Heroic Sacrifice Research Articles

War Commemoration and the Republic in Crisis: Weimar Germany and the Neue Wache

“Our dead are above the petty quarreling and the wretched, empty phrases that we cherish. A deep remembrance of our fallen brethren can only strengthen the will to reconcile differences and awaken the spirit that one of their number once expressed in this fashion: ‘Germany must live, even if we must die.”’ Thus a conservative nationalist representative to the Reichstag in Berlin addressed his colleagues in March 1927. His words reflect several notions current in Weimar Germany. They voice a call, still impassioned eight years after the armistice, for commemoration of the war dead, and they register a frustration with the contentious fragmentation of contemporary political culture, so dissonant with the image of soldiers unified in selfless sacrifice for the German fatherland. Finally, these words articulate the widespread sense that it was in the memory of the fallen of the Great War and in the emulation of their heroic sacrifice that Germans could find the bond to unify them as a people during the postwar period.

What Should Janek Learn? Staffing and Curriculum in Polish-American Parochial Schools, 1870-1940

Setting the parameters of education for the prototypical Janek (Johnny) required a series of important decisions. Definition of the teaching corps, curriculum, and authority structure were negotiated among priests, teach? ers, ethnic leaders, and parents. The Polish-American press took a lively and continual interest, with editors publicizing the discussion while vigorously offering their opinions. Outsiders, such as diocesan superintendents of education and the public education establishment, also influenced school development. Finally, the formation of Polish-American Roman Catholic elementary education occurred in the context of an evolving ethnic iden? tity which conditioned continuity and innovation. Students of Polonian1 education have examined the topic from sev? eral perspectives. Internal histories of communities of religious women have usually stressed their heroic sacrifices for ethnic instruction.2 Studies by outside scholars have varied more, but the consequence too often has been

They Had Their World as in Their Time: The Monk’s “Little Narratives”

They Had Their World as in Their Time: The Monk's "Little Narratives" Richard Neuse University ofRhode Island [Julian Schnabel's paintings of the female Christ and the black St.Francis} exhibit careful attention to cultural history while interrogating-politically and ethically-the traditional representations of heroic sacrifice.... It is not simply a matter of at last dignifying suffering women and poor blacks, but of decentering classical patriarchy in some of its most moving moments....The doubleness and ambivalence of postmodern pastiche-simultaneously set in and against cultural history-regularly tilts toward social criticism.The poli­ tics here is neither neoconservative nor revolutionary, but nearer to anarchistic. -Vincent Leitch, Postmodernism-Local Effects, Global Flows LIKE BoccAcno's D, ,w;bu, v;ro,um ;//u,t,;um, from which it takes its (sub)title, The Monks Tale is a somewhat disconcerting mixture of a kind of world chronicle and literary fiction. In his Prologue, the Monk leaves it an open question whether his primary concern is with his Tale as fiction-in this case, tragedy, which he, in a manner of speak­ ing, is the first to introduce into English literature1 -or with history. He begins with a definition (of sorts) of tragedy and follows that with an apologia for his ignorance of history in case he "by ordre telle nat thise thynges, / Be it of popes, emperours, or kynges" (MkP 1985-86). Commentators have usually taken this profession of ignorance at face value, partly because of their unsympathetic view of the Monk as, in Renate Haas's phrase, a "sham humanist,"2 and partly because there are indeed manifest violations of chronological order in the arrangement of the Tale's tragedies. Two further possibilities in this connection have not 1 See Renate Haas, "Chaucer's Monk'.r Tale: An Ingenious Criticism ofEarly Humanist Conceptions of Tragedy," Humanistica Loviniensa 36 (1987): 44-70. In all probability, Chaucer "was the first to experiment with tragedy in the vernacular" (p. 44). 'Ibid., p. 67. 415 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER been raised, so far as I am aware. The first is that the apologia is a mere humility formula not meant literally, such as we get a number of times at the beginning ofrales.3 The second possibility, for which I shall argue here, is that the Monk deliberately violates chronological order as part of his agenda of breaking with the "grand narratives" of biblical-Christian history writing framed by Creation, Incarnation, and Apocalypse. What I am proposing, in other words, is that the Monk is not to be seen as a frivolous character or a fraud but as a serious-minded humanist with a bent toward postmodernism4 avant la lettre. His Tale, I suggest, is one in which the distinction between literary fiction and history is tacitly elided and traditional ideas of historiography are subverted in a number ofways. It might be objected that to apply the termpostmodern­ ism to a fourteenth-century text is an anachronism, but as used by Lyo­ tard and others, postmodernism stands precisely for "anachronism" in a literal sense: a break with the idea oftime and history as one thing after another, a diachronic series or progression. Instead, postmodernism pos­ its a historiography ofunique and hence discontinuous events, involving a doubling oftime, that ofthe past and that ofthe present ofrepresenta­ tion/narration. The Monk:r Tale has some of the appearance of a traditional world chronicle, but the tragedies in terms of which it is presented quickly put the lie to any such appearance. It begins with the fall (casus) ofLuci­ fer, followed by that ofAdam, and takes the reader all the way to present times. Yet even if the so-called Modern Instances are placed at the end of the Tale (as they are in some MSS), there is, as already observed, no real chronological order in the arrangement of the casus, and these dis­ play such a variety of frequently contradictory historical paradigms as to undermine any notion of a coherent historiographic perspective or intent. The fa\;ade of a universal history dissolves, and The Monk's Tale·' A familiar example is the Franklin's elaborate apologia for his "rude speche" (lines 716-28...

Shakespeare's Alternative Tales.

Henry IV and the tale of the prodigal son King John and the tale of the bastard son A Midsummer Night's Dream and the tale of the faithful friends for Measure and the tale of the heroic sacrifice All's That Ends Well and the tale of the chivalric knight Cymbeline and the tale of the substitute bedmate.

From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia

A CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN satirist once wrote that his fellow countrymen identified too much with fairy-tale hero Ivan Fool, who always gets same mysterious assignment: go nobody knows where to find nobody knows what. But he knows exactly where it is and always comes home with a firebird (or at least with a princess) and becomes people's hero. The problem is that Ivan Fool does not know how to survive his everyday life between heroic deeds. He is often described as a lazy mama's boy who does nothing but nap and daydream on heated furnace, waiting for a new feat. The everyday, is a more dangerous enemy for him than multiheaded dragon with flaming tongues. Two key words in this contemporary retelling of Ivan Fool's story are feat and everyday: both were claimed to be untranslatable by various scholars and writers. Roman Jakobson, in his formalist fairy tale about avantgarde hero Vladimir Mayakovsky, perpetual fighter against the fortresses of byt, writes that word byt is untranslatable into Western languages because of strong opposition to everyday routine known onfy in Russia.' Dmitrii Likhachev insists that word for feat, podvig, is also untranslatable for cultural reasons: it does not refer to a specific achievement but rather to spiritual drive itself.2 These diverse representations of national character-satirical, formalist, and elegiac-are remarkably similar in their key structures: opposition between byt (everyday existence) and bytie (spiritual or poetic existence), and valorization of heroic sacrifice over both private life and practical accomplishment. The border between bytie and byt seems to parallel mythical border between Russia and West. There are radical differences between representations of -the dream of private pursuit of happiness in family home-and dream that, according to philosophers of the idea, consisted of heroic spiritual homelessness and messianic nomadism. Unpractical daydreaming is not part of American myth of individual self-sufficiency. Privacy, on other hand, is not important for Russian personality. Might this be reason why history of private life remains unwritten? In summer of 1993, passing through Red Square, I found a display of new best-sellers right by steps of Lenin Museum: they included The

History and Martyrological Tragedy: The Jewish Experience in Sholem Asch and Andre Schwarz-Bart

In Isaiah 43:11-12, God, after instructing His servant, Israel, that beside Me there is no saviour, imposes the awesome obligation: Therefore ye are my witnesses . . . that am God. A rabbinic midrash or exegesis offers this meaning: When you are my am God, and when you are not my am, as it were, not God.(1) The biblical text and response embody the potentially tragic crisis for both individual and community who may be called upon to the [of God]--Kiddush haShem--by suffering martyrdom, the act of witnessing whose imperative is declared in Lev. 22:32: Neither shall ye profane my Holy Name, but will be hallowed among the children of Israel: am the Lord which hallow you. While the act of Kiddush haShem affirms God's spiritual sovereignty, there also seems little doubt that a major consequence of martyrdom bears directly upon the necessity of witnessing God's salvational history grounded in and shaped by the Covenant, exile, testing, suffering, faith, sin and punishment, expiation and messianic hopes of redemption. God's divine primacy, as the biblical narratives (Exodus, above all) and their commentaries attest, is manifested in His power as a Lord of history. Thus, when the crisis of whether or not to the Name appears in times of persecution and ideological strife, the very meaning of history itself is placed in theological jeopardy. When you are not my witnesses, the midrash insists, I am, as it were, not God. To remove God from history is, then, a desecration of the Name--Hillul haShem--perhaps the most shattering violation of all. For while the failure to witness cannot affect the ontological nature of God or thwart His providential design, it can, for those seeking order and purpose in the apparent chaos of history, either destroy it or render it so problematic that what remains is a form of existential despair. And yet the grand irony is that there is also an inherent tragic knowledge in the reality that countless individuals have witnessed with their lives to the honor of God and the integrity of His revealing historical plan. The putative martyr is nevertheless faced with a tragic dilemma: if the individual fails to witness, God and divine history are betrayed; but to pass the test of sacrifice and to sanctify God's presence in the historical moment means death. As Max Weber has termed it, martyrdom is the of absolute ends.(2) Moreover, it is an ethic fraught with a genuine tragic content which has been thematically exploited by both secular and religious writers, most markedly from the seventeenth century to the present.(3) This ethic energizes the very form of martyrological drama and other genres whose appearance and popularity in Judeo-Christian culture characterize the response of the artist to those historical and ideological clashes which rarely admit of a reconciliation or solution except through death. Most significantly, martyrological tragedy in particular becomes a theological commentary on both the tragic and redemptive nature of history itself. Conceived as either an irony-laden providential order or a random process upon which meaning must be subjectively conferred, history inevitably creates those situations which demand the need for a total commitment to some abiding or absolute truth. Martyrdom is thus a fated condition of the historical process. The testimony incarnated in the martyr's death is the tragic ground of this process. From this perspective, individual artistic statements about the nature of God, martyrdom, and history independent of any formal dogma, may be fairly--if loosely--called literary theologoumena or, in generic terms, the trauerspiel (mourning-tragedy), whose influence on the development of a non-Aristotelian esthetic of tragedy Walter Benjamin seminally analyzed in 1928. A central tenet of Benjamin's study is that the royal martyr-tyrant tragedies of seventeenth-century German baroque drama embody the shift from the classical mythos of heroic sacrifice to the realm of history. …

The Antecedents of American Holocaust Drama and the Transformation of Werfel's Jacobowsky and the Colonel

The Holocaust is an ineffable occurrence that defies the capabilities of the human imagination. Dramatic representations of the historical catastrophe must transform, or as Adorno has said, transfigure; the terror so that it can be endured by an audience. In the American theater this is usually accomplished by the imposition of melodramatic modes upon the historical model. Sententious messages, moral exemplars, uplifting endings, and heroic sacrifices are used to bring order out of the chaos; to make the unimaginable approachable and the unbearable manageable. Lawrence Langer refers to this as the Americanization of the Holocaust, and asserts that such representations "permit the imagination to cope with the idea of the Holocaust without forcing a confrontation with its grim details."

Narrative Structures, Meanings, and Life Histories in the Historical Novel Kaugurieši

Abstract Narrative structures serve the double function of selecting episodes and charac-ters to be included in the narration, as well as offering a generative mechanism for their sequencing, both functions being simultaneous and mutually interac-tive. According to Eco (1984), narrative structures are multilayered, including an abstract level of ideology. Few studies have been done on specific narrative subgenres, such as the historical novel. This article examines a historical novel by Latvian writer Karlis Zariņš (1938, 1948, 1975, 1985), which depicts a failed peasant uprising at Kauguri, Latvia in 1802. Bakhtine's (1978) theoreti-cal notion of chronotope is invoked, distinguishing the external chronotope— the general historical and geographic situation—from the internal chronotope—the sequence of individual transformations. In Kaugurieši, the ex-ternal chronotope is depicted as a sociopolitical chess game, in which the Rus-sian king and the German knights play active roles, the queen is chance, and the pawns (Latvian peasants) are helpless victims. The plot centers on a tragi-cally failed attempt by the Latvians to change the historical givens by becom-ing an active, collective force. The internal chronotopes reveal the paths of individual lives, some of which follow the abstract model of heroic quest and sacrifice. (Psychohistory)

‘We throw the torch’: Canadian Memorials of the Great War and the Mythology of Heroic Sacrifice

The enthusiasm and attendant rhetoric when Canada went to war in 1914 matched responses in Britain. Among the reasons for this was a shared literary heritage of romantic and neo-chivalric values imbibed from childhood which encouraged a misleading view of the realities of war. As the war proceeded its grim realities were ignored or “sanitized," partly as a result of the skilful use of propaganda, censorship, and traditional “high diction”. Contrary to the arguments of a number of modem historians, “high diction” was not one of the casualties of the war, as is evident from the analysis provided in this paper of three very different Canadian war memorials.

Cherish the Memory of Qu Qiubai

It is already the forty-fifth anniversary of Comrade Qu Qiubai's heroic sacrifice. Although Comrade Qu lived only thirty-six brief years, he still made great contributions to the party and to the proletarian revolution. He is worthy of the people's eternal remembrance.

Comedia and Trauerspiel: On Benjamin and Calderón

COMPAEATIYE drama 1 Volume 16 Spring 1982 Number 1 Comedia and Trauerspiel: On Benjamin and Calderon Anthony J. Cascardi Nowhere but in Calderon could the perfect baroque Trauerspiel be studied. Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) is a dense and difficult book. “Conceived,” as its dedication evasively states, in 1916, written in 1925, and published three years later, the work is the single full-length book by a critic whom Frank Kermode could hail as “matchless in intuitive power.”l Benjamin specialized in aphorisms, essays, and, as one translated collection calls itself, “reflections.” These are widely known to a broad segment of readers. His essays on Proust and Baudelaire are masterpieces of lyrical prose; his study of Karl Kraus is a trenchant analysis of modem narrative. His essays on photography, as all his work, are marked by a deep vein of philosophic concern. Indeed, none was as philosophical as the Ursprung, a book Benjamin sub­ mitted as his University Habilitationsschrift, the rough equivalent ANTHONY J. CASCARDI is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. 1 2 Comparative Drama of a dissertation. Rejected by various departments as inappro­ priate or incomprehensible, the text remains among the lesserknown of Benjamin’s writings. On the one hand, it deals with relatively arcane materials, with the Trauerspiel (the term is significant) of the German Baroque—the work of Gryphius, Opitz, Sigmund von Birken—with late seventeenth-century collections of heraldic emblems, with occultist tracts and odd word lists; on the other, it is grounded in a philosophy strongly flavored by German Romanticism (there are major debts to Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche), yet directly anticipating the dialectical materialism of the so-called Frankfurt School to which Benjamin would later be tangentially related. It was, in fact, the opening section of the Ursprung that proved seminal in the development of Theodor Adorno’s thought. Walter Benjamin is also a thinker in a long line of Germans with a profound admiration for and interest in the Spanish comedia. On these grounds, Benjamin warrants comparison to Schlegel, Goethe, and Tieck. The Ursprung is to be sure not the only text in which he trained his powers of thought on the Spanish Baroque theatre. The essay “ ‘El mayor monstruo, los celos’ von Calderón und ‘Herodes und Mariamne’ von Hebbel” is a characteristic investigation of what Benjamin called the “melodrama of fate,” the Schicksalsdrama. As in the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin focuses intensely on the privileged function of objects and on the workings of fate in the Herod plays. Through­ out his work, he finds that the German plays are particularly poignant, but circumscribed in their range of sadness and melancholia. In comparison, the Spanish court and martyr plays of Lope, Tirso, and Calderón are superior in sheer poetic effect, in delicacy of motive, in intricacy of execution. Stylistic features like these are worth noting because Benjamin is a staunchly aesthetic thinker; convinced that there is a significance to the inner hollowness of the Baroque world, he turns consistently to what seem superficial aspects of style. But in addition, Ben­ jamin’s own style is of a density and syntactic weld that could only be matched by the supremely ordered verse of a Calderón. In Susan Sontag’s words, Benjamin’s style of thinking and writing is like “freeze-frame baroque. . . . It was as if each sentence had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes.”2 Why the concern with Trauerspiel and not tragedy? The Anthony J. Cascardi 3 distinction is crucial to an understanding of whatever special variations on the tragic pattern of feeling that the Spanish comedia and late Renaissance and Baroque drama may, on the whole, contain. The first distinctions are categorical. Tragedy deals with myth. Its metaphysical foundation is that of ritualistic and heroic sacrifice. It is transcendental in thrust. Not so the Trauerspiel. As its name signifies, the Trauerspiel opens onto a realm of sadness and mourning rather than to the devastating wretchedness of painful destruction felt in ancient tragedy. Its action works in and through history, not myth (“The...

The Myth of Stalingrad

In the propaganda of totalitarian countries the truth is often so adeptly intertwined with falsehood that the one cannot be disentangled from the other, nor do the leaders of totalitarian states want the attempt to be made. In the case of the Third Reich the nazis created an empirically unverifiable 'new reality', as Hannah Arendt calls it, to replace objective truth. Thus myth, sometimes encompassing truth, sometimes not, became the 'new reality'. The Fiihrer, purportedly sent by Providence to lead the Aryan people to victory, was the source of myth. The second world war presented nazi propaganda with many difficulties not faced in peacetime, because the armed forces of Germany's enemies posed a threat to nazi ideology. Goebbels could not depend on myth alone in interpreting day to day events; ideology and myth might 'explain' the great issues, such as the war to the death against the Germanic peoples' racial enemy, the 'Jewish-Bolshevik', but the masses at whom propaganda was aimed needed more than this. The daily course of the war had to be interpreted for them. In carrying out this task Goebbels was faced with the difficult assignment of interpreting Germany's military successes and reverses in a manner which could be reconciled with nazi ideology. He had several choices open to him. If all were going well, he could give a factual account of the progress of the war. On the eastern front this corresponded to the period from June to September I94I. Secondly, because there was wide scope for manipulation in war reporting, Goebbels could withhold information and misrepresent the facts, as he did in the campaign for Moscow. Finally, he could deny the truth about an unfavourable campaign altogether by resorting to deception, distortion, and falsification. In the case of Stalingrad this entailed substituting myth for reality. Hitler could not admit a defeat of the proportions of Stalingrad. That tragedy was therefore represented as a heroic sacrifice to

The Quintessence of Idealism; Or, the Slaves of Duty

When, in 1879, W. S. Gilbert had his Pirate King of Penzance advise the unhappy hero, “Frederic, if you conscientiously feel that it is your duty to destroy us, we cannot blame you for acting on that conviction. Always act in accordance with the dictates of your conscience, my boy, and chance the consequences,” the Pirate Apprentice who expected soon to be out of his indentures found himself in a world as generally obsessed with the sense of duty as he was himself. It is true that only with considerable difficulty did he find “one maiden breast” which felt the moral beauty “Of making worldly interest/Subordinate to sense of duty,” but the Pirate King had plenty of other support for his conscientious philosophy. Not only was he joined by the somewhat weathered Ruth, but even the Sergeant of Police, remembering his own obligations when constabulary duty's to be done, forgave Frederic his tergiversation when reminded that the undependable young man, however queerly he behaved, had always been actuated by his sense of duty. And even Mabel, faced with the loss of her lover, announced proudly to the police force, “Dearly as I loved him before, his heroic sacrifice to his sense of duty has endeared him to me tenfold. He has done his duty. I will do mine. Go ye and do yours.” Nevertheless, poor Frederic remained the victim rather than the master of his convictions; he suffered ceaseless spiritual tortures under the admonitions of the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God, and at one critical point exclaimed:Oh joy unbounded !Oh sweet relief ! oh rapture unexampled !At last I may atone, in some slight measure,For the repeated acts of theft and pillageOf which, at a sense of duty's stern dictation,I, circumstances' victim, have been guilty.

The Role of the University in the Political Orientation of Negro Youth

In discussing the role of the university in serving the needs of Negro youth, it appears to me that one glaring weakness of our universities protrudes like a sore thumb. I allude to the haphazard and uninspired efforts with regard to the political orientation of the students. It is notorious that the student which we run off of the production belts in our American universities is in general a disoriented, placid and smug product; uninspired, unequipped with any ordered dynamics, philosophical or moral; lacking in political creed and drive. I would wish to see us continue to cultivate scholars, but I would also like to see some crusaders-some crusaders for democracy-stride forth from our somber portals. Is it not clear that it is only through democracy that we can hope to continue to produce scholars? It is no secret to any one now that the democratic principle is sorely beset throughout this world, and is indeed threatened with total annihilation. If democracy as even an ideal is to be salvaged from the present world carnage, it will be only because the vast majority of citizens of all colors, classes and creeds in the remaining few democracies of the world are imbued with an unquenchable love for it, and are eager to make heroic sacrifices in its behalf. Democracy cannot be saved by people who

The Status of Nursing among the French Canadians of the Province of Quebec

with eagerness, they knew the pressing needs of the Colony still in its infancy. Madame la duchesse d'Aiguillon, niece of the Cardinal de Richelieu, whose zeal equalled her piety, resolved to furnish the necessary funds to build in the city of Quebec a hospital destined for the colonists and the Indians, as the savages of the country are called. Three nuns, nursing sisters of Dieppe, of the order of the Chanoinesses of St. Augustin, were chosen for this heroic enterprise. In company with the first group of Ursuline nuns, among whom was Mother Marie of the Incarnation (who was called the T6r'se of New France), they arrived at Quebec on the first of August after a frightful voyage of three months. At this moment an epidemic of smallpox broke out among the Hurons; the nursing sisters, lodged temporarily by the Jesuits, put themselves to work immediately and in less than three months they had given care to more than two hundred of these unfortunates whose filth was equalled only by their misery. A life of unheard-of sufferings and privations began for the group of noble women, which was to be theirs for more than a century. Their unconquerable courage, their great charity, were above everything. Extreme poverty, the cruelty of the Iroquois, fire, war-nothing could conquer their devotion. In 1642 occurred the founding of Ville-Marie, today Montreal, 180 miles from Quebec. The distance of the borough of Hochelaga (the Indian name for Montreal) from that of Stadaconna (the Indian name for Quebec) necessitated the establishment of a new hospital, that of the HAtel-Dieu of Montreal. The same sublime devotion, the same heroic sacrifices that were so admired at Quebec surrounded the cradle of Ville-Marie. To the great Jeanne Mance (the collaborator of Maisonneuve), whose ability and qualities we know, was entrusted the direction of the new hospital. She is the first woman who appears in the origin of Ville-Marie (Montreal). With her noble heart, her sound judgment, her enterprising spirit, her firm will, and her heroic virtues, she is the fine pure type after which her followers are modeled. She associated with her the nursing sisters of la Fleche to help her and to continue her work. The history of these noble and ancient institutions is the history of Montreal, of its heroic origin, of its stirring struggles, of its astonishing