"In fiction, the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them performs only one half of his office."
Thomas Babington Macaulay, "History," Edinburgh Review, 1828
Showing posts with label December Anniversaries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label December Anniversaries. Show all posts
The Nazis were nothing if not culturally acquisitive. Although harshly critical of modernist art and literature, they portrayed themselves as the heirs and custodians of the great European and German national cultural traditions (the mirror image of the German Marxist claim). In some cases, the appropriation was easy. In others, a certain amount of manipulation or disingenuous treatment was required.
In the literary realm, the great Weimar Classicist writers and friends Goethe (1749-1832) and Schiller (1759-1805) stood at the center of the effort, though not all the works of these humanistic authors readily lent themselves to the messaging of a racist and dictatorial regime. Although Goethe's "Faust" could, with some gymnastics, be held up as the portrait of the archetypal "Germanic" soul, Schiller's drama Don Carlos proved awkward when audiences applauded the line, "Sire, give us freedom of thought!" And in 1941, Hitler requested that Schiller's anti-tyrannical drama Wilhelm Tell no longer be performed. Be that as it may, a general emphasis on the Nationalliteratur, reinforced by selective quotation, remained an effective overall policy.
The glorification of the national cultural tradition extended to Kitsch and collectibles. These small glass Schiller Christmas ornaments (c. 30 x 35 mm) were given to donors at street collections for the Winter Relief Work effort in March 1941.
Some recipients may actually have used them as tree decorations, but the Winterhilfswerk also offered an album for collectors.
The series,"Heads of Famous German Men," included Hitler (featured on the album cover above), historical
military leaders, and artists and composers from Dürer to Wagner. Goethe
and Schiller were, along with philosopher Immanuel Kant, the only literary figures.
It was a travesty of the German intellectual tradition. On the other hand: if only other countries took their literary heritage so seriously that they felt the need to co-opt and distort it.
This is a document that my father acquired during his service with the US Occupation Government in Germany after World War II: confiscated, or just found in his office or quarters—I don’t know. It is described as a “war diary” for a young girl. Normally speaking, a war diary (Kriegstagebuch) is an official German record of a military unit or department, or occasionally, a private record kept by a combatant. The extension of this term—rather than, say, scrapbook—to a gift made for a child is indicative of the culture of militarism and indoctrination under the Third Reich. (more background at the bottom of the page)
* * *
The Christmas entries are particularly instructive.
Weihnachten with the Wehrmacht
24 December 1940
"Our soldiers, too, decorate the Christmas tree, for it connects them
with the homeland and recalls many a pleasant hour."
In one of the most famous military broadcasts of the War, German radio shared transmissions from the Arctic Circle and Stalingrad to Africa as soldiers sang "Silent Night."
Of course the tendency to seize upon Christmas as a respite from combat was not unique to Germany. 101st Airborne veteran Art Schmitz recalled being surrounded by the Germans at Bastogne in 1944. Hearing "Radio Berlin doing a request broadcast: German civilians asking for Christmas carols to be played for their soldiers serving in Narvik, Norway; Italy; or Novosibirsk, Russia," the Americans decided to sing their own Christmas carols. "There was 'The First Noel,' 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' and others before we began 'Angels We Have Heard on High.' What we heard was the sound of angels of death overhead." A Nazi air raid began and the singing ceased, but the memory remained.
The diary pages for the two days of Christmas (celebrated for two days in Germany) epitomize the blending of the military-propagandistic and bourgeois-sentimental.
25 December
The Führer on Christmas with his personal Guard Regiment
The Commander of the Guard Regiment
SS Lieutenant General Sepp Dietrich, greets the Führer
26 December
Santa Claus with the Führer's escort team
Nazism was ideologically anti-Christian, but it readily availed itself of Christian imagery and symbols not only because they were familiar, but also because they were particularly well suited to convey the fascist message of "palingenetic" ultranationalism, or the urgent need for national regeneration: the propaganda film "Triumph of the Will" begins, after all, by speaking of Germany's "crucifixion" by the Versailles Treaty and "rebirth" after the advent of Hitler.
Christmas was in many ways the ideal holiday for the Nazis: a
convenient means to affirm their connection with mainstream society (for
even their most barbarous acts were committed in the name of
decency and middle class values) as well as to impart their own
inflection to it. Christmas was of course common to both Catholic and Protestant Germans, but the latter connection was most fruitful, for Lutheranism was associated with the national identity and heritage: the revolt against Rome; the translation of the Bible, which laid the foundations for the modern German language; and (at least according to popular tradition) even the introduction of the Christmas tree. Further, the natural-seasonal aspects of the holiday, which coincided with the winter solstice, were multivalent, allowing for easy identification with either a Christian or a Nordic-pagan message (or some combination of both), as the need dictated.
Finally, the holiday, with its themes of both domesticity and light versus darkness, could incorporate varying ideological messages about the relation between battle front and home front, depending on the course of the war: from the early expectations of peace and national renewal, to later, increasingly bitter denunciations of the barbarous enemy--whether the advance of the Red Army or the allied air campaigns against German cities--as a motivation to fight for the preservation of the innocents at home.
Thus, the page facing the photo of the soldier trimming the Christmas tree was devoted to a an address by Hitler.
The Nazis as the Peace Party?
24 December
Prepared for the Final Call!
When this war will have ended, then there will begin in Germany a great process of creation, then a great "Awaken!" will resound throughout the land. Then the German people will cease the manufacture of cannons and begin with the work of peace and task of reconstruction for the masses in their millions!
And then from this labor will arise that great German empire of which a great poet once dreamt. It will be a Germany to which every son is attached with fanatical love, because it will be a home even for the poorest.
Adolf Hitler!
If this strikes us as preposterous as well as utopian, it is because we are so detached from the perceived reality in that time and place. Today we associate Hitler and Nazism primarily with war, but we need to recall that this was not always the case, at least domestically. Another book that my father acquired was a propaganda album of cigarette cards issued to commemorate the first year of the new regime (1934), which it praised as "The State of Labor and Peace."
Indeed, as Ian Kershaw so clearly demonstrated in his modern classic, The Hitler Myth, Hitler succeeded for so long precisely because he was credited not only with achieving domestic recovery but also securing--without war--the consensus international goals of the military and geographic revision of the Versailles Treaty. This presumed evidence of his genius as a leader reinforced his standing among the loyal and cut the ground out from under the would-be critics. When war finally broke out in 1939, the German people, fully aware of what had happened in 1914, were more sober and anxious than enthusiastic, but the relatively easy victories in Poland and then in the west following the end of the "Phony War" in 1940 merely reinforced Hitler's reputation for wisdom and infallibility.
What the mother writing this diary--and the rest of the public--did not know was that peace was in fact further away than ever: on 18 December 1940, Hitler had ordered the military to prepare for the invasion of the Soviet Union, even if the war against Britain was not brought to a conclusion.
From Peace Party to Pagan Turn
Thus, when Himmler greeted the SS and their families in the 1943-44 volume of the holiday annual Weihe Nacht (a deliberately archaic spelling of Christmas, connoting pagan origins), it was in a very different tone:
Women and mothers! Men of the SS and Police!
Implacably harsh is the enemy power, against which we have to defend and augment the Reich as the legacy of our ancestors and obligation for our children. Once again the season of the solstice and Christmas summons us to the gathering of clans [a term with a pagan-racial tinge] and families. Once again the task in the longest night of the year is to yearn for the victory of the sun with the faithful trust of our ancestors. May this deep faith in the victory of the light characterize us more deeply than ever today, when we in the privacy of the family or comrades kindle our lights. The lights on the green boughs will, spanning the distances that separate comrades in the front lines and the women and children at home, form bridges between hearts.
You mothers and women truly stand, as in all the great hours of destiny of our Teutonic-German past, truly also personally in battle. The enemy's dishonorable conduct of the war has reduced to rubble the homes of many, and yet you have lost neither courage nor faith. The harsher the struggle, the more cordially the clans must close ranks . . . .
* * *
Background
The culture
About a generation ago, there was a rather sterile but revealing debate among scholars of women’s history. One view, which passed for a radical political and feminist stance of a sort, maintained that, because Nazism was a masculinist racial system, women could not have been complicit in the crimes of a regime that also oppressed them. A countervailing and more plausible view called attention to their neglected role as “accomplices,” providing the stable private sphere supportive of the tasks of the politically and militarily active males. As others pointed out, one does not have to choose between victim and accomplice: it was entirely possible for Aryan women, individually and collectively, to be both.
In 1935, Hitler declared, “I would be ashamed to be a German man if only one woman had to go to the front. The woman has her own battlefield. With every child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk, exactly as the woman stands up for the family.” The continuation of that battle meant raising girls to understand the culture and course of warfare.
The bibliographic object
The document takes the form of a notebook of blank pages (c. 16 x 25 cm, with lines ruled in with pencil), bound in faded purplish boards with a black cloth spine. A handwritten label (in an indeterminate hand) on the cover calls it “Kriegstagebuch For [name],” whereas the title page, in the large printing of a child’s hand reads, “Mein Kriegstage Buch [sic].” By contrast, the text entries are all in an immaculate version—thus evidently an adult hand—of the Sütterlin German script taught from 1915 through 1941: under the Nazi regime, the only one from 1935 on.
The contents consist of dated entries—generally excerpts from or summaries of press reports, speeches, and the like—accompanied by photographs clipped from newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, the book covers only the period November 1940 to early February 1941; the reason for that choice is unclear.
It's a French eighteenth-century pencil sketch with sepia wash, on laid paper (c. 40 x 25 cm, with no apparent watermark).
The geometry suggests to me that it was a sketch for a wall painting, but that's just my best guess.
Oddly enough, the depiction of the central figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ child seems somewhat awkward in comparison with that of the flanking shepherds, who observe the miracle in quiet dignity.
In any case, the piece just radiates the spirit of the period.
Members of the Amherst Select Board have few ceremonial duties, none of them obligatory. Still, I do relish the ones that have both historical and civic meaning. Participating in this commemoration, like those held on Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and the 9-11 anniversary, is among such quasi-obligations that I value most. The others are held in spring or summer weather. This one, by contrast, is the most universal in significance but the least well attended, held on what invariably proves to be one of the most frigid days in December, as we remind ourselves that winter has not even begun. The fact that the event usually takes place after dark, by electric candle light, only adds to the sense that we are doing something important, keeping something very important alive.
"Many of the assumptions about who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are wrong"
Attendance is also low, however, because, whereas the other dates are established US holidays, this one is not. Few of us know of the Declaration, and even among those who are familiar with it, few are aware of the real story. At best, we "know" that Eleanor Roosevelt had something to do with it. Well, not that much, and she certainly was not the only one. I always refer people to an admirable article by the equally admirable and courageous Gita Sahgal, a founder of the Centre for Secular Space. She reminds us of two crucial points:
(1) "Many of the assumptions about who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are wrong. The less known story of the men and women who wrote this foundational, emancipatory and anti-colonial document must be told in today's world."
(2) That in turn should serve as a rebuke to those on both right and left who dismiss the notion of human rights as, respectively, a sign of liberal elitist weakness or a reactionary bourgeois affectation, not to mention those who claim an exemption from these universal standards for a particular culture or faith.
Universal Human Rights--and now, more than ever, the rights of immigrants
This year's ceremony was a little bit different. Because the anniversary fell on a weekend, Human Resources and Human Rights Director Deborah Radway and the Human Rights Commission decided to begin in the afternoon and daylight, at 4:00 p.m.
And, given the toxic climate surrounding the recent presidential campaign and the rise of new nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment, the Select Board proclamation of the holiday explicitly reaffirmed the Town's decision (represented by a Town Meeting vote of 2012) to do the utmost to protect the rights of immigrants, including the undocumented, from what was regarded as unnecessary and excessively aggressive government intervention:
Key excerpt:
Then THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Town of Amherst and its officials and employees,
to the extent permissible by law, shall not participate in federal law
enforcement programs relating to immigration enforcement, including but
not limited to, Secure Communities, and cooperative agreements with the
federal government under which town personnel participate in the
enforcement of immigration laws, such as those authorized by Section
287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Should the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts enter into an agreement or Memorandum of Agreement
regarding Secure Communities, the Town of Amherst shall opt out if
legally and practically permissible. To the extent permissible by law,
immigration detainer requests will not be honored by the Amherst Police
Department. Municipal employees of the Town of Amherst, including law
enforcement employees, shall not monitor, stop, detain, question,
interrogate, or search a person for the purpose of determining that
individual’s immigration status. Officers shall not inquire about the
immigration status of any crime victim, witness, or suspect, unless such
information is directly relevant to the investigation, nor shall they
refer such information to federal immigration enforcement authorities
unless that information developed is directly relevant. The use of a
criminal investigation or arrest shall not be used as a basis to
ascertain information about an individual’s immigration status unless
directly relevant to the offenses charged.”
Above: Amherst political notables take part in the reading of the Declaration. At left: Select Board Member Andy Steinberg, State-Representative-elect Solomon Goldstein-Rose, Town Manager Paul Bockelman.
For the record, this is the first time that I (or anyone else, as far as I can tell) can recall a Town Manager taking part in this event: big props to Paul, who doesn't even live here yet on a permanent basis and is still commuting from Somerville.
Human Rights Day in Amherst: the 2015 post, describing the origins of the Declaration, with still and video footage from Amherst commemorations, 2011-2014.
The Battle of Verdun, which had begun on 21 February 1916, at last came to an end on 18 December. The meat-grinder, as it came to be known, occasioned some 700,000 to 900,000 French and German casualties--among them at least 300,000 dead.
The medal below was issued by the city to the defenders. As historian and security expert John Schindler notes in a piece written on this week's centennial: because of the French system of rotating units in and out of Verdun, "virtually every division in the French army fought at Verdun at some point in 1916."
John Schindler (@20committee) places the Battle of Verdun in the context of other bloody operations of 1916, including the Somme (intended to relieve the pressure on France arising from Verdun), and the lesser known battles in other theaters: Isonzo, on the Italian Alpine front, and Russia's Brusilov offensive against Austria-Hungary.
From my father's World War II diary, written in Scotland:
7.XII. News from the Pacific
Pearl Harbour - Guam - Philippines
Ill tidings [literally: Job's message/tidings] from the Far East
9.XII. Roosevelt's Speech
The reasons for the dating are unclear: The early morning attack on Pearl Harbor is listed under 7 December, as one would expect. Although the news appeared in The Scotsman and other papers on 8 December, the BBC announced it on radio on the day of the event. President Roosevelt delivered his "Infamy" speech to a joint session of Congress at 12:30 p.m. on 8 December, so the entry under 9 December (assuming it is not just a scribal error) may, given the time difference and schedule of the army day, reflect the fact that the diarist got the news from the papers rather than the wireless.
It certainly would have been grim news: Since the start of November, the
British had lost the aircraft carrier "Ark Royal" and the battleship
"Barnham." In Africa, the Nazis briefly crossed the Egyptian frontier,
while in Europe, they advanced to the gates of Moscow (though the
Soviets launched a counteroffensive on 5 December).
Grim news, to be sure, but in the long run a positive development to the extent that it finally brought the United States into the war and brought badly needed support to Britain on the western front.
This simple message announced the attack on Hawaii 75 years ago.
The Library of Congress reproduces the document in its post for the anniversary:
"A
hurried dispatch from the ranking United States naval officer in Pearl
Harbor, Admiral Husband Edward Kimmel, Commander in Chief of the United
States Pacific Fleet, to all major navy commands and fleet units
provided the first official word of the attack at the ill-prepared Pearl
Harbor base. It said simply: AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR X THIS IS NOT
DRILL"
As chance would have it, when I shared this post on Twitter, one of my tweeps informed me that the Museum of World War II in Natick also has a version of the document in its collections. (Another destination to add to my list.) It would be interesting to know how many others are extant.
Among other items mentioned in the LOC blog post:
• an annotated script from the NBC news broadcast on that day
• a description of folklorist Alan Lomax's response to the crisis. Best known today as a collector and chronicler of folk music, he put his ethnographic bent to work in the service of oral history, recording the reactions of ordinary people across the country.
The post includes this sample:
My first thought was what a great pity that… another nation should be
added to those aggressors who strove to limit our freedom. I find myself
at the age of eighty, an old woman, hanging on to the tail of the
world, trying to keep up. I do not want the driver’s seat. But the
eternal verities–there are certain things that I wish to express: one
thing that I am very sure of is that hatred is death, but love is light.
I want to contribute to the civilization of the world but…when I look
at the holocaust that is going on in the world today, I’m almost ready
to let go…”
On the first anniversary of the creation of the Empire, Napoleon won "the greatest battle of [his] career" when he defeated the forces of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz (Slavkov) near Brünn (Brno) in Moravia. The triumph was so decisive that it ended the War of the Third Coalition and forced Austria to sue for peace.
The Emperor's encampment at Austerlitz after a drawing made on the scene the morning of the battle
Battle of Austerlitz: The Emperor gives his orders to the Marshals
General Rapp brings the Emperor news of the victory at Austerlitz
Pictured here are pieces of ammunition recovered from the battlefield.
• Iron canister shot: a tin of 112 balls (61 for a four-pounder gun) could be used with devastating effectiveness against infantry at a range of some 300-500 meters
One has to pause to remind oneself of the terrible damage that such large but low-velocity projectiles did, especially in the absence of modern medicine and sanitation.
Casualties amounted to one eighth of the French forces and one third of the Austro-Russian.
The Battle of Hohenlinden east of Munich in 1800 was in some sense the predecessor of the later battle of Austerlitz (1805). The great victory at the latter ended the War of the Third Coalition by forcing Russia to withdraw its forces and Austria to sue for peace, leaving England to fight alone.
In the campaign of 1800, Napoleon's victory at Marengo (June 14) stands out as the stuff of legend but, despite the initiation of peace talks with Austria, the war continued. It was in fact the great victory by General Moreau at Hohenlinden near Munich half a year later that turned the tide of the war. His subsequent advance threatened Vienna, which signed an armistice on Christmas Day. Subsequent French gains in Italy led to the defeat of the Second Coalition and the Peace of Lunéville in February of the following year.
There is another connection between Marengo and Hohenlinden. The former was Bonaparte's first major victory after assuming power, and he was determined to aggrandize his role--even to the point of rewriting history--at the expense of the commanders who actually saved the day. He therefore resented Moreau's fame after the German battle, viewing the general as a potential rival. The latter was foolish enough to contemplate such a role for himself and became embroiled in a royalist plot that led to his imprisonment and then exile in the United States in 1804. Historical opinion today is more inclined to affirm Moreau's essentially republican sentiments but fault him for his bad judgment and political ambition (the latter driven in part by his wife). He fell at the Battle of Dresden, fighting with the Russian forces in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon.
Because I'm teaching my course on modern East Central Europe again this fall, it seems an appropriate time to remember the so-called "Velvet Revolution" (a sappy term I never liked) in the course of which dissidents peacefully forced the hard-line Czechoslovak communist regime from power in 1989.
The driving force behind the revolution were the dissidents such as Václav Havel, associated with the Charter 77 human rights movement. As the spirit of protest spread throughout the bloc in the fall of 1989, they organized themselves as the "Civic Forum" (Občanské fórum, OF).
I acquired this small--I guess you would call it a (?)--mini-placard some years ago in a Prague antiquariat. It displays the name of the organization against the background of the Czechoslovak flag. It is the size of a small bumper sticker (193 x 63 mm.) but is printed on stiff (now yellowed) pasteboard and thus lacks adhesive, which makes me wonder what its intended use was: for display in apartment or store windows? (After all, Havel's famous essay on "the power of the powerless" anchors its notion of "living in truth" in the story of those who agree vs. decline to accede to the regime's supposedly meaningless and harmless demand that they place its propaganda signs in their windows.) For display in an automobile? And when? The dampstaining at the bottom suggests that it was actually placed in a window where it would have been subject to condensation arising from a heated interior in cold weather.
It is at once an inspiring and a sad memento. Although Czechoslovakia had been an island of liberal democracy among the post-World War I successor states that drifted toward authoritarianism, it became one of the most hardline communist states after 1948, and indeed, its leaders (in contrast to those of Hungary and Poland) refused even to nod to the de-Staliniziation "thaw" in the wake of Krushchev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes in 1956. Following the short-lived and optimistic episode of the "Prague Spring," crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks in August 1968, the regime pursued a quietly brutal policy of "normalization."
Despite this long history of resistance to reform, the communist regime collapsed in only ten days in 1989 in the face of determined citizens jingling their keys and refusing any longer to be afraid. Former dissident Václav Havel became president at the end of December 1989.
By 1991, however, the movement split into conservative-capitalist and liberal factions. The latter triumphed in the elections of 1992, and the latter passed from the scene. A cautionary tale about politics in more ways than one.
Etching with hand coloring.
Image dimensions: c. 214 x 267 mm (approx. 8.4 x 10.5 inches)
Signed in the plate, “G Cruishank fect” (left) and “Pubd. Augt 1st 1835, by Thos McLean, 26, Haymarket.” (right)
This is the second issue. The print first appeared in the 1826 collection, Holiday Scenes, published by Samuel Knight (active 1805-41). Thomas McLean (1788-1875) reissued it 9 years later in Cruikshankiana, an assemblage of the most celebrated works of George Cruikshank. He largely effaced the original Knight signature, but it survives as a ghost imprint above his own, at lower right:
“London Pubd Jany 3d 1826 by S Knight, 3 Sweetings Alley [{Roy[a] X'Change’}]
Not yet "Victorian” in the strict (or any other) sense, the etching
nonetheless lacks the ribaldry or bite of Cruikshank’s other early
(especially political) work: it manages to be satirical and sentimental
at once. We can already recognize in it our received image of Christmas
as domestic idyll, familiar from Dickens to “The Nutcracker” (though the evolution of the latter is a tale in itself).
The fourteen (count 'em!) children–this, at a time when the average British family size peaked at around 6 children (1, 2)–play
with a mixture of sedate enjoyment and abandon as a stout serving-woman
brings in a tray of treats. The image is rich in period detail, from
the toys and the copy of the Eaton [sic] Latin Grammar
abandoned on the floor, to the delicate jelly-glasses (whatever
possessed the parents of that day to put them in the hands of
youngsters?) and the faux-bamboo “fancy chairs” on which the children
sit or climb.
The etching also also suggests why the Calvinists and their American
descendants held no truck with Christmas. Theologically, it was a
problem for them because its celebration was not biblically mandated,
and the date of Jesus’ birth was in any case unknown. The holiday was
moreover associated with revelry–whether heavy drinking by adults or
just boisterous behavior, as shown in our print–that seemed
incommensurate with the spirit of a holy festival.
Such was certainly the attitude here in Massachusetts, where Christmas celebrations were banned in 1659,as the legislature put it:
“For preventing disorders … by reason of some still observing such
ffestivalls as were superstitiously kept in other countrys, to the great
dishonnor of God & offence of others.” The state lifted the ban in
1681, but it took more than a century and a half before things really
began to change. Under the influence of shifting national tastes,
Christmas began to assume its familiar lineaments of wholesome domesticity and consumption. (In Massachusetts, Irish immigration also contributed to the shift.) The 1855 Christmas celebration at the Worcester Free Church under minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a symbolic turning point. The following year,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed, “We are in a transition state
about Christmas here in New England. The old Puritan feeling prevents it
from being a cheerful hearty holiday; though every year makes it more
so,” and the legislature officially recognized the holiday.
Whenever possible, I like to use images and objects in teaching. They
can provide insights into specific aspects of life in the past
in the past or simply help to make tangible a world that can seem irredeemably
distant and alien to students.
One of the favorite
objects in my collection is this one. It's not terribly rare (you can
still find them fairly easily, and they don't cost a fortune), but it is
special.
hinged embossed brass box, 37 x 125 mm (click to enlarge)
The Imperial War Museum calls this brass box, created as a Christmas gift for British troops in1914, "one of the most enduring mementos of the First World War."
In the center, enclosed in a circle within a wreath, is a profile of Britain's Princess Mary facing left, flanked by the cursive initial "M." Above, center, in a cartouche in the decorative border, the words "Imperium Britannicum" (British Empire) set over a garlanded sword. Below, center, a cartouche with the words "Christmas 1914." flanked by the bows of warships.
The names of the major allies, France and Russia, are set within circles over tripods of banners at left and right, respectively. In the four corner cartouches, diagonally facing the center of the lid, are the names of the other allies. Clockwise: Belgium, Japan, Montenegro, and Servia (sic).
The story is as intriguing as the box is beautiful. The War Museum, which holds the documentary and material record of the undertaking, provides the fullest recounting on its website, but here are the essentials.
'every Sailor afloat and every Soldier at the front'
The story began in the early months of the war, when Britain's Princess Mary (Victoria Alexandra Alice Mary; 1897-1965), daughter of King George V, wanted to do something to honor and cheer the troops.
The undertaking proved far more complex than anyone had anticipated, and
indeed, can serve as an illustration, on a microcosmic scale, of the
challenges of morale-building efforts and industrial activity in the era of nascent
total war. Virtually every aspect of the project, from concept, funding, and contents, to manufacturing and distribution, had to be modified.
Although the Princess's original plan had been to make a true personal gift from her own resources, it soon became apparent that a public effort and fundraising appeal were required, so in October, she wrote:
I want you now to help me to send a Christmas present from the whole of the nation to every sailor afloat and every soldier at the front. I am sure that we should all be happier to feel that we had helped to send our little token of love and sympathy on Christmas morning, something that would be useful and of permanent value, and the making of which may be the means of providing employment in trades adversely affected by the war. Could there be anything more likely to hearten them in their struggle than a present received straight from home on Christmas Day?
The gift was to consist of the hinged and embossed brass box, "one ounce of pipe tobacco, twenty cigarettes, a pipe, a tinder lighter, Christmas card and photograph [of the Princess]." The Executive Committee then decided to produce several variant versions for those for whom the smoking-oriented contents might be inappropriate. For the non-smokers, "a packet of acid tablets, a khaki writing case containing pencil, paper and envelopes" took the place of the tobacco and related products. Nurses at the front received chocolate instead. As for the Colonial troops: "The Gurkhas were to receive the same gift as the British troops; Sikhs the box filled with sugar candy, a tin box of spices and the Christmas card; all other Indian troops, the box with a packet of cigarettes and sugar candy, a tin box of spices and the card."
The fundraising campaign was so successful--bringing in nearly £ 163,000, most of it from small donations--that it allowed for boxes to be given to all troops, but this proved to be a mixed blessing, given the sheer number of recipients, estimated at some 2.6 million. The Executive Committee thereupon decided to do a sort of triage, aiming to reach recipients in Class A--essentially, the Navy, frontline troops, nurses, prisoners and internees, and families of the deceased--by Christmas, and those in Classes B (British, Colonial, and Indian troops outside the UK), and C (troops within the UK borders) later on. Because these latter were distributed after Christmas, the card proffered New Year's greetings instead.
As it happened, just fabricating the box proved more than challenge
enough. The manufacturers were not eager to take on the task in the first place, but the largest problem consisted in the shortage of appropriate
brass metal, even after the Committee was forced to intervene and supply it directly. In the event, there proved to be enough for the Christmas issue, but the Committee struggled to find the remainder, even turning to American sources. Nice bit of historical trivia: most of the US shipment was aboard the Lusitania, famously torpedoed by the Germans in 1915.
426,724 boxes were distributed by Christmas 1914. This meant that 1,803,147 still had to reach the other two classes, a daunting number that prompted the Committee to streamline things yet again by settling upon a uniform gift consisting of only the box, New Year's card, and pencil. After the final accounting was done in 1919, the surplus went to Queen Mary's Maternity Home, which aided the wives and newborns of men in the service.
* * *
One of the things that is so fascinating about the rise of the web and social media in museum and historical work is the possibility for dialogue, among members of the public, and between the public and professionals. There is a nice representative collection of responses--from Massachusetts and the UK to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India--on the web page of the box from Museum Victoria in Australia. Some of the commenters knew what the box was, some were learning for the first time about this mysterious object that they had in their homes. One collector and writer used the opportunity to add to his knowledge base prior to issuing a new publication. One of the most intriguing and laconic posts seems to come from a British soldier who found one in an abandoned house in the course of the current war in Afghanistan.
This sort of engagement (though presumably lacking the direct personal connection) is what I hope to bring out when I show the box in class. One can begin the conversation via any one of multiple avenues:
The striking elegance of the design and quality of the product, for example. Do they reflect a soon-to-be antiquated aesthetic?
What of the relationship between monarchy, state, and public? How do the texts and images of the box feature in the construction of a patriotic ideal?
Are students surprised to see Japan featured on the box? Why?
What do the design of the box, along with the production and distribution problems, tell us about expectations of the course of the war? Were the initiators of the project naive?
What do the contents such as tobacco and writing products tell us about the culture of the era and the daily life, hopes, and fears of the soldier in the trenches?
And what about the substitution of spices and sweets in the boxes destined for Indian troops? How did the Empire understand cultural diversity and pluralism? Why has the significant presence of Colonial forces failed to become part of our popular image of the war? (1, 2)
And then there is the now-fabled "Christmas Truce" of 1914 in which the soldiers of the opposing sides climbed out of their trenches, and for a day, at least, met face to face as friends rather than foes. Among the gifts they exchanged were cigarettes. What if this box was there? What if this box could talk?
As I pondered which historical Christmas or New Year's artifact to share this year, I managed to settle on a modest one that addresses both holidays and moreover anticipates the course on twentieth-century Europe that I am teaching this spring.
It is a combined Christmas and New Year's military Field Post greeting card from the 11th Railroad Company of the Imperial and Royal (k.u.k.) Austro-Hungarian army, from 1915. An elf, using the railroad emblem as his wheelbarrow, trundles a tiny snow-covered sign denoting the Company down the track.
The address side depicts the leader of the chief allied state, a fiercely martial German Emperor Wilhelm II.
The card thus seems to differ from the typical commercial card of the era in that it has prominent graphic content on both sides. Early postcards reserved one side for the image and the other exclusively for the address. Senders therefore scribbled any message on the image side, which seems strange to modern sensibilities. After the advent of the "divided back" postcard in 1907, senders could use one side for both address and message, in the manner familiar to us (or which was familiar, until the rise of mobile electronic communication), although some of the more verbose correspondents allowed their prose to overflow onto the "picture" side.
The card, dated Christmas Eve, 1915, and postmarked 26 December, is from one Lieutenant Hugo Mischek to his wife Bertha in "Ober Erlitz," a small town (1930 population: 374) within the larger precincts of Grulich, Bohemia: today, Olomoucký Kraj in the Pardubice region of the Czech
Republic. (The mixture of German personal names and Slavic family name—though in Germanized spelling—reminds us that the relation between nominal ethnic ancestry and personal identity was often complex in the multiethnic Danube Monarchy.)
The address and inscription are written in the purplish indelible pencil typical of the era: in that context, a sort of "predecessor to the ball-point pen", very useful in the field. Lt. Mischek wishes his wife "a most lovely Christmas celebration," with "warmest greetings." Immediately beneath this, a comrade adds, "Hugo is doing quite well" and the Austrian salutation, "I kiss your hand!" while other members of the unit simply add their signatures. Presumably, the men came from the same region. The intimacy suggested by the use of the first name may also be in part a matter of cultural style. The Berlin-born historian Felix Gilbert recalled being "highly astonished," "almost shocked" to hear Austrian officers, upon meeting one another for the first time, promptly slip into the informal address, "Du," which the reserved and punctilious Prussians would never countenance.
The modest artifact is noteworthy in at least two ways.
First, it reminds us that this was a new kind of war. Almost since the inception of the railroad, governments sensed its military usefulness, but it took them some time to put this insight into practical effect. The success of the Prussian army in rapidly bringing 370,00 troops to bear against the 240,000 of France in 1870 was a wake-up call. "Build no more fortresses, build railways," was the advice of General von Moltke, and other nations began to heed the lesson. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian army, which had itself fared poorly against the more mobile Prussians in 1866, had 12 Railroad Companies, a number that would soon increase.
More than any other conflict, the Great War has come to be associated with the railroad. Historians have long noted that the mobilization of the immense new mass armies raised logistics and timing to an unprecedented level of importance (a policy that reached its logical conclusion—or reductio ad absurdum—in the "launch on warning" stance during the thermonuclear doomsday scenarios of the Cold War). The late great military historian John Keegan, taking as his point of departure Wellington's observation that "In military operations, time is everything," wrote that space as well as time played a crucial role in the German and Austrian calculations involving railroads and mobilization schedules vis-à-vis Russia. And Stephen Kern devotes an entire chapter of his provocative The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 to "The Temporality of the July Crisis," in which both the railroad and the telegraph, as well as more psychological or metaphysical notions of "national" time play a prominent role.
Second, we are reminded that the Great War did not take place only on the Western Front, whose static "war of position" epitomized by trench warfare has come to define our image of the entire conflict. The fighting in the east, by contrast, was a traditional "war of movement," made possible in part by the bungling as much as the successes of the two sides. The city of Czernowitz, capital of the Bukovina, the easternmost district of Galicia, is said to have changed hands 15 times in the course of the war. The German forces scored great initial successes against the Russians in the north, establishing the fame of Hindenburg. To the south, the Austrians did not fare as well: by the fall of 1914, the Russians had advanced to the hinterlands of Kraków. In December, the Austrians turned the tide, and none too soon. They had lost 1,268,000 killed, wounded, or captured. A year later, at the end of 1915, the combined German and Austrian forces, supported by the Bulgarians, took Belgrade and pushed the Serbs into Albania, but none of the great powers had lost its fighting capacity, and victory was in sight on neither front. As Keegan writes, "The coming year of 1916, all parties recognised, would bring crisis on land, east and west, and at sea also. It would be a year of great battles between armies and fleets."
The elf on the postcard looks businesslike rather than particularly cheerful, for which he might be excused, given the circumstances.
Postscript
A website devoted to the history of a local Austrian railway station lists a certain Hugo Mischek who was involved with railway administration in the vicinity of Olomouc (thus, the home region of the sender of this postcard) but who is then described as having been sent through retirement relocation to Vienna in 1915-15 and in retirement there, 1915-1918. This does not seem to fit the description of a Lieutenant apparently in active service, but one wonders whether there might not be some family connection. A later Hugo Mischek was a leading builder and developer in post-World War II Vienna. The full history behind our little postcard remains to be explored.
