Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How war has been remembered collectively is the central question in this volume. War in the twentieth century is a vivid and traumatic phenomenon which left behind it survivors who engage time and time again in acts of remembrance. This volume, containing essays by outstanding scholars of twentieth-century history, focuses on the issues raised by the shadow of war in this century. The behaviour, not of whole societies or of ruling groups alone, but of the individuals who do the work of remembrance, is discussed by examining the traumatic collective memory resulting from the horrors of the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Algerian War. By studying public forms of remembrance, such as museums and exhibitions, literature and film, the editors have succeeded in bringing together a volume which demonstrates that a popular kind of collective memory is still very much alive.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface(p. vii)
• Introduction(p. 1)
• 1 Setting the framework(p. 6)
• 2 Forms of kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War(p. 40)
• 3 War, death, and remembrance in Soviet Russia(p. 61)
• 4 Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War veterans and disabled soldiers(p. 84)
• 5 Children as war victims in postwar European cinema(p. 104)
• 6 From survivor to witness: voices from the Shoah(p. 125)
• 7 Landscapes of loss and remembrance: the case of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles(p. 142)
• 8 The Algerian War in French collective memory(p. 161)
• 9 Private pain and public remembrance in Israel(p. 177)
• 10 Personal narratives and commemoration(p. 205)
• 11 Against consolation: Walter Benjamin and the refusal to mourn(p. 221)
• Index(p. 240)