Week 3 (2/1-2/3)

Discussed:

Discussion of Jay Winter and Sivan, focuses on how different groups within society construct memory rather than society as a whole.

Student Presentations:

Kinship in the Great War (Collin and Kay)
- families and parts of disjointed families were brought together because of WWI
- these smaller groups each formed their own memories of the war
Disabled Spanish Civil War Veterans (Dylan)
- Wounded veterans of the Spanish Civil War, especially Republican veterans, were often forgotten by the public.

Discussion of Paper #1 requirements

Discussion of personal stories of war within families

Student Presentations:

From Survivor to Witness: Memories of the Shoah (Caitlin and Isabel)
- memory of the Holocaust was mainly kept alive in the early years by the Jewish community, who primarily focused on preserving the memory of the victims.
- the witness became an increasingly important part of this memory with the Eichmann trials and the 1980s memory boom as it became more possible to record stories of survivors.
Memory of the Algerian War (Matthew)
- is often forgotten in French collective memory because loosing Algeria was seen as a “disgrace”
- memory differed for French people living in Algeria- seen as a “paradise lost”
- Although there is abundant scholarship on the French Algerian War, it is absent from popular culture.
Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn (Peter and Turner)
- Walter Benjamin argued against collective mourning, arguing it created a myth of collective solidarity and erased the individual’s suffering
- Memorialization created a more abstract view of memory that erased the individual