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The German Army, also known as the Wehrmacht, fought a brutal war on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. These soldiers, under the command of military officials of the Nazi state, vowed to destroy Bolshevism and Jewish populations. By examining letters from soldiers to family members on the German home front as well as letters from families to the men on the front lines, a better understanding of the motivations of war is revealed. Letters of these men and family members present insight into a vast area of research in German twentieth century history. An estimated 20 to 40 billion letters circulated throughout the German armed forces from 1939 until 1945. In addition to letters, Nazi propaganda and the Hitler Youth greatly contributed to the influx of anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik mindsets throughout the military ranks. Due to the events surrounding the end of the First World War, Hitler was successful in creating a vendetta against his European neighbors who betrayed Germany in 1918-1919. Revenge against Germany's enemies was constantly preached to the German population as well as soldiers serving in the Wehrmacht. These individuals would take their revenge against civilian populations and prisoners of war. The majority of German atrocities took place on the Eastern Front in Russia after the launch of operation Barbarossa in June 1941. The following research does not attempt to describe every German veteran of the Second World War; rather, it is important to realize that war is horrendous under any circumstance and the Second World War proved no different. Additional research, namely in Germany, is necessary in order to develop an even more detailed perspective of the average soldier of the Wehrmacht.

The dissertation examines the evolving role of Germans under the auspices of European imperialism in modern China's hydraulic management and economic globalization. In the early nineteenth-century, Germans were on the margins of both the Chinese and British Empires, connecting former frontier regions to the major hubs of Asian trade. Over the nineteenth-century there was a large expansion of trade on the coast, where Qing authority had to contend with an emerging international maritime legal and economic order, and German shippers before national unification had a niche as carriers of domestic Chinese trade. As transport technology changed, western shipping interests clamored for the Chinese state to undertake material changes on China's waterways to develop new port infrastructure. Galvanized by a series of natural disasters as well as a dramatic increase in trade, Chinese officials began to collaborate with Western officials and engineers to manage infrastructure projects. Germans in particular played a key role in the transnational transfer of technology. All the while, late Qing and Republican Chinese governments gained increasing control over the internationally-staffed water conservancy organizations. With the First World War, Europeans, preoccupied with their own conflict, shifted their attention away from China, and Americans took up where the Europeans had left off in the financing and advising of hydraulic projects. Yet, German modernity continued to have an enduring influence in visions for China's economic globalization, hydraulic infrastructure, and state power. / History

Abstract / History

<p> An examination of the wartime correspondence of hundreds of Jewish individuals living or interned in France, citizens who denounced or advocated for them, and the response of French officials to these petitions reveals a multifarious discourse regarding who was capable of belonging to the French state. Letters from the camps of France offer an exceptionally rare window into the perceptions and self-conception of the interned as they engaged with friends, family, and colleagues, petitioned officials, demanded the restoration of their legal status, and endeavored to disprove accusations that they constituted a separate and unassimilable group. France experienced an immigration crisis and a period of intense political friction directly prior to the Second World War. These factors stirred anxiety over moral &lsquo;degeneration&rsquo; and a perceived loss of socio-economic control, inspiring exclusionary policy and policing of immigrant and refugee communities. </p><p> This correspondence requested recognition and release, the provision of aid for the interned and their families, and for French and Jewish organizations to explain anti-Jewish measures. Within their letters and entreaties Jews in France consistently confirmed their loyalty and patriotism while decrying the abhorrent nature of the classification, &lsquo;aryanization,&rsquo; arrest, and deportation measures. Within correspondence from the concentration camps traumatic violence, extreme deprivation, and the fervent need to acquire resources for survival (provisions, medicine, news) frequently took precedence. Internees pursued petition as part of their multi-pronged survival strategies. Although it is difficult to gauge intention within such a complex and controlled medium, the sense of shock present in the letters implies authors were often convinced their citizenship, service, or in the perilous case of the &lsquo;<i> juifs &eacute;trangers</i>&rsquo; their motivation to assimilate, held emancipatory power. While officials of the French State rarely responded directly to personal letters, these demands were taken up by leaders of Jewish organizations, the <i>Union g&eacute;n&eacute;rale des Isra&eacute;lites de France</i>, the <i>Consistoire central</i>, aid societies, and delegations of veterans and wives of prisoners, in their meetings with Vichy and <i> Commissariat g&eacute;n&eacute;ral aux questions juives</i> officials. These petitions mobilized familial, friendship, and professional networks in their defense, and give insight into how strategies of adaptation and perceptions of the persecution shifted over time. </p><p> Hundreds of letters of personal correspondence and petition between camp internees and Jewish and French officials from the Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande, Compi&egrave;gne, and Pithiviers camps are primarily found in <i>Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine</i> collections in Paris, the USHMM camp collections, and Yad Vashem. Dozens of letters written by Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and organizations advocating for the rights of the Jewish community can be found in the Archives <i>Nationales- Commissariat g&eacute;n&eacute;ral aux questions juives</i> collections.</p><p>

<p> In many advanced societies today, it is taken for granted that the relatively free circulation of opinion on a minimally regulated print market brings social and political benefits. Such benefits can only be taken for granted if one assumes that markets are capable of regulating themselves and that the clash of opposed opinions in venues of public expression is salutary for the society in which those clashes occur. Early eighteenth-century Britons lacked both of these assumptions, and so for them the deregulation of the print market that resulted from the 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act was a formidable problem, a challenge to the intelligibility of their world that had, somehow, to be confronted. This dissertation seeks to give an account of this confrontation. Specifically, it seeks to understand how key metaphors within British culture were adapted and repurposed as descriptions of what printed writing was, what it was good for, and what rules and norms readers and writers needed to respect in order to serve that good, at an historical moment when such descriptions were lacking but badly needed.</p><p> The first two chapters argue that the early decades of the eighteenth century were characterized by an intense struggle, conducted across an array of printed genres, over which descriptions would be prove authoritative in this new environment of reading and writing. In this contest, two key metaphors&mdash;one was "debate," the other "conversation"&mdash;emerged as particularly strong candidates as ways of figuring print and mediating it for its users. These two candidates were called upon to do similar work: to provide the procedural and ethical norms needed to turn the unruly production and consumption of printed matter into an orderly and beneficial cultural routine. Because these two metaphors were substantively different, however, they produced divergent understandings of the meaning of print. Indeed, a main claim of these chapters is that the two metaphors struggled for authority in the early decades of the century, with conversation emerging as the dominant (though certainly not exclusive) metadiscourse. These chapters give an account of how metadiscursive struggle was conducted and offer some claims about why it took the precise form that it did. Along the way, they complicate existing scholarly histories of eighteenth-century British print that locate the major metadiscursive innovations of the century in the legal realm. By contrast, I emphasize the extent to which writers, in trying to make of print an ordered and rule-bound totality, drew on their existent discursive culture and its metaphors as resources for figuring print. The resulting cultural process was a complex and dynamic one, whereby the application of these metaphors to print changed both the meaning and force of the metaphors and the practices of reading and writing.</p><p> The first two chapters contribute to the history of how British culture helped to mediate print technology for eighteenth-century Britons. The third and fourth chapters are somewhat narrower in scope; they work to identify a particular formal category, crafted by Hogarth and Sterne, and then to demonstrate that this category came to be used, by writers like Burke, to represent British society to itself. In Burke's hands, this politico-aesthetic category, which I call "the eccentric," represented the British social and political order as the intricate result of historical time rather than the work of purposive human agency. Through it, Burke forged a rhetoric designed move his fellow Britons to understand their "country" as an intricate totality whose very existence was threatened by Jacobin "political metaphysics." In adapting this formal category as a vehicle for political and historical thinking and argumentation, Burke invented a style of public address in which whole social and political orders could be revealed as precious, fragile things in need of the protection that a reading public might provide simply by feeling grateful for them and concerned about them.</p><p> As a whole, the dissertation seeks to identify and theorize forms of "thin mediation"&mdash;that is, forms of mediation that have discernable formal and affective features but few necessary ideological entailments. The metadiscourses analyzed in the first half of the dissertation and "the eccentric" analyzed in the second are "thin" in this sense: they are able to disconnect themselves from robustly articulated ideologies, to circulate widely, and to give strangers a sense of their social order as a totality and of their place within that totality. If, as I suspect, such thin forms of mediation are indispensable to "liberal governmentality," this dissertation may contribute in its modest way to the on-going genealogy of liberalism.</p>

This dissertation asks to what end were so many Ovidian poems written during the last fifteen years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Arguing that the poems have a distinct political subtext, this study situates the poetry within the context of Elizabeth's unsettled succession. The fraught question of who would succeed the Virgin Queen was further complicated with Elizabeth's ban on any discussion of the subject. I argue Tudor historiography ironically helped construct a sense of an ending with its projection of genealogical stability, which linked the Tudor family to England's ancient roots, and its emphasis on paradigmatic structures. Sixteenth-century historians claimed that to know the past was to know the future. At the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, precedent predicted an unsettled succession would precipitate violence and ruin. In the face of rupture, the poets used Ovidian resources to construct an alternative epistemology. They developed a poetic that truncated the exemplar's paradigmatic status to emphasize the constituent role of the material present. In doing so, the Ovidian poem emphasized the role of perspective, contingency, and revision; their response to the dead end Elizabeth came to represent insisted on the gap between the past and any recovery of that past to qualify the providential claims of Tudor genealogy. Following a discussion of Tudor genealogy and historiography, which I organize around the appropriated biblical iconography of the Tree of Jesse, and evidence of English frustration and anxiety over the succession, I turn to case studies of Ovidian poems. Using the examples of Edmund Spenser's Muiopotmos, William Shakespeare's Lucrece, and George Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence, I demonstrate how late-century Ovidian poetry challenged recoveries of exemplars and paradigms to disperse sites of authority. The poems collectively underscored the instability of the past and how meaning manifests in collaboration rather than recovery. Reading from a generic rather than biographical point of view, I argue the Ovidian poems written during the 1590s provided a significant method to imagine alternatives beyond the grounds of political crisis.

Between 1580 and 1660 the English travel book emerged as a site of rich literary innovation. To supplement practical features long associated with the genre, writers called upon an array of poetic devices, satirical modes, and mixed prose and verse forms to represent the early modern traveled world. The World Inscribed: Literary Form, Travel, and the Book in England, 1580-1660 historicizes such literary experimentation by examining how travel narratives moved through the transmission circuits of early modern book culture, and how, in turn, modes of textual production shaped the genre's formal characteristics. Reading canonical poets and dramatists (Spenser, Donne, Marvell, Jonson, Herbert) together with a number of contemporary printed and manuscript travel books, this project argues that the aesthetics and literary aims of prose travel writing developed rapidly alongside developments in the travel book as a circulating text technology. The project's five case studies articulate not only how the form and style of early modern English travel writing could be altered or suppressed across different versions of a given narrative (within print or manuscript networks), but also how the travel book itself could serve as a vehicle for literary texts, especially verse, related to the writer's travel experience but not necessarily offering direct descriptions of travel. By engaging with the understudied intersection of literary form, textual transmission, and early modern English travel writing, this project traces how new ways of representing the traveled world through material texts reveal the formal mechanics of a genre in the making.

Citizenship is an important social status that indicates a person is a legitimate member of a nation. Citizenship thus exists in a very specific relation to State power; ideally, citizenship protects the rights of an individual. T. H. Marshall's influential 1949 essay “Citizenship and Social Class” proposed a linear, historical model of citizenship: an expansion of rights paralleling the growth of the Welfare State in England. To be a citizen was synonymous with the ability to make claims (i.e., regarding health or education) upon the State. As Marshall describes this complex dynamic, citizenship appears inevitable and unproblematic. My analysis of citizenship both builds on and departs significantly from Marshall's classic formulation. I argue that many individuals and groups in contemporary England are not treated as full citizens. Increasingly, exclusion or inclusion in the life of the nation is determined by cultural practices. Citizenship serves as a boundary delineating acceptable behaviors from unacceptable ones in English society; it draws a line between moral and immoral activities, as if an essential ‘British-ness’ is being attacked. Once individuals and groups living alternative lifestyles are marginalized and declared deviant in this fashion, they may find their rights encroached upon and welfare services difficult to access. This book explores three English alternative lifestyle and political groups in depth: New Age Travellers, hunt saboteurs, and the Exodus Collective of Luton. All resolutely practice their own versions of what it means to be English, and all have been subject to police harassment and legislative control. Subcultural members express themselves by adopting unconventional manners of living, or otherwise creatively voicing their dissent. When the State provision of welfare services fails them, people may devise their own survival solutions rather than conform. Constructing citizenship also constructs criminality, and so citizenship serves as a hegemonic device that promotes a singular definition of peace and order within civil society. My exhaustive examination of the social processes that laud or assail pluralism in English society brings together cultural studies and criminological analysis to make a major contribution to the sociological literature in both fields.

This dissertation is concerned with the representation and reception of Nazis in West German theater as contributions to the cultural memory of the Holocaust. It examines eight dramas and their performances: Ingeborg Drewitz's Alle Tore waxen bewacht (1955), Erwin Sylvanus's Korczak and die Kinder (1957), Rolf Hochhuth's Der Stellvertreter (1963), Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung (1965), Thomas Bernhard's Vor dem Ruhestand (1979), Heinar Kipphardt's Bruder Eichmann (1983), Joshua Sobol's Ghetto (1984), and George Tabori's Mein Kampf (1987). This study takes into account the literary criticism of the plays and reviews of the world premieres and subsequent stagings. It highlights the role of the media in influencing the formation of public awareness of a text as well as a staged play. The playwrights created a space for the perpetrator memory that has been a taboo in the national discourse about the past since the end of Word War II. They targeted the suppression of this memory in German society's recurrent tropes of denial, invoking “Nazism as a demonic force,” “Germans as victims of Nazism,” the “Nuremberg defense” of “just following orders,” or “just cogs in a machine,” or “just puppets.” The dramatists challenged such cultural myths by revealing their Nazi characters in situations of choice and exposing an individual motivation (anti-Semitism, sadism, fear, careerism) that led to the issue of individual culpability. The playwrights asked their German audiences to accept the perpetrators as human beings similar to themselves and to contemplate their own complicit relationship with and memory of the Holocaust. Despite the ostentatious confrontation with the perpetrator memory, the reviews of the plays' stagings indicate that the media, for the most part, ignored or played down the perpetrator performative in favor of other aspects of the plays. They also tended to conflate the victim and perpetrator categories in plays by Sobol and Tabori that presented Jews as fallible human beings. Nevertheless, there were some critics who did point out the significance of the Nazi characters for a German audience. Overall, the disparity of views expressed shows that dealing with the perpetrator memory has been an ongoing struggle in German society.