Prussian Officer Research Articles

Prusya ve Osmanlı Devleti’nin Ordu ve Askeri Eğitimlerinde Modernleşme Çabaları İle Osmanlı Askeri Eğitimi Üzerinde Prusya Etkisi

In this study, the modernization studies conducted by the Ottoman Empire and Prussia in their armies and in their military trainings are discussed. The Military Schools established by both Ottoman Empire and Prussia for military education were examined separately and the effects of Prussian officers on Ottoman military education system was stated. In the related literature, it is mostly stated that the Ottoman military education was tried to be modernized by taking example of the western states, the establishment process of Military Academy in Ottoman Empire by Sultan Mahmud II as a model of Royal Military School (Ecole Royale Militaire) in France and increment of the effects of Prussia on Ottoman military system in line with the developing political relations between these Empires. However, the related studies about the military education of the western states where the Ottoman military education reforms are taken as an example, and the military education of Prussia who has a significant role in Ottoman military education are limited in number. For this reason, the military education reforms carried out by the Ottoman Empire and Prussia, which is an important example of the reforms in Ottoman military education, were examined in this study. In this context, it is defined that why these reforms wanted to be realized, which deficiencies were tried to be eliminated, what kind of role the officers played in these reforms and which institutions they established. Therefore, the military modernization policies of both Prussia and the Ottoman Empire, their military education, the curricula taught in military schools, the position of Prussian influence in Ottoman military education and its effects, were indicated by examining the Ottoman archive documents and related research studies.

A Fascinating Life: The New Biography of Elizabeth von Arnim

A Fascinating Life:The New Biography of Elizabeth von Arnim Juliane Römhild Joyce Morgan. The Countess from Kirribilli: the Mysterious and Free-spirited Literary Sensation Who Beguiled the World. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2021. Pp. viii, 344. isbn: 978-1-76087-517-6, au$32.99. Elizabeth von Arnim's readers are in a unique position: they can now choose from no less than five biographies in English (and one in German) to learn more about their favourite author. The first, written by von Arnim's daughter under the pseudonym Leslie De Charms (1958), was a collage of excerpts from diaries and letters with brief comments for context. The second, by Karen Usborne (1986), offered the first comprehensive account of von Arnim's [End Page 91] life although not all its claims hold up to closer scrutiny. The third biography, by Jennifer Walker (2013), is based on scrupulous research and is currently the go-to biography for scholars. In 2020 Gabrielle Carey used von Arnim's life as a springboard for autobiographical meditations on von Arnim's and her own quest for happiness. Now, only one year later, Joyce Morgan has added yet another biography—what, the reader wonders, could there possibly be left to tell? As it turns out a fair bit. The Countess from Kirribilli offers a fresh and eminently readable account of von Arnim's colourful life. Morgan, an experienced Australian author, biographer and journalist, traces the stations of von Arnim's biography with a deft hand: born in 1866 in Kirribilli (Sydney) into an English-Australian merchant family as Mary Annette Beauchamp, von Arnim spent only the first years of her life in Australia before her father relocated the family back to Europe. The Beauchamps were a mobile lot, and von Arnim inherited her father's travel gene. On a trip to Italy at the age of 23, she met and then married Count Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin and settled with him first in Berlin, then on a large property near the Baltic Sea, where the young Countess wrote her first book, Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1896). Published anonymously, it became a literary sensation overnight. It established "Elizabeth" as a household name and forever identified von Arnim with her literary alter ego, Elizabeth. Von Arnim wrote several sequels and quickly established herself as an author of witty novels of women's doubtful quest for personal fulfilment in marriage and an astute political satirist of German nationalism. Although she remained faithful to her themes, von Arnim's range in tone and her skilful play with genre remain impressive: The Caravaners (1909) is a bitingly comical self-portrait of a pompous Prussian officer. Vera (1921) uses the Gothic to create a devastating study of domestic abuse, which John Middleton Murry compared with Wuthering Heights—written by Jane Austen. By contrast, The Enchanted April (1922) is a light-hearted tale about the restorative effects of a holiday in Italy, which reminded Katherine Mansfield of Mozart. Today, we can appreciate von Arnim, who wrote over twenty best-selling novels, as a great—if academically still undervalued—satirist of the early twentieth century. Her contemporaries certainly recognized her as such, and von Arnim's friends included Bertrand Russell, Katherine Mansfield, her lover H. G. Wells, Hugh Walpole, Frank Swinnerton, Ethel Smyth and many others. Several of her novels were made into films; Patrick White thought The Caravaners was the funniest book he had ever read, and Virginia Woolf compared von Arnim's sense of comedy with Dickens. After living in England and Switzerland for many years, von Arnim settled at the French Riviera, before fleeing from the Nazis to the u.s. where several of her children lived. She died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1941. [End Page 92] Morgan's biography makes important contributions to von Arnim scholarship. She offers an impressively detailed account of the slow discovery of von Arnim's identity by the press. Throughout her life von Arnim's books were signed "By the Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden", and for the first years of her career, von Arnim, who was notoriously private, managed to avoid any connection between the august von Arnim family...

Chinese Narrotologies

Chinese Narrotologies

Et in Patria ego: Medieval monuments in travelogues from Serbia from the beginning of the 19th century

The paper analyzes writings on medieval monuments in Serbia noted in a number of literary essays written after the Second Serbian uprising. Seeing as in prior historiographical accounts these data on Serbian antiques were mostly viewed from a positivist angle, when it comes to medieval research, or as a written echo of the encompassing national revival in the interpretations of newer artwork, special attention has been paid to specific authors, their intellectual origins and heritage with which they had firstly encountered monuments from the distant past, and to a specific cultural rift caused by the extent of their lack of knowledge on the fatherland of their ancestors. As opposed to texts by "domestic" authors such as Đorđe Magarašević and Joakim Vujić, the travelogue by the Prussian officer Otto Dubislav von Pirch reflects a clear awareness of European spiritual and material values of Serbian medieval history, displayed through the literary manner appropriate at the time.

Plany odtworzenia fortyfikacji Wrocławia z lat 1807–1830

In 1807 French troops demolished fortifications of Wrocław. This paper presents the ideas and designs for the rebuilding of this fortress from the period 1807– 1830. In designing process participated following Prussian officers: Grawert, Rode, Pullet, Harroy, Boyen, Grolman, Liebenroth, and Schubert. The only today existing remains of this forgotten period of fortress Wrocław is the new city moat with a promenade, built after 1807.

PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS AND THEIR TRANSLATION IN «PRUSSIAN OFFICER» BY D.H. LAWRENCE

The main goal of the article is the analysis of phraseological units found in «The Prussian Officer» by D.H. Lawrence, including phraseological units (here and after referred to as «PU») with author’s modifications, and review of translation of these PUs from English into Russian. The article begins with the description of one of the leading motives in works of D.H. Lawrence, brief introductory comments on the novel «The Prussian officer», researcher’s findings concerning the character of the PUs and reasons for their selection. In the main body of the article, there is the survey of PUs found in the novel. The total number of reviewed PUs is 40. The PUs are studied with the aim to find out as to whether the author’s modifications are in place according to the classification of the leading representatives of the Kazan linguistic school. Further on, there is a review of the classification of the major methods of translation of PU including those with the author’s transformations and without them. After that, every single act of selected PU’s translation is investigated. Maria Koreneva (the official translator) performed the translation under review. And, finally, in the end of the article the conclusion is drawn, considering the fact that PU and its modifications present a challenge to translators of fiction. As for the translation of the studied PU it was proved that despite of the presence of some inaccuracies in the translation into the Russian language, on the whole, the Russian translation of the novel is a good one.

Образ Берлина в путевых заметках М. Е. Салтыкова-Щедрина «За рубежом»

The article deals with the features of the image of the artistic space of Berlin in travel notes of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin “Abroad.” The relevance of the study is determined by the need for imagological analysis of topos texts, which reflect the images of “foreign,” in particular, the German element in the framework of Russian culture. The German-marked locus of Berlin in M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s work is realized through a number of motives related to the changed image of the united Germany as a new European empire in the perception of the Russians of the late 19 th century, which, in turn, gives the author an opportunity to express his social and critical views on the prospects and trends of Europe. The author considers the motives of the German hidden threat as an aggressive expansion into the outer space, the militarization of Germany with distinguishing the image of a Prussian officer-“a hero” as the central one, spiritual and political unfreedom, order, boredom and at the same time the theatrical appearance of the German existence as the main motives related to the locus of Berlin identified in travel notes by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. It is shown that the basis of the description of the city is the observation of the street life of the German capital. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that in the work by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin Berlin is portrayed as non-chronical locus with the characteristics of mortality, which functions similarly to the mechanism on the principle of continuous cyclical movement.

Clausewitz and His Time: Essays in the Cultural and Intellectual History of Thinking about War by Peter Paret

Clausewitz and His Time: Essays in the Cultural and Intellectual History of Thinking about War, by Peter Paret. New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2015. vii, 134 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). Carl von Clausewitz's On War (Berlin, 1832) is one of those classic works more often cited than read. To many people, Clausewitz is reducible his famous statement in chapter one that [w]ar is merely the continuation of policy by other means (Der Krieg ist eine blosse Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln). That the German word Politik can mean both and policy in English suggests the breadth of Clausewitz's understanding of war and the myriad ways that all wars are intertwined with larger historical forces--a central theme of Peter Paret's book. Paret, Professor Emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study, has studied Clausewitz for over half a century. His biography, Clausewitz and the State (New York, 1976), and his translation in the same year, in collaboration with Michael Howard, of On War (Princeton, 1976) are essential starting points for any serious student of Clausewitz. In the present slim volume, Paret brings together four of his recent essays on Clausewitz (all published separately), two new essays, and a short introduction. He seeks supplement his earlier works by providing new, or more detailed, analyses of both Clausewitz's texts and the contexts in which the latter developed his ideas, culminating in his magnum opus, On War. Two essays look ahead, comparing Clausewitz Alfred von Schlieffen in their interpretations of Frederick the Great's campaigns; and Clausewitz Marc Bloch on their interpretations of disastrous defeats--Prussia in 1806 and France in 1940, respectively. Not surprisingly, the book feels thematically loose and repeats some themes and material from Paret's earlier works. The book's longest and most substantial essay, A Learned Officer among Others, analyzes Clausewitz's development in the context of a cohort of five Prussian officers who came of age around 1800. Among them was the eminent playwright Heinrich von Kleist. All breathed the air of the German Enlightenment (especially the work of Kant), early Romanticism, and nationalism. All fought against Napoleon's army, experiencing first-hand its more flexible tactics. All were marked by the great defeats of Prussia at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806, and the subsequent reforms of the Prussian Army. And all (save Kleist) rose high positions in the Prussian military state. All, notes Paret, possessed a common-sense awareness of the links between war and politics (67). Yet only Clausewitz was able to create a systematic theoretical understanding of how war and the reasons for it interact in policy, but also in other realms commonly thought of as purely military or purely civilian (67). …

German Imperialism before the German Empire. Russo-Prussian Military Expeditions to the Caucasus before 1871 and the Continuity of German Colonialism

German Imperialism before the German Empire. Russo-Prussian Military Expeditions to the Caucasus before 1871 and the Continuity of German ColonialismThe common understanding in imperial History is that the Prussian-German military remained rather unimpressed by imperial desires outside Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century. This article argues instead for a longer continuity of military imperialism in the German armies before the foundation of a German nation state. It traces this early interest in imperial engagement by analysing three thus-far forgotten expeditions of Prussian officers to the Caucasian region. By using the concept of the «imperial cloud», it follows the remembrance of these undertakings and the careers of their participants to the end of the century, when this tradition was later used as a justification for colonial activities now carried out in Africa and Asia.

Hollywood �ber Alles : Seeing the Nazi in American Movies

Hollywood Über Alles:Seeing the Nazi in American Movies Geoffrey Cocks No figure in fact or in fiction embodies absolute evil as much as the Nazi. The American-movie Nazi drew its initial presence and force from the sheer enormity of Nazi destructive impact on the real world, the Nazis’ own projection of their dark drama onto the movie screens of that world, and the emigration of much German, European, and Jewish talent to Hollywood in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Hollywood largely avoided the subject of Nazism for political and economic reasons. From 1941 on, however, the Nazi figure assumed a place in a wide variety of movie genres, not only because of the fervor of war, but because the Nazi allowed Hollywood to engage American issues of class, race, and power without indicting American culture itself. Hollywood movies about the First World War caricatured Prussian officers as bearers of the arrogant rot at the top of Old World society. This type of “pre”-Nazi figure was evident even in the urbane officer in Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941) in contrast to the thuggish party leader (Confessions of a Nazi Spy [Anatole Litvak, 1939]). Click for larger view View full resolution Nazi officers in Man Hunt (left) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy Such urbanity usually conceals thuggishness, however. Erich von Stroheim’s portrayal of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in Paramount’s Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943) recalls Stroheim’s earlier portrayals of Prussians, but it adds the menace of Nazi racism. Wilder, an Austrian-Jewish émigré, indirectly exposes the Nazi persecution of Jews when Rommel notes that there is no Moses to part the Red Sea for the British and when Rommel rages, in German, at officers dallying with a French hotel maid: “Is this the German army or a Jews’ school?” The movie elliptically refers to the Final Solution (articulated formally in early 1942) when Rommel observes ominously about prison camps that “we can use paper in Germany, a great deal of paper,” hinting at the bureaucracy of euphemisms used in Nazi communications (Sonderbehandlung—“special handling”—being the most infamous). Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) channeled Warner Bros.’s longstanding anti-German and anti-Nazi stance into themes of group identity and collective resistance to the Nazis, an approach promoted by the new Office of War Information. Colonel Strasser, as played by German émigré Conrad Veidt, is Teutonic in the aristocratic Prussian style without being self-stereotyped like von Stroheim and so exudes a more modern malevolence à la Nazi. He, like Rommel, sports no aristocratic “von.” His name has a utilitarian, even proletarian, simplicity and directness to it. He wears the uniform of the Luftwaffe, the most recent and Nazified of the German armed services, and he arrives in an airplane. The German army officers [End Page 38] around him are a blend of arrogance and officiousness, described and dismissed by Rick’s Russian bartender as “Germans boom, boom, boom, boom.” Click for larger view View full resolution The Nazi uniform is, in other words, dapper camouflage for thugs--typically played, ironically, by the sorts of people the Nazis despised. More than any other wartime American film, Casablanca’s production resounds with the powerful voice of recent emigrants, many of them Jewish, from fascist Europe. Director Curtiz was from Hungary. Veidt had fled Germany with his Jewish wife. Peter Lorre, born László Löwenstein in Hungary, plays Ugarte, an oily but hapless trader in refugee souls.1 But even though many of the crew and cast, as well most of the twelve German-speaking actors, were Jewish, there is famously no mention of Jews in Casablanca, or indeed of religion or race at all. Unlike Once Upon a Honeymoon (Leo McCarey, 1942), Address Unknown (William Menzies, 1944), Tomorrow the World (Leslie Fenton, 1944), and None Shall Escape (André de Toth, 1944), the Nazi in Casablanca appears not to be presented in the context of a war against the Jews. This tactic reflected the concern among Jewish studio heads in Hollywood that America, with its own obvious history of anti-Semitism, would interpret the war (or the film’s representation of it) as a defense of Jews.2...

Color Words in D. H. Lawrence’s Fictional Works

D. H. Lawrence was of greatest figures in twentieth-century English literature. Many of his works deal with issues of dualistic balances between men and men, men and women, men and nature, etc. Very few of critics have noticed color words in his fictional works, though they are prevailing in nearly every piece of Lawrence's writings. As a matter of fact, color words not only reflects Lawrence's metaphysic assertion and strategies applied in narration, but also shows his growing background and influences from other modernists of his time. Therefore, it will be worthwhile to deal with color issues in Lawrence's fictional works, and findings about stylistic, strategic and biographical reasons behind application of color words will be quite helpful to highlight aspects which we may have overlooked and add another dimension to understand Lawrence's fiction. Most of studies on Lawrence deal with Lawrence's philosophy, his language and even his biographical background. It is quite a shame that few of them touches upon question as to reasons behind frequent appearance of color words in Lawrence's work, though it is obvious that Lawrence have a predilection for color terms for their overall appearance in Lawrence's writings in all kinds of genres. Some critics have noticed this phenomenon, but their comments are quite limited. Hugh Stevens thinks that Lawrence's attitude towards races is reflected in colors in characters. According to him, Lawrence's writing strikingly blends eroticism and racial markings such as color of every part of body. He draws attention to contrast of color between and Prussian officer by proposing that the two men are systematically opposed not only in terms of class, age and authority, but also in terms of color: 'light blue eyes' and 'cold fire' of officer are opposed to 'warm flame' of 'swarthy' orderly (Stevens, 2003, p. 55). Anais Nin justifies Lawrence's preference for color terms as one of things which give his work an incredible reality (Nin, 1964, p. 63). In his review about Sea and Sardinia, Jack F. Steward returns to rhetorical issue of Lawrence's language and approaches color usage by referring to Roman Jacobson's theory of metaphor and metonymy as intellectual background. This essay draws attention to a group of color motifs in Lawrence's description of natural scenes. Though these critical studies touch upon specialty of chromatic characteristics of language in Lawrence's writing, still they fail to relate this phenomenon with Lawrence's metaphysic or narrative strategies behind it. This article seeks to highlight Lawrence's application of color terms and tries to give a specific analysis of reasons behind his predilection for color words. In line with that, it will help readers be more aware of importance of color words in Lawrence's fictional writing and give a more panoramic understanding of Lawrencian narration and its relation with spirit of his time. 2. Discussion

Adliger Stand und militärischer Rang. Konflikt- muster hochadliger Offiziere in der brandenburgisch- preußischen Armee (1713–1786)

Abstract During the 18th century, the officers of the European standing armies were usually of noble origin. The requirements the army had towards the officers conflicted with their own self understanding. It was requirement of them to leave their »lone soldier « attitude behind and subordinate into a hierarchically system. The officer corps of the early modern times were dominated by nobles and the aforementioned conflicts had an impact of different intensity on the relation between the point d’honneur and the requirements of the military service. As for the Prussian example, it was assumed that this conflict between noble origin and military rank was less virulent than in the French army. Reason for that believe was mainly that the majority of the Prussian officers originated from the gentry. It was also assumed that the monarch was able to impose a better discipline among his officers. One group of officers, members of the high nobility, has been completely ignored so far. That comes as a surprise given the fact that they accounted for 10 percent of all generals. Those princes had a protestantic background, served in the army for several reasons and were preferentially promoted. Their service in the army did not come without potential conflicts which required the monarch to compromise and using different strategies to solve them.

If Joakim Vujic really translated "Zalostnoe vozvrascenje Francuzov'' iz'' Rossje", who wrote it?

This paper focuses on book Zalostnoe vozvrascenje Francuzov'' iz'' Rossje printed 1814th in Buda. In our bibliographical science this translation is attributed to Joakim Vujic, which is very difficult to determine in exact way. However, completely unknown original author of this text has been finally revealed. It is a Prussian officer (later general) Ernst von Pfuel, who at the time of the expulsion of Napoleon?s army in Russia in 1812. was in the Russian service. His testimony about the war he recorded as a witness. The book R?ckzug der Franzosen bis zum Niemen was issued by him in Berlin already in 1813. year.

Kleist's Spy Writing, or the Autobiography of the Dash1

This paper examines the seven‐month period between January and July 1807 that Heinrich von Kleist spent in French confinement on charges of espionage, and the Trauerspiel Penthesilea he wrote during that time. There exists no satisfactory account of the reasons for Kleist's travels at this inopportune moment (a Prussian officer on leave travelling to French‐occupied Berlin!) and it remains unknown whether the French charges had any factual grounds. In his correspondence Kleist claims his innocence and denies any such accusations. But whether guilty or not he is taken prisoner, and for an indefinite amount of time. No international legislation protected captured spies at the time, and Kleist's suspension in this legal threshold without end date and in the absence of any legal defense is used in this paper to elucidate the letters he wrote from prison and the powerful and mysterious play he finished writing during this period. It is to these works, written from a place of imposed legal silence, that the paper refers as “spy writing.”

Winter-Crack Trees: Botanical Symbolism and D. H. Lawrence’s 1914 Revisions of Odour of Chrysanthemums

IN an analysis of the opening paragraph of Odour of Chrysanthemums, Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet draw attention to the manner in which D. H. Lawrence uses realistic detail to ‘set up his story’s ending’ by symbolically foreshadowing ‘the key insight of Elizabeth Bates’ concluding epiphany’. The colliery pit-bank of discarded waste can thus be read as both realistic scene-setting, and also as a symbol of the Bates’ children who are unwanted by-products of their parents’ sexual relationship. Lawrence’s fusion of realism and symbolism ‘contributes to the verisimilitude of the locale’, and also ‘adumbrates Elizabeth’s discovery at story’s end’ that ‘the true worth mined was the coal or the sex, an insight that the foreshadowing helps establish’.1 The pit-bank is not, however, the only instance of Lawrence fusing realism and symbolism to foreshadow Elizabeth Bates’ concluding epiphany; another example, also located at the opening of the story, is that of the winter-crack plum-trees growing in the garden of the Bates’ cottage. In the first published version of the story, which appeared in the 1911 June issue of the English Review, the trees are simply an incidental part of the naturalistic description of the environment of the Bates’ cottage: ‘There were many twiggy apple-trees, winter-crack trees, sinister looking bushes, and ragged cabbages’.2 However, in the revised 1914 version, published in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, the trees are also used symbolically to parallel and prefigure the process by which Elizabeth arrives at her climactic epiphany at the close of the narrative.

An Update on Feldsher Training and Practice in the Ukraine

INTRODUCTION During a recent visit to a feldsher training program in Kiev, Ukraine, the author (a physician assistant [PA] educator with extensive experience in PA education) had an opportunity to meet with Victor Federovich Seedyelkinov, the dean of Kiev Medical College #2 and director of its feldsher training program. The meeting was held in Kiev and conducted in Russian with the assistance of an interpreter. The conversation identified many similarities in the development of the feldsher profession in the former Soviet Union to the PA profession in the United States. Current training and clinical practice of feldshers and PAs also share many similarities. Feldshers are midlevel health care providers whose origins date to 1872, when the first training programs were established.1 The name feldsher was derived from the German word feldscher, meaning field shearer (feld= field, scher=shearer), which was the name of medieval military barbersurgeons who worked as army field surgeons in Germany dating from the first half of the 15th century during the Thirty Years War.2 The term was later transported to Russia by Prussian officers. Director Seedyelkinov reported that Kiev Medical College #2 opened its doors for feldsher training during World War II. At that time, the focus of training was combat-oriented and feldsher students received training on the battlefield. Current training is designed to meet government regulations that are specified by the Ministry of Health, which calculates the feldsher needs of a region by establishing the population size and identifying the numbers of feldshers needed using a predetermined ratio. The government authorizes a feldsher program to train students if it adheres to the government-approved curricula and training standards. Each student is eligible to practice after receiving a certificate of successful completion of feldsher training.3 Successful completion of program and training requirements enables the feldshers to practice and meet the primary care needs of populations in rural areas, where feldshers typically practice upon graduation and where there are no other primary care providers. Nonmilitary feldshers provide primary care for nearly 40% of the population in rural ambulatory clinics.4 A student attending feldsher training at Kiev Medical College #2 is a high school graduate who provides evidence of high scores in the following areas: competency exam (SAT equivalent), biology, and Ukrainian language and literature. Applicants are interviewed by the faculty and are evaluated for maturity and suitability for providing medical care. One of five applicants is accepted into the program. Upon acceptance, each student becomes eligible to receive financial support, including tuition, from the Ukrainian government for the duration of training. Upon matriculation, each student receives a monthly stipend from the government in the amount of 400 hryvnia (US $50). The student uses the Feature Editor’s Note:

Whither the “Good Europeans”?: Nietzsche’s New World Order

Whither the “Good Europeans”? Nietzsche’s New World Order Daniel Conway (bio) Call that in which the distinction of the European is sought civilization or humanization or progress, or call it simply—without praise or blame—using a political formula, Europe’s democratic movement: behind all the moral and political foregrounds to which such formulas point, a tremendous physiological process is taking place and gaining momentum. The Europeans are becoming more similar to each other [. . .] [T]he democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the cultivation of tyrants—taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual. —Beyond Good and Evil, Section 2421 Now that the so-called “Nietzschean century” has passed, superseded by an as-yet-unbranded century, I will take this opportunity to reconsider Friedrich Nietzsche’s prescient speculations on the future of Europe, European identity, and European culture. In particular, I wish to revisit three points that strike me as still relevant: 1) Nietzsche’s insistence on the irreducibly political role of European intellectuals; 2) his opposition to European nationalisms; and 3) his vision of a new world order with its center in a Europe reinvigorated by dint of a productive collaboration with its perceived Other. Nietzsche was a keen, if curmudgeonly, observer of contemporary Europe, and he specialized in delivering contrarian evaluations of the leading trends and movements of the time. He was famously unimpressed by, and downright contemptuous of, the progressive reforms, democratic ideals, and liberal institutions that arose and prevailed in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century. He treated these supposed indicators of progress as just so many symptoms of the cultural decay that threatened to extinguish, once and for all, the noble pathos of distance that formerly had informed and animated European culture. An inveterate traveler in his own right, he was deeply disturbed by what he took to be the social and political implications of the unprecedented mobility afforded Europeans in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These implications included an indiscriminate mixing of races and classes, which, he believed, would [End Page 40] only exacerbate the democratization of Europe and thereby accelerate the production of the “mishmash,” mongrelized European. Nietzsche’s contrarianism regularly placed him in diametric opposition to the received wisdom of his day. Appalled by the philistinism of Bismarck’s Reich, he awarded victory in the Franco-Prussian War to the vanquished French, who were enviably free to devote their resources to the development of a genuine culture. An unabashed Francophile,2 he closely followed the daring research conducted by French psychologists toward the end of the nineteenth century. Embarrassed by the unseemly scramble for Africa, he chastised his contemporaries for abandoning the cultural riches of their home to expropriate natural resources from far-flung colonies. At the same time, he relished the prospect of a Europe purged of the foul-smelling adventurers, sham idealists, and self-appointed guardians of Aryan purity—including, no doubt, his despised brother-in-law—who were intoxicated by the siren song of imperial expansion. Distraught by the disintegration of Europe into petty, squabbling splinter states, this self-proclaimed “good European” anticipated the reintegration of a distinctly European culture, which would stem the rising tide of nationalism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other manifestations of cultural decay. Attempting to pre-empt the Jewish Question, which, he rightly sensed, soon would become explosive, he argued for the assimilation of European Jews, even offering (in jest) to match Prussian officers with Jewish brides (BGE 251).3 As the sheer weight of these contrarian positions perhaps indicates, Nietzsche believed that he alone saw what was happening: Europe, his Europe, was disintegrating before his very eyes. Where others saw triumph, progress, advancement, and maturation, Nietzsche perceived loss, rupture, dislocation, and decay. He also realized, however, that this ongoing process of disintegration was only temporary, inasmuch as cultures and epochs naturally partake of cyclical patterns of growth and decay. Despite its current fascination with all things exotic and colonial, in fact, Europe wished to become one again, the mighty source of a noble, unifying culture (BGE 256). Before it could do so, however, Europe and its champions were obliged to...

SELF AND THE OTHER: MIMETIC DESIRE AND VIOLENCE IN STEPHEN CRANE’S “MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS” AND D. H. LAWRENCE’S “THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER”

This essay examines Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Prussian Officer”, in light of Rene Girard’s notion of mimetic desire. Girard argues that at the heart of interpersonal relationships is the desire for that which makes the Other being. In possession of this being, the Other becomes at first the model the subject reveres, and later, the rival the subject detests. For Girard, this is what stands at the heart of violence and disharmony in human societies. Violence or ritual sacrifice become the mechanisms capable of halting mimetic desire and bring back social order. In the two narratives analyzed, mimetic desire stands at the center of the protagonists’ existential crises and violent deaths.

Wissenschaft und Abenteuer in der Arktis

its beginning in 1868 German polar expeditions were focused on scientific exploration. History shows that around 1910 only well prepared and equipped expeditions were successful and could gain valuable experiences. The training expedition of the Bavarian officer Wilhelm Filchner who subsequently led the German Antarctic Expedition (1911–1912) was one of these. This is contrasted by the preliminary expedition to Nordaustlandet (Svalbard) of the west Prussian officer Herbert Schröder-Stranz. Other expeditions gave rise to longrangeinvestigations like the permanently occupied German Geophysical Observatory on Svalbard (1911–1914) established for the investigation of the upper air by aerological measurements to prepare a future exploration of the Arctic by airships.
 There was a long tradition for German scientific expeditions to Greenland, which is represented for instance by Alfred Wegener‘s meteorological programme to investigate the glacial anticyclone. The year 1930 was a fateful year for German polar research, when he died on the ice-cap and geologist Hans Kurt Erich Krueger vanished in the north Canadian archipelago. Both men represented science as well as adventure.
 International projects initiated or organised from the German side were always successful. Georg von Neumayer, director of the German Navy Observatory (Deutsche Seewarte), played an important role in organising the 1st International Polar Year (1882–1883) after the untimely death of Karl Weyprecht. Only extensive research without recognition of national borders would provide new scientific knowledge in meteorology and earth magnetics for weather forecast and shipping. After World War I economical ideas concerning the introductionof trans-arctic air traffic lead to the foundation of the International Society for the Exploration of the Arctic Regions by Means of Aircraft (Aeroarctic). In the meteorological planning of the first expedition with the airship LZ 127 “Graf Zeppelin” to the Russian Arctic, the results of the German Geophysical Observatory in Svalbard were used. This paper discusses the connections between science and adventure established through the German expeditions.

Metaphors of Modernity: Prostitutes, Bankers, and Other Jews in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes

Why are the brothels of modern French literature filled with Jewish prostitutes? From Vanda in Huysmans's A Rebours, qui remplissait chez Madame Laure l'indispensable role de la belle Juive (119), to in Maupassant's Mademoiselle Fifi, who kills a Prussian officer out of patriotic devotion, Jewish women seduce men powerless to resist their fatal attractions. Not do the walls of the bordello confine their numbers, which include both the glamorous actress Josepha in Balzac's Cousine Bette, whose deadly charm destroys respectable families, as well as the affreuse Juive of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, whose corps vendu inspires the poet with both lust and horror. Tapping into fantasies of the oriental exotic, fictional Jewish prostitutes, like Rachel quand du seigneur in Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu, perform a part that is always already a fiction, a sexual and racial masquerade designed to arouse mysterious passions: C'est une Juive! ca ne vous dit rien? tempts Rachel's procuress in Proust's novel, hoping to whet the appetite of the narrator; Pensez donc, mon petit, une Juive, il me semble que ca doit etre affolant! Rah! (556). Prostitution has emerged in recent years as a critical locus for investigations into the imbrication of the social and the symbolic in modern French culture. Following Alain Corbin's pathbreaking history of prostitution and its regulation in nineteenth-century France, T.J. Clark, Peter Brooks, Charles Bernheimer, and Jann Matlock have all pointed to the importance of the prostitute in the cultural imagination of the time, showing how the prostitute's body inscribes class as well as gender hierarchies. (1) Building on their work, I want to explore the ways in which this body becomes still more marked in certain narratives. How do the vexed categories of race and religion further inflect our understanding of an already overdetermined figure? And what does this figure have to tell us about modernity? My discussion will focus on perhaps the first, and certainly the paradigmatic, literary representation of the Jewish prostitute, Balzac's Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes, published between 1838 and 1847. The Jewish prostitute surfaces in French literature at just the moment (the July Monarchy) that significant numbers of French Jews rose to positions of prominence. (2) The decades of the 1830s and 40s also saw the transformations associated with modernity--by which I mean the economic, social, and cultural effects of industrial capitalism--begin to take root in French culture, especially in Paris. In what follows, I argue that the Jew comes to serve as a privileged screen for the projection of anxieties about modernity in both literature and other discourses from the time. But whereas the male Jew tends to incarnate the negative aspects of modernity, the Jewish prostitute embodies a far wider range of associations. A counterpoint to the scorned figure of the Jewish banker or usurer, the Jewish prostitute elicits desire as well as disgust, lust as well as loathing. She thus provides Balzac as well as later writers with a means of registering the complex affective ambivalence at the heart of modernity--an ambivalence that many theorists have tended to overlook. Balzac's ambivalent handling of the Jewish prostitute in Splendeurs et miseres, brings into focus the realist novel's conflicted relation to the culture of capitalism, which it simultaneously criticizes and mythologizes. Before turning to the novel, a historical question arises: was the Jewish prostitute actually a myth? Might this literary obsession have sprung from empirical rather than merely fantasmatic sources? Given that historical documents on nineteenth-century prostitution were themselves not immune to fantasmatic projections, such a question is difficult to answer with certainty. Anecdotes provide some evidence. We know, for example, that there were Jews among the upper crust of the capital's courtesans, who may have provided models for Balzac's Esther or Josepha: the Russian-born Therese Lachmann (known as La Paiva), as well as the Dutch-born mother of the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, achieved fame as professional demi-mondaines in Paris during the July Monarchy. …