Christine G. Krüger and Sonja Levsen (eds), War Volunteering in Modern Times: From the French Revolution to the Second World War

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-649
Author(s):  
Nir Arielli
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Second World ◽  
The French Revolution

The French Revolution, the Union of Avignon, and the Challenges of National Self-Determination

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 717-747
Author(s):  
Edward James Kolla
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
Domestic Affairs ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
The French Revolution

National self-determination was one of the most important and controversial concepts in twentieth century international relations and law. The principle has had a remarkable history, from Woodrow Wilson's assertion that the peoples of Eastern Europe ought to form their own national states in place of ruined multiethnic and multilinguistic empires after the First World War; to decolonization after the Second World War, when populations worldwide invoked a right to throw off the yoke of imperialism; to the breakup of and war in the former Yugoslavia at century's end in precisely the same area in which a nation's self-determination was first intended to be a panacea for the region's diverse peoples. And yet, national self-determination, if not always called that, has a much longer lineage. Some note its earliest appearance in 1581, when the Dutch claimed independence from Hapsburg Spain. However, it was not until the French Revolution when, as Alfred Cobban remarks, “the nation state ceased to be a simple historical fact and became the subject of a theory,” that a people's right to determine its destiny in international as in domestic affairs was first articulated and applied. The clearest instance of this articulation and application during the Revolution was the union of Avignon and France.

The Legitimization of the Diaspora Experience

2010 ◽  
pp. 49-64
Author(s):  
Todd M. Endelman
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social Status ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Second World ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter details promotion of Jewish integration into the mainstream of social, political, and cultural life as the major item on the agenda of Western Jewish leaders from the French Revolution to the Second World War. It discusses the communal energies of Jews that were devoted to removing legal obstacles to full equality, combating the bureaucratic discrimination that persisted after emancipation, countering defamation in media, and gaining entry to elite social circles and institutions. It also looks at the communal tensions between traditionalists and reformers over the modernization of Jewish worship. The chapter considers the enhancement of the image of Judaism in order to improve the legal and social status of Jews as one of the chief motives of the reformers in Germany. It discusses the western Jewish concern regarding immigration from eastern Europe from the 1880s, which was derived from the fear that the newcomers would fuel antisemitism.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
English Language ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Planner ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Archives ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Second World

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (b. Neuruppin, 1781–d. Berlin, 1841) was a celebrated Prussian architect, theatre set designer, artist, furniture and object designer, urban planner, and civil servant. Born into modest yet respectable circumstances as the son of a deacon, Schinkel, by virtue of his talent and work ethic, rose in his own lifetime to become one of Prussia’s most celebrated cultural figures and its chief royal architect. He worked mostly in Berlin and its surrounding territories, including in some areas that are now part of Poland. His built works suffered heavy destruction during the Second World War, but important examples still survive or have been reconstructed, including the Altes Museum, the Friedrich-Werder Church, the Theatre (Schauspielhaus), and the New Guardhouse in Berlin, as well as the Charlottenhof and Glienicke Palaces in nearby Potsdam. His paintings, drawings, and personal archives can be found mostly in collections in and around Berlin, including at various departments of the Berlin State Museums. Recent debates have surrounded the potential reconstruction of Schinkel’s celebrated masterpiece, the Berlin Bauakademie (which was demolished in 1962), bringing a consciousness of Schinkel’s legacy to the fore in German public life once again. Despite his fame in Germany and his noted status as a reference-point for German avant-garde modernism, Schinkel’s work has remained under-explored in the English language (with some notable exceptions) due to difficulties accessing both his buildings and his archives in the years between the Second World War and German reunification. Since the 1990s, however, Schinkel’s international reputation has been steadily restored due to the efforts of a number of scholars and curators who have sought to disseminate his work more widely than ever before. Schinkel’s oeuvre is as eclectic as the tools and media he employed to realize it are versatile. They reveal traces of neoclassicism and the neogothic, French Enlightenment formalism, German Romanticism and Idealism, and 19th-century historicism. But at the same time, his work resists absolute categorization, by virtue of the fact that he lived and worked suspended between two epochs: he was born too late to be immersed in the worldview of the 18th-century Enlightenment and French Revolution, but nor did he live to see Germany’s development as a fully industrialized and unified nation. Occupying this ambiguous historical moment has given Schinkel’s work a versatility, a freedom, and an inquiring rigor that has assured its originality and enduring value.

Memories of Jewishness

2010 ◽  
pp. 315-332
Author(s):  
Todd M. Endelman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Second World ◽  
Distinguished Member

This chapter looks at Marcel Proust's epic, a multi-volume novel titled In Search of Lost Time, where a distinguished member of the Jockey Club named Charles Swann is regarded as a Jew before the Dreyfus affair erupted and heightened the Jew-consciousness. It explains why Marcel and others in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain regarded Swann as a Jew, who saw himself in a similar light towards the end of his life. It also explores why the lines demarcating Jews from Christians became blurred between the French Revolution and the Second World War and how this blurring affected Jews who had converted to Christianity. The chapter refers to Jews in medieval and early modern Europe, with the exception of Iberian Conversos, who were not troubled by issues of collective identity. It recounts how Jews exchanged one well-defined legal and cultural status for another when they rejected Judaism and became Christians.

Federal Systems of Government

1976 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-186
Author(s):  
P. Elman ◽  
M. Knisbacher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
World Government ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Second World

It is perhaps paradoxical that the spread of nationalism in modern times has been accompanied by a counter-movement for the establishment of broader units of government, not only internationally, where plans and projects for some form of world government go back to at least the 17th century, but regionally as well. This study is concerned with the local or regional expression of integration, called federalism or federation.Clearly inspired, if not directly and immediately affected, by the example of the United States, the federal movement made headway in the 19th century, but it is largely since the end of the Second World War and the demise of colonialism, that its dimensions have grown. Although its success generally is rather doubtful—there appears to be a kind of empiric rule that the first fifteen are crucial—the retreat, so to speak, from particularism and attempts to advance to geographically broader units of government have persisted.

Modern Greece and the Sephardim of Salonica an Overview

Belleten ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 64 (239) ◽  
pp. 161-186
Author(s):  
Albert De Vıdas
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Greek Population ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Basic Facts ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

The first encounter between Greece and tha Spanish and Portuguese Jews (the Sephardim) in modern times started in 1821 during the Greek rebellion against the Sultan. From the beginning this encounter would follow a rocky path because of three basic facts; the faithfulness of the Sephardim to the Ottoman Empire, the traditional religious anti-Semitism of the Greek population and the economic rivalry between Jews and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean. Nowhere would the antagonism of the Greek population and government towards the Sephardim be more intense than in the city of Salonica, the Sephardic metropolis which Greece occupied in 1912. With over two-thirds of the population being Sephardi and with Spanish being the everyday language of the population, Salonica, under the liberal rule of the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire had flourished economically and had become the center of the Sephardic Nation within the Empire. Greek policy would be one of constant antagonism from the time of the occupation until the extermination of the Sephardim by the Germans and their loal collaborators during the Second World War. Every effort would be made by the Greek government to diminish the influence of the Sephardim in the city and to reduce their presence and economic wellbeing. The 70,000 Sephardim of Salonica at the time of the Greek occupation would see their numbers diminished by emigration. Those who remained would be reduced to a frightened minority in a city that had been theirs for over 400 years.

The Diner Versus the Ducat

1973 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jere L. Bacharach
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Gold Coin ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
International Trading ◽  
Venetian Republic ◽  
Second World

Since the Second World War, United States currency has been accepted in almost every country in the world, and in many locations the ‘George Washington’ dollar has been in greater demand than local monies. In ancient, medieval and modern times, other currencies have had a similar success. Examples of this phenomenon are the ancient Athenian silver ‘owl’, theByzantinegoldsolidus, the Florentine gold florin, and the Maria Theresa silver taler. In the late fourteenth century A.D. the florin was replaced by the gold coin of Venice, the ducat, as the ‘dollar of the Middle Ages’; that is, the international currencypar excellence. The position of the ducat was associated with the international trading position of Venice as well as the fact that ‘the Venetianducato, which was first coined in 1284, kept both its weight and fineness remarkably intact up to the end of the Venetian Republic’. The ducat's domination of the Eastern Mediterranean money market led to the appearance of a series of imitations, including Islamic imitations which were produced in response to the introduction of ducats into the internal economy of Mamluk Egypt. All the accounts based on Arabic sources date the domination of the ducat in the Mamluk market froma.h.801/a.d.1399. These same sources describe the various attempts by Mamluk sultans to meet the challenge of the ducat by coining imitations. Their efforts culminated in the ashrafî, first issued in 829/1425, which successfully replaced the ducat as the principal gold currency of the Mamluk Empire until the Ottoman conquest of 922/1517.

Tragedy’s Endurance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Fischer-Lichte
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
World War ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
German States ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The book is devoted to the remarkable phenomenon of Greek tragedy’s endurance on German stages during the last 200 years. It examines how performances of Greek tragedies since 1800 contributed to the emergence, stabilization, and transformation of the German Bildungsbürgertum’s (educated middle class) cultural identity. Its focus lies on performances that either introduced a new theatre aesthetics or a new image of ancient Greece, or both. Key here are the truly transformative moments as well as the cultural dynamics involved. In this context, the overall political situation of the 200 years between the French Revolution and the peaceful revolution of 1989 in the German Democratic Republic plays a central role. It resulted in the reunification of the two German states, both founded in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War and at the beginning of the cold war. What was/is the purpose and role of performances of Greek tragedies in such a political climate? Did they help to bring about changes or did they result from changes that were already taking place? Were the performances seen to be welcoming, opposing, or even negating these changes? This study supplies answers to these questions by shedding some light on the underexplored relationship between the Philhellenism and the theatromania of the German Bildungsbürgertum, which has been brought into a sharper focus in performances of ancient Greek tragedies since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In short, it attempts to understand tragedy’s endurance.

‘A civic tool of modern times’: politics, mass society and the stadium

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Spectacle ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
Vichy Regime ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
Second World

This chapter explores how the stadium became central to a mode of political spectacle in France, from the mid-1920s up through the end of the Second World War, at a moment when it was also critical to politics elsewhere in Europe. A range of political luminaries and groups, from the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition to the Vichy regime, promoted stadium-based spectacles as a visible manifestation of political vitality, mass support and masculine citizenship. The stadium gave politicians a vast spectator space that proved ideal for staging political rallies, political plays or religious ceremonies that both aspired to transform spectators into active participants and that entailed efforts to discipline the public. But while the crowd may have been disciplined and mobilized inside the stadium, it also eluded those constraints and often disappointed those politicians seeking to create a unified public. In the years after the Second World War, the French stadium gradually disappeared as a pre-eminent staging-ground for mass politics, as the stadium crowd itself became progressively depoliticized.

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