October 31, 2024

For early Europe we went over the Dutch Revolt and how the Netherlands was able to become a big deal in Europe with regard to their wealth. They were really good at trading and invented the food grading system that we see today, I guess that made them trustworthy and people started to really like Dutch products due to that. We learned about Dutch society back in the seventeenth century as well and how it was a bit of an outlier, mostly because of the religious tolerance. But by the eighteenth century the power shifted towards England, but it’s not like they completely declined.

For Modern Europe we started the class by reviewing our second quiz, this one was definitely my worst but thats not saying much since I got 15.5/18. Not bad but my third quiz will be better, and hopefully the final as well. Anyway after that we started by talking about the Paris Peace conference. It took place in the hall of mirrors at Versailles and it was to discuss peace after the ceasefire. This conference was noble, if not naive. Representatives of the civilian German government agreed to the armistice of 1918 and there was less negotiation, more talks on annexing territory and revenge (revanchism).

A bunch of people were there but the most “influential” (not a compliment) were the big 3: Clemenceau (France), Lloyd George (UK), and Wilson (USA). Russia was not there as they were dealing with the revolution and had already delivered on their “peace, land, and bread” in 1917. Russia was never compensated for WWI and was now considered a belligerent. France was invested in revanchism due to the 1871 war loss. The western front was also mostly fought in France so they suffered quite a lot. They really wanted to disincentivize the Germans from ever invading again (we all know how that turned out). The USA was really wanting to create a blueprint for enduring peace, and the UK was kind of in the middle. So Woodrow Wilson had 14 points and the big thing with it was National Self-determination, which means that every nation gets its own state. So just fostering more nationalism, which was one of the causes of WWI. How would nationalism solve it? Well obviously it would not do that. The next thing was an end to secret alliances, and because America was/is a global financial power he wanted countries to invest in each other to prevent conflict. The nations in Austria-Hungary need political autonomy. Post-WWI Turkey emerged from the fallen Ottoman Empire and the League of Nations is created. The LON believed that the Nation-State was natural and was doomed by the US senate’s refusal to join (isolationism returns). We all know that it lacked teeth, one example brought up was the failure to intervene when Poland seizes land from Lithuania, another was when in 1931 it did nothing to stop Japan from taking Manchuria, and the last mentioned was when Italy seized Ethiopia in 1936. Wilson’s ideals were very selective and did not apply to every situation.

Next we talked about the legacies of the Great War and the Versailles Peace. New countries were created alongside political boundaries. Tradition authorities were now considered suspect and hereditary monarchies took a direct hit: 3 warring monarchs were all 1st cousins, two out of three would not survive, and in 1917 the British royal family changed their last name because the original one was too German. Also apparently Alexei’s hemophilia was due to the abundance of intermarriage going on. Another legacy was the consolidation of the nation state and the idea of national self-determination: Wilson’s mantra benefited some (Poland) but it was, again, selective. It was exclusionary in practice and caused large population transfers, even genocides would be committed against those without a nation-state (Armenia). She then showed us a Hobsbawm quote. Colonial independence movements would start to arise like in India where Gandhi would demand self-governance, and a young Ho Chi Minh would petition for Vietnamese independence (he even used European language of freedom and whatnot to plead his case), both were present at Versailles but brushed aside, this would sow bitterness at home. There was also a global pandemic (Spanish flu) that killed 50 million people and was exacerbated by the movement of troops, civilian displacement, nutritional deficiencies, and troops returning home were hit exceptionally hard. Changes in gender norms and women’s rights was next. We talked about how women got the vote, the Jazz age/roaring 20s, and pre-war suffragettes: we learned about Emily Wilding Davison, who was forced fed many times and threw herself in front of the King’s horse to make a point (she showed us the footage and it was horrific). Anti-suffragettes used her death as propaganda against giving women the vote. States expanded after the war (income tax, conscription, veteran’s benefits), the US began to rise as a major global player (European hegemony falls), and massive cultural trauma (pessimism, cynicism, irony, loss of faith in traditional authorities/liberal progress).

Also I should talk about office hours, this happens before classes as she’s only available in the morning. Anyway, I go to office hours for multiple reasons but this time I went because I needed my participation for the All Quiet on the Western Front discussion, something I don’t do because of shyness/anxiety (one day I will get over it, maybe next semester). When I got there she seemed excited as she though I was there to talk about the Russian Revolution/Stalin video lectures as she had previously expressed that she wanted to hear my thoughts on it, but I clarified that I wanted to do the discussion stuff. She was fine with that too, of course. I admitted that I didn’t know what to discuss as all the questions on the sheet were answered in class and I didn’t really have much to add, so she took the initiative and asked me what I thought about the discussion the characters had about the motives of the war, because why would a farmer in France have to profit from this war. So I went on to say that they were discussing that only the weapons manufacturers and such were benefitting while they themselves gained nothing. She asked me this due to the Marxist analysis that could be made. I did mention something that did catch my interest in the book that was not related to any of the discussion questions and that was the differences in intimacy; the intimacy that Paul has with his family and even the French woman is completely different to that he shares with his fellow soldiers and even enemy ones too. I told her my friend made a comment to me about how during one scene he thought I tricked him into reading a gay war novel, she cringed at that and I specified that he didn’t say it in a homophobic way just kind of joking, but it is kind of like that. While I don’t think there was any sexual intimacy between the soldiers in the book (there wasn’t anything written, obviously) but the bonds were incredibly close and it just made me think about how common it is in the army, back then and now. She then told me about how its a homosocial environment and that she agrees with my observations on the tender nature of the soldiers interactions with each other, while she doesn’t think it was homosexual explicitly, although she admits that maybe it was purposefully omitted due to the time it was written, but the feelings are there either way and she appreciated my thoughts and bringing this up.

This segued into talking about how the Nazis went crazy over this book and maybe the intimacy of the male soldiers with each other was part of that as Hitler was notorious about upholding masculinity, even if he didn’t fit his own definition of it. We then talked about Hitler and this weird complex he had, some even speculated that he might have been gay himself due to his obsession with this image and making sure the strongest “Aryan” men were at the forefront. I then brought up his wife, she told me they may have never been married but either way their relationship was odd as Hitler seemed to want a mother. If anyone is worried about this being a “pink swastika” moment, it isn’t, although I might ask her if she is familiar with that awful conspiracy. Either way it was a good discussion and she gave me some resources on fascism when I asked her about it (my school has a fascism class but no professor to teach it so its never available to enrol in). She sent me a New York Times Magazine article about Robert Paxton (Vichy France historian and one of her idols) and she told me to watch the Hitler bunker film called Downfall which I will be watching during my Fall break.

She’s got to be one of my favourite professors so far and I’m glad I have another class with her next semester (French Revolution and Napoleon).