War Heroism Research Articles

Gender, War, and Religion: Feminist Perspectives on Pathways to Just Peace

Starting with clashes between Western and Ukrainian feminists, this article discusses basic questions from an intersectional perspective on the relation between gender, war and religion. In the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, how should a gender-sensitive peace ethics look? Among feminists, as in religious communities, we find radical pacifist positions next to and sometimes conflicting with approaches that draw on traditions of “just war” and/or “just peace.” After discussing the different approaches in Christian tradition, including Eastern traditions, and describing the imperialist nature of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the author highlights the importance of engaging feminist theories of war and militarism in the analysis and how they resonate with practices on the ground in Ukraine. The feminist lens demands attention for the full reality of war, for women’s multilayered agency in war, and for the genderedness of discourses and practices surrounding war heroism and war traumas. Based on such considerations and arguments, the article proposes five “principles” for a feminist political theology on war and peace, as a contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate. Markers on a feminist-theological pathway to just peace may include: reconsidering the notion of sacrifice; fearlessly bringing theology into religious diplomacy; nothing for Ukraine without the voices of Ukrainian women; embracing a paradigm of human security instead of state security; and the remaining challenge to imagine a common future with the enemy beyond the current evil of destruction.

Remediating the culture industry

Abstract This article examines to what dramaturgical effect Sam Shepard’s political play States of Shock (1991) remediates strategies associated with the culture industry. In plays, spectators forge an interpretation from a medium that is considered ‘hypermedial’ or capable of combining discrete signifying systems such as dialogue, costumes, acting style and scenography at the same time. In States of Shock, genre remediation implicates its audience in the spectacle of war by juxtaposing American war heroism and military ideology with entertaining vaudeville. By examining Shepard’s appropriation of the vaudeville genre in relation to other dramatic signifying systems, the article offers a new and more layered reading of the play’s supposedly ‘blatant’ political message.

We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day by Ivana Bodrožić (review)

BOOKS IN REVIEW a photo album, with each chapter providing a picture of V.’s life with G. at certain moments, all moving toward the abyss. The structure provides the reader with a greater sense of how V. recalls her life in a way that supports, but also makes as accessible as possible, the trauma of her experience . Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that nearly everyone in V.’s life is complicit in the affair. Her relationship with G. was an open secret, and most chose to look the other way or put G.’s behavior down to his “genius” as an author. Perhaps most damning is V.’s mother and her refusal to protect her daughter. The title of the memoir, Consent (Le Consentement in French), is also an indictment of the circumstances and the world in which V. found herself. V. never gave her consent to be used by G. in the way that he did, to become someone’s fantasy, or be sacrificed by her mother and the social circle surrounding them. What is most devastating is the inability to fully recover one’s life, one’s childhood, after a traumatic experience such as this, and V. writes with brutal honesty and precision, further exposing herself to the world. In one of the most horrifically honest statements , V. writes: “When you’re fourteen, it’s not normal for a fifty-year-old man to wait for you outside your school. It’s not normal to live with him in a hotel, to find yourself in his bed at teatime with his penis in your mouth.” It’s not normal to sacrifice our children to monsters. V. is not writing this memoir solely for herself; she’s writing it as a plea to stop normalizing the type of toxic masculinity that is often excused because the male is a “great artist.” Great art does not excuse this type of behavior, and until we acknowledge this and stop accepting it, more childhoods will be stolen and destroyed. Consent is powerful and tragic, and one of the most important testimonies on this subject ever written. Andrew Martino Salisbury University Ivana Bodrožić We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać. New York. Seven Stories Press. 2021. 240 pages. IN HER NATIVE Croatia, Ivana Bodrožić is controversial. While internally displaced as a nine-year-old at the beginning of the civil war, whose father disappeared fighting for Croatian independence from Yugoslavia, she is cynical about the political and cultural legacy of the 1990s conflict . We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day caused an uproar when it was published in 2016; in the novel, Bodrožić questions every foundational element of the Croatian postwar rhetoric, politics, and institutions that are rooted in war heroism but are actually driven by corruption, bribery , and self-interest. Even more daringly, she suggests that contemporary Croatian issues are self-generated. Her criticism is sweeping, touching religion, nationalism, education, and gender politics, written in a fast-paced, narration-dominant journalistic style: “The war was actually a shiny, radiant point people kept returning to; they hadn’t moved on from what they still saw as a time of pride and glory. The aggression, the destruction, and devastation continued, only now it was not about defending the country. Two decades after the war, damaging behavior was still being honored, exacted, treated as if it were holy.” Many of Bodrožić’s negative characters are almost exact replicas of public figures engaged in political scandals whose careers benefited from the war, easily identifiable to the Croatian reader, and consequently blurring the line between the fictional and factional. The main character’s background is reminiscent of the author’s, and although the location is not specified in the novel, it is easily recognizable as Vukovar, Bodrožić’s hometown. Vukovar is one of the most eastern Croatian cities, located on the Danube and the border with Serbia, and as such was a site of horrendous battles and violence during the ethnic war. Even nowadays, the school system is segregated into Croatian and Serbian, and schoolyards are literally separated by fences. In...

The Stalinist Past in Contemporary Russian TV Serials: Reconfigurations of Memory

Abstract The two main issues that continue to be in the focus of hot public discussions in Russian society are the Great Patriotic War (the German–Soviet war of 1941–1945, as part of World War II) and the tragedy of Stalinism. While the Great Patriotic War was widely reflected in Soviet literature and cinema, the Stalinist issue was seldom represented in Soviet art. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a period when Soviet and post-Soviet art contributed much to the debates on the Soviet past, and several significant anti-Stalinist films and literary works were created. Since the early 2000s, the cultural situation in Russian society has changed and nostalgia of the Soviet past has spread in the mass consciousness. The purpose of this research is to analyze how the Stalinist past is reconstructed in public memory in contemporary cinema narratives. We arrive at the conclusion that since the 2000s, public interest has drifted from images of war heroism to ordinary people’ lives under Stalin; the contemporary public interest is not the war heroes and famous victims of repressions, but the everydayness of ordinary Soviet citizens who tried to build their private lives, careers, friendships, and family relations under the conditions of pressure from the authorities, spreading fear in the society, shortage of goods, and loss of loved ones. We concentrate on several representative Russian TV serials, such as “Liquidation” (2007), “Maryina Roscha” (2012), and “Leningrad, 46” (2014–2015), because all of them are devoted to the first year of the Soviet peaceful life in different Soviet cities, such as Odessa, Moscow, and Leningrad.

Aging Narratives Over 210 Years (1810-2019).

ObjectivesThe World Health Organization launched a recent global campaign to combat ageism, citing its ubiquity and insidious threat to health. The historical context that promoted this pernicious threat is understudied, and such studies lay the critical foundation for designing societal-level campaigns to combat it. We analyzed the trend and content of aging narratives over 210 years across multiple genres—newspaper, magazines, fiction, nonfiction books—and modeled the predictors of the observed trend.MethodA 600-million-word dataset was created from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English to form the largest structured historical corpus with over 150,000 texts from multiple genres. Computational linguistics and statistical techniques were applied to study the trend, content, and predictors of aging narratives.ResultsAging narratives have become more negative, in a linear fashion (p = .003), over 210 years. There are distinct shifts: From uplifting narratives of heroism and kinship in the 1800s to darker tones of illness, death, and burden in the 1900s across newspapers, magazines, and nonfiction books. Fiction defied this trend by portraying older adults positively through romantic courtship and war heroism. Significant predictors of ageism over 210 years are the medicalization of aging, loss of status, warmth, competence, and social ostracism.DiscussionThough it is unrealistic to reverse the course of ageism, its declining trajectory can be ameliorated. Our unprecedented study lay the groundwork for a societal-level campaign to tackle ageism. The need to act is more pressing given the Covid-19 pandemic where older adults are constantly portrayed as vulnerable.

A Person in a Totalitarian State. Article Two. Heroism in War

Heroism — a quality, ability and virtue — was one of the decisive factors of the Soviet military victory. But it would be wrong to consider it itself, in isolation from the general characteristics of the Great Patriotic war, not only as a people's war, but also as being waged by one totalitarian state against another. In this quality there inevitably appeared the traces of Stalinist totalitarianism of peacetime. Caught up in the war, Soviet people “went from hell to hell” and were often forced to show heroism, forced by man-made circumstances, forced by fear, compensating for mistakes and inhumanity, which is the result of Stalin's totalitarian evil. And if the Soviet soldiers were characterized only by this forced heroism, then, faced with the fascist heroism, which originated from the thirst for profit, discipline and duty, it would be hardly possible to win. The main reason for the Soviet soldier was a free heroism, which showed itself outside of totalitarian actions and ideology, and after the war did not immediately break out. Free military heroism had its origins. They are in the good that has ever fallen to everyone in life. For someone, the most important, the first source of heroism was the mother, family, home. For another, it is the perceived meanings and values of a great culture. For someone — loyalty to the oath and professional duty. For another one — the values and meanings of Christianity. What in reality was the correlation between the forced and free heroism, it is impossible to say. Just as it is impossible to evaluate what in the victorious end was the result of the fear of the barrage squad behind the soldiers’ back or the power of love, pushing forward into the enemy fire

Gendered War Heroism and Heroisation During the 20th Century

Gendered War Heroism and Heroisation During the 20th Century

War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Modernism, and Psychology ed. by Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes

Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, eds. War and Mind: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Modernism, and Psychology. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh UP, 2015.186 pp. 70,00 [pounds sterling]. In Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, Ford's character, tells Colonel Levin, the thing is to be able to stick to integrity of your character, whatever earthquake sets house tumbling over your head (167). Ending collection on this note, Gene M. Moore illustrates for us Ford that gave us who has fascinated each of essayists in this perceptive collection, which is admirably introduced by Ashley Chantier and Rob Hawkes, its editors. Here is list of essays: CHAPTERS OF WAR AND THE MIND: Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, Introduction (1-16). Max Saunders, 'Sex ferocity' and 'the sadic lusts of certain novelists': Sexuality, Sadomasochism, and Suppression in Parade's (17-34). Karolyn Steffens, Freud Madox Ford: Impressionism, Psychoanalytic Trauma Theory, and Ford's Wartime Writing (35-49). Eve Sorum, Empathy, Trauma, and Space of War in Parade's (50-62). Megan Marie Hammond, Fellow Feeling in Ford's Last Post: Modernist Empathy and Eighteenth-Century Man (63-76). Barbara Farmworth, The Self-Analysis of Tietjens (77-91). Alexandra Becquet, War and Mind; Composing Parade's (92-111). Sarah Kingston, The Work of Sleep: Insomnia and Discipline in Ford and Sassoon (112-26). Charlotte Jones, Representing Shell Shock: A Return to Ford and Rebecca West (127-42). Leslie de Bont, 'I hate soldiering': Ford, May Sinclair, and War Heroism (142-58). Gene M. Moore, Peace of Mind in Parade's (159-70). Two things are unavoidable in writing about Great War. First, there are no individuals to Army's way of thinking. Discipline applies to everyone in uniform no matter what his distinctive character traits or his social connections. Consequently, as the military machine denies the soldier's subjectivity, that very soldier's heroism entails fighting against one's own (150). Second, it is individual soldier who records horrors he experiences in battle that change his way of thinking. Thus cannot rid himself of two excruciating experiences. First, 0 Nine Morgan is hit by shell-fragment and bleeds to death in Tietjens' arms. cannot shake this event from his mind: it haunts him throughout No More Parades. Second, German shell buries in trench mud from which he extricates himself with an exhausting effort that he must similarly employ to rescue Lance-Corporal Duckett, whose face reminds him of Valentine Wannop. This singular event of war thus momentarily returns to woman he loves. If army buries him in battle, Valentine raises him to life. Thus we are unavoidably plunged into considerations of Eros and Thanatos throughout Parade's End tetralogy. Karolyn Steffens shows how moments of death cannot be divorced from moments of love, like Duckett-Valentine moment. Even when O Nine Morgan is bleeding to death, Tietjens' thoughts go to Valentine too: what would she as pacifist make of this horror taking place in lap of man she loves? So Ford's impressionism doesn't end with unspeakable but is absorbed into unutterable: love stronger than death. Max Saunders shows another dimension in scenes of love and death by his acute analysis of sadomasochism in variety of characters in Some Do Not ... like Reverend Duchemin, his wife Edith Ethel, and Macmaster, but especially in Sylvia Tietjens. She embraces it totally in her on-and-off love-hate relationship with Christopher. She whips to death bulldog: a naked white beast ... Obese and silent.... Like Christopher (23). This is simply one prominent instance among others in Sanders' essay which thoroughly analyzes sexual madness, sadism, and assorted violence in Parade's End. …

Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz

Reviewed by: Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic Americaby William B. Kurtz Mary C. Kelly Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. By William B. Kurtz. The North’s Civil War. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 236. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-6886-3; cloth, $120.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-6753-8.) Nativism, reinforced by the massive influx of immigrants during the Irish famine of the 1840s, revitalized perceptions of American incompatibility with Catholic loyalty to Rome. Debates over manifest destiny, the [End Page 186]U.S.-Mexican War, abolitionism, and sectionalism exacerbated the Catholic Church’s embattled condition in the Civil War era. William B. Kurtz’s study of Catholicism at a pivotal juncture in American history effectively documents a tumultuous progression. Kurtz initially unscrambles bitter sectional tensions disrupting northern Catholic fidelities to church, region, and party before and during the Civil War. Most Catholics opposed prowar Republicans, he notes, but wartime service allowed War Democrats to enhance their prospects as “true Americans” (p. 43). Catholic colleges supported the Union army, while the reputations of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania regiments soared. Commanders Thomas F. Meagher and Michael Corcoran, alongside other soldiers, supported emancipation, temporarily affirming the compatibility between faith and patriotism. The more than six hundred nuns who bolstered the national Catholic profile more than “the actions of Catholic chaplains or soldiers” contributed much, Kurtz continues, but ethnic prerogatives continued to challenge assimilation prospects (p. 68). Bishops’ indecisiveness on emancipation neutralized the value of Catholic military service for many northerners, while debates over abolition sidelined the repeal movement for Irish Americans committed to their home-land’s independence. Catholic advocator Orestes A. Brownson’s prowar, pro-emancipation stance confronted the conservative stance of New York’s Archbishop John Hughes, who based his opposition in economic and faith concerns and not in mere “unprincipled obstructionism,” Kurtz argues (p. 109). The brutality of incensed Irish New Yorkers who lashed out against conscription in the 1863 draft riots is adroitly counterpoised against bishops’ efforts to renounce the violence and contextualize factors of “patriotism, disaffection, ethnicity, class, and racism” underpinning the clash (p. 110). The virtual erasure of Irish Catholic sacrifice in the Union army from contemporary culture is recognized, while Kurtz positions the failure to exempt clergy from the draft against Protestant hostility to Pope Pius IX’s “mostly humanitarian” appeal for an end to the war (p. 121). But Protestant antipathy to a cohort associated with such violence, and therefore seen as incompatible with America’s founding principles, eclipsed the pope’s call. Proposals for Catholic veterans to defend the Papal States against Italian nationalist forces seemed to confirm Catholic disloyalty as Thomas Nast’s cartoons kept draft riot memories alive. Kurtz concludes that while Knights of Columbus and Ancient Order of the Hibernians commemorations of Irish Civil War heroism asserted local and regional Catholic cultural empowerment, negative perspectives remained until their abatement during World War II. Several focuses merit additional scrutiny, including Father Edward Purcell and the Cincinnati-based Catholic Telegraph’s “fierce advocacy of the war and emancipation,” Horace Greeley’s anti-Catholic attitudes, curtailment of U.S.-Vatican diplomatic relations in 1867, and Catholic cohorts other than Irish or German (p. 123). Kurtz is unduly cavalier in citing Irish priority of church over radical nationalism, but deft in summarizing that “[s]upport for Ireland, the working class, and the church were not necessarily incompatible, and were in many cases simply three different but related parts of Irish Catholic Americans’ daily lives” (p. 132). His contention of Catholic aspirations to [End Page 187]“uphold law, order, and stability” also warrants further exploration, while the “separate Catholic America” of the title is somewhat disingenuous—Catholics arguably forged a distinct, rather than “separate,” religious culture in the modernizing United States (p. 91). Any book tackling such thorny topics should inevitably prompt such questions, however. Kurtz is to be commended for his masterful interrogation of the fusion of faith, national crisis, and ethnic identity at a critical moment in American history. This is a notable and welcome contribution to Catholic, Civil War...

Don’t Fight Like a Girl

Military culture promotes status hierarchy and a hypermasculine paradigm, upholding combat arms, and war heroism to exemplify the ideal soldier, contributing to existing gender disparities. This study utilized an online anonymous survey of U.S. military veterans ( N = 25) to examine veterans’ likability related to gender and level of combat exposure using frequencies, descriptives, and Mann–Whitney U tests. Results indicate that veterans prefer combat experienced and male soldiers. Female, noncombat exposed or injured veterans may be more socially isolated than their male counterparts following military service or deployment, illuminating potential barriers to help seeking and service provision with this vulnerable population.

Acts of heritage, acts of value: memorialising at the Chattri Indian Memorial, UK

The Chattri Indian Memorial is a public site that hosts and embodies heritage in complex ways. Standing on the edge of Brighton, UK in a once-remote part of the Sussex Downs, the Memorial was built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front during the First World War. As both a sacred place and a space of socio-cultural heritagization processes, the monument is an enduring testament of past values of war heroism, but also more ephemeral practices of ritual. The article documents the heritage-making at work within memorialisation at the Chattri as a case study, examining how differing ‘valuations’ of a memorial site can be enacted through time, between material form and immaterial practices, and across cultures. The article theorises participants’ current affective practices as conscious ‘past presencing’ , and analyses how their conscious acts of heritage-making affectively enacted values of morality, community and belonging.

Studies on Documented Historical Cases of Civil and War Heroism: A Mini-Review

This mini-review identifies and briefly describes a total of 12 published studies investigating aspects of war and civil heroism by analyzing larger data sets on documented historical cases of such behavior. Eleven of these studies focus on either Carnegie Medal or Medal of Honor recipients. These two most prominent data sources are briefly characterized and directions for future research are pointed out.

Historical and experimental evidence of sexual selection for war heroism

We report three studies which test a sexual selection hypothesis for male war heroism. Based on evolutionary theories of mate choice we hypothesize that men signal their fitness through displaying heroism in combat. First, we report the results of an archival study on US-American soldiers who fought in World War II. We compare proxies for reproductive success between a control sample of 449 regular veterans and 123 surviving Medal of Honor recipients of WWII. Results suggest that the heroes sired more offspring than the regular veterans. Supporting a causal link between war heroism and mating success, we then report the results of two experimental studies (n’s=92 and 340). We find evidence that female participants specifically regard men more sexually attractive if they are war heroes. This effect is absent for male participants judging female war heroes, suggesting that bravery in war is a gender specific signal. Finally, we discuss possible implications of our results.

Singapore. War memory and the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore. By Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 458. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

War memory and the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore By KEVIN BLACKBURN and KARL HACK Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Pp. 458. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi:10.1017/S002246341300074X On 15 February 1946, the first anniversary after the return of British forces of the Fall of Singapore, its attempted commemoration by a crowd of 250 demonstrators in Bras Basah Road in the heart of today's civic centre in Singapore was met by police fire and the death of two demonstrators. Today, the 15 of February is commemorated in grand style every year in Singapore as 'Total Defence Day' by a Singapore state bent on educating its young to remember the war as 'a catalyst in building a nation out of the young and unestablished community of diverse immigrants' (p. 304). In the neighbouring state of Malaysia, a different war is remembered. Hari Pahlawan or Warriors Day is celebrated on 31 July every year, 'to commemorate the dead in the battle against Communist terrorists and also the Malays who have given their lives for the country in fighting for independence since 1511' (p. 234). War memory lends itself par excellence to the project of collective and national myth-making, thanks to its intricate link to the individual and group experience of trauma. Politics, or mourning, have thus been the two paradigmatic approaches taken to its commemoration, and the extensive literature on the subject has tended to focus on either the one or the other. In this painstakingly researched and richly detailed book by historians Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack on war memory and the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore, the theme of politics clearly dominates. The book is an ambitious attempt to write the making of modern Malaysia and Singapore in terms of the multiple--but clearly delineated as distinct and disparate --war memory of individuals, communities, and state in these two countries. In charting the politics of memory over a span of almost seven decades of cultural production and sites of memory related to the war in these two umbilically linked new states whose birth emerges from the Japanese Occupation and its aftermath, the authors focus on the very different trajectories of memory production and suppression which the two nation-states have generated, traceable, they argue, to the kind of state each has become. Two multiethnic polities with contesting visions of political community have shaped two contrasting models of war commemoration. A Malay-dominated state in Malaysia exercises a highly selective memory in which official war memory has been limited to the war heroism of the Malay Regiment, on whose shoulders rests ultimately the burden of defending ketuanan Melayu or Malay primacy, in Malaysia's multiethnic polity. In this narrative however, the war centring on the Fall of Singapore and the Japanese Occupation is only one of a series of martial memories which reaches back to 1511 and the much more momentous Fall of Malacca, when Malay sovereignty was lost, and culminates in the 1957 end of the Emergency, with which Malay sovereignty was restored. It is this day, 31 July, which is commemorated every year. In elevating this longue duree 'Malay memory' to the historical master narrative of the nation, the Malay-dominated state, albeit completely ignoring the memories of all the other communities (Indian, Chinese, Eurasian) and refusing to take them into account in the construction of official history and memory, allows them to tend to their own memories in their own ethnic spaces, resulting in what the authors call 'a model of plural commemoration' (p. …

Are psychopaths and heroes twigs off the same branch? Evidence from college, community, and presidential samples

We examine the relation between psychopathy, especially its fearless dominance dimension, and heroism in two undergraduate samples (N=124 and 119), a community sample (N=457) and 42 U.S. presidents. The first undergraduate and community sample revealed significant positive correlations between fearless dominance and heroism and altruism toward strangers; the presidential sample provided some evidence for an association between fearless dominance and war heroism. In the second undergraduate sample, fearless dominance was related only to altruism toward strangers; heroism was instead significantly positively correlated with the impulsive antisociality component of psychopathy. These findings raise the possibility that some psychopathic personality traits are modestly associated with heightened levels of heroic altruism, and raise questions for future research on the personality correlates of heroism.

Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry and Heroism

Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry and Heroism

“The Hero As Historian”: Pieter Geyl and the Condition of Carlyle after Hitler

“The Hero As Historian”:Pieter Geyl and the Condition of Carlyle after Hitler Owen Dudley Edwards (bio) I. If we were to fasten a postscript to Thomas Carlyle’s 1841 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, entitled “The Hero as Historian,” we should probably find that the twentieth century demanded more physical and mental courage of its historians than the nineteenth. The hero-as-historian of Carlyle and totalitarianism, towering over the rest of us, is the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl (1887–1966). Geyl’s place in Anglophone historiography is secured by his essays on British historians and “The American Civil War and the Problem of Inevitability.” 1 In European studies, his volumes on the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and his Napoleon, For and Against, published in 1949 but initially written during his imprisonment by the Nazis, should be held in admiration far beyond our lifetimes. No more heroic entry in Who’s Who exists than Geyl’s. Among the notable events of his extraordinary life, the entry lists: in 1924 [Geyl’s] title changed into Professor of Dutch History and Institutions in the University of London; resigned 1935; Professor of Modern History, University of Utrecht, 1938–68; 7 Oct. 1940 arrested as hostage, spent thirteen months in Buchenwald, then over two years in various internment camps in Holland, released 14 Feb. 1944; 28 Nov. 1942 dismissed by Reichskommissar from professorship on ground of suspect “general mentality,” restored after liberation of Holland…. May 1941 elected Reichskommissar, confirmed by Queen on liberation of Holland. (Who Was Who 421–22) The entry concludes with a list of visiting lectureships and professorships in the United States and in Britain, awards from both countries and from the Netherlands, honorary degrees, a British CBE, and “Ordre pour le mérite (Germany), 1959.” [End Page 167] Geyl was not, of course, the only Dutch historian with war service as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, but he was the greatest, as his prodigious list of prestigious publications in Who’s Who bears witness. Perhaps no comparable hero-as-historian in World War II could be named, other than the great Marc Bloch of France, tortured and shot while in the Resistance. The blazing pride of Geyl’s listing of his imprisonments, degradation, and dismissal by the Nazis almost parodies the distinctions with which most of the rest of Who’s Who invited attention to their achievements, but the state decoration from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland in 1959 bore the warmth of generous reconciliation. I never met Geyl, but I once had a long interview with his successor as Professor of Dutch History and Institutions in London, Gustaag Johannes Renier, and at the beginning of a fascinating conversation, he asked me to do him the honor of calling him “Professor Renier” on the ground that he regarded tenure of the chair that had been previously occupied by his friend and mentor as his own greatest claim to respect. S. T. Bindoff, professor of history at Queen Mary College, London, translator of Geyl’s work and author of Tudor England, a dazzling work of scholarship that may have outsold all of Geyl’s books together, made it clear to me that the latter Geyl was the greatest historian he had known, and that must have included all of the active great historians of the UK in his time. 2 Geyl’s war heroism was incidental to their admiration, but it becomes vital when we look at his ideas on Carlyle. His twenty-two years in London, six as a journalist including World War I (when the Dutch were neutral), gave him primary authority in recent British history, particularly in English cultural self-image. It did not necessarily produce historiographical Anglophilia. The English in 1903 were on the plateau of their imperial self-assurance, despite their prewar symptoms of unease, and as the imperial preoccupation diminished after the war, a somewhat xenophobic insular superiority took its place—the disillusioned intellectuals of Bloomsbury and elsewhere being nonetheless England-obsessed for all their mockery of past propaganda. Renier, who also followed Geyl in becoming a Dutch journalist in London, would write a hard-hitting but fair...

The Positioning of Baathist Intellectuals and Writers Before and After 2003: The Case of the Iraqi Poet Abd al-Razzaq Abd al-Wahid

One of the poets who played a leading role in the propagation of Baathist ideology in Iraq was Abd al-Razzaq Abd al-Wahid. Having published more than forty collections of poetry addressing topics like heroism in war, martyrdom for the nation and poems in praise of the leader, Abd al-Wahid was one of Saddam Hussein's favorite poets. In my article, I will first examine the poet's biography and his political and literary positioning before and after 2003 in relation to his poetic work of the 1980s, then analyze examples of literary criticism issued on this nationalist author. The central question relates to the extent to which the poet's attitude toward his role during the Baathist era and the evaluation of his poetic work by Arab literary critics have changed after the fall of the Saddam regime. A comparison of a number of critical writings on this renowned poet not only offers valuable insights into apologetic literary criticism and Arab intellectual discourse today, but also contributes to an evaluation of Iraq's recent cultural history and its (former) protagonists.

Heroic Weakness: Bulgarian man facing the death of the national ideal

Is it possible to conceive of the masculinity of war veterans as manifesting characteristics usually associated with women rather than men? Questioning the classical notion of war heroism and taking as a starting point an obituary published in 1899, this article traces the commemorative practices of honouring participants in the Bulgarian national movement of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how the identity of the veterans was based on a complex mixture of the memory of heroic deeds during the war and the physically weakened condition of the soldiers in post-war Bulgaria. Highly praised and endowed with privileges in the first years after the Russian–Ottoman war (1877–78), by the end of the century, the ex-volunteers and ex-revolutionaries were perceived as grotesque public figures. The discourse in the veterans' journals emphasised the heroic weakness of the veterans in post-war Bulgaria as they struggled to survive with old war wounds and poor living conditions. The journals called for state assistance to look after them. Thus, the feminised image of weak survivors seeking protection was attached to the patriotic vision of the manly strength and courage of the soldier on the battlefield.

The Falklands/Malvinas 25 years on: a comparative analysis of constructions of heroism on Argentinean and British television

This paper examines constructions of war heroism within the context of the commemoration in 2007 on Argentinean and British television of the 25th anniversary of the end of the Falklands War. In order to do this, it combines two analytic frameworks: synchronic-diachronic analysis (Pardo 2006, 2008, 2010) and revisionist face-work/politeness analysis (e.g. Bravo 1999). The origins of both frameworks, especially the synchronic-diachronic analysis, lie in Latin America/Spanish linguistic scholarship. Methodologically, therefore, our analysis moves beyond traditional examination of non-Western contexts and cultures through Western analytic/theoretical models. The results reveal several differences in the discursive construction of heroic selves within mass mediated commemorative practices in Argentina and the United Kingdom. Thus, while Argentinean constructions generally coincide with a ‘modern’ notion of heroism, which highlights individualism and extra-ordinariness, British ones generally coincide with a ‘postmodern’ notion of the ordinary, ‘banal’ hero. Both sets, however, incorporate some elements, respectively, of ‘postmodern’ and ‘modern’ heroism. This suggests a gradual (post)modern heroism in the corpus rather than a binary (modern–postmodern) construction.