War Guilt Research Articles

"I Just Have to Do What I Can": "Mobile Suit Gundam 0079" and the Burdens of War

The implications of the Asia-Pacific War persisted throughout the 20th century. Since 1945, Japan found itself in an endless conflict between various approaches at remembering the war and had to deal with the ways that these memories pervade public life. The 1970s saw a resurgence of pro-nationalist media, specifically in animation. As an entertainment medium, animation has proven itself to be a popular and receptive outlet for both creative and political expression. In 1979, Tomino Yoshiyuki's Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 first aired in Japan, which launched the Mobile Suit Gundam series. Gundam's historiography consists of analyses of the cinematic remakes of Mobile Suit Gundam 0079, close examinations of later entries, and a thematic approach of the entire series. This paper builds upon the argument that Gundam is a critique of war, and that Tomino specifically criticizes Imperial Japan's policies in the Asia-Pacific War, unlike industry contemporaries. By analyzing selections from the original Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 television series, focusing on major and minor side characters, and connecting this analysis with the experiences of Japanese soldiers during the war, Tomino makes his views apparent to the audience. A conversation between Gundam 0079's protagonist's father and a soldier that would later become an important part of the show and an examination of the main cast of teenage characters as they begin their journey, reveal Tomino's opinions towards the use of child soldiers, a "filler" episode of a rogue soldier protecting a group of defenseless children he previously traumatized illustrates the power of war guilt, and a brief profiling of a major character in the show touches upon the agony of involuntarily participating in war.

Od prisluškivanja činovnika do istraživanja međunarodnog društva

The paper analyses historical developments in the discipline of the history of international relations, from its origins in the nineteenth century until present day. It provides an overview of numerous approaches and topics that have driven its development over the previous two centuries. The article focuses on the evolution of the history of international relations in its American and Western European variations. In the first part, the origin and the activity of diplomatic history are examined in the context of the emergence of professional historiography. At that time, diplomatic history narrowly focused on studying the political and diplomatic relations between states and was the most prominent topic in political and intellectual discourse. Its significance further intensified following the First World War, when the topic of war guilt emerged as one of the major interwar political issues. In the second part, the study discusses the evolution of diplomatic history into a broader international history, emphasizing social, economic and ideological aspects. The shift happened as a result of the rising interest in social and economic history following World War II and manifested itself throughout specific discussions in various countries. It was also marked by increased uneasiness and self-criticism that historians of international affairs have become prone to. Following that, the paper explores the impact of new theoretical approaches and thematic concerns, that emerged as a result of the cultural turn, on the practice and the shape of international history. It now includes not only interstate relations, but also a diverse set of actors such as international organizations, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations and networks of researchers, scientists and experts, all of which have been studied through the lenses of ideas, ideology, gender, beliefs, language, memory, value and perceptions.

The “One Guilty Nation” Myth: Edith Durham, R.W. Seton-Watson and a Footnote in the History of the Outbreak of the First World War

ABSTRACT This paper will investigate the development of the War Guilt Question in interwar Europe through an examination of the dispute between two of Britain’s leading experts on the Balkans, Mary Edith Durham and R.W. Seton-Watson. The locus of their disagreement centred on the question of Serbian complicity in the plot to murder Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, and the subsequent debate over their responsibility for the outbreak of War. The dispute was prompted by revelations published by Ljuba Jovanović, former Serb Minister of Public Instruction. The debate over the Serb complicity in the Sarajevo crime, fundamentally shifted the debate over responsibility for the failure of peace in 1914, moving the focus away from Berlin, back to the Balkans.

Die völkerrechtliche Bedeutung des Vertrages von Saint-Germain-en-Laye im Lichte der österreichisch-tschechoslowakischen Beziehungen

Within the Paris Peace Order, the Treaty of Saint‐Germain‐en‐Laye provides the legal basis for the newly establishedRepublic of Austria: it defines its borders and name, regulates the protection of minorities, the army, war guilt orreparations, establishes a system of international peace maintenance, and deals with consequences of the dissolutionof the Habsburg Empire. Considering core elements of the treaty, central aspects of the Austrian‐Czechoslovak relationsbecome visible: the existence of Austria as an independent state, including its economic survival, the limitationof its military capability, or the protection of its minorities. They reveal one baseline of the interstate and internationalrelations: Austria, which was ought to be “the rest”, should continue to exist in this form.

The War Guilt Clause and the Rise of Adolf Hitler

After the fall of Nazi Germany during World War II, the allied powers issued harsh reparation payments that burdened the German economy and humiliated the Germans. Most importantly, the War Guilt Clause led Germany into an economic and social turmoil, which in turn paved the path for the rise of radical extremists like Adolf Hitler.

An Early Expression of Max Weber’s Thoughts on Germany’s “War Guilt”

An Early Expression of Max Weber’s Thoughts on Germany’s “War Guilt”

On the Theme of “War Guilt”

On the Theme of “War Guilt”

The Tannenberg myth in history and literature, 1914–1945

ABSTRACTThe Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914 has been described as the ‘most powerful German myth’ of the First World War. This essay analyses the role of the battle in German collective memory up to the end of the Third Reich. During the war, the victory in East Prussia was celebrated widely and greatly contributed to the personality cult surrounding Paul von Hindenburg. After 1918, Tannenberg served right-wing circles as a political argument against the post-war order, evoked to underscore the notion of German victimhood against Slav ‘encirclement’, the ‘war guilt lie’ and the territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. However, it never really captured the attention or imagination of writers and artists. Linked primarily to national-conservative groups and ideals, Tannenberg was also of no major significance in National Socialist propaganda.

From «East to West», the «world crisis» of 1905-1920: a re-reading of Elie Halévy

ABSTRACTThe Lectures The World Crisis of 1914–1918, delivered by the French historian Élie Halévy in Oxford in May 1929, represent «a model of explanation which in its profundity and suggestiveness has never been rivaled» (F. Stern). Surprisingly, however, they have been mostly neglected by the huge bibliography on the Great War. This article will thus analyze the development of Halévy’s conception of the «world crisis of 1914–1918» against his own biographical and intellectual backdrop; then it will try to rethink Halévy’s contribution in the light of the most recent historiography on the topic. Why did he choose to engage with such a topic as the origins of the Great War, which was still at the core of a highly politicized debate in the late 1920s? How does his interpretation fit with those of his contemporaries and of the following historiographical controversies?Since the Great War, Halévy, serving as a volunteer, tried to understand the tragic meanings and the lasting implications of that catastrophic event. Well-known for his work on 19th-century British history, Halévy also became in the 1920s an historian of the Great War. After publishing, between 1912 and 1923, the first three volumes of his Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle, dedicated to the period 1815–1841, he decided to move forward, taking a closer look at the period of political and social crisis between 1895 and 1914.In the Lectures, irrespective of the search for the «war guilt», Halévy proposed a dynamic explanation of the processes leading to the war of 1914 and to the revolution of 1917. He outlined a global pattern of the world crisis, shifting his perspective from West to East and Far East and calling attention to the Balkan setting of the origins of the Great War. His attention to the Young Turks’ Revolution and to the subsequent Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as to the first and the second Balkan war in 1912–13, accounted for the Great War as the «third Balkan war». Halévy then traced the origins of the world crisis of 1914–1918 to the Russian-Japanese war of 1904–1905, focusing on the subsequent revolution in the Russian Empire, the fall of the Chinese Empire, and the deep constitutional and political transformations in India and Persia. However, his reflection on the «world crisis of 1914–1918» was deeply connected to his interest in Great Britain as a global power.In spite of the periodization suggested by the title of the Lectures («the world crisis of 1914–1918»), the shifting of his historical perspective eastwards induced Halévy to contrast with the conventional periodization of the war, which was the product of a «Western» perception of the World War. In his opinion, the crisis had begun in October 1912, with the First Balkan War, and it had come to an end only in August 1920, with the end of the Soviet-Polish war and the ascent of Fascism in Italy.

Diagnosing the Kaiser: Psychiatry, Wilhelm II and the Question of German War Guilt The William Bynum Prize Essay 2016.

After his abdication in November 1918, the German emperor Wilhelm II continued to haunt the minds of his people. With the abolition of the lese-majesty laws in the new republic, many topics that were only discussed privately or obliquely before could now be broached openly. One of these topics was the mental state of the exiled Kaiser. Numerous psychiatrists, physicians and laypeople published their diagnoses of Wilhelm in high-circulation newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books shortly after the end of the war. Whether these diagnoses were accurate and whether the Kaiser really was mentally ill became the issue of a heated debate.This article situates these diagnoses of Wilhelm II in their political context. The authors of these diagnoses - none of whom had met or examined Wilhelm II in person - came from all political camps and they wrote with very different motives in mind. Diagnosing the exiled Kaiser as mentally ill was a kind of exorcism of the Hohenzollern rule, opening the way for either a socialist republic or the hoped-for rule of a new leader. But more importantly, it was a way to discuss and allocate political responsibility and culpability. Psychiatric diagnoses were used to exonerate both the Emperor (for whom the treaty of Versailles provided a tribunal as war criminal) and the German nation. They were also used to blame the Kaiser's entourage and groups that had allegedly manipulated the weak-willed monarch. Medical concepts became a vehicle for a debate on the key political questions in interwar Germany.

Guests of Empire, Ghosts of Dispossession: Traumatic Loss and the Subject without a Proper Name in The Gangster We Are All Looking For

Guests of Empire, Ghosts of DispossessionTraumatic Loss and the Subject without a Proper Name in The Gangster We Are All Looking For Yasuko Kase (bio) The strategy of not-naming raises some related questions about identity and the mechanisms of identification through which identity is ascertained and secured: In what ways does a name indicate presence? Must the absence of a name be linked to loss? —Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony What constitutes the outrage of the Holocaust—the very essence of erasure and annihilation—is not so much death in itself, as the more obscene fact that death itself does not make any difference, the fact that death is radically indifferent: everyone is leveled off, people die as numbers, not as proper names. In contrast to this leveling, to testify is to engage, precisely, in the process of re-finding one's own proper name, one's signature. —Shoshana Felman, "Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching" Vietnamese American writer lê thi diem thúy's first novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) has provoked discussions on the complicated politics surrounding the memory of the Vietnam War.1 According to Isabell Thuy Pelaud, for example, writings by Vietnamese refugees were "vivid reminders of either national guilt or the abuses perpetrated by leftist regimes—neither the American Right nor the Left were keen to hear Vietnamese American stories."2 Thus, even in the field of Asian American literary studies, Vietnamese American literature was long ignored because [End Page 71] of their positioning in relation to the conventional Leftist political formula, which idealizes "bad subjects," that is, resistant subjects.3 Since the mid-1970s, it can be argued, one basis of the US acceptance of Southeast Asian refugees was to create a cultural memory of the war based on US notions of hospitality. However, because of internal economic tensions and outward social hostility toward Southeast Asians who "embody" the war, the American public has often expressed displeasure and antagonism at receiving refugees. To achieve a smoother assimilation by easing these ambivalent feelings, the US public expected Vietnamese refugees to behave as versions of "good" refugees, principally by becoming economically self-sufficient, socially passive, and academically successful. This typical "model minority" stereotype, which most Asian American intellectuals have always disavowed, but the political conservatives often endorse, has long been attached to the image of Vietnamese refugees.4 "Good" Vietnamese refugees at one level appease US national war guilt and allow it to retrieve an illusionary return to "wholeness." In "Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real" (referring to Freud's version of fetishism), Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff argue that for the little boy who denies his difference from his mother and her "castration," fetishism operates in order to replace his mother's "absent" phallus.5 The fetish object covers up this loss by allowing the boy to maintain the misperception and turn away from his own fear of castration. With his attempt to maintain his dual relationship with his mother, he refuses or fails to enter the symbolic realm governed by the "Father." Similarly, the "good" refugees serve as "fetish" objects, allowing the United States to maintain a mode of social-political-psychical defense against the national castration/defeat, substituting the "lack" of "phallic" victory.6 In US official memory, the war should be remembered as a "heroic" war against communism to protect humanity, liberty, and democracy. "Good" Vietnamese refugees are often framed therefore to justify US Cold War ideology: they operate as proof that the United States can offer minorities social mobility and human rights. Thus, Vietnamese refugees have needed to behave as "idealized" guests, who follow what Jacques Derrida calls "the law of hospitality,"7 within the "symbolic order,"8 or the preexisting linguistic and cultural structure that constitutes and defines the subject. These guests should "politely" follow this "law," in exchange for receiving "conditional" hospitality. [End Page 72] "Proper" Vietnamese American writings should therefore conform to this "symbolic order" of the host country by accepting their assigned role as "good refugees." Conforming to the ideological fantasy of a version of the American Dream, "good refugees" need to accommodate...

War Guilt in Nobuko Yoshiya's Literary Works – The Discourses Surrounding "the War Widows" –

This paper is part of an effort to inquire into guilt in literary works of Nobuko Yoshiya. Yoshiya`s literary works sought an exclusively female community for women who did not wish to follow conventional women`s policy which entailed that woman should be a good wife and wise mother. Her literary works exhibit changes in representation of widows and women in general as she joins effort as member of the Imperial Army comfort correspondents and Pen Unit when Sino-Japanese broke out. In this study, we will see that Yoshiya`s novel the Widow emphasizes maternal instinct and which her other previous works of literature did not deal with. We will also see that her novel is in sympathy with women`s policy of time and remarriage denial which was part of expected discourse concerning women of day. We have also pointed out that symbolism which had been imposed only on widows was being transferred also to widows in general. The Sino-Japanese also known as the Hundred Years` War or the Eternal War, made all soldiers` wives on home front potential widows. In this way, Yoshiya`s literary works needed to construct an idealized image of war or just widow because of fact that great number of Yoshiya`s readers were women. To meet this need, Yoshiya`s works provided driving force for by imprisoning women in system of sacrifice and endurance. For this reason, it is thought that we can pursue close inquiry into guilt in Yoshiya`s literary works.

Reawakening the Nation

Scholarly interest in the interwar debate on the origins of the Great War has focused on the role played by historians and decision-makers, which eventually settled into a revisionist consensus stressing collective responsibility. This article reexamines the role played by British journalists in the early political debate on the origins of the war, recapturing the interpretations of journalists, editors, and political commentators after World War I. Through postwar memoirs, books centered on the origins of the war, essays, and other writings, many of the most prominent British journalists focused on making the case for German war guilt after 1914. In doing so, they mostly worked to support the official judgment of the Versailles Peace Treaty against revisionist historians and opinion in Britain and abroad. The interpretation developed by British journalists in this period thus served as a direct counterfoil to the revisionist consensus of this period and continues to resonate even up to the present day among those who see World War I as Britain's “good war.”

McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Origins of the First World War (review)

REVIEWS 569 McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Origins of the First World War. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2013. xii + 324 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $18.95: £14.95 (paperback). Sean McMeekin, an American-trained historian who teaches in Turkey, has a lot of scores to settle with several dead statesmen as well as several living and dead historians on the origins of World War One. His primary concern — one might say obsession — is with war guilt and who is responsible for the outbreak of the Great War. He is impatient with recent efforts to argue for a ‘no-guilt war’ or an accidental war. Nor does he have much sympathy for Fritz Fischer and his acolytes, who placed the blame for the outbreak of war on Germany’s war aims and its ‘grab for power’, though McMeekin himself made a very persuasive case for German war guilt and the Kaiser’s fantasies of raising a German jihad against the Entente in an earlier book, The BerlinBaghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918 (London, 2010). For McMeekin the clearly guilty party was Russia. The overriding motivation of Russian diplomats and generals was the conquest of Constantinople and the partition of the Ottoman Empire. The leading villain in the drama is Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov, whose ‘own deeply dishonest memoirs’ (p. 238) are one of the primary sources of the fundamental misunderstanding of the beginnings of the war, a history the author seeks to rescue from ‘the deep freeze’ (p. 1). This enthusiastic revisionism is based only partly on the recent availability of Russianarchives;McMeekinreports,‘thereisnowmoreformerlysecretmaterial available on Russia’s war aims in 1914 than on those of any other power’ (p. 2). The problem, however, is only partly in the gap in the documentary record (and there is evidence that even the surviving Russian archives were purged to conceal embarrassing diplomatic exchanges). The more serious problem is a historical amnesia for which McMeekin holds Winston Churchill largely responsible, who, out of misplaced pity for the Russian people after the Bolshevik atrocities, forgot how Russia was a signatory to what has long been known as the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide up the post-war Ottoman world. Our author insists we ought to properly call it the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov agreement. But for the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the new government’s repudiation of British and French debts and their murder of the tsar and his family, Russia would have been a full-fledged partner in the final settlement of the accursed Eastern Question. Even Norman Stone’s classic, The Eastern Front 1914–1918 (New York, 1975), comes under scrutiny for adopting the AustroHungarian and German perspectives of the archives he relied on. McMeekin acknowledges Luigi Albertini’s equally classic three-volume study (New York, 1952–57) and C. Jay Smith Jr.’s 1956 book as predecessors, but correctly argues SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 570 that those studies, though based on Russian archival materials available at the time in the West and in published sources, were largely ignored by the broader community of historians of World War One. It’s not clear how helpful this frame of war guilt is to understanding the origins of the war, especially as McMeekin’s prosecutorial gaze is also fixed on the French, who are portrayed, through a sharply drawn portrait of a cynical French Ambassador Maurice Paleologue, as ‘colluding’ with the Russians to conceal from the British a plan to partition the Ottoman empire after the war. The British, by contrast, are portrayed as clueless and naive, sometimes obtuse — this includes a roster of Sir Edward Grey, Sir George Buchanan and Herbert Horatio Asquith. McMeekin even describes the British as ‘ventriloquists’ for Russia’s position on issues, further evidence of Sazonov’s remarkable skills as the diplomat of a power that had imperial ambitions beyond its means and needed to resort to these schemes. He also partially absolves the British for their responsibility because British diplomats, after all, operating in liberal democratic conditions, had more constraints on their freedom than did a Sazonov who negotiated on behalf of...

La culpa de la guerra en Hannah Arendt y Karl Jaspers

This essay reflects on Alan Norrie’s article “Justice on the slaughter bench: the problem of war guilt in Arendt and Jaspers”. In his article Norrie addresses the difficulties surrounding the attribution of guilt for crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime during WWII. The attribution of guilt offered by criminal law against such crimes does not entail forms of collective guilt, which are generally beyond the scope of criminal law doctrine. Although criminal law does not seem to be the only mechanism to attribute guilt for crimes committed during totalitarian regimes, it has become the most common mechanism to resolve the atrocities of the past. Keywords: guilt (criminal responsibility), international criminal law, transitional justice, human rights, crimes against humanity.

The War Guilt Question: A Note on Politics and Historiography in the Weimar Republic

The War Guilt Question: A Note on Politics and Historiography in the Weimar Republic

The national between the global and the local: Commemorating the First World War in Germany

Algunos comentaristas alemanes se han referido al año 2014 como el Supergedenksjahr –el año de la súperconmemoración– que señala el 25 aniversario de la caída del Muro de Berlín, el 75 aniversario del comienzo de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el centenario del estallido de la Primera Guerra Mundial. Este artículo ofrece varias observaciones acerca de la conmemoración de la Primera Guerra Mundial dentro del contexto más amplio de las política con respecto al pasado en la Alemania contemporánea. En primer lugar, la Primera Guerra Mundial emerge de las sombras de otros dos eventos de enorme importancia en la historia alemana del siglo XX –el Tercer Reich y la división de Alemaniasuperada en 1989. Si esto se mantendrá así es incierto, puesto que la atracción por los otros dos eventos se mantiene pujante. En segundo lugar, si hubo algún debate primordial en Alemania sobre la Primera Guerra Mundial se debe en gran parte al éxito del libro Sonámbulos, de Christopher Clark. Su tesis sobre la responsabilidad compartida se analizó en contraposición a la tesis de fondo de Fritz Fischer, que atribuía gran parte de la responsabilidad a los imprudentes líderes alemanes. A su vez, el resurgimiento del debate sobre la culpabilidad de la guerra se relacionó con los debates actuales sobre el rol de Alemania en la política europea. Para terminar, la conmemoración se ha caracterizado por un alejamiento del marco estado-nación, por lo que muchas exhibiciones y programas adoptan o una perspectiva global o local.

Italy's Amnesia over War Guilt: The “Evil Germans” Alibi

The Italian national memory has still not come to terms with the responsibilities of Benito Mussolini's Italy for the Axis war of 1940 – 43, which Italy fought on the side of Nazi Germany. It has also not come to terms with the serious war crimes Italy committed in the occupied territories, especially the Balkans. Instead, a master narrative elaborated the positive stereotype of the “good Italian,” an opponent of war and a savior of the Jews, in contrast to the negative stereotype of the “evil German,” sadistic and brutal, onto whom the Italians shifted all the blame for the war. This essay analyzes the origin of these interwoven stereotypes, which were created by the Italian ruling class in order for the defeated nation to avoid a punitive peace and were subsequently spread by the mass media.

The First World War and International Relations Theory: A Review of Books on the 100th Anniversary

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Christopher Clark. HarperCollins, 2013. July 1914: Countdown to War. Sean McMeekin. Basic Books, 2013. The Russian Origins of the First World War. Sean McMeekin. Harvard University Press, 2011. The Origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and Military Documents. By Annika Mombauer (editor), Manchester University, 2013. The Fischer Controversy 50 Years On. By Annika Mombauer editor of Special Issue of Journal of Contemporary History July Crisis: The World's Descent into War, Summer 1914. Thomas G. Otte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. July 1914: Soldiers, Statesmen and the Coming of the Great War: A Brief Documentary History. By Samuel Williamson Jr, Russel Van Wyk. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. The First World War was probably the most important political event of the modern global system. It transformed in a fundamental way how we think of war and created an aversion to war that is still present (Mueller 1989). Academically, it has remained the most complicated of wars. For political science and international relations (IR), it has had a special impact with many of our theories, including both spiral and deterrence models, being influenced by our understanding of it. The 100th anniversary of the First World War has produced, as expected, a spate of new books on the outbreak of the war. These books are not simply commemorative; they show that we are still far away from a consensus on certain basic issues. In fact, what the books make clear is that the First World War is still an open field. In this review, I will concentrate on three things: (i) the shift in the understanding historians have of the origins of the war and some of the central remaining questions, (ii) the implications of the recent historical scholarship for IR theory, in particular the applicability of some of our conceptual approaches, like two-level games and the importance of domestic politics, and (iii) the merits of each book for classroom use. There are many reasons why IR scholars need to read these books, but an essential one is that they reflect a shift away from the view that Germany is mainly responsible for its outbreak, a view that goes back to the war guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty, but in recent times has been most associated with the Fischer (1967, 1975) thesis. The consensus among historians has varied over time, but Germany has been a focus of blame, except for the brief revisionist period in the late 1920s …

The origins of the First World War

The recent crop of books on the origins of the First World War dispenses with the notion of inevitability in the outbreak of war, and stresses the maturity of European civilization in 1914. They are in danger of prioritizing urban life over rural, civilization and culture over backwardness and superstition. They also say less than they might about the enduring place of war in international relations. The stress on contingency is to be welcomed for getting history away from the determinism of long-term trends, and for reopening the uncertainty of the outcomes still open to the Great Powers in 1914. However, the overall effect is cyclical. The prevailing wisdom on the reasons for war has reverted to the argument that �Europe slithered over the brink�, which dominated from the 1930s until the publications of Fritz Fischer in the 1960s. This does not mean that �Fischerism�, with its belief in German war guilt, is extinct. The challenge which now confronts historians, as they approach a four-year centenary, is to break this circularity and to explore new paths.