War Memory and Popular Culture

This collection of essays investigates such diverse vehicles for war commemoration as poems, battlefield tours, souvenirs, books, films, architectural structures, comics, websites, and video games. Drawing on essayists from Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Israel and the United States, this work explores the evolution from traditional to contemporary forms of war commemoration while addressing the fundamental question of whether these new forms of memorial are meant to encourage the remembering or the forgetting of the experience of war, as well as what implications the process of commemoration may have for the continuation of the modern nation state.

Michael Keren is a professor of communications and Canada Research Chair in communication, culture and civil society at the University of Calgary (Calgary, Alberta, Canada). He is the author or editor of numerous books on such topics as the media, politics and freedom of the press. A native of Hamburg, Germany, Holger H. Herwig is a professor of history and Canada Research Chair in military and strategic studies at the University of Calgary). He has written extensively about German military-diplomatic relations in the 20th century, and has taken part in several History Channel and Discovery Channel productions.