The best history books on the memory of the war dead

Some may disagree with me, but I think this is Winter’s masterpiece. It is a book that charts the ways our remembrance of the war dead changed from the violence of the First World War to the Holocaust to the present. He looks at film, photographs, literature, and war memorials to show how our memories have become less vertical and more horizontal over time and how we have focused less and less on the faces of the dead and more and more on the names of the masses, such as one finds on Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. While all of Winter’s works are fantastic, this is his best.

This Republic of Suffering came out just as I was beginning my own writing process and, to be honest, I panicked about it. As I read Faust’s book, I found that she had used some of the same sources I planned to use. But when I finished this book, I came to understand just how powerful the study of the war dead could be. Faust used the war dead evocatively as a canvas to paint the remaking of a nation and she did so by placing the dead in the foreground of the story. Her highly readable account brought the dead back to life, so to speak, for just a moment, so that we could understand their sacrifice and sympathize with them.   

This was one of the first books I read about the politics of the dead and it reshaped the way I thought about dead bodies. It is readable, provocative, and challenged Mark Twain’s idea that “none but the dead have free speech.” Even after dying, the dead can be used for political purposes and Verdery lifts the veil on the postsocialist world to discuss how the reburial of bodies, be it Lenin or war graves, exposes the politics of society. She originally delivered this as a series of lectures at Columbia University and although its findings may seem a bit dated now, almost every writer who covers the war dead lists this book in their bibliography. 

Rothberg is not a historian but I love what he accomplished with this scholarly book. He examines film, literature, and paintings to suggest that our memories are multidirectional: meaning they often move in different directions at the same time. This allows him to place the holocaust side-by-side the colonial/decolonial project and produce a devastating story of how each fed upon the other. For example, he looks at moments in 1960s Paris that places Jewish survivors of Auschwitz in conversation with Algerian survivors of French concentration camps during the Algerian war to suggest their memories could work together to produce an honest remembrance of the past. I try to do something similar in my own book by illustrating how the war dead could link domestic and foreign places together in building an American Empire.   

This may be the book that started it all. Mosse has many books that try to explain the rise of the Nazis in Germany who Mosse and his parents fled in the 1930s. Here Mosse describes how Nazis used the war dead from the First World War in an explicit attempt to harness the nationalism of Germans to support Nazi politics. Winter disagrees with Mosse and developed arguments that are probably more accepted by historians today but, for me, that doesn’t take away from the power of Mosse’s argument. Even though I don’t always agree with Mosse’s analysis, I can’t help but be engrossed by his writing, his passion, and his ability to describe how the war dead could be used as political weapons.