Category Archives: Book Reviews

Glorification of the Death of Heroes: Review Essay by Rana Salimi

Publisher:

Cornell University Press

Author:

Mark Schantz

Format: Paperback

Published on: Apr. 2008

ISBN-10: 080143761X

Language: English

Pages: 264

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon at a special, discounted price, click here.

In Awaiting the Heavenly Country, Mark S. Schantz argues that American attitudes and ideas about death helped facilitate the Civil War’s tremendous carnage. Asserting that 19th-century attitudes toward death were firmly in place before the war began — rather than arising after the losses became apparent — Schantz has written a fascinating and chilling narrative of how a society understood death, and reckoned the magnitude of destruction it was willing to tolerate.

About the author: Mark S. Schantz is Professor of History and Director of the Odyssey Program at Hendrix College.

About the Reviewer

For the past 7 years, Rana Salimi, Ph.D has researched Palestinian bombers, especially female bombers, who choose the path of violent resistance — risking the lives of their victims, their family members, and the lives of their own.

Her doctoral dissertation, “Visual Representation of Palestinian Female Martyrs Inside and Outside of Muslim Culture”, deals with the issue of self-sacrifice for a higher cause: how individual volunteers — motivated by either nationalist, religious, or political agendas — transform into “political performers” before carrying their bombing missions.

Rana Salimi received her Ph.D from UC San Diego, department of Theater and Dance. Currently, she lectures at UC San Diego and National University on a variety of subjects, including theater, history and language arts.

Dear Colleague,

Please read Rana Salimi’s exciting review essay of Mark Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country directly below, on our blog or on the LSS Book Reviews website.

Salimi summarizes Schantz’s argument: Religious beliefs about death were “deeply significant for the Civil War.” Soldiers marched off to war secure in their belief that “their bodies would be restored and they would be reunited with loved ones in heaven.” These beliefs about death, according to Schantz, “insulated soldiers and their families from the horrors of war.”

On a more fundamental level, the ideology of the Civil War demanded that citizens “sacrifice their lives and commit violence against their fellow countrymen so the nation as a whole could survive.” The individual could achieve eternal life and be commemorated as a hero “if, and only if, he was ready to sacrifice himself.”

Here, we are on familiar grounds. The ideology of sacrificial death—“The individual must die so that the nation might live”—lies at the heart of many wars fought by many nations at many different times and places. Thus, it is difficult to argue that a 19th-century culture of death was the primary source of America’s willingness to accept casualties during the Civil War.

The following are examples of troops fighting in other wars that engaged in suicidal battle strategies resulting in enormous casualties:

Japanese soldiers in the Russo-Japanese war (1905).
British, French, Italian, Australian, Italian, Australian and Turkish soldiers (among others) during the First World War.
Japanese soldiers during the Second World War.
Royal Air Force pilots during the Second World War (the number of UK airmen who gave their lives was ten times greater than the number of kamikaze pilots who died).
American soldiers at the Battle of Normandy. German soldiers fighting Russia in the Second World War (e.g., the Battle of Berlin).
Chinese troops attacking Americans in North Korea during the Korean war (1950): the “human wave attacks.”
Iranians fighting in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88): human wave attacks

These are cases with which I’m familiar. I’m certain historians can provide many additional examples.

The Civil War is only one among many wars characterized by suicidal battle strategies resulting in an extraordinary number of casualties. It is not parsimonious to explain a constant (suicidal battle strategies and the acceptance of casualties) by a variable (the 19th-century American attitude toward death).

Salimi notes that—far from being unusual (as Schantz suggests)—many national and religious groups today “share values with the Civil War society of the United States,” for example, jihadists who see death as a means of redemption, and activists who die engaged in violent political protest. Indeed, Salimi says, the belief system that defined the Civil War—that through sacrificial violence (death of the corporeal body) freedom is achieved, the nation liberated, an ideology preserved and the hero commemorated— “exists today in ideologies throughout the world.”

The idealization of sacrificial violence that characterized the Civil War has been common in many wars in many societies, at different times and places. Indeed, episodes of massive political violence are so common that we rarely ask why they occur. What is the meaning of our willingness to die and kill in the name of ideologies?

According to Jonah Winters (1987), the word for “martyr” and “witness”—shahid—is nearly identical in Greek and Arabic. Shahid usually is taken to mean that the martyr is one who “witnesses to the sincerity of his faith or political conviction through the ultimate proof—his own life.” Franco Fornari hypothesizes (1975) that war is a spectacular demonstration whereby “death assumes absolute value.” The ideas for which we die have a right to truth because death becomes “a demonstrative process.”

People who wage war, Fornari says, believe that “faith in a just idea legitimates every sacrifice.” War as a sacrificial duty signifies “destruction put into the service or preservation of what is loved.” To understand political or collective violence, therefore, it is necessary to identify that which is loved in a particular society, the nature of the “sacred object” in the name of which sacrificial actions are performed.

The beloved object for Northerners who fought in the Civil War was the idea of the American Republic (the “perfect union”), and the ideal of “freedom.” However, the beloved object for which people die and kill has been given many names: Great Britain or France or Germany or the Emperor or Allah or the communist party. The names differ, but the dream remains the same.

Human beings wage war—die and kill—in order to demonstrate devotion to ideas or entities conceived as greater or “higher” than concrete existence. By engaging in suicidal battle strategies that generate enormous casualties, we demonstrate our sincerity: show that we truly believe.

Death in war is performed to prove that the idea or ideal or entity that we worship is real. We seek to prove that there is a transcendent domain of reality beyond actual existence. Surely there must be some thing that gives rise to all the sound and fury. It is difficult to imagine that all of that death and destruction could have been undertaken in the name of no thing.

Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg

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Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

Schantz, Mark, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008) xv, 245pp., notes, index. Review by Rana Salimi.

In Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death, Mark S. Schantz notes that during the Civil War era Americans encountered death in “myriad and intimate ways.” Pointing to the ever-present shade of death as a result of high infant and childhood mortality rates, the pervasiveness of tuberculosis, and frequent epidemics, Schantz argues that “Americans . . . taught each other how to die.”

Antebellum Americans wanted a “good death,” one that came at a ripe old age, took place in the bosom of the family, and enabled the dying person to “utter last words that would reveal not only the disposition of their soul but also serve as a spiritual lesson to those who attended the death.” Daniel C. Eddy, the author of Angel Whispers; or the Echo of Spirit Voices Designed to Comfort Those Who Mourn (1857), promoted a religious view of disease and even wrote about the “advantages of consumption” because it gave the dying person plenty of time to undergo authentic conversion in preparation for eternal life. Instead of focusing on the corporeal death of the individual, Eddy and his contemporaries highlighted the significance of the soul.

Schantz argues that religious beliefs about death were deeply significant for the Civil War. Soldiers marched off to war secure in the belief that their bodies would be restored and they would be reunited with loved ones in heaven. In a conflict that violently took the lives of 620,000 men, who were not just killed but “ripped apart,” these beliefs sustained soldiers on both sides of the conflict who wrote about heaven as a home where death and suffering would be no more. Schantz writes that such beliefs about death insulated soldiers and their families from the horrors of the war. Thus, religious notions of life and death served political purposes and set the ground for the bloodiest war in American history.

Schantz turns his attention to a group of Americans who rarely had the opportunity to die the “good” death, African American slaves, for whom the ideas of freedom and death were part of a daily calculation. He traces the thought of African American abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet, who argued that the hope of freedom rested on the willingness of slaves to risk death. For Schantz, this notion goes even deeper: if African Americans were to “grasp the fruits of freedom fully,” they would need to “make friends with the prospect of death.” For abolitionists and former slaves, slavery was already a form of death, what Frederick Douglass called “a life of living death.” Schantz points out that this concept anticipated sociologist Orlando Patterson’s notion of “social death” by many decades. Choosing to die while resisting slavery was a distinctly African American version of the “good death.” Schantz then turns this lens on African American soldiers who volunteered for service in the Civil War. Although their willingness to kill and be killed were viewed, and rightly so, as an indication of their commitment to racial equality and their desire for citizenship, Schantz argues that it was the already familiar equation of the risk of death in the pursuit of freedom that helps us understand why African Americans were willing to risk so much in the Civil War. Noting that black soldiers risked death just as willingly as their white counterparts, Schantz points out that only in death did black soldiers achieve the status of American heroes.

Schantz explores the rise of rural cemeteries and the emphasis on the proper burial of the deceased in the antebellum and war years. The growth of cemeteries throughout America created what Schantz calls a “liminal spiritual terrain,” hovering between heaven and earth, where the dead would be properly buried and remembered, where Christians would find solace in the face of grief. Grief, in this new setting, became a family affair, one that included the young and the tender. Memorialization of the dead was meant to bring together the living in a climate of support and solidarity. However, as Schantz points out, the inclusiveness the cemetery promised “stopped hard at its gates.” Most new cemeteries were for white Protestants only; large groups of Americans, including African Americans, Native Americans, Catholics, and Muslims, were excluded from these pastoral refuges for the dead and grieving.

The last chapter of the book is dedicated to the items Americans used to complete proper mourning. The “art of mourning” that helped families confront and come to terms with the death of their loved ones included many physical remembrances, such as memorial lithographs, postmortem photographs of the loved one, and cemetery monuments. These material evidences of mourning were intended to preserve individuals and their families. Schantz briefly touches on the gendered nature of grief; in the “vital tasks of weeping and mourning for the dead,” women had an elevated role.

In contrast to the focus on the needs of families cemeteries represented, Civil War battlefield photographs had a political agenda. In addition to glorifying the martyred soldiers of the war, sanitized photographs of battlefields indicate the desire of the American public for an aesthetic view of the war. Dead bodies were arranged carefully for the camera and the landscape occupied the photograph more than the dead soldiers. Such “recordings” of traumatic events helped the public come to terms with the unimaginable by giving it images that could be comprehended. In Civil War photographs, the dead bodies are always peaceful and complete without a trace of gunshots or dismemberment. The “beautiful death” was visualized on a body that had apparently not been ravaged by death; these were not photographs of soldiers who experience the far more common fate of being blown to bits. The peacefulness and wholeness of the dead hero implied that the martyr in a higher cause never dies but remains intact and memorable. The photographers who produced such images publicized the political agenda of the pro-Union war.

The construction and political system of U.S. society in the Civil War era demanded that its citizens sacrifice their lives and commit violence against their fellow countrymen so the nation as a whole could survive. The dominant religious ideology, literature, and the arts of the time imposed the culture of “good death” on the nation and required citizens to voluntarily exchange the mundane world for the heavenly rewards of the afterlife. In other words, the individual could achieve the eternal life in heaven and could be commemorated as a hero if, and only if, he was ready to sacrifice himself. However, the individual never acted alone. It was the pressing torment of war that completed the doctrines of the “good” and honorable death. It was the reality of a nation perishing in the course of a devastating war that urged the culture to seek peace in the death of its children.

In the twenty-first century, political upheavals and social systems similarly shape the decisions and actions of the individuals who are identified, rightfully or otherwise, as terrorists. It is in individual sacrificial violence (the death of the corporeal body) that freedom is achieved, the nation liberated, an ideology preserved, and the hero commemorated. The oppressed individual who experiences “social death” on a daily basis feels the urge to find solace in a rewarding and heroic ending. Self-sacrifice promises an ending that is at least regarded as a “good death,” even though it does not resolve the critical issues. Schantz’s scholarship suggests that readers ponder the Civil War in an attempt to understand the ones who “fought the American Civil War in such a way that respects both the manner in which they lived and the ways in which they died.” Perhaps the same profound, scholarly, and clear comprehension is required for reading between the lines of violent protests that create turmoil in the world today.

In his epilogue, Schantz cautions against assuming that we are the same as the mid-nineteenth-century Americans he writes about. He argues that in their embrace of mass death, they are in fact alien to us, concluding that “if we participate in the nineteenth-century culture of death today, it is most evident perhaps in our willingness to honor and valorize the past.” I wonder if this is accurate. It depends on who “we” is. If we expand the definition beyond the borders of the United States, the values Schantz writes about seem very present in our modern world. Jihadists who believe in death as a means of redemption, activists who engage in acts of violence to protest corrupt political systems, and religious and national ideologies that promote self-sacrifice share certain values with the Civil War society of the United States. The difference perhaps is that in the Civil War, the enemy was from within; today’s volunteers for martyrdom draw attention to the crushing power of occupation, colonization, and defeat at the hands of external forces. Just as the overwhelming pressure of slavery induced many individuals to choose death as a form of freedom, oppression today initiates the response of extremist violence around the world, even when that violence necessitates the death of the actor.

Review Essay of Dynamic of Destruction by Joanna Scutts

Publisher: Oxford U. Press
Author: Alan Kramer
Format: Paperback
Published on: Mar. 2009
ISBN-13: 9780199543779
Language: English
Pages: 448

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon at a special, discounted price, click here.

From the Western Front to the Balkans, from Italy to the war in the East, the First World War was the most apocalyptic the world had ever known. This book tells you how and why the civilized nations of Europe descended into unprecedented orgy of destruction.

About the Author: Alan Kramer is Professor of European History at Trinity College Dublin.

About the Reviewer

Joanna Scutts is a literary critic and cultural historian with teaching and research interests in all aspects of modernism. She holds a BA in English from the University of Cambridge, MA from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where her research focused on World War One commemorative practices and their impact on British literary modernism.

Her writing and research seminars, on “The Return of the Soldier” and “Memory and the City” respectively, explore questions of cultural memory and identity, and both focus on the ways that literature shapes our understanding of history, gender, and place.

She has written book reviews and essays for publications including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation, and is currently at work on a new book project about self-help culture and feminism in the 1930s. More information is available through her website.

Click here to read her article on commemoration, Battlefield Cemeteries, Pilgrimage, and Literature after the First World War.

Dear Colleague,

We are very grateful to Joanna Scutts for her review essay on Alan Kramer’s Dynamics of Destruction. You may read the complete review directly below, or on the LSS Book Reviews website. Here are my own reflections:

Scutts discusses the idea of “mass death,” defined by Kramer as the “killing of a large proportion of a military formation, or a large number of civilians,” distinguished from genocide by “reciprocity.” In other words, during the First World War, one group murdered members of another group—while the group on the other side could kill back. Whereas in the case of the Holocaust, one group murdered members of another group—while the other group could not kill back.

Omer Bartov has observed (1996) that the Nazi death camps were “architecturally and organizationally modeled on the experience of the Great War,” incorporating all the attributes of a military environment such as uniforms and barbed wires, watch towers and roll calls, hierarchy and order, drills and commands. The Holocaust, Bartov says, was “almost the perfect reenactment of the Great War,” with the important correction that “all the perpetrators were on one side and all the victims on the other.”

Bartov observes that there is reluctance to associate the imagery of the Great War with the Holocaust because of our “discomfort of perceiving national wars as an instance of industrial killing;” and because of our desire to insist that there is a difference between war and genocide.

Historians, Scutts notes, tend to view the First World War as some kind of “natural disaster,” an extension of masculine violence, or an instance of a war that somehow got out of control—people and cultural artifacts being destroyed by a “whirlwind” or a “machine.” The most important contribution of Dynamics of Destruction, according to Scutts, is how Kramer brings into focus how human agents brought the First World War into being. Mass-murder and mass-destruction arose based on “specific decisions of specific commanders, by orders decreed from above and carried out by armed men on the ground.” Human being acted to create—and to perpetuate—the First World War.

So what is the difference between the First World War and the Final Solution? One might say that the Holocaust was a case of “intentional” mass-murder, whereas the First World War was an instance of “unintentional” mass-murder.

However, if young men were asked to get out of trenches for four consecutive years (the “slow march of men into machine guns” and artillery shells)—based on specific decisions made by specific commanders—can we truly say that the extermination of young men that occurred during the First World War was “unintentional?”

Thanks again to Joanna Scutts. Please read about her in the column to the right, take a look at her website, and read her online publication, “Battlefield Cemeteries, Pilgrimage, and Literature after the First World War”.

To comment on Scutts’s review essay (or on my own comments), please write below.

Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg

195647_752727057_1121836_n

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

Kramer, Alan., Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Reprint 2013. 434pp. ISBN 9780199543779. Reviewed by Joanna Scutts, New York University.

Any history of the First World War begins with numbers. The war is defined by the dizzying casualty rate on all combatant sides, and remembered in acres of grave markers and monuments listing what Siegfried Sassoon called the “intolerably nameless names” of the missing. Its impossible statistics make the war feel both modern and historic: modern for ushering in a century marked by mass death, yet old-fashioned in its combat methods (the slow march of men into machine guns, the last shreds of the cavalry) and the sheer size of its amateur army. But as historians like Jay Winter have made clear, statistics alone are an inadequate measure of meaning. Even in the rare cases where numbers are accurately calculated and recorded, they can only be understood when placed into a dynamic relation with other numbers, other facts, other testimony.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

Alan Kramer’s comparative history of the First World War, Dynamic of Destruction, acknowledges a debt to Jay Winter’s demographically rooted approach, but digs more deeply into what numbers can tell us at the distance of a century. He pays attention to statistics that are usually footnoted in conventional histories of the war: civilian deaths in the early weeks of the German advance into Belgium; the massive casualty rates of the wars that bookended the conflict in the Balkans and Russia; Italian fascist violence in North Africa; and the genocide of the Armenians. In the process he disrupts many fixed assumptions about the war, and urges the reader to a bold reimagining of what mass death means, for victims, perpetrators, and societies at large.

“Mass death” is defined by Kramer in broad terms as “the killing of a large proportion of a military formation, or a large number of civilians,” and is distinguished from genocide by “reciprocity.” (2) His study begins with a detailed account of the German mass murder of civilians in the Belgian university city of Louvain in August 1914, an atrocity compounded by the destruction of the university library and many other historic buildings. The attack on Louvain, and subsequently on Rheims cathedral in France, instigated a wave of international condemnation of German military tactics.

In the United States, in particular, the attacks were denounced as evidence of German “barbarism.” Yet for Kramer they are not barbaric, in the sense of a throwback to a pre-civilized world, but rather represent a stage in the evolution of twentieth-century warfare. German tactics in Belgium in 1914 were “an expression of something entirely modern: the logic of annihilation.” (27) His analysis of the events in Louvain, which draws on both Belgian civilian sources and the evidence of German soldiers and the military high command, sets the stage for Kramer’s central thesis, that the First World War brought together the destruction of people—soldiers, prisoners, and non-combatants—with the destruction of culture—churches, libraries, ancient buildings, archives, and museums. This cultural annihilation was more extensive than ever before and, Kramer argues, was a deliberate military tactic, ordered by senior officers and carried out by individual soldiers.

The brutal combination of human and cultural destruction was not some kind of natural disaster, nor the logical extension of human (or masculine) violence, as it was (and is) often explained. Instead, it “arose from strategic, political, and economic calculation.” (41) This is perhaps the book’s most important contribution: the awareness that people and cultural artifacts were not destroyed by a “whirlwind” or a “machine” but by the specific decisions of specific commanders, by orders decreed from above and carried out by armed men on the ground. Historians are usually reticent to assign “blame” in the First World War, and often dismiss contemporary reports of German atrocities as mere Allied propaganda. By contrast, Kramer convincingly shows that the German war aims and policies, especially in the crucial months of July and August 1914, were indeed “total war” aims in a way that the policies of the other combatant powers were not.

By marshaling evidence against myth, Kramer continually debunks popular theories about what started the war—for instance, he refutes the idea that it was made inevitable by the binding treaty structures of pre-war Europe in part by pointing to many instances before 1914 when treaty obligations were avoided. Drawing on his previous work on the German atrocities in Belgium, he shows that at least in the West, these specific German tactics (and attendant worldwide outrage) were what precipitated British and French entry into the war.

The anti-war approach of many historians, emphasizing the conflict’s wasteful pointlessness, had tended to understand this connection backwards, as evidence of the power of bellicose propaganda. By this light, the German atrocities (bayoneted babies, raped nuns, and so on) are downplayed as the hysterical imaginings of right-wing pro-war journalists and politicians. Yet as Kramer even-handedly demonstrates here and in his German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial, the mass murder of civilians, including women, children, and elderly men, as well as rape and forced prostitution in the occupied territories were distinctive—and deliberate—features of Germany’s invasion.

This central insight, that mass murder and cultural destruction were specific instruments of policy, serves as a kind of moral anchor to Kramer’s study, as he goes on to examine the concept of “total war” and the ways in which the First World War did and did not correspond to it. This is where his comparative approach truly pays off, in the nuance and variety he uncovers within the overwhelming scale of the conflict. Cultural destruction was not universal, for instance—churches, cathedrals, and cultural monuments were often spared, in the wake of Louvain and Rheims.

Human destruction, too, was not usually genocidal during the war itself: it was aimed at the enemy’s political and economic collapse (and hence the victor’s gain), rather than at ethnic “cleansing” or murder. At the same time, however, much of the war’s worst attendant violence—the destruction of Catholic Louvain, the Armenian genocide, the horrific conflicts in the Balkans as the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires fractured—was spurred or worsened by racial and religious prejudice. These mass killings at the historical edges of the conflict made the unthinkable possible, and made familiar deaths in the tens or hundreds of thousands by forced displacement, mass incarceration, starvation—all methods that would precede and accompany the more technologically advanced mass murder of the Holocaust.

The Second World War unavoidably shadows this investigation of the First World War’s human and cultural destructiveness. As both wars recede into history, Kramer notes, they increasingly “appear as a single period,” or in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, a “Second Thirty Years’ War.” (328) By this logic, the brutalization of war tactics and interwar politics leads somehow inevitably or inexorably to Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. Here again, Kramer’s careful comparative approach provides a thoughtful counterweight to this too-simple argument.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

He shows that the notion of the universal “brutalization” of politics in interwar Europe is false, and that in Britain and France, and even in Weimar Germany after the anti-Communist violence of the immediate postwar period, governments were strenuous in their avoidance of political violence and in their commitment to establishing international laws against it. By contrast, in Soviet Russia and Italy, violence entered the political mainstream as any distinction between civilian and military leadership crumbled.

Although arguments about the causes of the Second World War are largely beyond the scope of Kramer’s book, his concluding chapters offer some intriguing new ways of understanding the links—and discontinuities—between the two wars. In the spirit of debunking historical myths, for instance, Kramer revises conventional understandings of the Versailles treaty, by showing that the German “stab in the back” myth was deliberately stoked by right-wing extremists rather than truly felt by the majority of Germans.

Unlike historians who tend to blame Versailles for producing the (supposedly inevitable) conditions for the Second World War, he demonstrates that the reparations were not beyond Germany’s ability to pay, nor was the “war guilt” clause so loathed by the Nazis unique to Versailles or much remarked on at the time—similar clauses were a standard part of other contemporary treaties. Instead, if we read the war guilt clause in its original spirit, rather than through the lens of the Second World War, it is an important recognition that German war aims were indeed different to those of the Allies, that conquest and extermination of the enemy were part of the theoretical planning of the German military, and the military had far greater control over the government than in other nations.

What this book eloquently shows is that the history of the First World War should not be remembered merely for the scale and nature of death in trench warfare, nor should our understanding of it be dominated by the interpretations of the poets, like Wilfred Owen, who stressed its “futility” and tragic meaninglessness. Kramer’s great achievement is to imbue the war’s mind-numbing numbers with meaning, and to begin to dismantle the historical myths around them.

Why, for instance, do the British remember the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 as the ultimate expression of the war’s tragedy, when more of their troops died on the first day of the 1918 German Spring Offensive? Is it because “futility” and trench immobility have so absorbed British historical memory that it cannot make space for the urgent, mobile beating-back of an offensive that nearly won the war for the Germans? What are the consequences for history of such selective memory?

Kramer’s book is also an important deepening of the analysis of military modernization in the Great War. As he shows throughout, it is not merely the development of aircraft, tanks, poison gas, and heavy artillery that made the war “modern,” but the way in which these weapons and their capabilities were understood. For the first time, modern science provided metaphors to expand the range of what was permissible in warfare—the language of hygiene, surgery, ethnic difference and “cleansing” providing a spurious intellectual justification for mass murder. Kramer thus emphasizes the role played by modern writers and artists, especially the Italian Futurists, in developing and popularizing pseudo-scientific fantasies of historical rebirth. Similar excitement over the new and modern was apparent in the German military, with generals keen to put the ideas of Schlieffen and other total-war theorists to the test.

Despite his comprehensive comparative approach that enlightens not only the German and Allied experience but the less-studied events of the Italian front, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, and the Balkans, Kramer stresses that there is still much archival research to be done. In particular, the Turkish government’s refusal to allow historians to properly investigate the Armenian genocide means that the importance of this event at the time, and in subsequent understandings of the war, is still underestimated. Yet Kramer’s careful weighing of the available evidence, and his insistence on taking seriously the way that events were understood at the time rather than perpetuating historical myth, provides an instructive methodology for future historians. In its centennial year, our understanding of the First World War is still incomplete. Alan Kramer shows us why it is so important to continue to investigate its events and interpretations.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

War as Extermination: Review essay by Brian Crim

Publisher: Rodopi
Author: André Mineau
Format: Paperback
Published: Apr. 2012
ISBN-10: 9042035064
Language: English
Pages: 144

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon, click here.

SS ideology was the expression of a philosophical self-containing system of thought, articulated around a systematic body of knowledge. It portrayed itself as a global approach to society and civilization, based on eugenics and ethnic cleansing. SS theory and praxis was a response of the cultural shock brought about by World War I — and promoted total war for the sake of total health.

SS Thinking and the Holocaust is part of Rodopi’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies (HGS) series, which is committed to philosophical examinations of the Holocaust and genocide.

About the author: André Mineau is Professor of Ethics and History at the University of Quebec at Rimouski.

About the Reviewer

Brian Crim is Associate Professor of History at Lynchburg College, where he teaches courses in modern European history and the Holocaust. His research revolves around war, political violence, and antisemitism in modern Germany.

His monograph entitled Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914-1938 will be published by Lexington Books in 2014.

Dear Colleague,

In his essay on Heinrich Himmler, Max Hastings writes about the “stunning incompetence” with which the Nazi war machine was conducted. Even with his familiarity with the period, he never ceases to be amazed by the authority entrusted to men of miserably meager talents.

Himmler, Heydrich and the SS, Hastings says, were amazingly careless of the “rational priorities of war,” devoting themselves with “demented single-mindedness to pursuing, herding, eventually killing Europe’s Jews.”

Brian Crim’s complete review essay of SS Thinking and the Holocaust appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

Hastings writes about the economic and strategic cost to Germany of undertaking a program of “liquidating those who were unwanted, while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance.” Only fools could have chosen to “address the agenda of supposed ethnic purification before Nazi hegemony on the Continent was secure.”

Like other conventional historians, Hastings sets up a dichotomy between the “rationality” of warfare, on the one hand, and the “irrationality” of genocide or ethnic cleansing, on the other. But what if the primary objective of Nazism was precisely ethnic cleansing, specifically ridding the world of Jews? How then will we understand Nazi warfare?

Brian Crim is a young historian challenging the view that genocide and warfare are inct political forms. Building upon Andre Mineau’s book, SS Thinking and the Holocaust, Crim demonstrates that the Holocaust and Second World War were two sides of the same coin: the struggle to free the world of “Jewish Bolshevik bacteria.”

Crim cites an order issued by Field Marshall Reichenau to Wehrmacht forces in October 1941, just three months into the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). Reichenau states that the objective of war against the “Jewish Bolshevik system” was “complete destruction of their means of power and elimination of the Asiatic influence from European culture.” The troops faced tasks that “exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering.”

The need to eliminate “Asiatic influence from European culture,” Crim suggests, meant that “nothing short of genocide, a racial reordering of the continent under National Socialist terms, accomplishes this goal.” Reichenau’s directive, Crim says, encapsulates the National Socialist worldview by framing war as a “clash of civilizations inevitable and indispensable to saving the German race.” Nazism grew out of the belief that Germany and the world were threatened by “biological evils.” Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust therefore, according to Crim, were “inextricably linked to the same massive biological engineering project.”

Brian Crim’s complete review essay of SS Thinking and the Holocaust appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

Mineau puts it more starkly: “Operation Barbarossa and the Holocaust can be understood as a single and gigantic sanitary operation.” To the SS, space management — providing for the security of the German Lebensraum — was essentially an “antibiotic operation.” Confronted with the pervasiveness of biological evil, Nazism was the “politics of hypochondria.”

The Nazi party, Crim observes, consistently portrayed Germany as a “patient in danger of racial infection.” War was a matter of self-defense, a “prophylactic,” and therefore ethical. Total war sought “total health.” The war against the Soviet Union was officially discussed by Hitler on March 30, 1941, during a speech to top Wehrmacht commanders. General Franz Halder noted the essentials:

This would be a “clash of two ideologies,” a “war of extermination.” It was necessary to fight against the “poison of disintegration.” Commanders would have to “overcome their personal scruples.” After decades of fostering an anti-Semitic world view, Crim says, the Wehrmacht was encouraged to “act against Judeo-Bolshevism without restraint.”

If the “Final Solution” sought the extermination of the Jewish people, and Operation Barbarossa was a war of extermination, what is the difference between genocide and war?

Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in the largest military operation the world had ever seen. By the time the brutal Russian winter descended, millions of Soviet POWs were dying in captivity, penned in behind barbed wire with no protection from the elements, being executed en masse by the German Army or transported to Germany for extermination by the hundreds of thousands.

Adam Jones estimates that in a mere eight months, 2.8 million Soviet prisoners-of-war died from systematic starvation, forced labor, disease, shooting and gassing. This case, Jones says, vies with the genocide in Rwanda as the “most concentrated mass killing in human history.” During the course of the Second World War, according to Crim, 5.5 million Soviet POWs died in captivity.

If nearly 6 million Soviet prisoners-of-war were killed by German soldiers, what was the difference between the Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa?

Brian Crim’s complete review essay of SS Thinking and the Holocaust appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

Max Hastings disparages the Nazi leadership for undertaking a program of ethnic purification while the “outcome of the war still hung in the balance.” However, if the objective of warfare was precisely ethnic cleansing—to destroy Jewish-Bolshevik bacteria—was the Nazi way of waging war ineffective?

Historians twist about, straining to maintain their belief in rationality: to pretend sense exists within a sea of senselessness. Hitler could have defeated Great Britain had he focused exclusively on achieving this goal. However, he was preoccupied—distracted by his belief that Europe was being inundated by “disease bacilli which at the moment have their breeding ground in Russia.”

Andreas Hillgruber sees a parallel between the launching of the war against the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Final Solution, suggesting that the conquest of European Russia, for Hitler, was inextricably linked with the extermination of these bacilli, the Jews. The racist component of Hitler’s thought was so closely interwoven with the central political element of the program that “Russia’s defeat and the extermination of the Jews were—in theory and later in practice—inseparable for him.”

Hastings claims that Nazi leaders like Himmler, Heydrich and Goering were amazingly careless of the “rational priorities of war.” Yet it is estimated that over 21 million people died in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. And that nearly 60 million people overall died in that war. Even if Germany had “won” the Second World War, by what measure could this war have embodied or reflected rationality?

From a conventional military perspective, Hitler had lost the war. But if his goal was to kill as many Jews (and other humans) as possible, did Hitler fail?

Brian Crim’s complete review essay of SS Thinking and the Holocaust appears on our website.

Click here to read the complete review essay.

We would appreciate your comments on this Newsletter — or the entire review essay. Leave your reflections and commentary below.

On February 4, 1945, Hitler dictated a note to Martin Bormann, proudly declaring that National Socialism had “tackled the Jewish problem by action & not by words.” This action had been an essential “process of disinfection.” Hitler had been true to himself: had achieved the objective he set out to achieve when he entered politics 25 years before. He set forth the substance of his achievement: “We have lanced the Jewish abscess, and the world of the future will be eternally grateful to us.”

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

Sacrifice, American Exceptionalism and War-Culture (part I of II)

Review Essay of Stanley Hauerwas’s book War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity

by Kelly Denton-Borhaug

Publisher: Baker Academic
Author: Stanley Hauerwas
Format: Paperback
Published on: Oct. 2011
ISBN-10: 0801039290
Language: English
Pages: 208

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon at a special, discounted price, click here.

How are American identity and America’s presence in the world shaped by war, and what does God have to do with it? Esteemed theologian Stanley Hauerwas helps readers reflect theologically on war, church, justice, and nonviolence in this compelling volume, exploring issues such as how America depends on war for its identity, how war affects the soul of a nation, the sacrifices that war entails, and why war is considered “necessary,” especially in America. He also examines the views of nonviolence held by Martin Luther King Jr. and C. S. Lewis, how Jesus constitutes the justice of God, and the relationship between congregational ministry and Christian formation in America.

About the author: Stanley Hauerwas (Ph.D., Yale University) is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He is the author of numerous books, including Cross-Shattered Christ, A Cross-Shattered Church, With the Grain of the Universe, A Better Hope, and Matthew in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.

About the Reviewer

Rev. Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. She holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Her teaching and scholarly interests include Christian theology and ethics with a particular focus on the ethics of models of redemption in liberation theologies. She is the author US War-culture, Sacrifice and Salvation. More information is available through her blog.

US War-culture, Sacrifice and Salvation

By Kelly Denton-Borhaug

Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd.
Author:Kelly Denton-Borhaug
Format: Paperback
Published on: Dec 15, 2010
ISBN-10: 1845537114
Language: English
Pages: 298

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon at a special, discounted price, click here.

The military-industrial complex in the U.S. has grown exponentially in recent decades, yet the realities of war remain invisible to most Americans. A culture has been created where sacrificial rhetoric is the norm when dealing in war. This culture has been partly enabled to flourish because popular American Christian understandings of redemption rely so heavily on the sacrificial. U.S. War-culture, Sacrifice and Salvation explores how formulations of Christian redemption have been manipulated to create a world and a time of necessary sacrifice. It reveals the links between Christian notions of salvation and sacrifice and the aims of the military-industrial complex.

Dear Colleague,

Professor Kelly Denton-Borhaug’s review essay of Stanley Hauerwas’ book, War and the American Difference, represents a major breakthrough in our understand of the sacrificial dynamics of warfare.

Building on Hauerwas’ central themes, she argues that the “sacrificial war narrative”— profoundly embedded in American culture, historical memory and national consciousness— is “our national story.” Subsequent to the Civil War, “sacrifice and the (American) state became inseparably intertwined.”

This sacrificial metaphor at the heart of citizenship—inextricably tied to war—has incredible power, all the more so because “most citizens are unconscious of its active impact in our lives.” In fact, Denton-Borhaug says, most citizens are “blithely unaware” of the “sacrificial war-culture that profoundly shapes their understandings of citizenship and the nation.”

The text which appears below is a summary or edited version of the first two sections of Denton-Borhaug’s review essay. We urge to read the essay in its entirety here.

We are grateful for Professor Denton-Borhaug’s valuable contribution.

Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Telephone: 718-393-1081
Fax: 413-832-8145
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

PS: The text below covers the first two sections of the review essay. A summary of the balance of the essay will appear in a subsequent edition of the Library of Social Science Newsletter.

“Sacrifice, American
Exceptionalism and War Culture”

Review Essay by Kelly Denton-Borhaug

There is a story that informs American attitudes and identity. Hauerwas traces the impact of this story on Americans in this book. This is a story about “the sacrifice of war,” and how it shapes our understanding of the nation and citizenship. As Hauerwas explores this story, especially through its development in the experience of the American Civil War, the connection between “the sacrifice of war” and a common moral identity for American citizens becomes clear.

The experience of the Civil War defined and unified the nation: “The story of the transformation of the Civil War from limited to total war is also the story of how America became the nation we call America”. We should not miss the ways that Christian sacrificial formulations influenced the development of this national narrative.

I expand here upon Hauerwas list: from President Lincoln as a Christ figure; to the many sermons comparing the war to “a vicarious atonement” made for the developing nation; to the growing need to justify the unbearable and overwhelming accumulation of death over the course of the war through sacralizing death; and through the sacrificial national commemorations that developed both during and after the war, including those that continue up to the present day. Thus, “sacrifice and the state became inseparably intertwined”.

The text that appears in this issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter (Part I of II) is a summary or condensed version of the first two parts of Denton-Borhaug’s essay.

Please click here to read the complete review essay. If you wish to comment on this excerpt—or the entire review essay—leave your reflections and commentary below.

This is our national story. Yet we tend not to think consciously about this as our “story” – certainly not as consciously as we think about other national stories that shape us as citizens—such as those about the separation of church and state, freedom of religious choice and freedom of the state from religion. These others stories tend to push (quasi)religious factors into the background.

I argue that the sacrificial war narrative—so profoundly embedded in American culture, historical memory and national consciousness—shapes us in a subterranean, subconscious fashion. As George Lakoff has demonstrated, we cognitively internalize certain metaphors that shape the way we value, make decisions, and generally go about living our lives—but tend not to be conscious of these same metaphors.

The sacrificial metaphor at the heart of citizenship—inextricably tied to war—has incredible power, all the more so because most citizens are unconscious of its active impact in our lives. In fact, most citizens are blithely unaware of the contradiction between their assumptions regarding “the separation of church and state”—and the deeply religious sacrificial war-culture that profoundly shapes their understandings of citizenship and the nation. Legal and political theorist Paul W. Kahn has explored this dimension:

Through our secular faith as U.S. citizens, our identity is affirmed by way of those who sacrificed themselves for the conception and maintenance of the nation. In addition, through ongoing sacrifice (with war as the apotheosis), citizens are linked to “the organic body that is the mystical corpus of the state.”

This national narrative—alive in commemorative national rhetoric and ritual, but subconscious in terms of its religious reality—has enormous power. I argue that this is the story we must investigate more deeply if we are to truly understand the morally compelling nature of war for people of the United States. Hauerwas explicates the consequences of U.S. sacrificial war-culture that were cemented in the experience of the Civil War and beyond.

He quotes historian Mark Noll: “War is America’s altar. . . our church”. What does this mean? We can identify a host of consequences. I expand on Hauerwas’ list: first, war becomes a central component in the story of American exceptionalism. Second, the compulsion toward war increases in ratio to our connection to war as our most dynamic moral reality. Third, the dying and killing of war become attached to certain understandings of redemption, both personal and national.

Fourth, the sacrifices of war create the very mechanism through which the nation achieves and maintains its transcendent status. President Lincoln declared that it is through war that the nation achieved the right to exist “in perpetuity”: “The baptism of blood in war unveils the transcendent dimensions of the union” (note the religious language!). Fifth, not only does war transcendentalize the nation—the nation must return to war again and again in order to maintain this transcendentalized status.

For the very dysfunction Hauerwas describes is in fact an addiction to sacrificial dynamics. “American wars,” he writes, “must be wars in which the sacrifices of those doing the dying and the killing have redemptive purpose and justification”. Just war analysis is not so much the attempt to investigate whether a given war will rise to the level of just war principles, but is revealed as “an attempt to control the description, ‘war’”.

The text that appears in this issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter (Part I of II) is a summary or condensed version of the first two parts of Denton-Borhaug’s essay.

Please click here to read the complete review essay. If you wish to comment on this excerpt—or the entire review essay—leave your reflections and commentary below.

In other words, to understand the dynamics of sacrificial war-culture in the United States, we must investigate our language, and how it shapes our very ways of knowing, for “War possesses our imaginations, our everyday habits and scholarly assumptions”. One way to investigate this keen insight would be to explore more deeply the utilization of sacrificial formulations in just war discourse.

American popular political culture is a most revealing site to discover these dynamics at play. For instance, a 2008 television ad for the presidential republican candidate featured a veteran of the Iraq war speaking directly to the camera—to the American people as it were— passionately arguing that Obama is unfit to be president because “he doesn’t understand or respect the sacrifices of war.” The word, “sacrifice” surfaces repeatedly in this short speech, while the camera focuses on his upper body, only at the end panning out to show his entire figure—and the loss of his limb—to make very visually specific the “sacrifice” he has endured.

The ad powerfully warns the American public that not to ascribe to commitment and faith in this sacrificial construction is a type of (religious?) political heresy that casts suspicion. In fact, not to ascribe wholeheartedly to this belief is to be cast out: marked as “other” from patriotic, faithful Americans. The veteran concludes his sacrificial logic, “It is a fundamental truth that freedom is always worth the price.”

Hauerwas includes a chapter that suggests a way forward, expanding upon his colleague Enda McDonagh’s suggestion that one way to counter the bulwark of just war thinking, and its self-imposed discipline and paucity of imagination, is to begin to use a different rhetorical formulation: “start a discussion about war that would make war as morally problematic as slavery”. In other words, develop an argument regarding the “abolition” of war in similar terms to the abolition of slavery.

The text that appears in this issue of the Library of Social Science Newsletter (Part I of II) is a summary or condensed version of the first two parts of Denton-Borhaug’s essay.

Please click here to read the complete review essay. If you wish to comment on this excerpt—or the entire review essay—leave your reflections and commentary below.

Review of "The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier"

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning,
and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body

Wittman, L., The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 464 pp. $85.00 U.S. (pb.) ISBN 1442643390. Review by Roger Griffin.

Laura Wittman’s quest to unpack the meaning of major state memorials to an anonymous military victim of the First World War in Britain, France, Italy and the US leads to the history of the state planning of the tombs—and study of the rhetoric and ritual they generated. She examines novels, poetry, photography, religious iconography and contemporary testimonies to document how secularization and disenchantment have eroded the cosmological foundations of funerary rituals.

Working with case studies and sources, Wittman collates the conflicting ‘receptions’ of the tombs and their incorporation into the collective psyche. She explores their impact upon national consciousness—swollen with pride rather than diminished by the war’s human cost and bottomless grief generated by its futility and mind-numbing destructiveness.

Conventional historians tempted to dismiss her approach as ‘culturalism’ might lack the will or intellectual stamina to read past the introduction. But those who sense the crucial role played by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier— shaping the convulsions of the human spirit wrought by the cataclysm of the war and catastrophe of modernity’s unfolding—will find the effort demanded worthwhile.

Wittman is utterly absorbed by her subject, driven by an urge not just to record ‘the facts’ surrounding national projects to commemorate the war dead en masse through an anonymous victim or empty tomb, but to interpret what they signify. Read sympathetically, the mythic space contrived by the tomb’s architecture and ritual becomes a portal through which—almost a century after the events—we can still engage key issues arising from the ‘Great War’.

The war marked a profound caesura in the linear temporality and optimistic narrative of progress inherited from the Enlightenment, setting in train the Russian Revolution, disappearance of four empires, birth of new countries (some of them by the Caesarean section demanded by savage peace treaties), a lethal flu’ pandemic, and radical economic, social and political upheavals unique to each country. Cumulatively, these traumatic events created a climate of profound existential anxiety even in the victorious nations, engendering despair and anomie—alongside new forms of hope in a transformed future and secular millennialism.

The project of the tomb can be seen as a grotesque exercise in state hypocrisy and euphemism, perpetuating the myth relentlessly exposed by the poetry of Robert Owen—that to die for the nation was still ‘Dulce et decorum’ (sweet and fitting). The public response to these contrived manifestations of ‘political religion’ showed that the tombs reified authentic but inarticulate collective longings—to make sense of incomprehensible mass death and mechanized slaughter, and somehow transfigure the oceanic suffering and trauma into a rite of passage to a new age.

The monuments’ cold stone or marble with their promise of immortality can thus be seen as signifying the unconscious bid to transcend the collapse of reality’s self-evident solidity and purpose captured in T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in the section Unreal City:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

Reading these lines in the context of the war memorials highlights the deeper psychological import of the word ‘defeat’, from the French ‘défaite’, which, like the Italian ‘disfatta’, derive from the verb for ‘undo’.

At the same time, the tombs give aesthetic expression to the need of modern man for redemptive myths despite, or maybe because of, the ‘death of God’. They marked yet another point where the modern West collectively expressed the existential dissatisfaction and intimations of nihilism—and hence the concomitant longing to return to the ancestral state of mythic consciousness that had given rise to the first burial ceremonies. This longing was diagnosed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy:

And now mythless man stands there, eternally hungry, in the midst of all past ages, rummaging around and digging as he looks for roots, even if he has to shovel for them in the most remote ancient times. What is revealed in the immense historical need of this dissatisfied modern culture, the gathering up of countless other cultures, the consuming desire to know, if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythic homeland, of the mythic maternal womb?

Seen in terms of mythic responses to the threat of nihilism, the tombs of the Unknown Warrior signal the onset of two decades in which superficially modernized currents of mythopoeia were drawn from deep cultural wells. They were poured into forms of secular apocalypticism familiar as ‘political ideologies’—for which ‘civilized’ Europeans will within little over a decade again be killing and dying in their millions.

Already in Russia the myth of the Bolshevik Revolution—as the act of creative destruction needed to usher in a new age of socialism—was finding affective resonance within broad swathes of Russians, infusing them with enthusiasm for a vast experiment with the nature of society, history and humanity itself. These mythic energies would soon animate the mass support for Fascism, Nazism and both sides in the Spanish Civil War—before exploding into the violence of the Second World War—fuelled from outside Europe by the Japanese variant of ultranationalism based on the emperor cult.

The tombs highlight how anomie following the Armistice of 1918 was at fever pitch, within both victorious and defeated nations. Nationalism filled the spiritual vacuum for millions, and nationalists created new ritual ceremonies and spaces that could transmute a sense of loss and decay into hope and redemption. The modern state conceived as an embodied ‘people’ took up the role once performed by the Church—as orchestrator and choreographer of mass emotion.

The evidence Wittman collates from Italy, France, Britain and the US shows that—even in purportedly rational, liberal countries upholding the values of Enlightenment—it was not democracy or socialism, but a dangerously Romantic, organic, almost tribal form of nationalism that created powerful forms of political religion. This elemental force—having fuelled hostilities for four years—was more akin to the driving force of the Aztecs than to anything in the works of J. S. Mill.

It was a religion of state and people capable of papering over cracks between official Christianity, and a modern sense of absurdity and bottomless contingency; between humanistic values that insisted on respect for all human life, and the anonymity and obscenity of death mass produced by modern warfare; between official rationales given for the war, and the reality of its utter pointlessness.

Wittman’s book throws into relief two key dilemmas arising from the nature of modernity, inhabited by human beings whose cosmological needs and ritual reflexes are still those of the Stone Age. What does the ‘eternity’ or ‘perpetual presence’ celebrated in the symbology and ceremonies of the tombs mean in the absence of a theologically conceived immortality? What can ‘sacrifice’ mean in an age where there is no metaphysical basis for a sense of the sacred or sanctity?

Laurence Binyon’s poem The Fallen, whose lines are solemnly repeated every Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph in London, expresses the concept of eternity offered by the political religion of nationalism forged by the hecatombs of the battle fields, even though they were written in 1914:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

And here is the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge’s blatant attempt to pervert Christianity into a rationalization of the death of Irish volunteers at Gallipoli—in lines that combine the topoi of both sacrifice and the eternity of the fallen in a celebration of nationalism:

Who said that such an emprise could be vain?
Were they not one with Christ Who strove and died?
Let Ireland weep but not for sorrow.
Weep that by her sons a land is sanctified
For Christ Arisen, and angels once again
Come back like exile birds to guard their sleep.

The banality of the nationalist ethos that dictated these lines and created the tombs is thrown into stark relief by Owen’s profoundly humanistic dramatization of the absurdity of the mutual slaughter of the trenches in Strange Meeting. Here the talk is not of eternity or sacrifice, but of how the war cut short lives (his one of over 9 million), some of which were destined to reveal the only true eternity and sanctity of life possible in a post-Nietzschean secularized world.

These, he suggests, are achieved by plunging to the depths of a shared humanity and emerging into the light with vitalistic acts of compassion beyond race or nation, acts that acquire a peculiar beauty which cannot be sculpted into stone.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

A few lines earlier Owen has presaged the age of yet more bloody conflict engendered by those who, discontent with the world left by the war, find their blood boiling for new utopias:

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek
from progress.

The tomb of the unknown warrior drew its cleansing water not from a restored humanism, but from the toxic wells of nationalism blended with Christianity, which within 20 years would be eclipsed by the ideological equivalents of cholera: Nazism and Japanese Imperialism.

Wittman’s book can help researchers in historical studies come to grips with the profound liminality of the inter-war period wherever modernity was striking home, and the terrible events ideologically fuelled by the need for new mythic certainties and dimly articulated collective hopes for redemption.

Roger Griffin

Roger Griffin is professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of over 100 publications—and is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on Fascism. Read more about him on Wikipedia.