War remembrance

It's almost May, which means that in the Netherlands, the yearly debate surrounding the remembrance of WWII is heating up again. We have our Remembrance Day on the 4th of May, with the national ceremony at 20:00. The 5th of May is Liberation Day, with lots of music and festivals around the country. There has been some debate as to whether the proportion of remembrance and celebration is quite right: many people are keen to celebrate their freedom, but not to remember those who died for it.
Having witnessed Remembrance Day on the 11th of November at the National War Monument in Canberra, I can tell you that our 'remembrance' pales in the light of the Anglo-Saxon way. This is partly a cultural thing: we Dutch don't like to dramatise things and we don't really have a strong military presence, and probably partly due to the fact that we weren't the liberators who sent thousands of young men halfway across the world to die on foreign soil, we were the ones who had to be liberated, after failing to keep out the enemy. Also, for the Allied forces, it's easy to determine who was 'good' and who was 'bad' in the war: we are still trying to come to terms with some of the things that Dutch people did to other Dutch people 70 years ago.
In a way, the whole debate surrounding the remembrance makes the event itself seem less important, at least to the younger generation who hasn't witnessed the war itself, or seen the effects on our parents. Which is why I turn to books, as with so many things in life. From an early age on, I've always been interested in WWII, and at some point I'd literally read all the WWII children's books our library stocked. It wasn't really a subject my grandparents talked a lot about, but for some reason I found it fascinating, so I went and got my information from elsewhere. As I got older and discovered 'real' literature this interest waned somewhat, but as I've been digging into 'the classics', I've come across several war books which have made a pretty big impression on me.
Firstly, there is All Quiet on the Western Front, a German account of WWI. 'We' were neutral in that one, so what is known as the Great War in other parts of the world isn't really a thing here, but this novel did bring the message home. I cannot imagine how anyone could ever start another war after reading that novel, which was probably why it was banned in Nazi Germany. I'd read some of the English war poets for my literature classes and was pretty familiar with that side of the story, but you keep forgetting that it was just as bad for those on the other side.
Then I read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which isn't about a 'live' war, but plays out in post-WWII Berlin. The Cold War is something that ended during my lifetime, so I have some memories of it (the fall of the Berlin Wall, most prominently, although I was very piqued when the country which I'd finally memorised as Czechoslovakia suddenly didn't exist anymore, and was now two separate countries). 'Cold' as it may have been, that war also changed many lives, and the setting of this novel made quite an impression.
Then I read Slaughterhouse 5, which you can't actually say anything proper about, except that again I cannot imagine anyone reading that novel and still being in favour of warfare. It is harrowing, and it will stay with me for some time to come. But I loved the jumbled-up style, and I wish I'd read this book before my 'trauma theory' essay for literature, as this would have been a great primary text to work with.
Concurrent with all the above, I've been reading De Ontdekking van de Hemel, which is translated as The Discovery of Heaven in English. This doesn't deal so much with WWII directly, but the after effects on Dutch society run throughout the novel.
And finally, my newest read is Brideshead Revisited. This was written during WWII by someone actively involved in WWII, and although most of the story takes place earlier, the whole atmosphere is that of a time gone by, destroyed by the War (amongst other things). In that sense, the novel has more in common with The Discovery of Heaven than any of the other novels written during a war.
In a way, I find these novels even more disconcerting. We can all imagine the horrors of war, but the effects that a war leaves on a society, the things that are lost and cannot be restored because something essential has been taken out, be it trust or innocence or a whole generation of young men, those effects are much harder to formulate and come to terms with. I cannot imagine how my country and my society would have been without WWII, because it took place and changed the world irreversibly. But through reading novels like these, we can get a glimpse of the profound impact a war can have on society. Maybe it isn't about whether we would have been 'good' or 'bad' during the war itself, but about how we go on when the war has ended, and peace will never be the same again.