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Zeitalter der Gewalt: Zur Geopolitik und Psychopolitik des Ersten Weltkriegs

Zeitalter der Gewalt: Zur Geopolitik und Psychopolitik des Ersten Weltkriegs The starting point of this volume, edited by Michael Geyer, Helmut Lethen, and Lutz Musner, is to question the idea of the First World War as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. This interpretation, Michael Geyer argues in the preface, has the effect of monumentalising the war, a perception which has formed ‘like a shell around this event’ (p. 7). A further effect, Geyer claims, is the suggestion that the First World War broke upon a fundamentally intact political and social order. Yet this was not the case. The volume thus aims to explore longer continuities that led to the events of 1914–1918 and beyond which went on to shape the twentieth century. Geyer thus depicts the war as the consolidation of a longer period which saw the increasing institutionalisation of violence, and as an ‘explosive moment of crisis in a changing world’ (p. 7). The volume’s preface is followed by an introductory essay by Geyer. Here he critically examines a number of tendencies in recent world war research. Geyer’s points of departure are key works by Christian Illies (1913) and Christopher Clark (The Sleepwalkers). These studies have updated the approach that Geyer counts amongst the ‘most exciting discoveries in modern historical scholarship’: the ‘rediscovery of the future of history’. On the one hand, Geyer points to the potential for reform in the multi-national empires of Russia and Austro-Hungary that has been acknowledged by newer research into this ‘rediscovery’. Predominantly, however, Geyer includes within this rediscovery the expectations and hopes of those living in the Europe of 1913, and who were surely unprepared for a century of violence. These perspectives lead Geyer to the counterfactual observation of what would have been necessary at the start of the twentieth century to achieve a safe future for the contemporaries of 1913 (p. 17). Here he comes to the conclusion that ‘there was no directly recognisable path from the visions of the future in 1913 to the present day’, 100 years later (p. 36). In none of the European societies of 1913 was demilitarization of the kind that has been implemented since the 1980s on the agenda. Three subsequent contributions dedicate themselves to geopolitics and concepts of space (Raum) in the time of the world wars. Karl Schlögel explores ‘border tectonics’ and outlines the interplay of geopolitical discourses in the pre-war period and the German ‘Raum obsession’ in the inter-war period. His statement that German infantry soldiers returned from the First World War’s eastern front with a ‘go east’ spirit seems to rest a little too strongly on a theory of continuity which has been rendered considerably more complex within recent military history. Hew Strachan adopts a more classical approach to the geopolitics of the first half of the twentieth century in which he compares the theses of Halford Mackinger—of the dominance of land over sea power—with the navalism of Thayer Mahan. Lutz Musner breaks new ground in the field of geopolitical approaches in his chapter dedicated to the ‘micro-spaces of the first world war at the Isonzo Front’, using wartime memories of the ‘Karst War-Landscape’. The reports used by Musener about the potential for destruction of mass artillery attacks in mountain areas are striking. Admittedly his interest in the interplay of the ‘changed conceptions of small war landscapes’ and the ‘new adjustment of the soldier’s psyche’ (p. 15) is primarily postulation, rather than an empirical exploration within this contribution. Jay Winter’s chapter is the first of the essays to deal with a history of violence in the context of the world wars. Winter refers to the gas war and the Armenian genocide to question the interpretation that there was a ‘degeneration of war’ between 1914 and 1918. The gas war was, according to Winter, the symbol of this ‘degeneration’, yet it had comparatively few victims. In contrast, the death toll of the Armenian genocide numbered hundreds of thousands. This has not been interpreted a ‘degeneration of war’, however, because the genocide was a continuation—admittedly taken to the extreme—of similarly disposed Turkish-Ottoman nineteenth century ‘projects’. The First World War was for him a nineteenth-century war, carried out with twentieth-century methods. Richard Bessel explores the world war as the beginning of the ‘modern era of forced displacement in Europe’ (p. 37), which he portrays as a turning point in European history and as a prerequisite for the later collapse of civilization. Laura Engelstein places the excesses of violence of the Russian civil war in a long-term perspective. She argues that the anti-Semitic pogroms before 1914, the violence against minorities in the western Russian territories during the war, and finally the mass ‘red terror’ from 1917/18 onwards find themselves in a ‘relationship of violence’ (p. 149), although it remains unclear what exactly this relationship rests on. Her argument that pogroms and the atrocities of war each rested on a closed-off worldview remains somewhat unclear, and might also be applied to other forms of collective violence (p. 150f). Tamara Scheer’s contribution on the theme of identities and loyalties in Austro-Hungary opens a set of four essays on the Politik der Sinne. On the basis of three biographies she shows, with reference to the work of Pieter M. Judson, that the classification of individuals in terms of specific nationalities from the nineteenth century onwards did not follow a linear pattern. ‘National flexibility’ was typical, expressed through the ‘imperial loyalty’ of the non-German officers in the k.u.k. army, whilst the clear assignment to a particular national identity could take decades. Patrick J. Houlihan uses the example of Catholicism in Germany and Austro-Hungary as a counter-example to the nationalization of religion and religiosity typical of world war historiography. In his thought-stimulating contribution, he argues for examinations of the local, or, rather, social surroundings, in which comforting gestures of religiosity as well as the religious processing of war experiences played a large role for soldiers from central and central eastern Europe, in particular for those with rural backgrounds (p. 203). Elisa Primavera-Lėvy explores ‘pain discourses’ in Germany and France after 1914. She determines that the common belief in the regenerative power of war amongst German intellectuals, combined with the topos of the ‘stimulating and transformative pain’ (p. 224) had no direct equivalent in France. The anthology is concluded by a contribution from Helmut Lethen, in which he analyses the war diaries of Ernst Jünger (edited in 2010) and attributes the ‘coldness’ of his war narratives to a descriptive language that resembled that language of natural sciences. The ‘style of Sachlichkeit’ links, in Lethen’s view, Jünger the combatant with the later beetle collector, and furthermore separates him from the political publisher of the 1920s, who had dedicated himself to a ‘heroic realism’. Overall the anthology offers a wide spectrum of research on the world wars, both in terms of themes and methodologies, and is distinguished by a range of styles and by the novelty of individual pieces. The latter is especially true of those contributions that deal with the ‘Politik der Sinne’, or rather ‘psychopolitics’. In comparison with perspectives centred upon geopolitics, which have been established for almost two decades, but also in comparison with the history of violence, this approach currently seems to hold the most research potential. Despite their heterogeneous nature, all contributions measure up to the editor’s claims to view the First World War through a long-term perspective. The portrayal of the First World War as a compression point (or Verdichtungsknoten, p. 7) in the context of longer-term processes without relativizing the character of the conflict as a human catastrophe is perhaps the most significant overall insight of the volume. It also shows that the historicization of these events has come further than the selective re-politicization of more recent world war historiography would suggest, with a view to Christopher Clark’s ‘Sleepwalkers’ or the debate about ‘German atrocities’ in Belgium at the outbreak of war in 1914. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png German History Oxford University Press

Zeitalter der Gewalt: Zur Geopolitik und Psychopolitik des Ersten Weltkriegs

German History , Volume 36 (4) – Nov 14, 2018

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Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved.
ISSN
0266-3554
eISSN
1477-089X
DOI
10.1093/gerhis/ghy068
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The starting point of this volume, edited by Michael Geyer, Helmut Lethen, and Lutz Musner, is to question the idea of the First World War as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. This interpretation, Michael Geyer argues in the preface, has the effect of monumentalising the war, a perception which has formed ‘like a shell around this event’ (p. 7). A further effect, Geyer claims, is the suggestion that the First World War broke upon a fundamentally intact political and social order. Yet this was not the case. The volume thus aims to explore longer continuities that led to the events of 1914–1918 and beyond which went on to shape the twentieth century. Geyer thus depicts the war as the consolidation of a longer period which saw the increasing institutionalisation of violence, and as an ‘explosive moment of crisis in a changing world’ (p. 7). The volume’s preface is followed by an introductory essay by Geyer. Here he critically examines a number of tendencies in recent world war research. Geyer’s points of departure are key works by Christian Illies (1913) and Christopher Clark (The Sleepwalkers). These studies have updated the approach that Geyer counts amongst the ‘most exciting discoveries in modern historical scholarship’: the ‘rediscovery of the future of history’. On the one hand, Geyer points to the potential for reform in the multi-national empires of Russia and Austro-Hungary that has been acknowledged by newer research into this ‘rediscovery’. Predominantly, however, Geyer includes within this rediscovery the expectations and hopes of those living in the Europe of 1913, and who were surely unprepared for a century of violence. These perspectives lead Geyer to the counterfactual observation of what would have been necessary at the start of the twentieth century to achieve a safe future for the contemporaries of 1913 (p. 17). Here he comes to the conclusion that ‘there was no directly recognisable path from the visions of the future in 1913 to the present day’, 100 years later (p. 36). In none of the European societies of 1913 was demilitarization of the kind that has been implemented since the 1980s on the agenda. Three subsequent contributions dedicate themselves to geopolitics and concepts of space (Raum) in the time of the world wars. Karl Schlögel explores ‘border tectonics’ and outlines the interplay of geopolitical discourses in the pre-war period and the German ‘Raum obsession’ in the inter-war period. His statement that German infantry soldiers returned from the First World War’s eastern front with a ‘go east’ spirit seems to rest a little too strongly on a theory of continuity which has been rendered considerably more complex within recent military history. Hew Strachan adopts a more classical approach to the geopolitics of the first half of the twentieth century in which he compares the theses of Halford Mackinger—of the dominance of land over sea power—with the navalism of Thayer Mahan. Lutz Musner breaks new ground in the field of geopolitical approaches in his chapter dedicated to the ‘micro-spaces of the first world war at the Isonzo Front’, using wartime memories of the ‘Karst War-Landscape’. The reports used by Musener about the potential for destruction of mass artillery attacks in mountain areas are striking. Admittedly his interest in the interplay of the ‘changed conceptions of small war landscapes’ and the ‘new adjustment of the soldier’s psyche’ (p. 15) is primarily postulation, rather than an empirical exploration within this contribution. Jay Winter’s chapter is the first of the essays to deal with a history of violence in the context of the world wars. Winter refers to the gas war and the Armenian genocide to question the interpretation that there was a ‘degeneration of war’ between 1914 and 1918. The gas war was, according to Winter, the symbol of this ‘degeneration’, yet it had comparatively few victims. In contrast, the death toll of the Armenian genocide numbered hundreds of thousands. This has not been interpreted a ‘degeneration of war’, however, because the genocide was a continuation—admittedly taken to the extreme—of similarly disposed Turkish-Ottoman nineteenth century ‘projects’. The First World War was for him a nineteenth-century war, carried out with twentieth-century methods. Richard Bessel explores the world war as the beginning of the ‘modern era of forced displacement in Europe’ (p. 37), which he portrays as a turning point in European history and as a prerequisite for the later collapse of civilization. Laura Engelstein places the excesses of violence of the Russian civil war in a long-term perspective. She argues that the anti-Semitic pogroms before 1914, the violence against minorities in the western Russian territories during the war, and finally the mass ‘red terror’ from 1917/18 onwards find themselves in a ‘relationship of violence’ (p. 149), although it remains unclear what exactly this relationship rests on. Her argument that pogroms and the atrocities of war each rested on a closed-off worldview remains somewhat unclear, and might also be applied to other forms of collective violence (p. 150f). Tamara Scheer’s contribution on the theme of identities and loyalties in Austro-Hungary opens a set of four essays on the Politik der Sinne. On the basis of three biographies she shows, with reference to the work of Pieter M. Judson, that the classification of individuals in terms of specific nationalities from the nineteenth century onwards did not follow a linear pattern. ‘National flexibility’ was typical, expressed through the ‘imperial loyalty’ of the non-German officers in the k.u.k. army, whilst the clear assignment to a particular national identity could take decades. Patrick J. Houlihan uses the example of Catholicism in Germany and Austro-Hungary as a counter-example to the nationalization of religion and religiosity typical of world war historiography. In his thought-stimulating contribution, he argues for examinations of the local, or, rather, social surroundings, in which comforting gestures of religiosity as well as the religious processing of war experiences played a large role for soldiers from central and central eastern Europe, in particular for those with rural backgrounds (p. 203). Elisa Primavera-Lėvy explores ‘pain discourses’ in Germany and France after 1914. She determines that the common belief in the regenerative power of war amongst German intellectuals, combined with the topos of the ‘stimulating and transformative pain’ (p. 224) had no direct equivalent in France. The anthology is concluded by a contribution from Helmut Lethen, in which he analyses the war diaries of Ernst Jünger (edited in 2010) and attributes the ‘coldness’ of his war narratives to a descriptive language that resembled that language of natural sciences. The ‘style of Sachlichkeit’ links, in Lethen’s view, Jünger the combatant with the later beetle collector, and furthermore separates him from the political publisher of the 1920s, who had dedicated himself to a ‘heroic realism’. Overall the anthology offers a wide spectrum of research on the world wars, both in terms of themes and methodologies, and is distinguished by a range of styles and by the novelty of individual pieces. The latter is especially true of those contributions that deal with the ‘Politik der Sinne’, or rather ‘psychopolitics’. In comparison with perspectives centred upon geopolitics, which have been established for almost two decades, but also in comparison with the history of violence, this approach currently seems to hold the most research potential. Despite their heterogeneous nature, all contributions measure up to the editor’s claims to view the First World War through a long-term perspective. The portrayal of the First World War as a compression point (or Verdichtungsknoten, p. 7) in the context of longer-term processes without relativizing the character of the conflict as a human catastrophe is perhaps the most significant overall insight of the volume. It also shows that the historicization of these events has come further than the selective re-politicization of more recent world war historiography would suggest, with a view to Christopher Clark’s ‘Sleepwalkers’ or the debate about ‘German atrocities’ in Belgium at the outbreak of war in 1914. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Journal

German HistoryOxford University Press

Published: Nov 14, 2018

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