“The Suicidal ‘Spirit of 1914:’ Personal Self-Destruction as National Sacrifice.”
The European History Workshop is meeting to workshop a dissertation chapter by Matthew Hershey, a sixth year PhD candidate in the History Department whose research focuses on Germany and the First World War, on January 27th at 4pm (via Zoom). The working title of the project we will be discussing is “The Suicidal ‘Spirit of 1914:’ Personal Self-Destruction as National Sacrifice” from the dissertation entitled Inclination Toward Death: Suicide and Sacrifice in First World War Germany. A short abstract of the chapter/ dissertation we will discuss is below:
“My dissertation analyzes the spectrum of suicidal behaviors in Germany during the First World War and situates suicide within the broader context of wartime attitudes toward death and sacrifice. I argue that an emotional and ideational configuration centered on a duty to sacrifice emerged at the center of the mobilization in August 1914 and papered over a suicidal substrate—an inclination toward death—which formed concurrently (Chapter 1). On the macro-level, the German military’s reporting directives for soldiers’ suicides helped hold this configuration in place by mandating that report writers follow an interpretive trajectory which displaced responsibility for these deaths, kept ‘suicide’ categorically separate from ‘sacrifice,’ and archivally instantiated an ‘objective,’ morally-exculpatory narrative about the army’s conduct in the face of mounting losses and ultimate defeat (Chapter 2). On the micro-level, wartime experiences and practices of leave-taking (Abschied nehmen) and the conspicuous parallels between suicide notes and farewell letters illustrate the durability of the inclination toward death ‘on the ground,’ in all its specifics—most notably the sacrificial continually papering over the suicidal undercurrent—all the way into the autumn of 1918 (Chapter 3). The accumulating socio-emotional weight of this self-destructive configuration, however, can be seen in the dynamic and overlapping circles of mourning in wartime Germany, indexed chiefly through the circulation of soldiers’ grave photographs across front and home (Chapter 4). This configuration finally broke down under that weight in 1918, when the latent, implicit suicidality within the sacrificial consensus of 1914 became blatant and overt as the war was lost, sacrifice ‘became’ suicide, and Germans refused to continue fighting (Chapter 5). Throughout the war, I argue, the suicidal was not the ‘flipside’ of the sacrificial, but its largely unspoken and unacknowledged, implicit center—the worm at the core.”
To register for this event please click the below link:
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Additionally, to receive a copy of Matthew’s paper please email Cheyenne Pettit (Ckpett@umich.edu). As it is a draft we ask that you do not circulate the paper beyond this workshop.
