishuv families, founded for the most part by people
who had immigrated young and without their own parents.) As one
might perhaps expect in the highly ideologized society of the 1950s,
parents - but also former teachers, who are frequent contributors to
booklets - evince a deep sense of responsibility for the soldier's death, an
event viewed in a way as the end-result of having brought their children
up to serve the nation. In a broader context, death is seen as the upshot
of their very immigration to Palestine. When parents recount their own
life-story in a booklet, they begin, as a rule, with their immigration; life
in the Diaspora is, typically, disregarded. In what was then a strongly
conformist society, and in the context of a war deemed a 'good war',
fought in self-defence and for the undisputed ideal of national independence, none of these issues gives rise to doubts as to the sense of this
death, but they do provoke a feeling of deep personal responsibility that
needs to be resolved, and endowed with meaning, in order to mitigate
grief. An appeal to history and reference to an historical context could
be a means to that end, hence the urgency of contributing to historywriting through the activity of commemoration.
At times editors and writers (especially of the parents' generation),
however conformist, attest to their own anxieties that the Zionist dream
may be turning sour - given certain Israeli realities of the 1950s (the
decline of the pioneering ethos, party squabbles, corruption). They see
the activity of commemoration, therefore, as a response to the social ills
which have developed: social amnesia about the values on which the
185
state was established, values for the sake of which they believe their sons
had fallen. This complex of feelings is summed up by a telling metaphor
- the 'sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham'. It was first used in a Zionist
context in 1930 by the poet Yitzhak Lamdan to describe the pioneering
effort, and it was adopted by bereaved parents during the 1948 war.
Through them it passed into current usage through the Yizkor books. In
the Biblical story, both father and son agree to obey the order; and even
in the post-Biblical Midrash commentary, only the father has some
doubts (which he overcomes). Indeed, the 1948 war was not a controversial war, as the Yom Kippur and Lebanon Wars would be. But
gnawing doubts and anxieties remained; and certainly grief never
disappeared, as all booklets testify. Healing is never assured.
Commemoration, it was hoped, might help to resolve this predicament within the context of the support group (family, friends, youth
group, kibbutz, neighbours) which organized the commemoration and
in a way stood for society at large. Resolve somewhat, but never
completely, particularly as far as parents were concerned. There was
justification but no sign of real (or enduring) solace. Here is the
testimony of a mother:
It is difficult to acquiesce with this loss. Why is it that this being, so full of life
and animation, lies still, his glowing eyes dimmed, his fresh body turning into
earth. Why is it that there will be no more joy at my home, no worry for his
future any more. I'll never hear his pals whistling for him. But why do I say this,
I who have educated him to be a dedicated patriot, and even fight if necessary?
Why do I say this, I who at your open grave declared that I am proud you fell for
our homeland? Why?7
This does not explain why Israelis chose the publishing of booklets as
a preferred method of commemoration. Booklets were obviously much
less costly than monuments - their closest competitor. Many were
published with the aid of a stencilling machine and required a short
preparation time. There was no need to call upon a sculptor or ask for
permission from the land-surveyors or zoning authorities. Monuments,
on the contrary, had to be left usually to the initiative of the state, large
army units, towns, or municipalities. What is more, as against the mere
mention of a name engraved upon a slate, the booklet could present
some of the individual traits of the departed - meeting a need felt
perhaps with particular intensity in a small, intimate society like that of
Yishuv (630,000 in May 1948). Other available alternatives did express
this individuality, usually in a cultural project such as a library, community centre, or scholarship. Yet these were often more costly than a
booklet. A fourth alternative, the planting of a grove of trees or a special
7
Micah Fisher, Alim Le-zichro (Tel Aviv: privately printed, 1952), p. 52.
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Emmanuel Sivan
garden, had the advantage of fitting in with the future-oriented pioneering ethos (leaving one's mark upon the landscape, etc.). Yet, here
again, all that could be left was a mere name, with no individual message
for posterity, no hallmark of who was the name's carrier, or what his life
had been like.
Traditional religious forms of commemoration - for instance, the
introduction to a synagogue of a Torah scroll named in honour of the
dead - did not appeal to what was then an overwhelmingly secularized
society, and account for barely half a dozen cases in the 1950s. They will
emerge in the late 1960s, with the growing number in Israeli army ranks
of 1950s immigrants (and their children) coming from Islamic countries, and imbued with a more traditionalist outlook; a development
amplified by the growing, post-Six-Day-War respectability of religion
even among Ashkenazi Jews.
In the wake of the 1973 war, civil society commemorated 52 per cent
of the war dead (as against 32 per cent of those who were killed in
1948). The booklet mode still has pride of place, but it is followed by
synagogue-oriented commemoration (dedication of a Torah book,
chanting of psalms on the anniversary day of the death in battle,
donation of chandelier or air-conditioning to synagogues), which accounts for one-quarter of the cases. The secularist nature of commemoration in the 1950s and 1960s is evident in the fact that even
monuments and memorial plaques in cemeteries are rarely to be found
(except in religious kibbutzim). In the eyes of Yishuv society, monuments sanctify the soil on which they are built, and not the other way
round. No wonder that in the commemoration booklets themselves
God's name is rarely mentioned; the name of God appears in a
significant number of booklets only after the 1967 war, and even then
only in a minority of them.
Respect for learning, long cherished among Jews, no less than considerations of cost and individuality, most probably contributed to that
predilection for books as artefacts of memory. Most of the 'special
commemoration projects', such as libraries, were and are related to
books and book-learning.
Yet the phenomenon goes deeper than what is covered by the bland
formula of 'people of the book'. It has roots in the Jewish tradition of
commemoration, a tradition recently transformed and reinvented in the
wake of the 1948 bloodletting.
These roots are to be found in the Yizkor (remembrance) books
which appeared in thirteenth-century Germany and later spread to
Central and Eastern Europe. These were chronicles of specific communities, updated from time to time by their notables, which depicted the
187
history of the community: its major rabbis and prominent individuals,

the persecutions it had suffered (especially since the First Crusade, that
watershed of Jewish life in Christian Europe) and, most particularly, its
list of martyrs, a list recited in synagogue four times a year within the
framework of the special Yizkor prayer instituted in the early twelfth
century. This prayer and the martyrs' names were the major motivation
for the persistence of the literary genre and its conscientious updating.
Historiography here was a sort of ancillary practice to ritual - that is, a
way of conserving the collective memory by means of the perennial
'chain of martyrology' which was perceived as the Jewish people's lot in
Exile, the martyrs sacrificing themselves in obedience to the just
demands of the Lord. Collective memory was thus conveyed in a
religious interpretive mode, especially through sacred liturgical texts.
Each new wave of persecutions was taken to be a re-enactment of
former ones.
The growing secularization of the Jewish people in the nineteenth
century filtered down in the early twentieth century from elite historiography to the level of collective memory, and reshaped the martyrology.
It is not fortuitous that this happened primarily in the two most lively
centres of Jewish collective activity - Eastern Europe and Palestine.
In Eastern Europe the recasting of the tradition took place in the folk
historical literature written in the 1920s under the impact of the
pogroms which had taken place during the Russian civil war and the
Russian-Polish war. The typical artefact is the community notebook
(pinqas) which contains a description of the pogroms in a specific locality
(Vilno, Pinsk, etc.), a list of the dead, the fluctuations of community life
during the First World War, as well as a sketch of its life prior to 1914.
These very sketches, sometimes quite long, reflected the change in
outlook as compared to traditional Yizkor literature: in describing the
community they did not limit themselves to rabbis and notables, but
depicted all avenues of social and economic activity and dwelt upon
emigration to the New World. Demographic transformations as well as
pogroms are explained by this-worldly factors and not by a medievaltype theodicy.8 This new, or rather reinvented, framework for collective
memory, created a new form of Yizkor book, in which European Jews,
during the Second World War and much more intensively after it, would
register their collective response to the Holocaust (see chapter 6 of this
book). Its artefacts constituted that spontaneous literature of Yizkor
books and pinkasim commemorating those communities which had
been obliterated, and published by Landsmannschaften of the survivors
8
See articles by N. Wachtel and L. Valensi in Hisury and Anthropology, vol.2 (1986).
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Emmanuel Sivan
in Europe, but above all in North and South America as well as in Israel.
Here the aim of the survivors, or of relatives amongst earlier immigrants,
is to cope with their grief and make it into a tool for crystallizing a
historical consciousness. There is very little theodicy, because of the
secularized character of most Landsmannschaften. The stress is upon the
detailed description of the pre-war community and the horrors of its
extermination, so that both will leave their indelible mark on the
collective memory. The identity offered to the survivors does not refer to
the deity but to the dead - a historical relationship predicated upon the
continuity of an ethnic, secular affiliation. The centrepiece is the local
community, and the individual is measured by his contribution to the
latter. There is little trace of the ritualistic-liturgical context.
An analogous secularization of the Yizkor literature took place in the
pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine, starting with the Yizkor book
to the memory of Second Aliyah members killed by Arabs (published in
Jaffa in 1911), which produced numerous offshoots over subsequent
years. As in Eastern Europe, the thematic framework is that of a profane
grief. Bereavement is integrated into a consciousness of historical
continuity, but lacks a transcendental presence. The entity overarching
the individuals is that of the nation, not the local shtetl. The individual
'martyrs', who are accorded in Palestine, from the very beginning, much
more detailed attention than in the East European books (perhaps
because of the smaller numbers involved), are measured by their
contribution to the pioneering project of the nation.
Still, it is significant that these booklets were self-consciously given the
title of Yizkor books and that they made ample usage of the traditional
martyrological discourse, reinterpreted according to the needs of the new
ethos. Even modern societies, when facing war and the existential
challenge of mass violent death, do need some anchoring in tradition (see
chapter 2). That this happened even in a revolutionary, future-oriented
society such as the Yishuv only underscores this argument; all the more
so as the 'commemoration literature' is suffused not only with secularism
but also with agnosticism and atheism. God is absent from the great
majority of these books. Emblematic of this profane state of mind is the
poem written by a father addressing his dead son:
Standing before your closed book shelves
as before the Ark of the Law [in synagogue];
Ark with no curtain.
Your father and mother shed tears there.
Tears with no prayers.9
9
E. Kalir, Mikerev (Tel Aviv: privately printed, 1950), p. 37.
189
The encounter with death presents the true mirror of a society. And here
we have one which even in an existential crisis makes no appeal to
religious transcendence; it does, however, feel an urge for tradition.
This new martyrological ethos subsumed by the Yizkor literature of
the Yishuv puts its subject, those who died a violent death (usually at
the hands of Arabs), in a special, higher category among those who lost
their lives for the sake of the Zionist endeavour (more 'sacred' than
those who died of malaria, for instance). Here is the origin of the
distinction still maintained by Israeli society between fallen soldiers and
civilians killed by terrorist action.
The historical framework which endows their sacrifice with meaning
is that of those who fell fighting for Jewish sovereignty, beginning with
the Hashmoneans (second century BC), and those who rose in revolt
against the Romans (first and second century AD), a tradition renewed,
after a hiatus of nineteen centuries, with the First Aliyah. Jewish
martyrology in the Diaspora is rarely, and at best erratically, mentioned.
Unlike the traditional martyrology which cherished passivity, accepting
the fate laid down by the Lord, the Yishuv martyrology had a distinct
activist edge. Even when commemorating those killed in the Arab attack
on Tel Hai in 1920 - an event transformed into a General Custer-type
'epic of defeat' - the emphasis was on the 'last stand' as an inspiration to
continue the struggle, to take the initiative, to imitate the model of a
heroism which does not resign itself to Fate (whether imposed by
Providence or by the nation's enemies). Heroism consists of revolting
against Fate.10
This secular, collectivist, and activist ethos was also geared to express
the individuality of the fallen. In pre-twentieth century Yizkor books,
only rabbis, notables or particularly heroic martyrs received such attention. The secular Yizkor and pinkasim literature of the 1920s or the
post-Holocaust era concentrated on a wider gamut of prominent individuals (in culture, economics, social life) of an increasingly secularized
shtetl. In Palestine, even when the numbers of dead during periods of
riots were in the hundreds (1929, 1936-9), the 1911 formula was
adhered to: a biography (usually accompanied by a photograph) of each
of the dead, followed by testimonials, evaluations, memoirs, documents,
literary, or artistic bequests.
While the first initiatives were entirely due to the leadership of the
labour movement and, above all, to its mentor Berl Katznelson, the
genre soon spawned a more spontaneous literature produced primarily
in the kibbutzim, which possessed an institutional infrastructure, such
10
See E. Sivan, Dor Tashach (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), ch. 8.
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Emmanuel Sivan
as a 'culture committee' and a stencilling machine. From the late 1930s

on, the genre began to spread little by little beyond even the confines of
the so-called 'labour (pioneering) sector' into long-established right-ofcentre colonies or groups of friends in towns. Some semi-commercial
publications followed suit. Other forms of commemoration (monuments, groves) did not proliferate to the same extent.
Ill
The commemorative literature on the War of Independence represents
not merely a quantitative leap - almost ten times as many booklets were
published in the 1950s as in all the pre-state days. What was still in
Yishuv days to a large extent a semi-institutional literature, mostly
beholden to the labour movement, now became a widespread social
phenomenon, the product of a plethora of private initiatives. It should
be noted, though, that the Ministry of Defence in 1955 published its
own official Yizkor book, with quarter-page biographies of all the fallen,
as it continued to do for subsequent wars.
Parents, friends, comrades-in-arms, neighbours, fellow residents, and
professionals created ad hoc grassroots associations for publishing such
books and booklets, side by side with kibbutzim, schools, etc.
The spread of the Yizkor literature as a socio-cultural mode of action
had a direct impact upon what Roger Bastide calls the 'organization of
memory'.11 People remember as a part of a social group. Personal
memories exist in relationship to the memories of other people who are
relevant to the individual. Personal memories intermingle, influence
each other and thus create a collective memory, feed it, and maintain its
continuity. A collective memory enables groups to attain a consciousness
based upon a sort of'network of complementarity'. Collective memory
is, thus, not an abstract entity over and above individuals. It is the
product of these exchange relationships to which each group member
contributes his or her own memories. Obviously the weight of the
various memories is not equal. The group's organizational structure
moulds the organization of its memory. The contribution of elites
carries more weight. Whoever articulates his or her memories in public
leaves a deeper imprint than one who does it merely in private or not at
all.12
If we apply these analytical tools to the Israeli case, we perceive
immediately that the 'organization of memory' gave a distinct advantage
11
12
R. Bastide, 'Memoire collective', L'annee sociologique (1970), esp. pp. 76-96.

M. Douglas, How Institutions Think (London: Routledge, 1986), chs. 6 and 7.
191
to certain social groups in the early years of the state. For instance, a
comparison of the distribution of the fallen commemorated in booklets
shows that sabras are substantially over-represented among the commemorated (four out of ten as against three out of ten among the bulk of
fallen soldiers of the 1948 war). The longer an immigrant was in
Palestine the greater his chances of being commemorated. Soldiers who
had come before the Second World War were over-represented; those
who had come after 1940 were under-represented by half; those who
had arrived during 1948 barely figured at all. This applies even more
acutely to those who were given what one may term 'intensive' commemoration - that is, in a booklet as well as in a scholarship, grove,
youth group, or who were the subject of an individual booklet rather
than part of one consecrated to a whole group. Sabras and veteran
immigrants had an even greater advantage. This inequitable commemoration is all the more noteworthy, given the fact that war casualties
were evenly distributed among all social categories, a fact due perhaps to
conscription operating from the early months of the war.13 What
accounts for this commemorative imbalance?
Social integration is crucial here. Commemoration is carried out
above all by families, by friends, by fellow soldiers, or by voluntary
associations. Given that the median age of the fallen soldiers was
twenty-two, if they had arrived in Palestine before the Second World
War, they would have passed at least half their lives there, or at least had
part of their schooling there. Moreover, those who had immigrated after
1940, and a fortiori after 1945, were Holocaust survivors, and hence
much more likely to arrive as orphans, without any other immediate
relatives in Palestine.
Due to their short sojourn in the country, immigrants who arrived in
1946-7 (more than a quarter of the fallen) were less likely to be
members of youth movements or other voluntary associations, so vocal
in what one may call the chorus of collective memory. Those who came
in 1948 - usually from Displaced Persons camps in Europe or Cyprus a few months or weeks prior to their death, were totally uprooted, hence
rarely commemorated.
As one poet, a veteran of the war, was to put it years later, writing
about new immigrant soldiers:
We should try to remember them
but this is not easy. . .
In whose memory would a [newcomer] live?
13
The statistical data and method used here and in what follows are set out in my 'The
life of the dead', in J. Frankel (ed.), Reshaping the past (New York: Oxford University
Press,1994) , pp. 172-4 (esp.figs.1 and 2).
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Emmanuel Sivan
He has no parents to visit his grave
through the seasons, and water his roots.
He has no room to fit his photo,
no friends to talk about him, no widow
to confer his name upon her son.14
While social integration is a major factor, in what was (and still is) an
immigrant society, in the 'organization of memory', it operates in
tandem with the location of the individual in the gamut of articulation
and social activism. The more educated the soldier, the greater the
chances that his family, friends, or fellow group members would have
access to commemorative modes: a knowledge of Hebrew (there are
virtually no booklets in other languages); a newspaper (likelier in a
kibbutz, a youth group, or a well-established neighbourhood); contacts
with printers. No less crucial was the sheer fact of having relatives,
friends, or associates who could invest the time and who possessed the
editorial capacity to collect (or write down) testimonials and memoirs. It
is hardly surprising that the higher the educational standard of the
fallen, the more he featured as the subject of a booklet. He was also
more likely to be given 'intensive commemoration'. Being an officer was
an extra advantage, as it presupposed a high level of education (the same
is true of the sabras and veterans). The collective profile of the commemorated thus tends to be somewhat slanted in favour of elite groups.
This characteristic begins to change from the 1973 war onwards, as
the immigrants of the 1950s or their offspring gained access to secondary education and became integrated into social networks, for
instance, synagogues, sports clubs, and the like.
Moreover, the better organized a social sector and the higher its
collective consciousness (and sense of history), the more likely it is to
devote effort and resources to commemoration. In the wake of the 1948
war this gave a distinct advantage to the kibbutzim, most of which had
weekly or monthly newspapers, not to speak of the publishing facilities
of the four major kibbutz movements. The upshot was that three out of
five kibbutz members who died were commemorated (as against one in
three of all fallen soldiers). Their share declined from the 1970s on, but
still remained substantial. Even the rising representation of the nationalreligious during the past twenty-five years is due above all to commemoration by religious youth movements and yeshivas.
So strongly did integration combine with articulation to determine
the organization of civil society commemoration in the 1950s and 1960s
that the collective profile of those who are the subject of books is
14
Ma'ariv (Tel Aviv), 8 May 1981.
193
dominated by sabras and those who had migrated in early childhood,

officers and NCOs, the better-educated, kibbutz members, and
members of youth movements in Palestine rather than members of such
movements abroad.
Who, then, are those who are forgotten and left un-commemorated?
Primarily 1948 immigrants and those with less than full primary
schooling (who received a third of the share of the commemoration to
which they were 'entitled'). They were followed by other new immigrants and lower socio-educational groups, who are under-represented
by 50 per cent. New immigrants were obviously at a double disadvantage: they were less integrated socially and had a significantly lower level
of education as a result of interruption of schooling in the war years.
The vast majority came from Central and Eastern Europe.
And indeed to this very day Israeli society tends to remember the
'1948 generation' as one made up of Sabras (or virtual Sabras, Palestine-educated veterans), articulate young males, preferably kibbutz (or
labour-movement) affiliated - a sort of Israeli variant of the image of a
lost, elite generation in Europe. This representation disregards the sizeable share of uprooted, barely educated, isolated, and perhaps alienated
Holocaust survivors, who make up almost one-third of the population of
fallen soldiers as a whole. Indeed, these people comprised about onethird of all those drafted in the 1948 war.
This is not to say that this folk literature was the only factor which
created the image of a myth of the Sabra generation in the 1948 war. No
less important was the role played by the poetry and fiction dedicated to
the 1948 war experience. This creative effort was dominated by writers
in their twenties and thirties; members of the older generation, standing
in awe of the sacrifice of younger men, felt themselves, on the whole,
disqualified from dealing with it. The young writers (the so-called
'Palmach generation') were, with few exceptions, Sabras or old-timers,
preferring to write about those they had known best as comrades-inarms and school friends. They were oblivious of the newcomers,
insensitive to their past and present predicament, if not arrogant
towards them.
The up-and-coming novelists and poets of the 'Palmach generation'
(with its offshoots in the theatre and the media) were arguably the most
powerful of the social actors shaping the collective memory of the 1948
war. Historians, for one, were almost totally absent from this arena. Yet
how could such a distorted picture of the 'lost Sabra generation' be
depicted without any protest from a civil society which had undergone
the war experience? One way to account for this is through the fact that
myth-making paralleled the spontaneous production of memory in civil
194
Emmanuel Sivan
society itself. At the same time they created an image of a war, the
burdens of which were carried by Sabras and old-timers, a war in which
a huge educated elite was sacrificed, thus creating a sense of qualitative
social loss. This sense of loss was authentic but exaggerated, as was the
role attributed to Sabras, though in qualitative terms (through their
large representation in the officers' ranks) they did make a unique
contribution to the war effort.
That the Sabras' and old-timers' claim to hegemony in Israeli society
was thereby legitimated, was an unintended consequence of this parallel
effort. One finds no trace of deliberate manipulation by the elite. This
does not mean that those active in the field of memory-shaping, who
tended by virtue of integration and articulation to come from these very
social groups, were not comforted by this extra degree of legitimacy. For
it did fit in with their own exalted self-image; an image shaped by,
among other things, the way they remembered the war experience, and
dwelled on those close to them who had fallen. The social and political
rewards of their dominance of collective memory would not be refused
by people so sure of their superiority as members (or descendants) of
the 'pioneer generation', and at the same time so bruised personally by
the sacrifices made by their social milieux in the 1948 war.
In the course of the (intended) passage from commemoration within
the social group to the community at large, selective storage/retrieval
and reconstruction (nay even distortion) of memory traces occurred.
Collective myths were generated through the interplay of unintended
consequences and non-consequent intentions (see chapter 1, p. 30 and
above).
Yet what was the shelf-life of the remembrance of the 1948 war? The
half-life of intense in-group (and some out-group) activity was, in this as
later wars, approximately five years. During this period, a memory
artefact is created which had a life of its own in the out-group (readers
of the booklets, visitors of monuments, audience of a commemorative
concert, etc.) and in the society at large. The in-group continues its
activity (e.g. annual meetings of friends, camp fire chats, visits to the
monument, etc.), though the pace tends to slow down with the parents'
ageing and dispersal of friends. This activity still has a ripple effect,
whereas the commitment of the in-group, created by the constant
rehearsal of the memory it cherishes, made its members into constant
spokesmen for this memory, a powerful voice in the 'chorus of memory',
performing, so to speak, in the public sphere.
A telling indicator is how much early Israeli responses in all agegroups to the Intifada (1987-9) tended to pass through the (somewhat
distorting) prism of memories of 1948: 'once again insecurity on the
195
roads', 'civilians ambushed', 'our very existence in danger', arguments

backed up by references to the first part of the War of Independence
(Dec. 1947 to May 1948). This usage of the 1948 vocabulary is to be
attributed not merely to the dramatic stories, told and retold by ingroup members, by artefacts (and by fiction), but also to the changes
undergone by the 'communities of memory', that is by those groups (inor out-) for whom a certain memory trace is poignantly meaningful.
Much in-group activity, from the 1960s on, was consecrated to the
maintenance of artefacts, especially monuments. Yet distance from
population centres (as well as ageing and dispersal) made this activity
increasingly difficult. The state, which had always been suspicious of
what it termed spontaneous commemoration, was loath to take over
their maintenance. Frequently neighbouring small new towns (or regional councils) stepped in and accepted responsibility for them from
the hands of the dwindling troops of relatives, war veterans, and friends.
These adopting localities tended to be populated by immigrants of the
1950s for whom this step represented a way of linking up with a major
national myth and endowing a new locality with a national genealogy,
fostering local patriotism.
These new communities of collective memory, spreading in particular
from the mid-1970s on among oriental immigrants, gave the 'memory
traces' of 1948 a new lease on life. These communities likewise signified
a growing integration of groups hitherto not included in the national
military mythology - a reflection of deeper social processes, evidenced,
for instance, in the growing rate of inter-communal marriages. Commemoration as legitimator of the Sabra hegemony was slowly phased
out. All the more so as integration of 1950s immigrants (particularly of
oriental origin) was having a visible impact on forms and contents of
commemoration in civil society. Markedly less secular than the oldtimers, who would rarely put a monument in a cemetery, or invoke God
in Yizkor books, the oriental immigrants introduced new forms already
after the 1967 war, but especially from 1973 on: a Torah scroll written
to the memory of the fallen soldier - a traditional Jewish mode of
commemoration; a donation to a synagogue (chandelier, Ark's curtain,
air conditioner) or the naming of one's child after the fallen; Talmud
study or psalm recitation by Yeshiva students on the anniversary of the
death, etc. Today these forms follow the booklets in terms of popularity,
far preceding the old secular, future-oriented forms (e.g. groves). The
greater militancy of the National Religious camp (whether Ashkenazi or
Sephardi, old-timer or new immigrant) and its entrance into the powerstructure, vying for cultural hegemony, further bolstered the religious
content - not just modes - of commemoration (as we shall see below,
196
Emmanuel Sivan
p. 202). It is only the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) who are anti- Zionists,

and needless to say, the overwhelming majority of Israeli Arabs, who
remain outside this web of 'communities of memory', and whose voices
are not heard in this collective chorus.
IV
It would be wrong to view the dynamics of remembrance solely through
the metamorphosis of the memory of 1948, even though its heavy
imprint is still felt in most aspects of Israeli commemorative culture.
The input of other wars has to be reckoned with, if only because the
interference of new memory traces diminishes (distorts, reinterprets)
the impact of old ones.
None is more powerful than the memory of those intensive, halfdefeat half-victory weeks of warfare in October 1973. Individual commemoration of the Yom Kippur War is above all expressed in hundreds
of booklets, carrying on writing (sometimes through taped and transcribed conversations) the ongoing debate unleashed within Israeli
society about the meaning of this war.
What does this multi-vocal chorus tell us? One encounters the
universal gamut of reactions to sudden and violent death (guilt feelings,
anger, revenge). One likewise finds typical Israeli themes such as the
pre-war anxiety of the parents' generation (many of whom had fought in
1948) whether the sons would stand the test of fire. This parents'
generation, one must stress, was much larger than in 1948, for almost
all the war dead had at least one surviving parent, while in 1948 most
immigrant-soldiers who had come after 1940 had no parent, and few
relatives, in Palestine. And as the brunt of the 1973 war was borne by
the regular army and young reservists aged 18 to 25, who accounted for
70 per cent of casualties, this fact seemed to convey a reassuring answer
to the parental doubts. All the more so as the share of the Israeli-born in
the 1973 fallen generation was much higher than in the past, keeping
pace with the changing make-up of the younger age-groups: two-thirds
of those killed were Sabras.
But the attitude of the 1973 parents' generation combines grief (as
in previous wars) with particularly heavy guilt feelings. The lack of
sufficient Israeli army preparedness made the parents, above all those
who had served in 1948, feel responsible for the debacle of the early
days of the war. All the more so as they may have served as role
models for their sons, and perhaps even motivated them directly to
volunteer for combat service. Worse still, shaken in their confidence
that society was worth defending on the battlefield, many parents
197
began to wonder aloud whether there was any justification for death,
let alone solace.
The most salient thematic change consists of the sombre reality of war
which casts its shadow upon this folk literature. Previous wars left in the
Yizkor books matter-of-fact descriptions of the conditions of warfare in
a manner which tended to work against militaristic glorification. Consider for instance the soldiers' conversations in The seventh day, published in the wake of the Six Day War. The overall share of such
descriptions was, however, minimal in Yizkor books of the 1950s and
1960s. The sections dealing with the exact circumstances of their
subjects' death tended to be laconic.
The post-1973 literature (including that of the Lebanon War) gives
pride of place to descriptions of operations as well as of the circumstances of individual deaths. This is a virtually uniform phenomenon, all
the more surprising given the spontaneity of this literature, but which
could be accounted for, in part, by a 'demonstration effect'.
The 'operational' sections are fully documented. There are oral
testimonies culled from comrades and commanders, later visits of the
parents to the particular sector of the front (at their initiative or with the
army's help). The text is illustrated with sketches, operational maps are
peppered with code names. It is documented often with the help of
reports of military commissions of inquiry appointed at the pressing and
much publicized demand of parents to throw light upon controversial
cases (e.g. the way the injured were evacuated from a certain battle).15
Such reports never appear in the commemoration literature of the
1950s, because parents' protests, in this more conformist age, were
channelled through correspondence with officials (including BenGurion), and their none-too-frequent demands for inquiry were rarely
satisfied. The blow the Yom Kippur surprise dealt to the credibility of
the army high command - till then basking in the glow of 1967 - and
their political superiors, is evident in the very multiplicity of such official
reports after 1973. Moreover, such reports were now made public. Guilt
feelings in high places combined here with the vociferous, no longer
respectful and restrained, anguish of bereaved parents, backed up by the
battle-bruised comrades who were so active in postwar protest movements.
Other documents which appear in the mid-1970s booklets concern
men missing in action (MIA) and presumed dead. The MIA phenomenon was much broader than in any previous Israeli war, and adds a
wrenching twist to bereavement, depriving it of the modest succour of
15
Yizkor Ya'acov-ze'ev Blitz (Tel Aviv: privately printed, 1974).
198
Emmanuel Sivan
the grave site. The dry language of such official reports barely covers the
horror:
Tank Number xxx was the nearest to the Suez Canal. In it were found the
bodies of two soldiers directly hit by Egyptian anti-tank missiles. The two other
occupants, one of whom being your son . . . might have been thrown out of it or
left it after it had been hit and might have been killed by enemy infantry.16
This increased exposure of the brutality of war and its devastating

effects is attributable in part, to a greater degree of military professionalism: most parents of the 1973 generation had long military service
(regular and reserve) behind them, as did friends and comrades. Yet it
reflects above all the shock undergone by a society which led it now to
break a tacit agreement honoured previously: if the horrors of war are to
be referred to, this was not to be done in direct reference to the
circumstances of death of theperson(s) commemorated. Self-censorship
by fellow soldiers, wishing not to rub salt into the family's wounds, must
have persisted to some extent, but the very bluntness one finds in the
post-1973 descriptions denotes a battered and at the same time more
open society.
A striking note of finality is struck in the appendices of the booklets:
technical ones such as the army official form 'List of Personal Objects
and Documents Related to an Injured Soldier': watch, key ring, purse,
bus schedule, small coins. This is it, says the document. He is no more.
Other appendices comprise letters written by parents to the son during
the war in the days after his demise or disappearance and returned to
them by the military mail. All such letters have but one refrain: 'please
give a sign of life'.
This exposure of the horrors of war as well as that of the anguish of
parents, wives, and friends makes these booklets gloomier than those
produced after previous wars. It could be argued that they render
society even less likely to be infatuated by war. The anguish is illustrated
by a multiplicity of details related to the long wait for publication of lists
of the dead (or MIAs or POWs); unpleasant contacts with an obtuse
army bureaucracy; the emotional ups and downs undergone by family
and friends. All this is reported in a variety of styles: from the barely
literate to the highly articulate. Even the tendency to add a heroic tinge
to the dead is obliterated. He may be described warts and all, even in
war. One mother recounts how her son reacted to the radio announcement on Yom Kippur 1973, at midday, that a war had broken out. 'You
did not believe it. You said: "It's impossible; it's an electoral ploy." You
lay down and fell asleep. You wanted to forget it all. I waked you up,
16
Yizkor Ya 'acov Kramersky (Kibbutz Mesilot: privately printed, 1974).
199
confounded and depressed.' A tank commander named Jacob tells in a

booklet commemorating his friend Danny, how they last met, a day
before the latter would be killed:
On Sunday, 7 October, we came back to the Tassa camp [in Sinai] at seven. We
ate breakfast and went through with tank maintenance. One of the guys told me:
'There was somebody here, with glasses, looking for you . . . He didn't say his
name, must have gone to chow.' I rushed to the mess and here I see Danny, in
unbuttoned overall, black undershirt, unshaved, Uzi slung on his shoulder,
looked terrible. I said: 'Danny, how are you?'
Danny: Look, Jacob, it's horrible. We got wiped out yesterday. All my guys are
gone.
Jacob: Danny, do me a favour, don't tell me anything. Let's talk about now.
We are alive. Let's get on with it.
Danny: Jacob, you can't imagine what happened to me yesterday.
And then he tells me how their tank got stuck last night. Nobody came to pull
them out. They were told to fend for themselves. They fought out and joined
our forces.
Jacob: Danny, listen, get a hold of yourself.
Danny: If I go, I will not come back.
Jacob: Danny, enough is enough.
I still tried to boost his morale, but in vain. We embraced . . . I accompanied
him to his tank, he heaved himself into the turret . . . We waved to each other
. . . I bit my fingernails. How did Danny get to such a state, I thought. He never
was a coward. I was desperate.17
Indeed, the commemoration literature changes its tropes: more of the

realistic, less of the heroic. And as we shall see below (pp. 203-4) a third
trope, the ironic, would creep in.
What makes the description of war horrors and those of its aftermath
so traumatic is not just their exposure, but the wrath and outrage with
which it is suffused. The commemoration literature of the 1950s was
elegiac; the sense of loss somewhat mitigated by what was taken to be a
worthy achievement, the state's birth and survival. The 1967 literature
was immersed in a narcissistic, complacent, and self-congratulatory
tone: yes, war is horrible, but on the whole we kept our moral fibre and
won - a tone which the 1973 generation would dub derisively: 'shooting
and crying'. The 1973 literature, on the other hand, is characterized by
probing, merciless self-criticism, doubts as to the very justification for
the slaughter. True, these were the dominant themes in the mid-1970s
public sphere, expressed in the media and in protest movements. A
'feedback loop' operated here, manifest above all in the parents' and
friends' conversations out of which the commemoration literature
emerged. Yet the very fact that these themes were now expressed
17
Ner Zikaron Le-danny (Jerusalem: privately printed, 1974).
200
Emmanuel Sivan
through a genre the aim of which had been to cope with loss shows how
profound was the 'October Earthquake', privately and collectively. It
was difficult even to look for some solace, whereas the failures, especially
in the early part of the war, were too glaring to be eclipsed, in the eyes of
the bereaved (as well as of most Israelis) by the victories of the later
phase.
Criticism of the way operations were conducted was levelled by
parents and comrades even in 1948, but not in public. 18 Complaints
were sent to the authorities, often to Ben-Gurion in person, through the
proper channels. The tone was bitter but on the whole respectful; only
in rare cases were medals sent back in protest or a commission of
inquiry demanded (in vain). In 1973 the criticism is in the open - an
indicator of a more transparent, less conformist society. That this
criticism is to be found even in the Yizkor booklets gives it a particular
weight.
Here is an account of a reconnaissance unit going into battle in the
Golan Heights:
When I arrived at the base camp in the night following Yom Kippur it was three
A.M. We found that our unit had less jeeps at its disposal than it was supposed
to have by regulation. Some jeeps lacked machine guns. We had to 'steal' them
from semi-armed vehicles in storage. No jeep was equipped with the regulation
binoculars. We had to scrounge them. All this wasted a lot of time. Worst of all we didn't find enough maps, and we were about to go into an area we didn't
know at all . . . Driving up toward the southern part of the Golan Heights we
met a horribly battered group of dozens of our soldiers going down by foot, like
refugees, in torn clothes, most without arms. Some had fled from army
positions, others had abandoned their tanks. They told us terrible stories.19
Another fellow soldier writes:
For seven years we have lived the illusion of omnipotence. This led some of the
IDF top command to recklessness, perhaps to corruption. We have been selfsatisfied while the Arabs have drawn lessons from their debacle. How strange it
was that they became the heroes of night warfare. We were frightened at night
for they had night-vision instruments and we didn't.20
A scathing barrage of criticism targets the war strategy, for instance
the wasteful tank battles of attrition. This sort of criticism was elicited in
the past only by one botched battle, the Latrun battle of 1948. This is
what one reserve soldier says of a tank battle he had closely studied, in
which his brother had been killed:
What enrages me in particular is that his tank stopped dead twice during the
18
19
20
IDF archives, files 1512 - 702/60; 1189 - 782/65; 592 - 852/51; 377 - 580/56; 1006 220/70.
Havrei Ha-goshrim (Kibbutz ha-Goshrim, privately printed, 1975), pp. 11, 16.
Ibid. p. 17.
201
operation. Is that what you call maintenance? The very fact that General
Gorodish dispatched them against an iron wall of Egyptian tanks and infantry,
not knowing really how effective the enemy missiles were, is infuriating. There
were intelligence reports of these [shoulder-held] anti-tank rockets, but had they
never caught his attention?21
This reservist goes on to lash out at the political leadership (for shortsightedness, avoiding a peace initiative before the war), yet he doesn't
shun self-criticism and even finds some fault with his dead brother: 'One
cannot lay all the blame upon the powers that be. They are an integral
part of the people and each influences each other.' He points out that
this very air of self-satisfaction can be found in his brother's letters,
suffused with derogatory references to the Arabs and their culture.
These twin factors greatly contributed to what happened in October
1973. Indeed in one of the letters included in the Yizkor booklet, dating
from 1969, the brother, then a teenager, reacts enthusiastically to an
arrogant militaristic speech delivered at his high school by General Ariel
Sharon.
Exposure, openness, and self-criticism are pushed even further in
Yizkor booklets published by kibbutzim, which had produced the more
conformist specimens of the genre. Their publications now comprise
letters of fallen soldiers complaining of the 'conservatism', 'mediocrity',
and 'rot' of kibbutz society. Mutual support is found to be lacking, envy
to reign supreme.
Enveloped in such an air of crisis, it is hardly surprising that there is
questioning of the justification for death in battle. This is certainly true
of the secularist booklets which constitute the majority of the genre,
though a somewhat smaller majority than in the previous two decades.
For most parents and friends, even when facing such a terrible loss,
invocation of the transcendental still has no place; sacred agencies are
not their recourse, the profane dominates. God is absent from their
(tape-recorded) conversations.
The secularist majority still accepted in the mid-1970s the basic
justification for war as action taken in defence of the collective. The
Egyptian-Syrian joint attack on Yom Kippur in 1973 helped most
Israelis stick to this article of faith, which would be really shaken merely
by the Lebanon War (1982-3). A tiny minority of the 1970s Yizkor
books puts the blame upon Israeli leadership for not offering political
compromise in order to reduce Arab motivation to go to war. Many
parents and friends said openly, however, that their own particular son/
husband/comrade died in vain, in the Yom Kippur war, because of bad
strategy/tactics, or sloppy training and maintenance. In the past it was
21
Ne'edar - Sihot Le-toch Ha-layla (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1976), pp. 19,31,43,70.
202
Emmanuel Sivan
unheard of to speak in this vein in the house of the bereaved or in such

an intimate artefact as a Yizkor book. And what's more, to do so before
the end of the year of mourning. Many booklets used to end on a partly
affirmative note: 'Our loss has meaning but there's no solace.' Now
meaning was in doubt, solace virtually impossible.
None of the above applies, however, to booklets originating in the
national-religious sector, which represent (from 1967 on) a sizeable part
of this folk literature, and a part much more committed to a collectivist
ethos than the increasingly individualistic, secularist booklets. The very
form of the national-religious booklets is different. It has two parts: the
first, the traditional mode of Jewish written homage to the dead exegesis of canonical texts not necessarily related to the fallen soldier's
life or circumstances of death, yet dedicated to 'the elevation of his
memory'; the second is modelled on the secularist booklets. Obviously
there is a difference in content as well: justification for death in battle
was always endowed here with both transcendental and nationalist
qualities. And this sense of zidduk ha-Din (accepting God's just verdict)
is maintained intact in the wake of the 1973 war. The Sacrifice of Isaac
and Abraham metaphor would come to be used in the secularist Yizkor
in a somewhat sceptical way (does the father have the right to send his
son into battle for a blemished society?). It would even be extended in
ironic ways, as we shall see below. No echo of all this can be detected in
the national-religious Yizkor books. There the metaphor is used reverently, an example of a pure act of faith. 'Ours is not to reason why this
soldier died. God has so decreed. We lower our heads, accomplish the
mitzva (precept) of dying for the sanctification of His name, or dispatching our sons and students to do so. He, in his infinite wisdom,
resolved that this sacrifice should be made for His name and for the
Jewish people', writes one rabbi in the book dedicated to graduates of
his Yeshiva fallen in battle.22 All this reflects the growing chasm between
the secularist and the religious sectors of Israeli society. This chasm
accounts, in part, for the rise in 1974 of the Gush Emunim ultranationalist fundamentalist movement, as a response to the 'failure of
nerve' of secular society in coping with human loss and the prolonged
Middle Eastern conflict.
What the national-religious termed 'failure of nerve', the secularist
majority after 1973 called 'auto-critique' and 'demystification'. In 1970
during the War of Attrition on the Suez Canal, only a young playwright,
Hanoch Levin, dared to mock the bereavement myth. Indeed the War of
Attrition was the moment when the first cracks were visible in the Israeli
22
Rabbi Y. Ba-Gad, in Yizkor (Nehalim: Nehalim Yeshiva, 1974).
203
'security consensus'. Was this war necessary, some (regular and reserve)
soldiers, as well as teenagers, asked in 'open letters' to the Prime
Minister, which were later published in the press. Hanoch Levin gave a
particularly poignant voice to these questions and doubts in an acerbic
cabaret play, Queen of the bathtub (the said queen being the then Prime
Minister, Golda Meir). The Tel Aviv theatre where it was staged was the
object of angry and violent protests, led quite often by bereaved relatives
who denounced it as sacrilegious. The show had to be taken off after
two months. The cabaret number which enraged them most was a song
where a fallen soldier talks to his father from his grave:
Dear Dad, when you stand at my grave,
Old, weary, and very much childless,
And you'll see how they put my body into the earth
And you stand above me, Dad
Don't stand so proud
Don't raise your head, Dad
We remained flesh against flesh
And it's time to cry Dad
So let your eyes cry over my eyes
Don't keep silent out of respect for me,
For something more important than Honour
Lies down at your feet, Dad.
And don't say you made such a sacrifice
For he who sacrificed was I,
And don't use high words anymore
For I already lie very low, Dad.
Dear Dad, when you stand at my grave,
Old, weary, and very much childless,
And you see how they put my body under the ground
- Ask for my forgiveness, Dad.23
The metaphor of the dramatic test of Abraham and Isaac was turned
on its head. In the early 1970s such a denunciation of the Bereaved
Parent myth, pointing out that parents gained in social status and moral
authority while sons rotted, was accepted only by a young, mostly
dissident audience. After 1973, one finds Yizkor books, notably in
kibbutzim, where this sarcastic song had pride of place alongside the
'canonical' modern Hebrew poems on death and mourning. A hitherto
marginal argument has moved into the very centre of public discourse,
and into that of its major audiences, the 'Family of Bereavement' - that
none-too-inaccurate Israeli term, denoting the nebulous web of kin and
23
H. Levin, Ma Ichpat La-tsipor (Tel Aviv: Zemora-Bitan, 1987), p. 92.
204
Emmanuel Sivan
adoptive kin (friends, comrades) which carries on the remembrance

effort.
An even more telling indicator is the most commercially successful of
the memorial books, which has become something of a cult object. The
book consists of translations of anti-war poetry (by Bertolt Brecht,
Jacques Prevert, Bob Dylan etc.) made by a 23-year-old kibbutznik who
died in the Yom Kippur war.24 The tone is irreverent, sardonic, angry.
To the heroic and realistic tropes, an ironic one was added. Nor were
Hanoch Levin and that poet-kibbutznik its only voices. Four young
satirists, all reservists who had served in the Yom Kippur War, published
in 1975 a pastiche of the Yizkor booklet, Comrades talking about Sahbak.
It sends up a popular sub-genre, which records a conversation 'around
the camp fire' about the Fallen (above, p. 181), a genre which had
produced a few best-sellers. The 1975 booklet combines tall stories,
cliches, and patriotic pieties, about Our Friend {Sahbak, a jocular term
in soldiers' slang, borrowed from Arabic), a good-for-nothing boy, very
conformist, but much liked by everybody, who dies a senseless death in
action.
Dr Joseph Burg, a crusty old politician, said that 'before the [Yom
Kippur] war everything was better, even the future was better'. In any
case, after the war, all would be different; bereavement and remembrance would be starkly different.
In subsequent wars one would find the bereaved, first spearheading
the opposition to the war, drawing upon their moral status in the
Lebanon War (1982-3); then, during the Intifada, acting in the name of
mourning and 'sacred memory', in both political camps, one criticizing
the repression and the other supporting it. As society split asunder along
a Right/Left axis, and as, moreover, it tended to become more individualistic and hedonistic, the collective memory of war, perhaps even
grief itself, became increasingly politicized and controversial.
24
G. Rosental, Oh Barbara, what a dastardly business is war (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim,
1975). The book was edited by his brother. The title poem is by Prevert.
10
Personal narratives and commemoration

Samuel Hynes
Writing about memories is less a way of finding out what actually

occurred than what, in the fullness of time, one is capable of making of
what may have done so.
Frank Kermode1
A personal narrative is what can be made of what may have happened; a

personal narrative of war, then, is what can be made of remembered
war. Men who write such narratives are makers, like poets (who are
etymologically makers), and novelists, and all other constructers of
words. But what exactly do they make? Are such narratives memorial
gestures that fix and communicate public meaning, like war-monuments
- the Cenotaph or the Marine Corps Memorial or the Menin Gate? Or
are they a different kind of gesture, a different act of making?
If we follow James Young, and take memorial to be the general term
for a class of collective gestures of public commemoration, including
material objects (monuments), fixed days (Memorial Day), assigned
spaces (Valley Forge Cemetery), and even unique occasions (meetings,
conferences), then we must surely say that the written recollections of
the men who performed the acts that taken together constitute a war
must also be memorials.
But there are problems in the terms of that definition. In what sense
are personal narratives collective} Are they generated by some common
impulse beyond the personal? Are they conditioned by states of mind
outside themselves? Do they individually belong to the art of public
memory? Of national memory? Or are they a set of essentially private
transactions between a man who was there and the things that happened
where he was? Is it accurate to say that one man's remembered war can
expand to embrace some larger category of his fellows - his regiment,
his army, all the fighting men in his war? Or does it speak only for a class
of one - himself?
We may find some answers to those questions by looking at the
1
The Observer, 23 June 1996, p. 14.

205
206
Samuel Hynes
differences between personal narratives and other acts of remembrance.

The most obvious is that only personal narratives are stories: among
memorial gestures only narratives happen along a line of time, in which
meaning is not fixed but emergent. Stories deal with causality and
change, and war-stories tell us processes of war: what happened to the
teller, and with what consequences. Meaning in narrative is that process
in time, and not a frozen gesture; and because that is so, the relation
between the artefact and the person who experiences it is different from
other cases. You participate vicariously in Robert Graves's war when you
read Goodbye to all that; you don't experience a cemetery that way.
Personal narratives also have voices, and that is another difference.
Voice in narrative asserts the individuality of the experience, and
imposes private feelings and responses upon events. Look at Lutyens's
war-memorial at Thiepval, and then read Edward Liveing's memoir of
the first day of the Somme offensive. Are they both memorials? What do
they have in common, beyond geographical location? Which one expresses the meaning of what happened on that ground on that day?
Which is 'collective memory'? I'd say neither, but for different reasons:
not Lutyens, because no pile of bricks and stones can cause us to
remember what we have not seen - the deaths of many men; not
Liveing, because one man's 1 July 1916 is not everyman's and is not
ours, and even the most vivid words will not change that fact.
The problem is in the word memory itself. It is common for historians
who write about memorials to say that memorials as a class embody and
communicate memory; but I find it hard to see how this can possibly be
true, unless, like Humpty Dumpty, we make words mean what we say
they mean. Memory is the mental faculty by which we preserve or
recover our pasts, and also the events recovered. Without that link now reaching back to then - you may have an image of the past in your
mind, but it isn't memory but something else, a social construction,
history.
What does it mean, for example, to say that what one experiences at
the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial is memory? For actual veterans of that
war the names on the stone will call up persons and events in their own
personal pasts; but for the rest of us? What we hold in our minds as we
stand before the Wall will be the carved names themselves, and the sad
army of the dead that they stand for. There is no element of remembering here. Or think of the First World War. I have a clear and quite
detailed set of images of that war in my head, and so does every other
literate person; but I don't remember it as I remember my own war, and
no amount of monuments, Armistice Days, and conferences can turn
my images into memory. For the images and stories in our heads that
207
constitute our versions of other men's wars we must find some other
term.
And there is a perfectly good one at hand: what we do, when we
summon up our common notions of what the First World War was like,
is to call upon a collective, vicarious memory: we evoke our shared myth
of the war. Myth here, it scarcely needs saying, is not a synonym for
falsehood; rather, it is a term to identify the simplified, dramatized story
that has evolved in our society to contain the meanings of the war that
we can tolerate, and so make sense of its incoherences and contradictions.
In the construction of a myth of war, memorials play a very small role,
and personal narratives a very large one. Not any single narrative alone,
but narratives collectively, for what war-stories construct is a combining
story that is not told in any individual narrative, but takes its substance
from the sum of many stories. Over time a process of selection takes
place, one anecdote is preserved and another rejected and forgotten.
Sometimes (as in the case of the First World War) an ironic tone is
adopted as the appropriate mode of telling, and words like disenchantment and disillusionment come to be used as though they were objective
and neutral terms for the soldiers' attitude toward the war's events, and
even of all wars. Story and way of telling converge, tone determining the
selection of events and events determining tone, until a complete,
coherent story emerges. We might call that emergent story 'collective
remembrance', if we insert the necessary qualifier vicarious; but myth is
a better, clearer term.
In this process of myth-making, personal narratives both share in the
creation and preserve it. Not all of them, to be sure: most narratives, of
any war, sit dustily on library shelves, unread partly because they are illwritten and dull, no doubt, but partly because they tell the wrong story,
because they don't conform to the myth. Those that are read tend to
confirm each other - Sassoon supports Graves supports Blunden supports Frederic Manning supports Guy Chapman; Caputo supports
O'Brien supports William Merritt supports Tobias Wolff.
We must believe that war narratives also confirm the memories of
men who fought but did not write about their wars. Confirm, but also
perhaps construct; for the order and meaning that written versions give
to the incoherence of war must operate on other memories, making
sense of the muddle of images that most men bring back from their
wars. So the stories that Sassoon and Graves tell shape and colour the
recollections of Private Smith, who never wrote a word about them. In
this sense, and only in this sense, personal narratives do create a kind of
collective memory in the minds of men who shared a common war. But
208
Samuel Hynes
in other minds, in other generations, they have a different existence, as a

complex shared myth of great imaginative power. You can see the power
of the First World War myth in the tone and particulars of novels and
plays written by authors who have no personal war-memories, but are
energized by other men's stories - novels like Pat Barker's Regeneration
trilogy and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, and plays like Frank McGuinness's Observe the sons of Ulster marching towards the Somme. These are
excellent, moving works, and convincing ones; but they are not memory,
and they don't draw on memory, except indirectly through the myth of
the war that they share.
I have been using 'personal narrative' here as the name of the general
category of war-stories written by men who were there, and experienced
directly what they wrote about. Within this category there are sub-sets,
and we ought to keep them distinct in our minds. Two principal
distinguishing elements occur in war-narratives, which vary inversely
with each other: call them immediacy and reflection. The nearer the act of
recording is to the events recorded, the greater the element of immediacy - the pure happening of sensory particularity. The further the
narrative is from its events, the less pure the happenings will be, and the
greater the element of reflection, which shifts the focus inwards, to
meaning and subject-response: no longer simply what happened, but
what did it mean? How did it affect me? How was I changed by it?
The most immediate of personal narratives are of course the letters
that men at war write. Their letters give us the purest, most unmediated
version of war, the least shaped, the least reflective. Days are recorded as
they come, in all their dailiness, the boredom along with the excitement,
the trivial with the historic. Letters generally are unweighted by judgment or retrospection; they simply report.
Diaries and journals are similar in their dailiness and particularity, or
almost so, but they differ from letters in one important aspect: in the
nature of their audience. The letter-writer speaks to someone else,
elsewhere, and shapes his record to that otherness; the diarist speaks to
himself. Self addresses self, writer and reader share the same knowledge
and the same feelings, and so the telling inevitably turns inwards and
becomes reflective.
The least immediate and most reflective personal narratives are those
for which I would reserve the term war-memoir - thus noting the roles of
time and memory in their making. These are the war-books that most of
us know, and the ones that collectively provide the fabric of our warmyths. They are distanced from their events by a decade or more,
sufficient distance for the narrator looking back on his soldiering self to
see almost another person, the young man who came out of innocence
209
into war and was changed by it, as seen and reflected on by the later self,
the man after the change.
All these kinds of war-narratives - the letters, the diaries, the
memories - are acts of commemoration, but the differences among
them of immediacy and reflection make them different acts of mind,
with different objects, as we can see by considering a few examples.
Take first, as typical, the Letters of an American airman, written by
Captain Hamilton Coolidge during the First World War. Coolidge was a
21-year-old Harvard undergraduate when he enlisted in 1917. He
trained as a pilot and was sent to France in July 1917, though he didn't
fly in combat until a year later. In the last few months of the war he shot
down five German planes. Two weeks short of the Armistice his plane
was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he was killed.
Coolidge seems, from his letters, an ordinary sort of young man,
bright and observant, and excited by his war. His letters are made of
observed immediate events in his life - the weather, a new plane, a funny
anecdote about prisoners, a trip to Paris - mixed up, in a dissonant way,
with descriptions of air fighting, like this passage in which he tells how,
with the help of another pilot, he scored his first victory:
We both shot at the Boche and a second later great hot, red flames burst out
from beneath his fuselage. I shall never forget the sensation of seeing a stream of
flaming tracer bullets from my guns sink into its body and almost instantly
flames bursting out as we dove at great speed through the air.2
That's what I mean by pure happening. War-letters give you that, but
dissonantly, mixed up with details of soldiers' ordinary lives that seem to
have nothing to do with the drama of actual killing. So, for example,
Frederick Keeling, an infantry sergeant on the Somme in 1916, describes how the troops, removed from the front line for a day, put on a
show for themselves, with comic turns and a clog-dancer, and adds: 'I
never laughed so much in all my life.'3 Such disharmonious particulars,
trenches and comic turns, bring us as close to the actual experience of
that war in that place as a latter-day reader can get. I'm touched and
surprised by that clog-dancer, a mile or so from death; but war is
touching and surprising.
Because war-letters were commonly published posthumously (as both
Coolidge's and Keeling's were) they are the most immediate and the
most fixed of literary acts of commemoration. In a sense they are
monuments, constructed by bereaved friends and relatives to memorial2
Letters of an American airman: being the war record of Capt. Hamilton Coolidge, U.S.A.
(Boston: privately printed, 1919), pp. 153-4.
Keeling letters & recollections, edited by E.T., with an introduction by H. G. Wells
(London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1918), p. 300.
210
Samuel Hynes
YL& the man who died. Because each man's life ended where the book
ends, there could be no retrospection in his telling, no later ironic
revision of his thoughts and acts, no disenchantment; his image stands
as unchanging as a tombstone. Yet each is a narrative of continuous
change, the flow of immediate particulars of war-experience in all their
dailiness. War-letters commemorate those two realities: the man who
died, and the changing stream of his experience of war. They do so
unreflectively, particular by particular.
I said that diaries and journals are like letters in their immediacy, but
different in their audience of self. This doesn't mean that all diaries and
journals are introspective and reflective (though in some cases they are);
but it does mean that the writer is free to record his feelings and
responses, unmodified to suit another auditor. Fear can be frankly
confessed, and exhilaration too; but I think the element that comes out
most clearly in these self-to-self narratives is the way in which war, seen
as it happens, mixes the ordinary and the strange, what is familiar with
what is unimaginable, and makes war-existence both like a man's
previous life, and altogether unlike any life he can imagine.
Here is a brief example from the First World War - from The war diary
of the Master of Belhaven, by Lt. Colonel the Hon. Ralph G. A.
Hamilton. Hamilton was one of the old breed of army officer, a Regular
and an Honourable; he was commanding an artillery brigade on the
Somme in the summer of 1916 when he recorded this visit to a frontline trench:
The heat was terrific and the smells simply too awful for words. The only thing I
can at all compare it to was the rhino that G. and I shot before leaving East
Africa, and that was mild in comparison to this ... In many places the men who
had been killed a week or ten days ago were lying in the bottom of the trench,
and one had to walk and crawl over them. Many had been buried by the shells,
and only their faces or hands or feet could be seen. They had been trampled into
the soft earth by the many reliefs who had passed along the trench since they
were killed. Many of the bodies were not complete; in one place a pair of legs
were lying on a path and no signs of the rest.4
Here are the war's ordinary dead - dismembered, buried, trampled by
their fellows, in a grotesque scene that reminds Hamilton of nothing
except a grotesque comparison, the dead rhino. Nothing in his Regular
Army experience could prepare him for the trench, or provide him with
comparisons.
Another example, this time from a classic diary of the Second World
War, James J. Fahey's Pacific War diary. Fahey was an ordinary enlisted
4
Lt. Col. the Hon. Ralph G. A. Hamilton, The war diary of the Master of Belhaven
(London: John Murray, 1924), pp. 226-7.
211
man of that war: working class (he had been a garbageman in Massachusetts), not very educated, not a man who thought much about the war
he was in. He joined the Navy in 1942 and served as a seaman on the
cruiser Montpelier in engagements at Guadalcanal, the Marianas, the
Philippines, and Okinawa.
Fahey's great virtue is that he put down everything that happened
indiscriminately: what he had for breakfast, the latest rumour, what a
kamikaze attack is like to a man on the deck. He does so without any
evident sense that one event is more important than another, or that he
is creating himself as he writes: everything is seen with a sharp but
innocent eye, everything is equally real and possible, because he sees it
happening. And so we get from him an essential truth of war - the
ordinariness of its extraordinary strangeness. Here is Fahey's entry for 9
July 1944. The Montpelier is cruising near Saipan, where the fighting for
the island is almost over:
After chow I took a shower and sat in the sun and got some tan. There is not
much doing so they let us get some rest. A body floated by on a stretcher, it was
all blown up and some kind of a cloth was over its head. You could see blond
hair sticking out. It was one of our Marines that was killed on Saipan. The
Doctor got in a whaleboat and took a look at it ... It is about 3 p.m. and I sit in
the sun with just my pants on, getting some tan. Some of the officers are doing
the same. I can see smoke coming from the northern tip of Saipan. You can see
the Japs jumping off the high cliffs to their death.5
A sailor sits on deck getting a tan, and in the distance people commit
suicide; it's the juxtaposition of such discordant details that give diarywars like Fahey's their most distinctive quality, the strangeness of warexperience.
Diaries and journals get that strangeness best because experience
there is not filtered and mediated by time, or by an audience beyond the
self. You might say that that strangeness is what these documents
commemorate; they exist to subvert the notion that war can be both
familiar and imaginable to persons who were not there.
Letters and diaries of soldiers record what is memorable as it
happens. The third kind of narrative - the memoir - records the
remembered war that persists in the mind through a lifetime. Shakespeare imagined such a memory in a veteran of Agincourt:
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day.
James J. Fahey, Pacific War diary 1942-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 187.
212
Samuel Hynes
That was no doubt true of Agincourt, and it has been true of battle
memories ever since. Elisha Stockwell was fifteen when he joined the
Wisconsin Volunteers in 1861, and eighty-one when he wrote his
recollections; John Harris fought in the Peninsula with Wellington in
1805, but didn't tell his story until forty years later; Alvin Kernan served
in the American Navy in the Second World War, and published his book
about his war in 1995.
Not all memoirs have waited so long to get written, but the best have
appeared well after the events they narrate. The First World War
memoirs that we still read came in a wave at the end of the 1920s, and
the best personal narratives of the Second World War have been even
longer in gestation, and are still being published. In these remembered
wars the time that separates events from writing about them is clearly an
important shaping factor. The experiences are those of a young self.
Young men at war feel life and death with an intensity that is beyond
their peacetime emotions; they know comradeship, a closeness to other
men that ordinary life doesn't often provide; they see friends die, and
they feel grief that is different from what they have known before, back
home where folks die naturally and mostly old; and they feel fear, and
the exhilaration of fear overcome. And by all these new experiences and
feelings they are changed.
It is their older selves, the selves on the other side of those deep
changes, who write the memoirs. They look back on themselves when
young as on another life, and the questions they ask of memory are
different from those a young man asks. The usual narrative questions
are posed: what happened there? What happened then? But behind
them are deeper questions: who was I then? What changed me? What
did I become? Courage is no longer the challenge - that question has
been answered; truth of being is what matters now. So William
Manchester, after thirty years of not remembering his life as a young
marine in the Pacific War, returned to the islands where he had fought
to rediscover it, and wrote Goodbye, darkness. 'This, then', he writes at
the end of his narrative, 'was the life I knew, where death sought me,
during which I was transformed from a cheeky youth to a troubled man
who, for over thirty years, repressed what he could not bear to
remember.'6 By then he had remembered, and had come to terms with
his memories.
To perceive the changes that war has made in a man requires the
passage of time and the establishment of distance from the remembered
self, and it is not surprising that most war memoirs come late, that
6
William Manchester, Goodbye, darkness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 398.
213
memory dawdles and delays. For most men, understanding comes

slowly; and imagination must wait upon memory to reveal itself. When
it does, it picks its favourites, who are usually not war's favourites.
Heroes are by and large no good for war memoirs; they stand too close
to the centre of the war's values, and whether they mean to or not they
act out the mottoes on the flags and the slogans on the posters. What
suits memory best, it seems, is a war life lived close to the action, but at
some distance from the values, lived by a man who is by nature or
circumstances an outsider, who can be a witness as well as a soldier.
Robert Graves was an untidy, undisciplined officer, Manchester went
into battle against orders, Tim O'Brien tried to go AWOL, Keith
Douglas left his behind-the-lines unit without permission in order to get
into the fighting (soldiers don't usually run away in that direction).
Memory also likes the man without medals: Graves had none, and
neither did Douglas, and they wrote two of the best modern war
memoirs. Sassoon seems an exception to this rule; he won a Military
Cross. Yes, but he threw it into the Mersey, and one might argue that by
the act he freed himself to write one of the great war memoirs.
Among memoirs, Sassoon's is something of an anomaly; it's the only
one I know of that appeared in three volumes, published under different
titles and at different dates: The memoirs of a fox-hunting man (1928),
Memoirs of an infantry officer (1930), and Sherston's progress (1936). The
three were later collected in one volume as The complete memoirs of
George Sherston (1937), but it is important to keep in mind their initial
separateness; for though the three together contain a single complete
narrative of one man's war, each volume is its own distinct act of
commemoration.
The memoirs of a fox-hunting man has nothing to do with war for threequarters of its length; it is simply a narrative of life in an idealized
English countryside, all fox-hunting and cricket and landscape. Why
begin a war-memoir with these pastoral pages? Because the book is
about more than Sassoon's youth; it is about a world that the war ended,
a vision of a dream-England before the war. That vision is an important
part of the English myth of the war: this England is what men fought for
- not their city slums or their suburban semi-attached houses, but rural
England, bucolic and unchanged, the England you get in this passage
from the book, in which young Sherston/Sassoon rides through the
countryside to a cricket match:
The air was Elysian with early summer and the shadows of steep white clouds
were chasing over the orchards and meadows; sunlight sparkled on green
hedgerows that had been drenched by early morning showers. As I was carried
past it all I was lazily aware through my dreaming and unobservant eyes that this
214
Samuel Hynes
was the sort of world I wanted. For it was my own countryside, and I loved it
with an intimate feeling, though all its associations were crude and incoherent. I
cannot think of it now without a sense of heartache.7
What Sassoon did, in the first three-quarters of his Fox-hunting man,

was to fix the relationship between this dream Edwardian country landscape and the war; he created a basic model for the nostalgia for pre-war
England that is so powerful an element in English war-memoirs. That's
one reason for the decade-long delay between Sassoon's experience and
the writing of it: nostalgia is the product of time.
But it isn't only that dream-England that Sassoon says goodbye to in
Fox-hunting man; there is also the traditional figure of a soldier that is
created slowly through the peacetime pages of the book, only to be
obliterated at the end, when real, modern war enters. This soldier-figure
is implied in Sassoon's title: fox-hunting men like him, well-born and
country-bred, with private incomes, good at field sports, and not too
brainy, were the pool from which the fashionable cavalry regiments had
always drawn their junior officers. When war was declared, young men
of this county class rushed to enlist, as Sassoon did, and rode off to war,
usually on their own horses. By the end of the first year of war most of
them were dead, and those who survived had been dismounted, to serve
as infantrymen, as Sassoon did. So there is this other goodbye in
Sassoon's first volume: goodbye to romantic war, goodbye to cavalry
charges and lances and sabres and plumes waving, goodbye to the old
officer caste of country gentlemen at arms.
Fox-hunting man is primarily a book of nostalgia, a long look back
across the chasm of the war years to an earlier England that at that
distance seemed simpler, happier, and more stable than the troubled
England of the postwar years. If it is an act of commemoration, it is that
lost Edwardian world that it commemorates and not the war. War enters
in the last pages, in which Sassoon becomes an infantry officer and
reaches the western front, but it functions less as a war-narrative than as
a manifestation of how history burst upon a dream of England and
swept it away forever.
Sassoon's second volume, Memoirs of an infantry officer, is probably
the most famous English narrative of the war, the one that has most
influenced the shaping of the myth of the war that we all share. Yet the
story it tells is not really representative of what that war was like for most
ordinary fighting men who were there.
Consider this point: Infantry officer is set on the western front during
Sassoon's first two tours of duty there, and in England during the
7
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a fox-hunting Man (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928),
pp. 94-5.
215
months following the second tour: that is, from April 1916 to July 1917.
Yet it is not shaped around the battles fought then (which included the
Somme offensive), but around three individual acts of remarkable
courage that might have occurred anywhere.
Look at the first two actions for a moment. The occasion of the first,
in May 1916, was an order that troops of Sassoon's regiment were to
attack the German trenches opposite them. Sassoon was not in the
party, but when the raid failed and the survivors returned, Sassoon went
out into no man's land on his own to find a wounded man. He did find
him, and brought him back, but by the time they reached their own
trench he was dead. For this act Sassoon got his Military Cross.
The second action was another raid, this time on the fourth night of
the Somme battle. Sassoon was sent forward with a few men to occupy a
captured trench and to attack the retreating enemy with grenades. When
the second part of the order, the bombing attack, was rescinded, he sent
his men back but went forward alone, into the next German trench, in
time to see the German troops fleeing. Then he returned to his own
unit. For this act he was severely reprimanded by his colonel.
Anyone would call these two acts courageous, and in one case the
army officially agreed. But think what is implied by the two episodes.
Both were done in direct disobedience of orders, and neither accomplished anything. Furthermore, neither was a part of any collective
military action; there is no visible British army in either story, and no
opposing enemy. Nobody kills anybody, or captures any enemy position,
and the war-situation is not altered in any way.
This point becomes clearer and more emphatic if you set Sassoon's
personal narratives of his raids against his battalion's official war-diary,
the day-to-day reports of the battalion's activities. Here is the diary for
25 May 1916:
Battalion in the line. Raid on KIEL TRENCH by 25 men under Lieut. N.
Stansfield; detailed account in Appendix 'A' (Battalion Orders 29/5/16).8
If you consult the Battalion Orders referred to, you find a report that
more or less confirms Sassoon's version up to the point at which he
crawled out to search for the wounded man; that incident is simply not
mentioned, and Sassoon's name nowhere appears. Yet this is the act for
which he won his Military Cross.
The war-diary for the 5 July raid is similar, though more detailed:
Reserve Bombers and C Company [Sassoon's] ordered to take the right half of
QUADRANGLE TRENCH. Bombers to force their way down the saps
8
War diary, 1st Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers: Public Record Office, Kew (WO 95/
1665).
216
Samuel Hynes
running to QUADRANGLE SUPPORT, to seize the junction of these saps and

to establish a bombing post there.
And 'Later':
Order for C Company to move forward cancelled. Royal Irish report having
failed to gain WOOD TRENCH. Orders issued to try and bomb along towards
WOOD TRENCH and assist R. I. ... It was however found that between
QUADRANGLE TRENCH & WOOD TRENCH a gap of 60 or 70 yards
existed across the Railway, which was swept by M.G. fire. A patrol did get
across but daylight was now coming on and the Royal Irish withdrew.9
Sassoon must have been that 'patrol'; but he is not named.
The battalion war diaries are the army's war-stories: battalions receive
orders, companies send out patrols, men act in groups and succeed or
fail in groups. By comparison, Sassoon's stories aren't acts of war at all:
they are simply adventures, which the army rightly ignores, because they
had no military consequences. Yet these acts are central episodes in a
narrative that is a classic act of commemoration. We must ask, then,
what exactly they commemorate. It seems clear that they commemorate
the traditional romantic idea of personal military courage, an idea that is
embodied in a long literature of war-stories from Homer to Henty. It
commemorates the brave individual rush into danger, in which the
solitary soldier is an agent in his own war, and it does so because the
modern mass-war that Sassoon fought in had made that kind of
individual gesture obsolete and irrelevant, as dead as Horatius at the
bridge. Sassoon's adventures are heroic and pointless; they belong to a
lost, idealized past, like the dream of England. That's the point.
In making his war personal and heroic, Sassoon made it recognizable
to readers who knew war only in its literary forms. Other personal
narratives of modern war would defamiliarize it; Sassoon made it
familiar. A reader could imagine himself acting as Sassoon acted, being
romantic out there in no man's land, as he could imagine acting like
other heroes in books. Sassoon, you might say, had turned the western
front into literature.
The third of Sassoon's centred gestures seems at first to have nothing
to do with courage, to be in fact the opposite. In 1917 Sassoon, home on
sick leave, wrote a letter to his commanding offer in which he resigned
from the war. The letter begins like this:
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority,
because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have
the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of
soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and
liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest... I have seen and
9
War diary, same references.
217
endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong
these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.10
He was quitting the war: not deserting - soldiers have always done that but declining to participate in it any further, because it had gone wrong.
And to make his defiance even more wilful he sent copies of his letter to
the newspapers, where it was widely publicized.
In his letter Sassoon claimed for himself the name of soldier; but that
is obviously not the case. A soldier doesn't walk out on a war, or act in
wilful defiance of authority, nor does he have a private conscience to tell
him when to obey orders. No, Sassoon was being what he had always
been, a foolhardy, self-dramatizing individual, like the fox-hunter who
rushes at the tallest hedges to see if he can jump them. Such acts require
courage of a sort, but not a soldier's sort. That letter of protest and
resignation, written in war-time and chancing a court-martial and even a
firing squad, was as much an example of that fox-hunter's courage as the
two night raids: as courageous, as personal, and as pointless. For readers
who were appalled by the idea of modern war, it was another familiarizing gesture, something they might do (with a bit more courage).
What does the letter commemorate, exactly? Not a new-found opposition to war in general; Sassoon didn't become a pacifist in 1917 (he
eventually returned to the western front and was wounded once more
before his personal war ended). I think, rather, that it commemorates
the spirit in which Englishmen went to war in 1914, a spirit that has
connections with the dream-England of Fox-hunting man. That spirit
was gone, destroyed by the realities of trench warfare and soldiers'
disillusionment with their leaders at home, and Sassoon's letter is a sort
of elegy for it. Like the stories of the two raids, the letter episode is a
monument to a lost ideal of war, as Fox-hunting man is a monument to a
lost ideal of England. In both books the primary mood is nostalgia - for
the lost Good Place, the lost Good War.
Sherston's progress, the last book in Sassoon's trilogy, is the shortest,
the least interesting, and the least shaped - less like a literary man's
memoir than like a diary, which in fact it mostly is, transcribed directly
from the war-diary that Sassoon kept. It does, however, have one
interesting passage, the coda-like final chapter. At this point, though the
war is still going on, Sassoon's personal war is over; he has been
wounded in the head (by one of his own men), and is back in England
convalescing. In the book's last pages he lies in a hospital bed and thinks
about the exactions that the war machine has inflicted on him, what he
achieved in it, and what is left. 'My war had stopped', he writes,
10
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an infantry officer (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), p. 308.
218
Samuel Hynes
but its after effects were still with me ... I saw myself as one who had achieved
nothing except an idiotic anti-climax, and my mind worked itself into a tantrum
of self-disparagement. Why hadn't I stayed in France where I could at least
escape from the war by being in it? Out there I had never despised my existence
as I did now.11
We must see this passage as a conclusion to the entire trilogy, I think, the
last of the book's annihilations of self. The war annihilated the foxhunting man, the turn that the war took away from idealism annihilated
the believing infantry officer, and now the end of personal war has
annihilated whatever was left. Removed from the war that he no longer
believed in, Sassoon is nothing, an emptiness where a self should be. To
live, he will have to create a new self and a new life; but how is he to do
that when war has left him with no conviction about anything 'except
that the war was a dirty trick which had been played on me and my
generation'?12
The tone of that coda, with its sense of disillusionment and loss of
self, is specific to the First World War, but the more general point is not:
war annihilates the past selves of young men, changes them so utterly
from youths into soldiers that a return to a past life is impossible; and
then, at the end, it dumps them into the strange new disorder that is
peace, to construct new lives. If Sherston's progress is an act of commemoration, what it commemorates is not the end of the war, but the power
war has to empty and transform the lives of the men who endure it and
survive.
The complete memoirs of George Sherston is the most comprehensive of
First World War memoirs - the most inclusive in its themes, the most
self-aware, the most consciously constructed. But its principal elements
are visible in many other memoirs: the nostalgia for the lost past, the will
to be an agent in one's own personal war, the sense of irreversible
change in self and the self's world. You'll find those elements in the
narratives of many of the major memoirists, in Graves and Chapman
and T E. Lawrence in the First World War, in Manchester and Eric
Lomax and Farley Mowat in the Second, in Caputo and O'Brien in
Vietnam. They are present in those memoirs, as they are not in letters
and diaries, because memory delays; these are the elements of retrospection and reflection, of war remembered as another time.
If we consider personal narratives of war as a general category, taking
all together the letters, the diaries and journals and the memoirs, what
conclusions can we justifiably reach about their common characteristics?
We can say that each example tells the story of one man in actions
11
12
Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston's progress (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), p. 277.
Ibid. p. 278.
219
involving many, and that each speaks in its own individual voice, which
is not the voice of history, nor of collective memory. We might add that
the span of time in a narrative is not historical either, but personal, that
few personal narratives begin when a war begins and end when it ends,
but tell only that part of the whole story that is a man's personal war,
and show no interest in the military idea of closure in victory or defeat.
Indeed, in personal narrative The War, as a global historical reality,
scarcely exists; only men exist, and act, and sometimes die, and when
they do, they do so personally.
It is important that in our defining of the term we also give attention
to what personal narratives are not. They are not usually narratives of
trauma experienced and healed (or not healed). The element of wartrauma varies greatly from war to war; some narratives of the First
World War contain it (Graves's Goodbye to all that is an obvious
example), and Vietnam War narratives even more commonly (see Ron
Kovic's Bom on the fourth of July, and Lewis B. Puller's Fortunate son).
But Second World War narratives are almost entirely free of it, except
for some prisoner-of-war narratives, and then only when the captors are
Japanese.
Personal narratives are not victims' stories either; no man with a
weapon in his hand can be entirely a victim, and the narratives show that
men did not think of themselves as such. Every narrator believes himself
to have been to some degree an agent in his personal war, and agents
aren't victims. The victim-view is a later reaction to wars by persons
who weren't there; understandable and humane, but wrong. Nor are
personal narratives horror stories. Narratives will often contain episodes
that to the chair-borne reader sound horrible, but the man on the scene
is likely to respond to the unimaginable violence and death he sees not
with horror, but with astonishment.
Most important, personal narratives are almost never polemically
anti-war. Readers, being themselves against war, would like the narratives they read to support their convictions. But they don't, as a whole.
Both Sassoon and Graves specifically deny that their writing is directed
against war as an institution. And so do others. Indeed, many narratives
testify to the satisfactions of military life during war - the comradeship,
the excitement, the satisfactions in complex physical skills, the pride
men feel in hardships shared and endured. Memoir after memoir ends:
'I wouldn't have missed it.' Even when a man expresses disillusionment
with his own war, as Sassoon did at the end of Shertson's progress, he
doesn't generalize to all wars. We must accept as fact that men on the
whole are glad they went to war; their narratives tell us that.
What, then, do personal narratives commemorate, that they should be
220
Samuel Hynes
included in a book on war and remembrance? The best way to put it, I
think, is to say that each narrative among the thousands that exist of
modern wars, commemorates one life lived in the mass action of a
modern war, that each is a monument of a kind to that one soldier, or
sailor, or pilot, and to no one else, and that by existing they refute and
subvert the collective story of war that is military history. Not one of
these men was necessary to the war he fought, not one affected the
winning or losing; individually they were irrelevant. But they were there;
they bear witness to their human particularity, and to their particular
visions.
Collectively these narratives contribute, by a sifting process that is
gradual and probably not conscious, to the emerging, evolving story of
their wars, a story that is neither history nor memory, but myth - a
compound war-story that gives meaning and coherence to the incoherences of war-in-its-details, which is what each narrative separately tells.
Are they necessary, these personal narratives? To us, probably not: I
can see no social or psychological necessity for individuals or societies to
possess either myths of their past wars or the particular accounts from
which such myths are made. Those myths, however bloody and horrible,
have no apparent restraining power over nations or peoples when the
next war comes; young men will go to war, regardless. Are they
necessary to them, the veterans of past wars? Perhaps yes: for them these
narratives will re-constitute memory, and stand as monuments to shared
experience, bringing their wars back down out of generalization of
collective action into the narrow realm of human acts, where individuals
live and die. Perhaps they constitute a kind of dialogue among the only
readers who can connect narratives to actual memory, and so understand what personal narratives really mean - that is, the men who were
there, The rest of us will read them, for our various reasons: because war
interests us, because we are curious about extreme experiences, because
we weren't there. And if we do, we will no doubt construct in our minds
images that will be in a sense our memorials to those wars we didn't
fight. But they won't be memory; we can't construct that.
11
Against consolation: Walter Benjamin and

the refusal to mourn
Martin Jay
No student of the mysteries of collective memory can fail to acknowledge that those who do the remembering stubbornly remain individuals
whose minds resist inclusion in a homogenous group consciousness.
The dialectic of exterior, public commemoration of the past and its
interior, private traces refuses easy reconciliation. It is thus fitting that a
book on the ways in which cultures struggle to remember and memorialize concludes with a chapter focusing on a single figure, whose life
and work was devoted in large measure to an exploration of the ways in
which the past haunted the present, as well as offered a possible resource
for the future.
What makes the choice of this specific individual especially appropriate is that his thoughts on the modalities of memory were stimulated
by the violent trauma of the First World War, the cataclysmic event
whose rupturing of the continuity with the world that preceded it
brought to a head the 'memory crisis' that began in the nineteenth
century.1 Moreover, while a fiercely idiosyncratic thinker, 'd I'ecart de
tous les courants', as his friend Theodor W Adorno called him,2 Walter
Benjamin arrived at insights into the dialectic of memory and trauma
that gradually found a receptive audience. They have, in fact, come to
be extraordinarily influential on many current considerations of these
highly vexed themes. Our collective memory of the modern era, it can
be said with only slight exaggeration, has increasingly been shaped by
the unique ruminations of this isolated intellectual.
In August, 1914, Walter Benjamin, along with many other 22-year-old
German men, volunteered for the Kaiser's army. He acted, however,
according to his friend Gershom Scholem, 'not out of enthusiasm for
the war but to anticipate the ineluctable conscription in a way that
would have permitted him to remain among friends and like-minded
1
Richard Terdiman, Present past: modernity and the memory crisis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1993).
Theodor W. Adorno, Uber Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 96.
221
222
Martin Jay
people'.3 Benjamin was, as it happened, refused, and when it came the

turn of his age-group to be drafted that fall, he faked palsy and was able
to postpone induction until another order arrived to report in January
1917. Again he was able to avoid conscription by trickery, undergoing
hypnosis to simulate the symptoms of sciatica.4 Shortly thereafter,
Benjamin left Germany for Berne, Switzerland with the hypnotist, who
was also his new wife, Dora Kellner. This was Benjamin's first emigration from his native country in a period of crisis, but not his last. After
the Armistice, following a short stay in Austria, the Benjamins returned
to Berlin in March 1919, where he spent the turbulent years of the
Weimar Republic until forced to flee to Paris in 1933.
Walter Benjamin was thus spared the glory and misery of the Fronterlebnis, the community of the trenches that so powerfully marked his
generation for the rest of their lives, if they were lucky enough, that is, to
survive it. But he did not, in fact, escape the violence caused by the war.
Indeed, it might be said to have sought him out immediately after the
hostilities were declared. On 8 August 1914, two of his friends, the 19year-old poet Friedrich (Fritz) Heinle, to whom he was passionately
devoted, and Heinle's lover, Frederika (Rika) Seligson, the sister of one
of Benjamin's closest comrades in the Youth Movement, Carla Seligson,
committed suicide together in Berlin. Their act, carried out by turning
on the gas, was designed as a dramatic protest against the war, a war in
which lethal gas was, as we know, to take many more victims. Benjamin
learned of the news when he was awakened by an express letter from
Heinle with the grim message 'You will find us lying in the Meeting
House.'5 The place of their deaths was not chosen accidentally; 'the
Meeting House' (Sprechsaal) was the apartment Benjamin had rented as
a 'debating chamber' for his faction of the Movement.
All accounts concur that Benjamin was inconsolable for months, and
indeed seems never to have fully recovered from the loss of Heinle, to
whom he could only bear to refer in later years as 'my friend'.6
3
4
5
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The story of a friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken, 1981), p. 12. Benjamin himself later wrote that he joined 'without a
spark of war fever in my heart'. Gesammelte Schriften, 12 vols. (Frankfurt am Main,
1980), VI, p. 481.
Ibid. p. 35.
Walter Benjamin, 'A Berlin chronicle', Reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical
writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, 1978), p. 18.
Scholem, Walter Benjamin, p. 11. For accounts of the impact of his death, see John
McCole, Walter Benjamin and the antinomies of tradition (Ithaca N. Y: Cornell University
Press, 1993), p. 54, and Hans Puttnies and Gary Smith, Benjaminia (Giessen: Anabas,
1991), p. 18. The fullest account of their friendship can be found in Rolf Tiedmann's
Nachwort to Benjamin, Sonette (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986). They had, in fact, only
met in the spring of 1913 and had gone through a period of some estrangement the
following winter, but clearly the tie was strong.
Against consolation: Walter Benjamin and the refusal to mourn
223
According to Pierre Missac, who came to know Benjamin in 1937, he

was able to overcome his shame at surviving only by 'mythologizing the
lost friendship'.7 In the quarter-century that followed the initial trauma,
ended only by his own suicide in 1940, Benjamin composed seventythree unpublished sonnets, discovered in the Bibliotheque nationale in
1981. Some fifty-two of these he arranged in a cycle dedicated to
Heinle, prefaced by a motto from Holderlin's Patmos, which began:
'Wenn aber abstirbt alsdenn/ An dem am meisten/ Die Schonheit hing.'8
His will, which was discovered in 1966, revealed that 'my entire estate
contains in addition to my own writings primarily the works of the
brothers Fritz and Wolf Heinle', the latter having also been a poet and
friend, who died prematurely in 1923 at the age of twenty-four.9 Until
the end, Benjamin had hoped to get his friend's own poetry published, a
desire that was to remain unfulfilled until many years later.10
Although several commentators have shown that Benjamin's disillusionment with the Youth Movement began well before the war, the
suicides intensified and brought to a climax his disgust for the devil's
pact he saw between the Movement's alleged idealism, its celebration of
pure Geist, and its patriotic defence of the state.11 With the death of the
adolescent Heinle came the end of Benjamin's faith in the redemptive
mission of youth itself, although he remained stubbornly wedded to its
ideals. In March 1915 he abruptly broke with his mentor in the Youth
Movement, Gustav Wyneken, in a harsh letter that detailed his feelings
of betrayal.12 During the rest of the war, Benjamin distanced himself
from others who defended it, such as Martin Buber, and brutally
dropped old friends from the Youth Movement, such as Herbert
Belmore.13 Instead, he gravitated towards like-minded critics of the
7
8
9
10
1:
12
13
Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin's passages, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), p. 4.
Benjamin, Sonette, p. 6.
The will is cited in Scholem, Walter Benjamin, p. 187.
Werner Kraft saw them into print in Akzente, 31 (1984). See his accompanying essay,
'Friedrich C. Heinle', as well as his earlier piece, 'Uber einen verschollenen Dichter', in
Neue Rundschau, 78 (1967).
Tiedemann writes, 'Not only in his life but in his work was the war a caesura, but an
even stronger one was the suicide of Heinle caused by it' (p. 117). For accounts, see
Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: an aesthetic of redemption (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), chapter 1; McCole, Walter Benjamin and the antinomies of
tradition, chapter 1. Before the war Benjamin had defended Heinle to Wyneken against
the claim of Georges Barbizon that he was conspiring to take over the Youth Movement
journal Der Anfang. See the letter of 4 April 1914 to Wyneken in Benjamin, Gesammelte
Briefe, vol. I, 1910-1918, ed. Christoph Godde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1995), p. 203.
Benjamin to Gustav Wyneken, 9 March 1915, in Benjamin, Briefe, 2vols.,ed. Gershom
Scholem and Theodor W Adorno (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), vol. I, pp. 120-1.
HerbertW. Belmore, 'Walter Benjamin', German Life and Letters, 15 (1962).
224
Martin Jay
conflict, although never himself actively engaging in anti-war agitation,

and wrote increasingly apocalyptic treatises on the crisis of Western
culture. His estrangement from the German university community,
which reached its climax with the now notorious rejection of his
Habilitationsschrift at the University of Frankfurt in 1925, began with his
disgust at the spectacle of so many distinguished professors enthusiastically supporting the so-called 'ideas of 1914'.14 The empty bombast of
their chauvinist rhetoric hastened his abandonment of traditional
notions of linguistic communication, as well as whatever faith he may
have had left in the German Jewish fetish of Kultur and Bildung.15
It has long been recognized in the extensive scholarship on Benjamin
that the war had a decisive effect on all his later work. As one
commentator typically put it, 'it is the First World War which provides
the traumatic background to Benjamin's culture theory, Fascism its
ultimate context'.16 In particular, it has been acknowledged as a
powerful stimulus to his remarkable thoughts on the themes of experience and remembrance, which were to be so crucial a part of his
idiosyncratic legacy. One of the most frequently cited passages in his
work, from his 1936 essay 'The storyteller', is often cited to show its
relevance. It reads:
With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not
halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned
from the battlefield grown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable
experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was
anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing
remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more
thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience
by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by
those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar
now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained
unchanged but the clouds, and beneath those clouds, in a field of force of
destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.17
14
15
16
17
For a discussion, see Julian Roberts, Walter Benjamin (London: Macmillan, 1983),
p. 38.
For a discussion of the impact of the war on Benjamin's theory of language, see Anson
Rabinbach, 'Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and modern
German Jewish Messianism', New German Critique, 34 (Winter 1985). He argues that
'On language as such and on the language of man', of 1916 'must be read between the
lines as an esoteric response to Buber's pro-war and pro-German position' (p. 105).
For a discussion of Benjamin in the context of a generational revolt against the German
Jewish fetish of Kultur, see Steven E. Aschheim, 'German Jews beyond Bildung and
liberalism: the radical Jewish revival in the Weimar Republic', in his Culture and
Catastrophe (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
Peter Osborne, The politics of time: modernity and the avant-garde (London: Verso,
1995), p. 227.
Walter Benjamin, 'The storyteller: reflections on the work of Nikolai Leskov',
225
The modern crisis of experience, or more precisely of the integrated,

narratively meaningful variety known as Erfahrung as opposed to mere
discontinuous, lived experience or Erlebnis, was thus brought to a head,
Benjamin tells us, by the war and its aftermath. Despite the efforts by
celebrants of the Fronterlebnis such as Ernst Junger to recapture its
alleged communal solidarity, Benjamin knew that the technologically
manufactured slaughter of the Western Front was anything but an 'inner
experience' worth re-enacting in peacetime. In his trenchant 1930
review of the collection edited by Junger entitled War and warrior, he
ferociously denounced the aestheticization of violence and glorification
of the 'fascist class warrior' he saw lurking behind this new cult of
'eternal' war.18 There could be nothing 'beautiful' about such carnage.
These aspects of Benjamin's response to the war are well known.
What is perhaps less widely appreciated and will thus be the focus of
what follows is the fact that Benjamin, never a straightforward pacifist
hostile to all violence,19 also steadfastly defied all attempts to heal the
wounds caused by the war. However much he may have lamented, at
least in certain of his moods, the lost experience underlying the storyteller's craft, Benjamin resisted short-circuiting the process of recovering
the conditions that allowed it to occur - or more precisely, creating the
new ones that might allow it to reappear. He refused, that is, to seek
some sort of new symbolic equilibrium through a process of collective
mourning that would successfully 'work through' the grief. Scornfully
rejecting the ways in which culture can function to cushion the blows of
trauma,20 he wanted to compel his readers to face squarely what had
happened and confront its deepest sources rather than let the wounds
18
19
20
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1968), p. 84.
Walter Benjamin, 'Theories of German Fascism: on the collection of essays War and
warrior, edited by Ernst Junger', New German Critique, 17 (Spring 1979), pp. 1 2 0 - 8 .
See in particular, his controversial essay 'Critique of violence', in Reflections. According
to Irving Wohlfahrt, 'Benjamin saw in pacifism no alternative to the cult of war but only
its mirror image'. 'No-man's-land. On Walter Benjamin's "destructive character"',
Diacritics, 8 (June 1978), p. 55.
According to Kai Erikson, 'Traumatized people often come to feel that they have lost
an important measure of control over the circumstances of their own lives and are thus
very vulnerable. T h a t is easy to understand. But they also come to feel that they have
lost a natural immunity to misfortune and that something awful is almost bound to
happen. One of the crucial tasks of culture, let's say, is to help people camouflage the
actual risks of the world around them - to help them edit reality in such a way that it
seems manageable, to help them edit it in such a way that the dangers pressing in on
them from all sides are screened out of their line of vision as they go about their
everyday rounds.' 'Notes on trauma and community', in Trauma: explorations in
memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 194.
Benjamin's disdain for culture as a means of camouflage was apparent in all of his
subsequent work.
226
Martin Jay
scar over. Rather than rebuilding the psychological 'protective shield'

{Reizschutz) that Freud saw as penetrated by trauma, he laboured to
keep it lowered so that the pain would not be numbed. For the ultimate
source of the pain was not merely the war itself. As Kevin Newmark has
noted,
Benjamin seems, ultimately, to generalize Freud's hypothesis - produced in
response to the traumas of World War I - about the destabilizing and repetitive
memory-traces left in accident victims into a global economy of modern life.
And in so doing, he gives himself the means of repeatedly bemoaning the
traumatic loss of 'experience' entailed for the subject when the mode of all
possible experience is recognized as a recurrent strategy of defense against the
'inhospitable, blinding age of large-scale industrialism.'21
This generalization was evident, inter alia, in his influential discussion

of Baudelaire's response to the shocks of modern life. The poet's lyric
parrying of distressful stimuli, he argued, was in the service of preventing them from becoming truly traumatic, keeping them, that is, at
the level of unreflected episodes with no long-term effect on the mind,
which failed to register them beyond the moment of impact.22 Although
he understood the reasons for doing so, Benjamin warned explicitly
against such defensiveness, which was of a piece with other techniques
of anaesthesia developed in the nineteenth century to dull the pain of
modern life.23 Shock-parrying purchases its fragile peace, he claimed, at
the cost of a deeper understanding of the sources of the shocks, which
might ultimately lead to changing them.24 Shocks, in short, must be
allowed to develop into fully-fledged traumas, for reasons that will be
clarified later.
In so arguing, Benjamin was profoundly at odds not only with the
nineteenth-century culture of anaesthesia, but also with the postwar,
international 'culture of commemoration' that, as George Mosse,
Annette Becker, and Jay Winter have recently shown, desperately drew
on all the resources of tradition and the sacred it could muster to
21
22
23
24
Kevin Newmark, 'Traumatic poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the shock of laughter', in
Caruth (ed.), Trauma, pp. 2 3 8 - 9 .
Benjamin, ' O n some motifs in Baudelaire', in Illuminations, p. 162f.
O n the issue of anaesthesia and Benjamin, see Susan Buck-Morss, 'Aesthetics and
anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's artwork essay', October, 62 (Fall 1992).
For a suggestive discussion of the distinction between shock and trauma, see Hal
Foster, 'What is neo about the neo-avant-garde?', October, 70 (Fall 1994). H e stresses
the delayed temporality in the trauma, which is 'a complex relay of reconstructed past
and anticipated future - in short, a deferred action that throws over any simple scheme
of before and after, cause and effect, origin and repetition'. T h e avant-garde, h e goes
on, was traumatic precisely in this sense: 'a hole in the symbolic order of its time that is
not prepared for it, that cannot receive it, at least not immediately, at least not without
structural change' (p. 30). Benjamin seems to have been anxious to resist symbolic
recuperation of trauma for the same reason.
227
provide meaning and consolation for the survivors. 25 Rejecting, for

example, the cult of nature that led to the construction of Heldenhaine
(heroes groves) of oaks and boulders in the German forests, Benjamin
wrote:
It should be said as bitterly as possible: in the face of this 'landscape of total
mobilization' the German feeling for nature has had an undreamed-of upsurge
. . . Etching the landscape with naming banners and trenches, technology
wanted to recreate the heroic features of German Idealism. It went astray. What
is considered heroic were the features of Hippocrates, the features of death.
Deeply imbued with its own depravity, technology gave shape to the apocalyptic
face of nature and reduced nature to silence - even though this technology had
the power to give nature its voice.26
No pseudo-romantic simulation of pastoral tranquillity in cemeteries

that were disguised as bucolic landscapes could undo the damage. No
ceremonies of reintegration into a community that was already deeply
divided before the war could suture the wounds.
The same impulse informed Benjamin's celebrated defence of allegory
in Origin of German tragic drama, which has been recognized by Susan
Buck-Morss as 'a response to the horrifying destructiveness of World
War I'. 27 Understood as a dialectic of unmediated extremes, opposed to
the mediating power of symbolism, allegory refused to sublimate and
transfigure a blasted landscape like that of the war into a locus of beauty,
a forest of symbolic correspondences.28 'Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed
in the light of redemption', Benjamin argued, 'in allegory the observer is
confronted with the fades hippocratica [death's head] of history as a
25
26
27
28
G e o r g e L . M o s s e , Fallen soldiers: reshaping the memory of the world wars ( N e w York:

Oxford University Press, 1990); Annette Becker, La guerre et la foi: De la mort a la
memoire, 19141930 (Paris: A. Cohn, 1994), and Jay Winter, Sites of memory, sites of
mourning: The Great War in European cultural history (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1 9 9 5 ) . H e was n o t , t o b e sure, t h e only critic of this c u l t u r e of c o m m e m o r a t i o n .
See, for example, t h e c h a p t e r o n ' A n t i - m o n u m e n t s ' , in S a m u e l H y n e s , A war imagined:
the First World War and English culture ( N e w York: A t h e n e u m , 1 9 9 0 ) , w h i c h discusses
figures like t h e journalists C . E. M o n t a g u e a n d Philip G i b b s a n d t h e p a i n t e r Paul N a s h .
Benjamin, ' T h e o r i e s of G e r m a n F a s c i s m ' , p . 1 2 6 .
Susan B u c k - M o r s s , The dialectics of seeing ( C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . : M I T Press, 1 9 8 9 ) ,
p . 1 7 8 . M c C o l e notes t h a t ' b e h i n d t h e s t u d y of allegory, in t u r n , is t h e p r o l o g u e t o
" T h e life of s t u d e n t s " written in t h e first m o n t h s of t h e war'. Walter Benjamin and the
Antinomies of tradition, p . 2 6 5 . H e discusses this apocalyptic a n d decisionist text o n
p p . 63f.
A c c o r d i n g t o M c C o l e , ' T h e desire t o u n m a s k t h e official m o n u m e n t s t o progress, t h e
stabilized totalities a n d transfigured a p p e a r a n c e s of t h e d o m i n a n t culture, b y casting
t h e m in t h e light of the petrified, primordial l a n d s c a p e created o n t h e battlefields of t h e
w a r - t h a t gave Benjamin his eye for t h e c o h e r e n c e of t h e allegorical way of seeing'
{Walter Benjamin and the antinomies of tradition, p. 139). I would emend this claim only
slightly to include the monuments to the war dead produced by the dominant culture
after 1918.
228
Martin Jay
petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the

very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed
in a face - or rather in a death's head.'29
Benjamin's saturnine attraction to Trauerspiel, the endless, repetitive
'play' of mourning (or more precisely, melancholy), as opposed to
Trauerarbeit, the allegedly 'healthy' 'working through' of grief, was,
however, more than a response to the war experience in general. It was,
I want to argue, specifically linked to his reluctance to close the books
on his friends' anti-war suicides.30 As he argued in the case of another
suicide, that of the innocent Ottilie in Goethe's Elective affinities, the
work to which Benjamin devoted a remarkable study in 1922,31 making
sense of such acts in terms of sacrifice, atonement, and reconciliation
could only reinforce the evil power of mythic fatalism (and the myth-like
social compulsions of bourgeois society).
To understand Benjamin's uncompromising resistance to both the
cult of the Fronterlebnis and the culture of commemoration, including its
pseudo-pastoral naturalism, it is thus necessary to recall the precise
nature of the trauma that he personally suffered in the war. For the
suicides of two teenagers vainly protesting the outbreak of hostilities
cannot have had the same meaning as the deaths of the soldiers who
were assumed to have gallantly fought for their country. Although both
could be made intelligible, even ennobled, through a rhetoric of sacrifice, in the case of the former, the cause could be construed as even
more of a failure than in that of the latter. It certainly was one little
honoured in the inter-war era. Benjamin's bitterness is evident in the
autobiographical 'Berlin chronicle' he composed in 1932, in which he
wrote of the obstacles he experienced in attempting to lay Fritz Heinle
and Rika Seligson to rest: 'Even the graveyard demonstrated the bound29
30
31
Benjamin, The origin of baroque tragic drama, trans. J o h n O s b o r n e ( L o n d o n : Verso,

1 9 7 7 ) , p . 166.
F o r a discussion of t h e distinction b e t w e e n Trauerspiel a n d Trauerarbeit, see Philippe
L a c o u e - L a b a r t h e , Typography: mimesis, philosophy, politics, ed. C h r i s t o p h e r Fynsk,
introduction by Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989),

p. 234. The same preference for a kind of play that resisted closure was evident in the
scripts for Benjamin's radio plays of the 1930s. 'What is significant', according to
Jeffrey Mehlman, 'is the author's insistence on repetition {Wiederholung) in opposition
to imitation {Nachahmung) as the grounding virtue of play. For imitation (of parents) is
the stuff of narcissism, the subjectivist psychologizing that Benjamin seems intent on
keeping at bay. Whereas repetition, however oriented toward mastery, retains its
traumatic or catastrophic valence to the end.' Walter Benjamin for children: an essay on
his radio years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 5.
Benjamin, 'Goethes Wahlverwandschaften', Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, eds. Rolf
Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). At times,
to be sure, Benjamin had a more nuanced attitude towards myth, as a stage through
which culture must pass before genuine Erfahrung could be achieved. See Winfried
Menninghaus, 'Walter Benjamin's theory of myth', in Smith, On Walter Benjamin.
229
aries set by the city to all that filled our hearts: it was impossible to
procure for the pair who had died together graves in one and the same
cemetery.'32
But rather than remaining a prisoner of his resentment, Benjamin
ultimately made a virtue out of that failure, or at least turned it into a
warning against the premature, purely aesthetic smoothing over of real
contradictions. It was this intransigence that saved him, however close
he may seem to have come, from wallowing in the self-pitying 'left-wing
melancholy' of the homeless Weimar intellectuals, as well as from the
seductive nostrums offered by those on the right.33 Unlike the commemorative lyrics filled with the traditional healing rhetoric that has
allowed Jay Winter to claim that 'a complex process of re-sacralization
marks the poetry of the war',34 Benjamin's sonnets to his war dead - or
rather anti-war dead - enacted a ritual of unreconciled duality. Here
eternal salvation and no less eternal sorrow remained in uneasy juxtaposition, as antinomies that resist mediation. As Bernhild Boie has noted,
whereas the nationalist mobilization of religious rhetoric, in the work of,
say, Friedrich Gundolf, sacrificed individual souls for the collective
good, Benjamin's poems refused to do so: 'Because Gundolf pompously
sacralized the profane horror of the hour, he robbed conscience of its
responsibility. Benjamin had conceptualized his sonnet cycle as the
radical antithesis of such violence.'35 Only by a ritualized repetition the value of ritual, according to Adorno, having been taught to Benjamin
by the poetry of Stefan George36 - could the violence of amnesia be
forestalled. Only by refusing false symbolic closure in the present might
there still be a chance in the future for the true paradise sought by the
idealist self-destroyers buried in their separate and separated graves.
The trope of troubled burial is, in fact, one to which Benjamin
32
33
34
35
36
Benjamin, ' A Berlin chronicle', Reflections, p . 2 0 .

Benjamin, 'Linke Melancholie. Z u Erich K a s t n e r s n e u e m G e d i c h t b u c h ' , Die Gesellschaft, 8,1 ( 1 9 3 1 ) , p p . 181-4.
W i n t e r , Sites of memory, sites of mourning, p . 2 2 1 .
Bernhild Boie, ' D i c h t u n g als Ritual d e r Erlosung. Z u d e n wiedergefundenen S o n e t t e n
von Walter Benjamin', Akzente, 3 2 ( 1 9 8 4 ) , p p . 3 0 - 1 .
T h e o d o r W A d o r n o , 'Benjamin t h e letter writer', in On Walter Benjamin: critical essays
and recollections, ed. G a r y Smith ( C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . : M I T Press, 1991), p . 3 3 0 - 1 .
Benjamin, to b e sure, rejected t h e aestheticizing elitism a n d m y t h - m o n g e r i n g of t h e
G e o r g e Circle, as s h o w n in his frequent criticism of Friedrich G u n d o l f . T i e d e m a n n , in
fact, argues t h a t t h e sonnets to H e i n l e show an explicit rejection of the striving for
r e d e m p t i v e form in G e o r g e . See his Nachwort, p p . 8 8 - 9 . T h e link b e t w e e n ritual a n d
o t h e r aspects of Benjamin's work is stressed b y A n d r e w Benjamin, w h o argues t h a t 'it
will b e in relation to ritual t h a t a c o n c e p t i o n of experience that involves allegory will
e m e r g e . Events are particularized a n d c a n n o t b e repeated. T h e continuity of ritual is
t h e repetition of the storyteller.' 'Tradition a n d experience: Walter Benjamin's " O n
some motifs in Baudelaire'", in The problems of modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed.
Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 127.
230
Martin Jay
returned only a few pages after describing the suicides in the 'Berlin
Chronicle', where he generalized about the relation between memory,
experience and language. 'Language', he wrote,
shows clearly that memory is not the instrument of exploring the past but its
theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in
which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past
must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of
genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the
same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over
soil.37
Benjamin's own method of digging and redigging his personal past in

memoirs like 'A Berlin chronicle' or Berlin childhood around 1900 was, of
course, generalized into a tool of cultural rediscovery - or rather
redemptive reconstellation - in his never completed Passagenwerk. It
followed the principle he derived from that restless, obsessive returning
to the displaced graves he had experienced in his relation to his dead
friends: 'remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or
still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic
manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to
ever-deeper depths'.38
Benjamin's insistence on not letting the dead rest in peace, at least as
long as they remained in false graves, was at the heart of his celebrated
critique of historicist attitudes towards the past. Whereas historicists
assumed a smooth continuity between past and present, based on an
Olympian distance from an allegedly objective story, he assumed the
guise of the 'destructive character' who wanted to blast open the
seemingly progressive continuum of history, reconstellating the debris in
patterns that would somehow provide flashes of insight into the redemptive potential hidden behind the official narrative.39 It is hard not to hear
echoes of his personal anguish over the suicides of Heinle and Seligson
when he remarked in the Passagenwerk that the task of remembrance is
'to save what has miscarried'.40 The complicated notion of salvation
(Erlosung) with which he worked, at once theological and political,
contained the imperative to rescue what had been forgotten by the
victors of history.
As Stephane Moses has argued, such an act of total recall - what
might be called a benign variant of the malady of memory dubbed
37
39
40
38
Ibid. p. 27.
Ibid. p. 26.
Benjamin, ' T h e destructive character', Reflections. T h e last line of this piece, first
published in 1931, shows what was still on Benjamin's mind: ' T h e destructive character
lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, b u t that suicide is not worth the
trouble' (p. 303).
Benjamin, Passagen werk (Frankfurt a m Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), p . 611.
231
'hypermnesia' by the French psychologist Theodule Ribot41 - was

ultimately aimed at an 'un-knotting of the aporias of the present'42
through the mobilization of the Utopian potential of the past for future
transformation. Rather than constructing spatial topoi of commemoration, those lieux de memoire or Kriegerdenkmale that functioned to solidify
national identity in the present and justify the alleged sacrifices made in
its name, the explicitly u-topian - in the literal sense of 'no place' - and
ritualized remembrance of past miscarriages must intransigently resist
current consolation.
It would perhaps be exaggerated to claim that Benjamin, like Georges
Bataille, the friend who saved many of Benjamin's texts after the Second
World War, consistently wrote 'against architecture', to borrow the title
of the English translation of Denis Hollier's study of Bataille.43 Benjamin's ambivalent fascination with the glass architecture of complete
transparency and public openness promoted by the Utopian novelist Paul
Scheerbart must, after all, be acknowledged, as must his enthusiasm for
the work of Sigfried Giedion and Adolf Loos.44 But Benjamin did
vigorously protest nonetheless against the attempt to embody symbolic
fullness in visible, opaque, built forms above the earth, such as the tower,
the cenotaph or the pyramid. Even before the war, he was suspicious of
this cultural practice. In his Berlin childhood around 1900, he recalled
youthful visits he had made to the triumphal column that had been
erected in the capital of a united Germany to commemorate the famous
Prussian victory over the French at Sedan. At its base was a gallery of
murals, from which he had always averted his gaze out of fear that they
would remind him of the illustrations from Dante's Inferno he had seen in
the house of one of his aunts. 'The heroes whose deeds glimmered there
in the hall of the column', he wrote, 'seemed as quietly infamous as the
crowds who did penance whipped by whirlwinds, imprisoned in bleeding
tree-stumps, or frozen into blocks of ice. So this gallery was the Hell, the
counterpart of the circle of grace around the radiant Victoria above.'45
41
42
43
44
45
T h e o d u l e Ribot, LesMaladies de la memoire (Paris: Alcan, 1881).

Stephane Moses, 'The theological-political model of history in the thought of Walter
Benjamin', History andMemory,
1, 2 (Fall/Winter 1989), p. 3 1 .
Denis Hollier, Against architecture: the writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing
(Cambridge, Mass.: M I T Press, 1989).
On his fascination with Scheerbart, see Missac, Walter Benjamin's passages, chapter 6.
On Benjamin's general attitude towards modern architecture, including the work of
Loos, see Michael Miiller, 'Architektur fur das schlechte N e u e . Zu Walter Benjamins
Verarbeitung avantgardistischer Positionen in der Architektur', Links hatte noch alles sich
zu entratseln . . .' Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Frankfurt:
Syndikat, 1978).
Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit urn 1900 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), p. 17. T h e
translation is by Shierry Weber Nicholsen from the forthcoming English version of the
book. I thank her for letting me see it before publication.
232
Martin Jay
No amount of ceremonial gilding, in short, would efface the grim fate of

the victims of even the most famous victory.
As is well known, both Benjamin and Bataille were hostile to the
general Hegelian logic of sublimation and sublation that sought to
transfigure horror into something culturally elevating. Both were suspicious of calls for a return to a lost Gemeinschaft through symbolic
restoration in architectural terms.46 Indeed, as Irving Wohlfahrt has
noted, Benjamin's more general relation to the past 'marks a clear
departure from the Hegelian digestive system, an encyclopedic, (anal-)
retentive, self-interiorizing memory (Er-Innerung) which preserves and
negates" (aufheben) the entirety of its prehistory'.47 Such 'digestive'
remembering can only be premised on a certain forgetting, the forgetting of everything that resists incorporation into its system, such as the
suicides of anti-war protestors, which are then abjected as so much
unnecessary waste.48
In fact, even the war itself, Benjamin once speculated, might be
understood on one level as a comparable kind of misconceived struggle
to heal the fissures that rend modern life. It had been, he wrote in Oneway street of 1928, a 'desperate attempt at a new commingling with the
cosmic powers',49 which would overcome the gap between man and
nature that had disastrously widened since the time of antiquity through
the application of technical means. 'This immense wooing of the
cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the
spirit of technology. But because the lust for profit of the ruling class
sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the
bridal bed into a bloodbath.'50 Benjamin may have held out hope for a
different version of benign technology not in the service of that lust for
profit, and thus did not reject the desire for reconciliation between man
and nature out of hand. But he was resolutely against the distorted
effort that characterized the war, as well as the aestheticization of
46
47
48
49
50
For a discussion of Benjamin's thoughts on the metropolis, which highlights his

rejection of Gemeinschaft as impossible to restore, see Massimo Cacciari, Architecture
and nihilism: on the philosophy of modern architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 92f. It is for this reason that Richard
Terdiman's placement of Benjamin in the same camp as those nostalgic theorists
influenced by Tonnies's classic distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is
problematic. See Terdiman, Present past, p. 206.
Wohlfahrt, 'No-man's-land', p . 6 3 .
O n the dialectic of remembering and forgetting in Benjamin, see Timothy Bahti,
'Theories of knowledge: fate and forgetting in the early works of Walter Benjamin', in
Benjamin's ground: new readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nagele (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1988).
Benjamin, 'One-way street', Reflections, p. 9 3 .
Ibid.
233
destructive technology that he saw in the postwar writings of Jiinger and

other 'reactionary modernists'.51
Only a variant of what Lenin had called 'revolutionary defeatism', a
willingness to ride the catastrophe until the end rather than stop it
prematurely before its full destructive fury could be allowed to do its
work, would provide a sober alternative to such aestheticization. The
daily catastrophe of even peacetime society had to be understood as
such, and this knowledge had to facilitate a more fundamental reckoning
with the forces that led to the war in the first place. As he put it at the
conclusion of his essay on Jiinger's volume on War and warrior, referring
to 'the habitues of the chthonic forces of terror', they will possess 'a key
to happiness' only 'when they use this discovery to transform this war
into civil war and thereby perform that Marxist trick which alone is a
match for this sinister runic humbug'.52
Not surprisingly, Benjamin could not stomach the religious rhetoric
of Resurrection employed by certain artists after the war to give
meaning to those who died in battle.53 'Everything saturnine', Benjamin
wrote in The origin of German tragic drama, 'points down into the depths
of the earth.'54 Thus, the labyrinth, that subterranean tangle so often
evoked in descriptions of the trenches on the Western Front,55 was
preferable to the monument as a spur to the right kind of remembrance.56 Although originally an archaic topography, it was revived,
Benjamin later argued, in the modern city, the locus of the flaneur and
the prostitute, where the minotaur mythically situated at its centre
embodies the image of'death-dealing forces'.57
Accordingly, it is only the dead body acknowledged as nothing but the
corpse that it has become, only, that is, a melancholy acceptance of the
destruction of the organic, holistic, lived body, that prepares the remains
for their allegorical and emblematic purposes. 'The human body',
Benjamin grimly wrote, 'could be no exception to the commandment
which ordered the destruction of the organic so that the true meaning,
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
For a discussion of this phenomenon, which draws on Benjamin, see Jeffrey Herf,
Reactionary modernism: technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Benjamin, 'Theories of German Fascism', p. 128.
See Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, chapter 6, for a discussion of the
appropriation of the Resurrection by artists like Georges Rouault.
Benjamin, The origin of German tragic drama, p. 152.
For a discussion, see Eric J. Leed, No man's land: combat and identity in World War I
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), chapter 3.
See Hollier, Against architecture, pp. 5 7 - 7 3 , for the importance of the labyrinth in
Bataille. On its role in Benjamin's work, see Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for children,
pp. 63f. H e comments on the parallel with Bataille.
Walter Benjamin, 'Central park', New German Critique, 3 4 (Winter 1 9 8 5 ) , p. 5 3 .
234
Martin Jay
as it was written and ordained, might be picked up from its fragments

. . . The characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as
corpses, that they can enter into the homeland of allegory. It is not for
the sake of immortality that they meet their end, but for the sake of the
corpse.'58
Although it is impossible to know for certain that Benjamin's refusal
to seek consolation for the trauma of his friends' suicides found an
expression in his bleak ruminations on unresurrected, fragmented
corpses in his book on baroque tragic drama, the parallel between the
two is striking. In both cases, the proper attitude was one of allegorical
melancholy rather than symbolic mourning. The restless ghosts of
Heinle and Seligson seem to haunt the pages of this book and much else
in Benjamin's oeuvre, which one commentator has gone so far as to call a
'love affair with death'.59
Benjamin's morbid preoccupations were thus the opposite of those
that fed the widespread revival of spiritualism, which accompanied that
superstitious belief in the uncanny presence of lost comrades prevalent
among soldiers at the front.60 For whereas the soldiers yearned for the
dead miraculously to return to life and thus end their own grieving,
Benjamin, resolutely hostile to vitalism of any kind, sought to keep the
grief unconsoled by focusing on the de-animization that had produced
the corpse. 'Criticism', he was to argue in The origin of German tragic
drama, 'means the mortification of the works . . . not then - as the
romantics have it - awakening of the consciousness in living works, but
the settlement of knowledge in dead ones.'61 Mortification of the nontextual world as well, or at least facing the catastrophe that had already
occurred, was preferable to wishing it away. Rather than seek life in
death, the animate in the inanimate, it was better to acknowledge the
ubiquity of mementi mori and decry the false consolations offered by
magical thinking.62 Only in so doing might the Utopian hope for an
58
59
60
61
62
Benjamin, The origin of German tragic drama, p p . 2 1 6 - 1 7 .

Rey C h o w , 'Walter Benjamin's love affair with d e a t h ' , New German Critique, 4 8 (Fall
1989).
W i n t e r , Sites of memory, sites of mourning, p p . 64f.
Benjamin, The origin of German tragic drama, p . 182.
G a r y S m i t h has argued t h a t in t h e early 1920s Benjamin did share a certain rhetoric of
spiritual esotericism with o t h e r h e t e r o d o x Jewish thinkers of his day, including Oskar
G o l d b e r g , Erich U n g e r , Erich G u t k i n d , a n d G e r s h o m Scholem. See S m i t h , ' " D i e
Z a u b e r j u d e n " : Walter Benjamin a n d o t h e r Jewish esoterics b e t w e e n t h e world w a r s ' ,
The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 4 ( 1 9 9 5 ) . However, h e acknowledges that
Benjamin always found G o l d b e r g distasteful a n d ultimately c a m e to dissociate himself
explicitly from t h e o t h e r ' M a g i c Jews'. See Benjamin's letter t o S c h o l e m of
24 D e c e m b e r 1 9 3 4 , w h e r e h e uses the t e r m derisorily. The correspondence of Walter
Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932 1940, ed. G e r s h o m Scholem, trans. G a r y S m i t h
a n d A n d r e Lefevre ( C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . : H a r v a r d University Press, 1 9 9 2 ) , p . 148.
235
ultimate apocatastasis, the redemption of all the fragments of fallen

reality, the admission of all souls into heaven, be maintained.63 Only
then might happen a true awakening from the spell of myth and
mystification that produced the conditions that led to the war in the first
place.
Benjamin's desperate gamble that such an outcome might possibly
follow from the rigorous denial of any consolation in the present has
aroused considerable discomfort in many of his commentators. The
nihilist streak evident in his antinomian evocation of divine violence and
refusal to endorse the humanist pieties of conciliation and communication - as if the promise of the Youth Movement's Sprechsaal had been
smashed forever by the self-destructive violence committed in its halls seems to some a literal dead end. According to Gillian Rose, 'it is this
unequivocal refusal of any dynamic of mutual recognition and struggle
which keeps Benjamin's thinking restricted to the stasis of desertion,
aberrated mourning, and the yearning for invisible, divine violence'.64 His
defence of repetitive, never-worked-through remembrance Rose
grounds in the Jewish notion of Zakhor, which she claims 'has the
consequence of devaluating historiographical discernment in different
times and places. It encourages eschatological repetition in the place of
political judgment. But for Benjamin, all political judgment is melancholic and violent.'65 What she calls 'inaugurated' as opposed to 'aberrated mourning' contains the potential for forgiveness that Benjamin,
with his furious fixation on the injustice of his friends' anti-war suicides,
could never realize. As such, Benjamin's position may seem uncomfortably close to what the recent historian of psychoanalysis Peter Homans
has called the Nazis' own 'refusal to mourn'.66 For, to put it in the
vocabulary of Judith Lewis Herman, it favours the maintenance of
63
64
65
66
O n t h e idea of apocatastasis in Benjamin, see Irving Wohlfahrt, ' E t Cetera? D e

l'historien c o m m e chiffonnier', in Walter Benjamin et Paris, ed. H e i n z W i s m a n n (Paris:
Cerf, 1986), pp. 5 9 6 - 6 0 9 .

Gillian Rose, Judaism and modernity: philosophical essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993),
p. 209.
Ibid. p . 2 0 7 .
P e t e r H o m a n s , The ability to mourn: disillusionment
and the social origins of
psychoanalysis
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). He argues that the Nazis, 'intolerant of
chaos [,] . . . sought to reinvent with great rapidity and astonishing creativity a total
common culture in which a sacred symbolic structure overcame time, the sense of
transience and diachrony . . . For them, the manic defense and persecutory activity
successfully energized a new cosmology which abolished the ability to mourn and what
I would also call "the capacity to be depressed". It was as if they had said, There has
been no loss at all' (p. 338). The larger argument of the book is that psychoanalysis,
unlike Nazism, was based on a healthy ability to mourn the loss of cultural meaning
produced by secularization.
236
Martin Jay
'traumatic memory', which simply repeats the past, over 'narrative

memory', which works it through by telling intelligible stories.67
Jeffrey Mehlman, from a vantage point far less Hegelian than Rose's,
suggests other dangers. Benjamin's insistence on valorizing catastrophe
rather than trying to heal it, on 'plunging into evil, albeit to defeat it
from within',68 echoes the Jewish messianic tradition that Scholem had
shown often promoted mystical transgression as a means to redemption.
It also recalls the tragic episode of the seventeenth-century false messiah
Sabbatai Zvi, in which catastrophe was mingled with fraud, an explosive
mixture that Mehlman ingeniously discerns in the scripts of Benjamin's
radio plays of the early 1930s. Sabbatianism, he notes, rejected the
symbolic reading of the world in the earlier Kabbalah in favour of an
allegorical one, in which there was no apparent or natural unity between
sign and signified. But this dissolution had its great danger. For now, to
be a good Jew and to appear to be one were no longer necessarily the
same, which opened the door to the possibility of a false messiah, such
as the Sabbatai Zvi.
In the case of what he calls Benjamin's 'neo-Sabbatianism',69 the
same dangerous possibility exists. That is, there could be no guarantee
that Benjamin's desperate wager on melancholic intransigence and
resistance to commemorative healing would ultimately bring about the
genuine redemption for which he so fervently yearned. Especially when
he yoked his negative theology to the Marxist dream of a classless
society, as he did in the final lines of his essay on Jiinger's War and
warrior when he advocated the transformation of war into a civil war, the
potential for catastrophe to produce fraud rather than salvation was
increased still further.70 When one recalls Benjamin's own willingness to
use fraudulent means to dodge the draft during the First World War one of the few links in the chain left unforged by Mehlman's superheated
associative imagination - it may well seem as if he were not above
67
68
70
Judith Lewis H e r m a n , Trauma and recovery ( N e w York: Basic Books, 1992). F o r a

critique of this argument, which comes close to Benjamin's position without drawing
on it, see R u t h Leys, 'Traumatic cures: shell shock, Janet, a n d t h e question of m e m o r y ' ,
Critical Inquiry, 2 0 , 4 ( S u m m e r 1994), p p . 6 2 3 - 6 2 . S h e shows that for Pierre Janet,
fully narrating t h e past w a s itself insufficient, as some liquidation of it as well was
necessary to 'cure' shell shock.
69
Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for children,-p. 80.
Ibid. p. 94.
Mehlman hints at the end of his book that it is not so much the Marxist dream of a
classless society that constitutes the fraudulent echo of Sabbatianism, but the Enlightenment dream of assimilation itself. The latter, he claims, leads to the '"silent
Holocaust" of Jewish self-denial which is the daily mode of ordinary Jewish life in the
West'. Walter Benjamin for children, p. 97. In effect, Rose attacks Benjamin for his
allegiance to a Jewish notion of repetitive, ahistorical memory, whereas Mehlman
criticizes him for fostering the dissolution of Jewish particularity in the universal solvent
of the Enlightenment.
237
exploiting both catastrophe and fraud for his own dubious redemptive
fantasies.
A third critique is made by those who claim that by holding on to such
fantasies in whatever form Benjamin drew inadvertently near to the very
Fascist aestheticization of politics he was ostensibly trying to fight. This
is the damning conclusion, for example, of Leo Bersani's The culture of
redemption.11 From this perspective, Benjamin's apparent resistance to
symbolic mourning, his defiance of the imperative to work through his
grief, is understood as still in the service of an ultimate reconciliation,
which is impossible to attain. Whereas neo-Hegelians like Gillian Rose
fault Benjamin for rejecting a good version of mourning - inaugurated
rather than aberrated in her vocabulary - anti-Hegelians like Bersani see
a desire for any version of mourning as problematically holistic and
harmonistic, based on a nostalgia for an origin prior to the fall, a state of
bliss that never really existed.72
What these critics perhaps fail to register is the critical distinction
between a refusal to mourn that knows all too well what its object is - in
Benjamin's case, the anti-war suicides of his idealist friends - and is
afraid that mourning will close the case prematurely on the cause for
which they died, and a refusal to mourn based on a denial that there was
anything lost in the first place. Whereas Benjamin defended allegorical
melancholy to keep the wound open in the hope of some later Utopian
redemption, understanding ritual and repetition as a placeholder for a
future happiness, the Nazis sought symbolic closure without any delay,
hoping to fashion a seamless continuity between the revered war dead
and their own martyrs.73 Rather than melancholic, their refusal to
mourn was maniacal, in the clinical sense of a mania that giddily denies
the reality of the lost object. Melancholy and mania, as Freud famously
argued, may both be sides of the same inability to mourn, but in this
case, the differences, it seems to me, outweigh the similarities.
What makes Benjamin's hopes for redemption so hard to grasp is that
71
72
73
' T h e cultic use value of art that Benjamin claims we have lost is actually an archaic
version of the fascist use of art as he dramatically defines it in " T h e work of art in the
age of mechanical reproduction": the aestheticizing of politics.' Leo Bersani, The culture
of redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 60.
For a consideration of the issue of origin in Benjamin, see John Pizer, Toward a theory of
radical origin: essays on modern German thought (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska
Press, 1995). Pizer argues that the concept of Ursprung in Benjamin, derived in part
from Karl Kraus, must b e understood as more than a simple return to plenitudinous
grace. But he rejects the deconstructionist reading of Benjamin as being entirely against
all notions of origin.
According to Mosse, 'the martyrs of the Nazi movement were identified with the dead
of the First World War, and identical symbols were used to honor their memory: steel
helmets, holy flames, and monuments which projected the Nazi dead as clones of the
soldiers who had earlier fought and died for the fatherland', Fallen soldiers, p. 183.
238
Martin Jay
they seem not to have been grounded in a simple desire to undo the
trauma of the anti-war suicides and resurrect the dead or even merely to
realize the anti-war cause for which they died. Instead, the model of
redemption he seems to have favoured, I want to suggest, may paradoxically have been based on the lesson of trauma itself. Was he perhaps
talking more of himself than of Baudelaire when he wrote in 'On some
motifs in Baudelaire' that 'psychiatry knows traumatophile types'?74 It
will be recalled that Benjamin's critique of Baudelaire's poetic parrying
of the shocks of modern life was directed at the anaesthetic refusal to
register the pain of the trauma; which meant keeping the protective
shield of the psyche up at all costs. Like the aesthetic response of
symbolic sublimation, defensive parrying struggled to regain the subject's mastery over a world that seemed out of control. In a certain
sense, both aesthetic and anaesthetic responses missed something in
their haste to move beyond that pain. Or put differently, both were too
hasty in trying to reconcile the unreconcilable. What was unreconcilable
about trauma has been noted by Freud, who understood, to cite Cathy
Caruth, 'that the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its
belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance
outside the boundaries of any single place or time . . . trauma is not
simple or single experience of events but . . . events insofar as they are
traumatic, assume their force precisely in their temporal delay'.75
Benjamin's redemptive fantasies, such as they were, were thus not for
harmonistic closure and plenitudinous presence. They were u-topian, as
we have seen, precisely because they denied a positive place that could
be the locus of fulfilment. They were also temporally disjunctive, pace
his frequent evocation of the mystical notion of Jetztzeit (Now-time).
Favouring instead what might be called the stereoscopic time of the
dialectical image, they incorporated that experience of lag time produced by trauma. They were thus based on a notion of memory that
differed from a Hegelian Erinnerung, in which the past was digested by
the present in a heightened moment of totalizing interiorization.
Instead, Benjamin's notion of Geddchtnis preserved the very dissociation
between past and present, the temporal delay of the trauma itself, that
made a constellation - and not a collapse - of the two possible. For only
if the distinctness of past and present and the heterogeneity of multiple
spaces were maintained could a true apocatastasis, a benign hypermnesia without exclusion and incorporation, be achieved. Only if the
intractable otherness of the lost object is preserved and not neutralized
through a process of incorporation can the possibility of genuine
74
75
Benjamin, ' O n some motifs in Baudelaire', p. 165.

Cathy Caruth, 'Introduction' to Caruth, Trauma, p . 9.
239
Erfahrung be realized. 76 Thus, in some profoundly paradoxical sense,

the catastrophe and the redemption were the same, and the infinite
ritual repetition without closure not a means, but an end. The true
fraud, pace Mehlman, is thus the very belief in the resurrection of the
dead, their symbolic recuperation through communal efforts to justify
their alleged 'sacrifice' and ignore their unrecuperable pain.
It is for this reason that Benjamin's intransigent resistance to symbolic
healing and positive commemoration merits continued respect. For
even if one is unable to share his belief in Utopian apocatastasis, it must
be acknowledged that he gave the lie to the assumption that the victims
of the war - or more profoundly, of the society ruled by myth and
injustice that could have allowed it to happen - could be best understood as heroic warriors who died for a noble cause. This is a lesson that
ironically can be learned as well from the fate Benjamin himself suffered
on the eve of the Second World War. For his suicide on the French/
Spanish border also defied symbolic closure. Indeed, his rest proved as
peaceless as those of Fritz Heinle and Frederika Seligson in 1914. As
Pierre Missac observed in words that can fittingly serve as the final ones
of this paper:
His body . . . disappeared after his death. We have nothing but one more death
without burial among so many others; no name on a common grave, even for
someone who, while alive, provided a name for the nameless; not even the white
cross of the military cemeteries sprinkled across Europe and the Pacific. All the
more reason why no tombeau will evoke Benjamin's memory, only the
interminable prose pieces after Babel, among them the present work.77
76
77
A c c o r d i n g to Angelika R a u c h ' s insightful gloss o n Benjamin's position, 'As m e m o r y of

an experience, c o m m e m o r a t i o n o r r e m e m b r a n c e m u s t refuse t h e labor of m o u r n i n g
b e c a u s e such a Trauerarbeit aims at t h e representation of t h e other - t h e experience a n d
affect - b y t u r n i n g it into w h a t Benjamin h a d labeled "a souvenir", t h a t is, a n object in
conscious m e m o r y t h a t c o r r e s p o n d s to a n object in t h e history of events. O n c e t h e other
h a s achieved t h e status of a n object, t h e subject can dispose of it. If a n experience in t h e
sense of Erfahrung is, however, responsible for shaping t h e self, is p a r t of t h e self, t h e n it
c a n n o t so easily b e split off, disposed of, a n d , in t h e e n d , forgotten. T h e mission of
tradition is precisely not to m a k e experience into a n event o r a n object b e c a u s e only t h e
p o w e r of feeling h u m b l e s u s , sensitizes us to a n other, a n d teaches u s to live with w h a t
K a n t h a d identified as t h e monstrosity of t h e sublime.' ' T h e b r o k e n vessel of tradition',
Representations, 53 (Winter 1 9 9 6 ) , p . 90.
M i s s a c , Benjamin's passages, p . 10. O n e m i g h t a d d that, for A d o r n o in particular,
Benjamin's suicide seems to have worked in t h e way t h a t Heinle's h a d for Benjamin: as
a never-worked-through t r a u m a t h a t c a m e to e m b l e m a t i z e t h e h o r r o r of t h e age. See
the discussion in Susan Buck-Morss, The origin of negative dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno,
Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 165.
Index
Abramov, A. 67n
Abramson, G. 177n
abstractions 153-4, 159
adolescence 120-4
'adoptive kin' see 'fictive kin'
Adorno, Theodor W. 221, 223n, 229,
23 9n
advertising 13
aestheticization of violence 225, 229,
232-3, 237, 238
affection, public displays of 43
Afghan War (1979-89) 63
African Americans 150, 155
agency 9-10, 29-39, 40-1
'brain-washing' and manipulation 17
and victimhood 17-19, 219-20
see also social agency approach
agents of remembrance 40-60
in civil society 145
Spanish Civil War 84-103
Ageron, Charles-Robert 162n, 163n
Aguilar, Paloma 18, 84-103
Albrecht, Donald 143n
Alexsiyevich, Svetlana 63n, 76n, 77n, 78n
Algeria, independence 163
Algerian War (1954-62) 4, 33, 161-6
in French collective memory 161-76
non-remembrance of 171-2
representations of 37
Algiers, rue d'Isly fusillade (1962) 167
Alien Land Law, California (1913) 147
All quiet on the Western Front (Remarque)
36
allegory 227-8, 2 3 3 ^ , 237

Almond, G. 39n
Alsace 174-5
German annexation (1871) 162
Alsatians 162, 174-5
Alterman, Nathan, 'The silver platter' 36
Altman, Irwin 144n
Am diesen Dienstag (Borchert) 119
Ami a murderer? (Perechodnich) 128

240
'America's Concentration Camps' exhibit,

Japanese American National Museum
142, 149 illus. 152-3
Amichai, Yehuda 177
amnesia 7, 130, 184-5, 229
official 67
amnesty 35
for Spanish political prisoners 101
And the world was silent (Wiesel) 131-2
Andersch, Alfred 116

Andreev, E. 62n
ANFANOMA (Association Nationale des
Francais d'Afrique du Nord d'OutreMer et leurs Amis) 167
Annales d'historie economique et sociale 24,
25-7
Annee sociologique 23
anthropology 19, 20, 27-9, 40

anti-commemoration 75
anti-Semitism, in France 173-4
anti-war poetry 204
anxiety 66-8, 81
apartheid 35
apocatastasis 235, 238-9
Appleby, R.S. 39n
Applefeld, Aron 139
Arab-Israeli conflict 181-2
architecture
Benjamin on 231-2
narrative 144
archives of the ghettos 126-9
Arendt, Hannah 225n
arenitis 94
Armistice Day 55, 60

art
and collective remembrance 29
and cultural memory 20-2
art history 21-2
artefacts of memory 16, 37, 130, 178, 179
books as 186
artists, recording of camps 148
Aschheim, Steven E. 224n
Index
Ash, Timothy Garton 81n
Ashkenazi Jews 186, 195
deported from France 176
'Asiatic karma' 20-1
Aslund, Anders 82n
Asociacion Cultural de Invalidos Militares
deEspana (ACIME) 101-2, 103
Asociacion de Invalidos de Cataluna 87
Assmann, Jan 22n
associations ofanciens combattants de' 14
170, 173
associations of disfigured men after First
World War 18
associations of ex-deportees 175
associations of First World War disabled
18,48-51
associations of Spanish veterans and
disabled soldiers 95-100, 101-3
Audin, Maurice 171
audiovisual media 31, 123, 137
Auerbach, Rachel 135
Auschwitz 19, 136, 138, 176
Auschwitz-Birkenau 127
Australia 107
First World War memorials 55n
autobiographic memory 12, 31, 180-1
Avigur, S. 178n
Awfully big adventure, An (film) 108
Ba-Gad, Y. 202n
Baddeley, Alan lln, 144n
Bahti, Timothy 232n
Banaji, Mahzarin R. 7n
Bar-On, Daniel 64n
Barbizon, Georges 223n
Barker, Pat
Regeneration 3, 42, 208
The eye in the door 3,42
The ghost road 3, 42
Barshay, Andrew 38n
Bartel, Manfred 109n
Barthas, Louis, Les carnets de guerre 44
Bartlett, F. l l n
Bastide, Roger 20, 27-9, 36, 41, 59, 190
Bastille Day 95
Bataille, Georges 231, 232
battlefields, pilgrimages to First World War
37, 54-5
Baudelaire, Charles 226, 238
Baumgarter, Jean 130n
Becker, Annette 55n, 226, 227n
Becker, Wolfgang 109n, 114n
Beethoven, Ludwig van 68
Belarus 69
Belmore, Herbert 223
Ben-Gurion, David 197, 200
241
Benedek, Laszlo, Kinder, Mutter und ein
General 114-15
Benemerito Cuerpo de Caballeros
Mutilados (Honourable Corps of
Disabled Gentlemen) 95, 97, 101-2
Benemerito Cuerpo de Mutilados de
Guerra por la Patria (Honourable
Corps of Disabled in the War for the
Homeland) 90, 95
Benjamin, Andrew 229n
Benjamin, Walter 5, 32, 35, 221-39
Berlin childhood around 1900: 230, 231
'Berlin chronicle' 228-9, 230
biographical details 2 2 1 ^
culture theory 224-39
essay on Jiinger's War and warrior 225,
233,236
One-way street 232
Origin of German tragic drama 227-8,
233,234-5
Passagenwerk 230
sonnets 223, 229
suicide 223, 239
"The storyteller' 224
Benz, Wolfgang 4n
Berg, Mary 127
Bergson, Henri 23, 24, 25
Berlin childhood around 1900 (Benjamin)
230,231
'Berlin chronicle' (Benjamin) 228-9, 230
Bersani, Leo, The culture of redemption 237
Bessen, Ursula 109n
Best years of our lives, The (film) 145
Beyrak, Nathan 128, 139
Bildung, and Kultur 224
Birdsong (Faulks) 3, 42, 208
Birkenau 175
Birt, Dan, No room at the inn 110-11
Bloch, Marc 24, 26n
Bloch, Maurice 40n
Blondel, Charles 10
Blum, Alain 62n, 64n, 77n
Blunden, Edmund 207
Boc, Francoise 4In
body
and death in Russia 66
discovery of the 180
see also dead body; embodiment
body memory 144-5
Boie, Bernhild 229
Boll, Heinrich 119
Bolshevism 65
and death 66-9, 70-1
Borchert, Wolfgang
Am diesen Dienstag 119
Drausen vor der Tu'r 119
Index
242
Born on the fourth ofJuly (Kovic) 219

Botticelli, Sandro 20
Bourdet, Claude 172n
Bourguet, Noelle 29n
Boyarin, Jonathan 129n
'brain-washing' 13, 17
Brazil 27
Brecht, Berthold 204
Brezhnev, Leonid 63, 80
bricolage 28-9
Bridge on the River Kwai, The 107
broken faces, the men with see gueules
cassees
Brossat, Alain 7n
Briicke, Die (Wicki) 114, 115
Bruner, Jerome 181, 182n
brutalization, by exposure to mass death
65,82
Buber, Martin 223, 224n

Buchenwald 176
Buck-Morss, Susan 226n, 227, 239n
Bukharin, Nikolay Ivanovich 69
Burckhardt, Jacob 21
Burg, Joseph 204
Burguiere, Andre 25n
burial, trope of troubled 229-30
burial traditions, Russian 66-7, 70-1,
72-3
Burke, Peter 6n, 26n
Buruma, Ian 4n
Bush, George 151
Busquets, Julio 96n
Byrne, Justin 84n
Cacciari, Massimo 23 2n
California Registered Historical Landmark
151, 156
Calvino, Italo, Ultimo viene il corvo 120
Campane a martello (Zampa) 11 In
Camus, Albert 52-4
Camus, Catherine 52-4
Camus, Lucien 52-4
cannibalism 65, 73
Caputo, Philip 207, 218
carriers of memory 19-20
Caruth, Cathy 15n, 31n, 225n, 226n 238
Casa in collina, La (Pavese) 115-16
Casey, Edward 144n 145
Catalonia, Fourth Division of Navarre in
97
catastrophe, and redemption 236-7, 239

Catholicism 39, 59
Caught (Green) 108
cemeteries 227
Soviet decree on (1918-19) 71
suppression of Russian 72-3
Cenotaph, London 54-5

censorship
of individual memory 61-83
Soviet 63, 67-8, 70, 76, 81
Census, US (1990), Japanese Americans in
151
Champs d'honneur (Rouaud) 3, 42
Chan, Sucheng 147n
Chapman, Guy 207, 218
charities, local 61
Chartier, Roger 26n
Chavez Ravine 155
Chechen crisis 80
Cheval d'orgueil, Le (Jacquez-Helias) 43
childhood
an invention of the 1940s 109
the discovery of 122-4
children
attitudes to war 108-9
deportation of Jewish 128, 136
mourning over 123-4
as war victims in postwar European
cinema 104-24
weeping among ruins 109-13
Children on Trial (Lee and Dalrymple) 120
China, revolutionary 37
Chirac, Jacques 168
Chopin, Frederic 68
Chow, Ray 234n
churches 56
cinema, children as war victims in postwar
European 104-24
citizenship, Algeria and French 162
civil society 10, 28-9, 30, 33, 40, 41, 47
commemoration by 179-81:
organization of 192-3
constraints within 34-5
'memory work' in 17
civil war, fratricidal dimension 85, 102
civilians killed by terrorist action 189
Clark, Terry N. 23n
classical art 21-2
Clement, Rene, Lesjeux interdits 108n,
117-18
Cling, Maurice 128n
codes
interpretive 36-7
transmission to a new generation 130
cognitive psychology 10, 11-19
collaboration 173-5, 176
stigma of 127
in suppression of Soviet documents
74
of victims 65-6
collaborators, witch hunts for 81

collective action, framework of 9
Index
collective memory 1, 23-5, 51
construction of 129-33, 137^1
definitions of 9
in family stories 3, 9
French 161-76
and historians 8, 16, 19
and historical knowledge 8
politicization of 204
relation to official histories 102-3
in religious interpretive mode 187
shelf-life 16, 24, 30-1
social imperatives of 138
traumatic of Spanish Civil War 84-103
use of term 40
collective myths, generation of 1 9 3 ^
collective psychology, history of 26-7
collective remembrance 6-10
agency approach 29-39
anthropological approaches 19, 27-9
psychological approaches 10-19
sociological approaches 19-27
use of term 9
vicarious 206-8
collectivization 64, 77
collusion 74, 81
Colton, Timothy J. 63n
Combe, Sonia 7n
Comision de Madres de Soldados Muertos
(Association of Mothers of Dead
Soldiers) 18
commemoration
and absence of voluntary groups in
Soviet Union 61-83
culture of 228
andfictivekinship 54-6
'intensive' 191, 192
national 60, 61
and national unity 170-2
as objectification of the dead 182-3
and personal narratives 205-20
postwar culture of 226-7
selective Soviet 63, 67-8, 76-7
as a social activity 182, 183-5
and social integration 190-6
state-produced 33, 38
commemorative art 57-8
commemorative associations 137
commemorative booklets see Yizkor
books
communism 8, 68
collapse of 79, 138
Communist party
last Soviet rehabilitation campaign
(1988) 63
in Spain 103
communities of memory 181, 195-6
243
community notebooks, of Eastern

European Jews see pinkasim literature
'compassionate pact' 140
compensation claims for war injury 33
Complete memoirs of George Sherston
(Sassoon) 213-18
complicity 176
computers 138
Comrades talking about Jimmy 181
Comrades talking about Sahbak 204
Conan, Eric 174n
concentration-camp survivors, stories of
106, 128
concentration-camp symbols, of second
generation Japanese Americans 37
concentration camps, Nazi 4, 19, 94, 100,
142, 143, 173
Jewish survivors of 100
Spanish Republican exiles in 94
confessional groups 59
Conrat, Maisie 148n
Conrat, Richard 148n
conscription 191
Benjamin's evasion of 222
consolation, denial of 221-39
context-dependency, extrinsic or intrinsic
14-15,37
Coolidge, Captain Hamilton, Letters of an
American airman 209
Corral, Pas 91 n
Cortes 97-8
Coser, Lewis A. 6n, 1 On
Craig, John E. 24n, 25n
Crawford, Margaret 143n
creativity, and emotion 22
cremation, in Russia 66, 71-2
Crichton, Charles, Hue and cry 109
crimes, soldiers' 33
cues 14
cultural hegemony, and forms of
remembrance 195-6
cultural landscapes 142-60
cultural memory 20-3
cultural pessimism, French 2
culture, as camouflage 225-6
Culture of redemption (Bersani) 237
culture theory, Benjamin's 224-39
culture-dependence 13
Cytryn, Abraham 128
Czech Republic 6, 80
Czerniakow, Adam 127
Dalrymple, I., Children on trial 120
Danger tree, The (Macfarlane) 44-7
Daniels, Roger 148n
Darskii, L. 62n
Index
244
Davies, R.W. 64n

Davis, Mike 156n
de Bretteville, Sheila 158
de Gaulle, Charles 161, 163, 168
de la Bollardiere, General Paris 171
de Sica, Vittorio 111, 123
de Silva, Carlos 9 On
dead
Jewish written homage to the 202
reassurance to living 56
symbolic offering to the 18, 38
dead body 2 3 3 ^
Dearden, Basil, I believe in you 112
death
Benjamin's 'love affair with' 234
and Bolshevism 66-9
collective anxiety about 66-8
first anniversary of 183
moment of 180
and remembrance in Soviet Russia
61-83
as ritual 117-18
see also mass death
Death Camps, Germany see concentration
camps, Nazi
death penalty, Soviet 69
declarative learning 11
decolonization
end of 38
war of 161, 171
Delaporte, Sophie 48n, 5In
delayed memory see latent memory
'delayed mourning' 91-3
delusions, of veterans 94
demobilization 42
democracy, transition to Spanish 100-3
demographic catastrophes in Soviet Russia
64
demonstration effect 197

demystification 176, 202-4
denial
of consolation 221-39
of mass death 63, 65
official of loss 75-6
density
of a memory 12, 180
threshold of experience 15
deportation, and genocide 175-6
deportees' children 176
depression 81
Der var engang en krig (Kjaerulff-Schmidt)
108
Derrida, Jacques 228n
dialectic of memory and trauma 221-39
diaries 178,208,210-11
of the Warsaw ghetto 127
Diaspora 184, 189

dictatorship, collective memory under 7-8,
34-5, 61-83
Dien Bien Phu, battle of 164
Dinour, Yehiel, The girl's house 137
disability allowances 87
disabled 47-8
artificial limbs for the 88
laws for positive discrimination in Spain
89, 95-6
special schools for the 88
disabled soldiers
associations of 18
associations of Spanish 86-90, 95-100
disenchantment 207
disfigured men, associations of 18
disfigurement 48-51
disillusionment 207, 217-20, 223
Displaced Persons camps, in Europe or
Cyprus 191
distance 182-3
in war-memoirs 211-18
distortion 13-14, 33
Division Azul (Spanish volunteers with the
Nazis in Soviet Union) 9 In
djebels, Algerian 164
Dobrosyscki, L. 127n
documentation of grief 105-6
Doi, Christopher 152n
Donat, Alexander 126
Donatello, David 21
Dorgeles, The cross of wood 54
Dorian-Smith, Kate 107
Douglas, Keith 213
Douglas, M. 190n
Drancy 136
Drausen vor der Tu'r (Borchert) 119
dritter hurban see genocide
Droz, Bernard 162n
Dubnov, Simon 125
Dudai,Y. lln
Dupront, Alphonse 26, 27n
Durkheim, Emile 20, 23, 25
duty to remember 125
Dylan, Bob 204
Eastern Europe 80-1, 187-9
Echeburua, Enrique 91 n
Edelman, Marek 133
Edelson, A. 127n
Ehe der Maria Braun, Die (Fassbinder) 108
Ehrenburg, Ilya 131 n
Eichmann trial (1961) 19, 31, 133-7,
176
Elam, Yigal 25n
Index
Elective affinities (Goethe) 228
elites
commemoration by 190-4
political/cultural and manipulation/
reinterpretation of memory 17
second-order 28-9, 38, 41
third-order 38
Elordi, Carlos 92n
embodiment 135, 137, 138
Embrey, Sue Kunitomi 151
emotion 105
and creativity 22
and memory 12, 180
encoding 13, 15, 144
enemy, hatred of the 102-3, 180
Enlightenment 23 6n
enlistment, forced 100
Entre alambradas (Ferrer) 94-5
epidemic diseases 64, 71
episodic memory 12, 103
Epuration (cleansing of collaborators)
173-4
Erfahrung 225, 238-9
Erikson, Kai 225n
Erinnerung 238
Erlebnis 225
Ertel, Rachel 129, 13 On, 131-2
ethics 107
Ettlinger, Leopold 22n
evacuees, children to Scotland 110
events, recall of 14, 103
Evian Treaty (1962) 163
ex-soldiers, French in Algeria 161, 166,
170-2
exchange, ritual 38
exchange relationships 27-8, 59-60,
019
exclusions 62, 145-8
Executive Order 9066 on exclusion and
incarceration of Japanese Americans
146-8,158
exhibitions 8, 142, 152^
exoneration 30
experience
crisis of 225
memory and language 230
and remembrance 224-6
experimental psychology 37
expertise, crisis of 139-40
'exposure therapy' 93
externalizing of anger 99
Eye in the door, The (Barker) 3, 42
eye-witness testimony 134-6
facies hippocratica of history 227-8
Fahey, James J., Pacific War diary 210-11
245
families
extended 47-59
family allowances 42
family memories 9
family pilgrimage to battlefields, post First
World War 37
family stories 3, 42, 43-7
famine, in Russia (1932-3) 62, 64-5, 72-3,
74-5
Fascism 7-8, 8, 141, 224, 225, 237
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Die Ehe der
Maria Braun 108
fathers
absent 52-4, 119
of Israeli war dead 32
Faulks, Sebastian, Birdsong 3, 42, 208
Febvre, Lucien 24, 26
Federation nationale des combattants
prisonniers de guerre (Federation of
prisoners of war) 173
fellaghas, Algerian 161, 164, 172, 175
feminism, and film in male-dominated
societies 118-19
Fenoglio, Beppe, Una questione privata 113
Fentress, James 145n
Ferrer, Eulalio, Entre alambradas 94-5
fertility trends, and First World War 42
Feyerabend, Paul 105
fiction 7, 42, 106
'fictive kin'
and patterns of remembrance 47-59
use of term 40, 41 n
fictive kinship, and commemoration 54-6
Fifth Republic 163
filming, technique of 139-40
films 36, 106
archives 134
German and Italian post-1945 5
importance to historians 105-9
Fink, Carole 25n
Finkelkraut, Alain 130
Finland, winter war of Russia against 62
First Aliyah 189
First Street Historic District museum,
Little Tokyo 142, 149 illus., 155-8
First World War (1914-18) 4, 8, 132
claims for compensation for war injury
33
diaries 210
disillusionment and loss of self 218, 219
images and stories of 206-8
kinship and remembrance after 40-60
First World War (1914-18) (cont.)
in Russia 63-4
trauma 221
246
Index
Fisher, Micah 185n

Fitzpatrick, Sheila 74n, 77n
FLN (Front National de Liberation) 161,
162, 163,164-5,170
FNACA (National Association of Anciens
Combattants of Algeria) 170
folk historiography 178
Ford, Gerald R. 151
forgetting 24, 178
deliberate 135
and 'digestive' remembering 232
and remembering 18, 62
Fortes, Meyer 40n
Fortunate son (Puller) 219
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies 137-9
Fossey, Brigitte 112n
Foster, Hal 226n
Foster, Rachel A. 7n
Foucauld, Michel 176
Fowler, Henry 112n
framework 6-39
see also social framework of memory
France 133
and Algeria 161-76
collective memory of Algerian War in
161-76
expenditure on museums and cultural
activities 2-3
German occupation of 171-2
lack of warfilms122
Republican Spanish veterans in exile in
84-5, 94-5, 98
Franco dictatorship 85-100
FrankelJ. 19 In
fraud, catastrophe and 236-7, 239
Freed, James Ingo 144
Fremond, Armand 170-1
French 131, 132
French Resistance 84-5, 172-6
Freud, Sigmund 32, 226, 237, 238
Friedlander, Saul 7
Friedmann, Esther 127n
Friedmann, Joseph 127n
frontline 142
Front National 168, 169
Fronterlebnis 222, 225, 228
Fujita, Tom 152n
'functional kin' see 'fictive kin'
Fundamentalist movements 39, 202
funerals, Soviet 70-1
FURR (Federation pour I'Unite des
Rapatries, Refugies et de leurs amis)
167
Fynsk, Christopher 228n
Gaiser, Gerd, Fine Stimme hebt an 107

Gedachtnis 238-9
Gedi, Noa 25n
Geistesgeschichte 20, 21-2
Geistpolitik 22
Gellner, Ernest 4 On
Gemeinschaft, return to a lost 232
genealogy 42
generations
conflict of 118-22, 124
transmission to later 18, 31, 130
genetics, cultural 20
Geneva agreement (1954) 163
genocide
deportation and 175-6
use of term 129
witnesses of 125-41
see also Holocaust
'geographical accident' 99-100
George, Stefan 229
Germain, Louis 53-4
German war veterans 33
Germania anno zero (Rossellini) 111-12,
120-1
Germany 4
defeat post-1918 35
former East 80
reconstruction healing process 92-3
representations infilmof postwar
113-16
Gesensway, Deborah 148n
Ghost road, The (Barker) 3, 42
Giap, General 164
Gibbs, Philip 227n
Giedion, Sigfried231
Gila River, Arizona 147
Girl's house, The (KaTzetnik) 137
Gironde prefecture 171
Glassberg, David 145n
Godde, Christoph 223n
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Elective
affinities 228
Golan Heights 200
Goldberg, Oskar 234n
Goldman, Michael 135
Gombrich, E.H. 21n
Good-time girl (Macdonald) 121, 123
Goodbye, darkness (Manchester) 212
Goodbye to all that (Graves) 36, 44, 206,
219
Goodman, Lynn Shibata 154n
Goodyear family 44-7, 54
Gorer, G. 181n
Gouri, Haim 136
Gradowski, Zalman 127
Index
Grafteaux, Serge 48n
Granada, Colorado 148
graves
'false' 230
First World War in Russia 63-4
opening of Jewish mass 136
public reopening of Soviet mass 7 On
Graves, Robert 207, 213, 218
Goodbye to all that 36, 44, 206, 219
Great Patriotic War (1941-5) 62, 76-7
Great Purge killings (1937-8) 69, 75
Green, Henry, Caught 108
Greenblatt, Stephen 38n
grief 18, 30
abstract general 105-6
coping with 178-9, 188
and guilt 196-7
kinships of 77
profane 188
unspoken 62
grieving process, third stage of 182-3
Gromyko, M.M. 67n
Grossman, Vassili 13 In
groups, how they remember 1, 24-5
247
Hayden, Dolores 142-60

healing
reconstruction of Germany as 92-3
resistance to symbolic 239
rhetoric of 229
healing effects 5, 18
ambiguity of 5, 32
possibilities of 158-60, 177-8
Heart Mountain, Wyoming 147, 153
reassembled barracks 149 illus.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 232, 238
Heimannsberg, Barbara 8In
Heimat 107
Heinle, Friedrich (Fritz) 222, 223, 228-9,
230, 239
Heinle, Wolf 223
Heldenhaine (heroes' groves) 227
Helphand, Kenneth 148n
Henningsen, Mannfred 4n
heredity, collective 20
Herf, Jeffrey 233n
Herman, Judith Lewis 235-6
Hermandad de Alfereces Provisionales
(Brotherhood of Provisional
Subalterns) 96-7
gueules cassees 48-51
Hernandez, Miguel 84n
guilt 121, 124
heroism 70, 127,213,239
of complicity 176
open admission of 35
Jewish tradition of 189
of survivors 74-6, 81, 100, 180, 184-5
hero's funeral, Soviet 67-8, 70
Gundolf, Friedrich 229
Hersey, John, The wall 127
Gush Emunim ultra-nationalist
Hibi, Hisako 148
Hilberg, R. 127n
fundamentalist movement 202
Hinduism 39
Guterman, Simha 128
Gutkind, Erich 234n
Hirabayashi, James 152n, 155n
Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais) 108
histoire des mentalites 20, 25-7
Haiti 27
historians
Halbwachs, Maurice 6, lOn, 20, 23-5, 41,
103, 129
and collective memory 8, 16, 19
Hamilton, Annette 107
importance offilmsto 105-9
Hamilton, Paula 107n
historical knowledge, and collective
Hamilton, Ralph G.A., The war diary of the
memory 8
historicism 4, 230
Master ofBelhaven 210
historiography, and ritual 178, 187
Hammond, Keith 76n
history
handicap 48
Hansen, Arthur A. 142n, 145n, 151n
memory and 2
Hansen, Asael T. 150n
professional 8
harkis 33, 165-6
public 152, 155
Harris, John 212
written by the victors 126
Harrison, Mark 64n
see also spatial histories
Hashmoneans 189
History Workshop Journal 6 In
Hasuike, Robert Y. 154
Hitler, Adolf 113, 114, 121
Hata, Donald Teruo 147n
Hitlerjugend 115
Hata, Naddine Ishitani 147n
Hobsbawm, E.J. 8n
Hatamiya, Leslie T. 151
Hoffman, Alice M. 1 In, 99n
Hausner, Gideon 134-6
Hoffman, H.S. l l n
Hayashi, Brian Masaru 15 On
Hoffmans, Gerd 116n
248
Index
Holderlin, Friedrich, Patmos 223

Hollier, Denis 231, 233n
Holocaust
Eastern European Jewish response to the
187-8
historical treatment of the 4-5
see also Shoah
Holocaust Museum, Washington 138, 144

Holocaust survivors 63-4, 81
descendants of 31
in Israel 191, 193
Holocaust (TV series) 137
Homans, Peter 235
homoagens 10, 29-39
homo psychologies 10-19
homo sociologicus 10, 19-27
honour, and horror 9
Hope and glory (film) 108
Houston, James D. 148n

Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki 148n
Hoven, Herbert 119n
Howard, S. 99n
Howe, M. l l n
Hue and cry (Crichton) 109, 117, 118
Hutton, Patrick H. 26n
Hynes, Samuel 18-19, 205-20, 227n
hypermnesia 231, 238
from Islamic countries in Israeli army

(1950s) 186
illegal 155
Japanese to US 147
in-groups see insiders
Inada, Lawson Fusao 148n
incarceration, and identity 147-8
incoherence of war 207-8
Independence War (1948), Israel 181-90
shelf-life of 194-5
individual memory 1,6, 14, 105
censorship of 61-83
in closed ethnic group 126-33
individualism, Halbwachs's critique of
24-5
individuality 179, 183, 185, 189, 206, 221
industrial disaster, victims of 62
industrialized war 4, 17, 29-30
infanticide 65
information technology 31, 138
Inglis, Ken 55n
inscriptions on war memorials 55
insiders, and outsiders 144, 158-60, 194-6
interference in memory 12
Interlenghi, Franco 112n
International Labour Day 95
International Relief Rescue Committee 94
Internationale 68
I believe in you (Dearden) 112, 120

Ichioka, Yuji 146n
iconography 46, 55
of First World War propaganda 22
identity
affirmation of ethnic 152
and disfiguration 48-51
and incarceration 147-8
need to establish of victims 139
place-bound 144-6
remembrance and 27-8
Soviet 79
and testimony of survivors 140-1
see also Jewish identity; national identity;
racial identity
ideology, and war 7, 104
Ignatieff, Michael 62n, 77n, 79n
images
emotional impact of 110, 112-13
frozen demonic of the enemy 102-3
and memory 22, 105-9
immediacy 208-11
immigrant society, social integration in
190-6
immigrant soldiers, new Jewish to Israel
191-2, 193
immigrants
French hostility to 169
interpolated learning 13
interpolation 13-14
Intifada (1987-9) 194-5, 204
intimacy 137, 139, 140
Irgendwo in Berlin (Lamprecht) 109
Irish civil war (1920s) 73
Irons, Peter 15 On
irony 199, 202, 204, 207
Irwin-Zarecki, Iwona 6n
Ishii, Amy Uno 150-1
Ishii, Sonya 158
Ishizuka, Karen 152-3, 154, 159
Islam 39
Israel 33, 34, 133-4, 177-204
Israeli cult of the fallen 180, 182, 189
Israeli families, kinship bonds 57
Israeli Memorial Day 36
Israeli War (1967) 179
Israeli war dead, fathers of 32
Issei 146-7, 151,152
Italy 113, 116-17, 150
Iurasov, Dmitrii 73n, 80
Jackson, Justice Robert 134
Jacquez-Helias, Pierre, Le cheval d'orgueil
43
James, William 178
Janet, Pierre 23 6n
Index
Japanese, during Second World War 145
Japanese American Community League
(JACL) 151
Japanese American Cultural and
Community Center 155
Japanese American National Museum, Little
Tokyo 142, 145-51, 152-5 (149 illus.)
Japanese Americans
in US Census (1990) 151
in Little Tokyo 146-60
second generation 31,37
Second World War veterans 155
Japanese Union Church 150, 156
Japrisot, Sebastien, Un long dimanche de
fianf ailles 3, 42
Jay, Martin 14n, 221-39
Jephcott, Edmund 222n
Jerome, Arkansas 147
Jerusalem, Yad Vashem 133
Jetztzeit 238
Jeux interdits, Les (Clement) 117-18
Jewish calendar of bereavement 1 8 3 ^
Jewish Councils 127
Jewish historiography, post-1918 129
Jewish identity
and memory of genocide 133-7
of survivors in relation to the dead 188
Jewish police of the Warsaw ghetto 128
Jewish state 134
Jewish survivors
of the Holocaust 125-41, 188
of Nazi concentration camps 100, 175-6
Jews 31, 59
Algerian 169-70, 176
'amnesia' about the disappearance of 7
collective response to the Holocaust of
European 187-9
deportation of 171
'imaginary' (Finkelkraut) 130
of Lodz 126-7, 128, 136
Soviet 76n
of Warsaw 126-9, 132-3
journals 208, 210-11
JPN (YoungPieds noirs) 168
Juan Carlos I, King 85n
Judaism 39
Judenrat, in Warsaw 127
Jiinger, Ernst, War and warrior 225, 233,
236
juvenile actors 112
Kabbalah 236
Kaes, Anton 107n
Kalinin, Mikhail Ivanovich 72n
Kalir, E. 188n
Kamenev, Lev Borisovich 69
249
Kampe, Norbert 4n, 82n
Kant, Immanuel 239n
Kaplan, Benoit 166n, 172n
Kaplan, Chaim 127
KaTzetnik see Dinour, Yehiel
Katznelson, Berl 189
Kawahara, Lewis 152n
Kawasaki, Yajusiro 157
Keeling, Frederick 209
Kellner, Dora 222
Kermisz, J. 127n
Kermode, Frank 205
Kernan, Alvin212
Khar'kova, T 62n
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich 62, 76,
106n
kibbutzim
collective historical consciousness 192
Yizkor books published by 189-90, 201,
203^
Kiev memorial 79
kin, 'fictive kin' and patterns of
remembrance 47-59
Kinder, Mutter und ein General (Benedek)
114-15
kinship, after First World War (1914-18)
40-60
Kitano, Harry H.L. 147n

Kjaerulff-Schmidt, Pale, Der var engang en
krig 108
Klarsfeld, Serge 176
Le Memorial des Juifs en France 139
Knesset 133
Kollwitz, Kathe, the extended family of
56-9
Kollwitz, Peter 56
Koselleck, Reinhart 55n
Kotkin, Stephen 73n, 75n, 80n, 83n
Kovic, Ron, Bom on the fourth ofJuly 219
Kozlov, V.I. 62n
Kraft, Werner 223n
Krall, Hanna 153
Kraus, Karl 237n
Krauss, Werner 119
Kremleva, LA. 63n
Kristeva, Julia 57n
Kugelmass, Jack 129n
Kulnev, Thomas Vladimirovich 79
Kulturwissenschaft 22
Kundera, Milan 6
Kunz, Ernst-Adolph 119
Kurashige, Lon Yuki 159n
Kvardakov, A.I. 71n
labour camps, Stalinist 70
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 228n
250
Index
Lamdan, Yitzhak 185

Lamprecht, Gerhardt, Irgendwo in Berlin 109
Landi, Marcia 119
Landmannschaften 187-8
landscapes
of loss and remembrance 142-60
of total mobilization (Benjamin) 227-8
Lane, Christel 7In, 83n
Lange, Dorothea 148, 149
Langfus, Leib 127
language
of emergency and heroism 70
euphemisms of incarceration 148-9
experience and memory 230
of sacrifice 79, 228
of testimony 130-2
Lapides, R. 127n
Lapierre, Nicole 128n, 130n
Laqueur, Tom 38n
latent memory 15,16
Latrun battle (1948) 200-1
Laub, Dori 64n
Lawrence, T.E. 218
Lazarev, V. 71 n
Laze, M. 49-50
Le Goff, Jacques 26n
lePen,J.-M. 168, 169
learning see declarative learning;
interpolated learning; social learning
Lebanon War (1982-3) 185, 197,201,204
Lee, J., Children on trial 120
Leed, Eric J. 233n

Lefebvre, Henri 142
Lefevre, Andre 234n
legitimacy
of dictatorship 100-1
historical 2
and memory-shaping 194
recognition and 140
of resistance 175-6
of victimhood 173-6
of war 171-2
Lejeune, Philippe 140n
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 69, 233
funeral of 68
Leningrad, siege of 73
Leon-Dufour, Xavier 131
letters
men at war write 208-10
to the dead soldier 178
written by parents during the war 198
Letters of an American airman (Coolidge)
209
Lever, Evelyne 162n

Levi, Primo 128, 136, 140
Se questo e un uomo 106
suicide 32
Levi-Strauss, Claude 28
Levin, Hanoch 202-3, 204
Lewental, Zalman 127
Lewin, Abraham 127
Lewin, Christophe 173n
Leys, Ruth 236n
Lezhneva, Lyudmila 76n
Liauzu, Claude 170n, 172n
Lieux de memoire, Les (Nora) 1-2, 37
Liga de Mutilados e Invalidos de Guerra de

Espana (LMIGE) 87-9, 97-8,
99-100, 102, 103
in France 86n, 98-9, 102
Mutilado 87, 88, 89
Lin, Maya 38n
literature 36, 42-3, 106-8, 119
death of 2, 3
and intimacy 139
oftheShoah 126-33
in Soviet dictatorship 7
'literature of commemoration' see Yizkor
books
Little Tokyo, Los Angeles 37, 142-60
Little Tokyo Citizens' Development
Advisory Committee 155, 156
Liveing, Edward 206
Lloyd, David 54n
LMIGE see Liga de Mutilados e Invalidos
de Guerra en Espana
Lodge, David, Out of the shelter 108
Lodz
chronicle of the ghetto 127-8
Jews of 126-7, 128, 136
Polish war crimes trial (1946) 136
Loftus, Elizabeth E 7n, 13n
Lomax, Eric 218
Long dimanche defianfailles, Un (Japrisot)
3,42
long-term memory 12, 144
Lonitz, Henri 223n
Loos, Adolf 231
Lorimer, R 64
Los Angeles see Little Tokyo
Los Angeles Community Redevelopment
Agency (CRA) 155-6, 158
Los Angeles Conservancy 155, 156
loss
landscapes of 142-60
official denial of 75-6
Lottman, Herbert R. 52n
Louis XVI, execution of 69n
Low, Setha M. 144n
Lunacharskii, A. V 68
Luomala, Katherine 15 On
Lutyens, Edwin 54
Index
war-memorial at Thiepval 206
Lyubyanka Square 80
251
memorials 62, 134, 137, 220

First World War 55
to Spanish Civil War Nationalists 97
McCole, John 222n, 223n, 227n
use of term 205-6
Macdonald, David, Good-time girl 121,
war 38, 54-5
memory
123
Macfarlane, David, The danger tree 44-7
altered by subsequent information 12,
McGuinness, Frank, Observe the sons of
99
Ulster marching towards the Somme 208 collective vicarious 206-8
McKinstry, John A. 146n
dialectic of trauma and 221-39
McWilliams, Carey 146n
and emotions 180
Majdanek 126
experience and language 230
Manchester, William, Goodbye, darkness
fear of its fallibility 178-9
212,213,218
historical study of 16-19
Mandelstam, Nadezdha 7
and images 105-9
Mandelstam, Osip 7
impossible 170-2
mania, melancholy and 237
persistence of 31
manipulation of memory 17, 29
and place 144-6, 159, 168-9
Manning, Frederic 207
psychology of 11-17
Manzanar, California 148, 149
reconstituted 206, 220
camp cemetery 142, 151
replaced by ideology 7
model of barracks 149 (illus.), 154
retention 180
maquisard 37
use of term 1, 11
Maravall, Jose Maria 93n
see also autobiographic memory;
Mark, Bernard 127n
collective memory; cultural memory;
Marmari, H. 204n
episodic memory; long-term memory;
Marquard, Odo 55n
passive memory; racial memory;
restricted memory; second-order
marriage patterns, and First World War 42
memory; semantic memory; spatial
martyrology, traditional Jewish 129, 187,
memory; traumatic memory; visual
188-9
memory
martyrs of the Nazi movement 237n
memory aids 16, 37
Marxism 236
Mason, William M. 146n
see also artefacts of memory
mass death 4, 188
'memory business' 3
'memory crisis' 221
denial of 65-6, 74
memory traces 1-2, 12, 180
Matsumoto, Deanna 148n
meaning, search for 183
overlap in 16
meaninglessness of war 104, 170-1
positive and negative 35
media event 135
reconstruction of 13, 194-5
meetings, yearly of relatives and friends
selective nature of 13, 194-5
181
'memory work' 17, 18, 31, 178-9
Mehl, Dominique 137, 139, 140
films as vehicles for 107
Mehlman, Jeffrey 228n, 233n 236, 239
men, insecurity of 119
Meir, Golda 203
Menninghaus, Winfried 228n
'melancholia' 32
mentalites 9, 20
melancholy 228, 234, 236-7
Annales and the history of 25-7
memoirs, war 208-9, 211-18
Meron, Dan 36n
Memoirs of an infantry officer (Sassoon) 213, Merridale, Catherine 61-83
Merritt, William 207
214-17
'metahistory' 107
Memoirs of a fox-hunting man (Sassoon)
213-14,217
metaphors, military of Stalinism 70
Memorbuch 129
Mexican Americans 155
Middle Eastern wars 176
memorial books see Yizkor books
Memorial desjuifs en France, Le (Klarsfeld) Midrash commentary 185
miliciens (French collaborationist police)
139
174
Memorial Society, Russia 80, 83
252
Index
militarism, Soviet 70, 80

military conflict, change in 38-9
military history 220
military life, satisfactions during war 219
military operations, descriptions of 197-8,
200-1
military parades, Soviet 77
military service, women in 77-8
Millan-Astray, General 89-90, 97
Minidoka, Idaho 147
Missac, Pierre 223, 231n 239
missing in action (MIA) and presumed
dead 59, 197-8
Mitrofana, Monakha 72n
Mitscherlich, Alexander 8In, 92n
Mitscherlich, Margarete 8In, 92n
Miyatake, Toyo 154, 157
Miyauchi, John J. 155
mobilization of young boys 113-16, 122
Modelljohn 147n
modernization, and Second World War 104
Mollet, Guy 163
monarchy, in Spain 103
Montague, C.E. 227n
monuments 8, 21-2, 54-5, 179, 185, 186
sculptural 145
to shared experience 220
Morocco 167
Moscow, commemoration ceremonies
(1995) 79-80
Moses, Stephane 230-1
Moskoff, William C. 73n
Mosse, George L. 55n, 62n, 65n, 73n, 82n,
226, 227n, 237n
mourn, inability to 237
mourning 32, 81, 183
aberrated 235
and attribution of responsibility to
enemy 99
defeat and 91-3
'inaugurated' 235
over children 123-4
psychological study of 182-3
in Soviet Russia 72-3
Mowat, Farley 218
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 68
Miiller, Hans, Undfinden dereinst wir uns
wieder 114
Miiller, Michael 23In

multimedia 138
Murase, Ichiro Mike 146n, 147n
Murphy, Robert 109n
Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institute, Washington 38
museums 134, 137, 142, 155-8
and body memory 144-5
growth of 3
music, for Lenin's funeral 68
Muslims, French in Algeria 33, 162, 164,
165-6
Myers, Joan 148n

mystification 235
myth
Benjamin on 228, 235, 239
bereavement 202-4
shared of the war 207-8, 220
Zionist-Israeli foundation 180
myth of the Israeli Fallen Soldier 180, 182,
189,202-3
myth of the Sabra generation 193-4, 195
myth of the war, English 213-14, 217
myth of the war experience (Mosse) 65n,
73n
myth-making 193-5, 207-8, 228
Nagasawa, Nobuho 154, 158, 159
Nakamura, Robert A. 154
Namer, Gerard 24n
narratives 11
of ghetto Jews, resistance of 127-8
meaning in 206
rehearsal of 14-15, 236
survivors' 18
see also personal narratives; scripts;
soldiers' narratives; stories
Nash, Paul 227n
Nasser, Gamal Abdel 163
national commemoration 60, 61
National Federation of Trepanned and
Disfigured Men 50
national fundamentalism 202
national identity 231
in Soviet Union 79
National Socialism see Nazis
national unity
and commemoration 170-2
and resistance 172-6
Nationalist Spanish veterans
associations of 95-100
commemoration of 85-6, 89-90
native Americans 155
nature 232-3
cult of 227, 228
Nazis
extermination of the Jews 125-41
former 81
Resistance against as principle of
remembrance 113-16, 172, 173-6
Nazism 7, 105, 141
and racial identity 20
refusal to mourn 235
and Soviets 79
Index
need (or impulse)
for public recognition 133-7
to forget and need to remember 18
to identify victims of mass murder 139
Needham, Rodney 40n
negotiation 34-5
in collective memory 105
multi-faceted in remembrance 30
networks
of complementarity 27, 32, 190
offiliation47-8
and the process of remembrance 151-2
of survivors 18
neurology 15
New German cinema 108
NewWave, French 108
Newfoundland Regiment 46
Newmark, Kevin 226
Niborski, Itzhak 130n
Nicholsen, Shierry Weber 23In
Niiya, Brian 152n
Nisei 148, 151,152
Nisei Week parades 147
Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple 156-7
Niv, K. 204n
No room at the inn (Birt) 110-11
Noborski, Itzhok 129n

Nolte, E. 82
non-consequent intentions 30, 32, 180,
194
Nora, Pierre 3, 26n
Les lieux de me'moire 1-2, 37
'normality' 7
normalization 4, 82
Nosova, G.A. 66n
nostalgia 168, 213-14, 217, 218
for an origin prior to the fall 237
Notre-Dame de Lorette, tomb of the
unknown soldier of the Algerian war
170
novels 106-7, 108
Nuremberg trials 131, 134, 137
OAS (Secret Army Organization) 166-7
objectification of the dead,
commemoration as 182-3, 239n
objectivity, of history 25-7
O'Brien, Tim 207, 213, 218
Observe the sons of Ulster marching towards
the Somme (McGuinness) 208

Oeret, Marc, 'Verdun' 37-8
official histories 6-8
relation of collective memories to 102-3
Okamura, Raymond 148
Okihiro, Gary Y. 147n
Okuba, Mine 149
253
Omoide no Shotokyo (sidewalk), Little
Tokyo 157-8
One-way street (Benjamin) 232
'Oneg Shabbat' 126-7
Opler, Marvin K. 150n
Oradour, burning of (1944) 174
oral histories 145
oral testimonies of survivors 14, 197
organization of memory 28, 59, 190-6
Origin of German tragic drama (Benjamin)
227-8, 233, 234-5

orphanhood 42
orphans 5 2 ^ , 110, 191
number of First World War 42
of Spanish Civil War 96n
orphans' groups 61
Orthodox Church 70, 72
Osborne, Peter 224n
Otwock ghetto 128
Out of the shelter (Lodge) 108
outsiders, and insiders 145, 158-60, 194-5

Oz, Amos 177, 181
Pacific War diary (Fahey) 210-11
pacifism 225
Paisd (Rossellini) 110-11, 123
Palestine
collective Jewish memory in 187, 188,
189
youth movements in 193
'Palmach' generation 1 9 3 ^
Pan African Congress 35
Papon, Maurice 171
parents' generation
in Israel 196-7
sense of responsibility for death of sons
184-5
Paris, tomb of the unknown Jewish martyr
133
Paris Commune 162
Passagenwerk (Benjamin) 230
Passerini, Luisa 7n
passive memory 6
collective formulaic 14
past
digging for the 230
embodiment of the 137
haunts the present 221
ignoring legacy of the 81-2
images of the 206
official versions of the 6-8
Utopian potential of the 231, 234-5,
237-9
Patmos (Holderlin) 223

patriotism 185
Soviet 77-8
254
Index
Pavese, Cesare, La casa in collina 115-16

Pearl Harbor, bombing of (1941) 147
peasants, in Spanish civil war 85n
Pedersen, Susan 42n
pensions
for disabled Nationalist Spanish veterans
96,101
for disabled Republican Spanish veterans
91,94, 101
'people of the book' 186
Perechodnich, Carel, Am I a murderer? 128
Perez-Diaz, Victor 93n
performative exercises 159
Perlez, Jane 153n
personal narratives
characteristics of 218-20
and commemoration 205-20
use of term 208
Petain, Philippe 173
photographs
archetypal 113
of camps 154
destruction or mutilation of Soviet 6, 75
exhibitions of 153
Picot, Colonel 51
Piedsnoirs 162, 163, 164-5, 166-70, 176
culture 168-9
Jewish 169-70
pilgrimages
after First World War 37, 54-5
to Japanese American camps 151, 153,
159
Pilsudski, Jozef 132
pinkasim literature 187, 189
'pioneer generation' in Israel 194
Pitt-Rivers, Julian 40n
Pizer, John 23 7 n
'place attachment' 143, 144, 159
place memory 144-6, 159, 168-9
play of mourning 228
plays 106-7, 119
Plesu, Andrei 7n
Plievier, Theodor, Stalingrad 107
Plock 128
pluralism 30
poetry
anti-war 204
ofthewar229
pogroms, Russian civil war 187
point of view
of children 108-9, 110
language of testimony and 131
points of reference 46-7
Polish Jews, photographs of 153
Polish Legion 132
Polishchuk, N.S. 67n
Polonsky, Abraham 127n

popular art 22
population movements, Soviet 64
'post-traumatic stress disorder' 31, 91-3
Poston, Arizona 147
Potel, Jean-Yves 7n
Power of Place, The 156, 157-8
preservation, historic 142
Prevert, Jacques 204
primacy effects 14-15
of Israeli war 34
Princet, Liliane 127n
prisoners
amnesty for Spanish political 101
fair treatment of 59
prisoners of war (POWs), in France 172-3
private memories 9,10
and public remembrance in Israel
177-204
'proactive interference' in memory 12
procuradores familiares 97-8
Pronay, Nicholas 106

propaganda 13, 88
iconography of First World War 22
Proposition 187 denying social services to
illegal immigrants 155
Prost, Antoine 18-19, 48n, 51n, 55n,
161-76
Protestantism 39, 59
psyche, collective 26-7
psychiatry 15
psychoanalysis 235-6
psychology 10-19
politics and 140
publicart 142, 157-8
public commemoration 6, 8, 205, 221
public remembrance, and private pain in
Israel 177-204
public space 137, 140
Puller, Lewis B., Fortunate son 219
purges, Stalinist 64, 65-6, 69-70, 75
Puttnies, Hans 222n
quadrillage 164, 165, 172
Queen of the bathtub (Levin) 203
Questione privata, Una (Fenoglio) 113
Rabinbach, Anson 4n, 224n

racial identity, Nazism and 20
racial memory 19-20, 20
Raczymow, Henri 130n
Radvanyi, Geza 108n
ValaholEuropavan 117, 118, 123
Ralph Appelbaum Associates 153
rapatries
Index
laws compensating and indemnifying
167-8
Rauch, Angelika 23 9n
re-sacralization 229
Reagan, Ronald 151
'real', character of witnesses 135, 138
reasons for remembrance 30, 36
reasons for war 104
recall 12, 13, 14,37
and extrinsic contexts 15
total 230-1
recognition 12, 13, 37
and extrinsic contexts 15
legitimation function of 133-7, 140
and the'real' 135, 138
social of violent death 73
records
distortion of Soviet 73-4
documentary 8, 134
of war survivors 3
RECOURS (Rassemblement et
Coordination Unitaire des Rapatries et
desSpolies) 167, 168
Red Cross 59
Red Square, Moscow 67, 68
redress movement, national 151-2
reflection 208-9
refugee camps, for Spanish Republicans in
southern France 94-5
refusal to mourn 221-39, 237
Nazi 235
Regeneration (Barker) 3, 42, 208
Regimental Combat Team, 442nd 150
rehearsal 14-15, 29, 35, 177
public 18
and ritual 16-17
reinterpretation 13-14
Reitz, Edgar 107
Reizschutz (psychological protective shield)
226
relatives of those arrested in Stalinist
purges 75-6
religion, Soviet attack on organized 66-7,
70-2
religious forms of commemoration, Israeli
traditional 186,202
religious rhetoric 233
nationalist mobilization of 229
Remarque, Erich Maria, All quiet on the
Western Front 36
remembering
duty of 125
and forgetting 18
remembrance
after First World War (1914-18) 40-60
ambiguity of healing effects 5, 32, 177-8
255
ambivalence of Second World War 104
and experience 224-6
and families 41-7
kin, 'fictive kin' and patterns of 47-59
landscapes of 142-60
living tradition of 28
processes of 30-9, 151-2
public and private pain in Israel 177-204
role of the state in 38-9
in Soviet Russia 61-83
survivors and 137-41
trajectory of shelf-life 30-1
use of term 41
war and 17-19
see also collective remembrance
Remi, Henriette, Homines sans visage
49-50, 54
Renaissance art 21-2

Rentschler, Eric 107n
reparation to Japanese American victims
151-2
repetition, for Benjamin 228n 229, 235,
237, 239
representations 31, 35-7
visual and spatial 152^
repression 30, 34-5, 62
repressive regimes 7-8, 85-100
Soviet 61-83
Republican Disabled League (Spanish), in
France see Liga de Mutilados e
Invalidos de Guerra de Espana
Republican Spanish veterans
after Franco 100-3
in exile 84-5, 86-7, 93-5, 98-100, 102,
103
postwar period 90-5
Resistance
ambiguity of 113-16
legitimacy of 175-6
in narratives of ghetto Jews 128
and national unity 172-6
Resistants 19, 106, 172, 173
Resnais, Alain, Hiroshima Mon Amour 108
responsibility, feelings of 184-5, 229
restitution,financial151
restricted memory 166-70
retrieval, selective storage 194-5
'retroactive interference' in memory 12,
34
Revel, Jacques 25n
revenge 30
Ribot,Theodule231
Rilke, Rainer Maria 21
Ringelblum, Emmanuel 126, 129
Ringelheim, Foulek 133n
256
Index
Rioux, Jean-Pierre 161, 163n, 166n, 167n,

168n, 170n, 171n
ritual 14, 28, 57
banishment of 1-2
and historiography 187
imposition of 83
and rehearsal 16-17
repetition without closure 237, 239
Russian funerary 66-8
of separation 38
in social learning 15
of survivors 159
and time 16-17
value of 229
Robert, J.-L. 38n
Roberts, Julian 224n
Roche, Anne 168n
Roggevelde military cemetery 58
Rohwer, Arkansas 147
Roma citta aperta (Rossellini) 113, 115,
116-17
Romanov dynasty 67
Romans, Jews in revolt against the 189
romantic war 213-14, 217
Rose, Gillian 235, 236n, 237
Roseman, Mindy 149n
Rosental, G. 204n
Rosental, R. 178n
Rossellini, Roberto 36, 108n, 110, 111,
113, 123
Rouaud, Jean, Champs d'honneur 3, 42
Rouault, Georges 233n
Rouquet, Francois 173n
Rousso, Henry 173n, 174n, 175n
Royal Welsh Fusiliers, official war diary
215-16
ruins, children weeping among 109-13,117
Rushdie, Salman 26
Russell, Mark 23n
Russia 34, 37, 61-83, 131
census (1937) 65, 74
war-attributable excess deaths 64-5
Russian Civil War 64, 70, 187
Russian revolution 7
Russian-Polish war 187
Rymkiewicz, J.M. 133n
Sabbatai Zvi 236
Sabbatianism 236
sabras 191, 193, 194, 195, 196
sacred, the 2, 57, 226
sacrifice 189, 231,239
language of 7 9, 228
principle of 56
'sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham' metaphor
185,202,203
Saidel, Rochelle G. 133n

Saint-Cheron, Michael de 13In
Saitowitz, Stanley 38n
salvation (Erlosung) 230
Santer, Eric 113n
Santerre, Meme 47-8
Sarasua, Belen 9In
Sartarelli, Stephen 23 2n
Sassoon, Siegfried 207, 219
letter of resignation from the war 216-17
Memoirs of an infantry officer 213, 214-17
Sherston'sprogress 213, 217-18, 219
The complete memoirs of George Sherston
213-18
The memoirs of a fox-hunting man 213-14,
217
scale, small 32-3, 40-60
Schachter, Daniel J. 11 n, 15n, 31 n
Scheerbart, Paul 231
schemata 13, 28
Schiper, Ignacy 126
Schmidt, Christoph J. 81 n
Schneiderman, S.L. 127n
Scholem, Gershom 221, 222n, 223n, 234n
236
Scholl, Norbert 109n, 114n

Schudson, Michael 11 n
Schulte, Regina 57n
Schweppenhauser, Hermann 228n
Sciusda (De Sica) 111, 123
scripts 11, 13, 28
encoding and revision of 13, 15
social 29, 37
sculptures in sand 95
Se questo e un uomo (Levi) 106
seances 56
Second Aliyah members killed by Arabs
188
Second World War (1939^5) 4, 62
cinema representations of 104-24
diaries 210-11
Frenchmen in 19
Japanese during 146, 147-51
remembrance of and non-remembrance
of Algerian War 171-2
resistance and national unity 172-6
Yishuv volunteers in 182
second-order memory 1-2
secret police, Soviet 72
'secrets' 64, 69-70
secularization, and remembrance 186,
187-8,201-2
segregation, patterns of 143, 155
selective memory traces 13, 194-5
self, loss of 218
self-censorship 30, 198
Index
self-esteem, low 33
self-help associations 47
Seligson, Carla 222
Seligson, Frederika (Rika) 222, 228-9,
230, 239
semantic memory 12, 13

Sennett, Richard 69n, 140
separation allowances for soldiers' wives
42
separation during war 41-2
Sephardijews 195
from Algeria 169, 176
Service Sociale d'Aide aux Emigrants 94
Seventh Day, The 197
Shakespeare, William 211
Shamir, I. 16n
Shapiro, Judith 82n
Shapiro, Robert Moses 132n
Sharon, Ariel 201
Shatzky, Jacob, History of the Jews of
Warsaw 132-3
Shchastny, Aleksei 69
shelf-life 16, 24, 30-1
of remembrance of 1948 Israeli war
194-5
Sherston'sprogress (Sassoon) 213, 217-18,
219
Shi'ite Islam 39
Shoah
aftermath of the 129-33
use of term 125n
voices from the 125-41
see also Holocaust
Shua, religious protesters in city of 69
Sidon, E. 204n
Sikhs 39
silence 18, 33-4, 62, 64, 74, 81, 92n, 93,
145, 177
silence, beyond 158-60
Sirinelli, Jean-Francois 162n, 175n
sites of extermination, visits to 138
'sites of remembrance' 40
Sivan, Emmanuel 6-39, 57, 129, 177-204
Six Day War (1967) 177,186, 197
slaves 73, 83
Smith, Gary 222n, 228n, 229n, 234n
Snow, C.P., Strangers and Brothers 107
social agency approach 40-60

social cues 14
social facts 23
social frameworks of memory (Halbwachs)
6, 103, 105,129,176
social geography 55
social integration, commemoration and
190-6
social learning 11
257
implications for the historical study of
memory 16
interpolated 33
ritual in 15
social memory, Warburg's theory of 21-2,
23
social movements
Europe (1960s) 108
post-Franco 101
social psychology 10
social relations, and space 142-3
social reproduction, space of 143
social structure 20, 23, 24
socialization of survivors 140
sociology 10, 19-27
soldiers' narratives 18, 33, 36, 106
Somme battlefields 45, 46
Sorlin, Pierre 104-24
sound archives 134
South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation
Commission 35
South America 188
Southwick, Steve 15n
Soviet dictatorship 7, 61-83
Soviet state, selective commemoration of
63, 67-8,76-7
space
the production of 142-3

and social relations 142-3
Spanish Civil War (1936-9) 4, 18, 34-5
veterans and disabled soldiers 84-103
Spanish Refugee Aid 94
spatial histories 142-60
spatial memory 17, 37-8, 153, 157-8
Spicer, Edward H. 150n
Spielberg, Steven, Visual History of the
Shoah Foundation 137-8
spinsterhood, and First World War 42
spirit of an age 20
spiritualism 56, 234
Squire, L.R. lln
'stab in the back legend' 35
Stalin, Joseph 62, 63, 106n
Stalingrad (Plievier) 107
Stalinist purges 64, 65-6, 69-70, 75-6,
79-80, 82
standpoint, psychological 24-6

Staron, S. 127n
state 29, 30
'exuberance of the' 41
the role of the 38-9
statistics, unearthing of accurate Soviet 62
step-mothers, Soviet 76n
Stern, Anne-Lise, 'To be deported and a
witness' 138
Stierle, Karlheinz 55n
258
Index
Stimme hebt an, Eine (Gaiser) 107
Stockwell, Elisha212
Stora, Benjamin 165n 172
stories 28, 206-7
'master code' of 43
official army war- 215-16
telling of 14, 15
Stoyanov, N.N. 68n
Strangers and brothers (Snow) 107
structure of memories 28, 36-7

Sturken, Marita 38n
subjectivity, of memory 25-7
sublation 232
sublimation 232, 238
Suez Canal, War of Attrition on the 202-3
Suez expedition (1956) 163
Sugimoto, Henry 148
suicide 32, 81-2, 95
anti-war of Benjamin's friends 222-3,
228-9, 230, 232, 234, 235, 237, 239
Sullivans, The (TV series) 107
Sunni Islam 39
superstition 66-7
support groups 47
suppression of memories in Soviet Russia
73^
survivors 3, 18-19
of First World War (1914-18) 40-60
guilt of 74-6, 81, 100, 180, 184-5
psychological instability legacy 91-3
testimony of Holocaust \37i\
to witnesses 5, 125-41
Sutzkever, Avram 130-1
Sverdlov, Ya. M. 67n
Sword of honour (Waugh) 107
symbolic closure
Nazi 237
resistance to 229, 238-9
symbolic substitutes 1-2
symbolism, Benjamin's opposition to the
mediating power of 227-8
Sztaray, Susan 157-8
Szurek, Jean-Charles 7n
Takaki, Ronald 148n
tape recording, of memories of American
Holocaust survivors 137
Tarkovskii, Andrei 106n
Taylor, Sandra C. 148n
teachers, and war orphans 52, 53-4
teaching, and transmission 134
technology, Benjamin on 227-8, 232-3
Tel Hai, Arab attack on (1920) 189
telescoping of memory traces see selective
memory traces
television 123, 137
interviews of Holocaust survivors

139^0
'of intimacy' 137
Terdiman, Richard 22In, 232n
territorial conflicts 143
testimony 125, 134-6
about a vanished world 126-9
of an Israeli mother 185
and assertion of identity 140
change in nature of 138
importance of language of 130-2
and IT 31
possible perverse uses of 141
Thanassekos, Yannis 128n
Thiepval, war-memorial at (Lutyens) 206
Thomas, Dylan 11 On
Tiedemann, Rolf 222n, 223n, 228n, 229n
time
of death 180
and ritual 16-17
Tonnies, Ferdinand 232n
Topaz, Utah 148
toponyms, from Russian revolution 7
topos, los (moles) 93
Torah scrolls named in honour of the dead
186,195
Torbado, Jesus 93n
torture 171, 172, 175
total war 61, 109, 121
totalitarianism, collective memory under
7-8, 29
Touvier, Paul 174

Trabal, Antonio 86n, 98n
tradition 226
transmission
generational 18, 31, 130
and teaching 134
Trauerarbeit 228, 239n
Trauerspiel 228, 234
trauma 15-16, 46-7, 180, 219

biochemical pathways of 15-16
dialectic of memory and 221-39
long-term legacy of 82
shelf-life of 31
temporal delay in 226n, 238-9
war as 9
traumatic memory 15-16, 235-6
Trench of the Bayonets 145
trenches 104, 113,210
community of the 222
as labyrinth 233
triggers of memory 15
Triimmerfilme (ruin-films) 109
Tule Lake, California 148
Tunisia 167
Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 35
Index
typhus epidemic 71
Uchida, Gloria 158
Ukraine 65
Ultimo viene il corvo (Calvino) 120
Umemoto, Karen 152n

Umsdilagplatz 128
UNC (National union of combatants) 170

Undfinden dereinst wir uns wieder (Miiller)
114
Und iiber uns der Himmel (von Baky) 122
Unger, Erich 23 4n
unintended consequences 30, 32, 36, 194
Union of Disfigured Men 50
United Nations 171
United States 113, 132, 133
unknown soldier 76, 79
First World War memorials 55n 170
Urraca, Francisco Fernandez 92n
Utopian potential of the past 231, 234-5,
237-9
Uyematsu, Amy, 'The shaping of pine'
158
Val-de-Grace military hospital, Paris 51
Valahol Europdvan (Radvanyi) 117, 118,
123
Valensi, Lucette 27n, 29n, 187n
Vallat, Xavierl73
Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen)
85n97
Van Creveld, Martin 39n
Van den Berg, Ger P. 69n
Van der Bruck, Moeller 20-1
Vasilevskii, L.A. 65n
Vasilevskii, L.M. 65n
Vega, Pedro 9 7n, lOOn
Veil, Simone 175
verbal memories, distortion and selection
of 13
Verdi, Giuseppe 68
Verhey, Jeffrey 56n
veterans
contested views of 33
disabled 47-8
Soviet women 78
veterans' associations 32, 50-1, 61,
86-103
Vichy regime 98, 173
victimhood
and agency 17-19, 219-20
legitimacy and 173-6
victims of genocide, community of 176
victims of Soviet repression 80
victims of war 9, 31, 59
259
children in postwar European cinema
104-24
victory
and history 126
and mourning 86
and remembrance 172
Victory Day parade 78
Victory Parades, in Spain (1939-76) 85n
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 125n
video testimonies 137-9
videos 31, 36
Vietnam Veterans' Memorial 38, 206
Vietnam War (1965-73) 218,219
Vietnamese War (1954) 163, 164
viewpoint, of group 24-5
visits to sites of extermination 138; see also
pilgrimages
Visual History of the Shoah Foundation
(Spielberg) 137-8
visual memory 17
distortion and selection of 13
voice in narrative 206
Volga region 65
voluntary groups 29, 61, 179
Von Baky, Joseph, Und iiber uns der Himmel
122
Wachtel, Nathan 27n, 29n, 187n
Wagner, Richard, Gotterdammerung 68
Wall, R. 42n
Wall, The (Hersey) 127
war
as a crime 37
cult of'eternal' 225
death and remembrance in Soviet Russia
61-83
dramatic effects of 112
'good' 184
representations of 35-7
un-named 161, 164, 172
war deaths, selective recording of Russian
73-4
War diary of the Master of Belhaven
(Hamilton) 210
'war enthusiasm' 56
war generation 61
war memorials see memorials, war
war orphans see orphans
War Relocation Authority Center,
Manzanar, California 142, 149 illus.
War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps
147-51
war strategy, criticisms of 200-1
War and warrior (Jiinger) 225, 233, 236
Warburg, Aby 21-2, 23
260
Index
warfare
desultory 37
the nature of 34, 38-9
Warsaw, Jews of 126-9, 132-3
Wartime Relocation and Internment of
Civilians, Presidential Commission on
the 151-2
Washington, Holocaust Museum 138, 145
Watson, Rubie S. 77n
Waugh, Evelyn, Sword of honour 107
Weisse Rose, die 114
Weliczker-Wells, Leon, 19, 136

Wellers, George 136
Wells, H.G. 209n
Westermann, Barbel 114n
Western European societies 106
Wette, Wolfram 55n
Wheatcroft, S.G. 64n
Why we fight 123
Wickham, Chris 146n

Wicki, Bernhard 108n, 114, 115
widows
associations 61
number of First World War 42
of Spanish Civil War 96n, 101
Wiesel, Elie 127n
And the worldwas silent 131-2
Wieviorka, Annette 19, 125^1, 175n, 176
Winter, Jay 6-39, 40-60, 73n, 144n, 226,
227n, 229, 233n, 234n
Wismann, Heinz 235n
witch hunts 80-1
witness
as opposition 19
use of word in New Testament 131
witnesses
depositions of 134
emergence of 133-7
the era of 137-41
existential 137
living 17-19
to Japanese American camps 151-2
Wohlfahrt, Irving 225n, 232, 235n
Wolff, Tobias 207
Wolin, Richard 223n
women
Soviet 77-9
voices of 7
in warfilms108
works of art, racial cultural memory in 20-2
wounded 42, 47-51
writings as artificial memory 136

Wyneken, Gustav 223
Yad Vashem
Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem 133
oral archive 135, 136
Yeltsin, Boris 80
Yiddish 130, 131-2
Yiddish poetry 129
Yiddishkeit 129-33
Yishuvperiod (1882-1947) 181, 182, 185,
186,188, 189
YIVO (Jewish Scientific Institute) 132
Yizkor books 129-33, 177-90
in thirteenth-century Germany 186-7,
189
1911 formula 179, 189
changing tone and themes of literature
199-200
interviews with editors of 184-5
new forms commemorating community
life after First World War 187-8
official Ministry of Defence (1955) 190
post-1973 197-204
published by kibbutzim 189-90, 201,
203^
reasons for popularity 185-90
as a socio-cultural mode of action 190-6
Yizkor prayer 187
YomKippur War (1973) 181, 185,
196-204
Yoo, David 159n
Young, James 205
youth
rebirth through, as cinematic theme
117-18
Russian 80
in war 113-16
Youth Movement 222, 223, 235
Ypres 44, 57
Zagorskii, V. G. 67n
Zakhor235
Zampa, Luigi, Campane a martello 111 n
Zay, Jean 174
Zelenin, D.K. 67n
Zinoviev, Grigoriy Yevseyevich 69
Zionism 180, 184-5, 188-9
Zipes, Jack 4n
Zohn, Harry 22n, 225n
Zubizasteta, Irena 9In
Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare

Titles in the series:
1 Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural
History
Jay Winter
ISBN 0 521 49682 9 (paperback)
2 Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919
Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert
ISBN 0 521 57171 5 (hardback) 0 521 66814 X (paperback)
3 State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War
Edited by John Horne
ISBN 0 521 56112 4
4 A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's
Spain, 1936-1945
Michael Richards
ISBN 0 521 59401 4
5 War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan
ISBN 0 521 64035 0
6 European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and
Propaganda, 1914-1918
Edited by Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites
ISBN 0 521 57015 8
7 The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in
Australia
Joy Damousi
ISBN 0 521 66004 1 (hardback) 0521 66974 X (paperback)
8 The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery
in Western Europe, 1945-1965
Pieter Lagrou
ISBN 0 521 65180 8
9 War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German
Occupation in World War I
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
ISBN 0 521 66157 9
10 The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany

Jeffrey Verhey
ISBN 0 521 77137 4
11 German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914-1918
Matthew Stibbe
ISBN 0 521 78296 1
12 Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust
in Occupied Germany
Zeev W. Mankowitz
ISBN 0 521 81105 8
13 Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923-2000
Anne Dolan
ISBN 0 521 81904 0
14 Jews and Gender in Liberation France
K. H. Adler
ISBN 0 521 79048 4
15 America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915
Edited by Jay Winter
ISBN 0 521 82958 5
16 Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World
War in Britain
Janet S. K. Watson
ISBN 0 521 83153 9
17 Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life
in World War I
Maureen Healy
ISBN 0 521 83124 5
18 The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism,
1914-1940
Mona L. Siegel
ISBN 0 521 83900 9

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War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century

No scholarly consensus exists about how the terms 'memory' and

Jean-Louis Robert, Capital cities at war: Paris, London,

1914-1919 (1997). He is winner of an Emmy for Outstanding TV

Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern

War and Remembrance in

Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Setting the framework

Pembroke College, Cambridge

Hebrew University ofJerusalem

Forms of kinship and remembrance in the

War, death, and remembrance in Soviet Russia

Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War veterans and

Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, and

Children as war victims in postwar European cinema

University of Paris - III

From survivor to witness: voices from the Shoah

8 The Algerian War in French collective memory

10 Personal narratives and commemoration

University of California at Berkeley

There is a rough common denominator in this book, fashioned through

second-order memory: we collect, organize, exhibit, catalogue, but

stories in bigger, more universal, narratives. The government invests in

Jean Rouaud, Champs d'honneur (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990).

of questions about the nature of 'collective memory' in the context of

Setting the framework

Maurice Halbwachs, On collective memory, trans, by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University

Setting the framework

Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan

E. J. Hobsbawm, The age of extremes (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), p. 4.

Setting the framework

and is especially salient in non-official forms of collective remembrance.

Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan

As cited by Coser in his introduction to Halbwachs, On collective memory, p.13.

Setting the framework

Many historians use the term 'memory' as if it were unproblematic.

Cognitive psychologists use the term social learning. It is a process to be

R Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932); A. Baddeley,

Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan

Setting the framework

Recognition and recall

Evidence produced so far supports the view that the distortion of

E. R Loftus, Eyewitness testimony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan

Later access or recall of memories is greatly enhanced by the retelling of

We are grateful to Martin Jay for his comments on this point.

Setting the framework

dependency. The evocation of a whole world triggered by a French

Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan

analysis is that 'traumatic' memories are not a separate category of

The study of how individuals remember is hard enough. Historians

Societies do not learn. Individuals in societies learn, but their learning

Collective memory has no existence independent of the individual, and

Latent (and even implicit, fleeting, or overlapping) memories become

Setting the framework

especially connected with 'ritual', which is a series of stylized and

Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan