The War Years and Bárány’s Decision to Leave Vienna

Author(s):  
Robert W. Baloh

As the conflict in Adam Politzer’s clinic heated up and with the approach of World War I, Robert Bárány volunteered for service in the army medical corps, in keeping with his pacifist ideas. Although he could have been excused from military service because of his ankylosed knee, Bárány was swept up in the wave of patriotism prevalent in Vienna. He was immediately assigned as an army surgeon to a hospital in the fortress of Przemysl near the Russian border. Przemysl was eventually overrun by Russian troops, and Bárány was transported along with more than 100,000 other prisoners in cattle cars across the Russian steppe to Turkistan. It was during his stay in Russia that Bárány received the exciting news from the Swedish minister in St. Petersburg that he had been awarded the 1914 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on the caloric reaction.

Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich

This chapter provides the biographical and historical context necessary for understanding Fraenkel and his time. The analysis is organized into three sections: his early years, the Weimar Years, and the Nazi years. In the first section, I trace Fraenkel’s upbringing in a secular household influenced by the so-called Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah; explore the origins of his life-long predilection for social democracy; and recount the intellectual effects of his military service in World War I. In the second section, I reconstruct Fraenkel’s education and socialization as a young lawyer and interpret Fraenkel’s most important Weimar-era writings. I explicate the roles they played in preparing the ground for the writing of The Dual State. In the third section, finally, I commence my analysis of Fraenkel’s Nazi-era thought and conduct up until his escape to freedom in 1938.


2021 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-95
Author(s):  
Dorothea McEwan

Abstract This article attempts to throw a light on Warburg’s little-known engagement in political caricature during World War I. Though deemed unfit for military service, Warburg was eager to contribute to the German war effort. Perceiving Allied war propaganda as anti-German lies, he recorded what he considered its half-truths and falsehoods in his Kriegskartothek, or war archive. But Warburg, as indicated by his involvement with the short-lived La Guerra del 1914: Rivista illustrata in the early stages of the war, kept looking for a more active role in influencing public opinion: From privately commenting on the output of the Allied press, he went on to offering his own ideas for political caricatures to leading artists like Olaf Gulbransson and Max Slevogt, and to well-established satirical journals such as Simplicissimus and Kladderadatsch.


2019 ◽  
pp. 096777201987609
Author(s):  
Liam McLoughlin

Dr Joseph Dudley ‘Benjy’ Benjafield qualified from University College Hospital Medical School, London in 1912. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I and was in charge of the 37th Mobile Bacteriological Laboratory serving with the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force when the Spanish flu struck in late 1918. He observed the features and clinical course of the pandemic and published his findings in the British Medical Journal in 1919. On return to civilian life, he was appointed as Consultant physician to St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, London where he remained in practice for the rest of his career. He was a respected amateur gentleman racing driver frequently racing at the Brooklands circuit from 1924 after buying a Bentley 3-litre and entering the Le Mans 24 h race seven times between 1925 and 1935, winning in 1927. He was one of an elite club of young men known as The Bentley Boys and went on to become a founding member of the British Racing Drivers Club (BRDC) in 1927. He rejoined the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II, serving briefly again in Egypt. He died in 1957.


Author(s):  
Michael Geheran

At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming “evacuations.” Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of this book. The same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, persecution under Hitler. They upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, this book challenges the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, the book exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, the book forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.


Author(s):  
Rasmus Navntoft

The German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann (1875-1955) perceived World War I as a moral battle against the civilization project rooted in the European enlightenment. Like many other German intellectuals of that time, Mann stresses an opposition between the concept of culture and that of civilization – this conflict is seen as inherent in the European soul – and defends Germany’s right to remain a culture that does not evolve into a civilization. The concept of culture can contain irrational features such as mystical, bloody and terrifying teachings, whereas civilization is characterized by reason, enlightenment, skepticism and hostility towards passion and emotion. In his major work The Magic Mountain (1924) however, Mann tries to overcome this opposition and displays, through the metaphors of the text, that a new humanism is dependent upon a mystical and completely illogical balance between culture and civilization. The main character of the novel does not succeed in finding this balance. But, nonetheless, Mann continues to see the possibilities of a new humanism through this perspective in order to point out a humanistic hope in the shadesof two European world wars.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 262-272
Author(s):  
Tore Rem

In 1920, the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature for his novel Markens grøde ( Growth of the Soil) (1917). This article explores some of the key contexts for this work, highlighting the author’s own ambitions, the reasons why he sided with Germany during the war, and his generally völkisch perspectives on the Germanic and Nordic. It furthermore analyses the early reception of this World War I novel, and how it was first subjected to a number of positive readings and seen as an example of idealism, before being appropriated by Nazism.


Author(s):  
Koritha Mitchell

This chapter examines together the first two one-act lynching plays to appear in periodicals. These scripts' presence in the archive offers access to the playwrights' willingness to maximize periodical culture and the diversity of perspectives encouraged by it. Dramatic revisions of Grimke's Rachel began with Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Mine Eyes Have Seen, a play that compares lynching to black military service in World War I. This 1918 one-act soon inspired Mary Burrill's similarly themed script, Aftermath, published in 1919. Heated debate drives the action of both plays, prompting honest, painful conversation in black communities not unlike that among the characters. The plays question to varying degrees black patriotism in a country that tolerates lynching, but they equally underscore the importance of the black soldier.


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