Memory has been an abiding concern of 20th-century intellectual heavyweights. Freud was keen on techniques for recalling and re-interpreting individual memory. Sociologist Emile Durkheim thought collective memory was part of the everyday social architecture that makes it possible to talk about society as real. It's through commemoration that history and memory are most often brought together in public. Monuments such as war memorials and statues can work this way, as can national ceremonies, historic stamp issues, Phar Lap at the Museum of Victoria and the TV series Our Century.
Commemoration is memory work that is public, formal, authoritative and seemingly permanent.
Catherine Merridale writes on how ordinary people in the Soviet Union remembered and grieved for the millions who died in wars, famines, state repression and industrial disaster, despite official silence about anything beyond the entombed Lenin and patriotic wars. This is not a book that is likely to find a wide audience here, and not only because of its price. War and Remembrance's case studies are concerned with the impact of European wars on Europeans with the exception of Sivan's chapter on Israel and Dolores Hayden's on the memory-work of Japanese Americans who were interned in the US between 1942 and 1945. But it is a book worth finding, perhaps in a university library, because it offers so many insights derived from serious scholarship. Joy Damousi's The Labour of Loss is a locally produced book from the same publishing series.