Readers will be left unsatisfied by this broad study of the “memory boom” in the twentieth century. In the end, the whole is less than the sum of its parts, which provide sensible commentary but also feeble conclusions and serve up too many cliches but few telling examples. Winter has worked over much of this material over the last ten to fifteen years and, in this book, he has added little that is new. Ultimately, readers will come away disappointed because Winter generally skims the surface and simply reports on the complexities of his material. The excessively cautious style is evident at the beginning when Winter reports that “it is in the Great War that we can see some of the most powerful impulses and sources of the later memory boom” (p. 2). Surely no one can argue with that. Moreover, the “memory boom” is actually the “memory boom of the twentieth century” (p. 1), which leaves the question of the “memory boom” of the nineteenth century, with its diaries, memoirs, albums—all genres of witness—unreferenced, but not dismissed. As a result, the actual part of World War I in modern history is obscured by pretty obvious declarations about its part in twentieth-century history.

What do we learn about photography? “A man with a camera once decided to freeze time by capturing the scene, and by doing so, he engaged in the difficult art of bringing memory and history together. To be sure the photograph is an image, full of distortions and misleading elements. But once located within the life of the photographer, such images tell us much about the visual world of remembrance in the twentieth century” (p. 102). I am sure they do, but in this book, Winter does not tell us how and why (which) images are eloquent.

Published collections of war letters such as the one edited by Germany's Philipp Witkop in 1916 lead Winter to the conclusion that “it is evident that we need a much more multivocal approach to soldiers' tales in order to register the ways in which different cultural archives inform storytelling, and how storytelling becomes part of different cultural archives. Only then will the many forms of the soldiers' tale emerge as poignant, distinctive, and powerful elements of national cultural histories” (p. 117). Again, no disagreement, but little insight. “Some monuments are grandious,” Winter tells us, “but many go beyond state-sponsored triumphalism to approach the regional, the local, the particular” (p. 136). Unfortunately, Winter never gets to the smaller scale. War memorials might convert “world history into the history of the household” (p. 175) (or is it the other way around?), but how, exactly? There are “indelible traces” that “we can see to this day” (pp. 179–80). Where? Which ones? I found all this slipping into hackneyed, Walter-Benjamin-besotted phrases.

Winter argues that the work of remembrance expresses “some fundamental truths about the tendency of ordinary people, of many faiths and of none, to face the emptiness, the nothingness of loss in war, together” (p. 153), but the evidence he presents via the literary critic Jean Norton Cru is that most vernacular writings were sentimental rather than critical, life-affirming in a saccharine way rather than open to “emptiness.” Moreover, Winter himself at one point dates the recognition of the meaninglessness of the war to a point “two decades later,” with the onset of the next world war. Still, epic antifascist narratives remained strong in post-1945 Europe, even once the Holocaust “appeared to be an event without a meaning” in the 1970s (p. 32), so the entire role of World War I is vaguely linked not so much to the Holocaust as it is to its emergence in historiography. In any case, do “ordinary people” remember in order to face emptiness? Despite the appeal to the “local” and the “ordinary,” which allegedly resist the monumentalization and univocality of national history, Winter does not really have much to say about the women who “are now at the heart of acts of remembrance” (p. 6) or the actual households that have collided with world history or the strong press for redemptive narratives both on the part of the bereaved and veterans in countless unironic vernacular renditions. It is, in point of fact, important to note that the high literary canon of British writings on the war, which were often deeply ironic, has had astonishing little impact on France, but even more astonishing is the desire among so many contemporary Germans to refight the war. No “lost generation” here. The entire notion of World War I as a self-acknowledged cultural calamity sounds right, but is not convincingly revealed in this study. Everything Winter handles is more complicated, more mediated, more humane, more multivocal than we might at first think.

Even so, there are insightful sections in Winter's analysis. The ways in which war and memories of the war fastened and finally weakened ties between Britain and its Dominion populations in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada is a first-rate examination of the economy and geopolitics of feeling, which provided a foundation for new national narratives in the 1920s and 1930s. And when Winter leaves summary and commentary, and examines his own role in the production of historical narratives, the tone changes, the reader is drawn in, and actual examples are introduced, weighed, and assessed. The best parts of the book are Winter's account of participating in a joint NEH-BBC series on the “Great War” and negotiating different national sensitivities and intellectual styles and his report on his role in the Historial, a museum and research center at Péronne, Somme, in fact “the only international museum of the Great War” (p. 223). There is no doubt that Winter is a hugely able interpreter, and his appeal for more engagement in public history is convincing. At the museum, he describes his new appreciation for the objects of war, the ordinary archives that war created in countless households. It is the evidence of the networks of European lives in the context of war that has always fascinated Winter, whose approach in this book, however, is inconsistent with the aim of recovering those networks, their artifacts, and their subjects; here he is too judicious, distanced, and abbreviated.