Sebastian Haffner’s Germanys

boundary 2 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 199-212
Author(s):  
Rosemarie Bodenheimer
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
General View ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Individual Privacy ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Time Capsule ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Great War

Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler: A Memoir appears in the twenty-first century as a kind of time capsule, offering a personal and political analysis forged during the 1930s, when the endgame of the Nazi regime was not yet visible. Haffner attempts to account for the historical precursors of Nazism, beginning with the Great War–besotted children of his own generation, now hungering for another dose of public excitement, and moving back to the mistaken nationalism of Bismarck’s 1871 Reich. Haffner’s general view of German character as incapable of democracy, reliant on strong leaders, but not essentially anti-Semitic, sits uncomfortably with his more personal horror at the Nazi invasion of individual privacy. Defiant analysis yields to tragedy as the memoir goes on to represent individual capitulations to Nazi tactics, including Haffner’s own. Reflecting our current dilemma, his dramatic narrative puts us vividly in mind of the angry, fearful, strident, hopeless, hopeful, and courageous elements that contend, unresolved, during an unpredictable rush of threatening world events.

The Nature and Legacy of British Imperial Internment

2020 ◽  
pp. 303-314
Author(s):  
Stefan Manz ◽  
Panikos Panayi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
First Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins by highlighting the main findings of the book, including the globalization of internment by the Empire during the Great War and the consequences for individuals and their families, but also the fact that Britain treated those it had incarcerated in a humane way. The chapter examines the return to Germany, its consequences for individuals, and the way in which the German authorities dealt with the former residents of the British Empire. These people, who may not have seen their homeland for decades, made efforts to preserve the memory of their experiences, along with former civilian and military prisoners who came from other states at war with Germany. While the memory of internment may have survived into the interwar years, it disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century, but came back to life in the early twenty-first century, inspired by the centenary of the Great War.

Prophetic Imagination and Empire in Asia

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Jude Lal Fernando
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Prophetic Imagination ◽  
Twenty First Century

The aim of this article is to identify the glimpses of prophetic imagination amongst the Christian communities in Asia, particularly in Korea and Japan, who are engaged in resisting the new round of militarization in the twenty-first century. This resistance denounces the globalist security complex in the region and announces a nonmilitaristic alternative forming a praxis that is necessary for a new theology of peace in East Asia and in Asia broadly. The political reality of the new round of military empire-building will be discussed with a personal narrative and a political analysis after which the theological meaning of prophetic imagination as opposed to imperial consciousness will be analyzed, correlating the personal and political with the theological. The ways in which the resistance to militarization resonates with the prophetic imagination of an alternative consciousness and community will be examined through an analysis of memories and renunciation of war by the churches. Broad implications of these resonances for a peace theology in Asia will be identified.

In the Shadow of the Swastika

2019 ◽  
pp. 181-216
Author(s):  
Norman Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Great War

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 caught the Ligue des droits de l’homme by surprise. The Ligue debate on how to respond to Nazism breathed new life into the war guilt debate. Increasingly, the Ligue’s gaze was directed forward to how to deal with Nazism, rather than backwards to a debate on the Great War, but its political analysis continued to be inspired by a reading of the meaning of the Great War. Both minority and majority initially failed to understand the sea change that Nazism represented, but the minority was transfixed by the idea that resistance to Nazism was going to require a new Union sacrée and the division of Europe into antagonistic blocs. Much of the minority’s opposition to this was the belief that France was complicit in the rise of Nazism. The threat of domestic French fascism was also a major preoccupation.

The Great War, Independence, and Latvian Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4 (463)) ◽  
pp. 9-21
Author(s):  
Benedikts Kalnačs
Keyword(s):  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Written Sources

The article focuses on the representation of the year 1918 in Latvian literature. On November 18, the independent Republic of Latvia was proclaimed, and in the years to come international recognition of the state’s sovereignty followed. In retrospect, this event stimulated a number of salutary descriptions and interpretations and certainly provides a milestone in the history of the Latvian nation. It is, however, also important to discuss the proclamation of independence in the context of the Great War that brought a lot of suffering to the inhabitants of Latvia. Therefore, a critical evaluation of the events preceding the year 1918 is certainly worthy of discussion. The article first sketches the historical and geopolitical contexts of the period immediately before and during the Great War as well as the changed situation in its aftermath. This introduction is followed by a discussion of the novel 18 (2014) by the contemporary Latvian author Pauls Bankovskis (b. 1973) that provides a critical retrospective of the events leading to the proclamation of the nation state from a twenty-first century perspective. Bankovskis employs an intertextual approach, engaging with a number of earlier publications dealing with the same topic. Among the authors included are Anna Brigadere, Aleksandrs Grīns, Sergejs Staprāns, Mariss Vētra, and others. The paper contextualizes the contribution of these writers within the larger historical picture of the Great War and the formation of the nation states and speculates on the contemporary relevance of the representation of direct experience, and the use of written sources related to these events.

The Quartet in the Political Persona of Ida B. Wells

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joy James
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century

Antilynching activism and advocacy are codified in Wells’s writings, particularly the 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Wells presented an astute political analysis of racial-sexual violence within US democracy that remains influential from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A review of Wells’s advocacy for Afro-American autonomy and self-defense to counter racial terror and rape, and her critique of the duplicity of antirape discourse that demonizes blacks, suggests that the legacy of Ida B. Wells is discernible in contemporary analysis and activism found in organizations such as Black Lives Matter and the Black Women’s Blueprint.

The Calais Conference of December 1915

1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Great War ◽  
General View ◽  
General Staff ◽  
Primitive Form ◽  
Differences Of Opinion ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Great War

The Allies' conduct of the Great War has frequently been castigated by historians as inept and amateurish. But it is perhaps the conduct of their diplomacy which most merits this description. Until the creation of the Supreme War Council at the end of 1917 there existed, apart from a number of liaison officers, no machinery to synchronise the strategy and diplomacy of Great Britain and France other than the periodic meetings of the politicans and generals of the two countries. Yet, as David Lloyd George came to realize, these were not really conferences at all, but rather meetings of men with pre-conceived ideas who desired only to find a formula which could obscure the underlying differences of opinion from the general view. They were really nothing but a ‘tailoring’ operation at which different plans were stitched together. What was required was the construction of an inter-Allied General Staff, designed to examine and give advice on the changing military situation. Obviously no government could abdicate its right to issue orders, but if the Central Powers were to be defeated the Allies needed to concede that there was far more to participation in a coalition than the mere lip-service to unity involved in the periodic gatherings of soldiers and statesmen. An examination of the Calais Conference of December 1915, called at a time when Allied operations on all fronts were showing a marked lack of success, will illustrate many of the failings and dangers of this primitive form of war diplomacy.

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