Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning

Abstract

Jay Winter's powerful 1998 study of the 'collective remembrance' of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Dr Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing 'modernist' interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914–18, Dr Winter instead argues that what characterised that reaction was, rather, the attempt to interpret the Great War within traditional frames of reference. Tensions arose inevitably. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century.

‘Unitedly we have fought’: imperial loyalty and the Australian war effort

“…To paraphrase Jay Winter on the cultural history of the war, there was an 'overlap of languages and approaches between the old and the new'. 68 This is not to deny that there were probably many Australians for whom the ideology of imperial loyalty resonated less powerfully in 1919 than it had in 1914. All convictions, whether political or spiritual, are tested at the personal level by the desolation of grief.…”

Haunted house: Memory, ghosts and political theology in Lenin's Mausoleum

“…Immediately after his death, Lenin's Mausoleum functioned as a kind of pilgrimage site and was quickly associated with sovereignty (Tumarkin, 1983(Tumarkin, /1997 where those whose remains are unknown are remembered. They serve as memorials to war and national identity (see also Koselleck, 1994Koselleck, , 2002Mosse, 1990;Winter, 1995Winter, , 2006. Nina Tumarkin traces the connection between the Russian veneration of the saints and the emerging cult of Lenin.…”

Japan as the Occupier and the Occupied

“…Combining a Second World War memorial with a war memorial of the First World War was acceptable practice in Europe, Australia, and the United States, but it carried different connotations in postwar Singapore. 87 The First World War had not affected the people in Singapore as it had the peoples of Europe, and for the countries that fought for either side, like Australia and Turkey. If the Singapore Cenotaph was incorporated as the centerpiece of a Second World War memorial park, it would privilege a colonial past and render the local experience and memory of the war secondary at best.…”