Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History.

Abstract

In the four-year blood bath that began in the summer of 1914, about half of the nine million people who perished were citizens of France, Great Britain, and Germany.One in six of those who served in the armed forces of these three nations never returned.There was scarcely anyone on the home front who had not lost a close relative.The one experience shared by virtually all the survivors of the Great War, regardless of socio-economic status, educational attainment, or political tendency, was that of bereavement.Jay Winter's engrossing book investigates that process of mourning by treating the multifarious ways in which the widows, orphans, and parents of the dead soldiers in these three countries sought to cope with the loss of their loved ones.It also examines the ways in which literary, artistic, cinematic, and architectural themes served as devices of commemoration.This study of the cultural consequences of the Great War admirably complements Winter's earlier works on its military, political, social, and economic dimensions.The author is unabashedly selective, restricting his comparative analysis to the three principal partic-