Reconsidering Moretti’s “rhetoric of innocence”: Ambivalence Toward and Rationalizations of Heroic Violence in Contemporary Epic

Alchemists, Epics, and Heroes: The Rhetorical Construction of the Seventeenth Century Experimental Philosopher

Reviewed by: The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship ed. by Andrew Mein, Nathan Macdonald, and Matthew A. Collins Philip Jenkins andrew mein, nathan macdonald, and matthew a. collins (eds.), The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship (LHBOTS 691; Scriptural Traces 15; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019). Pp. x + 307. $91.80. When the First World War broke out, clergy and religious intellectuals in the main combatant nations were enthusiastically involved in patriotic propaganda, to a degree that attracted the scorn of later generations. That fact is very familiar in the historical literature, which commonly draws illustrations from sermons and pamphlets from the genre mockingly characterized as "Hurrah and Hallelujah!" Far less studied is the role of such sentiment in shaping the world of biblical scholarship, which was then in such a flourishing state across much of Europe. The present book makes a well-conceived and indeed groundbreaking contribution that tells us as much about the history of biblical scholarship as it does about political religion. The result is multiply interesting and rewarding. [End Page 344] Except in passing, the book makes no attempt to discuss the use of the Bible, or of particular biblical books, among ordinary believers, whether soldiers or civilians seeking consolation in a time of catastrophe. Other writings dealing with that theme would, for instance, highlight such texts as the Gospel of John, and the ubiquitous protective psalms—above all, Psalm 91. Rather, the book explicitly focuses on academic and intellectual approaches, on how ivory tower scholars allowed themselves to be so comprehensively "mobilized." The present book is a collection of fourteen essays by academics chiefly drawn from Great Britain and the United States, and the level of contributions is uniformly high. Following the introduction by Andrew Mein ("Biblical Scholarship at War 1914–1918"), a section entitled "Individuals and Institutions" offers the following studies: "Maintaining the Light of Truth? The Mobilization of University Academics, 1914–1918," by Tomás Irish; "For Christ and Kaiser: Caspar René Gregory and the First World War," by Timothy J. Demy; "Between Prophetic Critique and Raison d'État: Rudolf Kittel on German Jews during the Great War and on Old Testament Hebrews in Biblical Wars," by Lukas Bormann; "William Sanday, Modernism and the First World War," by Mark D. Chapman; and "SOTS, SBL, and WWI: Anglo-American Scholarly Societies and the Great War," by Matthew A. Collins. These studies address the issue of mobilization, showing how groups and institutions responded to the global crisis. As we quickly learn, few scholars needed much prodding to join the patriotic cause wholeheartedly, and that was true of liberal and modernist thinkers as well as the more conservative. Most influential was Adolf von Harnack, who played a critical role in galvanizing German intellectual support for the Kaiser's cause, and indeed formulating imperial propaganda. The following essays constitute a section entitled "Biblical Texts and Themes": "Thou Shalt Not Kill, Unless …: The Decalogue in a Kaiserreich at War," by Paul Michael Kurtz; "Holy War and the Great War in German Protestant Scholarship on the Old Testament," by Nathan MacDonald; "Psalms, Patriotism and Propaganda: A Favourite Book in Wartime Biblical Scholarship," by Andrew Mein; "Ecstasy versus Ethics: The Impact of the First World War on German Biblical Scholarship on the Hebrew Prophets," by Susannah Heschel; "Martyr: Title and First World War Context," by Jan Willem van Henten; "The First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Fate of Social-Scientific Approaches to the New Testament and Christian Origins," by James Crossley; and "A Disconnected Dialogue: Adolf von Harnack, C. J. Cadoux and the Biblical Case for Peace at the Outbreak of the First World War," by Hugh S. Pyper. These studies address such topics as the concept of holy war in German scholarship of the time; German thought on the Hebrew prophets; the role of the Psalms in wartime scholarship; and the application of the idea of martyrdom to the modern-day struggle. After the barrage of sentiments justifying war and slaughter, we are almost startled to find scholars excavating biblical texts to justify peace and reconciliation, but such did occur. Although the subject matter is so rich and varied...

Desert Insurgency: Archaeology, T. E. Lawrence, and the Arab Revolt

Ernest Poole's <i>The Harbor</i> as a Source for O'Neill's <i>The Hairy Ape</i>

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 582 Christopher Browning, Theo Schulte and Omer Bartov should feature Beorn’s volume as well. Norwegian Defence Research Establishment Johannes Due Enstad Merten, Ulrich. Forgotten Voices: The Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II. Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2013. xx + 336 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). Studies on the ‘German East’ have reached a curious stage. Since the renewed interest in German victimhood during the late 1990s, research has increasingly emerged that covers a fascinating and apparently inexhaustible field of study. The rediscovery of what some scholars — especially in Germany — labelled a ‘taboo’ has led to an omnipresence of the lost German past in the East, particularly the contentious history and legacy of the expulsions of Germans from East-Central Europe towards the end of and following the Second World War. So far-reaching has this interest become that even unshakable British truths about World War Two and Britain’s relationship with Europe are now up for debate. In the autumn of 2014, the British Museum, along with BBC Radio 4, introduced the British public to ‘forgotten’ German pasts with its programme Germany: Memories of a Nation. The exhibition at the British Museum charted 600 years of German history and began this tour de force with a focus on towns and cities that are no longer part of Germany, among them Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Danzig/Gdańsk and Prague. Despite this outpouring of interest in the German East, the issue of expulsions and German victims of World War Two — an interest that has long extended well beyond the erstwhile parochial Landsmannschaften (homeland societies) — has remained something that scholars feel the need to preface with claims of breaking a taboo (German victims) and covering new ground (the German East). Ulrich Merten’s book, Forgotten Voices, is no exception, as the title itself indicates. A detailed and often quite personal book on the German experiences of expulsion from East-Central Europe during the 1940s, it also claims to tread new ground. Similar to other recent publications — R. M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT, 2012), comes to mind — Merten takes the reader on a country-by-country journey and details the experiences of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and elsewhere through their own voices. What makes this book worthwhile is Merten’s very personal insight into its subject matter. Born in Berlin in 1930 to a bourgeois family that opposed the Nazi regime, Merten and his family left the Third Reich for the USA in the late 1930s. Thereafter, he spent his life as a German exile torn between several worlds: REVIEWS 583 the USA, Nazi Germany and post-war Germany. Having lived in the shadow of the Third Reich in a country that, since the 1970s, has seen a remarkable surge in Holocaust memorialization, it is unsurprising that writing a book on German victims represented a seminal moment for Ulrich Merten’s own biography. This is evident in his preface and repeated protests (perhaps too many?) that he is not attempting to argue that the expulsion of Germans from East-Central Europe was in any way comparable to the Holocaust. Despite its good intentions, however, the book repeats a number of problematic claims regarding the nature of these expulsions. Although Merten points out that the expulsions happened for various reasons, including revenge and settling old scores (pp. 3–4), he repeatedly places the Holocaust and the expulsions in direct relation to each other. This feels like a throwback to older debates of the late 1990s and early 2000s which came close to creating an equivalence between these two events. The book could have been much clearer on the differences of victimhood between the Holocaust and the German expulsions. Both Jews and Germans were placed in camps; both Jews and Germans were put on trains and deported from their homelands. But this is where the similarities end. The majority of German expellees and refugees walked into promising futures in East and West Germany: for expellees in East Germany, the first decades after the war brought the end...

The Habsburg Monarchy and World War I:Integration, Disintegration, and Demise Peter Thaler Forging a Multinational Empire: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War. By John Deak. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. 376. Cloth $70.00. ISBN 978-0804795579. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. By Pieter M. Judson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 592. Paper $21.95. ISBN 978-0674986763. Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria. By Laurence Cole. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 320. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-0199672042. Stehen oder Fallen. Österreichische Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg. By Lothar Höbelt. Vienna: Böhlau, 2015. Pp. 323. Cloth €45.00. ISBN 978-3205796503. Der Erste Weltkrieg und das Ende der Habsburgermonarchie 1914–1918. By Manfried Rauchensteiner. Vienna: Böhlau, 2013. Pp. 1222. Cloth €45.00. ISBN 978-3205782834. A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire. By Geoffrey Wawro. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Pp. 472. Paper $14.99. ISBN 978-0465080816. There was a time when many portrayed the Habsburg Monarchy of the early twentieth century as yet another sick man of Europe. A remnant of the dynastic conglomerate states of earlier epochs, it no longer fit into the new world of middle-class societies and their core tenets of liberalism and nationalism. Its dissolution was just a matter of time. This perspective was widely propagated by the activists who promoted the monarchy's replacement by nation-states, but it also reverberated in interwar scholarship. Oscar Jászi set the tone with his influential 1929 tome The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy.1 In this work, the émigré Habsburg scholar ascribed the demise of the Dual Monarchy to its failure to adjust to the new realities of domestic and international politics. The monarchy did not merely fall because of external events such as World War I but owed its collapse to a much longer history of disintegration. It was not a [End Page 149] mechanical but an organic process and largely caused by flawed governance. Habsburg leaders relied on dynastic patriotism to combat cultural nationalism and failed to install an overarching state identity. Over the decades, interpretations have changed. Newer studies have taken a more positive view of the monarchy. Much of this reorientation has been connected with the increasing diversification of Western societies and the corresponding challenges to the concept of nation-states. The rise of a supranational association such as the European Union renewed interest in the Habsburg experience, which seemed to offer visible parallels. The historical debate merged into contemporary politics. As a consequence, the demise of the Habsburg Monarchy continues to evoke strong feelings and conflicting interpretations. This article reviews six recent studies that have reenergized the scholarly debate. They encompass a variety of approaches, ranging from synthesizing interpretations of the Habsburg idea via monographic studies of state- and identity-building in the late monarchy to narrowly subscribed analyses of the monarchy's response to the challenges of a world war. These monographs differ not only in subject matter and approach, however, but also in assessment and evaluation. In what follows I search for commonalities among these different accounts while at the same time doing justice to the breadth of interpretation they offer. Like the Habsburg Monarchy itself, its historians need to navigate the promises and challenges of diversity. State-Building and Identity Formation In Forging a Multinational Empire, John Deak examines the Habsburg Monarchy through the prism of state-building. The American historian argues that the Habsburg Monarchy fully partook in the modernization process that transformed European societies in the 1800s. He rejects conventional assumptions that the Habsburg polity was little more than a medieval holdover and an obstacle to European development. Such simplifications are not only factually incorrect, Deak argues, but restrict the course of Western civilization to the budding nation-states of the European West. The eastern half of the continent, including the Habsburg Monarchy, is thereby largely written out of this narrative. Deak proposes an alternative way of looking at European history, divorced from narratives that privilege the rise of nation-states. Citing...

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism

Reviewed by: Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film—Past and Present Joshua S. Walden Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film—Past and Present, by Eric A. Goldman. Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 2011. 272 pp. $35.00. During the brief period before the Second World War in which Yiddish cinema thrived, filmmakers produced dozens of works in a variety of genres including comedy, melodrama, musical performance, and documentary, for the entertainment of Yiddish-speaking audiences across the Jewish diaspora. Although Yiddish cinema descended rapidly into obscurity after 1950, our knowledge of the art form has developed significantly over the past several decades, with the discovery, restoration, and digitalization of increasing numbers of rare movies. Yiddish films typically depicted issues of contemporary Jewish life including immigration, assimilation, family, and religion; while many offered [End Page 202] nostalgic representations of the shtetl and the "old country," a number also portrayed America as a land of opportunity for the Jews of Eastern Europe. In this new edition of Visions, Images and Dreams, film historian Eric A. Goldman has revised and updated his groundbreaking study of Yiddish cinema, first published in 1983. His book is a valuable trove of information about the context in which Yiddish film developed, the people involved in its creation, and the stories behind individual works. For Goldman, the common denominator of Yiddish film is its language, a bond that connects movies produced in Poland, Russia, Austria, the United States, and elsewhere. Goldman uses more thematically defined criteria to characterize Yiddish silent film: made for the entertainment of Yiddish-speaking audiences, work in the genre had as its intent to "stimulate and reinforce Jewish identity" and to "insulate Jews from assimilation and external change" (p. xvi). He organizes the book chronologically and geographically, beginning with "precursors" before the First World War in the United States and Eastern Europe, and tracing the development of Yiddish film from postwar silent and sound pictures through its demise after 1950, the year that "marked the end of an era" (p. 140). The subject matter, stories, scripts, and dramatic techniques of Yiddish theater served as the foundation for the Yiddish cinema. Some of the earliest Yiddish silent movies were filmed productions by famed Yiddish theater troupes, and many stage actors made big names in Yiddish cinema. Chapter 1 introduces the earliest creators of Yiddish cinema, such as Sidney M. Goldin, who earned the title of "Dean of Yiddish cinema" for identifying the idea of targeting a particularly Jewish viewership during the silent era and into the first years of film sound. Chapter 2 addresses silent film after World War I, examining movies produced in Austria, Poland, Russia, and the United States, with a series of descriptive case studies of films including Mizrekh un Mayrev (1923), Tkies Kaf (1924), and Tsebrokhene Hertser (1926). Chapter 3 explores the brief but important development of Yiddish film in the Soviet Union between 1925 and 1933 and discusses the impacts on subject matter and storytelling of changes in Soviet policies regarding Jewish life and the arts. Goldman examines the work of prominent participants in the Yiddish moving picture, including Isaac Babel and the Moscow State Yiddish Theater's director Aleksandr Granovsky and actor Solomon Mikhoels. Chapter 4 focuses on the United States between 1929 and 1937, to study how Yiddish film was employed to construct a Yiddish-speaking cinema audience among Jewish immigrants in America. The chapter looks in particular at the work of producers Joseph Seiden and Henry Lynn. Many of these movies were based on Yiddish plays, skits, and vaudeville acts; also popular were [End Page 203] recordings of cantorial singing and sound films created by dubbing narration and speech onto compilations of repurposed clips from earlier silent films Chapters 5 and 6 address the "Golden Age of Yiddish Cinema," the period between approximately 1936 and 1940, in which the genre met with the greatest success and exhibited some of the most significant artistic innovation, particularly in Poland and the United States. Among the prominent Golden Age films produced in Poland are Der Dibuk (1937) and the four films Joseph Green produced in Poland between 1936 and 1938, Yidl Mitn Fidl, Der Purimshpiler, Mamele, and A Brivele der Mamen...

Leo van Bergen, Before my helpless sight: suffering, dying and military medicine on the western front, 1914–1918, transl. Liz Walters, History of Medicine in Context, Franham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2009, pp. ix, 528, £35.00 (hardback 978-0-7546-8553-5). - Volume 54 Issue 3

The different types of states on their diplomatic policy are discourse separate form one another so by the level of analysis and contemporary international relations give birth to the dispute of individual level, international level and intergovernmental affairs which finally lead world on the path of destruction and World War I was the outcome of such dispute. The development of international relation was not recognized until World War I. However the long tradition of drawing of social science has already enhanced its need globally. After World War I, the international relations aim to distinguish it identity from political science so the use of capitalizations of the “I” and “R” in international relations is prescribed and practice to separate from other branches of study. Therefore, this paper explore the history of international relations to get details study on subject matter.

This chapter describes simulations that the author had run with great success that last for a single class session (sometimes two). Each such simulation is brief, but that brevity sacrifices none of the important elements or advantages of a classroom simulation. The chapter discusses an afternoon's simulation which allows no time for character study, classroom speeches, or protracted negotiations. To properly simulate the need for speed, the chapter claims that the subject matter should be set in a time of crisis, requiring rapid decisions with immediate consequences. Ultimately, the chapter focuses on three simulations that the author had previously run: Guns of August, simulating the frenzied international deliberations that led to the outbreak of the First World War; Japan: 1941, a look at critical decisions in Tokyo that year that plunged Japan and the United States into the Second World War; and Missiles of October, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, that could have led to a third world war.

This article deals with how remembering the Second World War is conveyed in Bernard Kangro’s last three Tartu novels, The Stone Bridge (1963), The Black Book (1965) and Whirlfire (1969). The Second World War is a memory topos that has, more than anything else, divided the memory politics of European countries. If memory politics in Western Europe is focused predominantly on condemning Nazi crimes, primarily the Holocaust, then Eastern Europe, in addition to the legacy of Nazism, has to deal with the additional criminal legacy of Communism. To bridge the gap between Eastern and Western European nations’ collective memories, discussions started in 1990 about the European memory that should help form the basis for a unified European identity. In the opinion of Jan-Werner Muller, European memory assumes one of two processes. The first is linked to unifying the stances toward memory politics of various European nations; the second with unifying the contents of various collective memories. Although Kangro’s last three Tartu novels are among the peripheral works of Estonian cultural memory, they nevertheless deal with themes that have become relevant in the twenty-first century, on the one hand linking collective memory and national memory politics, and on the other hand, addressing the concept of European memory. Using Kangro’s Tartu novels, I first analyse the problematic aspects of national memory politics as they relate to remembering the Second World War in Estonia. Secondly, I point out the implicit criticism in the Tartu novels of the more inflexible and homogenizing form of European memory. For this I focus more closely on the formative stories of three characters – Benno Maran, Naatan Uirike and Juku Leebram. Benno Maran is one of the narrating voices in these novels, together with an anonymous narrator, an italicized narrator from a different time, and another character, named August September. Quotes from Benno’s diary dating from the days of the Russian and German occupations Russian and German occupations of Estonia are used extensively in the novels’ texts. These quotations overlap considerably with the inscriptions in Kangro's own diary from the period. This circumstance and the italicized narrator’s role as a witness to pivotal events in history enable Kangro’s Tartu novels to deal with moral witness, as explained by Aleida Assmann. According to Assmann, moral witness is the grievance of a forgotten historical injustice as well as an elegy which has no political objectives. What emerges from the italicized narrator’s text is that Kangro’s objective is to deliver a moral witnessing, as well as demonstrate the difficulty in bearing such witness: having participated in the events, he is responsible for the reality he remembers and portrays, and the impression he conveys of the people whose suffering he recounts. The process of bearing witness becomes the theme of these novels through the thoughts, comments and confessions of the italicized narrator; at the same time he distances himself from the narrated tale and characters, thus emphasizing the relative nature of the portrayal. The second characteristic keyword of the Tartu novels is pluralism, demonstrated by both their structure and subject matter. Namely, by using multiple characters, Kangro portrays very different Second World War experiences that are inconsistent with nationalistic memory politics as well as too conflicting for transnational memory politics. One example is theology student Juku Leebram’s life story. Juku collaborates with those in power during the Soviet occupation and takes part in the deportations, then turns traitor by fleeing to the German side, but is captured by the Germans and dies in jail. However, after the war, rumours circulate that Juku escaped and has become a Forest Brother. Thus, in the communicative memory of the Estonians in the homeland, Juku first becomes a martyr and then a resistance fighter and national hero.

This chapter provides a brief account of the history of Serbian war poetry, written during the First World War and in the interwar period. By examining its relationship to different geopolitical constellations (Serbian, Balkan, Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav) and literary contexts (the revival of war poetry during the Balkan wars, the poetry of pre- and post-war Modernism), it tries to show how Serbian war poetry was shaped by the dominant poetic idiom and by the collective and public representations of the First World War. Although selective, this account will essentially highlight the turning points in the history of Serbian poetry, where the possibilities and limits of expression were expanded or challenged in contact with a subject matter as unprecedented as the First World War.

While the Second World War was going on at all the fronts and battlefields, the common effort of both blocks was to drag Turkey into this war and to make her an ally of them. Although Turkey has not actively participated in the war, Ankara, the capital of the country has turned into an important center, where all information related to military operations has flown and has been transformed into intelligence. It may not be easy for us to grasp the importance of the previous human based intelligence activities when we consider the present day facilities. Notwithstanding, in those days, the human factor was far more important. In this context, the names of many people who served their countries can be counted. Of course, some of them are unfamiliar for us. The subject matter of this article will constitute such a personality, namely an Albenian spy, Elyesa Bazna, who worked for the British Embassy in Ankara as a kavas (the doorkeeper) between October 1943 and April 1944. Elyesa Bazna sold the documents he obtained from the British Embassy to the German Embassy for money. This article aims to draw attention to his influence to the course of the Second World War events and the importance of the espionage activities of the period.

The development of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) started after the Second World War in a period of enormous expansion of science, technology and economy. English language became an international language of communication, technology and trade and started to attract a new generation of learners: businessmen, doctors, lawyers, economists, engineers and others who wanted to study English because of their specific, professional needs. The most important difference between English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English as a second language (ESL) or general English lies in the nature of the learners and their purposes for learning English. An ESP program is built on an assessment of purposes and needs of adult learners who are learning the language in order to communicate a set of professional skills and to perform specific job-related functions. ESP also concentrate more on language in context than on teaching grammar and language structures. The language skills used in ESP are determined by a needs analysis and the syllabus is designed accordingly. English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is a specific approach to language based on the specific needs of the learners and it integrates motivation, subject matter and content for teaching relevant skills.