The Ground-Level Memory of War. A Cultural Reading

“Ground level” memory as the autobiographical memory that records historical events in a personal manner in the construction of identity and of the multiple self can be a means of attenuating the oversimplifications made by historians and by psychologists in establishing the motivations of the participants in the event. In the context of the cultural history of war from a fundamental perspective, the history of war was reassessed throughout the years as a state of being of a world in which the “civic militancy”, from the Antiquity to the modern era, subsisted or was transmitted by “a history of memory”, by a cultural memory of war understood as a true “pantheon” of the greater history of western civilisation.  The culture of war and of the battles from the viewpoint of the new cultural history, following a fundamental work of A.J. Lynn on the “combat culture”, essentially seems to be not a reconstruction of events, but rather a cultural interpretation of war, its memory and its instrumentalisation. The “ground level” memory of war in its development can be outlined by a polymorphism or by a complex scope that corresponds with the complexity of “first-hand” history. Seen from the “ground level”, besides the polymorphic descriptions and interpretations, war deconstructs a reality and multiplies it from the viewpoint of the timeline of the experience and the timeline of the recount. The moment of the historical fact confronts the moment of the memorable fact, a unique historical moment and a multiple personal moment, a subjective time (biographic time) and an objective time (historical time), a closed, sorted time and an open time, fluctuating between the speakable and the unspeakable  (according to G. Agamben), a definitive time and a reproductive time. The testimonies carry a “cultural memory”, they were created within the cultural horizons of the soldiers, by their worldviews, by the ideas and obsessions of the soldiers as delegates of the socio-cultural environments from which they originated.

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