Traces Of War

Traces of War examines how the trauma of the Second World War influenced the work of the brilliant generation of writers and intellectuals who lived through it.

At the end of the First World War, the landscape of the Western Front in Flanders had been transformed into a wasteland. After the war, the population returned, faced with the enormous challenge of rebuilding the region and making it inhabitable again. All traces of the war were wiped out, leaving only what was left in the ground - what is now the archaeological soil archive. Throughout the Westhoek, 30 centimetres beneath the ground and invisible to the naked eye, the archaeological remains of the war lie dormant. This book, the first of its kind, is a compendium of the findings of ten years of First World War archaeology in Belgium. Clearly written, it looks at many spectacular finds resulting from excavations at more than 150 sites in the front-line region, and also delves into the unexpected role of the landscape as the last witness of the war. These material remains from military camps, hospitals and trenches illustrate day-to-day life at the front, while also looking at the personal fates of several of the fallen soldiers - and many horses. The text is supported by a wealth of visual data, including photographs of excavated artefacts, maps, aerial photographs and other archive material.

The legacy of the Second World War remains unsettled; no consensus has been achieved about its meaning and its lasting impact. This is pre-eminently the case in France, where the experience of defeat and occupation created the grounds for a deeply ambiguous mixture of resistance and collaboration, pride and humiliation, heroism and abjection, which writers and politicians have been trying to disentangle ever since. This book develops a theoretical approach which draws on trauma studies and hermeneutics; and it then focuses on some of the intellectuals who lived through the war and on how their experience and troubled memories of it continue to echo through their later writing, even and especially when it is not the explicit topic. This was an astonishing generation of writers who would go on to play a pivotal role on a global scale in post-war aesthetic and philosophical endeavours. The book proposes close readings of works by some of the most brilliant amongst them: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Charlotte Delbo, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel, and Sarah Kofman.

This volume looks at Canadian women’s experiences of, and contributions to, the world wars through objects, images, and archival documents. The book tells the stories of women who worked as civilians, served in the military, volunteered their time, and grieved lost loved ones, through thematically organized vignettes. The authors place these personal narratives of individual woman, and their related material culture, in the wider context of the world wars while demonstrating that the experience of living through global conflict was as individual as a woman’s particular circumstances. Drawing from the collections of the Canadian War Museum, the Canadian Museum of History, and other public and private collections in Canada, Material Traces of War brings largely unknown material culture collections to public view and draws attention to the untold stories of women and war.

"How many Jewish children did they take to be destroyed, their worth unknown? The boy on the landing might have been a great painter. But I never saw him again." In the fall of 1943, Steve Rotschild and the other children are free to roam the passages and stairwells of the HKP labour camp in Vilna while their parents work. As a game, they construct a secret hiding place from the Germans. In March 1944, it saves all their lives during the Kinderaktion: the roundup of Jewish children who had to be fed but were of no use to the German war effort. The children's games, Rotschild writes, "were games of survival. The winner lived."

The ongoing effort of the United States to account for its missing Vietnam War soldiers is unique. The United States requires the repatriation and positive identification of soldiers’ bodies to remove their names from the list of the missing. This quest for certainty in the form of the material, identified body marks a dramatic change from previous wars, in which circumstantial evidence often sufficed to account for missing casualties. In The Remains of War, Thomas M. Hawley considers why the body of the missing soldier came to assume such significance in the wake of the Vietnam War. Illuminating the relationship between the effort to account for missing troops and the political and cultural forces of the post-Vietnam era, Hawley argues that the body became the repository of the ambiguities and anxieties surrounding the U.S. involvement and defeat in Southeast Asia. Hawley combines the theoretical insights of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Levinas with detailed research into the history of the movement to recover the remains of soldiers missing in Vietnam. He examines the practices that constitute the Defense Department’s accounting protocol: the archival research, archaeological excavation, and forensic identification of recovered remains. He considers the role of the American public and the families of missing soldiers in demanding the release of pows and encouraging the recovery of the missing; the place of the body of the Vietnam veteran within the war’s legacy; and the ways that memorials link individual bodies to the body politic. Highlighting the contradictions inherent in the recovery effort, Hawley reflects on the ethical implications of the massive endeavor of the American government and many officials in Vietnam to account for the remains of American soldiers.

The English Civil War has become a frequent point of reference in contemporary British political debate. A bitter and bloody series of conflicts, it shook the very foundations of seventeenth-century Britain. This book is the first attempt to portray the visual legacy of this period, as passed down, revisited, and periodically reworked over two and a half centuries of subsequent English history. Highly regarded art historian Stephen Bann deftly interprets the mass of visual evidence accessible today, from ornate tombs and statues to surviving sites of vandalism and iconoclasm, public signage, and historical paintings of human subjects, events, and places. Through these important scenes and sometimes barely perceptible traces, Bann shows how the British view of the War has been influenced and transformed by visual imagery.