As the art historians Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Rasutė Žukienė note in their foreword to this volume, Lithuania in the two world wars has been studied extensively by military, political, and social historians but has been given little attention by researchers of culture and art. With this selection of modern Lithuanian scholarship from an impressive array of disciplines, Jankevičiūtė and Žukienė have taken a welcome step toward correcting that omission. They have composed a collection of interest to a readership beyond that of students of modern Baltic history; the articles engage equally with film and music theory, memory studies, and narrative theory.

The editors have devoted considerable space to World War I, a conflict little memorialized in eastern Europe and Russia, where the wars of independence and the Russian Revolution have dominated historical discussions. Yet the articles show that a greater focus on the culture of memory during and after World War I is crucial for understanding the memorializing of World War II. For example, a chapter on post-Holocaust narratives by Larisa Lempertienė demonstrates the dependence of memorialists of the Holocaust upon the work of imperial German army journalists for descriptions of the Jewish communities in Lithuania that the survivors wished to commemorate. Examination of World War I, together with the subsequent period of independence and World War II, reveals memorial threads that bind the beginning to the middle of the twentieth century, most of which have been suppressed by the mutually exclusive Soviet and nationalist histories.

Two chapters describe encounters of Vilnius by soldiers in the imperial German army during World War I. Laimonas Briedis shows how German writers producing propaganda for the army press office employed the construct of the flaneur to model an imperial eye-view of occupied lands for the reader, both German soldier and civilian. Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė, likewise, focuses on the work of writers and illustrators serving as journalists for the German army during the First World War. Charged to describe to the reader the local life of occupied lands, including that of the Jewish population, the writers and artists in uniform—some of them Jewish themselves—created portraits of the Ostjuden for a German audience. These portrayals were alternately disdainful of the poverty of their subjects and reverent about their lives of piety. Evoking Rembrandt, these writers depicted Lithuanian Jewish life as an enduring remnant of the medieval past and the ancient religion. A chapter by Rasa Antanavičiūtė takes on the absence of public memory of the First World War and its 30,000 Lithuanian dead, characterizing this amnesia as a failure to integrate the “international war” of 1914–18 with the “national war” of 1918–20 that won Lithuania its independence. Finally, Larisa Lempertienė’s study of the memory of lost Jewish communities (mentioned above) rounds out the chapters on memory formation during World War I.

The remaining five chapters concern the trauma of the second war and its aftermath. Agnė Narušytė, an art and photography critic, considers Kęstutis Grigaliūnas's exhibit “Diaries of Death,” composed of NKVD archival photographs of people arrested by the Soviets in 1940–41. Narušytė explores the various narratives that contextualize the photographs, particularly, the perspective that “arranges” the photographs and invests them with meaning, a meaning supplied by the hegemonic gaze of the prosecutor, whose power is only amplified by pre-arrest photographs of everyday life. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, an art historian at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, examines artwork produced by local artists for evidence of everyday life under the Nazi occupation (1941–44). Jankevičiūtė is clearly familiar with the archival material and might have focused her argument more narrowly on a smaller body of art. As it is, the chapter reads like an exhibition of painting and sculpture of the occupation. Rasutė Žukienė describes Lithuanian artists who, as displaced persons in Germany after the end of World War II, attempted to advance Lithuania's claim to sovereignty in exhibitions and concerts. Žukienė illustrates the trap into which these refugee communities fell: despite counting among their number highly-respected artists, few Lithuanians broke into the broader European art markets, remaining instead confined to expatriate circles. Žukienė puts some of the blame on the use of exhibits to demonstrate not the originality of Lithuanians as artists but rather the industriousness of Lithuanians as immigrants-to-be. Rūta Stanevičiūtė also focuses on memory in the aftermath of World War II, in the music of two Lithuanian composers, Vytautas Bacevičius (Sinfonia de la Guerra, composed in 1940 in Buenos Aires) and Eduardas Balsys (Nelieskite mėlyno gaublio [Do Not Touch the Blue Globe]), composed in 1969 in Soviet Lithuania. Stanevičiūtė argues for a semiotics of memory and trauma in the form of musical gestures.

Natalija Arlauskaitė’s chapter is the only work not concerned explicitly with Lithuanian culture. However, she presents the problem of the construction of historical narratives that is relevant to the other chapters. Arlauskaitė focuses upon Sergei Loznitsa's 2006 film Blockade, which, she demonstrates, is a documentary that deconstructs the documentary as a form. Arlauskaitė’s analysis shows Loznitsa organizing his footage according to various forms of narrative “logic”—chronological order, spatial order, for example—to create the illusion of a unified, coherent perspective that lulls the viewer with its narrative familiarity. But Loznitsa administers jolts to his audience throughout the film by violating those narrative rules: for example, at times he alters the pace, showing in long, unedited takes taboo subjects such as migrating Leningrad inhabitants pulling their possessions and dead bodies on sleds, allowing an uncomfortable, seemingly unedited reality to interrupt the documentary narrative. Arlauskaitė explains the abrupt end of the film, a brief clip of the execution of German soldiers in 1946, and the only piece of footage with an explanatory subtitle, as the inescapable “signature” of the archive owner, the Soviet government, whose power to limit the material's narrative possibilities must always be conceded. Loznitsa's (and Arlauskaitė’s) pessimistic understanding of the elusiveness of the past, even now that the archives are accessible, brings a mature self-awareness to the reconstruction of national memory.