Von Moltke Research Articles

STING is an intrinsic checkpoint inhibitor that restrains the TH17 cell pathogenic program.

SUMMARYExternal and intrinsic factors regulate the transcriptional profile of T helper 17 (TH17) cells, thereby affecting their pathogenic potential and revealing their context-dependent plasticity. The stimulator of interferon genes (STING), a component of the intracellular DNA-sensing pathway, triggers immune responses but remains largely unexplored in T cells. Here, we describe an intrinsic role of STING in limiting the TH17 cell pathogenic program. We demonstrate that non-pathogenic TH17 cells express higher levels of STING than those activated under pathogenic conditions. Activation of STING induces interleukin-10 (IL-10) production in TH17 cells, decreasing IL-17A and IL-23R expression in a type I interferon (IFN)-independent manner. Mechanistically, STING-induced IL-10 production partially requires aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) signaling, while the decrease of IL-17A expression occurs due to a reduction of Rorγt transcriptional activity. Our findings reveal a regulatory function of STING in the TH17 cell activation program, proposing it as a valuable target to limit TH17-cell-mediated inflammation.

Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge: Decolonizing the European Avant-Garde

Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge:Decolonizing the European Avant-Garde Thomas O. Haakenson (bio) The 2021 GSA Distinguished Lecture In the Thick of German Studies: The GSA Distinguished Lecture Series As part of the German Studies Association's cooperation with the Free University of Berlin's Program for Advanced German and European Studies, it was both an honor and a pleasure to launch our winter semester 2020/21 with the GSA Distinguished Lecture by Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor in Critical and Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts on October 20, 2021. In his timely contribution, Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge: Decolonizing the European Avantgarde, Professor Haakenson offered critical reflections on the European avant-garde's role in conceptualizing Western knowledge since the mid-nineteenth century. Haakenson's presentation was the ninth in our annual Distinguished Lecture Series. Initiated by GSA long-time Executive Director David Barclay, the series is designed to feature outstanding research by GSA members at Free University of Berlin and to strengthen ties between scholars working in these fields. We have had the privilege of hosting distinguished speakers on a broad array of subjects and it was David Barclay who delivered the first lecture on "Old Glory und Berliner Bär. Die USA und West-Berlin 1948–1994" in 2013. Suzanne Marchand followed in 2014 exploring "Orientalism and the Classical Tradition in Germany." For 2015, Joy Calico spoke on "Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe: Musical Remigration and Holocaust Commemoration." Irene Kacandes took up another timely subject in 2016 and examined possibilities for "Memory Work for/ in the 21st Century." In her 2017 intervention "The Proletarian Prometheus," Sabine Hake applied the notion of cultural appropriation to examine the working class's use of bourgeois cultural tropes for political empowerment. Exploring the statue of a Hawaiian female deity in Berlin's ethnological collection, H. Glenn Penny engaged with the public controversies around ethnological museums in Europe in his 2018 contribution "Kihawahine: German Ethnology and its Histories of the World." Another compelling matter was taken up by Johannes von Moltke in 2019 who explored "The Meme is the Message: Alt-Right/Neue Rechte and the Political Affordances of Social Media." A strong case for considering Europe as a progressive alternative to Trump's America was made by historian Konrad H. Jarausch in his 2020 lecture "Embattled Europe: A Progressive Alternative." [End Page 329] The GSA Distinguished Lecture Series has given us much food for thought in the last decade and has served the program's central mission, to deepen the understanding of Germany and Europe in an exemplary way. Karin Goihl, Berlin Program Academic Coordinator, Free University of Berlin [End Page 330] The Wonderful World of Words My aunt Hiede Miyazaki was born in Kumamoto, Japan, on March 10, 1931. She was an excellent student, preparing at the end of World War II for college when her father passed away from cancer (Figure 1). At seventeen years old, she became the family's primary provider, often working several jobs and going hungry to support her mother, four siblings, and herself. Eventually, Hiede's English-language skills led to a position with the US Armed Forces at Camp Kumamoto and later on at both Itazuke Air Base in Fukuoka and Johnson Air Base in Tokyo. She continued her creative practice at the same time and became a skilled, much-sought-after Japanese Sumi-E artist, exhibiting widely and teaching classes in mainland Japan, the United States, Canada, and Germany. In the early 1960s, my Aunt Hiede met, and shortly thereafter married, my Uncle Gene. They were together for almost fifty-eight years. My first encounter with Germany, with German culture and the German language, was made possible thanks to my Aunt Hiede. In 1987, when I was fifteen years old, I flew to Germany to visit her and my Uncle Gene, who at the time lived in a small town in southern Germany near a US military base. I traveled alone transatlantically, with no German language skills and, quite frankly, a rather limited grasp of the English language as well. It was only my second time aboard an...

Monetary policy in a world of radical uncertainty

Monetary policy in a world of radical uncertainty

Approximating absolute war: The transformation of Prusso-German force structure under Helmuth von Moltke the elder

The following essay will serve as a historical case study on sound theory as the basis of strategic decision making. The argument is that Helmuth von Moltke the elder undertook a systematic transformation of the Prussian force structure to make his wars approximate Carl von Clausewitz’s philosophical abstraction of absolute war. That is, he sought to reorganize the Great General Staff (GGS) to produce an instantaneous discharge of force, both immediate and decisive in its results. In doing so, he produced a military strategy to overcome the geopolitical perils inhering in the nascent Prusso-German state, resulting ultimately in the unification of Germany. We then briefly relate the deductive lessons on the relationship between strategic theory and practice evidenced by Moltke to the contemporary crisis of Anglo-American theory.

Complicity and Lesser Evils: A Tale of Two Lawyers

Government lawyers and other public officials sometimes face an excruciating moral dilemma: to stay on the job or to quit, when the government is one they find morally abhorrent. Staying may make them complicit in evil policies; it also runs the danger of inuring them to wrongdoing, just as their presence on the job helps inure others. At the same time, staying may be their only opportunity to mitigate those policies – to make evils into lesser evils – and to uphold the rule of law when it is under assault. This Article explores that dilemma in a stark form: through the moral biographies of two lawyers in the Third Reich, both of whom stayed on the job, and both of whom can lay claim to mitigating evil. One, Helmuth James von Moltke, was an anti-Nazi, and a martyr of the resistance; the other, Bernhard Losener, was a Nazi by conviction who nevertheless claimed to have secretly fought against the persecution of Jews from the improbable post of legal adviser on Jewish matters. The Article critically examines their careers and self-justifications. It frames its analysis through two philosophical arguments: Hannah Arendt’s stern injunction that staying on the job is self-deception or worse, because like it or not, obedience is support; and a contemporary analysis of moral complicity by Chiara Lepora and Robert Goodin. The chief question, with resonance today as well as historically, is whether Arendt is right – and, if not, under what conditions lesser-evilism can succeed. This article will appear in a symposium with comments by Leora Bilsky and Natalie Davidson, Kathleen Clark, Erica Newland, and Shannon Prince.

Legal Ethics in Authoritarian Legality: A Response to David Luban

In “Complicity and Lesser Evils: A Tale of Two Lawyers” David Luban considers the dilemma of a decent person employed by the government or offered a government position in an evil regime. Through an analysis of two legal advisors in the Third Reich, Bernhard Losener and Helmuth James von Moltke, who remained on the job and arguably saved lives, Luban challenges Hannah Arendt’s contention that remaining in office in these conditions is necessarily to support the regime. In this response, we remain within Luban’s primarily consequentialist perspective, and ask, like him, whether any good can be done by lawyers staying on the job. However, we challenge his analytical framework for being overly individualist and agentist. We argue that, if we expand our perspective to the structure of evil regimes and the ways they inflict harm, we will notice important consequences of remaining and leaving that Luban fails to take into account. In particular, we argue that understanding the complex part played by legal institutions and legal discourse in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes would lead to the realization that lawyers face a particularly sharp dilemma in such regimes, as both their possibilities of doing good and of strengthening the regime are strong. We proceed in three steps. First, we show that Luban’s analysis is narrowly focused on individual agency. We then draw on scholarship on the Third Reich, bureaucratic crimes, and authoritarian uses of law to outline the structural characteristics and legal foundations of authoritarian wrongs. Finally, equipped with this theoretical background, we analyze anew the lawyer’s dilemma. Applying a structural perspective cognizant of the role of law in repression to the stories of Losener and Moltke as well as of two other lawyers in the Third Reich, Ernst Fraenkel and Georg Konrad Morgen, we argue that the lawyer’s dilemma is more difficult to resolve than Luban suggests.

Camden House German Film Classics Series ed. by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke

Camden House German Film Classics Series ed. by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke

Pietistische Konkurrenz und Naturgeschichte: Die Südasienmission der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine und die Dänisch-Englisch-Hallesche Mission (1755–1802)

Pietistische Konkurrenz und Naturgeschichte: Die Südasienmission der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine und die Dänisch-Englisch-Hallesche Mission (1755–1802)

Etching and Rewards of Uncertainty


 
 
 The process of etching is physical and elemental, requiring force and pressure, inviting aggression and then delicacy, conjoining fire, water, earth, and air. There is something about setting an image into metal that implies permanence, duration, and enduring presence, and I hope my images mirror the medium in that sense. I embrace themes of loss, futility, destruction, and unexpected, redemptive beauty, themes tied to the tradition of printmaking, whose imagery has always tended toward critical commentary and serious contemplation, and often toward humor and irony as well.
 Fail; fail again; fail better - Samuel Beckett
 No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy - Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke
 
 

З ІСТОРІЇ КОНКУРЕНТНОЇ БОРОТЬБИ НІМЕЦЬКИХ ТА РАДЯНСЬКИХ ТАНКОБУДІВНИКІВ У РОКИ ДРУГОЇ СВІТОВОЇ ВІЙНИ

Europe’s military theorists analyzed the course and results of the war, the causes of victories and defeats. One of them was German infantry general Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorf, in the past commander-in-chief of the Western Front during the First World War. His basic theoretical views on the preparation and conduct of an aggressive war were outlined in the book “Total War”, which was published in 1935. The essence of the theory was to preserve and consolidate the domination of the German people in the world solely through wars against other peoples. One of the main components of the concept of such a war is the theory of “lightning war”. It is a misconception among the public that this theory was developed by Nazi Ger- many’s military experts, that is, Hitler’s entourage. The plan for the “lightning war” belongs to the chief of operations of the General Staff of the Prussian Army, General Field Marshal Alfred von Schliffen, which he de- veloped in 1905. To secure the military industry. That is, a country cannot wage a long and simultaneous war on two fronts against the historic allies of France and Russia, whose banking system was entirely dependent on French money. Therefore, in order to successfully wage war, it is necessary to accumulate forces and means, while simulta- neously using all their mass, to conduct a fleeting (“lightning”) war, first with France, and after the victory over it – with Russia, in order to further capture the human and natural resources of these countries. The plan for the “lightning war” was first refined in 1906 by Helmut von Moltke Jr., who succeeded Schliffen, and then General E. Ludendorff, who closely linked the plan to his theory of “total war”. Hitler relied on this theory. This made it possible to succeed in a lightning-fast military campaign, where the primary purpose was to put an end to the enemy’s vigilance, to stun abruptness, to invade quickly and, thanks to large tank formations that would destroy the enemy’s defense, to advance deep into the country, to use mercilessness and intimidation to succeed. to the population, to paralyze his will and make him capitulate. With these methods, the Nazis calculated to defeat their opponents individually, pre- venting their efforts to join forces in supporting the aggressor. German military leaders hoped to win the war mainly through tanks and aircraft. The decisive role was planned to be achieved by encircling and destroying the enemy with the help of tank ticks and wedges. The purpose of the article is to understand how the principles of tank building in Nazi Germany and the USSR differed and how it affected the course of the war. The main role of the strike force in this case, was assigned to the tank group. Thus, throughout the Second World War, engineers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union developed a “rivalry” in the design and manufacture of the best in their combat capabilities of the tank.

HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF MODERN SOCIOLOGY OF WAR

Problem setting. Humanity entered the era of globalization, which is characterized by a number of factors - national economies have melded into a single global system where the capital can easily move, new information opportunities have made the world more open, the technological revolution has led to a qualitative change in the means of production and consumption, the planetary scientific revolution has become a reality; developed industrial countries are striving to liberalization of the movement of goods and capital, the world is moving closer together on the basis of modern means of communication; new international social movements, new modes of transport, new telecommunication technologies are being implemented, education is being internationalized. However, all these innovations have not made the issue of war less burning. World society has faced the trend of increasing wars and armed conflicts in the world over the past decades and in the total number of killed and injured have grown as a result of hostilities.Recent research and publications analysis. Numerous works written on the target topic indicate that the issues of war as a specific phenomenon in the life of human society have always been and remain in the focus of attention of thinkers, scientists, researchers of the past and the present time. In particular, the thorough analysis of the essence, content, forms of war, its features and laws have been carried out in the works written by V. F. Hegel, F. Engels, C. von Clausewitz, B. Liddel-Hart, N. Machiavelli, V. Mandragel, H. von Moltke, C. Moscos, J. Friedman, F. Fukuyama, S. Huntington, R. Aron, K. Hajiyev, M. Gareev, V. Slipchenko, V. Smolyanyuk, E. Toffler, M. Trebin, I. Panarin, V. Serebryannikov and so on.Paper objective. The goal of this paper is to specify the historical background of the formation of modern sociology of war.Paper main body. The article deals with the views on the war in a historical perspective, focuses on the methodological grounds of the armed confrontation, which started after the Second World War when the most developed countries developed a powerful military-industrial complex dominating in politics and economics. Potential opponents sought to overtake each other, to shift the developed military-strategic parity pursuing own benefit. They begin to develop nuclear missile weapons, which radically changed the concept of war over a short time. Due to the increase in the power of nuclear weapons, the leading authorities in the world military sphere and subsequently the military-political leaders of the countries-members of the nuclear club gradually started to understand that one of the long-term tasks is to contain the use of nuclear weapons by the enemy.The article emphasizes that the late 1950s - early 1960s are characterized by a significant increase in attention to the theoretical problems of war and peace. This is due to the creation of the military-political blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Since then many publications have appeared which focus the primacy of politics over the military sphere. Military theorists understand that the outbreak of war to solve political goals could lead to irreversible consequences. At the end of the 20th century with the beginning of globalization, many concepts arose to search for the causes of wars. The confrontation of the West with the rest of the world in the face of growing multi-polarity can become a cause of war and conflict at the beginning of the third millennium.The article also highlights the concept of mutiny war, which is seen as a new form of armed conflict, in which the future wars would be waged by small terrorist cells and special forces, gaining influence by subversion and organised revolutions rather than through traditional warfare.Conclusions of the research. Numerous theoretical and practical issues related to determining the laws of war, its essence and features as well as to transforming the goals, scope, nature and means of armed struggle and the importance of the human factor for the consequences of hostilities for a particular country and humanity as a whole should be considered on the basis of recognizing the fact that the phenomenon of war is eternal, inevitable and unavoidable. The views and concepts that were formed in the second half of the 20th century have not rejected and condemned armed violence but also approved and legitimized it, adapted to the needs of foreign policy and even have rationalized it. Political and military leaders have sought to make people consider the war in all its forms and violence as a common phenomenon that states and people can tolerate in their relations. The probability of using armed violence in the system of the modern world order can easily become a reality.

The Moltke Myth in German–Turkish relation

AbstractHelmuth von Moltke, who worked in the Ottoman Empire between 1835 and 1839, is generally considered the founder of German–Turkish friendship. However, it is forgotten that close relations between Prussia and the Ottoman Empire began under Frederick the Great. This article will deal with Moltke's role in Prussian–Ottoman relations on the basis of literature, testimonies, and files. Here, the contradiction between the low importance of his activity in the Ottoman Empire and the well‐kept myth of his person as a central identification figure for the German–Turkish relations becomes clear. The study focuses on the German perspective but also incorporates the Turkish Moltke myth.

Pre-Face, Sur-Face, Inter-Face, Post-Face: The Horror Story of <em>Goodnight Mommy</em>

Pre-Face, Sur-Face, Inter-Face, Post-Face:The Horror Story of Goodnight Mommy Olivia Landry (bio) The opening scene of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's 2014 Austrian horror film Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh ich seh) is an obscene preface (Figure 1). A dirndl-clad mother encircled by seven beaming and utterly Aryan-looking children all sing Johannes Brahms's putatively halcyon lullaby "Guten Abend, gute Nacht" ("Good Evening, Good Night"). For a horror film about a brutal matricide, this excessively harmonious first image appears to do nothing more than adumbrate its own violent demise. Foreboding is already contained in this singular image and its soundtrack. In particular, the lullaby's ominously coded message introduces the present film as a dream that could easily turn into a nightmare, sleep unto death: Morgen früh, wenn Gott will,wirst du wieder geweckt [Tomorrow morning, if God wills,You will be awoken once again] The obscenity of this image lies not only in what Marina Warner would refer to as the terror of death so often embedded in the lullaby but also in its cinematic citation.1 This grainy and harshly [End Page 90] saturated image would be uncannily familiar to an Austrian viewer (or a German one, for that matter). Framed like a picture by the black screen, it is an Ur-image from the national cinematic album. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The familial choir singing a lullaby in a citation of The Trapp Family (1956) that opens Goodnight Mommy (2014). This image was extracted from the final scene of Wolfgang Liebeneiner's 1956 West German classic film The Trapp Family (Die Trapp-Familie), which later went on to inspire a sequel, The Trapp Family in America (Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika, 1958), as well as the famed musical and film The Sound of Music (1965). The image's appearance here seems to recast a revisionist past in cinematic anticipation of its own rebuke. Historically based on among other things this Austrian family's flight from the Nazis, The Trapp Family (and the aesthetics of this final scene in particular) is inescapably part of the apolitical ethos of an archive of films from the 1950s often subsumed under the genre Heimatfilm. These features routinely served to present nostalgic and even escapist narratives to German-language audiences in which tradition, nationalism (pre-Nazism, of course), family, and a return to the simplicity and the idyllic nature of the hinterland was intended to offer temporary respite from the onerous memory of the horror of the recent past. While Johannes von Moltke has persuasively argued for the critical recovery of the Heimatfilm as not only an important Germanlanguage film genre, one that Thomas Elsaesser calls "Germany's only indigenous and historically most enduring genre,"2 but also one rich in nuance, the films of this genre still remain linked to a historical legacy of parochialism and repression of historical violence. Addressing this repressed history of violence has been a task [End Page 91] of much Austrian cinema since the early 1990s, as exemplified by many of Michael Haneke's German-language films. To paraphrase German film critic Katja Nicodemus, contemporary Austrian cinema is born of muted screams and carefully swabbed blood.3 But while critics have largely praised Goodnight Mommy for its ability to conjure up horror in the simplicity of the domestic and the quotidian with notable comparison to Haneke's 1997 Funny Games, Franz and Fiala's film has not been examined in much depth, and the filmmakers, both new to the director's chair, remain relatively unknown.4 Yet at a time when Austria, indeed much of Europe, has been swept up in a wave of frightening new nativism with the late 2017 election of the populist Austrian People's Party, which formed a coalition with the extreme right-wing Freedom Party of Austria, founded after World War II by former members of the Nazi Party, I propose that this film invokes some startling observations about cinema and politics.5 At the site of the face, cinema shows itself as a violent medium of the history and politics of whiteness in Europe and in Austria...

Abstract 4088: First-in-human dose selection for ALKS 4230, an investigational immunotherapeutic agent

Abstract ALKS 4230 is an engineered fusion protein comprised of a circularly permuted interleukin-2 (IL-2) and the IL-2 receptor (IL-2R) α chain, CD25, designed to selectively activate the intermediate-affinity IL-2R, but not the high-affinity IL-2R. Selective activation of the intermediate-affinity IL-2R by ALKS 4230 has the potential to provide enhanced tumor killing as well as improved safety and tolerability. Various in vitro and in vivo studies were conducted to characterize the primary and secondary pharmacodynamics (PD) of ALKS 4230 as well as its pharmacokinetics (PK). The results guided the selection of the starting dose for the ALKS 4230 first-in-human (FIH) clinical study based upon the Minimal Anticipated Biological Effect Level (MABEL) approach. The PK-PD relationship for ALKS 4230 was evaluated in in vitro pharmacology studies in target cells from murine, non-human primate and human donors. The mean EC10 values for activation of NK cells, memory CD8 T-cells and Tregs in target cells from human donors were 0.09, 0.18 and 0.13 nM, respectively. Using the lowest EC10 value of 0.09 nM (0.0031µg/mL) as a surrogate for the MABEL, assuming IV administration to a 70 kg human with 3 L plasma volume, a dose of 0.1 µg/kg would be expected to result in an immediate post-dose concentration of 0.0031 µg/mL. The mean EC50 values for activation of NK cells, memory CD8 T cells and Tregs in target cells from human donors were 0.46, 1.1 and 0.59 nM, respectively. Using the EC50 value as surrogate for minimal effective ALKS 4230 concentration that induces activation of human IL-2R complex, the projected minimal efficacious dose (MED) in humans to achieve a concentration of 0.46 nM (0.016 µg/mL) to 1.1 nM (0.038 µg/mL) is 0.7- 1.6 µg/kg. Based on a MABEL dose of 0.1 µg/kg and projected MED of 0.7- 1.6 µg/kg, the proposed doses to be evaluated in the FIH Phase 1 study are 0.1, 0.3, 1, 3, 10, and 30 µg/kg. In comparison, the projected Cmax at the proposed starting dose of 0.1 µg/kg is > 750-fold lower than the Cmax at the no-observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) in a repeat-dose toxicology study in monkeys. It is also about 3-fold lower than the lowest concentration of ALKS 4230 (0.01 µg/mL) tested in the cytokine release assays at which only slight elevations were observed for IL-6, IL-8, and IFN-γ in a small number of whole blood samples from healthy human donors, similar to those in the low-response control across the concentration range evaluated. Therefore, 0.1 µg/kg is considered a safe starting dose for the FIH study. The PK, PD and toxicology assessments conducted to date support the FIH investigation of ALKS 4230 at the proposed starting dose of 0.1 µg/kg. Citation Format: Lei Sun, Heather C. Losey, Juan Alvarez, Lisa von Moltke, William J. Slichenmyer. First-in-human dose selection for ALKS 4230, an investigational immunotherapeutic agent [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 4088. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-4088

The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America by Johannes von Moltke

Book Review| June 01 2017 The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America by Johannes von Moltke BOOK DATA Johannes von Moltke, The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. $70.00 cloth. $34.95 paper. $34.95 e-book. 336 pages. Ido Lewit Ido Lewit IDO LEWIT is a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and in Film and Media at Yale University. He is the co-editor of Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image (Wallflower Press, 2016) and the author of several articles on the topic of Kafka and cinema. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2017) 70 (4): 131–133. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2017.70.4.131 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ido Lewit; The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America by Johannes von Moltke. Film Quarterly 1 June 2017; 70 (4): 131–133. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2017.70.4.131 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Optics of Orientation: Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Kaufman in Moscow

The Optics of Orientation: Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Kaufman in Moscow John Hoffmann (bio) How would a film look if Walter Benjamin had been behind the movie camera? Miriam Hansen entertains this possibility in Cinema and Experience (2012) when she speculates about an “imaginary city film” made according to Benjamin’s aesthetic principles. Such a film, Hansen writes, would include a variety of avant-garde techniques “from French Impressionism to Soviet experimental cinema, in particular montage (that is, discontinuous and rhythmic editing), nonconventional and expressive framing, and camera movement.”1 Yet Hansen’s version of a Benjaminian film practice is inferred almost entirely from Benjamin’s film theory, while his descriptive essays on European cities—“Naples,” “Marseilles,” and the focus of this article, “Moscow” (1927)—are missing from her authoritative survey of Benjamin’s thought. That “Moscow” is absent from Hansen’s analysis follows a tendency in Benjamin scholarship to treat the essay as a minor work, as either a methodological precedent for his landmark study of Paris, the Arcades Project or, worse, a byproduct of an autobiographical curiosity, the Moscow Diary (1986).2 This article brings “Moscow” to the fore and derives from this densely visual text a Benjaminian film practice grounded in his impressions of the Soviet capital. Rather than project Benjamin’s later film-theoretical claims onto his experience of the city, I argue that his depictions of daily life and cultural transformations underway in Moscow were decisive for his developing views on cinematic perception. Benjamin spent two months in the Soviet capital during the winter of 1926–27, and in “Moscow” he blends luminous street [End Page 751] scenes with probing judgments of the cultural and political atmosphere under party rule, reporting the tumultuous effects of the New Economic Program, along with the uncertain transition unfolding in the wake of Lenin’s death in 1924.3 Unlike Berlin, where Benjamin was born and spent most of his life, and Paris, whose cultural world he reconstructs in the Arcades Project, Moscow remains distant, foreign, inscrutable to Benjamin, even as it threatens to overwhelm both him and his reader with the sheer volume of its concrete sensory stimuli. The Revolution is the thread that binds the disparate elements of the essay into a coherent whole, and Benjamin organizes his experience of Moscow through formal techniques that are correspondingly dialectical. Graeme Gilloch remarks that Benjamin’s city essays “aspire to be textual equivalents of the cinematographic” because among all artistic media, “film captures the fleeting, fluid character of the modern metropolitan environment” (Myth and Metropolis, 45). While it is true that “Moscow” contains filmic elements, the essay does not find Benjamin subordinating textuality to cinematic verisimilitude (45–46).4 Instead, he links cinema to an exploration of literary form, as in metaphors whose vehicles consist of the cinematic apparatus itself, rhetorical figures that foreground their literariness while underlining their connection to cinematic technology. Benjamin’s film practice thus comes closer to what Johannes von Moltke has recently dubbed “media promiscuity”—the fictional exploration of cinematic themes not reducible to filmic writing as such—which von Moltke claims was a response to the experience of exile on the part of classical film theorists.5 Neither a work of fiction nor a product of exile, “Moscow” nevertheless registers a deep sense of cultural estrangement that renovates Benjamin’s critical gaze: “what is true of the image of the city and its people applies also to the intellectual situation: a new optics is the most undoubted gain from a stay in Russia,” Benjamin testifies. “However little you may know Russia,” he continues, “what you learn is to observe and judge Europe with the conscious knowledge of what is going on in Russia.”6 With his ability “to observe and judge” inflected by the real effects of revolutionary change, Benjamin channels a “new optics” through his descriptions of Moscow, a film practice that occurs amid a range of intermedial strategies used to document a city as it dismantles the oppositions between urban and rural, labor and capital, art and life (“Moscow,” 22).7 Benjamin’s engagement with visual media finds a serendipitous counterpart in a neglected city-film—a real, not imaginary one...

Small Forces and Crisis Management

ABSTRACT: Widely available precision strike platforms, increasing weapons costs and systemic constraints on major war are altering how military actors prepare for future conflict. As the costs increase and the utility of fielding massed formations decreases, actors seek speed and surprise to force decisions short of escalating into costly major wars. The character of conflict is therefore evolving to favor small, multi-domain forces, which will require new approach to crisis management. ********** Multiple US military services are experimenting with how to use smaller formations for missions ranging from crisis response to forced entry. The Unified Quest 2014 exercise, the deep futures war game run by the Army Capabilities Integration Center, featured units engaged what the new operating concept refers to as combined arms megacity. (1) Bold Alligator 2014, the annual multinational littoral warfare exercise, experimented with smaller amphibious assault formations operating from Joint High-Speed Vessels and dry cargo ships, as well as long-range raids using MV-22 Osprey. (2) The force under examination was composite, linking distributed units with fly in command echelon. Other nations are also beginning to experiment with smaller, multi-domain (i.e., air, sea, land, cyber) formations designed to fight short, intense conflicts. As part of an ongoing conventional force modernization since 2008, the Russian military is fielding modernized brigade combat team formations and smaller battalion tactical groups. (3) Based on lessons learned from the near-war with Pakistan 2001, and the ongoing challenge of balancing China, India is testing integrated battle groups and formations able to launch short-notice attacks beneath the threshold major theater war. (4) The trend extends to armed proxies. As seen Crimea 2014, and ongoing Iranian support to groups like Hezbollah, regional powers are arming their proxies with increasingly sophisticated weapon systems. Despite different core missions and mandates as well as external threats, multiple security actors are clearly signaling preferences for smaller, modernized joint forces. What do these initiatives tell us about potential changes the character of modern war? Are the reforms simply local adaptions to anticipated conflicts, or do they indicate larger pattern? This article analyzes the trend towards smaller, multi-domain force capabilities global and regional powers. It argues that the character of contemporary conflict is being changed by the proliferation of precision strike and associated command, control, communication, computer, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems combined with an assumption that conflicts will be fought beneath the threshold of major war. These forces are altering how officers imagine future war. As result, military thinkers appear to be developing new concepts and forces substituting speed and multiple domain maneuver for mass on the battlefield. The end result may be new theory of victory. (5) Multiple nations are planning to use smaller, modernized combat formations to signal their capabilities and gain advantage crisis, and if necessary, fight and win short wars either directly or through proxies. Character(s) of War? Analyzing emergent trends across armed forces is an old idea military studies. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800-1890) hypothesized the changing character of war was function of how new material conditions, from railroads to telegraphs, changed the speed of mobilization and the character of war. Reflecting on his time, Moltke observed, a change the tactics of all branches based on the fact that ... the firepower of an infantry platoon [today] surpasses the range and destructive effect of the case-shot of six-pounder cannon. (6) Despite their differences, Russian military theorists Marshal Aleksander A. …

기병 돌격 전술의 쇠퇴와 기병 개혁의 실패: 프로이센-프랑스 전쟁(1870~1871)을 중심으로

Many historians have now focused upon the Franco-Prussian War as in terms the military systems, the role of firearms, railroad, telegraph and other technological aspects. However, besides the issues mentioned above, there was another noticeable point that the charge of cavalry on the European battlefield disappeared by the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Meanwhile, although the charge of cavalry already proved to be useless against rifle-armed infantry like Minie-bullet-firing rifled muskets and breech loading rifles, historians are intrigued as to why cavalry persisted with these assaults in the Franco-Prussian War. Thus, this article aims to analyze the reasons for the decline of cavalry charge tactics and to inquire into the reasons why the French and Prussian armies failed to institute any reform and continued to order cavalry to charge. Cavalry had held the leading role on the battlefield due to its shock charges. After the introduction of firearms, cavalry charges slowly waned. In the mid 19th century, with the rapid development of accurate firearms with improved rates of fire, cavalry was diminished in the role of shock charge. This phenomenon occurred in the Crimean War and the Austro- Prussian War. In addition, cavalry in the American Civil War carried out the role of mounted infantry and strategic raids, replacing the traditional role of engaging in shock tactics. The observers who were officially or unofficially dispatched from the French and Prussian armies informed European countries of these lessons of cavalry`s use on the battlefield. Despite these facts, the French and Prussian neither gave up in shock charge, nor were determined to implement the demands of cavalry reformation, as represented the cavalry`s tactics lack of evolution. The French did not alter the traditional role of cavalry because of the romantic legacy of the Napoleonic shock charges. And although the organization and tactics of the Prussian cavalry were partially altered by Von Moltke and Von der Goltz, it did not mean that they discarded all thoughts of traditional shock charges. Both countries continued to believe that shock charges could decide the outcome of the battles. This was demonstrated, at the Battle of Froeschwiller, where the French Reserve Cavalry charged the right wing of the Prussian infantry line, and at the Battle of Mars-la-Tour, where the Prussian cavalry succeeded in smashing the centre of the French defense line. In sum, in spite of repeated efforts by cavalry, cavalry charges seldom influenced the result of battle.

The origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and military documents by Anika Mombauer (review)

Reviewed by: The origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and military documents by Anika Mombauer Andrew Iarocci Mombauer, Anika – The origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and military documents. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, Pp. 660. Anika Mombauer is an authority on the origins and opening phases of the First World War. She has authored Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2001); The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (Longman, 2002); and Die Julikrise. Europas Weg in den Ersten Weltkrieg (C.H. Beck Verlag, Munich, 2014). The origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and military documents complements Mombauer’s earlier scholarship on the path to war and the conflict’s outbreak. The collection is arranged in two sections. Part I includes source material from 1911-1914, the period of “avoided wars.” Part II covers the July Crisis of 1914 and the onset of war. In both parts, the documents are organized [End Page 829] chronologically into chapters. Each of the four chapters in Part I covers one calendar year (1911 through 1914), while the documents in Part II are organized in seven chapters that follow the complex decision-making threads leading from the first moments after Franz Ferdinand’s death to the first shots of the war. While there may have been other ways to organize the documents—by nation or region for example—Mombauer’s arrangement is most suitable, as it underscores the cumulative impact of decisions and reactions as the crisis evolved from the diplomatic realm to the battlefield. Mombauer’s selections come from official or archival collections, as well as published memoirs, diaries, and letters. Some of the documents in the selection are familiar, while others have only recently been rediscovered since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents give voice to a broad range of speakers. Many of them were prominent political or military leaders from the major powers; others came from smaller states, and will be lesser known to most English-speaking readers. Beyond her editing and translation work, Mombauer has added considerable value to the documents with a general introduction on the historiography of the First World War’s origins, as well as shorter introductory remarks at the beginning of Parts I and II. She opens each chapter with a brief contextual statement. And at the top of each document, Mombauer names the relevant historical actors (speaker, recipient, or audience, as applicable), and summarizes the essential content of the document in a few words. Understandably, in the interests of brevity, Mombauer does not attach biographical information to historical actors in each document. Instead, she has included a glossary of names that includes key information such as nationality, rank, appointment, and term of service. Readers will need to look elsewhere for further contextual information on the historical actors however. In sum this selection of documents illuminates a series of significant controversial issues. Among the most important of these, we see how decision-makers in Berlin and Vienna came to view Franz Ferdinand’s assassination as a timely pretext for war (178, 185, 192-193). Some of the documents help to clarify France’s ambiguous role in the July crisis. We find clear evidence, for example, that the French were determined to stand firm behind Russia as Nicholas II ordered general mobilization (pp. 463-465). From a transnational perspective, it also emerges that military staffs across Europe tended to push their civilian leaders toward mobilization, despite misgivings that it would provoke war (pp. 458-459, 483). This collection of documents will be useful to specialists in diplomatic and military history of the First World War period, as well as instructors and students who seek convenient access to a cross-section of primary material on the origins of First World War. [End Page 830] Andrew Iarocci University of Western Ontario Copyright © 2014 Histoire sociale / Social History

Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer Edited by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke (review)

Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer Edited by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke (review)