1. The War that Didn’t End Flashcards
Jochen Böhler
“In East-Central Europe, the First World War did not end with the armistices of 1918.”
Jochen Böhler
In the wake of the Russian Revolution and imperial collapse, armed conflicts of various kinds, sizes, and political motivation dominated the years 1917 to 1922, when former citizens of the major European land empires fought for independence and statehood.
Jochen Böhler
With the imperial armies dissolving, a brutal but in some ways conventional war - occasional and sometimes even large-scale atrocities against civilians notwithstanding - gave way to an outburst of paramilitary violence against civilians.
Michał Römer
The war, finished in autumn, has not died away. Peace and a return to stability appear to be as remote, if not more distant, as in autumn when the war was formally approaching its end. Evicted from the trenches, front lines and from the official and regular struggle of militarised powers, it reached into human societies and transformed itself into a state of permanent chaos, a bellum omnium contra omnes.
What led to more violence in the east?
“the collapse of the Russian, Austrian, Ottoman and Prussian Empires, the repercussions of the Bolshevik revolution, and struggles for national independence blocked the road to peace in the years before and after the armistices of 1918-19.”
What sort of violence occurred in the east?
“In East-Central Europe, the First World War soon merged in a maelstrom of different armed conflicts - revolutionary wars, state building wars, interstate wars, civil wars, and other forms of violent clashes between soldiers, war veterans, warlords, armed bands of peasants and other agents of violence.”
Was the violence a surprise according to Bohler?
“nor did the violence accompanying them come like a jack in the box.”
What have historians named the lands in East Europe?
“Historians have named East-Central Europe - the large strip of land that stretches from the Baltic to the Balkans divided between the four European land empires - as ‘lands between’, ‘borderlands’, ‘frontier zones’, ‘shatter zones of empires’, ‘no place’ or ‘cauldron of conflict’, thus underlining the volatile character of these contact zones prone to cultural, political and ethnic dynamics.”
What was the tension in East Europe during the nineteenth century?
“the rising tensions between the autocratic rule of the imperial centres and the awakening of cultural, national, and ethnic self-conception at the periphery constantly charged the region like a giant accumulator. From time to time this led to a surge of voltages and flying sparks”
What was the effect of WW1 on prior tensions according to Bohler?
“When, during the course of the First World War the iron fist of the empires suddenly opened, as mass violence was still sweeping the region, the overheated accumulator exploded.”
What did tensions between ethnic groups in the east mean?
“Due to the ethnic mixture of the borderlands, the imperial soldiers everywhere faced alleged ‘internal enemies’ from the very outset of the war. Russian soldiers suspected German settlers and German-speaking Jews of spying for the Central Powers.”
What did the move from state violence to anarchic and paramilitary violence mean?
“Since in the areas of operations state control gave way to different forms of military or paramilitary control, the war and its ‘side effects’ introduced the arbitrary application of violence to a whole landscape, gradually afflicting inhabitants and occupiers alike with its devastating effects”
Where was the transition from military to paramilitary violence most fluent?
“The transition from military to paramilitary violence in the borderlands was fluent where armies that witnessed the decline of their governments did not dissolve entirely, but felt entitled to keep on fighting for different causes.”
What was a consequence of violence according to Bohler?
“As a consequence of the ubiquitous application of violence, the distinction between the civilian and military sphere almost completely disappeared.”
Where was the epicentre of violence?
“the epicentre of violence - in terms of the sheer number of different armed encounters - was the territory of the former Kingdom of Poland, a state forcibly partitioned at the end of the eighteenth century by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Now becoming the largest of the East-Central European successor states, the Polish Second Republic between 1918 and 1921 was engaged in no less than six armed conflicts with its neighbour states.”
What had Poland been doing before WW1?
“Before the outbreak of the First World War, Polish political parties had started to build up various paramilitary units mainly in the Austrian partition zone - altogether numbering approximately 30,000 men - that were intended to become the backbone of a future Polish state. They merged in the Polish Legions, a volunteer military organization under the charismatic authority of Józef Piłsudski”
Who led Polish paramilitary forces?
Józef Piłsudski
How was the Polish Second Republic forged according to Piotr Wrobel?
“the Polish Second Republic was . . . built by World War I veterans organized into paramilitary units. Forced to fight in the armies of the Great powers they developed skills and attitudes they could use in their struggle for Poland. The war had taught them how to use violence and intimidation”
How does Bohler describe the spread of ethnic groups as a result of war?
“the turmoil of the First World War scattered soldiers and paramilitaries with all kind of ethnic bonds and assignments all over East-Central Europe’s battlefields, fighting in different conflicts with ever-changing coalitions.”
As well as statehood, what else prompted violence?
“The decline of the empires and the success of the Bolshevik Revolution gave the cards a new shuffle. Since the latter threatened to swamp the rest of Europe, the postwar battles were not only fought for national independence within historically-claimed borders, but also for and against Bolshevism as a transnational phenomenon.”
How did violence become a goal in and of itself for paramilitaries?
“Since all these formations were cut off from any kind of regular supply and therefore heavily relied on looting, since, furthermore, no central state authority was able to control them, and since the authority of their leaders depended on their ability to maintain a ruthless reign of terror, violence against civilians became an aim in itself.” (Bohler)
Was violence always a result of a higher or noble purpose?
“In a landscape permeated with violence and marked by scarcity caused by the war years, the reasons for taking up arms in fact could be of a very mundane nature, such as ‘organizing’ food, clothes or shelter in order to survive, or just acting out of basic instincts.” (Bohler)
What was a common reason for joining paramilitaries?
“For many uprooted men in the borderlands, the mere struggle for survival was often reason enough to join or stay with armed groups that never had or soon lost any kind of political agenda: deserters from the frontlines, men trying to avoid conscription or death by starving filled their ranks, terrorizing and pillaging the war-torn countryside.”
Bohler
“In addition to the marauding gangs, nomadic deserters and displaced persons added to a general atmosphere of insecurity. Between the collapse of the empires and their replacement by nation states, the borderlands were the most dangerous tracts of land in Europe in which to live. New state structures evolving from the chaos created by war and revolution needed time to crystallize.”
Why did many soldiers not give up arms after 1918 according to Bohler?
“not only because they were used to violence and alienated in postwar civilian life, but also because with the Russian and Central Powers’ loss of territories and control post-1917, the hitherto rather fictive goals such as national independence had by now turned into realistic options. Violence after the First World War in Eastern Europe was used not to extend the war, but to end it in a fashion more favourable to the fighters engaged.”
Where did new forms of state control come from according to Bohler?
“After the decline of the empires, state control in the borderlands itself was born out of violence and built up by paramilitary organizations that turned into state institutions once the respective ideal of statehood was put into practice.”
What did the russian revolution do for violence in the east?
“But the successful consolidation of power by a determined revolutionary minority of Bolsheviks during the winter of 1917–18, in the midst of a massive military conflict that had already set in train its own dynamics of ethnic struggle, injected a powerful new energy into revolutionary violence.” (Robert Gerwarth and John Horne)
What happened in response to the russian revolution?
“In response, equally determined counterrevolutionary armies emerged whose overriding goal was the violent repression of revolution—and, more especially, of revolutionaries.” (Gerwarth and Horne)
How do Gerwarth and Horne describe the violence resulting from the russian revolution?
“Revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence ignited, spreading violence across the territories of European Russia (and, beyond, into the Caucasus and Central Asia) that dwarfed the specific but intense upsurges of revolutionary violence that had occurred in prewar Europe.”
What sort of person did the russian revolution produce?
“the modern Communist revolutionary, trained in political action and experienced in the necessity of violent action, who built a new state based on the party.” (Gerwarth and Horne)
Where did the violence of the russian rev come from?
“ut paramilitary violence did not legitimate the new regime. Rather, in line with Bolshevik understanding of Marxist theory and with Leninist practice, the party was the source of authority and organization in the new state, and it was the party (not the army) that provided the most important forms of extrajudicial violence, such as the Cheka (the notorious Bolshevik state security agency founded by Lenin) and the Terror. “ (Gerwarth and Horne)
“The Bolsheviks absorbed paramilitary violence in the growing dominance of the party” (Gerwarth and Horne)
How did the Russian rev affect Europe to the east?
“many Europeans after 1917 feared that Bolshevism would spread and “infect” the rest of Europe, prompting paramilitary mobilization against the perceived menace. This occurred not only where the threat was plausible—in the Baltic states and Ukraine, in Hungary, and in parts of Germany—but also in more peaceable victor states such as France and Britain.” (Gerwarth and Horne)
What did the breakdown on central authority lead to in the east?
“In parts of Central Europe and Eastern Europe, the politics of class in the context of military defeat and the disintegration of established political authority resulted in a counterrevolutionary mobilization in which paramilitary organizations such as the Freikorps, the White Guards, or the Heimwehren assumed a prominent role.” (gerwarth and Horne)
How do Gerwarth and Horne describe the right wing paramilitaries of the east?
“Action, not ideas, was the defining characteristic of these groups.”
How did the old and young mix in the right wing paramilitaries?
“In these paramilitary formations, ex-officers brutalized by the war and (in some areas) infuriated by defeat and revolution joined forces with members of a younger generation who compensated for their lack of combat experience by often surpassing the war veterans in terms of radicalism, activism, and brutality. For many of these young officer cadets and nationalist students, who had come of age in a bellicose atmosphere saturated with tales of heroic bloodshed but had missed out on firsthand experience of the “storms of steel,” the militias appear to have offered a welcome opportunity to live a romanticized warrior existence. “ (Gerwarth and Horne)
what did paramilitaries give to their members?
“In times of rapid socioeconomic change and a perceived existential threat at the hands of “international Bolshevism,” paramilitary organizations offered networks that protected their members from social isolation, and their perpetual activism provided outlets for their members to express their frustrations in a violent manner. “ (Gerwarth and Horne)
How did paramilitaries view violence?
“Paramilitary leaders claimed that violence could cleanse, purify, or regenerate the people and the national mentality. Despite their only vaguely defined political aims, they viewed themselves as the idealistic avant-garde who fought for the moral rejuvenation of the nation. It was mainly the violence itself that functioned as a performative act and created meaning for the activists.” (gerwarth and Horne)
give an example of where paramilitary violence and nationalism interacted?
“irredentist violence was possible, whether in “defense” of vulnerable members or in the interest of communal violence against the perceived anti-bodies so as to assert the new national community. Both dynamics were in evidence in the wars between Poland and the Ukraine and between Poland and Lithuania in 1918–19, when paramilitary forces sought to mark out and intimidate or expel the perceived enemy ethnicity in broad swaths of the contested frontier territories of eastern Poland.” (Gerwarth and Horne)
Where was there not paramilitary violence and was does it demonstrate?
“First, certain areas of Europe had remained virtually exempt from domestic paramilitary violence since the war ended. By and large, these were the territories of the victorious powers for whom the integrity of national frontiers, the authority of the state, and the power and prestige of the army had all been enhanced. Britain, France, Belgium, and even the newly established Czechoslovakia experienced little or no paramilitarism on their own soil. Since they had all been centrally involved in the war, they act as counterexamples that highlight what determined paramilitarism elsewhere.” (Gerwarth and Horne)
Why was there no paramilitary violence in places?
“The cohesion of the state, the prestige of victory, and the solidity of the forces of order left no space for a paramilitary countermobilization. Even where a potentially dissident population existed, as were the German settlers in Alsace-Lorraine, the strength of the French army and administration in the newly reacquired territory made paramilitary resistance out the question.” (Gerwarth and Horne)
How did churcill refer to paramilitary violence in the east after the war?
“quarrels of the pygmies”
What were the 4 factors that led to continuing violence that Gerwarth and Horne identify?
““quarrels of the pygmies”: the legacy of mass armed combat in the First World War; the Russian Revolution (and subsequent civil war) and the ideological counterrevolution that it generated internationally; the military collapse and dissolution of the multinational dynastic Ottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov empires, along with the often-violent attempts to create ethnically homogenous nation-states under the banner of “self-determination” (including many contested nation-states that obviously contained sizable ethnic minorities); and, finally, the experiences of defeat that accelerated violence in those countries that had been on the losing side in the war.
Do Gerwarth and Horne see a continuity of violence from before WW1?
“It is therefore possible (at the risk of some inevitable simplification) to trace a continuum of political violence in southern and Eastern Europe during the half century that followed the Eastern Crisis of the 1870s—violence that prefigured many of the forms of violence that emerged subsequently in Central Europe.”
Where did the legacies of violence come from before the great war according to Gerarth and Horne?
“the period 1917–23 was marked by the articulation of competing ideologies that by 1923 had taken shape in new states and in the system of European international relations. Here, too, the origins lay much further back, as far back as the 1870s, a decade of rapid cultural, socioeconomic, and political change. The transitions to new forms of mass politics that occurred in much of Europe with the franchise reforms of the 1870s and the emergence of mass movements around democratization, socialism, and nationalism marked a durable change in the terms of European politics and intellectual debate. Revolutionary socialism and syndicalism challenged a parliamentary democracy that was far from established as the predominant state form. New variants of nationalism (sometimes democratic in flavor, sometimes overtly hostile to liberal democracy) triggered internal crises in the Ottoman, Romanov, and Habsburg empires, whose governments in turn sought to assert their authority through violent demonstrations of strength at home and abroad.”
What did the great war do to empires?
“As the Great War destroyed the dynastic empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey and created a “bleeding frontier” in Germany’s east, it left “shatter-zones,” large tracts of territory where the disappearance of frontiers created spaces without order or clear state authority. “ (Gerwarth and Horne)
How did the central powers experience the end of the war?
“Defeat was infinitely more real for those who lived in the ethnically diverse border regions of the Central powers than it was for those in Berlin, Budapest, or Vienna, and it is no coincidence that young men from these disputed border regions were highly overrepresented in the paramilitary organizations of the postwar years.”
Why is brutalization not sufficient?
“One is the presumed “brutalization” of postwar societies. But the war experience itself (which was not dissimilar for German, Hungarian, British, or French soldiers) does not sufficiently explain why politics was “brutalized” after 1918 in some of the former combatant states but not in others.”
What is paramilitarism?
“Paramilitarism was a prominent feature in all of these conflicts, and this essay seeks to explore the origins, manifestations, and legacies of this form of political violence as it emerged between 1917 and 1923. By “paramilitary violence,” we mean military or quasi-military organizations and practices that either expanded or replaced the activities of conventional military formations.” (Gerwarth and Horne)
How do Gerwarth and Horne describe the end of the great war?
“Indeed, if anything, the cessation of hostilities on the western front on November 11, 1918, was the exception rather than the rule. The war had finished a year earlier on the eastern front, as the Bolsheviks extricated Russia from the conflict. Yet despite this, violence continued there and spread to the Central powers as they were defeated in the fall of 1918. Ethnic strife, pogroms, revolutions, counterrevolutions, wars of independence, civil conflict, invasions, and interstate wars went on until 1923.”
How does Benjamin Ziemann
describe the impact of violence in ww1 on Weimar society?
“The social mobilization for the First World War had profound and lasting effects on further developments, both structurally and culturally. The «damning inheritance of the lost war» was responsible for many forms of political and social action which led to the crisis of the Weimar Republic. This recognition is especially important in regard to the wave of political violence after 1918, for it seems plausible that there is a causal relationship from the massive experience of violence in wartime to the political violence of the 1920s.”
How does Ziemann describe britalization?
” Historians here follow a line of argumentation which Sigmund Freud developed in 1915 in order to explain human destructiveness in wartime. According to this thesis, the war set free an inborn aggressiveness, a sort of death and destruction wish, which supplied the soldiers with motivation, and which created the basis for the engagement of the soldiers in the civil war and the political violence after 1918. “
What sort of person did brutalization make?
” According to this line of thought the personality that was shaped through the front experience was predisposed toward authoritarian politics and toward associations of male camaraderie, which were characteristic of the nationalist veterans’ organizations of the 1920s.” (Ziemann)
Why is Ziemann not convinced by brutalization?
“They based their interpretation on a selection of autobiographical published materials drawn from soldiers of a bourgeois and academic background. The letters of the student volunteers from 1914 were very influential; they were often quoted. In these letters the soldiers stylized their own trench experiences into a radical break with the cultural tropes of interpretation and the biographical certainties before 1914. The brutalization thesis, therefore, is based on a not very representative sample, a sample, which, however, through its force and its constant repetition has found a wide circulation in the historical literature.”
What helped to undermine violence in Weimar?
“They based their interpretation on a selection of autobiographical published materials drawn from soldiers of a bourgeois and academic background. The letters of the student volunteers from 1914 were very influential; they were often quoted. In these letters the soldiers stylized their own trench experiences into a radical break with the cultural tropes of interpretation and the biographical certainties before 1914. The brutalization thesis, therefore, is based on a not very representative sample, a sample, which, however, through its force and its constant repetition has found a wide circulation in the historical literature.” (Ziemann)
How did peasants avoid brutalization?
“Among Bavarian peasants the front experience, the experience of war’s destructive power, did not lead to a brutalization nor was it a deep caesurae in an individual’s personal history. The psychological strain, which enacting and suffering physical violence brought with it, was taken care of through recourse to old, traditional patterns of interpretation, patterns which offered stability, such as Catholic piety, the farming family and agrarian subsistence (in a time of a grave nutrition crisis).” (Ziemann)
What were the people of the paramilitaries doing during the war?
“Toward the end of the Weimar Republic the members of the SA and the Rote Frontkämpferbund were mostly too young to have actually fought at the front; rather, they had experienced the war as young students.” (Ziemann)
How does Ziemann describe Weimar?
“The Weimar Republic was a society characterized by violence.” (Ziemann)
How did the Weimar state respond to fascist violence?
“The bourgeois nationalist public sphere of the Weimar Republic was increasingly able to accept the illegal violence of the fascist SA, or at least to tolerate it, because they perceived the Communist victims as being in opposition to the highest political value of the day, the Volksgemeinschaft.” (Ziemann)
Eagleton on defining fascism
“There are no limits to which monopoly capitalism will not go to ensure its continuing hegemony”
How does Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
describe the effects of the eastern front on those who fought there?
“What they saw among largely unfamiliar lands and peoples, both at the front and in the vast occupied areas behind the lines, left durable impressions. These crucial first impressions in turn had profound consequences for how Germans viewed the lands and peoples of the East during the war itself and in the decades to come, until ultimately these ideas were harnessed and radicalized by the Nazis for their new order in Europe. In this sense, the eastern front-experience was a hidden legacy of the Great War.”
What did the eastern front provide?
“Rather, the eastern front-experience of the First World War was an indispensable cultural and psychological background for what came later in the violent twentieth century, a preexisting mentality.” (Liulevicius)
What had the western front provided Germany?
“one important myth of the Great War, hammered a ‘‘new man’’ into being, a human war machine, the hardened ‘‘front fighter.’’ After the war, the works of former shock-troop commander Ernst Junger and the tidal wave of ‘‘soldierly literature’’ cresting in the late 1920s presented a new and brutal model of heroism in the person of the storm trooper, and a military model of society in the Frontgemeinschaft, the ‘‘community of the trenches,’’ which had supposedly overcome the weaknesses of liberal individualism and class division in a true egalitarian moment.” (Liulevicius)
How did the West differ from the East?
“As the mythical figure in the West gained in definition, growing clearer in outline, in the East limits were lost.”
“Armies in the East found themselves lost, far beyond their homeland’s borders, in huge occupied territories of which most knew little.” (Liulevicius)
What were the two main difference between the west and east?
“Above all, the stay in the East was marked by the central fact of German occupation. Unlike in industrial Belgium and northern France, the occupiers seemed to face not modern developed lands, but what appeared as the East’s primitive chaos. The second decisive difference came into focus as the war neared its end, a basic and essential point, though often forgotten. After the peace of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, imposed on beleaguered Russia, it appeared to Germans that half of the war had been won. This central fact, that war in the East apparently had ended in German victory, made it all the more difficult to accept the failure that followed upon Germany’s weakening in the West that same summer and the collapse into revolution at home. “ (Liulevicius)
How did churchil refer to the eastern front during the war?
“the Eastern Front has remained to a great extent the ‘‘Unknown War,’’ as Winston Churchill called it nearly seventy years ago in his book of the same name.” (Liulevicius)
Why have the west and east been treated differently by historians?
“The German eastern front-experience was so disorienting, conclusions drawn from it so unsettling, that it was not mythologized in the same ready way as the world of the western trenches in the decades after the war.” (Liulevicius)
Was the lands to the east what German soldiers had expected it to be?
“Mental pictures of a unitary and monolithic Russian empire, which most Germans held before the invasion, broke down before the varied and chaotic scene they now faced, a patchwork of distinct ‘‘lands and peoples.’’ The occupiers confronted a strange landscape and foreign populations, with unfamiliar traditions, cultural identities, and histories. “ (liulevicius)
What was the first impression of the east for soldiers?
“Seeing the East for the first time during war, in a whirlwind of human misery, dirt, disorder, disease, and confusion, produced visceral reactions in soldiers. These horrible sights seemed to be ordinary, abiding, and permanent attributes of the East they now surveyed, not just examples of universal human sufferings under the lash of war.” (Liulevicius)
What did the east offer to those german soldiers who went there?
“Yet the very destruction and disarray held out an alluring possibility to officials. The army could bring order to these lands, making them over in its own image, to realize a military utopia and establish a new German identity charged with a mission of bringing Kultur to the East.” (Lui)
What did germans seek to build in the east?
“The result was the attempt to build a monolithic military state beyond Germany’s borders, named ‘‘Ober Ost’’ “ (Liule)
What was Ober Ost?
“Ober Ost was to be the embodiment of the army as a creative institution. This military utopia’s ambitions went far beyond traditional conservatism or monarchism, instead showcasing a modern kind of rule, bureaucratic, technocratic, rationalized, and ideological. Under the slogan of ‘‘German Work,’’ which claimed for Germans a unique capacity for a kind of disciplined and creative work that organized, molded, and directed, it would reshape the lands and peoples, making them over to pave the way for permanent possession.” (Liule)
What did Ober Ost policies do to people in the east?
“Ober Ost’s administration sought to form and manipulate the identities of different native populations, shaping them through the German Work of arbitration and cultural mentoring in special institutions designed for this purpose. In essence, the military state tried to dictate a culture for Ober Ost, where crude and untutored primitive peoples would be cultivated and ordered by German genius for organization.” (Liule)
How did the east come to be seen?
” Increasingly, the area was seen not as a complicated weaving of ‘‘lands and peoples’’ (Land und Leute), but as ‘‘spaces and races’’ (Raum und Volk) to be ordered by German mastery and organization. For many, a new German identity and mission directed against the East grew out of the eastern front-experience.” (Liule)
How was the east viewed after 1918?
“Collapse in November 1918, coming just after the euphoria of what seemed final victory in the East, was beyond comprehension for soldiers of Ober Ost and many Germans at home. Shame, fear, and disappointment created a furious rejection of the East and its dirty, chaotic ‘‘spaces and races.’’ “ (Liule)
How did Ober Ost influence the Nazis?
“The experiences of the Eastern Front and Ober Ost were reworked in postwar Germany, forming an important backdrop to Nazi plans for realizing a racial utopia in the East. Categories of practice and perception which marked Ober Ost’s rule were radicalized, forming an integral part of the Nazi ideology of biological war for ‘‘living space.’’ Thus, the earlier military utopia’s failure had enormous consequences, as the Nazi regime moved to cleanse and order the spaces of the East, emptied of those populations which Ober Ost’s administration once tried to manipulate and form.” (Liule)
How did war change in the twentieth century?
“While the cabinet wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries restricted violence to the direct participants on the battlefield, the scorched-earth policies of twentieth-century total war once more universalized the threat.” (Wolfgang Schivelbusch)
What did defeat mean?
” With war imagined as a battle of life and death, not only between armies but between entire populations, defeat became tantamount to the nation’s death agony.” (Wolfgang Schivelbusch)
What is the first part of the response to defeat?
“Every society experiences defeat in its own way. But the varieties of response within vanquished nations—whether psychological, cultural, or political—conform to a recognizable set of patterns or archetypes that recur across time and national boundaries. A state of unreality—or dreamland—is invariably the first of these.” (Schivel)
How does Schivelbusch describe the first part of the culture of defeat - the dreamland?
“It is all the more surprising, then, how briefly the losing nation’s depression tends to last before turning into a unique type of euphoria. The source of this transformation is usually an internal revolution following military collapse. The overthrow of the old regime and its subsequent scapegoating for the nation’s defeat are experienced as a kind of victory. The more popular the revolt and the more charismatic the new leadership, the greater the triumph will seem. For a moment, the external enemy is no longer an adversary but something of an ally, with whose help the previous regime and now deposed system has been driven from power.”
What is the dreamland experienced as?
“In the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War I, Ernst Troeltsch coined the term dreamland for this phenomenon, in which all blame is transferred to the deposed tyrant and the losing nation feels cathartically cleansed, freed of any responsibility or guilt. In the wishful thinking of the dreamland state, nothing stands in the way of a return to the prewar status quo.” (Schivel)
How was the victory meant to treat germany according to germans?
“In all these conceptions, the nation was represented as the mother who, having been duped, deceived, even defiled by the father-tyrant, was now, with the help of her sons, about to regain her freedom, innocence, and sovereignty. In turn, the former adversary was expected to honor this act of self-purification, since to revenge himself upon and punish a nation that was deceived by its leaders would be to commit an injustice on a par with that of the leaders themselves.” (Schivel)
