The culture of defeat
Subtitle: on national trauma, mourning, and recovery
By: Wolfgang Schivelbusch ; translated by Jefferson Chase.
Edition: 1st American ed.
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2003
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 403
Subjects: World War, 1914-1918 -- Psychological aspects.; World War, 1914-1918 -- Germany.; Defeat (Psychology) -- Case studies.; National characteristics -- Case studies.; Military history, Modern -- Case studies.; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Psychological aspects.; Southern States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1945.; Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871 -- Psychological aspects.; France -- Social conditions -- 19th century.; Germany -- Social conditions -- 1918-1933.
Genres: Case studies.
Description: "History may be written by the victors, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues in his new book, but the losers often have the final word. 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.".

"Drawing on reaction 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. 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.

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.

From cathartic epidemics of "dance-madness" to the revolutions that so often follow battlefield humiliation, Schivelbusch finds remarkable similarities across cultures."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [295]-391) and index.