scholarly journals Managing the remains of citizen soldiers

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-51
Author(s):  
Adrien Douchet ◽  
Taline Garibian ◽  
Benoît Pouget

The aim of this article is to shed light on the conditions under which the funerary management of human remains was carried out by the French authorities during the early years of the First World War. It seeks to understand how the urgent need to clear the battlefield as quickly as possible came into conflict with the aspiration to give all deceased an individualised, or at the very least dignified, burial. Old military funerary practices were overturned and reconfigured to incorporate an ideal that sought the individual identification of citizen soldiers. The years 1914–15 were thus profoundly marked by a clash between the pragmatism of public health authorities obsessed with hygiene, the infancy of emerging forensic science, the aching desire of the nation to see its children buried individually and various political and military imperatives related to the conduct of the war.

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (17) ◽  
pp. 5-25
Author(s):  
Norman Laporte

Despite Ernst Thälmann's prominence in the German Democratic Republic's official antifascist narrative, there was no 'scholarly' biography of him until 1979. The reasons for this shed light on the political culture of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and its history-writing arm, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism – especially in the regime's early years under Walter Ulbricht. The refusal to falsify Thälmann's relatively conventional war record by the SED's appointed biographer, party veteran Rudolf Lindau, was a refusal to expunge his own party history from official memory. As a founding member of the International Communists of Germany (IKD), which was close to Leninism during and immediately after the war, Lindau did not want to contribute to myth-making which failed to account for the actual wartime antimilitarism of his own proto-communist grouping. The feud was part of wider debates in the SED about the nature of the November Revolution and the origins of the German Communist Party (1918), which ultimately identified the Spartacist tradition as the party's official heritage. Of course, Lindau could not change the party line; but he was given very considerable latitude to disseminate his own views within party circles. He only came into conflict with the party leadership after being accused of building a 'platform' (i.e. taking collective action) in the early 1960s and even then met no serious sanction. In short, the SED was not the monolith of cold-war cliché. Instead, it tried to maximise the latitude given to old Communists from a diversity of party traditions.


1982 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-386
Author(s):  
Hermann Kellenbenz

This study is intended to give a short survey on the development of shipping and trade between two main German ports and the Indian Ocean from the early years of the Bismarck period to the beginning of the First World War. The study deals with the area from East Africa to East India and from Indochina to Indonesia. China, the Philippines, and Australia will not be considered. It is based on an analysis of published material.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096834452110434
Author(s):  
Fabio De Ninno

During the interwar era, German naval history and naval doctrine exercised a profound influence on the development of the Italian Navy. The subject is relevant to understand how continental sea powers naval doctrines developed after the First World War, attempting to integrate new weapon systems to overcome the previous limits of the Fleet in being strategy. Italian naval thinkers incorporated the lessons offered by their German counterparts, preparing to repeat many of their mistakes, which explained in part the failures of Italian sea power in the early years of the Second World War.


2021 ◽  
pp. 176-193
Author(s):  
Richard Steigmann-Gall

This chapter explores the intersection of religion and dictatorship after the First World War. It examines the question of institutional relations between church and state, and seeks to explore how these relations shed light on the ideological relationship between religious traditions and fascism in particular. It does this by considering comparative perspectives across Europe, especially with regard to church–state relations but also in terms of politics, ideology, and culture. It goes on to explore the cases of Italian fascism and German Nazism, demonstrating how these regimes have typically been understood, as well as how they perpetuated a distinctive religious politics.


Author(s):  
GRAHAM OLIVER

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.


2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 274-284
Author(s):  
Stuart Mews

The assassination in London on the evening of 1 July 1909 of Sir Curzon Wyllie, aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, by a twenty-six-year-old Indian student named Madar Lai Dhingra stunned the nation. The background to the shooting and its consequences shed light on the attitudes of British Christians to Indian Hindus. In turn light is shed on the response of Hindus, most crucially that of the eventual leader of the successful campaign for Indian independence, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in the crucial decade before the First World War.


2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barnett

The young Joseph Goebbels, caught up in the heady mix of ideas and ideals permeating German artistic circles during and after the First World War, expressed both his convictions and his confusions through writing plays. None of these deserve much attention as serious drama: but all shed light on the ideological development of the future Nazi Minister of Culture. While also developing an argument on the wider relationship between Expressionism and modernism, David Barnett here traces that relationship in Goebbels' plays, as also the evolution of an ideology that remained equivocal in its aesthetics – the necessary condemnation of ‘degenerate’ art tinged with a lingering admiration, epitomized in the infamous exhibition of 1937. David Barnett has been Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Huddersfield since 1998, and was previously Lecturer in German Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford. His Literature versus Theatre: Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner Müller was published by Peter Lang in 1998, and other publications include articles on Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Werner Schwab, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Peter Handke.


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