Legacies Of Defeat Research Articles

Russian and Ottoman Newspapers in the War of 1877–1878

The proliferation of popular newspapers during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 transformed the boundaries of public debate in Russia and brought the people into close contact with each other as well as with the outer world. Printing and the press had a parallel effect on the fin-de-siècle Ottoman public sphere. Newspapers of the Sublime Porte utilized defeats against Russia to juxtapose – if not depose – the Sultan’s cult as the sole symbol of unity with a nationalist one. “Wartime Propaganda and the Legacies of Defeat” is a comparative study of the two major newspapers – Golos and Basiret – during this period. I examine the major commonalities between these papers: such as perceived images of the enemy, the war’s aims and purposes, as well as the behavior of the troops portrayed by the war correspondents. My primary purpose is to shed light on the Turkish popular press, which weighed in on the issues of nationalism, defeat and political campaigning just as its Russian counterparts did. Ultimately, this article argues that the emergence of a critically debating public sphere in Russia and Turkey demonstrates how both empires experienced modernity in the sense that most Europeans understood it.

:Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany

:Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany

Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. By Frank Biess. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii+367. $35.00.

<i>Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany</i>. By Frank Biess. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii+367. $35.00.

Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. By Frank Biess (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xiiiplus 367 pp.)

Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. By Frank Biess (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xiiiplus 367 pp.)

Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany

Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany

Homecomings: returning POWs and the legacies of defeat in postwar Germany

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi INTRODUCTION 1 PART ONE: From War to Postwar 17 CHAPTER ONE: Impending Defeat: Military Losses, the Wehrmacht, and Ordinary Germans 19 CHAPTER TWO: Confronting Defeat: Returning POWs and the Politics of Victimization 43 CHAPTER THREE: Embodied Defeat: Medicine, Psychiatry, and the Trauma of the Returned POW 70 PART TWO: Making Citizens 95 CHAPTER FOUR: Survivors of Totalitarianism: Returning POWs and the Making of West German Citizens 97 CHAPTER FIVE: Antifascist Conversions: Returning POWs and the Making of East German Citizens 126 CHAPTER SIX: Parallel Exclusions: The West German POW Trials and the East German Purges 153 PART THREE: Divergent Paths 177 CHAPTER SEVEN: Absent Presence: Missing POWs and MIAs 179 CHAPTER EIGHT: Divided Reunion: The Return of the Last POWs 203 CONCLUSION: Histories of the Aftermath 227 Notes 233 Bibliography 307 Index 359

Book Reviews

Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg, eds., Right-Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2003).Reviewed by David ArtDaniel Ziblatt, Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).Reviewed by John BendixNina Berman, Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004)Reviewed by Jutta HelmLouise K. Davidson-Schmich, Becoming Party Politicians: East German State Legislators in the Decade following Democratization (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006)Reviewed by Laurence McFallsFrank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)Reviewed by Brian E. CrimKathleen James-Chakraborty, ed., Bauhaus Culture. From Weimar to the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press 2006)Reviewed by Anja Baumhoff

Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (review)

Reviewed by: Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany Michael Heaney Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. By Frank Biess. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-691-12502-3. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 367. $35.00. As World War II entered its final phase in the West in 1944–45, Germans and Germany, having "sown the wind" of war, in the words of Winston Churchill, began to "reap the whirlwind" of devastating loss and utter defeat. By the time of Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945, about three million German soldiers had become POWs held in precariously underprovisioned Soviet prison camps. They were not completely repatriated until 1956, more than a decade after the war had ended. About 750,000 never returned. The scale of this frightful German experience, which many non-Germans (and some Germans) saw merely as the Nazis' just desserts, had a deeply disturbing and long-lasting impact on the captives themselves and their families, and on Germany in general, and arguably defined much of the politics and culture of postwar society in both East and West Germany. In his book, Frank Biess tells the story of the troubled reintegration of this mass of former German combatants into their home society during the decade or so following Germany's defeat. It is largely a cultural history of postwar Germany, centered on the soldier "returnees" (Heimkehrer), but told in the context of pertinent political and social factors, and key international developments, particularly the Cold War and the postwar division of Germany. Biess's main argument is twofold: first, that the POW issue was so large and disturbing for Germans that it virtually defined Germany's "post-war" period and national "narrative" of the war; and second, that despite the Cold War emergence of two very different polities and "top-down" influences in East and West Germany, ordinary Germans in both societies experienced the POW issue in similar ways, and responded "from the bottom up" in similar fashion, especially at the individual and family levels. He makes the important corollary point that the POW phenomenon delayed Germans' willingness to examine their responsibility for unprecedented wartime criminality and genocide. Cultural history is a tentative affair, and depends on selected and circumstantial, [End Page 272] rather than comprehensive and direct, evidence. As Biess points out, there are often large discrepancies between "official" and private narratives and memories, and there are inevitably entire spectrums of private recollections and interpretations. (Is a historian more apt to "find" those that support, or that challenge, his or her thesis?) Biess has done a judicious job marshalling facts in support of his arguments, using an imaginative array of primary sources and a solid and fair selection of secondary ones. Where a scholarly consensus is challenged, or does not exist, he lets us know. The work for the most part is free of "problematizing" jargon, and the writing is clear. I would have liked even more text describing individual experiences of German soldiers as combatants on the Eastern Front, and as POWs in Soviet camps, and the postwar adjustment experiences of spouses and other members of returnees' families. (Biess gives us some of this.) The work would also have benefited from more information on the social and demographic makeup of the Wehrmacht returnees relative to the larger German population. These would add to the reader's understanding of one of the author's essential—and I believe accurate—claims: the trauma, scale, and ultimately nationwide impact of the Eastern Front POW's experience. This is a very useful, well-researched, and briskly written work. It contributes much to the historiography of the two postwar Germanys, and to the field of veterans' history in general. It is timely, and advances our general understanding of the varied individual and social costs of war, especially of defeat. It should be read by anyone with these interests. Michael Heaney Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey Copyright © 2007 Society for Military History

Unmaking the fascist man: masculinity, film and the transition from dictatorship

This essay examines the recasting and renegotiation of Italian masculinity during the war and during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Film is my privileged source for understanding the complexities of male experience during this period of dramatic change, but I also rely on war crimes charges, diaries and memoirs. While not explicitly comparative in nature, the essay considers whether we can speak of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in postwar Italy akin to that diagnosed by historians of postwar Germany and France. Within this broad frame, the essay focuses the experiences and representations of one category of men who evoked particular anxieties about the legacies of defeat and the redemption of Italian men for democratic models of fatherhood and citizenship: veterans, in particular returned prisoners of war. The 1946 film Il bandito (The Bandit, Alberto Lattuada), which I analyze in the last section of the essay, dramatizes the situation of these returned prisoners and the problem of a generation of men raised according to fascist norms that linked masculinity to the performance of aggressive acts.