Free PDF Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery
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Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery
Free PDF Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery
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Review
“It may seem strange, just after an American military victory, to submit to the brooding brilliance of The Culture of Defeat. But that sort of irony is one of the book's points. Schivelbusch incorporates a cautionary note....[into this] wide-ranging...compelling account.†―The New York Times“Inspired...Call him nervy, call him eccentric, but, above all, call Schivelbusch the Clausewitz of defeat...Schivelbusch's anticipation of so many current front-page issues is only one of its many delights.†―The Philadelphia Inquirer“A book of detours, eddies, and fascinating asides...A feast of ideas, many of them strikingly appropriate to our own, bellicose times.†―San Francisco Chronicle“Fresh and provocative...A novel and thought-provoking book, one that deserves special attention at this moment.†―Houston Chronicle
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About the Author
Wolfgang Schivelbusch is an independent scholar who lives in New York and Berlin. His books include The Railway Journey, Disenchanted Night, and Tastes of Paradise.
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Product details
Paperback: 420 pages
Publisher: Picador; 49992nd edition (April 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312423195
ISBN-13: 978-0312423193
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 1 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.6 out of 5 stars
8 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#360,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This book is a tour de force in comparative history. Essentially unexplored among the vast number of treatises on war have been the psychological and cultural sequelae emerging from defeat. The author identifies a sequence of societal structural changes following defeat of the Confederate States of America, the Second French Empire (of Napoleon III), and the German Empire (of Wilhelm II). First come shock and denial, then rejection and humiliation of the former leaders, who are held responsible for the debacle. The term "dreamland" describes this situation when the nation feels cathartically cleansed, free of guilt, and hopeful for a return to the status quo ante. There is usually strong identification with the victor and adoption of many of his ideas and practices. However, the defeated nation may deny responsibility for its own defeat, invoking a betrayal from within or a "stab in the back." Next follows a desire and planning for revenge or "revanche." Perhaps the most powerful message conveyed by Schivelbusch is this: The 50 years spanned by the three studies mark the final transition from more or less "civilized" notions of war and peace to the unlimited and unsparing pursuit of 20th Century war--a REBARBARIZATION of the world! In this process, economic forces (massive production) have taken precedence over the military. In his epilogue, Schivelbusch asks if America's post-September 11 war fever is the belated response (revanche) to defeat in Vietnam. Is the situation analogous to that of the Weimar republic? I am a systems theorist (consider my own writings), and I was delighted that Shivelbusch's analysis fits well into the systems framework.
Well written and an interesting take on the consequences of losing a war. The thing missing from my perspective is that the US hasn't really fought a declared war in a month of Sundays. Nor has it fought a war where the US itself was going to be overrun. I doubt it will be relevant to an American.
Historicizing the idea of a short, "purposeful" war come about during late nineteenth century cabinet diplomacy, Schivelbusch's Culture of Defeat demonstrates that war is never-ending- a plea, in effect, for world peace, and disarming criticism of the today's interventionist politics.
No one before really explained how defeat can create a culture of revenge and how this culture can play out into the future.
This is a a very right-brained, synthesizing effort rather than a narrative of any kind. I'm prepared to love that sort of thing, but in the end this book doesn't work for me.As to the central theme, the similarities between the South/French/Germans after their losses aren't that tightly marked off, so the whole book lacks focus. It almost comes off as three ninety-page books, and each book is a lot of four and five page riffs on various topics, many of them interesting in themselves and all more or less related. But ultimately I found the effect unsettling and unsatisfying.That's enough of a problem, but I also felt the story bumped along with an uneven mix of minutiae on the one hand and generalization on the other. I wonder what it would be like if I knew more about the time periods involved here: would I appreciate the writing better, or would I be even more annoyed by the author's glibness?That said, I now know that slavery would probably have died a natural death but for the spectacular rise of the cotton industry (that's pre-Civil War, but whatever); I learned about the Paris Commune and some of the grandiose pan-European idealizations of the French in the last part of the nineteenth century (starring Victor Hugo); and I discovered that Henry Ford was very popular in post WWI Germany, and how Americanized that nation was in the twenties, particularly Berlin.But there are probably better places to read about these things.
THE CULTURE OF DEFEAT, an appraisal of the sociocultural similarities apparent in the American South after the aftermath of the Civil War, France after the Franco Prussian War, and Germany after WWI, is an extraordinary performance. Much more than mere sociology or social psychology, it ranges with bracing erudition and insight across the realms of intellectual history, cultural criticism, and political and economic history, synthesizing across these disciplines to elucidate its main thesis: that these "losing sides" went through nearly the same stages of national consciousness as they sought to come back from defeat, that each put forth an explanation of their failure in similar terms, and each, in the fullness of time, came back as more powerful after their defeats.Dreamworld, scapegoating, revenge -- these are just a few of the parallel stages these defeated states went through. For instance, Germany, France, the American South, all cultivated a "dreamworld" in the immediate aftermath of their defeats, a period of time where leaders are blamed for misleading the people into a war that could not be won, a time when the defeated nation looks to the victors for recognition of their true goodness and their unfortunate victimization by a corrupt elite. In licking their wounds, new more powerful "us vs. them" discourses were created and served to bind the defeated together in seeking their redemption among nations. The Southernization of U.S. politics, for example, over the past 25 years is emblematic of how the South has indeed risen again. In the short term, it took only a few years (with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as the enforcement arm of Southern elites) to rewrite the Reconstruction codes as Jim Crow laws and the "lawful" suppression of the African American to be de facto reinstituted against the early injunctions of the victor. As Schivelbusch points out, in a terrible irony, the Nazis looked to these codes for instruction as they planned the demonization and destruction of the Jews.Unlike Kubler-Ross' famous (and in danger of becoming as trite and omnipresent as the 12 step program) stages of grief, nation states do not apparently move toward acceptance. In the nation state new discourses must be hammered together out of the wreckage of defeat, and new goals and national purposes must be forged out of the ashes. One assumes it is difficult to mobilize a citizenry under the banner of acceptance. Schivelbusch, to this point, interestingly, takes issue with the notion that the cycle of defeat and revenge was broken at last after the Second World War through American munificence with Japan and Germany. Schivelbusch suggests that a form of revenge has indeed been in play in the economic arena.In his conclusion, Schivelbusch notes it is not much of a stretch to suggest that these same patterns may hold true in the wake of the current U.S. war and that a new, more virulent culture of defeat may be created in the Middle East. In less interesting and compelling fashion, other recent books suggest this has already come to pass. Importantly, what Schivelbusch does is show how Western states, too, use the same language of dreamworld and revenge, and shows how they have embarked on the same paths of retribution and domination.
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