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GSA 32nd Annual Conference, St. Paul, October 2-5, 2008 Session 114: New Perspectives on World War I (4): Victims and Veterans of the Great War (Sponsored by GSA Working Group on World War I) Moderator: Robert W. Whalen, Queens University of Charlotte "Love and Loss in German Home Front Literature" Erika Quinn, California State University – Sacramento "State, Society, and Care Provisions for Kriegsopfer in World War I Austria" Ke-Chin Hsia, University of Chicago "Veterans of a Different Front: German Prisoners of the Great War in the Weimar Republic" Brian K. Feltman, The Ohio State University Commentator and reporter: Jason Crouthamel, Grand Valley State University This panel featured three excellent papers dealing with definitions of victimhood in the wake of the Great War. The papers were unified by several themes. First, they investigated the paradoxes in how victimhood was conceptualized in cultural and political contexts. Second, they dealt with the ways in which changing constructions of gender shaped debates over victimhood. Finally, they examined struggles between individuals and institutions to control definitions of 'war victims,' which had ramifications for postwar conceptions of individual agency and control, welfare entitlement, and the memory of the war. Each of these scholars presented fascinating case studies for victims of mass violence who were often ironically empowered by the experience of total war. The papers revealed interesting new ways to approach the history of _Kriegsopfer_, complicating the category of 'victimhood' with rigorous analysis of archival sources. Erika Quinn demonstrated that conceptions of marriage and women's roles shifted as a result of the traumatic effects of the combat and home front experience. She investigated the experiences of women as constructed in popular war novels. These novels conveyed representations of total war that on the surface supported conventional gender paradigms. However, Quinn argued, they actually embodied rather ambiguous and complex views of the war and traditional gender roles. Before the war, marriage was already shifting from mainly economic concerns towards bourgeois ideals of love and intimacy. As with so many other phenomena, the war accelerated this shift, but channeled it towards a cult of nationalism and patriotic sentiment. As Quinn noted, 'the war instrumentalized marriage.' The war, and the cult of sacrifice it generated, obliterated traditional bourgeois values and institutions like marriage ideals, displacing private emotions and turning marriage into another component of the hypernationalistic war experience. The war's invasion into German private life triggered an interesting paradox. While war novels were designed to console women as passive war victims when their husbands were killed, they simultaneously perpetuated a cult of death, vengeance and national sacrifice that 'served to unwittingly emancipate women' from their dependence on marriage. Ke-chin Hsia also examined a shift in the relationship between war victims and dominant institutions. He analyzed the Austrian state's intervention in work and family life during the war. The expansion of the welfare state necessitated by the effects of mass trauma altered the ways in which the government interacted with individuals. Hsia argued that welfare officials were on the front lines of legitimizing the state in the eyes of Austrian citizens. Similar to Quinn, Hsia noted the inadvertent effects of the war on a group traditionally constructed as 'victims': men and women seeking welfare became more active participants in the political culture as they forced the state to work in closer proximity and make compromises with its citizens. The welfare state did not generate a passive citizen-client. As the traumatic effects of the war expanded, the expectations between state and citizens also grew. The government developed higher expectations for the performance of its citizens in combat and industry, and individuals expected higher performance by the state to meet basic needs. Ironically, the more the state intruded into Austrian social life, the more active agents for political change it created among the civilian population. Brian Feltman examined an often overlooked but interesting case study for defining war victimhood – prisoners of war. Within the front community, POWs occupied a grey area between the celebrated ideal of heroic death and the demonized image of the cowardly, defeatist soldier. Feltman's paper raised an interesting underlying question: who wielded authority in defining the masculine image of the front veteran. Feltman argued that POWs never fully recovered from the shadow of suspicion that they had failed to live up to the ideal of heroic sacrifice. The image of the returning POW evolved over time and was appropriated by competing Weimar political groups. At first, in the months after the war, they were represented as victims, brutalized by both the trauma of the front and the failure of the new Weimar government to recover them from the enemy. However, by the mid-1920s, conservative military and political elite mobilized behind the stab-in-the-back legend found in these men a useful scapegoat for defeat. Those who cultivated the _Dolchstoss¬_ myth argued that these men in their duty to fight to the last. However, advocates for POWs succeeded in convincing the Nazis after 1933 that POWs had actually fulfilled their duty and heroically maintained their spirit of patriotism, even if from behind barbed wire. Their 'manliness' in the eyes of the Nazis seemed to depend less on their performance in combat than on their political orientation and dedication to the nation. The enthusiastic questions from the audience and insightful answers from the panelists rounded out the session. The common denominator in the questions posed by audience members included: how did perceptions of war widows, disabled veterans and POWs change over the course of Weimar period, and how did these perceptions depend on the social class, politics, and ethnic/regional background of those generating images of war victims? The spirited conversation spilled over the allotted time as panelists continued to receive questions, highlighting the quality of this panel and the thorough archival research undertaken by these scholars. For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2008 German Studies Association Conference, please visit https://thegsa.org/conferences/2008/index.asp
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