10.1. World Wars and Memory: From Family Grief to Political Struggle

While studies in memory have often focused on trauma, victimhood, and implication some scholars have now turned to what Ann Rigney has called “the cultural transmission of positivity” (2018). Our aim is to embrace this turn by focusing on acts of profound love to elicit positive affect against a background of trauma. Where Michael Rothberg (2024) studies how affect is connected to implication, we examine the relationship between positive affect, the act of resistance, and commemoration. Our paper draws from both positive psychological conceptions of love as well as memory theory based on positivity to answer how the work of resistance fighters against the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands and the memories thereof can be categorised as a form of what we define as profound love. We propose that profound love could provide a useful new analytical framework for memory scholars and psychologists. In order to do this, we take the cause of the resistance fighters as well as how their acts are remembered through the monument dedicated to them near camp Westerbork as a centerpiece in our analysis of love. We focus on the display of non-violent resistance, the layeredness of the memory site, and the need for interaction with the monument itself. Our argument is that the focus on these narratives of resistance that show profound love, provide fertile ground for eliciting positive affect in the present. Rather than its background of trauma, profound love here becomes a gateway for remembering resistance against undemocratic rule and a current call for positive mnemonic action.

The Second World War in Greece was marked by overlapping traumas, the famine that claimed thousands of lives, the near-total destruction of Greek Jewry during the Holocaust, and the violent aftermath of the Civil War. Amid these crises, resistance movements emerged as both political and existential responses to occupation. This paper focuses on Jewish participation in the National Liberation Front (EAM) and its army, ELAS, the only major resistance group that accepted Jewish fighters. Through a close reading of post-war testimonies, the paper explores how Jewish partisans remember their involvement: was their participation primarily ideological, or a desperate strategy for survival within an occupied and hostile homeland? Methodologically, this study combines oral history analysis and memory studies, examining survivor testimonies archived in the USC Shoah Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Jewish Museum of Greece. It applies a microhistorical and comparative lens to trace how personal narratives of Jewish partisans intersect with broader national silences, post-war exclusions, and the evolving democratic memory of resistance in Greece. Key findings reveal complex intersections of memory, identity, and belonging. Figures like Dimitra Stamatelou and David Brudo show that Jewish resistance was not only political but also deeply gendered and existential. Women’s testimonies, in particular, frame participation as both an act of resistance and protection from sexual violence. The post-war persecution of EAM members, and cases like Brudo’s exile to Israel in 1956, highlight how Jewish-Greek identities were rendered incompatible within the national narrative. Ultimately, these memories challenge dominant democratic mythologies of resistance by reintroducing marginalized voices that question who was entitled to be both Jewish and Greek in post-war democracy.

This research considers bereaved families as memory-keepers and memory-makers in the aftermath of the First World War. A file series in the archives of the Australian War Memorial illuminates their role in shaping cultural memory of the conflict in Australia and across the British Empire. In Australia, the process of writing the official histories of the First World War began soon after the Armistice, drawing from the letters, diaries, and documents of those who had experienced the conflict. From 1927 to the mid-1930s, the nascent Australian War Memorial actively reached out to families whom it was believed might hold records of use to this work. 2454 enquiries were directed to the next-of-kin of war dead, scattered across Australia and the broader British Empire. While most of the recipients of these donation requests had no direct experience of the conflict, they remained profoundly affected by its results. For many bereaved families, the donation process itself marked a period of transition from “memory” to “history”. Respondents were conscious that donated records would continue to be used by future generations after the conflict had left living memory. While many of those contacted failed to respond, or declined to donate, their influence lingers in the spaces of the Australian War Memorial. Preserved as bureaucratic correspondence, the file series serves as testimony to the enduring impact of loss, and the role of bereaved families in shaping cultural memory of conflict. Incorporating archival histories and material culture, this research reveals the unconsidered processes of remembering, forgetting, and inventing that have shaped narratives of the First World War.

This paper examines how women’s experiences during the Second World War have been remembered, narrated, and culturally represented in Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The research investigates the question: How did the war reshape the social position of women, and how have these transformations been preserved, contested, or erased in collective memory? The methodology combines feminist memory studies, oral history, and analysis of autobiographical writing, diaries, letters, documentary film, and public commemorations. This approach foregrounds the tension between official state narratives and personal, embodied forms of remembering. Across all regions, wartime mobilization expanded women’s participation in labor, medical, logistical, and military services, allowing them to demonstrate technical competence, leadership, and resilience historically associated with men. However, post-war interpretations varied significantly. In the Soviet Union, state ideology publicly celebrated women as workers and wartime heroes, encouraging their continued participation in rebuilding the country. Yet, this narrative simultaneously reinforced expectations of maternal sacrifice and emotional self-silencing, leaving trauma unacknowledged. In the United States and Western Europe, women experienced temporary professional emancipation but were encouraged to return to domestic roles in the post-war years, sparking later feminist activism that framed wartime experience as evidence of women’s long-standing capacity for autonomy. A key finding is that women’s psychological experiences—grief, loss, sexual violence, and post-traumatic stress—were largely excluded from national memory projects. Because state narratives prioritized heroism and national unity, intimate and traumatic memories survived primarily through personal archives: letters, unpublished memoirs, oral testimonies, and textile-based commemorative practices. The paper argues that examining these alternative, gendered memory practices is crucial to sustaining pluralistic historical consciousness. By restoring women’s voices to public remembrance, we gain a more inclusive understanding of wartime experience and the long-term struggle for democratic recognition and equality.