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Abstracts
Etienne Balibar Many witnesses of the “Great War” breaking out in 1914, which was to last four years, with unprecedented killings and destructions on European soil and beyond, such as Freud or Thomas Mann, felt that this marked the collapse of a civilization. This was not only the end of an extraordinary era of prosperity and the bourgeois ideological and cultural values going along with capitalist and imperialist expansion (often referred to as the Belle Époque), it was the brutal awakening from the illusion that “civilization” in the modern sense could not lead in its core to a form of Barbarity worse than anything which had been deemed proper to “savage peoples” in the external world. What Kant had ruled out as contradicting the idea of a “meaning of history” in his writings on cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace was now becoming true in the form of a cruel “brutalization” of European nations (George Mosse). After the official end of the war, a distinguished participant in the Peace negotiations, John Maynard Keynes (who was also to become the greatest economist of his age), pronounced that the way in which the victors were settling their accounts with the vanquished could only lead to a new phase of hostilities where Europe’s identity was at stake. He coined the expression “European Civil War” which proved prophetic, and was to be adopted with nuances as a hermeneutic key after the “end” of World War II by historians and politologists sympathizing with each of the “Three Ideologies” : communism, fascism, and liberalism, which had been involved in the protracted conflict of the short 20th century (called by Eric Hobsbawm “The Age of Extremes”). While we are now entering a different era of World-History (conventionally referred to as “Globalization”, of which the “Provincialization of Europe” is considered a part) (Chakrabarty), we observe nevertheless ubiquitous traces of these two momentous events, civilizational and geopolitical, initiated by the great War, and we wonder how they still determine Europe’s “position” and “constitution”. Starting point and guiding hypothesis of this presentation will be that they can be discussed completely only in their complex interrelation. __________________________ Annette Becker Intentionally or incidentally, the Great War became a laboratory for the twentieth century: an experimental site to probe the practice of violence, and the optimisation of its effects on men and materials. More specifically, the civilians, in the zones of urban bombings, invasions and military occupations provided a full-scale testing ground for population shifts and repression; in relation to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, it even included policies of extermination. To some extent these regions became experimental zones on an atypical front where artillery and gas were replaced by exodus, deportation, forced labour or concentration camp. For these civilians, flight, taking refuge were positive actions forced by invasion; being expelled, being deported and then interned in a camp, as an ‘enemy alien,’ a hostage or for labour, were passive states imposed upon them. For all of them it meant being torn from home for a place of exile, believed or known to be temporary, for the duration of the war. But ‘temporary’ often lasted for four years or more. The extermination of the Armenians remained distinct, the paradigmatic case of this form of violence against civilians transformed into a ‘crime against humanity’ and genocide before the legal concepts themselves were invented. Raphaël Lemkin intuitively grasped the specificity of the fate of the Armenians when he included it in the more general framework of acts of violence against civilians, pogroms of the war in the East – like that of Byalistok in 1915 – deportations and forced labour in the west. Already he felt what the Second World War would confirm when he invented the word Genocide: that the degradation and the extermination of human groups was no accidental cruelty but the very essence of policies of occupation and incarceration of whoever was deemed ‘the enemy’ in wartime. Recommended readings: __________________________
Joseph Bendersky As professor of History at the University of Berlin and editor of the prestigious Historische Zeitschrift, Friedrich Meinecke exercised tremendous intellectual influence in the first half of the twentieth century. His Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat not only established intellectual history as an essential field of study but likewise demonstrated the significance of ideas in the world of power politics. The catastrophe of World War I, however, forced a reevaluation of his original nationalist stance, as evidenced by his study of Machiavellism in Die Idee der Staatsräson in der Neuren Geschichte (1924), where he struggle to reconcile power and morality. This paper will focus on a central theme that runs through his pre-war, wartime, and postwar thought---his skepticism about universal absolutes in both power politics and morality. Despite his postwar criticism of the chauvinistic nationalism and state worship he saw as causal in the outbreak and unprecedentedly destructive implementation of the Great War, he placed little hope in the universalism of Wilson’s New Diplomacy as manifested in League of Nations and anti-war sentiments of the postwar era. War would remain an aspect of the relations among states, though power politics had to be restrained by the dictates of morality. A serious problem emanated from those states seizing universal principles in pursuit of their own self-interested rasion d’état.For Meinecke, the entire future of Western civilization depended upon the working out of the intricate relationship between cosmopolitanism, raison d’état of the power nation-state, and the universal moral principles found in Christianity or Kant’s categorical imperative. __________________________ Russell Berman The consensus that World War I marked a profound caesura in cultural history dates back to the war itself: an era came to an end, and there was no genuine return to normalcy when the fighting stopped. It is less obvious that the war initiated some key processes which still remain with us. The habitus of the public intellectual was defined by the war; although anticipated by isolated figures like Emile Zola some decades earlier, the experience of WWI included a mass mobilization of intellectuals with distinctive positionings toward the mass public that still inform our understanding the status of intellectuals today . The war simultaneously marks the definitive end of the liberal era and the development of the expansive state as an aggressive actor in society and politics. This transformation unfolded in a distinctive geopolitical context, after the war propels the US into the status of a reluctant world power, while terminating the imperial systems in Russia, Central Europe, and the Ottoman Empire, the space of instability that still haunts the world system. __________________________Frank Biess This paper investigates the ways in which the experience of violence impacted or not the remainder of the 20th century. __________________________
Kai Evers This paper reads Kafka’s story The Burrow as a central example of an emergent literature of risk in modern Austrian and German literature. Written after WWI and in anticipation of a war decided by perception defying weapons, Kafka’s literary experiment offers the most radical exploration of emergent challenges to contemporary concepts of time, space, and risk. __________________________
Susan Grayzel This paper and the larger project from which it is drawn contend that the development of individualized anti-gas protection (especially the nearly ubiquitous gas mask) serves as emblematic of a genuinely new role for the state vis-à-vis the civilian body as a result of the First World War. It takes as its focus a material object with a peculiarly historically grounded time span. States that played a key role in the First World War or would come to play a decisive one in the Second World War, ranging from the Soviet Union to Germany to Poland to Hungary to Italy to France to Britain to Japan, all developed some form of individual protection for civil inhabitants to safeguard them against gas weaponry. At a time of economic hardship and international turmoil (to say the least) states devoted resources—financial, material, intellectual, and cultural—to creating these tools to enable civil populations to make use of them in a war to come. Read retroactively, the commitment to preparing for a war of aero-chemical annihilation—and to the mass production of individualized anti-gas protection-- seems overzealous at best, ludicrous at worst: a colossal waste and misdirection. But such a perspective misses the significance of what the gas mask represented. Using evidence (textual, visual and material) from both Britain and France, this paper argues that contested developments in military technology and debates about the nature of modern warfare itself--especially given the widespread use of chemical arms during World War I-- compelled state action to protect *all* civilians in places far removed from traditional battle zones. In response, as interwar democracies created the apparatus of civil defence, including safeguards against a potential chemical war waged at home, they confronted the truly novel idea that they were now in the business of protecting bodies as well as borders. This paper explores a few aspects of the development and meaning of civilian gas masks then in the following ways: as responses to lethal chemical warfare dating from 1915, as symbols of interwar fears and of the new stakes of modern warfare for democratic and imperial polities, and as devices embodying a new relationship between the state and its citizens and subjects. __________________________
John Kim __________________________
Elisabeth Krimmer This paper analyzes the representation of World War I nurses in texts by male and female authors. It shows that the figure of the nurse can be used to serve diametrically opposed ideological agendas. It allows writers to record the wounds of war, as Higonnet claims, but it also accommodates fantasies of female heroism along with a chauvinistic pro-war agenda. Texts to be discussed include: Ida Boy-Ed’s England-hating diatribe of a novel entitled _Die Opferschale_ (1916), a text that is infused with a firm conviction of Germany’s spiritual superiority while it portrays the war as a unifying force and moral catalyst; Ludwig Detter’s _Eine deutsche Heldin: Erlebniss einer Roten Kreuz Schwester nach Aufzeichnungen von Hertha Immensee_ (1916), which combines the representation of a female superhero with proto-fascist ideas; and Adrianne Thomas’s autobiographically inspired _Die Katrin wird Soldat_ (1930), which, in spite of its many contradictions, offers a critique of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, warmongering, and gender discrimination. __________________________ Jörn Leonhard The First World War was a historical watershed in the relation between European societies and other world regions. But at the same time the war also meant a redefinition of the relation between universal hopes and expectations and radically new experiences of millions of individuals. Against the background of a modern machine war and mass killing, most of the military scenarios, political plans and cultural anticipations developed before the summer of 1914 lost their meaning within a short period of time. The result was a vacuum of meaning which explains the almost messianic hope with which new utopias were perceived in 1917: be it Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a last war to end all wars in the name of democracy and national self-determination or W. I. Lenin’s model of a Bolshevik revolution in the name of a new social order. How can we explain the complexity of the war with regard to these constellations which went far beyond the European war societies? How did the crisis of universalism develop, what were contemporary responses to it, and what were the long-term consequences of this rupture? __________________________
The Great War was responsible for a considerable literary production, which goes for every participating country. It is logical that this “war writing“ represents important testimonies for historians. This presentation is going to be less concentrated on the very content of such texts, and more on the very acts of intellectual activities that took place even in the trenches. On the one hand, it will be shown that, for those learned soldiers, these activities represented the basic way to preserve their most intimate social identity, but on the other, that it was an elitist practice that allowed for them to be put aside from the rest of the squadron on account of the peace and quiet that they demanded. To read, write and think in the muddy trenches meant to maintain alive the ideals that made them engage, but also to preserve the social distance from other soldiers. __________________________
Lora Mjolsness While in Europe the years 1914-1918 mark WWI, for Russia these years also signify the beginning of a five year long Civil War and more importantly the Bolshevik Revolution which changed the course of Russian history, politics and culture for more than 70 years. This paper examines how Russian animation visualized WWI, the Great War, both with and without the lens of Socialist ideology in an effort to gauge shifting historical interpretations. This paper will interrogate the historical and ideological underpinnings of films such as Vladislav Starevich’s The Lily of Belgium (1914), Dziga Vertov's animated segments in the series Kino-Nedelia (1918), Aleksandr Bushkin's In the Snout of the Second International (1924), and finally, Yuri Norstein’s 25th – The First Day (1968). Through an analysis of how these films interpreted the war, this paper will add to a growing body of research on the significance of war on cultural memory and the role of the animated film in the telling of historical events. __________________________ Pat Morgan The War was very important in building the efforts to deter future wars, primarily via the League of Nations, and in promoting further steps in arms control, particularly in steps like the Washington Naval Conference. It also helped to create the conditions under which these important elements in modern international politics are often inadequate or ineffective. __________________________
Kevin Olson Can we think of the early 20th century as defined by a play of universalism and difference? Do the nationalist movements of the 19th century and the dark events of the early 20th add up to a disillusionment with universalist ideals, one that results in a resoundingly particular, deuniversalized 20th century? In this presentation I examine cultural, conceptual, and historical career of universalism at the beginning of the 20th century. I ask whether there was a crisis of universalism in this era, and if so, to what extent it established the conditions for the particular character of what followed. To answer these questions, we need to pay attention to the different qualities and concentrations of the universal, the different registers in which it is articulated, the way it responds to and arises out of historically specific problematics. In other words, universalism needs a genealogy. This presentation outlines such an enterprise, focusing on the long 19th century as the prehistory of 1914. In this view we see not the decline or disruption of universalist projects but the rearticulation in new forms of something that never really held together in the first place. This genealogy spans from a problem-plagued epistemic and political projects of the 18th century to the post-universalist universalisms of the 20th. Starting with the late Enlightenment and ending in early modernism, we see that universalism is a creature of our collective imagination. It has changed form to fit the changing times, responding to particular problematics. Universalism has never been one; it has never been universal. Rather, it is polyvalent, variable, and still very persistent in the beginnings of our own era. __________________________ David Pan The crisis of universalism embodied in WWI was the culmination of a trajectory in the transformation of sovereignty that began with the discovery of America and the Reformation. The surprising character of this transformation was a consequence of the way in which the early modern compromise of the Treaty of Westphalia harbored a fundamental contradiction whose consequences would not become clear until the outbreak of WWI itself. If Luther’s insistence on the priority of faith in spiritual matters established a relationship between faith and law in which the individual’s direct engagement with the Bible would allow its universal conception to proliferate without the mediation of the Catholic hierarchy, the Westphalian compromise with this position set up a notion of sovereignty that was implicitly linked to an inner experience in the people. The inherent conflict between the sanctity of national boundaries and the significance of an inner faith did not become apparent until World War I, which marked a turning point in the European notion of sovereignty from one that was based in rules of inter-state relations to one that functioned according to a model based on partisan war. Ernst Juenger’s Weimar-era writings document this shift in the character of war in their projection of a new type of soldier-hero defined by an aesthetic sovereignty over violence. This war-centered subjectivity becomes the basis for Juenger of a society’s total mobilization for war, which in turn created the context for the partisan as the totally mobilized warrior described by Carl Schmitt. Crucial to both Juenger’s and Schmitt’s conceptions is a focus on the inner experience of the soldier as the basis of an aesthetic representation of sovereignty. They both interpret the intensification of war in the 20th century as a consequence of a new model for sovereignty and its accompanying representation of violence. They disagree, however, on how sovereignty functions as a representational system after World War I. While Juenger focuses on the sovereignty of the individual as the basis of a universal soldierly consciousness, Schmitt insists on the partisan and thus particular character of sovereignty. A comparison of their two approaches leads to two opposing perspectives on the trajectory of war in the 20th century. __________________________ Sergei Plekhanov The First World War destroyed the international order which had existed for a century. Responding to the shattering crisis of the Western civilization, Russia and the United States became advocates of new rules of international behavior. Empowered by the Russian revolution, Lenin’s Bolsheviks called for an immediate end to the hostilities, withdrew the country from the war, and proclaimed the start of a “world revolution”. US President Wilson proposed a plan for ending the war and setting new rules of international behavior on the basis of liberal-democratic and pacifist principles. The profound conflict between the two projects was obvious. Still, there was a significant ideological overlap between them, and, assuming their new roles in world politics, the two countries, each in their own way, initiated the process which would ultimately lead to the formation of a new world order. __________________________ Michael Provence The paper will emphasize the centrality of the Ottoman East for the Great War, and the aims of the belligerents. The post-war settlement and the League of Nations is also part of this story. __________________________ Mohammad Rafi This research looks at the long lasting efforts of German Kulturarbeit throughout World War I, which played a significant role in shaping Iranian national identity in the 20th Century. Germany’s shift towards Weltpolitik from the time of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1888-1919) simultaneously marked the inception of a cultural exchange between Germany and Iran, which went beyond Germany’s geo-political interest in Persia. The foundation for a continuous growth of this alliance was made possible by cultural organizations that often reaffirmed positive stereotypes about Germany as Persia’s savior. Germany ostensibly supported Persia’s struggle against foreign exploitation and for independence. It thereby situated itself as the antidote to the two leading members of the Allies, Great Britain and the Russian Empire, who were marked by their history of imperialistic activities in Persia. Whereas Persia followed a policy of presumed neutrality in the Great War, an ideological shift stimulated through German efforts becomes visible. Germany’s upholding of Persian independence created space for a friendly collaboration between these two nations, whose economic relations were consistently foregrounded by its cultural foundations. Germany’s growing cultural efforts throughout the First World War transformed its relationship with Persia into an ideological alliance. This ideology based on the continuation of a long lineage of Persian history helped set the grounds for Iran’s current aim towards exceptionality in the Middle East. This paper traces German Kulturarbeit throughout the First World War in order to explore its consequences for Iran’s ideological position vis-à-vis the “West.” __________________________ Ekaterina Romanova Reconsidering the origins of the First World War in 1971 Joachim Remak referred to its beginning as the Third Balkan War, which continued throughout the period of 1914 – 1918 and led to the victory of South Slav nationalism. Though World War I cannot be reduced to the clash between the aspirations of South Slav movement and the multinational Habsburg Empire seeking to maintain its integrity, the role of the Balkans as the epicenter of conflicts at various levels of the existing international system is indisputable. The signs of its crisis can be detected in Great power politics in the region and the ideas which underlay it at the beginning of the XXth century. The paper will focus on the analysis of several models of regional order deduced from Great power politics in the Balkans, which developed as their reaction to the progressive decline of the Ottoman, and partially the Habsburg Empires, along with the emergence and strengthening of the new Balkan states. In particular, it will concentrate on the “concert approach” (however fragile it was) to the conflict management, based on the common interest in maintaining the existing order and, to a certain extent, on the conservative ideology – on the one hand, and the projects of individual great powers and their blocks pursuing imperial ambitions and trying to involve Balkan states in their spheres of interests – on the other. __________________________ Emily Rosenberg US President Woodrow Wilson expanded the scope and style of American empire both before and during World War I. Yet what Erez Manela has called the “Wilsonian Moment” also popularized the concept of self-determination and brought greater visibility and voice to anti-imperialism around the world. This paper asks how the war to “save the world for democracy” and Wilson’s championing of self-determination intersected with the structures and justifications that supported America’s own imperial sphere. It argues that Wilson’s tightening grip on America’s colonies, protectorates, and dependencies in the Caribbean and the Pacific sparked a “Wilsonian moment” in the American empire -- one directed at his own administration. In this “Wilsonian moment” anti-imperialist leaders in America’s sphere, although little studied by historians, not only stepped up their advocacy for self-determination but participated in the broader transnational currents that were energizing anticolonial movements everywhere. The contradictions between Wilsonian discourses of self-determination and universalism are nowhere better exemplified than in America’s own dependencies. __________________________ Annessa Stagner This paper examines the enduring significance of World War I within the realm of western psychiatry and efforts to create an international mental health movement. To many, the mental breakdown of soldiers in the form of shell shock and the seeming irrationality of diplomats that perpetuated the war raised anew the importance of developing healthy minds to create a more stable post-war society. The war became a turning point in which the locus of modern psychiatry at least temporarily shifted to the United States, and American doctors proclaimed that their approach to mental hygiene held solutions to healing Europe's soldiers and nations. Through various biopolitical interventions, they promised to build stable minds resistant to irrationality, fear, and violence. According to its supporters, the American-led mental hygiene movement provided an alternative approach to international relations outside the realm of politics that promised to preserve national identities while facilitating a lasting peace. __________________________ Georges Van Den Abbeele My aim is to reexamine the representation and reception of the "rape of Belgium" as taking place within a preexisting iconography of Belgian nationalism as victimized child, dating back to the earlier "rape of Antwerp" in the sixteenth century where the brutal destruction of the largest, wealthiest city in Europe by Spanish troops served as the foundational moment in the history of Belgium as a distinct geopolitical entity. In particular, I will consider the uneasy ways in which representations of infantilized or feminized Belgian victimhood recycle imagery from various imperial/colonial conquests -- Spanish Black Legend in the Americas/ Spanish Fury in Antwerp; Belgian and German colonial atrocities in Africa (Congo, Namibia) -- and finally between the widely-circulated impact of reported German atrocities in occupied Belgium on the Western Front and the lesser broadcast but far more lethal outcomes of the Turkish Genocide of some 2 million Armenians on the extreme Eastern Front of the Great War. Finally, a word on the extent to which the postwar discrediting of Belgian atrocities and the diminishment/forgetting of the Armenian genocide played into the cynical and even vaster destruction of civilian life in the Second World War. __________________________
Wang Ning This year, in many places, people commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. We Chinese scholars also pay considerable attention to this significant event although China did not suffer much from World War I. What we are most concerned about is the legitimacy of universalism or whether there is such a thing as universalism. When we talk about universalism, we will immediately touch upon the topic of modernity, especially that in the Chinese context. As we know, modernity represents the great interest of all the people in the world. But actually, modernity is also a relative project for it manifests itself in different forms in different countries or nations. The speaker will illustrate China as an example to show how modernity has been imported from the West and how it has been developing in an uneven way in the past hundred years. In this sense, the speaker just wants to prove that since modernity in China is a sort of alternative one which on the one hand has contributed to the grand narrative of global modernity, but on the other hand, it has also deconstructed the so-called “singular” or “universalist” modernity. The same is true of cosmopolitanism which is obviously a Western concept but with which there were certain parallel elements in ancient Chinese philosophy. Considering the pluralistic orientation of contemporary cosmopolitanism, the speaker offers his own reconstruction of a sort of new cosmopolitanism in the contemporary era of globalization. __________________________ Nikolay V. Yudin The beginning of the First World War was marked by a tidal wave of patriotic enthusiasm that swept through all the European Great Powers. City squares were flooded by ecstatic crowds; legislative assemblies declared their unanimous determination to fight to the bitter end. Till then, all political groups concluded party truce and in the name of victory committed themselves to work together. Thanks to the French president R. Poincaré’s good grace, this policy went down in history as “Union Sacrée.” In Russian Empire its own variant of “Union Sacrée” also was established. On the emergency session of the State Duma 8 August 1914 representatives of almost all Russian political parties (apart from the Bolsheviks) declared their unanimous support for the Tsarist government’s military efforts. Scenes of the Duma’s parties rallied around the throne profoundly shocked the contemporaries and made them think, especially the intelligentsia, about the nature and the essence of the patriotic enthusiasm experienced by the Russian society. In the center of the discussions to follow was the issue of Russian nationalism. The present paper is based on a wide range of primary sources including archive documents, memoirs, and diaries, and contains a comparative analysis of views of Russian liberals and conservatives on political and social events of 1914-1915. This approach opens a prospect of better understanding of Russia’s “Union Sacrée” peculiarities and of subsequent revolutionary upheavals.
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