The best books on war and collective memory

I am a huge fan of everything Paul Fussell (1924-2012) published. He was a colorful character in real life and earned his chops as a literary critic of modern war when he landed in France with the 103rd Infantry division in 1944, was wounded fighting in Alsace, and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

I couldn't put down his book. I find most important the universal way he describes the gap between the way common soldiers experience battlefields, in contrast to how the war is portrayed to the general public by observers at home, propagandists, and the like who interpret the war from a safe distance. I was always impressed by the sharp manner of his writing. He traces the pulverization of pre-1914 Victorian values as they collided with the sheer force and brutality of modern steel and gas technology.

I loved surveying the direct and profane language used by soldiers, so at odds with the anachronistic and knightly language used on the home front. I found the book at times disorderly, but that reflected the reality of the war. Fussell's pithy descriptions of the actual experience in the trenches both shocked and educated me. Fussell was one of the early pioneers among literary historians of the way that modern collective memory was shaped and reshaped by a war that was supposed to end all wars but was, in fact, only a prelude to more horrors to come.

This book is beautiful even as its subject is ugly: how the shock of the Great War led inexorably in Germany to the rise of Hitler.

I loved the aesthetics of this book. Eksteins begins by transporting us back to Paris, sitting us in the audience on opening night in May 1913 for Stravinsky's ballet The Rites of Spring, which caused mayhem because of the wild dance techniques and jarring music. Eksteins then takes us on a journey through the culture of Weimar Germany as Berlin seized the title of Europe's cultural capital from Paris.

I was enraptured by the dizzying esthetics of modernism, dada, surrealism, and other, punctuated bursts of artistic trends, both celebrated and opposed, in a right-wing backlash that had real-world consequences. Ekstein's thesis convinced me counter-intuitively that Hitler and Nazism were connected in the irrational conglomeration of birth and destruction, first introduced by Stravinsky.

This book belongs on the bookshelf next to the works of Paul Fussell, both authors who give us deep insight into how the aftershocks of modernity can be traced back to the war experience. 

I usually get bored by very long books too full of dates, people you have never heard of, and endless details, and I am a historian! But I make an exception for this book.

Clark took me back vividly to a period in history that has been covered so often by rewriting the old storylines of WWI with flair and freshness. I came to better understand why World War I was not just a fluke, started by the black swan event of the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife in a backwater of the empire on June 28th, 1914.

In spite of the title, if the European leaders were sleepwalkers, and in a narrow sense they were, Clark also provides plenty of evidence that the underlying tensions in the Austro-Hungarian empire were like huge dry piles of straw just waiting for a flame to ignite the whole European farm.

For me, the book is most useful for making sense of how large geo-political conflicts have their roots in longstanding tensions that can break out suddenly into cataclysmic events when leaders ignore the seemingly small brushfires.

I was riveted by this revisionist history of how America got into World War I and changed American society and politics. He shows how much of American collective memory about why WWI was fought, and the perception of Germany in America was fashioned, to a large extent, by British propaganda. He also shows why Germany had no choice but to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, which eventually brought the United States into the war.

Had the British modified the naval blockade on Germany, which starved the German population in a horrific manner, the United States might never have become involved. But Great Britain was determined to make sure Germany would never again pose a threat to its colonial overseas empire. President Wilson at first understood that American neutrality was the means by which he could have brokered peace, but British and French recalcitrance, and eventually the deaths of relatively few Americans on merchant ships carrying ammunition for the war effort, tipped the scales to US intervention in the war.

In an age of conspiracy theories, I was particularly taken aback by evidence that Winston Churchill, in his role in 1915 as Lord of the Admiralty, may have sent the famous cruise liner, Lusitania, on an unusual course towards England to the south of England, which was heavily infested with German submarines, rather than a safer northern route, anticipating it could be sunk, and thus draw the U.S. into the war. I feasted on the plethora of such details in the book about what actually happened during the war, in contrast to war propaganda. Collective memory always has two faces: the way memories are constructed and the truth behind the facade.

I think Zachary Shore is one of our most underappreciated, insightful interpreters of American and global history.

Shore impressed me with his unique method of examining micro-events that give us a much wider view of American culture. He shows how America, at its best, can be a strong and moral guiding force for good in the world, but he doesn't shy from divulging the darker sides of the American psyche, such as the blunders that lead American leaders to make terrible and consequential military decisions.

Shore is not only a great historian but also a gifted writer. This book showed me how the collective memory of our nation has been portrayed too often in flawed stereotypes, either a villainous, youthful colossus or a city on a hill, a shining example for the rest of humanity. Shore convinced me that at its root, America can be a force for good as long as we carefully study and remember our collective past. One is reminded of Churchill's quip, "America always does the right thing after it has tried everything else."