Disability in British poetry of the First World War

In 2005, K.D. Laird published an abrasive critique of the poem ‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen. This iconic trench poet of the First World War was accused of portraying his impaired veteran as a tragic victim of loss. However, 50?years before the modern disability movement, Owen lacked the language to interpret impairment as oppression. What ‘Disabled’ requires is a contextual analysis that integrates its literary qualities with the historical conditions. This article applies such an approach. Firstly, the technical devices used to tell the story are examined: for example, rhyming, verse structure and allusions. Secondly, the experience of impairment represented in the poem is related to early-twentieth-century British society: in particular to the initial patriotic enthusiasm for the War, to the influence of gender roles and to the limitations of state provision. In this way, we see how Owen’s literary image is situated within a historical time frame.     

Remapping the German Homeland: Germania and Catholic Efforts to Mobilise Continued Support during the First World War

Abstract

Despite a minority status that often left them viewed as outsiders, German Catholics – like their compatriots more generally – rallied behind the war effort in 1914. Indeed, intense involvement in the war effort came to be seen as a way to finally squash any remaining suspicions about whether Catholics could truly ever be at home in a country with a Protestant majority. Yet, as the war continued and conditions in Germany worsened, the divisions both within the Catholic Centre Party and among all political parties in the Reich began to resurface and cast a shadow on the common war effort. In an attempt to maintain unity and continued mobilisation for the war, Catholic rhetoric in outlets like the newspaper Germania – a leading organ of the Centre Party – crafted a narrative that redrew the mental map of the German homeland. To do so, the rhetoric relied upon formative geographic tropes established right after unification in 1871 that stressed regionalism and diversity as the hallmark of unity and Germanness. At first sticking closely to efforts at emphasising the centrality of Catholic regions on the periphery, the rhetoric in late 1915 and early 1916 turned towards stretching the map of the German homeland east, especially to the Baltics.     

Norms,Theories of Punishment,and Publicly Preferred Penalties for Crimes*

Despite growing interest in publicly preferred punishments for criminal offenses, investigators have paid relatively little attention to the criteria used by the public to determine appropriate punishments for different offenses. Classical theories of punishment and sociological conceptions of norms suggest two possible criteria: the perceived frequency and seriousness of offenses. Data from four independent Sample surveys of the adult residents of a southwestern metropolitan area are used to determine the effects of these two variables on the severity of preferred punishments for nineteen offenses. When the age and prior record of the offender are held constant, the seriousness of the offense is the central criterion used to determine appropriate punishments. These results cast serious doubts on recent claims that publicly preferred punishments are based on utilitarian motives.     

War against War!: pictures as means of social struggle in post-First World War Europe

Germany 1925: Ernst Friedrich, a young anarchist and anti-militarist activist, publishes one of the first independent books composed only of photographs and captions: War against War! His stated goal is to employ classified pictures of the First World War (WWI) to unmask nationalistic propaganda and expose the false narratives of militaristic rhetoric. Published on the eve of the golden age of photojournalism, this book is the first grassroots attempt to use photography as a means of social and cultural change on a large scale. Through in-depth analysis of some key pictures, I will investigate the relation this series of images establishes with the beholder and the role it plays in shaping his visual experience. Emphasis will be placed on 24 close-ups of disfigured faces which constitute the last set of this visually driven narrative. As I will seek to demonstrate, the complex array of pictures created by Ernst Friedrich testifies to a fundamental yet still embryonic change in the social perception of photography in the post-WWI Europe.     

The power(lessness) of Czechoslovak Jews during the Second World War

The article evaluates the perceptions of Jewish power among the Czechoslovak exiles in Britain during the Second World War. The analysis documents the apparent persistence of prejudices against the Jewish minority among the Czechoslovak non-Jewish authorities that eventually formed the government-in-exile (1940–5), under the presidency of Edvard Bene? (1884–1948). The Czechoslovak exiles believed that the Jewish minority, in particular the Jewish nationalists (Zionists), had vehement supporters within Jewish circles in Western countries. Furthermore, they believed that the Jewish press played a significant role in the formation of public opinion in Britain and especially in the United States. In the early 1940s, the government-in-exile embarked on a policy of national homogenisation of post-war Czechoslovakia and was anxious to give concessions to the political representatives of the ethnic minority groups in exile, in particular the Germans, Hungarians and Jews. Yet the concerns about Jewish influence in liberal democracies granted several political concessions to the Jewish minority, in particular the appointment of a Zionist representative, Arno?t Frischer (1887–1954), to the exile parliament. This notwithstanding, by analysing the internal situation among the Czechoslovak Jewish groups in London, the article documents the internal weakness and disputes among the Jewish groups which gradually revealed the utter powerlessness of the Jewish exiles during their negotiations with the Czechoslovak authorities. The Jewish groups (the assimilationists, Orthodox and secular nationalists) were divided by mutual as well as internal disputes which were not concealed from outside observers and were utilised by the exile government. What emerges from the analysis is an impression of quarrelling groups that could not agree on any of the fundamental issues and whose only power was the ability to court the support of Western Jewish groups, which were perceived by the non-Jewish exiles as influential actors in US and British society.     

Scotland at the Russian Front in the First World War: Robert Scotland Liddell,War Correspondent and Photographer,Red Cross Worker and Russian Officer

ABSTRACT

It is unlikely that one would encounter the name of Robert Scotland Liddell (1885–1972) in the list of eminent foreign correspondents covering the First World War in Russia for British newspapers and journals, but he deserves to be much better known both for the quality of the reports and photographs he sent from the Russian front for publication in the magazine The Sphere and for the trilogy of books that appeared in 1916–1917. Liddell began as an orderly attached to the Russian Red Cross in Poland in 1916 and after a period spent with Oliver Locker-Lampson’s British Armed Car Division on the Romanian front, he became an officer in a Russian divisional transport unit and narrowly escaped execution by mutinous troops after the October coup before escaping from Russia at the end of 1917. The article, while concentrating on Liddell’s reporting, experiences and exploits in Russia, attempts to survey his career from his early days as a Fleet Street journalist to the post-First World decades, when he wrote books of travel and novels, before sliding into obscurity.     

The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself 'White': White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War

The white working classes in the pre-First World War British Empire were not composed of 'nationally' discrete entities, but were bound together into an Imperial working class by flows of population which traversed the world. The labour movements based on this imperial working class produced and disseminated a common ideology of White Labourism. In this ideology, the element of the critique of exploitation and the element of racism were inextricably intermingled. The paper seeks to identify a few of the many 'vectors' along which white labourist ideology moved around the world. The paper ends with a discussion of the British labour movement response to the 1914 deportations of South African white labour leaders, which seeks to demonstrate how integral to that movement the conceptions of White Labourism had become.     

Aliens,Subjects and the State: Surveillance in British Hotels during World War I

The apparatus of the state expanded in unprecedented ways during World War I, with implications for longstanding practices and legal principles which governed the relationship between guests and staff within hotels and similar lodgings. Commercial hostelries were required, under successive Orders in Council, to register the movement of guests and supply these details to police authorities on state-mandated forms. This idea was new to the United Kingdom, where jurisprudence had upheld the right of guests to receive accommodation in anonymity. Exploring how institutions grappled with new regimes of surveillance, this article reveals how the British hotel’s relationship to the state and to guests of all nationalities changed dramatically in the course of war, with implications for the operation of the post-war hospitality sector.     

From War Refugees to Immigrants: The Case of the KMT Yunnanese Chinese in Northern Thailand1

The KMT (Kuomintang) Yunnanese Chinese in Northern Thailand have a complex migration history spread over different generations and places. It not only reflects political entanglements involving different power entities, but also illustrates the dynamic reaction of the people to the complications. The article focuses on the interactions between the political powers and the people. The process highlights that the Yunnanese are not mere objects controlled by external policies or conditions. After a few decades of hard life, they have been transforming themselves from refugee warriors to immigrants.