Abstract
Published under the umbrella of Berghahn’s Studies in Contemporary European History series, which has a total of 22 volumes either published or forthcoming, this volume spans a period of 80 years, from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, to the end of the Second World War. Interdisciplinary, with multinational contributions, it considers the impact of the period 1936–45 on post-war cultural history, legacy, and representation, with a focus upon individual and collective memories, and the ways in which they have shaped the continent’s cultural heritage. It is also of salient interest given recent developments in Europe, where, for instance, the AfD secured 12.6% in the German election on 24 September 2017; Poland is demanding that Germany pay war reparations of $1 trillion 72 years after the Second World War; and Brexit continues to dominate British (and EU) politics. Whilst the volume under review is not about politics as such, it does reinforce the primacy of memory and cultural history as significant elements in the forging of national identity, which in turn influences attitudes and politicians.
To this end (the formulation of memory and identity), chapter topics include poetry, fiction, film, material culture, memory, revisionism, counterfactuals, and trauma. Academic contributors have backgrounds in the arts, humanities, social sciences, history, sociology, and cultural history, with roughly a third of the material written by female academics. Reflecting the diverse nationalities, backgrounds, and expertise of individual authors, there is no direct correlation between the focus of each chapter and where academics are based, or perhaps grew up. For instance, several teach in the United States and Canada, and none appear to work in Germany, France, or Russia. These factors positively reinforce a sense that a truly European-wide perspective has been achieved. Here, a contributor from one country may be an academic expert in that of another, and many strands and flavours contribute to the volume’s thematic warp-and-weft.
Divided into seven parts of three chapters each, these are organized geographically from west to east, countries discussed including Spain, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the USSR/Russia. This provides 21 thematic chapters in all, with a foreword by Richard Overy, an introduction by the editors, and an afterword by Jay Winter. Each part begins with an overview of the broad historiography for the country under review, followed by two further chapters focusing upon ‘high’ or ‘low’ cultures, or which adopt differing cultural approaches (p. 12). Specifically, authors were asked to ‘reflect on the dynamics of identity and otherness through national perspectives’ (p. 9).
Of a diverse range, example chapter themes include: Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, ‘On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives: The Example of Cristina Fernández Cubas’ Cosas que ya no existen’; Marko Pajević, ‘Ilse Aichinger’s Novel The Greater Hope: Poetic Narrative to Deal with Trauma’; Kirrily Freeman, ‘A Capital Problem: The Town of Vichy, the Second World War, and the Politics of Identity’; Richard J.B. Bosworth, ‘Victimhood Asserted: Italian Memories of World War II’; from a Polish perspective, Urszula Jarecka, ‘Wounded Memory: Rhetorical Strategies used in Public Discourse on the Katyń Massacre’; and from the Finnish academic Markku Kangaspuro, ‘History Politics and the Changing Meaning of Victory Day in Contemporary Russia’.
Setting the scene for the volume, as Richard Overy notes in his foreword ‘Between World Wars’, ‘the long Second World War’ essentially included the Spanish Civil War (p. 5), given the many countries involved either directly or indirectly – Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the USSR, et al. In exploring the ways in which the Great War was perceived after 1918, he also reminds us that in the west, whilst there was widespread revulsion and pacifism at the prospect of a second major war, for different reasons, both Germany and the USSR felt either resentful or bitter about its outcome. The memory and impact of the Second World War was also markedly different to that of the Great War, not least in its laying the foundations of the Cold War. Overy also notes that, as reflected at an academic conference in 2011 on the theme of ‘the loneliness of victims’, there was disagreement about the moral equivalence of perpetrators and victims when considering the scale of loss experienced by all sides (p. xi), which in turn confirmed that reconciliation between former warring nations might still have some way to go.
This latter point is one of many explored in an excellent introduction by the volume’s editors, wherein they argue that, in the interests of current solidarity, it is essential that both EU members and their neighbours understand each other’s anxieties and war experiences. A key difficulty, they suggest, is that the EU does not have a unifying history other than in finance and the technical aspects of its governance (p. 9), and that, as recent politics have confirmed, it does not inspire widespread confidence and enthusiasm (p. 10). Pro-EU, the editors lament the relative failure of scholars and policymakers to make better use of the internet to forge a better, European-wide sense of itself as a supra-national entity (p. 11). A key ambition of the book has therefore been ‘to find common forums to discuss some of the more painful and divisive memories in order to move forward’ (p. 11).
As one example of the book’s content and focus, chapter 4 by Daniel Travers and Paul Ward, ‘Narrating Britain’s War’, considers the impact of early post-war cultural history and historiography on Britain’s sense of itself and the war (and, one might add, on the Brexit vote). They argue that the war remains key to understanding British identity, dominant themes including Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, rationing, evacuation, and social-levelling, still influential as ‘big facts’ in forging the collective memory of that time (p. 82). By contrast, themes which did not chime with these tended to be marginalized in early post-war historiography, and have been suppressed since.
Central to Britain’s popular narrative was Churchill’s dominance (propagated in no small part by his six-volume history of the Second World War), wherein, however, the ‘“Churchillian paradigm” masks the assertion of local, regional and national identities through commemoration of the diverse experiences of war across the United Kingdom’ (p. 78). As a result, Churchill, and the depoliticized ‘People’s War’ narrative, continues to hold sway in many heritage sites and attractions. But the authors believe that subsequent interpretations will naturally focus more strongly on multinational and racial themes as Britain’s society changes (p. 85). In this context, the authors suggest, Britain’s sense of its identity has already shifted and is therefore not static, and neither is the Churchill paradigm (p. 89).
Whilst the volume’s chapters are scholarly (sometimes quite theoretical) and thought-provoking, their very diversity, often sharp focus on a narrow subject, or a more general breadth, makes it difficult to identify a centre of gravity to these eclectic contributions, which allows for firm general conclusions. What they do confirm is that individual nations experienced very different wars. For instance, Britain’s war experience contrasts strongly with the Holocaust, Poland’s plight (and the Katyn massacre), the massive losses on the eastern front (German and Russian), Italy’s devastation after its surrender, Germany’s self-inflicted trauma, the bitterness of the Spanish Civil War, and France’s unease about the role of Vichy after 1940. Whilst poetry, literature, art, film, and other forms of cultural expression are universal, the experiences which they reflect are often very diverse in both their intensity and impact.
Perhaps reflecting this difficulty in synthesizing the contributions in a formal conclusion which brings the many strands together, Jay Winter instead suggests within this context that after the war there were three main zones, or ‘memory regimes’, extending across both western and eastern Europe, the latter divided by a notional line running from Trieste to Stettin, with the third zone being the remainder of the world (p. 373). Arguably, the chapters should be read and absorbed within that rubric. Throughout, Winter considers that the authors contest the idea of ‘the moral high ground’ (p. 375), which Overy had noted as a focus of dissonance at the 2011 conference.
Returning to the editors’ aspiration for the volume, does it succeed in providing a forum for discussing the more painful and difficult aspects of the Second World War in Europe? The chapters confirm that individual and collective memory often wields great influence when framed by culture and history. Within academic circles focusing upon this aspect of cultural history and memory, this collection of essays is highly valuable, and also reinforces the fact that many more could be written about numerous other individual and collective aspects. Whether the volume can achieve the editors’ aim of leading to a more harmonious and pan-European sense of collective suffering (with no moral high ground, and which has a reach well beyond academe), ultimately depends perhaps upon the EU’s willingness to invest in programmes which forge a cohesive European sense of history. Its Horizon 2020 ‘cultural heritage of war’ programme seeks to achieve that. Academics in this volume are well placed to make a significant contribution to these ambitions, and to help frame Europe’s sense of its long and troubled history during the latter twentieth century, and how it is perceived into this new century.