Pre-war Europe Research Articles

IDENTITY BECOMES AN ISSUE: EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN THE 1920S

The meaning of “identity” in its contemporary sense of “who—or what—I am” is of relatively recent vintage. It became current as a concept of individual and group psychology only through Erik Erikson's work in the 1950s and its extension to collectivities in the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. But an important strand of European literature began calling the possibility of fixed self-definition into question in the 1920s, occasionally even deploying the word “identity” explicitly. In the work of Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch and Franz Kafka, the dualistic representation of selfhood prevalent in much of prewar modernism gave way to the image of an infinitely fragmented and ontologically unfounded self not exhausted by any, or even the sum, of its many possible designations. For these authors, the events and aftermath of World War One desacralized a whole range of abstract collective identities—national or imperial citizen, cultured European, gebildete bourgeois, manly male, the spiritual “eternal feminine”—which had furnished the most deeply rooted and honored individual identities of prewar Europe. As a consequence, identity itself was undermined. The paradox of the birth of identity is that it was discovered in the negation of its very possibility.

Changing the Face of Europe

This article scrutinizes the role American diplomats played in using the Marshall Plan to introduce American influence into European transportation matters. While the Marshall Plan primarily involved economic redevelopment of Europe following the second World War the author also notes the use of 'soft power' to influence European powers to want the same things that American officials wanted — easier road access. The result is redevelopment of European transportation along American lines, which eventually included American automobile culture, something that pre-war Europe resisted. Given that adequate transportation was considered a key provision in successfully implementing the Marshall Plan, the author offers a detailed account of George C. Marshall's 1947 launch (as Secretary of State under President Harry Truman) of what began as the European Recovery Program (ERP). The eventual Foreign Assistance Act (1948) involved 16 European countries in a four-year program (1948-1952) to rebuild Europe to its pre-war status. Motorized transportation involving both automobiles and roadways became a major means of European transportation by 1949, beginning a rapid ascent. By 1950, European transport facilities had been rebuilt to favor motorized transportation, reflecting a defined shift in transportation mode proportions from what they had been before the War. The author concludes that the Marshall Plan, through its planners' insistence that Europe pay greater attention to road mobility, did at least attempt to contribute to Europe's post-War mobility redevelopment.

Louis MacNeice's Struggle with Aristotelian Ethics

Louis MacNeice's Struggle with Aristotelian Ethics James Matthew Wilson University of Notre Dame A beginning student of poetry coming across the published scholarship on Louis MacNeice would likely be surprised at the debate over that poet's relation to his times. This hypothetical student would probably have first encountered MacNeice's work either in a handful of gleefully nominalist lyrics, such as the 1935 "Snow" and "Sunlight in the Garden," or in the journalistic ruminations on man, politics, history, and nation that constitute his Autumn Journal (1938). If the student started with "Snow" and similar poems, he or she might wonder how MacNeice could be considered anything but an heir to the Aesthetics movement; but if AutumnJournal was the starting point, the student would doubt whether if there was any poet of the period who more vividly engaged the ethical significance of fascism and Marxism, of Roman, Russian, and Spanish politics. In that long poem MacNeice, the scholar and professor of Classics, deploys Aristotelian concepts to address the uncertainties of prewar Europe. Its cantos betray a ubiquitous concern for the relation of persons to their historical community and the possible moral responsibility that relation may entail. Autumn Journal's registered ambivalence has been more attended to than its Aristotelian pedigree, and so the debate over MacNeice's political stance continues. Two recent contributors to this debate, Edna Longley and Heather Clarke, have argued that MacNeice's poetry, and MacNeice the man, were embedded and engagés in a number of ways.1 Longley agitates for MacNeice's restoration as a specifically Irish poet, against the view of Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and others, that MacNeice "withdrew" from Ireland or at least could not speak adequately to its conditions.2 More recently, Clarke has narrated MacNeice's [End Page 53] career as a committed "propagandista" in London during the Blitz; in her reading, he becomes not a model of the artist paring his nails above a devastating war but the pragmatic, responsible, and ostensibly patriotic Anglo-Irish voice of an England under siege.3 In both accounts, MacNeice stands magnified as a better poet than his 1930s cohorts, Spender and Day-Lewis, and as a more quintessentially political one than the sometime Marxist Auden. Such readings are enlightening, but leave unanswered—indeed, unanalyzed—the criteria by which one might designate a poem as superficial or aesthetic, as politically committed or ethically engaged. Too much literary scholarship uses this terminology, without even implicitly offering definitions.4 A systematic assessment of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in MacNeice's work remains unwritten, despite the poet's own obsession with the matter; his work on Yeats, for example, should stand as one of the corrective texts for interpretations of any historical correspondences between high Modernist theories of the lyric and the ethos of totalitarianism. A full exegesis of MacNeice's poems must not simply observe the ethical concepts running through them. It must also regard ethics—and the foundation of ethics in a sociology, or a philosophy of the person—as the fulcrum on which MacNeice's poems turn. Though it is admittedly unfashionable to say so, ethics and sociology provided the schema in which MacNeice articulated his role as an Irish poet educated and living in Britain during a period of immense historical crisis. MacNeice's frequently alleged "aestheticism" amounts to more than a belated inheritance from the fin-de-siècle or high Modernist poets. The supposed aesthetes of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1920s soon interwove their pretensions with the theories of Marx and Freud, among others. For such persons, "the aesthetic" effectively signified not the amoral or apolitical, nor an escape from ethics, but rather, the ethically embedded decision to eschew designations of good and evil. As Adorno proposed long ago regarding Kierkegaard, "the construction of the aesthetic" is in a particular way an ethical project.5 Even the most hermetically sealed lyrics in MacNeice's oeuvre, therefore, can be read as materials integral to...

The Tragedy of Liberalism How Globalization Caused the First World War

The belief that globalization enhances peace, a central tenet of liberal theory, enjoys substantial support in recent scholarship on trade and conflict. To conclude that liberalism is right, however, is premature and wrong. Liberal theory is not sufficiently grounded in international trade theory to show how globalization generates constraints on military force, nor does it adequately link these constraints to strengthened peace. This article uses the Heckscher-Ohlin model of trade to connect globalization's economic effects to increased constraints on military force and then explores how, in the nineteenth century, globalization affected European peace. As liberal theory predicts, globalization generated substantial constraints on military force in prewar Europe. Yet there are important flaws in liberalism's logic linking these constraints to strengthened international peace. Contrary to liberal theory, globalization did not strengthen prospects for peace in prewar Europe but was a major cause of the First World War.

L'Espace Perdu: D. H. Lawrence's Travel Writings

From Twilight in Italy (1916) to the unfinished and posthumously published Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932), D. H. Lawrence's travel writing shows a continuous experimentation with the genre. His books include a journalistic report of pre-war Europe and his coming to terms with the tragedy of poverty and emigration in early twentieth-century Italy (Twilight in Italy), the immediate rendering of a personal experience in diary form (Sea and Sardinia), the fragmented description of his encounter with so different a reality as the Mexican one (Mornings in Mexico), and the ‘half-scientific’ intentions which underlie Sketches of Etruscan Places. In spite of their stylistic difference and variety of images and contents, these books reveal a common intention, which is the author's attempt to escape the wasteland of mechanisation and industrialisation, and to find an ideal place for a re-birth, a palingenesis, where humankind could live a harmonious relationship with Nature, with the Other and with the Self.

From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870-1914

From Revolutionaries to Citizens is the first comprehensive account of the most important antiwar campaign prior to World War I: the antimilitarism of the French Left. Covering the views and actions of socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists from the time of France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870 to the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in 1914, Paul B. Miller tackles a fundamental question of prewar historiography: how did the most antimilitarist culture and society in Europe come to accept and even support war in 1914? Although more general accounts of the Left’s “failure” to halt international war in August 1914 focus on its lack of unity or the decline of trade unionism, Miller contends that these explanations barely scratch the surface when it comes to interpreting the Left’s overwhelming acceptance of the war. By embedding his cultural analysis of antimilitarist propaganda into the larger political and diplomatic history of prewar Europe, he reveals the Left’s seemingly sudden transformation “from revolutionaries to citizens” as less a failure of resolve than a confession of commonality with the broader ideals of republican France. Examining sources ranging from police files and court records to German and British foreign office memos, Miller emphasizes the success of antimilitarism as a rallying cry against social and political inequities on behalf of ordinary citizens. Despite their keen awareness of the bloodletting that awaited Europe, he claims, antimilitarists ultimately accepted the war with Germany for the same reason they had pursued their own struggle within France: to address injustices and defend the rights of citizens in a democratic society.

The psychology of Kundalini yoga: notes of the seminar given in 1932 by C.G. Jung

yoga presented Jung with a model of something that was almost completely lacking in Western psychology--an account of the development phases of higher consciousness.... Jung's insistence on the psychogenic and symbolic significance of such states is even more timely now than then. As R. D. Laing stated... 'It was Jung who broke the ground here, but few followed him.'--From the introduction by Sonu Shamdasani Jung's seminar on Kundalini yoga, presented to the Psychological Club in Zurich in 1932, has been widely regarded as a milestone in the psychological understanding of Eastern thought and of the symbolic transformations of inner experience. Kundalini yoga presented Jung with a model for the developmental phases of higher consciousness, and he interpreted its symbols in terms of the process of individuation. With sensitivity toward a new generation's interest in alternative religions and psychological exploration, Sonu Shamdasani has brought together the lectures and discussions from this seminar. In this volume, he re-creates for today's reader the fascination with which many intellectuals of prewar Europe regarded Eastern spirituality as they discovered more and more of its resources, from yoga to tantric texts. Reconstructing this seminar through new documentation, Shamdasani explains, in his introduction, why Jung thought that the comprehension of Eastern thought was essential if Western psychology was to develop. He goes on to orient today's audience toward an appreciation of some of the questions that stirred the minds of Jung and his seminar group: What is the relation between Eastern schools of liberation and Western psychotherapy? What connection is there between esoteric religious traditions and spontaneous individual experience? What light do the symbols of Kundalini yoga shed on conditions diagnosed as psychotic? Not only were these questions important to analysts in the 1930s but, as Shamdasani stresses, they continue to have psychological relevance for readers on the threshold of the twenty-first century. This volume also offers newly translated material from Jung's German language seminars, a seminar by the indologist Wilhelm Hauer presented in conjunction with that of Jung, illustrations of the cakras, and Sir John Woodroffe's classic translation of the tantric text, the Sat-cakra Nirupana. ?

Critical Intellectuals and Identity Logic: Politics, Representation and Community

Abstract In his introduction to the special Telos issue on the French New Right Paul Piccone locates the main thrust of the Frankfurt School's attack on modernity in its critique of identity logic. The violence of fascism in pre-war Europe and the failure of liberalism in today's US, he specifies, have a common origin in the “identity logic of Enlightenment ideology,” whose “abstract universalism … comes to dominate concrete particularity … The abstract concept redefines the concrete particular in its own image while delegitimating all that is left out of this exercise in conceptual engineering…” Modernity's violence is a legacy of failed enlightenment strategies of representation which attempt to articulate power, reason, and rights.

Loosening State Control in Singapore: The Emergence of Local Capital as a Political Force

This chapter provides the observation that the Singapore state, until recently, was a notable example of a strong state. ‘State strength’ in a capitalist society is understood to comprise essentially two characteristics. First, a strong capitalist state will operate with considerable autonomy from social forces, particularly capital-owning classes; second, it will have a considerable capacity to organise social forces according to state-defined criteria. Corporatism is most often mentioned in relation to the fascist regimes of pre-war Europe and the bureaucratic-authoritarian governments of Latin America. People's Action Party (PAP) leaders have made it clear that definite limits will be maintained on this political liberalisation. The requirements of a more assertive middle class are also beginning to change the ground rules by which local politics is played. An authoritarian state generally finds the business community one of the most difficult sectors of society to control.

The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist

This autobiography looks at the life and times of Victor Weisskopf, a scientist at the forefront of particle physics research who became one of the early advocates of nuclear responsibility. This book chronicles his life, set against the backdrop of one of history's most fertile periods of scientific endeavour. Coming of age as a physicist in pre-war Europe, Victor Weisskopf worked with such scientific greats as Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli. He made seminal contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, and elementary particle physics, and he worked on the most important scientific project of the day - the Manhatten Project. The story of Weisskopf is truly international, moving from the Vienna of his childhood through Copenhagen, Zurich and on to Cambridge and Los Alamos. At each stopping point, he recreates the scientific ambience of the place, giving the reader an exciting sense of the close-knit community that existed among the brilliant scientists with whom he worked.

Democratic-elite theory : Stabilization versus breakdown of democracy

The question of how Western-style democracies have evolved and stabilized, and conversely why some countries have experienced a breakdown of evolving democracy —or the question of the transition to, versus breakdown of, democracy— is central to both socio-political theory and sociopolitical history. Apart from being a fascinating topic on its own, it is a fruitful meeting point between theory and history. Perhaps it is for those very reasons that there has been a surge of interest in it in recent years (see e.g. Burton and Higley 1987; Cotton 1989; Higley and Burton 1989; O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Stephens 1989). In this article, I apply a democratic elite or demo-elite theoretical perspective to the explanation of the historical processes of stabilization vs breakdown of democracy in prewar Europe, using illustrations from two European countries: Britain as a positive, and Germany as a negative case.

Organizing American dermatology and the founding of the American Academy of Dermatology

Born in the miasmatic mists of antiquity, growing up through centuries of complexity, and maturing in Europe, dermatology was brought to America in the early nineteenth century, and by the 1900s it became a vital part of the world's medical community. Fifty years ago American dermatologists formed an organization to bind the profession together through education and communication, the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD). Tyronic American dermatology began with Henry Bulkley in 1836/ who became the first American physician to study dermatology at the H6pital Saint-Louis in Paris before his return to New York to direct the Broome Street Infirmary for Diseases of the Skin. 2 He was the first to teach and practice dermatology in America? In 1869 with three colleagues, Bulkley founded and became President of the New York Dermatology Society, the first society dedicated to the study of skin diseases in the world? Dermatology was burgeoning in the United States, each year seemed to spawn new American dermatologic centers and masters and to see the publication of American treatises and textbooks about skin diseases, 5 but still most American dermatologists studied in Vienna, London, or Paris. In 1871 James White 6 was the first American professor of dermatology, an honor awarded by the prestigious Harvard Medical School. Henry Piffard 7 was the first to give postgraduate lectures in dermatology in 1875 at the New York University Medical College, and the opening of the New York Skin and Cancer Hospital in 1882, 3 and the development of formal dermatologic departments at medical centers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston gave Americans the chance for dermatologic study at home. However, most training included European tutorials. Dermatology was a stepchild to organized medicine in the United States. Opportunities and funding for research were meager. Despite these impediments, dermatology forged ahead in the United States during the early twentieth century. The late 1920s brought changes to American medicine) Fleeing the Nazis and the instability of prewar Europe, thousands of scientists emigrated to the United States. Old World training, didacticism, skills, and energy, mixed with American ideals, tenacity, pragmatism, and occasional pugnation, began a renaissance in dermatology. Residency programs and American-trained dermatologists vaulted in quantity and quality. By early 1937 two national organizations represented dermatologists, the American Dermatological Association (ADA) and the American Medical Association (AMA). In 1876 six dermatologists sent letters proposing a national dermatologic society, and 16 men attended the organizational meeting at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia of the ADA. Twenty-nine of the approximately 50 dermatologists in America at that time joined the ADA. 9 The AMA was founded in 1847, and its Section on Dermatology and Syphilology was established in 1887 in Chicago. For decades after its beginning, the Section on Dermatology was a political arena, whose meetings were not attended by many of the extant dermatologic leaders and whose minutes were not even recorded. '~ In 1932 the ADA and the Section of Dermatology and Syphilology of the AMA cosponsored the formation of the American Board of Dermatology.

THE NEUROPSYCHIATRIST AND THE CIVIL LAW

“Ambulance chasing” is the prerogative of the unscrupulous lawyer, and it should remain so. Unfortunately some physicians give the impression of being parties to this pursuit; and such behavior is undoubtedly responsible for much of the criticism which has been directed toward the participation of physicians in legal problems. Neither the legal nor medical profession can be fairly judged by the misbehavior of a few isolated individuals. Both great instrumentalities of social welfare have been diligent in promoting high ethical standards and in correcting deviations therefrom. One might reasonably expect a maximum of harmonious functioning between them. Actually this is not always so. One need only listen to private conversations of both lawyers and doctors to realize how deep their mutual discontent may be-sometimes even their frank contempt. The two fields of endeavor come into most intimate relationship on these occasions when a physician testifies as an expert in a court of law. Most medical expert testimony is given in courts of civil law as contrasted with courts of crinsinoJ law. This is not generally appreciated as criminal cases usually attract publicity because of the crime in question and the gravity of possible punishment. The reduction of medical testimony in criminal cases has been effected in a variety of ways, a discussion of which is not within the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that for every criminal case in which a neuropsychiatrist testifies there are at least 20 and probably ioo civil cases in which a medical expert testifies. Yet this subject has received relatively little attention. One of the reasons is that the field has been neglected by both medical and law schools: both are too engrossed in their own special fields. This problem was faced in a somewhat more realistic manner in prewar Europe where medicolegal institutes were established factors.

Social Reform in Pre-War Europe Alexander Lorch: Trends in European Social Legislation Between the Two Wars. (New York: Institute of Comparative Law, 1943. Pp. 148. $2.00).

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