"Nigel Young's rich tapestry of words, images and reflections leads us to understand how the total wars of the 20th century have shaped and changed our modern sense of memory. He shows how the shattering experiences of two world wars - and of the genocides, annihilations, crimes against humanity and the first use of nuclear weapons which accompanied them - have been dealt with in different ways. Some memories have been suppressed, some have emerged from long silence, and many have been variously interpreted and re-interpreted over the decades. They have also generated powerful art (vividly illustrated here), journalism and literature. Memory has moved from the private to the public sphere, developing new transnational forms to challenge the orthodoxies of nationalism and hegemonism. This is a book which invites us to revisit both the past and the present with searching questions about the impact of war on modern human consciousness." - John Gittings, author of The Glorious Art of Peace: Paths to Peace in a New Age of War.
"Nigel Young's challenging and interesting book draws on his wisdom and deep experience. It's very much a work of personal witness, most notably in the book's numerous vignettes and examples. These explore not only war poetry, literature, museums, memorials, paintings, musical requiems and so forth; but also more popular arts, like wall murals, songs, journalism and popular theatre, novels and films." - Robin Luckham, University of Sussex, UK.
"Memory is now a specialised field of its own and the author has spent much of his career deeply engaged in it, especially as it relates to modern war, genocide and mass violence - including nuclear weapons. Drawing on a huge range of examples from prose, poetry, film and theatre, painting, photography, music and the popular arts, he traces a narrative path through the tragic events of the 20th century. In this way, Young sketches out a history of modern remembering and explores the formation of a 'transnational' (or 'postnational') historical awareness, as an alternative to purely national narratives and imperial, militarist or ethnocentric histories. He takes us to 'sacred' sites (Auschwitz, Hiroshima and many more) and intersperses the more theoretical passages with telling personal 'vignettes'. This remarkable work is intense and deeply felt; not always an easy read, but one that repays the effort." - Colin Archer, MAW (The Movement for the Abolition of War) newsletter
"Given its historical range and geographical scope, Nigel Young's project - which is to trace what he interprets as a modern, postnational 'collective memory' since around World War I - is a considerable achievement.
At one point, he refers to the notion of an 'invention of tradition' - such as that of creating national commemorative rituals and narratives. This idea, a concept first developed by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger is an apt one for describing Young's own approach.
Postnational Memory draws from multiple sources, genres and exemplars from the arts, to depict, and then track a nascent tradition, evolving through more than a century. This cultural narrative reminded me of events and aspects of which I had been long aware, but mostly were at least half forgotten and were now re-united around this thesis.
I felt frustrated at times, while reading the book, that there is no single authoritative voice or conceptual scheme to organise everything neatly or tell the reader what s/he should think. However, I gradually started to feel the value and the benefits of the idea of being invited to join the creative process; to 'invent', detect or construct my own version, of these paths, or voices, of alternative experiencing and 'tradition-making'. The process of modern remembering thus represents a polyphony, a multiplicity of different voices, that prevents any imperialist or imperious domination by any single voice. Bakhtin would have been very happy with it!
Throughout the book, Young's own voice, and experiences - largely expressed in intermittent personal vignettes - covering decades of reflection and experience - contribute to making this an amazing and exhilarating read." - Tom Wengraf, former lecturer at Middlesex University and Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, UK
"It can be genuinely difficult to escape national confines when thinking about peace and war. Currently, for example a specifically British narrative of World War II is resurfacing in the apparently unrelated context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet even for the peace movement it can be hard to transcend national preoccupations when key reference points often relate to specific conflicts. Conscientious objection, Quaker service, CND, white poppies, peace demonstrations, and much else, take off from specific contestations in British history.
It is in this light that Nigel Young's Postnational Memory, Peace and War: Making Pasts Beyond Borders has a relevance beyond its range and cogency as an academic study. The book works its way towards an energizing message for the future - that we can create narratives of both mourning and hope beyond national borders and ancient enmities. But to accept Thomas Hardy's adage 'If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst' is to grasp why Young feels the need to revisit, in a focused, unsensational way the main horrors of twentieth century's wars.
So, yes, the book does chronicle what lies behind those tragically iconic words: Somme, Guernica, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Bosnia and, above all, Holocaust or Shoah. Yet this tour of man's inhumanity to man does not simply depress, for two reasons. First, there is a very strong emphasis on the witnesses - combatants, civilians, writers, artists - who have not only borne witness to atrocity but also shown how the human spirit can affirm shared values beyond violence and destruction. From the First World War poets to the relative unsung creators of the Hiroshima panels to the epic films of Claude Lanzmann on the Shoah and Peter Watkins on nuclear destruction, there have been affirmations of a transnational mourning and hope.
A second reason that the book threads securely between apocalyptic gloom and voyeuristic tourism, is that it is studded with vignettes of personal experience, as the author revisits sites of memory and mourning. These stories often touch on the very specific and local (the influence of W G Sebald is acknowledged). One heartening anecdote retails the author's boyhood encounter with railway-labouring Italian POWs. Their warm welcome and sharing of a novel wartime treat - espresso coffee - touchingly exemplifies the author's theme of crossing borders.
Yet his personal odyssey necessarily involves far darker encounters as he visits Thiepval, Verdun, Birkenau and Hiroshima. Intent on avoiding 'atrocity tourism' or 'museumization' of these sites, he works his way beyond the official narratives that may present us with what he terms prosthetic memories - which, like the screen memories of Freud's patients, serve to obscure rather than illuminate the past. Always, he seeks out counter-narratives. Some are the testimonies of citizen witnesses, like local Buddhist responses to the Vietnam war, while others are the 'memory-work' of individual artists like Paul Nash or Otto Dix, determined to memorialize the stark reality of conflict.
From such witnessing Nigel Young finds a foundation for transnational remembering and for consequent shared action in the future. He faces up to contemporary problems in achieving this: on the one hand, a rise in nationalism and fundamentalism, on the other hand a social-media absorption in an eternal present. But again, he finds numerous heartening examples of those creating 'a global archive of the past in the present', reaching out beyond national, ethnic or religious barriers to create a 'Transnational Memory' through which both past suffering and future hopes can be shared." - K. E. Smith, The Friend
