Jay Winter is not only the leading authority on world war commemoration but is also a practitioner as a founder in 1992 of the Historial de la Grande Guerre (Péronne, France), an international museum of the Great War. He discusses in War Beyond Words the impossibility of conveying directly the terror of modern industrial war by examining the changing ways through which this has been mediated in the creative arts. En route, he addresses two major themes: first, how war has shifted from the domain of a rule-governed military to encompass the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians; and second, how changing technologies of conflict and of the means of its representation form our understanding and responses to create a new cultural memory of war.

Winter organizes the book in two overlapping parts. The first, “Vectors of Memory,” explores how war has been configured in the fields of painting and sculpture, in photography, cinema, and writing (notably poetry). In chapter 1, he argues that the mass mechanized carnage of the World Wars and their associated genocides (above all the Shoah) have led to an abandonment of the heroic agency of combatants. A consequence is a shift in painting and sculpture from a focus on the individual face and person in favor of fragmented bodies, abstraction (exemplified in Picasso's Guernica), and worlds of vanished peoples. Chapter 2 outlines how the invention of cheap cameras has led to a struggle between soldiers, authorities, and journalists from the Great War to the present to control the way war is depicted, as well as to the creation of a huge database. The result is a revelation of the horrors of industrialized war, the vast movements of refugees, and ethnic cleansing (including the Armenian genocide). These two chapters support the contention that war is now portrayed as a site of victimhood. Chapter 3 examines the advent of cinema, making an interesting distinction between films as spectacle (purporting to be representative) and as (indirect) metaphors. Whereas films between 1930 and 1970 sought to present didactic representations of the good war, the silent films of the Great War and its aftermath (up to 1930) and those of the 1970s (from Vietnam onwards) are more metaphorical, the former allowing audiences to project their own emotions onto scenes, and the latter presenting war as at best morally ambiguous. In spite of the power of cinema, Winter doubts its capacity to communicate the sheer confusion and visceral horror of war. Chapter 4 examines the evolving lexicons of war, through a comparative and statistical analysis of “word clusters” (such as glory, duty, honor) in English, German, and French writing, relating the clusters’ persistence or decline to the potency of religious or revolutionary cultural traditions and to the fortunes of war. Winter argues with qualifications that there was a secular decline in associations of war with notions of glory and honor (but not of duty), though this trend was strongest in England. There were, he says, no equivalents in France and Germany to the British Great War poets.

In the book's second part, “Frameworks of Memory,” Winter discusses three mnemonic structures: of martyrdom, of the geometry of representation, and of silence. In chapter 5 Winter repeats the claims of the previous chapter to emphasize that the war dead are now seen less as martyrs than as victims, a shift which he argues came from an association of war with the Holocaust and postwar notions of human rights, though he points to many counterexamples outside Western Europe. In the next chapter, he outlines a movement in monumental representation from the vertical-heroic to a horizontality of mourning apparent in Kathe Kollwitz's sculptures and Maya Lin's Vietnam Wall. Finally, in chapter 7 Winter ruminates on silence (characterized as performative “non-speech acts”) as a form of language about the war, including Armistice two-minute silences, historical omissions in museums, absences in official statistics about the psychologically maimed, and the silences of traumatized soldiers—all conveying our difficulty in encompassing the ugly realities of modern war.

This is a rich, imaginative, and poignant study, full of fascinating illustrations. It would have been useful to have a chapter on music, but this is to cavil, for few would have been able to match what Winter has attempted here. Sometimes, predictably, his argument seems contradictory: Winter wants at some points to view the Great War as a dividing line, while at others he states (for example) that it perpetuated older religious idioms of representing loss. It is often hard to distinguish what is true about modern war and its memorialization from what it true about war generally, or at least in deeper history. Sometimes, too, as in his last chapter, one feels that disparate phenomena are being discussed under a common rubric (in this case, silence). Specialists in each of the fields may take issue with his universalizing claims. Furthermore, at times, Winter's writing has the normative and hopeful tone of an advocate rather than of an analyst, in proclaiming the de-romanticization of nationalist wars in favor of a shift to an enlightened transnationalism, governed by respect for universal human rights. However, Winter's intellectual range is impressive, his analysis nuanced, and his honesty as an historian evident as it leads him to point out many exceptions to his generalizations about cultural trajectories. Indeed, in the end, as he seems to admit, the “new cultural memory” tropes are largely confined to the populations of World War combatant states in Western Europe and the Dominions. Much of the world still clings to the myths of martial glory and heroism. This qualification should not detract from a humane and at times profound book to which historians of war should turn for original insights.