1. The War that Didn’t End Flashcards

Question

Why did many soldiers not give up arms after 1918 according to Bohler?

Answer 1

"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."

Answer 2

"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."

Answer 3

"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)

Answer 4

"In response, equally determined counterrevolutionary armies emerged whose overriding goal was the violent repression of revolution—and, more especially, of revolutionaries." (Gerwarth and Horne)

Answer 5

"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."

Answer 6

"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)

Answer 7

"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)

Answer 8

"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)

Answer 9

"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)

Answer 10

"Action, not ideas, was the defining characteristic of these groups."

Answer 11

"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)

Answer 12

"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)

Answer 13

"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)

Answer 14

"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)

Answer 15

"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)

Answer 16

"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)

Answer 17

“quarrels of the pygmies”

Answer 18

"“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.

Answer 19

"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."

Answer 20

"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."

Answer 21

"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)

Answer 22

"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."

Answer 23

"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."

Answer 24

"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)

Answer 25

"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."

Answer 26

"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."

Answer 27

" 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. "

Answer 28

" 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)

Answer 29

"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."

Answer 30

"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)

Answer 31

"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)

Answer 32

"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)

Answer 33

"The Weimar Republic was a society characterized by violence." (Ziemann)

Answer 34

"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)

Answer 35

"There are no limits to which monopoly capitalism will not go to ensure its continuing hegemony"

Answer 36

"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."

Answer 37

"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)

Answer 38

"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)

Answer 39

"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)

Answer 40

"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)

Answer 41

"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)

Answer 42

"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)

Answer 43

"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)

Answer 44

"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)

Answer 45

"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)

Answer 46

"The result was the attempt to build a monolithic military state beyond Germany’s borders, named ‘‘Ober Ost’’ " (Liule)

Answer 47

"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)

Answer 48

"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)

Answer 49

" 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)

Answer 50

"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)

Answer 51

"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)

Answer 52

"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)

Answer 53

" 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)

Answer 54

"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)

Answer 55

"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."

Answer 56

"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)

Answer 57

"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)

Answer 58

"“The victor has freed us from despotism, for which we are very grateful, but now it’s time for him to go.” Such is the prevailing sentiment within the dreamland state. Should the victorious nation turn out not to be content with this role—if it holds its defeated enemy liable for wartime damage and calls him to account, instead of treating him as an innocent victim—the mood shifts dramatically." (Schivel)

Answer 59

"The German myths of 1918 portraying Woodrow Wilson as the honest broker in whose hands Germany entrusted its future are the most striking example of this phenomenon, and there are corollaries in France and the American South after their defeats."

Answer 60

"As long as losing nations have an intact national identity at their command, they will stubbornly refuse to comply with the victor’s demands for moral and spiritual surrender through demonstrations of regret, conversion, and willingness to be reeducated. The situation is different when, together with the physical properties of a nation, its spiritual and moral backbone has been broken. The losers in 1865, 1871, and even 1918 had not yet reached this nadir. " (Schivel)

Answer 61

"After the initial shock has passed and defeat is seen no longer as a national catastrophe but as a kind of liberation and salvation, its forward-looking, almost missionary aspect comes to the fore. In the dreamland state, the loser describes the world from which defeat has freed him much like a convert recalling his former life of sin." (Schivel)

Answer 62

"In Germany, the collapse of the Wilhelminian empire was similarly greeted as an opportunity for national renewal." (SChivel)

Answer 63

"The conception of war as a purifying and renewing force is the most important legacy granted to the defeated. Although the dreamland euphoria may not last any longer than the feelings of elation at war’s outbreak, it does not vanish altogether. Instead, it becomes part of the ongoing, long-term interpretation of events." (schivel)

Answer 64

"defeat is understood as a national crisis of infirmity and decadence from which the nation, having purged itself, emerges healthier and stronger than before " (Schivel)

Answer 65

"Post-1918 Germany, having denounced its Wilhelminian mistake, offered its threefold services as a bulwark against the flood of Russian Bolshevism, a bastion against American commercialism, and a champion for the colonial world—in short, as the guide to a “third path” between capitalism and communism. "

Answer 66

"The Russian case, meanwhile, offers a more clear-cut example of the brutalization of a society by the Great War than either the German or Italian cases."

Answer 67

"1917-21 was defined by internal polarization, universalized violence, criminality, and not least, by hunger and cold. In the Soviet 'master narrative', as it established itself in the 1930s, the catastrophes of the Civil War were stylized into a 'heroic period' for the communists."

Answer 68

"Violence did not originate at the frontline, but had a much longer genealogy: the institutional weakness of the Tsarist state had allowed cultures of violence to exist before 1914." (Beyrau)

Answer 69

"But it took the complete breakdown of state authority to set these free and allow the evolution of biotopes of violence, quickly feeding upon each other. The First World War, then, made its contribution to the brutalization of politics in the former Russian empire insofar as it caused the breakdown of the state; and it is this very breakdown which marks the essential difference between the institutionalized violence of the First World War and the de-institutionalized spaces of the civil war. In these spaces, something new emerged, which can indeed be described well as a 'brutalization' of politics in Mosse's sense" (beyrau)

Answer 70

"the Bolsheviks opposed the anarchist violence, which had emerged in the wake of the breakdown of state and society during war and revolution, with an institutionalized violence organized in the military and the police, and legitimated by the project of socialism and the connected claim to total power" (Beyrau)

Answer 71

"The Bolsheviks, by contrast, used force and the threat thereof to transform society and build a new state. While this strategic use of force helped them to win the civil war, it also ensured that violence was institutionalized in the new state" (Beyrau)

Answer 72

"The Great War overwhelmed the organizational capacities of the Tsarist Empire, revealing its structural weaknesses and initiated an unparalleled breakdown of civilization, a brutalization and, at the same time, a 'barbarization' of both domestic conflicts and external warfare." (Beyrau)

Answer 73

"The weakness of the state and its inability to integrate the heterogeneous segments of its population made violence part of everyday politics by the turn of the century. The escalation of force reached its highpoint in the revolution of 1905-6. " (Beyrau)

Answer 74

"Again, the world war was crucial in this transformation. Before 1914, popular violence had been defensive, manifesting itself usually in unrests or upheavals against the state authority, including the destruction of estate property. Only the collapse of state institutions allowed the development of lawless spaces."

Answer 75

"The majority of the 270,000 officers serving in the old army by October 1917 had been trained during the war. Pre-war cadres were the majority only among the staff officers. By early 1921, the RA had 217,000 commanders (as officers were now called) in their ranks, 34 per cent of whom had held leadership positions in the old army. Meanwhile, about 100,000 officers of the old army fought with White forces, probably a large share of the old cadre officers trained before 1914 among them." (Beyrau)

Answer 76

"Communists serving in the ranks should not simply be soldiers, decreed Trotsky, but were to supply the example of the 'soldier-hero' " (Beyrau)

Answer 77

"Moreover, violence and administrative coercion were also used to actively transform society and re-educate the population. This combination led to a very specific accumulation of acts of violence: more or less organized violence against military opponents, violence against rebelling social groups, against the hard to contain criminal violence caused by the struggle for always scarce resources and as a result of the loss of state control. These factors were responsible for the brutalization of Bolshevik war-making and the reason for all kinds of acts of coercion against the population." (Beyrau)

Answer 78

"the Bolsheviks both represented and transformed an endemic culture of violence, which by the end of the Civil War had become the norm. The evolving 'spaces of violence' were the biotope of Soviet state formation. Threatening and using violence in pursuit of their goals had become second nature to Party leaders and Party cadres. " (Beyrau)

Answer 79

"Given its extent and consistent presence since autumn of 1917, we can list many instances of 'meaningless violence'. According to the Bolshevik charge against ministers of Kolchak in May 1920, the general's troops were particularly brutal during the retreat. Prisoners were shot in prisons, victims were tortured, strung up, or buried alive. In the Yekaterinburg region alone 'the Kolchak regime shot at least 25,000 people. 8000 people were shot or buried alive in the mines of Kizelov"

Answer 80

"During grain requisitioning in one village forty people were massacred, eyes gouged out, faces cut up, genitals chopped off, and people thrown into icy water. A priest was literally hacked to pieces." (Beyrau)

Answer 81

"Symbolic violence supplemented physical force: public shaming was part of this Bolshevik repertoire as were coerced public denunciations of 'enemies of the regime'. Similar methods were used against striking factory populations: the presumed ringleaders were arrested or shot, and the rest of the workers had to openly denounce them and swear allegiance to the regime." (beyrau)

Answer 82

"While not subscribing to similar world historical strategies, the White armies were as violent as their Red counterpart. Their behaviour confirmed to peasants and workers that they represented the old masters. Miners were thrown into mine shafts or locked up below ground. Sometimes their families were murdered." (Beyrau)

Answer 83

"In their fight against requisitions and repressive measures, peasant insurrectionists often used very expressive forms of violence. Members of grain requisitioning squads, for example, were disembowelled and their stomachs filled with grain or straw. Commissars or Party members had stars, hammer and sickle, or '100 %' (of the norm) cut or burned into their bodies. Older forms of execution were revived: quartering, stretching or cutting off of limbs and heads, drowning under the ice of frozen streams or lakes." (Beyrau)

Answer 84

"The crumbling of state authority and collapse of civilization which was triggered by the institutional over-reach of the First World War led to the proliferation of the uncontrolled violence of the subsequent civil war. As we have illustrated above, all participants in the civil war were extremely violent. The Bolsheviks were just the most successful of the violent actors in this struggle. " (Beyrau)

Answer 85

"The origin of the carnage, then, lies neither simply in Bolshevik ideology nor solely in long-term traditions. Rather, it was the interaction of these traditions of violent behaviour with the breakdown of civilization, caused, ultimately, by the war, in which the origins of civil war violence can be located."

Answer 86

"At the same time, however, the violent origins of the Soviet state had an afterlife which can indeed be described in terms of Mosse's 'brutalization thesis': Once the Bolsheviks had won through the use of force, violence remained a constitutive part of their project for the further transformation of society."

Answer 87

"Violence on the battlefields, violence against civilians, the violence of weapons and of words: the first global conflict marks a major rupture in the history of modern warfare, precisely because it abolished any distinction between combatants and non-combatants. "

Answer 88

"It consisted not only of violent acts, but also of violent images and words."

Answer 89

"From its very beginnings, the First World War was perceived as different from previous conflicts. In the spring of 1915, French soldiers used the expression ‘Grande Guerre’ for the first time in their correspondence; it reveals how the conflict pushed violence to its paroxysm and human endurance to its limits." (Cabanes)

Answer 90

"The war of movement that lasted four months on the Western Front (August to November 1914) and almost a year on the Eastern Front was particularly deadly: 300,000 French soldiers were killed in 1914, which is to say an average of 60,000 dead each month and more than 2,000 each day." (Cabanes)

Answer 91

"From the start, civilians were also targeted, in Belgium, in northern France, on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans. There were massacres, deportations and sexual violence; houses, hospitals and historical monuments were destroyed and cemeteries were desecrated. Only four days after the invasion of Belgium, 850 Belgian men, women and children had already been executed" (Cabanes)

Answer 92

"Civilians were far from spared in 1915, a pivotal year which saw Europe descend into total war. On the Western Front, the atrocities of the invasion period opened onto new kinds of violence against civilians, as Germany began its occupation of Belgium and northern France: forced labour; pillaging of natural resources; famine; deportations to German labour camps." (Cabanes)

Answer 93

"Starting in May 1915, the Russian authorities’ scorched-earth policy also forced the displacement of some 134,000 German and Austro-Hungarian nationals, as well as of a million Jews who lived in the Russian Empire and were suspected of being internal enemies. These massive population shifts, which accompanied the ‘great retreat’ of the Russian army in the spring of 1915, entailed heavy casualties from exhaustion, hunger and epidemics." (Cabanes)

Answer 94

"It was not only the intensity but the very nature of the violence of war that changed in 1915. By the end of the year, the majority of the Armenians in the empire would have been killed, in the first genocide of the twentieth century. " (Cabanes)

Answer 95

"But it was chiefly chemical weapons that made a spectacular breakthrough: after a first deployment on the Eastern Front at the end of January 1915, which failed because of the wind and the cold, asphyxiating gases were used on the Western Front, in the Ypres sector, on 22 April 1915. Poison gas immediately became a symbol of the atrocity of industrial warfare." (Cabanes)

Answer 96

"Industrial warfare reached its apogee in the following year, 1916, with the titanic confrontations of Verdun and of the Somme. The combatants’ experience of war was utterly transformed. For the first time in the history of warfare, firepower did not merely mean inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy; it meant that combatants who were hit by a shell could simply vanish. Without bodily remains, no burial was possible." (Cabanes)

Answer 97

"A new kind of battle was born, whose violence stemmed not only from the kinds of weapons being used, but also from the feeling of powerlessness experienced by soldiers. "

Answer 98

"War violence did not only take place on battlefields or in abuses against civilians. The First World War was also waged in images and words: it was a cultural war. At the time of mobilisation, each of the belligerent nations already had at its disposal a repertoire of collective representations that could kindle xenophobia and nationalism. The enemy of the summer of 1914 was often already the enemy of yesteryear. For the French, for example, the German – soon to be called the Boche – was the Prussian, the erstwhile enemy of the war of 1870–1." (Cabanes)

Answer 99

"For example, the stories of ‘German atrocities’ spread by the 200,000 Belgian and 150,000 French refugees often included terrifying descriptions of children whose arms or hands the Germans had purportedly deliberately cut off. This new version of the myth of the ogre, devourer of children, provoked a real panic in the north of France." (Cabanes)

Answer 100

"When the United States officially entered the war against the Central Powers in the spring of 1917, for example, mobilisation posters still referred to the ‘violation’ of Belgium –in the sense both of the violation of its neutrality and of sexual violence during the invasion. ‘Remember Belgium’, warned an American poster in September 1918; it depicted a German soldier with his spiked helmet dragging a little girl by the hand. In other posters, the enemy was portrayed as a gorilla assaulting a woman." (Cabanes)

Answer 101

"Soon the enemy was said to have a foul smell, a bloodthirsty temperament, and animalistic behaviour – to be an animal. In a classic process studied notably by the philosopher René Girard, the animalisation of the enemy allows him to be stigmatised as totally Other – and therefore to be fought without restraint. ‘They [the Germans] don’t deserve to be treated like human beings’, declared a French soldier from the Fourth Army in a letter to his parents on the eve of the Armistice." (Cabanes)

Answer 102

"After the slaughter of Verdun and the Somme, the representation of war violence changed forever. ‘Combat hammered and forged us to make us what we are’, Ernst Junger would state six years later in ‘Battle as Inner Experience’ (1922). ‘This war will always be the axis around which the carousel of our existence turns, as long as we are alive.’ " (Cabanes)

Answer 103

"There were battles between regular armies. For example, the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22) ended, for the first time in Western history, with the mandatory transfer of 1.5 million individuals on the basis of ethnic homogeneity" (Cabanes)

Answer 104

"In Germany, the months that followed the Armistice of November 1918 were marked first by the Spartacist uprising, by the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and of Karl Liebknecht, and then by the repression of revolutionary movements by paramilitary groups of the far right. ‘We were told that the war was over. That made us laugh. We are the war’, a member of the Freikorps (German paramilitary volunteer units) declared." (Cabanes)

Answer 105

"He pointed to veterans’ heightened indifference to violence as a result of the traumatic experience of the Front and of the pursuit, in peace, of the aggressive attitudes of war."

Answer 106

"For Dirk Schumann, the relative stability of France and of the United Kingdom is due to their displacement of postwar violence towards their colonies, whereas Germany, having lost its colonial empire, was forced to shift lingering war violence onto the political field – against its own citizens." (Cbanes)

Answer 107

"Defeat is neither only the result of the power balance between two nations, nor simply a fact sanctioned by diplomats, but very much a state of mind. In Germany, for example, the feeling of defeat encompassed various realities: the occupation of the Rhineland, the political instability of the Weimar Republic, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, the loss of border regions in central Europe – from which, not coincidentally, most of the members of the Freikorps emerged in the aftermath of the war."

Answer 108

"The Russian philosopher Pyotr Struve, who went from Bolshevism to the counter-revolutionary movement, concluded that ‘everything we are living through is only the continuation and mutation of the world war’. " (Cabanes)

Answer 109

"the lack of distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the fear of the internal enemy, the industrialisation of death on the battlefield, the degrading and murderous treatment of prisoners of war, the extermination and deportation of an entire people on the basis of ethnicity are collective practices of violence that were inherited from the Great War and that reached their climax in later conflicts." (Cabanes)

Answer 110

"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, frontlines 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. Formally, the regular war has stopped, but the catastrophe, of which the war was only the first act, goes on and is far from over. Who knows if it is only in its initial stage? "

Answer 111

"The search for a German identity in the East launched by Ober Ost did not end with the military state’s collapse in November 1918, but was revived in the form of a wild adventure by bands of German freebooters, the Freikorps." (Liule)

Answer 112

"As the fronts around Germany buckled and civil unrest gripped the unstable new Republic’s cities, individual soldiers looked to action, any action, to redeem this inner crisis. They organized themselves into hundreds of ‘‘Free Corps’’ units, each owing allegiance only to its commander." (Liule)

Answer 113

"In marching to the ‘‘Baltikum,’’ as Germans called the lands along the Baltic, these adventurers also left reality behind. Naming themselves ‘‘Baltikumer,’’ they launched a brutal adventure and search for an identity in Ober Ost’s former areas." (Liule)

Answer 114

"The Freikorps adventure in the Baltikum recapitulated Ober Ost’s trajectory, but now in more extreme and spontaneous form. While freebooters arrived hoping to find an identity here, they were thrown into confusion and madness instead, as the mission in the East turned into a rampage, which changed the Baltikumer. They returned to Germany brutalized, scarred by a failure they could not accept or explain, and filled with intense hate for the East which had transformed them." (Liule)

Answer 115

"The confused vacuum of power left behind by Ober Ost created opportunities for many competing political projects at this European crossroads. With Germany’s defeat, native peoples were freed from control and hurried to establish republics. Polish activists sought to win the area for a larger Poland, resurrected in the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’s borders." (Liule)

Answer 116

"Equally, brutal treatment of natives by Freikorps in captured towns precipitated resistance. In Mitau, Freikorps reportedly shot 500 Latvians suspected of Bolshevik sympathies without a trial, 200 in Tukkum, and 125 in Dunamunde. When Riga was taken, it was reported 3,000 died in the terror that followed." (Liule)

Answer 117

" The central, burning issue was a new direction for German identity, broken by defeat. As the Great War ended, lost on the Western Front (though seemingly won in the East), the first thought of many men who were to become Freikorps fighters was that ties which had held Germany to the West were now broken and Germans had to turn elsewhere in search for their destiny. It was then that ‘‘there awoke a vague hope in the East’’ for Freikorps fighters. " (Cabanes)

Answer 118

"The Baltikum was beautiful and dangerous, ‘‘a landscape of gentle and treacherous loveliness,’’ forming the backdrop for violent fun and games, the ‘‘carefree activity’’ of a bloody Baltikum adventure. "

Answer 119

"Just as in Ober Ost, the landscape prompted historical ‘‘memories’’ from the German past. While growing up, future Freikorps fighters took in popular understandings of German history, even if only in caricatured form. Now, scenes from that past seemed to be resurrected, pictures and voices filtered through into the fragmented present, and Freikorps men eagerly seized these evocations. To discover that they were playing historical roles from their nation’s past gave meaning to their adventuring." (Liule)

Answer 120

"Even the name Freikorps demonstrated history’s role in the identity they were patching together. Their chroniclers pointed out that ‘‘this name came to them of itself. It flew to them out of the past.’’ The original Freikorps were famous volunteer units fighting against Napoleon. Beginning with their name, the Freikorps depicted their often sordid experiences with a romanticizing historical sense." (Liule)

Answer 121

"When old forms of Imperial German society were broken, such historical role-playing by Freikorps men was part of their attempt to grasp an identity." (Liule)

Answer 122

"Outlawed by Weimar for the international embarrassment they were causing, the adventurers still felt themselves to be Germans, and yet were no longer Germans like those at home. One reported, ‘‘soldiers in the Baltikum sang a marching song, whose first verse began, ‘We are the last Germans, who stayed opposite the enemy.’ Now we felt ourselves to be the last Germans, period.’’" (Liule)

Answer 123

"Germany became ‘‘a land without reality’’ to them. Freikorps men saw themselves as a ‘‘people without a homeland on campaign.’’ Germany had to be replaced, somehow. Some suggested that it was really here with the fighters, in their midst, while others began to equate the nation with its borderlands, affirming, ‘‘Germany was at the frontier.’’ " (liule)

Answer 124

"War here was of incredible ferocity and frightening intensity, as the terrible things they did and saw brutalized Freikorps fighters. This colonial war was a pivotal experience for freebooters who went on to join the Nazis, notably Rudolf Hoss, later commandant of Auschwitz. In his trial after the Second World War, Hoss recounted decades later the jarring transformation he underwent in the East, searing his nature: The fighting in the Baltikum was of a wildness and grimness, which I had experienced neither before in the World War nor afterwards in all the Freikorps fighting. " (liule)

Answer 125

"In these lands without borders, Freikorps men lost limits inside. With interior barriers broken, they raged in landscapes of destruction, aimless and desperate. " (liule)

Answer 126

"On December 13, 1919, the last Freikorps units in Lithuania were thrown back on to Prussian territory, their year-long rampage brought to an end." (liule)

Answer 127

"In his identity and memory, the Baltikum Freikorps man took some of that world and landscape back with him. In real terms the adventure was a failure, but Baltikumer hoped that their new spirit might become a meaningful force back home. This was precisely what Germany’s government feared, and in mid March the formations were demobilized. Freikorps leaders tried to keep their men from drifting apart, organizing Lager camps for agricultural work and settlement. The Freikorps cast about for political direction, eventually forming a small but important part of the support for the Nazis, whose program reflected their aims of expansion and war in the East." (liule)

Answer 128

"The Freikorps saw the East as a place with no limits, where the only order was violence. While they had hoped that the adventure would produce a stable identity, honor, and settlement for German soldiers, it pitched them into unreality and madness. The rampage brutalized Baltikumer, leaving them with a greater hatred for what they saw as a monolithic, threatening East, which had first changed and then defeated them."

Answer 129

"The experience of the Eastern Front in the First World War and the ambitions expressed in Ober Ost left a fateful legacy for German views of the East after the war. In the Weimar Republic, certain conclusions were drawn from the experience and given durable form in political agitation and propaganda, and after the Nazis seized power in 1933, they put a radicalized myth of the East into violent action as an integral part of their ideology and foreign policy aims." (liule)

Answer 130

"Thus, while the western front-experience found meaning in the creation of a new man of steel, any redemptive value of the eastern front-experience was lost in the confusion of distant lands, historical memories, unfulfilled visions of settlement and Kultur." (liule)

Answer 131

"After depicting the effort armies invested in chaotic lands and ungrateful peoples, Ludendorff proclaimed, in what seemed his definitive verdict on ‘‘German Work’’ in the East, ‘‘The work has not been in vain. It had at least been useful to the homeland, army, and the land itself during the war. Whether seeds remain in the ground and later will bear fruit, that is a question of our hard fate, which only the future can answer.’’" (Liule)

Answer 132

"War in the East lacked the West’s sense of ‘‘closure,’’ yet the German public drew a set of specific conclusions or ‘‘lessons’’ from the experience of the East. The most obvious conclusion was the popular perception that Germany had in fact won the war in the East. Only later did incomprehensible events rob Germany of its eastern conquests. War-time annexationist fantasies made this conclusion even more enormously bitter. As Golo Mann points out, ‘‘Brest-Litovsk has been called the forgotten peace, but the Germans have not forgotten it. They know that they defeated Russia and sometimes they look upon this proudly as the real, if unrewarded European achievement of the war.’’" (Liule)

Answer 133

" If war in the East was won, how to explain the eventual loss? The same question was asked on the Western Front, where German leaders welcomed troops home as ‘‘undefeated on the battlefield.’’ The result was the myth of the ‘‘Stab in the Back,’’ claiming that the home front’s weakness and perfidy caused Germany’s defeat. " (liule)

Answer 134

"A study of political map-making shows how geographers and activists grew skilled in producing maps illustrating the wrongs of the Paris settlement, as ‘‘the discourse of German self-determination became thoroughly cartographic.’’ The propaganda methods of these maps, often attributed to the Nazis, were in fact inherited from this earlier nationalist mobilization, reflecting how ‘‘much of the expansionism of the Nazi state had been made palatable and convincing to the public as early as the 1920s,’’ laying the groundwork for later aggression" (liule)

Answer 135

"Above all, one central lesson was learned from failed plans for structuring, framing, and ordering the East: instead of planning for cultural development of lands (as was done in Ober Ost, for all the cynical calculation involved in those projects), the East was to be viewed more objectively and coldly, in terms of Raum, ‘‘space.’’ At first, conquest in 1915 brought awareness of how variegated these ‘‘lands and peoples’’ were, but defeat produced a visceral opposite reaction. With the failure of plans to ‘‘manage’’ that variety, the East’s diversity collapsed in popular imagination as well." (Liule)

Answer 136

"A decisive conceptual barrier was broken by this formulation of ‘‘Volk und Raum.’’ Now the lands and peoples were stripped of any legitimate claim to independent existence and stood bare as objects and numbers, resources to be exploited and exhausted. This fateful conceptual breakthrough yielded the central lesson of the experience of war in the East. The imperative of the future had to be: leave out the peoples and take the spaces." (liule

Answer 137

"Among those categories of perception and practice, important ones were inherited from the eastern front-experience. Ober Ost’s categories and practices were taken up again and radicalized: the gaze toward the East, cleansing violence, planning, subdivision and ‘‘intensification of control,’’ forced labor. Chief among them was the lesson of Raum." (liule)

Answer 138

"Seeking to instill ideas of a mission in the East, Nazis concentrated on youth. A new generation could more easily be won for that goal than those who still remembered the Great War’s suffering. In schools, traditional subjects were rewritten and instrumentalized, with history and geography, in particular, turned to Nazi purposes" (liule)

Answer 139

"In Nazi youth organizations, indoctrination on Raum and the East intensified. Youth organizations and schools took up trends in the curriculum of the First World War and war geography. Renewed ‘‘terrain-games’’ were of special importance for Hitler Youth. Boys ‘‘learned camouflage and how to write combat messages (when, where, who, how), use a compass, and read maps" (liule)

Answer 140

"At their camps, Hitler Youth and German Maidens sang hymns to the ‘‘Drive to the East,’’ poems new and old. Former members testify that these songs were among the most important parts of the indoctrination process, but are often overlooked by historians because they are so intangible, largely missing in the historical record. The repertoire of East songs was considerable. Turning history to their own purposes, Nazis set up genealogies for their own modern program of expansion. By singing old songs and repeating older slogans, they asserted historical continuities." (liule)

Answer 141

" Other new songs hit all of the themes of the mindscape of the East which grew out of the eastern front-experience of the First World War: In the East Wind Raise the Flags 1. In the East wind raise the flags, for in the East wind they stand well – Then they command to break camp, and our blood hears the call. For a land gives us the answer, and it bears a German face – Many have bled for it, and therefore the ground cannot be still. " (liule)

Answer 142

"At a November 1937 conference at the Reich Chancellery, recorded in the ‘‘Hossbach Memorandum,’’ Hitler outlined the solution he was preparing for Germany’s Raum problem. The long-range goal was conquest of living space to the East. Dividing up the East between Germany and Russia was the first step, defining spheres of interest and eliminating states which had arisen in this region between the two powers. On August 23, 1939, the Molotov–Ribbentropp Pact was signed, pledging nonaggression, but fortified with secret clauses carving up Eastern Europe. Germany launched its Blitzkrieg attack on Poland on September 1, 1939. Sections of western Poland were split off from the rump General-Government, and added to Germany as ‘‘Incorporated East Territories.’’ " (liule)

Answer 143

" In 1942, Himmler insisted, ‘‘Our duty in the East is not germanization in the former sense of the term, that is, imposing German language and laws upon the population, but to ensure that only people of pure German blood inhabit the East.’’" (liule)

Answer 144

"Natives would merely provide labor to build a racial utopia in the East, for as Himmler explained coldly, ‘‘Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our Kultur: otherwise it is of no interest to me.’’" (liule)

Answer 145

"With regard to natives, Hitler broke with the ideas that motivated Ober Ost’s venture. He warned, ‘‘it is not our mission to lead the local inhabitants to a higher standard of life.’’ They were not to be reshaped or cultivated or ordered, since ‘‘we must in no circumstances repeat the mistakes of excessive regimentation in the Eastern territories.’’ Hitler would allow only a minimum of administration in the East. Natives were only to be exploited, not improved" (liule)

Answer 146

"Under the impact of modern war from 1914 to 1918, German views of the East underwent a fundamental transformation with far-reaching cultural and political consequences. Millions of German soldiers were directly involved in the eastern front-experience, marked by fighting significantly unlike that of the West and colored by the realities and impressions of occupation. A different face of ‘‘total war’’ was exposed in the East. While in the trenches of the West, soldiers cowered under relentless bombardments of industrial modernity and faced battle against machines, German soldiers in the East instead directly confronted hostile nature, an insistent past all around them in a theatre of war that seemed ever less modern, and cultural clashes with surrounding native groups. "

Answer 147

"The ‘‘lessons’’ of the Eastern Front were eventually taken up by the Nazi movement and fused with the vile energies of their anti-Semitism, to produce a terrible new plan for the East, which they would launch with the coming of the Second World War." (liule)

Answer 148

"Thus, even before the propaganda-savvy Nazis assumed power, criticism of enemy propaganda as a cause of defeat became criticism of the German system for being unable to project itself effectively. Like all other losing nations, Germany began to search for the origins of the false path that had led it to the abyss. " (Schivelbusch)

Answer 149

"Many postwar observers dated the origins of the catastrophe back to the founding of the empire, seizing anew on ideas that had been advanced forty years earlier by Nietzsche, Burckhardt, Konstantin Frantz, and other opponents of Bismarck. The gist of the argument was that with the founding of the empire in 1871, Germany had renounced its former universalistic spirit, embraced non-Germanic traits such as materialism, mercantilism, and imperialism, and thereby lost all sense of proportion and spiritual substance. In short, Germany had lost its soul." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 150

"If there was a brief consensus immediately after the shock of defeat, it resided in the idea that collapse and revolution should be welcomed as a flood that would wash away Wilhelminian frivolity. The idea spanned the radical left, which was awaiting the outbreak of world revolution, the liberal center, which longed for the introduction of Western-style parliamentary politics, and the extreme right, which hoped for a rebirth of the nation. The results disappointed everyone." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 151

"The decisive element and defining criterion of the front line was fire. By passing through it, the so-called generation of the front underwent its baptism, its salvation ritual, or, to use one of the most popular terms of nationalistic war literature, its “purification” of the illusions, deformities, and pieties of prewar society. For the frontline soldier and radical conservative writer Ernst Jünger, for instance, the experience of war was nearly indistinguishable from the experience of fire. There were only two alternatives: to perish in the flames or emerge hardened by them." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 152

"the fire rituals of the Nazi Party, including ceremonial bonfires and torchlight parades, represented another modulation of the fire metaphors of war rhetoric. Even liberal politicians like Rathenau spoke of a “world fire that transforms material in order to free the spirit.” Across the political spectrum, then, the “fire” of the world war was seen as a medium for forging a new type of man, the war itself as a “war of education,” and defeat as an intrinsic part of this education. Had imperial Germany won the war, it would have meant the triumph of an inauthentic and superficial materialism." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 153

"Moeller van den Bruck’s conviction that Germany’s road to demise began with the “accursed riches”—the five billion francs in reparations exacted from France in 1871—cast German defeat as a necessary corrective. " (Schivelbusch)

Answer 154

"Having emerged from its trial by fire, the wartime generation was convinced that it had been called to lead the nation. Its mission consisted specifically of bringing the education received at the battlefront back to the home front, where people remained stubbornly ignorant. Rituals of return in primitive cultures traditionally require that warriors who have spilled blood undergo purification rituals before being allowed back into the community. In Germany, by contrast, the warriors were to carry the knowledge of fire back to the home front, which would then be purified as well." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 155

"Once the conflict had entered the phase of total war in 1916, the nation had ceased to be a mere spectator, if it ever had been one, and was drafted into the fight as an active participant. Even in the numbers of their dead—for example, the many victims of the Allied food blockade—the noncombatants bore comparison to their counterparts in the army. Just as the fighters could accuse civilians of not having put their lives directly at risk, the starving home front could counter that the frontline soldiers had at least been fed. Regardless of where it occurred, death was the result of the same war." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 156

"Those on the right and the left who had expected something more after 1918 than a reconstitution of the old system under a republican banner welcomed its failure as a chance—on a now empty stage—to do what had then been neglected. The party that declared itself best suited to the task was of an entirely new sort, consisting at first almost exclusively of combat veterans and sporting both “national socialist” and “workers’ party” in its name—a fact pointing toward the legacies from which its success was derived. The socialism of the Volksgemeinschaft: a product of the war. The worker: a further refinement of the frontline soldier, an archetype central to the so-called soldierly nationalism of Ernst Jünger and others. And finally, at the head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, a man who promised to bring about the national renewal that should have taken place in 1918: the frontline soldier Adolf Hitler." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 157

"Publisher Peter Suhrkamp succinctly captured the “spirit of 1933.” A veteran and an anti-Nazi, Suhrkamp also experienced spring 1933 as a recapitulation of 1914, as the rebirth of the feeling that anything was possible, a second chance for a nation that suddenly seemed quite young, as though the millions of fallen soldiers had returned to the realm of the living to help in the rebuilding effort. “I was repeatedly struck by the similarity to my memories of the summer of 1914,” he wrote." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 158

"Only America’s sudden intervention, at the Allies’ behest, had saved England and France from the coup de grâce of the spring invasion in 1918. Put simply, the Americans had stolen Germany’s victory. If one ignored the fact that it was German policies that had provoked America’s entry into the war, the psychology of stolen victory and a treacherous European stab in the back seemed plausible: German defeat was the result of the Entente’s betrayal of Europe to the non-European power America. " (Schivelbusch)

Answer 159

"All that mattered after 1918 was that America was the actual winner and Germany the loser—but only in relation to America. As painful as the defeat had been, it allowed Germans to imagine themselves as the only European power, the only serious participant in a future European-American duel, and therefore the only legitimate mouthpiece for Europe in a transatlantic dialogue. In sharp contrast to its prewar assertions of power, Germans could thus derive from defeat a claim to a leading moral role in Europe. This aspiration is clearly evident in statements like “Germany may have lost the war militarily, politically, and economically. Germany’s European enemies, however, did not fight for themselves and their part of the world but for the spread of the American economy. That was their victory” and “In defeating us, the New World has defeated all of Europe.”" (Schivelbusch)

Answer 160

"Before the war, a number of thinkers had argued for making technology, like the military, an instrument of the state instead of leaving it in the control of capitalist entrepreneurs. Men like Thorstein Veblen and Charles Steinmetz in the United States and Walther Rathenau and Wichard von Moellendorff in Germany wanted to see technology and industry liberated from the commercial entrepreneur and handed over to engineers, managers, and planners. The world war had made this dream possible, if only for a short time." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 161

"At the end of World War I, the victorious nations treated the return to a peacetime economy as a matter of course that no one questioned—not even the organizers of the war effort, who were now out of a job. But in Germany the situation was entirely different. There the Treaty of Versailles was perceived not as a cessation but as a continuation of the conditions of wartime, which differed from the war itself only in the sense that the demilitarized German empire was now a passive object in international politics. But was Germany really powerless? Since the German war machine had relied in equal parts on the military and the economy, the removal of the military component still left the economic arm intact. And since the postwar goal of the Allies—to extract reparations—could be fulfilled only by expanding Germany’s manufacturing base, its economic leaders were put in a position not unlike that of the military high command." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 162

"Like Johann Plenge, they understood war socialism as the economic manifestation of the Volksgemeinschaft. And since the Volksgemeinschaft was imagined as not just a temporary truce between hostile classes but a lasting achievement of the nation, it followed that the fundamentally altered, “socialized” economy of wartime would continue on after the end of hostilities. During his tenure in the Ministry of Economics, Moellendorff developed a program for a “social economy”—in essence, the continuation of war socialism in peacetime. His plan, as Moellendorff never tired of repeating, was not socialism in the Marxist or Social Democratic sense (“socialism of class interest”) but a national socialism" (Schivelbusch)

Answer 163

"Since peacetime did not bring a return to normality but instead a continuation of the struggle—an economic cold war aimed at winning the victory in the marketplace that had eluded Germany on the battlefield—the national economy could not be demobilized. On the contrary, it was all the more necessary that the economy fulfill its function as an “instrument of peaceful national liberation.” Moellendorff’s definition of Taylorism as “the militarism of production” echoes that belief, as does his characterization of the social economy as a “new national vow of brotherhood.” " (Schivelbusch)

Answer 164

"Gustav Stresemann, the architect of Germany’s rehabilitation at Locarno, was not only one of the most prominent political advocates of a German-dominated Central Europe during the war but also the person who had said in 1920 that the German economy would have to reconquer what the German army had lost. " (Schivelbusch)

Answer 165

"Herbert Hinneberg, director of the National Board for Economic Efficiency, argued that rationalization was a “slogan that stands for everything needed to restore balance.” Economic stabilization was thus characterized as part of an all-encompassing renewal of culture, everyday life, and society. Rationalization contained something of all the ideas about modernization and happiness that were under discussion in the 1920s." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 166

"The German capitulation of 1918 was historically unique not only in its suddenness but also because no nation had ever laid down arms while its forces were still so deep within enemy territory." "not a single bomb had fallen on Berlin, which was about six hundred miles from either front." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 167

"When Germany’s military leaders suddenly called for a cease-fire on October 4, they were naturally thinking not of capitulation but of a defensive strategy similar to the one Foch, Churchill, and Rosenberg later outlined. Ludendorff’s actions were not the result of a nervous breakdown, as is often assumed; he was planning to launch a new attack with replenished strength, once the truce had expired." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 168

"Frederick Maurice, the English general to whom the German right would later attribute the phrase stab in the back, commented: “There was no precedent for a great and powerful nation, which was fighting for its existence, surrendering while it still had the means to resist.” His view was echoed by Churchill: “Such a spectacle appals mankind" (Schivelbsuch)

Answer 169

"People reacted not with manly composure, as the heroic vision would have it, but with everything from bewilderment to literal paralysis and nervous breakdown." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 170

"Symptomatic of the German state of mind in the late fall of 1918 was the fact that hopes for salvation were pinned not to a leading national personality like Gambetta but rather to Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 171

"what transpired was one of the most unheroic capitulations in military history. Instead of falling heroically at the vanguard of his troops, the emperor fled in the night across the Belgian-Dutch border, while Ludendorff, after being relieved of command, went to Sweden. The German navy did not set sail for one last battle but mutinied, thereby hastening the national collapse it was supposed to prevent. With few exceptions, those who had preached resistance to the last man yielded without struggle." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 172

"“No enemy has defeated you. Only when the enemy’s superiority in numbers and resources became suffocating did you relinquish the fight.” These were the words with which Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, greeted the troops returning from the front to Berlin on December 10, 1918. The idea that, while Germany may not have won the war, it certainly hadn’t lost it held sway throughout the political spectrum." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 173

"That Germany had lost the war without being defeated in a decisive battle could no longer be held up as a sign of heroic triumph. “Undefeated on the field of battle” could all too easily be reinterpreted as “capitulated without having put up a fight.” " (Schivelbusch)

Answer 174

"Anyone who advocated peace through negotiation, as the SPD, the Center Party, and the Progressives did in their Reichstag resolution of 1917, could be accused of having ambushed Germany’s fighting troops from the rear." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 175

"Others identified three causes for the demoralization of Germany’s fighting forces: Unterwühlung (being undermined), Vergiftung (being poisoned), and Verseuchung (being contaminated). While the first two metaphors were traditional, the image of infection and contamination was new. It was used by the military leadership for the first time at the beginning of November 1918 to refer to the danger that revolution at home would spread to the soldiers at the front." (Schivelbsuch)

Answer 176

"Both the German stance of martyred innocence and the Allies’ moral condemnation of Germany had their origins in the central clause of the Treaty of Versailles. Since the entire treaty was based on article 231, the “war guilt” clause, which declared Germany solely responsible for the conflict, the amendation or propagandistic nullification of that article was destined to be the main strategic goal of postwar German politics" (Schivelbusch)

Answer 177

"Those defeated by propaganda, so the logic ran, must also be able to achieve victory by propaganda. Thus, although propaganda was also used to argue for Germany’s peacefulness and innocence, the main priority was to master its use as a weapon in anticipation of a further round of armed conflict." (schivelbsuch)

Answer 178

"From Ludendorff to Tönnies, the prevailing wisdom was that effective propaganda was an instrument, a kind of whirling fan that, if operated properly, could vent a certain opinion, conviction, or message out into the world. Perhaps the most concise image of this take on propaganda is Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator, who directs the applause of the masses with a single hand gesture, turning it on and off like a radio" (Schivelbusch)

Answer 179

"Finally, the National Socialists “propagandized” a domain that during the First World War had been considered inhospitable to propaganda, the military, which ceased to be used exclusively as the ultimate instrument of physical violence, coercion, and destruction and became, for several years at least, the primary weapon of foreign-policy propaganda. The great insight was that the perception of military strength was just as important as the actual number of planes and tanks. The mere threat of deploying Germany’s armed forces could be used to break the enemy’s will." (Schivelbusch)

Answer 180

"Historian Marc Bloch, who himself took part in the war, describes this phenomenon with singular insight. In his account of France’s lightning-quick collapse in the spring of 1940, the Wehrmacht emerges as victorious no longer because of its greater potential for destruction but because of its ability to inflict paralyzing fear. The French will to fight had been destroyed not by bombs from German Stukas, Bloch writes, but by the horrific, barbaric, and utterly enervating noise that accompanied them. That noise was not an accidental by-product of dive-bombing raids, like the thunder of cannons, but was deliberately created by sirens, so-called Jericho trumpets, expressly built for that purpose." (Schivelbusch)

1. The War that Didn’t End Flashcards

(204 cards)