![]() Aside from its thorough revisitings of post-Civil War America, late-19th-century France, and post-World-War-I Germany, it overflows with splendid quotes and citations illustrating defeat's ever-ebullient mind-set. Schivelbusch's anticipation of so many current front-page issues- The Culture of Defeat first appeared in German in 2001-is only one of its many delights. Schivelbusch's inspired idea is to look at three historical losers-the 'Lost Cause' Confederacy of the American Civil War, France in the Franco-Prussian War that ended in 1881, and Germany in World War I-to understand the process. "Many things in life naturally evolve into something else, and defeat-particularly as experienced by a nation's people-appears to be one of them. "It would be hard to exaggerate the breadth and brilliance of the variations Schivelbusch plays on these themes over fifty years of history and two continents."- The Nation It is based on immense, but smoothly presented, scholarship, with a great deal of intelligent comparison of diverse events and sociopolitical forces."- St. "This work is one of considerably suavity. A feast of ideas, many of them strikingly appropriate to our own, bellicose times."- San Francisco Chronicle "A book of detours, eddies, and fascinating asides. Reviews About the Author Reviews Praise for The Culture of Defeat From cathartic epidemics of "dance-madness" to the revolutions that so often follow battlefield humiliation, Schivelbusch finds remarkable similarities across cultures. He charts the losers' paradoxical equation of military failure with cultural superiority as they generate myths to glorify their pasts and explain their losses: the nostalgic "plantation legend" after the collapse of the Confederacy, the new cult of Joan of Arc in vanquished France, the fiction of the stab in the back by "foreign" elements in postwar Germany. He shows how conquered societies question the foundations of their identities and strive to emulate the victors: the South to become a "better North," the French to militarize their schools on the Prussian model, the Germans to adopt all things American. Focusing on three seminal cases of defeat-the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I-Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations to the experience of military defeat.ĭrawing on reactions from every level of society, Schivelbusch investigates the sixty-year period in which the world moved from regional to global conflagration, and from gentlemanly conduct of war to total mutual destruction. History may be written by the victors, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues in his provocative new book, but the losers often have the final word. Media Issues, Communication & Journalism. ![]() Computer Science & Information Technology.
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