War, Memory, and Archives: Building a Framework

Archives, often targeted for destruction in war, are also given meaning in these conflicts. Institutions with an archival function (archives, museums, and libraries) are destroyed, but new repositories are often created in their place. War even provides an impetus for the creation of new documentary forms. This essay explores archives within the framework of memory studies, specifically that part focusing on war. Drawing on the growing rich scholarly literature on war memory, this essay addresses the implications for understanding archives, in the context of documenting, remembering, and forgetting and in how memorials, from cemeteries to uses of new technologies, influence our understanding of archives and the archival function. In efforts to destroy archives as symbols of society and culture, we can begin to gain a new and different sense of the value of archives. This essay begins to lay out a framework for valuing archives that extends outside of the traditional notions of archives