Review of Richard W. Sterling, Ethics in a World of Power: The Political Ideas of Friedrich Meinecke (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1958; London, Oxford University Press, 1959)

2021 ◽  
pp. 319-320
Author(s):  
Martin Wight
Keyword(s):  
Nation State ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Ultimate Truth ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First World ◽  
Corporate Personality

Meinecke’s student and friend, Richard Sterling, composed this intellectual biography concerning Meinecke’s political ideas. Born in 1862, Meinecke was raised to venerate Hegel, Ranke, and Bismarck as pillars of the German State and conservative nationalism. Wight summed up Meinecke’s political evolution as follows: ‘In the first World War he justified the ultimatum to Serbia and the invasion of Belgium, he approved of unrestricted submarine warfare, and he explained to the minority peoples of the Central Powers that though the nation-state had been the proper goal for the Germans, it was their duty to remain content with the multi-national state. The shock of defeat started him on an assiduous criticism of his old beliefs. The moral autonomy of the State, the primacy of foreign policy, international relations as the fruitful competition of vigorously egotistic Powers, all gradually dissolved. He moved nearer to Goethe, and as an old man came to find the ultimate truth of politics not in the ideal, super-individual corporate personality of the nation-state, but in the martyrdom of the individual rebel against Hitler’s Reich.’

Performing National Identity in the Interwar Period: The Sarrasani Circus in Germany and Latin America

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-201
Author(s):  
Sabine Hanke
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
National Image ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The University ◽  
First World

This article examines the production and promotion of popular entertainments by the German Sarrasani Circus during the interwar period and how they were used to establish specific national narratives in Germany and Latin America. Focusing particularly on its engagement of Lakota performers, it argues that the Circus acted as an active negotiator of national concerns within and beyond Germany’s borders, and presented the group as ‘familiar natives’ in order to appeal to local and national ideas of Germanness. At the same time, it shows that the performers pursued their own interests in becoming international and cosmopolitan performers, thereby challenging the assimilation forced upon their traditions and culture by institutions in the United States. Finally, it demonstrates how foreign propaganda built on the Circus’s national image in Latin America to restore Germany’s international relations after the First World War. Sabine Hanke is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Duisberg-Essen. Her research examines the German and British interwar circus. She was recently awarded her PhD in cultural history, from which this article has evolved, at the University of Sheffield. A chapter based on her research is scheduled for publication in Circus Histories and Theories, ed. Nisha P.R. and Melon Dilip (Oxford University Press).

Writing Life: Early Twentieth-Century Autobiographies of the Artist-Hero

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mhairi Pooler
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First World

Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and Modernism via the First World War, this study offers a new way of evaluating biographical context and experience in the individual creative process at a critical point in world and literary history. Writing Life is also the story of four literarily and personally interconnected writers – Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson – and how and why they variously adapted the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, or artist narrative, for their autobiographical writing, reimagining themselves as artist-heroes. By appropriating key features of the genre to underpin their autobiographical narratives, Writing Life examines how these writers achieve a form of life-writing that is equally a life story, artist’s manifesto, aesthetic treatise and modern autobiographical Künstlerroman. Pooler argues that by casting their autobiographical selves in this role, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson shift the focus of their life-stories towards art and its production and interpretation, each one conducting a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War.

Naming the Dead, Writing the Individual: Classical Traditions and Commemorative Practices in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
GRAHAM OLIVER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Classical Traditions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
War Commemoration ◽  
First World

The chapter focuses on the commemoration of the individual in ancient and modern cultures. It argues that the attitude to individual commemoration adopted by the War Graves Commission in the First World War in Britain can be linked to the commemorative practices of ancient Greece, emphasising the importance of the part played by Sir Frederic Kenyon. The chapter draws on examples of commemoration from classical Athens, twentieth-century Britain and the Soviet Union in order to explore the different roles that the commemoration of the individual has played in ancient and modern forms of war commemoration.

Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children: Polish Jews and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. xii + 331 pp.

2020 ◽  
pp. 334-339
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
First World War ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
First World ◽  
Sense Of Obligation

It is common wisdom, both in scholarly historiography and in hagiography, that Ze’ev Jabotinsky was the founding father of the Israeli Right. In fact, as Colin Shindler’s excellent book proves, Jabotinsky adopted a right-wing world view only in the 1920s. Prior to the First World War, while undoubtedly a Zionist, he was also a man of cosmopolitan views. It was during a sojourn in Italy that he was caught up in the spirit of nationalism; Garibaldi’s influence was prior to Herzl’s. Moreover, whereas Jabotinsky’s heirs, Menachem Begin most prominently, paid lip service to his heritage, they were not entirely his disciples. Jabotinsky’s thinking largely lost its relevance in the face of the changing historical circumstances in which Begin and others operated. And so, with the passage of years following Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, there was an ever-lessened sense of obligation to the leader and his legacy....

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