Intro and Conclusion from my most bad-ass book review

Introduction

"A percentage! Nice little words they have, really: so reassuring, so scientific. A certain percentage, they say, meaning there's nothing to worry about. Now, if it was some other word . . . well, then maybe it would be more worrisome."

The quotation above was taken from a book published in 1866 in Russia, by an observer who, witnessing the growing hegemony of scientific knowledge and precision over all other ways of knowing the human condition, penned this portent of the pitfalls of over-calculation. It is a warning that echoes through time to the present, in which it seems particularly resonant given the tragic effects of social Darwinism and positivism run amok in the twentieth century. In studying the pinnacles of tragedy produced by such mentalities, historians would be advised to take care not to echo the coldness that attending singularly to the statistics generated by an event can perpetuate in the historical record. Joseph Stalin is said to have remarked that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin was no stranger to millions of deaths; if he indeed articulated this method of obscuring the visceral reality of violence, we should pay attention not to repeat his calculation.

The European “short twentieth-century” has been variously conceptualized into a coherent period as an age of ideology, a century of the nation-state for better or worse (and often for worse), and an unfortunate blip in the radar of nineteenth-century ideals. Another lens through which to understand it has been advanced by Jay Winter, who proposes the twentieth century as one of historical memory, in that historical memory became a chief characteristic of the self-understanding of societies. Winter writes of two generations of memory, corresponding to each of the World Wars. The first, spanning the 1890s to the 1920s, engaged memory to shape personal and national identity. The second came in the 1960s in response to the Second World War and the Holocaust, which introduced more subjective memories of witness and survivor to the field of remembrances as moral symbols.

All of the afore-mentioned approaches agree that the Second World War has been key to shaping the contours of post-war Europe, but Winter’s emphasis on legacy is critical. Whatever else we can say, each nation that emerged from the war crafted a narrative of it, defining themselves in the process—de Gaulle famously spoke of France as “a nation of resisters,” while the West conceptualized the conflict as a war for democracy, conveniently minimizing the role played by the USSR in enabling that success. German historians developed a Führer-centric interpretation of the Third Reich, thus mitigating whatever responsibility its citizens played in the most grisly elements of the war. Stalin made certain that the war was remembered as the great patriotic war, in which the sacrifices it demanded would be redeemed by the utopian vision offered by communism; a vision that was subsequently and magnanimously extended from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe. The history of the Second World War has been a nation-building story, a factor which makes the historian’s imperative to remain as true to the record as possible all the more acute and difficult.

In processing the meaning of this period, numbers matter more than they used to—so much of what happened between 1933-45 seems to defy rational explanation, and in confronting the prospect of being unable to explain the most dramatic event of the century, some historians cling to what they can know for certain. Historical events can be made intelligible through the statistics they produce—and can sometimes become eclipsed by them. The scale of the war is often invoked in these terms--72 million dead. $288 Billion (in 1940s dollars) spent. While these factors are defining characteristics of the conflict, how much do they tell us about the war’s legacy, and of the way people then made their decisions? To what extent can a quantitative look at history tease out the qualitative significance of events?

The following review will demonstrate that the materialist and mathematic approach to big historical questions are critical—that cannot be emphasized enough—to establish the parameters of what was possible at a given time. Economic factors and indeed any statistical measurement available relating to the catastrophe of the Second World War (indeed, for any conflict) are absolutely necessary to any grounded historical understanding of a time. Yet, when relied upon exclusively to answer larger questions—why did the Allies win the war? How pervasive was the French Résistance? Who were the victims of this catastrophe?—this strictly quantifiable approach to history crumbles in the face of the untidiness of human affairs. Intangible factors—complicity or resistance of citizens without official affiliations, moral purpose of troops that fought, attitudes that permitted setting aside the humanity of various peoples are important. Scientific method will not give us all the answers.

Conclusions

Total War demands a comprehensive perspective, including decisions made by masses of people, not just organizations and institutions. While empiricism is invaluable to good history, great history moves beyond it when the sources cannot measure the scope of its subject. The legacy of the Second World War was moral; its moral aspects have structured politics and policies, and new nationalisms that emerged in its wake; while hard numbers and facts remain the best way to understand the scope of the war and the material constraints against which humans made choices, the political dynamic of the conflict cannot be understood in those terms.

In each examined work, scholars are locked into a debate about how much the statistics produced by society can reveal about its nature. The conclusion I wish to draw here is an argument for synthesis, for inclusion of a broad range of factors into any analysis of the War. Admittedly, this is a tall order. Scholars that focus on victims tend to ignore structural determinants; economic historians tend to ignore the victims. In the end, the Second World War was so complex, it may well be true that as Ian Kershaw has suggested in his survey of the field, one can only hope to contribute to an explanation of the event in scholarly writing, and all contributions should be welcomed regardless of what they are unable to include. Yet, we should listen to our elders. Raskolnikov tried to live by reason alone, and wound up in Siberia as a result; the dynamics of human life continue to defy strict calculation. Any appreciation of historical change absolutely must keep this in mind.

vocabulary

grad school changes the tone of acceptable quotidian discourse; here's a list of words I use now and wouldn't have a year ago:

prolegomena
epistemologically
discourse
metanarrative
revisionist
reductionist
as a corrective to
baudelairian
sui generis
ad hoc
ex post facto
historical and dialectical materialism
historical myopia
antinomy (twice found in books about France in the 20s!)
hermeneutic
intra-archipelagic
stochastic
fungible
somnolence
Braudelian
synecdochical

learn from my mistakes. plus a few editorials.

Future graduate students:

1. One of the double-edged swords of being at an institution like Princeton has been the frequency with which I have completely accidentally and sometimes unknowingly interacted with really famous academics. There was a day-long conference hosted here on the topic of "Historical Memory of Violence and Catastrophe," with a changing panel of speakers throughout the day. During the lunch break, a few classmates and I found ourselves at a table with a man we didn't recognize, but who volunteered that he was teaching at the Woodrow Wilson School as a guest for the year. So we chatted about trivialities, comparing our experiences with Princeton undergraduates. The conference resumed, and we discovered that we'd wasted 30 minutes talking about 18 year-old New Jersey residents with a man who had been a human rights lawyer in Chile during the years of Pinochet, who had risen to be Chile's Foreign Minister after that regime was brought to an end, and who has been instrumental in instituting reconciliation after that particular catastrophe of human rights, but also has assisted in the rebuilding of other societies after traumatic changes, notably post-apartheid South Africa. Lesson Learned, and I'll share it with you: when attending a conference, a quick google-image search of the participants is strongly recommended.

2. Reading something you never wanted to read to begin with on the couch is a bad idea:


3. You will not make it through the year without cracking and using the phrase "a useful heuristic" at least once. Don't fight it.

4. I'm starting to think that Foucault is infinitely more irritating and problematic than Marx. Or maybe he's the Marx for post-modern history. Usually, you can know everything you need to know about an author's argument if they cite Foucault in the first three pages of their introduction, or worse, (and this happens a lot), if they thank him or dedicate their book to him. I'm happy to debate the point, but for now, Foucault is the new Marx, and he needs to simmer down in the historiography.

5. My adviser wrote the following in a published essay, and it's only one of many reasons why he's awesome: "Retarded France turns out not to have been so retarded after all..."

6. Getting the flu sucks, but in keeping with the theme of sleeping on the couch, and in appreciation for the magic of NyQuil, I'll show you what I looked like for most of last week (also to counter what you've undoubtedly been told, the lie that sleep stops when you get into grad school):

nationalism hangover

A few years ago, while discussing his recently-published book (that he was gracious enough to assign the class), a professor of mine made an aside about how after writing the book, he realized that he'd been preoccupied with the same issue for his entire academic career, but not having named it as such, he didn't recognize his own theme until 20 years into it. His theme was the causes and results of freedom of speech. Mine, I've realized of late, is nationalism.

I have always been uncomfortable with nationalistic ritual, even before my distaste for religion had blossomed. By always, I mean ever since I was old enough to pledge allegiance to the flag, in my case, a flag that I knew, and was continuously made aware, was not my own. It was a ritual that I had to perform, like everyone else, but because I was aware that my flag had green and an eagle on it while this one did not, I learned a lesson really early on about ritual--that it is meant to engender certain feelings, rather than to confirm feelings that are there naturally. I didn't belong, but I watched my peers learn to. And watching the process of indoctrination is unsettling, even to a six year old who doesn't quite know what to call it.

The way I grew up, I was neither Mexican nor American. I was born in Mexico City, yes, but my parents moved to the states in 1987. Both of them, come to think of it, had checkered pasts with the idea of the nation. My dad came from a long line of men who had attended Virginia Military Academy, and much to his father's chagrin, he refused to go. His ethnic background includes ancestors from Kansas, Ireland, Germany, Peru, and even San Martin, "liberator" of South America from Spain. Instead of going to VMI, he went to UNAM (in Mexico City), and when the Vietnam War came around, he made it a point to renounce his US citizenship. My mom's case is more straight-forward. She was born in Mexico to a fair-skinned mother and a VERY Indian (that is to say, native, indigenous, pick whichever is more tasteful) looking father. So her issue was never directly a conflict with patriotism, but was rather a class-conflict, which in Mexico can become an issue of patriotism.

I digress. We moved in the late 80s, just before I turned three years old. My parent's cosmopolitanism ensured that I spoke and understood english as well as spanish, and a little russian when we moved. I didn't have much trouble (compared with other immigrant studies) switching to just english for school, and reading was easy. Still, assimilation is hard when you know you're different. And school is almost entirely about assimilation.


One of the greatest joys of being a teenager is in finding creative ways to call your elders liars. Being able to claim moral high ground on your captors, as it were, never got old. And so it was that in high school, I began to look more critically at our history books for what was missing and what was there. It was obvious pretty quickly that what we were being told was not in fact history, but the national narrative from which our identities were to be formed. We associate with this country because it has done x, y, and z. We choose to forget the rest of the alphabet. This so profoundly offended my sensibilities as to guide my every intellectual interest since sophomore year, whether I knew it or not.

And in fact I couldn't quite put my finger on it until monday afternoon. Even as I wrote the following proposal for summer research, I didn't know quite what I was getting at:

"I am interested in the shaping of national identity through retellings of history. As the First World War is generally seen as a watershed event that ushered in the worst the twentieth century had to offer, a transformative moment in which the degree of change was visible on the ground at the time, I am interested in discovering the ways in which the War's significance and lessons were reprocessed for French and British children—both nations came out of the war nominally as victors, but both sustained immense human and economic losses. In this comparative approach, I am interested to find how the war fostered or reinforced their differing national identities—identities which, it has been argued, were forged in opposition to one another."

But Monday morning, I had my interview for citizenship, I was sworn in that afternoon, and spent the rest of the day in a profoundly ambivalent mood about what I had just done.


Here's my confession: After waiting in line at the Mexican consulate for 8 hours just to renew a passport, the conveniences of attaining citizenship in the place I'd always lived started to look practical, if not intellectually appealing. A few months later, it was announced that the cost to apply would almost double. My rational self prevailed, and I applied. This included swearing that I wasn't and am not a communist or a terrorist (that prompt is part of the same segment, implying that either association is equivalent to the other), that I would go to war for the country if required (I would certainly not), and that I swore I'd tell the truth "so help me god" (Clearly, I didn't, and anyway I'm an atheist.). I had my swearing in yesterday, which included more offensive questions and lies (are you mentally or physically disabled? Are you sure you're not a communist? Do you support the US foreign and domestic policy? Etc.), an announcement of "welcome" from "president" George W. Bush, and saying the oath, which I mouthed but didn't speak.

As a student of history, I find it deeply disturbing to have associated myself by choice, when I'm old enough to know better, with a country whose policies have generally been disgraceful for the last few centuries. On principle, I don't like answering a question about the virtues of the constitution with the words "freedom of speech," and then being asked to confine my worldview to "not communist." I don't like being shown a video for the army and being reminded that the men on the tape "died for my freedom," when this country hasn't fought a defensive war in over a hundred years (we can argue about wwii later). I don't like the way the government uses its past to draw the entirely wrong lessons. I sold out.

I like a bit of poetry in my politics.

Until recently, I was convinced that inspirational politics, in the sense of a leader rising up and inspiring citizens to aspire to greater heights, was the stuff of history, if it ever really existed at all. I find it hard to imagine generations past who actually had to fight to effect change--what could compel them to forget themselves for long enough to storm the Bastille? What nobility there must have been in the souls of the Mexican peasants who, at the dawn of the past century, decided that they'd had enough. Those who have been as fortunate as I grew up a bit jaded; we saw what happened to the generations of the '60s and '70s. We've watched them decay in suburbs. It never occurred to me that it might take a special kind of inspiration to act as a catalyst for self-investment in political life, or that that inspiration could come from a politician.

Barack Obama's candidacy has had me reflecting on a lot of different issues, but the theme that emerges the strongest, which my recent training may have given me the ability to see more easily than others might, is that some times are simply more able to effect change than others--Obama knows this; this is why he quotes Dr. King's masterfully phrased line: "the fierce urgency of now." He also knows that his candidacy is not entirely about himself, but largely about what hopes and aspirations people my age project onto the newness he offers. This feels like a turning point in history; those of us who are hopeful will either be vindicated, or disillusioned, and soon. Obviously, I hope for vindication; but even in disillusionment's, I will have learned something valuable about what it is like to be profoundly affected by the charisma of a time, place, and person, and if nothing else, my scholarship will be better for it.

Maybe it'll get you too, at least a little. Here's part of his concession speech from New Hampshire-- you'll see what i mean:

We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.

We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.

It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.

Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.

...

Together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can.

Hillary Clinton: irritating

On January 7th, Hillary Clinton said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” Outstanding issues:

1. She's an idiot.
2. Even if we are to accept her logic, it only presents a more powerful argument to elect someone like Barack Obama--hope personified--into office. Here she argues about the futility of idealism, but the fact that her target is the idealism of a fellow presidential hopeful presents a powerful case to elect the MLK figure into office, and to leave the Lyndon Johnson figure behind.

san antonio

I've survived another trip to the "alamo city," only a little scathed. I was greeted with a "welcome home" from my dad, but the words had something of an ominous effect. The unlikely Luddite has walled himself off in a house full of dusty books which he'll never read again, tied himself down with five dogs that provide him with an excuse not to change his life (a role I've come to realize that I once filled), and has stubbornly clung to eating habits that would be appropriate only for someone who didn't know when his next meal would be. Welcome home. Don't become this. Very unsettling.

I've decided that the transition to adulthood comes in unglamorous stages: the day you learn how expensive standard household items are (several HUNDRED dollars for a dresser? really? fifty for a cooler?); the day you look in your closet, find nothing that would look "appropriate" at any real job, and find that you have no idea where or how to buy "appropriate" clothing; the day you realize an unexpected pregnancy would no longer completely ruin your life; and, the day you visit home, survey the landscape, and decide to spring for a hotel room. check and mate.








My hotel, paid for by me, who can actually afford it, was a block away from the famous alamo, the pride and joy of san antonio, symbol of freedom--freedom to own slaves, that is. It's an appropriate metaphor. This town has a huge mexican population, visible everywhere, and a small white population that's very concerned with the borders. not that mexicans are quite slaves here, but people seem generally happy to pay them nothing to do their cleaning and other nasty work, while talking about them as being sub-human. freedom, indeed. This picture mostly captures the gist. Anyway, ignoring my better judgment, I thought I'd take a stroll through the shrine to freedomland, in the hopes that maybe this little historical nothing of a fact (the specificity of the freedoms sought) might make an appearance. No such luck. It's a shrine to self-righteous xenophobia now. I made a scene and got kicked out. fin.

my little girl...

what I've learned

1. Parties advertised as "Sleazy Grad Student Party" actually do contain a number of sleazy grad students. Most of them in finance.

2. It is important to gather the men in one's cohort BEFORE arriving at such a party, as our boys are more protective than they are sleazy.

well rested and confused.

When I worked at Oren's, I used to have these terrible dreams in which I'd wake up, open the store, and work for a few hours, and then I'd actually wake up and have to go to work. Those were the worst. It seems that I've traded excruciatingly banal dreams for bizarre ones in switching jobs to student--in the past few weeks, I've had dreams about Hitler in a clown suit getting tackled by a classmate (Ronny) and a rogue band of squirrels, Herodotus making me pancakes in the morning, and the new version of the banal coffee dream, in which I check my email to find that professors have responded to my request for a readings course--this has happened several times. Steve Kotkin, in his dreamed email response, asked how my Russian was, Harold James (whom I didn't ask and have never met) responded that he'd love to run a class, but only if he can shout at us in German the whole time, and Phil Nord just said "no. there are too many cookies to be had." I've had dreams about searching for German nationalism in New Jersey, solving the problem of nationalism in general (it the religious way of thinking, stupid), finding a Russian gulag filled with disney characters (I was pissed when I woke up from that one), and about my dog killing Lenin's cat and how that might have changed history. I wonder if this will taper off at some point, or if I'll have to abandon my evening reading habits.

research topic!

For the historian of the Twentieth Century, all roads lead back to August, 1914. If the French Revolution represented the best of our origins as the Modern West, The First World War is certainly emblematic of our worst beginnings, when the nineteenth century narrative of progress took a horribly, irreparably wrong turn.

The First World War was a transformative moment in history, a catalyst essential to the understanding of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, it contrasts so sharply with the nineteenth century, that one forgets the slow trauma it must have involved for those who lived through it. In its naïve beginnings, the irreversible change brought on by WWI appeared rather as a continuation of nineteenth century trends. “Triggered by a nationalist assassination, World War I began as a war of nationalities, igniting the collective passions that had filled the preceding century.” Empires doomed their native sons to battle, and nationalism compelled them to go. Particularly for those on the home front, the horrors of war, and the fundamental break with the past, unfolded as a series of broken expectations, and not as a sudden blow.

The War transformed every part of society in Western Europe, ravaging the home front as dramatically (if by different means) as the wasteland. This conflict left deep psychological scars, and a profound feeling of disorientation in the generations that waged it. The narrative of progress so championed by nineteenth century thought was utterly demolished, leaving empty battle scars in its place. Adding to the chaos, the demographic composition in Europe, which experienced a drop in birthrate even before the war, was intensified by the conflict. According to Eric Hobsbawm’s calculations, “not much more than one in three French soldiers came through the war without harm…The British lost a generation.”

By the end, the full extent of the senselessness and brutality of the war was well known to all involved. “Military servitude had never appeared less noble than it did to the millions of transplanted men, so recently snatched from the moral world of citizenship.” (Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 49) In the face of such futile violence, on such a scale, one would expect feelings of disillusionment about the Great War to permeate cultural production. While still paying homage to the patriots that volunteered to fight and die, or return home maimed, without diminishing their sacrifice, one would expect the war not to be remembered fondly, to take on a new image than that which dominated the propaganda in the warring countries during the conflict. Oddly, this is not always the case.


François Furet rightly notes that, by virtue of the eschatological properties of twentieth century ideologies, a critical sense of contingency (that element that makes history interesting to begin with) has been absent from histories of this short century. Neither religion, nor historical law drive history—action, and ultimately responsibility, rests on the shoulders of human actors in their milieu. Nothing is preordained.

In many ways, the idea of “historical necessity” (another tally on the list of things that are Marx's fault) has obscured the historian’s view of the people who lived through the Great War as people, parents, spouses, instead of as political actors, or potential political actors, or victims of the killing fields in France. Espoused ideology aside, the generation of 1914 had to find ways to return to normalcy after the war, and those with children had to teach them what normalcy was. Narratives of this generation tend to emphasize ideology, or disorientation, themes that rightly dominate post-war studies. Yet, ideology and disorientation are not the dominant themes that were transmitted to the children of this generation about 14-18, the period of upheaval, in France and England, in their literature.

Societal changes wrought by the War have been well studied by historians, but they have largely ignored the children that grew up and came of age in this period, and importantly, the way these massive societal changes were represented to a generation that had never directly known what came before (but would go on to fight the second world war). The Great War was disorienting for adults, but as parents, they were still faced with orienting their children to a world that they themselves didn’t fully understand.

I propose to survey children’s literature produced in France and England in the interwar period in order to better understand the adult worldview as communicated to a younger generation, with specific attention to any commentary on the war, and positionings of self versus other. In Germany, “the private sector” and the media became matters of state interest and, shall we say, influence, especially after 1933;the same can be said of Bolshevik Russia from its inception in 1917. in France and Britain, publishing and "family life" in general remained out of reach of the state. Thus, by nature of the relative freedom of expression granted for more of the interwar period in France and England, I will review books for children produced in those countries. Moreover, while a survey of children’s literature produced in fascist/totalitarian states might make for interesting contrasts, they tend to illuminate more of what one would expect of state interests, and less about what the public at large held as a value. For example, a brief search quickly turned up a book called “The Tale of Red-haired Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah and Commissar Bloch,” by Yosif Utkin, written in the USSR in 1933. It is a story of Motele, a Jewish tailor who renounces Judaism to become a Soviet commissar. This book is a striking example of the reaches of Soviet Propaganda, and nothing more.

The scope of my work will be limited to the ways in which adults positioned children in the context of a changing world; in other words, I will focus on the act of narration, which can be factually ascertained by virtue of the books themselves, and not on how children might have interpreted the materials. Though the latter would make for the most interesting study, there are simply no sources readily available for how children understood what they were told. In many ways, researching the child’s worldview is much like reconstructing the mentalitésof the subaltern of a distant past—not something my experience to date has prepared me to do.

In the private sector (contrasted from schooling, with its obvious focus on generating young patriots), children’s stories produced in this period are more akin to those written before the war than with any sort of propaganda, or any reflection of the guilt and resentment that filled adult literature about the war in the same period, in France and Britain. War is mentioned, to be sure, but in a context of a noble fight, and a fresh start after it ended. Are we to assume that the generation of 1914 wished to impart none of the wisdom it had garnered through the long, bloody war, or that literature was an inappropriate place to discuss these lessons, or was didacticism to the young not a component of “never again,” as they saw it?


The facts and meaning of this paradox will be the topic of my first research paper.

for discussion

I wish I'd come up with the following myself, but the following quotation is an excerpt from Andrew Sullivan, in the Atlantic Monthly--the full article is well worth reading:

"Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."

Andrew Sullivan, "Goodbye to All That," in The Atlantic Monthly, December 2007. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama.

I hadn't really considered the international implications of the primaries, but this guy just hit the nail on the head. Even the first female candidate incarnates "politics as usual," both at home and abroad, at a time when the credibility of the country demands a sharp contrast between the last administration and the next.

they should put me in charge

I have a few thoughts:
1. Affirmative action should be based on family income, and not on race. Poverty makes it difficult to succeed, no matter what skin color people are.

2. Food stamps should only be good for fresh produce and meat. Maybe that would cut down on the obesity epidemic, and give farmers a boost.

3. On immigration: maybe it's all the holocaust stuff I've been reading, but the idea that we can treat a group of people as less than us because they're not conceptualized as part of the nation strikes me as really disturbing. Especially because it seems to be a politically beneficial position to take, particularly the more extreme someone gets. I was watching the democrats (I'm disappointed in all of them) debate the issue of giving "illegal immigrants" (they objected to the term "undocumented workers" because it de-emphasized the crime) drivers licenses in New York. Hillary Clinton took the position that, while she would not have made the same decision, she understood the governor's impulse to issue licenses--the federal government certainly hasn't come up with any viable solutions, and it's better to know who's in the country than to ignore practical solutions to the problem in order to polemicise better. She was attacked from all sides for having a nuanced position (instead of yes or no, which is something the republicans do to the democrats, and the democrats shouldn't do to each other), and because "getting drivers licenses is a privilege that "these people" haven't earned. My god, you'd think we were talking about a gang of rapists. The only crime committed was crossing an imaginary line, to do a lot of shitty work. The politics surrounding the situation are disgusting to watch, and they echo the Nazi tactic of finding an enemy within to rally against and scapegoat. So lay off my people, jerks.

4. I learned something new today: obese people, when they're so far gone as to not fit into the CAT scan machine thingy, which apparently happens more often than is comfortable to think about, get sent to the zoo to use their machine.

a slight retraction, and thoughts on eugenics

I had dinner with four lovely colleagues a few nights ago, and after instating a "no talking about work" policy, I had a wonderful, non-maddening time. The German in me generally tends to think that rules can solve any problem (if people would only follow them!) but in this case, it worked. So, I like my classmates, I like it here, I just need breaks from work every now and again.

On to eugenics. Many of you will remember that I indulged myself a few months ago and got Nina's DNA tested for breed composition. The results are in...sort of. Of the 38 breeds they test for (listed below), they only found "significant levels (less than 50%)" of rottweiler, and golden retriever "in the mix." So, either Nina comes from a long line of mutts on both sides, or she's mostly a breed of dog that they don't test for. I was hoping for a more extensive list "in the mix," but it is interesting that they found nothing at all else on their list. No shepherd. No dobie. It feels a bit like we've been living with an impostor (golden retriever??).

They only test the breeds most common to the US, so we've decided that Nina's mostly beauceron, confirming our suspicions that she's French. Beaucerons usually get their ears cropped, but au naturalle, the look like this:

You can see it, right?

A list of what Nina isn't:

Afghan Hound,German Shepherd,Akita, German Shorthaired Pointer, Basenji, Golden Retriever, Basset Hound,Greyhounds, Beagle, Italian Greyhound, Belgian Tervuren, Labrador Retriever, Bernese Mountain Dog, Mastiff, Borzoi, Poodle, Boxer, Pug, Bulldog, Rottweiler,Chihuahua,Saluki, Chinese Shar-Pei,Samoyed, Chow Chow, Shetland Sheepdog, Cocker Spaniel, Shih-Tzu, Collie,Miniature Schnauzer, Siberian Husky, Dachshund, St. Bernard, Doberman Pinscher, Whippet, English Setter, Yorkshire Terrier, Border Collie

the novelty is wearing off

the deer in the back yard was pretty cool, and seeing bunnies and groundhogs frolic about on a daily basis will probably never get old, but I think I totally underestimated the value of having friends around who aren't colleagues. Sometimes, I don't want to talk about work, or what paper might be due soon, or how much reading there is. These issues slowly become as irritating as the "do I look fat in this outfit" question is to a guy. I'm tired of the anxiety--especially because I'm not anxious about this stuff. People run around like they're curing cancer sometimes, and I'm kind of tired of hearing about this or that inconsequential paper or presentation or article they should have read but didn't. And there's no escape! Tony's out of town, and there's no one unconnected anywhere near me. Nina's been getting an earful.

Omer Bartov, Redux

A friend of mine from Tel Aviv pinpointed what irked me so about Bartov's talk: the complexities of public memory were never addressed. She said she'd wanted to ask him what he thought about there being no public memorials in Israel to the Arabs killed by the Israeli army. If you address the property stolen from the Jews int he 1940s, don't you also have to talk about the displacement of Palestinians in Israel today with the same sense of indignation?

She was working with some kids in Israel, and they did this thing where they brainstormed to think of possible solutions to the issues with Palestine. THey drew up a whole list. Some of their suggestions were deliberately outlandish (let's kill them all!), other proposed solutions were more subtle (limited citizenship under the one state). They voted on a final list, and when all was said and done, they were left, more or less, with the Nuremberg Laws. Food for thought.

Empathy and Scholars of Modern Europe

Today, I had class on Fascism and Nazism with the esteemed Professor Rabinbach. In one of our early classes, he chastised (nicely) a fellow student's impulse to kill a bug. He also talked about a colleague of his, another famous historian, who called for "the final solution to the squirrel question" after getting a squirrel infestation in his office; "we must wipe out their eggs!" Today, as an evil cockroach swooped in to terrorize our class, Professor Rabinbach chased it around with a napkin, in order to spare its puny little life and get it out of the room. Actually, he let it run around for a while before it became clear that the rest of us were more concerned with tracing its movements than focusing on discussion. I guess if you spend all your time studying killers, you think twice before squishing the life out of something because the idea of it is inconvenient. I'm impressed.

omer bartov

I saw Omer Bartov give a talk the other day--it was underwhelming. He was talking about his new book, which, based on what I gathered from the talk, looks at public memory of the second world war in Gallacia (Western Present-day Ukraine) in the form of plaques on buildings, memorials, graveyards, and so forth. His point, over and over, seems to be that the testaments of memory are primarily to "Ukrainian" victims of the war, to the exclusion of Jewish memory. Fair enough, but (and he might do this in the book, I don't know) pointing out lingering traces of antisemitism isn't very interesting unless you explain it, which he didn't. The whole evening progressed like a city tour through that part of the world: I went to Lvuv, and they hid the Jewish past, and then I went to the next town, and they built a shopping mall where the synagogue used to be, and then...
...you get the idea. Lots of accusations, no effort to understand or explain. Needless to say, I won't be buying the book.

The night wasn't a total wash, though. As has often happened to me here at Princeton, I met someone whose work I'm completely in awe of, completely unexpectedly, without going out of my way at all. The post "girlcotting herstory" below, inspired by the book 14-18--one of the authors was there. She was lovely.

Nuremberg

Christian Delage just put together an excellent film on the Nuremberg trial, with truly remarkable original footage. It comes out this November. Go rent it. And when you do, answer me this: Why were some of the defendants wearing sunglasses during the trial?

entitlement

I've decided that being a graduate student at a well respected university entitles me to come out with my list of academic things that I hate, that I think are totally dry and boring and overrated. Before, this might have rendered me low-brow...but I think I've earned it (note: this list comes after a long day of dry reading).

1. Marx: you suck. you were never an historian--you should stay the hell out of my history books!

2. Marxist historians: see above.

3. Military historians--who stood where when really doesn't tell me much.

4. Economic historians--for the same reasons I find Marx boring. And, they're never good writers. If you pick a boring topic, you should write well.

5. Treaties, political history from above: Yawn.

6. It hurts me to say this a little, but Lenin: proletariat this, proletariat that...come on, already. The crafters of the french revolution at least strayed from the party line often enough to say something interesting.

7. Hitler: for someone so creepy, "Mein Kampf" was a real snooze. It took me forever to get offended.

8. Historians of sex: that one's surprising, but I have a good reason. They pick the most tawdry subject, potentially the best read ever, and then muck it all up by spattering the words "normative" and "heteronormative" all over their damn work, with completely scant descriptions of any getting it on. The field is based on the idea that the academy is too prudish for its own good--live up to your complaining!

9. Theorists: when you're supposed to study what people did and thought in their own context, theory, I think, just mucks it up. See: Marx

10. Feminist historians: see Theorists

11. Religious historians: a prerequisite is having reliable reserves of skepticism for sources.

12. Early American history: turns out, puritans were mostly a dull lot. and the people that tend to write about them...man.

Here's my recent list of people who are awesome, off the top of my head:
Eric Hobsbawm (though technically a marxist historian, he certainly doesn't write like one), Francois Furet, Mark Mazower, Robert Darnton, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ian Kershaw, Inga Clandennin, Karen Armstrong, Orlando Figes, Tzvetan Todorov.

my subconscious is misguided, ironic, hypernostalgic, and hungry.

Upon falling asleep "on the job," which is to say while reading a book for class, I dreamed about searching for the mythic origins of German nationalism in the forests of New Jersey. Last night, I had a dream about starting graduate school in the field of history, but during my dream I had the sense that this notion was so far removed from reality as to be absurd, and so I was aware of being asleep while dreaming, though I wish it had occurred to me to contrast the strange dream with "life" (what else could I be doing now?). The night before that, I dreamed about feeling profound nostalgia for living in New York City, which hasn't happened in reality since we moved. Also that night, there was one about making out with Anthony Bourdain, host of a fabulous show on the travel channel, but otherwise much too old for me.

Girlcotting Herstory

During my first semester of college, I took my first real history class, with Dr. Moretta at the University of Houston. He had us read this book, "the best war ever," that, in typical, starry-eyed, freshman-in-college fashion, completely changed my views on academia. Previously, us students had been presented with a narrative, boring and reverent, and apparently set in stone. Here was a book that challenged the party line, while explaining how such exalting views to history come about to begin with, and how that process is, in itself, historical.

I'm reminded of this now, as I'm reading an extraordinarily written history of violence during the first world war, and my old complaints from high school resurface, and I can begin to look back at my academic career and locate a running theme: taboos and popular constructions of history. This (epiphany!) is why I'm so preoccupied with the images of Hitler playing nicely with a dog--that view of Hitler, that his public 'madness' and private persona can at all be separated, is rarely included in standard histories. And yet, it's been there for all to see. What does it say about us that we choose to ignore it?

After World War I, Norbert Elias wrote a book called "the civilizing process," which , whether you've heard of it or not, probably influenced your attitudes towards your ideas of the West. His thesis (and he's not alone) was that the Western world has increasingly turned its back on violence and brutality, thus becoming more civilized, and so forth (he was a sociologist, not an historian). This idea plays nicely with the popular impression that Europe and "the west" is innately suited to democratic organization, and more generally, that history is essentially a story about progress (which itself is an idea that comes at the beginning of what we call modernity, but it's stuck around). I'll leave it to you to debunk Elias' claims, but I will point out that contingency is key, and progress as a thesis only works with an end in mind.

This brings me back to violence as an underexposed factor of human life, particularly in the history books. How can we expect children to understand the importance of this century (apart from homages to victims, which is all well and good, but insufficient) while "shielding" them from the realities of the very wars they study? Obviously, the example of the first world war teaches that simple awareness of the brutality of modern war doesn't necessarily prevent another one from starting. That said, the tendency to sanitize depictions of armed conflicts could only have helped the rush to war in Iraq, to take a prominent contemporary example. I have a friend who went to Iraq, and through my conversations with him, I've been able to experience personally what Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker note as the major impediment in this kind of scholarship in the historian's conscience: how can you pick apart the first-hand accounts of an event that must be absolute hell to live through, without having yourself ever made that kind of sacrifice (note: I'm uncomfortable with use of the word sacrifice, but can't help myself)? This friend of mine called me a few times from Iraq. When I asked what he was doing there, he'd respond with an anecdote about scraping someone's face off of the inside of a car with a shovel, and how that kind of work "sucks." He said it matter-of-factly, after I'd finished telling him about applying to graduate schools. Most of what he described were accounts of cleaning up the aftermath after someone blew themselves up in their cars--I also learned about the heat in Baghdad, and how shady the military can be in assessing the health of their officers (he was told that his coughing up blood regularly was gingivitis, so that the army could keep him posted instead of letting him go get medical help), but never anything personal...there were no accounts of anything he personally did to someone else, no being uncomfortable with the morality of his situation, in other words, no indication of what it might really be like to be there. Maybe he'll spill it in time, but I suspect not. Mostly, I'm sad for my friend, as I suspect he had no idea what he was getting into when he went into the army to begin with, and as a novice historian, I feel more than a little personal responsibility to try to tell more of the truth to more people.

So, current ideas for further research for me include a study of how people retold the story of WWI in the interwar period, to the generation that would grow up to fight in the next war.

Finally, it should be noted that the title for this post has little to do with the content, but it's a tonyism that I'm finding particularly amusing at present.



Otto Dix, Der Krieg 1924, "dead sentry in a trench."

geeks are freaks

This morning, in the laundry room, I saw a (stereo)-typical princetonite starching his underwear (white briefs, obviously)and folding all of his clothing into neat stacks of polo shirt-under shirt-starched briefs (who DOES that?)- socks. I wonder if he wears pants.

Gr(AAAAAAAH!)duate school

I should say this before classes start: I loooove my cohort. There's this great group of girls that just get along great already, and have really made this transition way less scary than it otherwise would have been. It feels like it must be a unique situation. And, I got a macbook, and have been playing with the picture taking thingy.

new jersey: initial impressions

So, we're mostly settled into our new place. It's actually really nice--we have front and back doors, and only one key for everything (weird), with grass on either side. Nina's loving the extra freedom this affords her--she can hang out in the back by herself and roll around in the grass and stuff (we leave her on the 20 foot leash, and check in every now and then, but there's much less people traffic here than in the city). We have screen door on both ends, so Nina can sit around inside and watch dog tv. There are lots of trees around, so there's a really high squirrel and cat count. On our walk earlier, we saw a bunny hanging out on someone's lawn. And tonight, as if to confirm my analogy that living here was like camping, a buck (big male deer) walked past our unit. It was amazing. Nina and Tony went in for a closer look, and Nina chased it off. It was HUGE.

The night we got in, a classmate of mine and her partner stopped by for a glass of wine. They brought plastic cups and Petit Ecoliers. If trends continue, it might not be so bad here at all.

What I learned during the move:

1. Hiring movers is awesome.
2. Super Wegman's is awesome.
3. Empty apartments that you lived in are depressing, no matter how ready to go you think you are.
4. It's of paramount importance to pack toothbrushes where you can find them.
5. Dogs make stressful situations way better.
6. Chris King reminded me of this, and it's true: almost nothing feels better than passing out on your new floor after a move.