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1. European Civilization (1648-1945): Introduction
Poziom:
Temat: Społeczeństwo i nauki społeczne
Prof: I'm John Merriman
and this is History 202.
I'm here every Monday and
Wednesday, 10:30 a.m.
to 11:20 a.m.
The way this course is,
these are all really major
themes.
I'm going to go over this a
little bit, and I'm going to
talk about some of the themes.
I kind of lecture on things
that I think that complement
what you're doing.
Let me give you an example.
When I talk about the New
Imperialism,
why it is that Europe basically
took over the entire world
between the 1880s and 1914,
you can read the chapter in
A History of Modern
Europe,
which I had fun writing,
but I lecture on the Boy Scouts.
I often say that I lecture on
the Boy Scouts because I was
thrown out of the Boy Scouts in
Portland, Oregon,
when I was a kid,
because I didn't manage to
accumulate a single badge and
was totally useless after sports
seasons ended.
But that's not why I do it.
To understand the New
Imperialism,
why Europe took over
essentially all of Africa,
where they had places that were
totally uncharted that suddenly
became highly contested between
British,
French, German,
and Italian conquerors,
one has to understand the
culture of imperialism.
The ordinance of the Boy Scouts
in Britain has a lot to do with
that.
Why generations of British
youth and their counterparts in
Germany,
and even Australia,
New Zealand,
and other places,
began to think that it was
important to be able to look at
a map in their schoolhouse that
had the color red for Britain
increasingly taking over the map
of Asia and Africa,
and lots of other places as
well.
So, instead of -- at the very
beginning of that lecture,
I'll say, "Look,
there are three things you
really ought to know about the
New Imperialism,
why they did this."
Then I talk about the Boy
Scouts, so that those two things
will fit together.
Or, when I talk about World War
I, and we'll have two lectures.
My friend and colleague,
Jay Winter, is doing one of
them on the Great War and modern
memory.
Instead of trying to do the
entire war, and there is,
I think, a quite sporty chapter
on that in the book,
I'll talk about trench warfare.
You'll see a film called
Paths of Glory.
That's an early Kubrick film
about the mutinies in 1917.
I'll talk about the mutinies in
1917 when people just said,
"Enough is enough.
There's no sense dying for
nothing.
We won't go over the top."
Which is to say that it's
important to come to lecture,
and it's important to come to
sections.
I've cut back on the reading.
I used to use about four more
books than I use now,
but it's better to concentrate
on what you're doing.
The books are A History of
Modern Europe,
second edition,
which I wrote for people like
you.
Then you'll read Persian
Letters, not all of it.
That would be a rather lengthy
day or so.
You'll read excerpts in
Persian Letters,
and Montesquieu talks about
relations between West and East,
and it's a phenomenal moment in
the history of the
Enlightenment.
Then you have a pause where
you're basically just reading
me,
for better or for worse,
but I hope for better,
until you get to Émile
Zola, his great novel,
Germinal,
which is a classic.
Zola was the first sort of
naturalist novelist,
at least in France.
When he wrote Germinal,
germinal means budding,
like the budding of trees.
But he means the budding of
people being aware of themselves
as workers.
He went down to the mines in
the north of France in the
Anzin.
One of the heroes of the book
is a woman called Catherine,
who is fifteen years old,
but has seen a lot of life for
being fifteen years old.
When Zola wrote
Germinal,
he went down into the mines to
look at fifteen-year-old young
women,
barely older than girls,
working in the mines twelve
hours a day.
It's a book that resounds with
reality.
It's really kind of an amazing
book, and I think you'll like
that.
I hope you will.
Then Helmut Smith's The
Butcher's Tale is about
accusations of ritual murder in
a German town.
It's about the second German
Reich, and it's about
anti-Semitism in a small place
with bigger consequences.
George Orwell went off to fight
the good fight in Spain during
the Spanish Civil War,
where it was sort of a dry run
for an even more horrible war,
and even more horrible fascists.
It's about his engagement and
disillusionment in the Spanish
republican forces,
the loyalist forces,
and about the tensions and the
duplicity of Stalin's folks
undercutting the Trotskyites and
undercutting the anarchists.
It's one of those classics
that's a classic for a very good
reason.
It's really a marvelous read.
Finally, there's Ordinary
Men.
I go to Poland a lot.
In the last couple of years
I've been there four or five
times for various reasons,
and I'd never been to
Auschwitz.
I went to Auschwitz a year ago.
I don't know,
some of you have probably been
there.
As you're going through the
horror of it all,
and as you're seeing empty
suitcases with people's names on
them that the people don't exist
anymore,
and you're seeing baby shoes
and things like that.
You think, "Who could have
done this?
Who could have gone out and
simply, in an assembly line way,
killed people?"
Or in fields around Lodz,
which was a large industrial
town and still is in Poland,
simply gone out and blown the
brains out of mothers,
babies,
grandmothers,
and anybody they found.
Who could have done it?
Well, the answer that Chris
Browning has is ordinary men.
And he had the quite brilliant
idea of looking at a German
unit,
essentially policemen from
Hamburg,
the port town of Hamburg,
an old important Hanseatic
port.
And he follows them from the
lives of very ordinary people
into the killing fields,
it was nothing less than that,
of Poland.
It's also short.
Germinal is long,
but these other ones are short.
It's gripping.
It's quite amazing.
So, those are the books.
I think that A History of
Modern Europe--I hope--is
fun to read.
I think you will enjoy that.
The lectures kind of--you see
the themes speak for themselves.
Sections, everybody likes
Wednesday night sections.
One of my colleagues has only
Wednesday night sections.
We've gone increasingly to
that, because sometimes you
don't find a large audience even
on Friday morning 10:30 slots.
We've abandoned that.
So, tentatively,
we're going to have two at 7:00
p.m., two at 8:00 p.m.,
then Thursday at 1:30 p.m.,
and Thursday at 2:30 p.m.
I don't know.
When are we starting sections?
Sometimes we don't do it until
the second week.
It depends on what day.
What day is this?
Wednesday.
I don't know.
Maybe we'll start them next
week.
Maybe we won't.
Who knows?
But they will happen,
and there's also a short,
sporty paper assignment.
By short I don't mean two
pages, but something like seven
pages, eight pages on something
that you want to write about.
Now, let me give you some
examples just off the top of my
head.
If you have any interesting in
painting, for example,
it would be interesting to take
looks by,
say, two Impressionist painters
like Pissarro and Renoir,
and to see how they viewed the
transformation of
nineteenth-century Paris,
the big boulevards and all of
that.
Or you could take another novel.
Germinal,
one of the interesting things
about it is that it's a document
of history.
It's a novel,
so these are invented people,
but it's a document of history
in some ways,
as is lots of the great
literature of World War I.
There isn't any period in
modern history that has so much
gripping literature about it as
the Great War,
the British war poets like
Siegfried Sassoon.
And a lot of these people were
dead after they wrote.
Sassoon wasn't,
at least not immediately.
I can't remember if he dies in
1918 or not.
But to take some of the poetry,
or the writing of the war,
and write a paper about it.
Or, if you're into diplomatic
history, or something like
that--I don't know,
a paper re-evaluating the
origins of the Crimean War.
That might put you to sleep
before it puts your TA to sleep.
But you can imagine a good
paper on that.
You can do whatever you want.
When I do the Enlightenment,
borrowing from my good friend
Bob Darnton,
I'll do a thing at the
beginning about why the
Enlightenment was important,
what it is.
There's secularization,
rational inquiry,
and all of that,
stuff that you may already
know, maybe not.
But it's in the book.
But then what I do is I look at
some of the third string,
or the third division in the
European football sense,
of Enlightenment hacks,
and what they wrote about
royalty,
and about aristocrats,
and the way they kind of
undermined those traditional
hierarchies that would be swept
away,
to a large extent,
by the French Revolution.
Or you could take somebody out
of the French Revolution,
such as the steely Saint-Just,
who ran off with his mother's
silver at age sixteen or
something and went on the grand
tour of France,
and talk about him on the
Committee of Public Safety that
signed away the lives of lots of
people,
but may have also saved the
revolution.
You can do whatever you want.
Well, it should have something
to do with the course and in the
time period we're talking about.
Nothing on the Red Sox or
something, but you would work
with your teaching participant.
I'm an email animal.
I'm always available on email,
and I have office hours as
well, but people don't come much
anymore.
They're doing NBA.com,
because email has made office
hours sort of oblivious.
I mean, irrelevant,
not oblivious.
But people are oblivious to my
office hours.
But, anyway,
they are Mondays,
1:00 to 2:30 p.m.
It used to be 3:00 p.m.,
but I just sit there by myself,
1:00 to 2:30 p.m.
in Branford College, K13.
There are also two other movies
when we get to fascism,
when we get to Adolf Hitler.
He was only one of a whole
bunch of dictators.
There were hardly any
parliamentary regimes left in
continental Europe by the time
1939 comes.
A woman called Leni
Riefenstahl, who just died in
2002 at age 102,
when she was a young woman did
a propaganda film for Hitler.
Hitler, like Mussolini,
believed in high tech.
He was one of the first people
to use the radio.
Franklin Roosevelt used the
fireside chat of the radio.
But Mussolini was already there
piling falsehood upon falsehood,
and Italians who could barely
afford to eat all had their
radios.
The same thing happened in
Germany as well.
She did a movie,
a documentary called Triumph
of the Will,
about Nuremburg.
It is truly chilling.
It's amazing,
it looks like a political
convention or something in some
ways.
All of these movies you can see
in the privacy of your luxurious
suites in Branford or Pierson
College or wherever,
because they're available now
in ways I don't even understand,
but on your Internet.
We used to actually show them
here.
I used to use a great movie
called The Sorrow and the
Pity, Le Chagrin et la
pitié.
It was four hours long.
People described it as a two
six-pack movie.
The janitors complained because
there were so many beer bottles
rattling around.
But, of course,
this was before the drinking
age was raised.
So, of course,
I don't show that movie.
I take that back.
I don't take that back,
but what the hell.
Anyway, I don't show that movie
anymore.
But I do show Triumph of the
Will, and you can watch that
at home.
The other one is Au revoir
les enfants.
Because one of the last
lectures I talk about resistance
and collaboration in Europe,
and because I live in France
much of the time,
I talk about France.
Au revoir les enfants,
Goodbye Children,
some of you have probably seen.
It was made by Louis Malle,
who just died a couple of years
ago.
It was about when he was in
college,
so he was the equivalent of
7^(th) and 8^(th) grade.
There was a new boy that shows
up at school during World War II
in Fontainebleau,
which is just southeast of
Paris.
He's a boy who hadn't been
there before.
He's a Jewish boy.
It's about his friendship with
this boy, and what happens.
At the end, it's not a happy
film, but it's a great,
great film.
What else?
What to say?
There's a midterm.
I don't like to waste a lecture
giving a midterm.
I would rather give a lecture,
but we have to have something
to report to you.
If you tube it,
if you don't do very well at
all, we don't count it as much
as if you do well.
People ask these questions,
I know.
How much is it worth?
Geez, there's more to live than
grades, but it's something like
twenty-five percent and the
paper is twenty-five percent.
Section participation is ten
percent, whatever we work out,
then the final.
It's an exercise in seeing how
you're doing.
It really is no big deal,
but it will help you pull the
themes of the course together.
It's no scary situation.
We all live in this sort of A-,
B range.
I'll tell you,
a couple of years ago I ran
into this student.
When I run into students,
I'm a friendly guy and I see
people, and I say,
"Hi, how are you?"
I ran into this one person.
I said, "Hi,
how are you?"
And she went,
"Oh, hello."
Oh?
I remembered her name and I
went and looked it up,
and there was the B .
It wasn't that,
"Hi, how are you?
A- or A," but whatever.
I'm sure she had all A's in the
other courses,
and a B is not the end of the
world, and most people get A's,
but whatever.
You have to take the midterm.
That's the way they run it here.
That's not my idea,
so that's what we're going to
do.
Okay, now I'm going to talk
about some of the themes.
At the end, I'm going to read
you a poem.
I started history in a serious
way because I read this poem.
So, I'll leave that until the
end of it.
I didn't got to Yale.
I went to the University of
Michigan, maize and blue
forever, very sad since last
weekend.
I came from Portland, Oregon.
I don't know if any of you come
from Portland,
Oregon, but that's where I'm
from.
When I went off to Michigan,
I'd been at a Jesuit high
school.
Jesuit high school was a sports
factory, in part,
but it was a very good school,
but it was very repressive.
I went off to the University of
Michigan after having been in
Jesuit school for four years.
It was wine, women, and song.
There weren't enough in the
middle and probably too much of
the first.
My first semester I got a 1.93
grade point average,
and my mother asked me if that
was on a two-point scale.
I'm serious.
I had an F.
I shouldn't laugh at myself.
My kids say,
"Oh, my god,
not the same story again."
But I got an F,
and I got two C's,
and I got a B.
The people I hung around with
in Ann Arbor were so
unaccomplished,
some of them anyway,
that they thought I was smart
because I got a B.
I'd go by in the dining room
and they'd say,
"He got a B."
They asked me to tutor them.
Can you imagine that?
Some of the people that I hung
around with were amazing.
You may even know people like
that, but I don't think so.
But one of the guys that I
knew, I've got to get back to
the topic in a minute,
but I just thought of this,
was sort of the king of
malapropisms.
One day he was going on and on.
These are the people I hung
around with.
He was going on and on about
this good meal that he had of
one course after another,
and it was fantastic.
It was a really good
restaurant, and somebody snuck
him some wine.
Finally, I'm tired of the whole
thing and I said,
"Was it gratis?"
He said, "No,
it was chicken."
Those are the people that I
hung around with at the
University of Michigan.
But I've taught here a long
time and I stand by maize and
blue, but I love Yale.
One of the things I love about
Yale is being able to teach
people like you.
And I mean it,
and I love this course,
so I hope that you will enjoy
it, if indeed you take it.
What about some of the themes?
What kind of stuff are we going
to do?
Could you get some syllabi for
some of those folks back there?
They're up on the thing.
Thanks a lot.
A couple of themes.
I don't believe,
and I've never believed,
that history is a series of
bins.
I guess I wrote that in the
book, but that you open up and
you say, "Well,
there goes the Enlightenment.
Shut that baby down."
Then you open up the next one,
and here comes
eighteenth-century rivalries,
and you shut that baby.
Then the French Revolution,
"Oh, I know all about that
now."
Pretty soon you go on to
Russian Revolution eventually,
and all that.
To do a course like this where
you're going to learn much of
what is important to know about
western civilization,
I do believe,
if you do the reading and
stuff,
and if you enjoy the lectures,
there have to be some threads
that go all the way through that
make it worth it so you learn
something.
One is certainly state-making.
Even if you take a sort of
federalized,
decentralized state like with
this very bizarre electoral
system like the United States,
that the growth of modern
states,
it doesn't really just come in
the twentieth century with the
welfare state beginning in
England,
and even before that in some
other places,
insurance programs and things
like that.
It begins with the
consolidation of state power in
the late Middle Ages with
territorial monarchies,
the Spanish, and the French,
and the English monarchies.
It has a lot to do with the
growth of absolute rule.
That's what I'm going to talk
about next time,
absolute rule,
absolutism.
The growth of standing armies,
huge standing armies,
never seen before,
of big forts built on
frontiers.
It has a lot to do with
bureaucrats who could extract
resources from ordinary people.
A lot of the rich didn't pay
anything or hardly anything at
all.
It has to do with an
allegiance, a dynastic
allegiance that could be
transferred later to a nation,
the idea of nation.
That starts in the eighteenth
century.
It doesn't start in the
nineteenth century.
It starts in the eighteenth
century, at least in Britain.
That's an argument that we'll
make also.
In 1500, which is kind of when
that book gets rolling--they
only start in about 1648--there
were about 1500 different
territorial units in Europe.
Some were no bigger than
Archbishop's Garden in Germany,
and some were larger
states--not yet what they are
now in terms of size,
such as France,
which expanded under Louis XIV
into Alsace and Lorraine,
and various other places.
But there's about 1500
territorial units.
In 1890, there were thirty.
So, the consolidation of state
power,
which is looking at it from the
state out,
or the emergence of an identity
where you see yourself as German
as opposed to Bavarian,
French as opposed to Gascon or
Provencal,
Spanish as opposed to Castilian
or as opposed to Catalan.
The Catalan language was
illegal until 1975,
until Francisco Franco finally
croaked in 1975,
in November.
This is a great phrase;
I wish I'd said it originally.
I don't know who said it,
but someone once said that a
language is a dialect with a
powerful army.
That's it.
That's true.
France at the time of the
French Revolution,
half the people in France knew
French.
There was bilingualism.
You could know Catalan.
You could know Auvergnat patois.
We live in the south of France
where a lot of old people still
speak a patois,
though that's mostly dying out.
How does it come that identity,
a sense of allegiance to a
state or a country?
Not everybody,
but how does it come to 1914
when people go marching off to
get killed singing the
Marseillaise,
the French national anthem,
in pretty good French?
How does that happen?
How does a state increase its
reach?
How is the modern world created?
We call this process,
it's a clumsy word,
but state-making.
How do states form?
The other side of this is how
do identities change?
In the sixteenth century,
seventeenth century,
ask somebody they were.
Say, "Who are you?"
They'd say, "I'm so and so.
I'm of this family."
Or, "I am
Protestant,"
if it was the sixteenth century
or late sixteenth century,
any time after 1520s or 1530s
in parts of Germany.
"I'm Protestant.
I'm Jewish."
In much of the Balkans,
"I am Muslim."
In most of Europe,
"I am Catholic."
In Eastern Europe,
"I am Russian Orthodox.
I live in a mir (village) in
Russia."
How does that happen by the end
of the nineteenth century that
people have,
even Russia as they're starving
to death,
starving in the famine that
Tolstoy,
the great writer,
called the world's attention
to.
A lot of them died in fields
thinking,
"only if the czar only
knew that we were starving,
and that his ministers were
treating us bad,
how angry he would be."
Well, they didn't get it.
They didn't know that the czar
could have given one damn.
But the allegiance to the czar,
the sense of being Russian or
being dominated by the Russian
czar, is something that had to
be constructed.
So, the state constructs its
ability to extract taxes,
extract bodies for national
armies, also to provide
resources, but identities are
transformed.
So, I give this as an example,
because state-making is one of
the themes that kind of ties
everything together.
This course ends in 1945,
but look at the problems in the
post-communist world of
state-making.
Look what's going on in
Georgia, which is more
complicated than the newspapers
present in very many ways.
Look at the horror show of the
Balkans in the 1990s.
A lot of the issues,
religious hatreds that we
thought only would be limited to
Northern Ireland.
That's another theme that's
very important to the whole
thing.
Another, of course,
is economic change.
Obviously, this is not a course
in economic history,
but the rise of capitalism,
that's what it's called,
capitalism or large-scale
industrialization.
It changes in ways that we'll
suggest in the reading,
and then I'll talk about a
little bit, the way people live
in very fundamental ways.
There's lot of continuities,
but there's lots of big
changes.
Everybody doesn't end up in the
assembly lines right away.
There are other ways of rural
production.
Women's work remains terribly,
terribly important.
I'll spend some time doing that.
A very dear friend of mine,
my mentor indeed, Chuck Tilley,
who just died a couple months
ago,
to my great sadness,
once said that "it's
bitter hard to write the history
of remainders."
Lots of people were left out of
all of this.
I'll do one lecture when I talk
about popular protest.
I'll take three examples of
people rebelling.
I stand back and say,
"What does this mean?
What is going on here?"
I take the example from the
Pyrenees Mountains,
a place called the
Ariège.
You're not responsible for that
name, would never be.
But where suddenly men dressed
as women carrying guns,
or carrying pitchforks,
came down out of the mists,
out of the snow and drove away
charcoal burners and drove away
forest guards.
Why?
Because they'd lost access to
glean, to pasture their
miserable animals.
Because the wealthy,
big surprise,
got the law on their side as
the price of wood goes up.
They didn't walk around saying,
"Well, I'm a remainder.
Eventually, I'm going to have
to move to Toulouse and my
great-great-grandchildren will
work in the Aero Spatial,
in the air industry there."
They didn't say,
"I'm remainder number
231."
But they fought for their
dignity,
and for a sense of justice they
thought existed at one time that
had been taken away by these
economic changes they couldn't
control.
Then I take an example from the
south of England,
from the same time, 1829,1830,
when they find people dead with
only dandelions in their
stomach,
dead of hunger.
Then these people start
marching the poor,
the wretched poor.
Rural laborers start marching
and threatening people with
threshing machines.
Why threshing machines?
Because threshing machines were
taking away their work as
harvesters.
And one day they found a sign
that said,
"Revenge from thee is on
the wing from thy determined
Captain Swing,"
suggesting that they were many.
They were righteous.
They were just.
They were armed.
They were ready.
Did Captain Swing exist?
Of course not.
They were weak and they get
lost.
They get defeated.
Some of them are hung.
Lots of them are sent to
Tasmania to the prison at Port
Arthur, Tasmania.
They're sent to Australia.
That's why when the Australians
play the English,
a lot of the Australians sing
that old Beatles' song,
"Yellow
Submarine",
which you don't remember,
which I vaguely remember.
"We all live in a convict
colony, a convict colony,
a convict colony.
Captain Swing,
they lost, but they went down
fighting.
It's bitter hard to write the
history of remainders.
But when you look up from that
and you say, "Look what's
going on here."
When you look at people
fighting for grain,
fighting for food,
they're fighting a larger
process that they can't control.
But it tells you a lot of
what's going on over the big
picture.
That's another one.
Then there is,
I'll just take one more,
maybe another ten minutes.
I'm going to read you my poem.
Then you can go.
But I hope you come back.
War--war as a dynamic of change.
Warfare changes with Napoleon.
There were already changes in
the eighteenth century,
but it's still basically
professional armies or people
getting conscripted in the
British navy,
because they were drunk at the
wrong place at the wrong time
outside of a tavern in
Portsmouth or something.
The next thing they know,
they're throwing up on a ship
bobbing off toward the English
empire.
But warfare changes with the
nation's state.
The French called it
leveé
en masse,
that's mass conscription,
the sense of defending the
nation.
There's this magic moment where
the artisans of Paris defeat the
highly-professionalized army at
a windmill called Valmy in the
east of France.
It changes the way things were.
Napoleon is arguably the first
total war,
because of a war against
civilians where there are no
longer the traditional limits
between fighting against
civilians and fighting against
armies.
Those limits hadn't existed in
the Thirty Years' War.
I'll talk a little bit about
that next time around.
But the wars are very different.
There's famous Goya paintings
of peasants being gunned down by
French soldiers,
and atrocities against peasants
in Calabria in the south of
Italy.
So, warfare really changes,
but it becomes a dynamic of
change.
If you think about the Russian
Revolution of 1917,
the Russian Revolution was not
inconceivable without World War
I,
but it was sort of
inconceivable without the
Russian Revolution of 1905,
and the defeat by the Japanese
in an extraordinary shocking
event,
at least for Europeans in 1904
and 1905.
And World War I provides
opportunities for dissidents in
Russia to put forward their
claims.
So, when the whole thing
collapses on the czar's head in
February 1917,
and the Bolsheviks come to
power,
the war itself was a dynamic of
change as well.
And what a war.
What wars.
There have been nothing ever
like it.
A few journalists who had been
in the Russo-Japanese war had
seen trenches in Manchuria that
had been built.
But nobody could have imagined
that the war that was supposed
to be over in six weeks was
going to destroy four
empires--the Ottoman empire,
the Austro-Hungarian empire,
the German empire,
and the Russian empire,
and, arguably,
we can talk about this and we
can debate this,
the British empire.
Because lots of people who had
fought in India,
Indians who had fought in the
war,
or people now we would call
Pakistanis who'd fought in the
war,
or people from Kenya who'd
fought in the war are no longer
going to be satisfied with
simply arguing that they're part
of the great empire,
even though they have hardly
any rights and no money,
and simply work for the big guy.
So, the war transforms Europe
by destroying these empires.
What it also does,
and it's very possible to argue
this,
and my friend, Jay Winter,
who is a great expert on World
War I,
and Bruno Cabanes also,
who's on leave this year,
would agree with this.
You could see the whole period
in 1914-1945 as a new and more
terrible Thirty Years' War.
Because Europe is in depression
all through the 1920s and
‘30s, agricultural
depression the whole time.
Only between 1924 and 1929 is
it not a big industrial
depression.
The poisoning of the political
atmosphere--I'm going to do a
whole lecture on Hitler and the
national socialists.
World War I created Hitler.
He was already just this
pathetic guy with grandiose
plans, no friends,
and sort of a sad sack going to
the theatre and droning on and
on about all he knew about
Wager,
whom he loved,
and the theatre,
and in a threadbare coat.
But World War I transforms him
into an anti-Semite.
He was already an
anti-socialist.
It transforms him into an
anti-Semite.
The troops that came back,
many of them simply kept on
marching.
They'd survived the war and
they kept on marching.
The poisoning in the political
atmosphere was something that
was simply extraordinary.
To understand fascism,
this is terribly,
terribly important,
you have to understand what
happens in World War I.
Great expectations dashed the
Treaty of Versailles,
which only the great British
thinker,
John Maynard Keynes,
really got right,
predicting the disaster that
came out of it.
There's no more fascinating
period in history,
in my mind.
It's absolutely fantastic.
What a war.
It's all obvious.
Everybody's seen these films
from Imperial War Museum --
which has been kind of wrecked
the way they've done it now,
it's sort of too high-tech --
in London.
But I leave you with just a
couple thoughts.
The Battle of the Somme in 1916
that started on July 1^(st) when
they blow the whistle and say,
"Over the top, guys."
There are more British soldiers
killed and wounded in the first
three days of the Battle of the
Somme,
S-O-M-M-E,
three days,
three days,
than there were Americans
killed in World War I,
Korea,
and Vietnam combined.
In three days.
Where are the great British
leaders of the 1920s and the
1930s?
They're all dead.
They're hung up on that old
barbed wire, as one of the war
poets put it.
They're hung up on that old
barbed wire.
One guy, a soccer player,
said, "We'll get some
enthusiasm."
He tried to dribble a ball
across these trenches,
across the craters.
He doesn't make it.
He's killed.
In 1914 on Christmas Day,
the Germans and the British
soldiers, some would say,
"Enough of this
stuff" for the day.
They sing to each other.
They actually play soccer;
they play football.
In 1915, a British soldier
said, "Let's do the same
thing."
They put him against the wall
and shoot him.
The horror of the war
transforms Europe,
every aspect of Europe.
It's impossible to understand
the growth of the agrarian sort
of semi-fascist regimes in
Eastern Europe,
very much under Nazi influence,
without understanding World War
I.
The war that was supposed to
end all wars;
of course, it doesn't do that
at all.
That's a big stop on our agenda
as well.
We did used to read All
Quiet in the Western Front,
but everybody's read that.
Then we read Robert Graves'
rather long and self-indulgent
Goodbye to All That.
That was pretty long,
so we don't do that.
But we will try to rock.
Let me just read you my poem
and then you can go.
Well, you can do whatever you
want, but anyway.
I remember this.
I remember reading this poem
back at University of Michigan
at 2:00 on a Saturday,
trying to figure out what I'd
done the night before.
But, anyway, no.
This is Brecht,
the great East German poet.
It's called "A Worker
Reads History."
Let me begin by saying that
we're going to study
"great,"
I mean really "great"
men,
"great" women.
Hitler is obviously not a great
man.
He's awful, just awful.
But the people who are thought
to have made history:
Napoleon, Peter the Great,
other people.
I do talk about the folks that
you read about in textbooks,
including mine.
But I ask the same question and
pose to you the same question
that Brecht poses.
It's a short poem,
so just hang on.
Who built the seven gates of
Thebes?
The books are filled with the
names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the
craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon so many times
destroyed.
Who built the city up each time?
In which of Lima's houses,
The city glittering with gold,
lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese
wall was finished
Where did the masons go?
Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph.
Who reared them up?
Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph?
Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces?
And even in Atlantis of the
legend
The night the sea rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed
for their slaves.
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in
his army?
Philip of Spain wept as his
fleet
Was sunk and destroyed.
Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed
in the Seven Years' War.
Who triumphed with him?
Each page a victory.
At whose expense the victory
ball?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the piper?
So many particulars.
So many questions.
If you hang with us this
semester, we'll get at some of
those.
See you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
