Egyptology from the First World War to the Third Reich: Ideology, Scholarship, and Individual Biographies, edited by Thomas Schneider and Peter Raulwing. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. Pp. 296. US$45.00 (paper).

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 202-204
Author(s):  
Miguel John Versluys
1976 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Biddiss

Over the last two decades none has done more than Fritz Fischer to compel major reinterpretation of German ambitions between the 1890s and the end of the Third Reich. In 1959–60 this Hamburg historian published two articles that hinted at the coming storm. It broke dramatically in 1961 with the appearance of his huge Griff nach der Weltmacht This densely documented treatment of Germany's objectives in the First World War was striking enough to become before long the object of official displeasure at Bonn. Nor did Fischer's thesis win any easy support from professional colleagues, who argued bitterly about it during the 1964 German Historical Convention. Its still wider impact was clear from the deliberations of the International Historical Congress held at Vienna in 1965. That same year saw the publication of Fischer's Weltmacht oder Niedergang, a brief volume in rebuttal of criticism, and soon scholars in many countries were swelling the tide of relevant literature. By 1969 this included Kreig der Illusionen in which Fischer greatly amplified his original arguments. All three books are, at last, available in English. The translation of Griff nach der Weltmacht dates from 1967, but only lately have the other two been similarly treated. It seems appropriate to review these alongside recent works by Dr John Moses, on Fischer's revolutionary place in a national historiographical tradition, and by Professor Norman Rich, on the German aims associated with the war that broke out in 1939.


2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-327
Author(s):  
Winfried Dolderer

De Duitse dominee Otto Bölke (1873 – 1946) was geboren en werkzaam op de Fläming, een streek ten zuidwesten van Berlijn die in de middeleeuwen door inwijkelingen onder meer uit Vlaanderen en Nederland was gekoloniseerd. De vermeende Nederlandse afkomst van zijn voorouders heeft hem levenslang geïntrigeerd en aangezet tot een intense heemkundige bedrijvigheid alsmede een vroegtijdige belangstelling voor de Vlaamse beweging. Vanuit die belangstelling ontbolsterde Bölke zich tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog tot propagandist van de Flamenpolitik. Hij was betrokken bij een netwerk van Duitse sympathisanten van de meest radicale, Jongvlaamse variant van het activisme. De stichting van België kwam voor hem neer op een ‘verovering’ door de franstaligen; de Belgische staat noemde hij een ‘fabriek’ tot Romanisering van de Germaanse bevolking. Met Domela Nieuwenhuis maakte Bölke begin 1917 in Berlijn kennis. Domela leefde in onmin met het burgerlijke bezettingsbestuur, maar beschikte over Duitse vrienden in militaire evenals uiterst rechtse annexionistische kringen aan wie hij tot op het laatst verknocht bleef, De talrijke protestantse dominee's in dit netwerk waardeerden niet alleen de Nederlandse ambtsbroeder, maar evenzeer zijn politiek radicalisme dat strookte met hun eigen antidemocratisch conservatisme. Bölke toonde na de oorlog belangstelling voor het Vlaams nationalisme en kwam uiteindelijk in nationaalsocialistisch vaarwater terecht. Hij was een typische vertegenwoordiger van een Duits-nationaal protestantisme dat uit het keizerrijk doorgroeide tot in het Derde Rijk. ________ A Protestant Flamenpolitik (Flemish policy)? Otto Bölke – protestant pastor, expert on local history, propagandist of the Young FlemishThe German pastor Otto Bölke (1873 – 1946) was born and worked in the Fläming, a region southwest of Berlin, that had been colonised during the Middle Ages by immigrants from areas including Flanders and the Netherlands. The supposed Dutch origin of his ancestors intrigued him throughout his life and inspired his profound interest in local history as well as his early interest in the Flemish Movement.During the First World War that interest turned Bölke into a propagandist of the Flamenpolitik. He was involved in a network of German sympathizers of the most radical Young Flemish version of the activism. He considered the foundation of Belgium the equivalent of a ‘conquest’ by French speakers. He described the Belgian state as a ‘factory for romanising the Germanic population.’ Bölke made the acquaintance of Domela Nieuwenhuis in Berlin at the beginning of 1917. Domela was at odds with the civilian occupying administration but had German friends at his disposal in military as well as far right circles favouring annexation, to whom he remained attached until the end. The numerous Protestant pastors in this network valued not only their Dutch colleague, but also his political radicalism that reflected their own antidemocratic conservatism.  After the war Bölke was interested in Flemish nationalism and finally ended up in the National Socialist arena. He was a typical representative of a German national Protestantism that evolved from the Empire to the Third Reich.


Author(s):  
Robert Jackson ◽  
Georg Sørensen ◽  
Jørgen Møller

This chapter examines how thinking about international relations (IR) has evolved since IR became an academic subject around the time of the First World War. The focus is on four established IR traditions: realism, liberalism, International Society, and International Political Economy (IPE). The chapter first considers three major debates that have arisen since IR became an academic subject at the end of the First World War: the first was between utopian liberalism and realism; the second between traditional approaches and behaviouralism; the third between neorealism/neoliberalism and neo-Marxism. There is an emerging fourth debate, that between established traditions and post-positivist alternatives. The chapter concludes with an analysis of alternative approaches that challenge the established traditions of IR, and with a discussion about criteria for good theory in IR.


Author(s):  
Robert Jackson ◽  
Georg Sørensen

This chapter examines how thinking about international relations (IR) has evolved since IR became an academic subject around the time of the First World War. The focus is on four established IR traditions: realism, liberalism, International Society, and International Political Economy (IPE). The chapter first considers three major debates that have arisen since IR became an academic subject at the end of the First World War: the first was between utopian liberalism and realism; the second between traditional approaches and behaviouralism; the third between neorealism/neoliberalism and neo-Marxism. There is an emerging fourth debate, that between established traditions and post-positivist alternatives. The chapter concludes with an analysis of alternative approaches that challenge the established traditions of IR.


Author(s):  
Bernard Vere

The third chapter deals with the wholesale importation of a British team sport, rugby, into France. Led by Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympics, who was the referee in the first French championship, its adoption by the French was a self-conscious response to defeat in the Franco–Prussian War. Choosing rugby over the more proletarian soccer, an haute-bourgeois and aristocratic elite played rugby at Paris’ most exclusive clubs, a moment reimagined by Henri Rousseau. But rugby could not be confined to these environs for long, and by the time of Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team, with its press photograph source, the sport was included alongside aeroplanes, the Eiffel Tower and advertising as a cipher of all that was modern in the Paris of 1913. Also on view at that year’s Salon des Indépendants was another picture of rugby, The Football Players, cementing the sport as a theme for salon cubism. During the First World War, rugby was celebrated by French nationalists as a sport that had trained its participants to become heroes on the battlefield. This, I surmise, is what led André Lhote to produce his cubist paintings of rugby during and after the conflict.


1988 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 871-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Adonis

Politicians in the 1880s believed they were introducing ‘democracy’ into Britain and many feared the – possibly revolutionary – challenge it posed to the existing social and political orders. Historians have for some time recognized that the aristocracy continued to play a significant role in each until at least the First World War. The peers' social hegemony, strong institutional position and relative economic security were a formidable combination. Few would now accept Ensor's view that the 1880s witnessed the beginning of ‘the economic dethronement of the landowners’, and that ‘political headship [could not] long survive economic defeat’. The durability of the late-Victorian aristocracy remains, however, a phenomenon more frequently asserted than examined. The peerage was the sum of its individual members; yet the few ‘micro’ studies hitherto published have concentrated on the ‘aristocracy of the aristocracy’ – the elite of wealth and power, mainly dukes, within the peerage. We know little of the mass of peers who were far less favourably placed, suffered real financial difficulties, but whose tenacity and continued sense of purpose were crucial to the peers' ability to survive.


2000 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 143-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Saunders

AbstractWERE tendencies in the direction of regional difference in the later Russian Empire outweighing tendencies in the direction of homogeneity? In view of the fact that the empire fell apart in 1917, it looks as if the emphasis ought to be on difference. A good case, however, can also be made for homogeneity. I shall therefore be proposing that the regions of the Russian Empire occupied a more or less constant position on an imaginary `divergence–coalescence spectrum'. Admittedly, the contest between divergence and coalescence ceased to be equal during the First World War and the empire collapsed. This imbalance, however, turned out to be temporary. The empire re-emerged under a new name at the end of 1922 and for sixty-nine years thereafter occupied more or less the same place on the divergence–coalescence spectrum that it had occupied before it collapsed. So I shall be arguing that, except under extreme duress, the empire was stable. It is this stability I wish to draw to your attention. One's natural inclination is to think of the later Russian Empire as a hotbed of change. I have argued in a recent article that the inclination should be resisted in analyses of work-patterns. I shall argue today that it should also be resisted in the field of regional diversity. To make the case, I shall divide what I have to say into three parts, the first on divergence, the second on coalescence and the third on the First World War.


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