Aviel Roshwald

European culture in the Great War : the arts, entertainment, and propaganda, 1914-1918

Introduction 1. Days and nights in wartime Russia Richard Stites 2. German culture in the Great War Peter Jelavich 3. Culture in Poland during World War I Harold B. Segel 4. Jewish cultural identity in Eastern and central Europe during the Great War Aviel Roshwald 5. The tragic carnival: Austrian culture in the First World War Steven Beller 6. Ambivalent patriots: Czech culture in the Great War Claire Nolte 7. Culture in Hungary during World War I Joseph Held 8. Culture in the south Slavic lands, 1914-1918 Andrew Wachtel 9. Between apology and denial: Bulgarian culture during World War I Evelina Kelbetcheva 10. Romania: war, occupation, liberation Maria Bucur 11. Occupation, propaganda, and the idea of Belgium Sophie de Schaepdrijver 12. Cultural life in France, 1914-1918 Marc Ferro 13. The impact of World War I on Italian political culture Walter L. Adamson 14. Popular culture in wartime Britain Jay Winter Conclusion.

Between Balkanization and Banalization: Dilemmas of Ethno-cultural Diversity

Abstract This paper seeks to highlight the inescapable nature of the dilemmas that confront any attempt to reconcile the desire for political cohesion with respect for ethno-cultural diversity within any actually existing nation state. Methods of accommodating such diversity while maintaining the states territorial integrity range from granting minorities regional autonomy to selectively incorporating aspects and symbols of their heritage and identity into a shared, trans-ethnic national tableau. Each of these approaches carries certain risks: the former may arouse fears of ‘Balkanization’, while the latter can be associated with assimilationist pressures that may be perceived as reducing substantive cultural differences to banal variations on a hegemonic national–cultural theme. In practice, any successful policy must rest on a flexible conception of state sovereignty and will likely rely on experimentation with a variety of options from along the Balkanization–banalization spectrum.

The Daily Plebiscite as Twenty-first-century Reality?

Abstract When, in 1882, Ernest Renan suggested that national identity is constituted by a daily plebiscite, he was invoking the idea in a largely metaphorical way. In the twenty-first century, the gap between metaphor and reality has narrowed dramatically across much of the world. To be sure, ever since the American and French revolutions, global history has been shaped in part by the tension between the uneven distribution (both within and across societies) of economic, military, and political power, on the one hand, and the formally egalitarian concepts of democracy, popular sovereignty, and self-determination, on the other. Yet, events of the last few years suggest that this systemic crisis is taking on new, reiteratively plebiscitary, forms in the age of instant communication and of popular backlashes against globalization.

Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I

ority scholars in their own right, and helped to promote national consciousness among non-Russian peoples. Meanwhile, the Orientologists’ collaboration with minority peoples not only spearheaded revisionist strands of scholarly practice and philosophy later advanced by post-colonial thinkers, but also provided a training ground for national leaders among Buriats, Azeris, and Abkhazians who served the Soviet state in pursuit of its nationalities agenda in the 1920s. Last but not least, many of the Orientologists’ minority collaborators and mentees would tragically perish during Stalin’s Great Purges – a time when “NKVD investigators posthumously accused imperial Orientologists of spreading the ideology of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ among non-Russian ethnic minorities, allegedly with the aim of dismembering the Russian empire and the USSR” (6). It is perhaps because Tolz’s analysis is so stimulating and the material she presents so fascinating that readers may feel somewhat shortchanged by the slimness of this book. In place of thick descriptions, Tolz too often delivers economical brushstrokes when describing the individual lives and personalities of the scholars whom she studies, not to mention their debates with other scholars both at home and abroad. The Orientologists appear as belonging to a parallel academic universe more often than they do as integrated into a wide variety of social and political milieus. This is all the more frustrating, for example, when Tolz does fleetingly pause to consider how these Orientologists’ heritage variously shaped their self-understandings as patriotic citizen-scholars. Tolz has provided specialists with a distinctive and valuable contribution to an increasingly robust scholarship on Russian Orientology and Russian ethnography more generally. Russia’s Own Orient notably enhances understanding of how Russian scholars who were professionally reared in the late tsarist period not only impacted the rationale and shape of early Soviet nationality policies, but also influenced some leaders among minority peoples who maneuvered those policies in the 1920s. It also persuasively expands the genealogies of post-colonial thought, showing how relatively little-known Russian scholars pioneered intellectual paths later taken and re-engineered by such theorists as Edward Said.

The Nation State as Domesticator of the Alien

Michael Hechter’s stimulating and provocative essay forces us to consider how modern nationalism and the nation state shape our conception of the familiar and the alien. As Hechter points out, there was a time just some centuries ago when ruling dynasties in many parts of the world exercised—theoretically at least—patrimonial authority over their domains and seemed free to conquer, marry into, or trade entire countries like so much personal real estate. A ruler’s ethnic or territorial origin appeared immaterial to the legitimacy of his or her authority so long as it was exercised with some modicum of effectiveness from the point of view of a given territory’s social, political and/or clerical elites. Lest we lapse too readily into nostalgia for what may start to sound like the protoWeberian rational functionalism of the early modern state, however, let us remind ourselves that the ruler’s conformity to the established religion of his/her realm was a vitally important criterion of political legitimacy. ‘Paris is worth a mass’ may have been a profoundly cynical (and perhaps apocryphal) throw-away line, but whether sincere or not, Henry IV’s formal conversion to Catholicism was a sine qua non of his accession to the French throne. Throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds, a ruler’s confessional identity was at least as important a criterion of his/her legitimacy as a head of state’s national identity is today. In any case, the central contradiction Michael Hechter points to is between the everincreasing acceptance of cultural diversity in many societies and the nearly universal continued belief that a legitimate ruler must be a member of the nation and not an ‘alien’. A word of caution is in order here: although the cultural and linguistic mixes of Western Europe and North America have indeed been dramatically reshaped over the course of the post-1945 decades by successive waves of immigrants hailing from multiple points of origin, there are other parts of the world that are much less culturally and ethnically diverse today than they were a century ago. Alexandria, Algiers, Istanbul, Salonika, Odessa, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Shanghai and Harbin are just a few of the urban centers whose streets featured a far richer and more diverse mixture of languages, religions, phenotypes and styles of dress in 1910, prior to the twentieth century’s Ethnopolitics, Vol. 9, Nos. 3–4, 415–418, September–November 2010

Review: Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006; 320 pp., 44 illus.; 9789053569566, 25.21 (pbk)

official efforts to dissuade him from continuing to write once he had started; and the elaborate schemes the Khrushchev family devised to hide the memoirs from a prying KGB. After the elder Khrushchev was summoned to the Central Committee compound in the late 1960s and reprimanded, Sergei Khrushchev asked an acquaintance who worked for a British newspaper and frequently travelled abroad to hide the memoirs in Britain. It was a wise decision. Under pressure from the Kremlin, the KGB stepped up efforts in 1970 to stop Khrushchev from writing, apparently unaware that a copy had already been sent abroad. Party leaders reputedly considered Khrushchev’s memoirs so scandalous that they refused to share the manuscript they had confiscated from Sergei Khrushchev with KGB analysts, who were trying to determine the authenticity of what had been published abroad. The analysts were forced to ask Sergei Khrushchev to review a reverse translation of Khrushchev Remembers to see if it corresponded with what his father had dictated! Penn State University Press and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University deserve credit for embarking on an immense project that is unlikely to have commensurate financial returns. For reasons of length alone, these Memoirs will not attract the lay audience that Khrushchev Remembers enjoyed. It is also probably the case that the Memoirs say less about Nikita Khrushchev than about the persons who championed him after his death, particularly his son Sergei. The Soviet Union, after all, produced many persons like Nadezhda Mandelshtam and Anna Larina who dedicated their lives to restoring the good names of loved ones who suffered at the hands of the state. At the end of his essay on the history of the memoir, Sergei Khrushchev casts his role in similar terms: ‘At long last, life brings my journey to its end. The memoirs of my father, the person who led our country through the stormy decade of the late 1950s and early 1960s, have seen the light of day’. If this volume encourages scholars to look beyond the simplistic caricatures of Khrushchev as a buffoon and an insincere reformer, to the contradictory man that he was, it will have been well worth the effort.

A Price above Rubies? The Value and Meaning of Survival in Modern Jewish History

Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany, translated from the German by Barbara Harshav, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997; ISBN 0–691–026653; x + 196 pp.; £21.95 David Cesarani, ed., Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary, 1944, Oxford: Berg, 1997; ISBN 1–859–73121X; vii + 220 pp.; £34.99 Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; ISBN 0521–593697; xxi + 568 pp.; £30.00 Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945, London: Arnold, 1997; ISBN 0–340–495634; x + 340 pp.; £45.00 Lynn Rapaport, Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish–German Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; ISBN 0–521–582199; xi + 325 pp.; £50.00 William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies could not have Saved More Jews from the Nazis, London: Routledge, 1997; ISBN 0–415–124557; xiii + 267 pp.; £20.99 Gerty Spies, My Years in Theresienstadt: How One Woman Survived the Holocaust, translated from the German by Jutta R. Tragnitz, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1997; ISBN 1–57392– 1416; 214 pp.; £23.00

Review Article : Between Catastrophe and Redemption: The European Jewish Diaspora and Zionism in the Twentieth Century

Michael Berkowitz, Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 19141933, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; ISBN 052147087-0 ; xvi + 305 pp.; £35 Hildrun Glass, Zerbrochene Nachbarschaft: Das deutsch-jüdische Verhdltnis in Rumänien (1918-1938), Munich, Oldenbourg, 1996; ISBN 3-486-56230-4; 638 pp. Hagit Lavsky, Before Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism, Jerusalem, The Magnes Press, 1996; ISBN 0-8143-26730 ; 292 pp.;

Review Article : The Culture of Paradox: Jewish Identity in Modern Europe: Anthony Polonsky, ed., From Shtetl to Socialism: Studies from Polin, London and Washington, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, ISBN 1-874-774-14, 1993; xxxiii + 581 pp.; £19.95. Jacques Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-253-33203-6; xii + 240 pp.; £20.00

30 Binjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel: The History of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1995; ISBN 0-8032-4243-3; xv + 148 pp.;

The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas

10 Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945, London, Penguin, 1997; ISBN 014-025359-9; xx + 332 pp.; £9.99