Abstract
The transformation of European military history from a marginal enclave into a major growth area and enormously respected subfield of the discipline of history writ large has taken place within the last dozen years. Whether the sources of the booming growth in military history and its increasing integration into the mainstream of the discipline can be found in the end of the Cold War and the resurgence in many parts of the globe of interethnic strife and ‘hot wars’ (and, more recently, the increasing incidents of terrorism and subsequent attempts to combat it), or in the succession of numerous anniversaries related to past wars (perhaps most significantly the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995), or in dynamics more internal to the subfield of military history which more and more opened itself to wider social historical trends (e.g. an interest in the daily lives of soldiers, the impacts of wars on home fronts, or the aftermaths of wars in military occupations and new regimes) even as social historians themselves became increasingly interested in utilizing diaries and letters produced during wars remains an open question. All these factors were consequential. What is indisputable is the richness and variety of the resulting research findings and analyses.1
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Notes
See T. Kühne and B. Ziemann, ‘Militärgeschichte in der Erweiterung: Konjunkturen, Interpretationen, Konzepte’, in T. Kühne and B. Ziemann, eds, Was ist Militärgeschichte? (Paderborn, 2000);
O. Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (New York, 2000);
J. Bourke and A. Burke, ‘Killing and Responsibility – A Dialogue’, Borderlands, 2, no. 2 (2003);
C. Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York, 2006);
A. Lüdtke and B. Weisbrod, eds, No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the Twentieth Century (Göttingen, 2006);
See especially the keynote essay by Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Rewriting History’, in M. R. Higonnet et al., eds, Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, 1987).
See C. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, 1990);
J. Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago, 1996);
J. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London, 1999);
P. Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry and the Politics of Trauma, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, 2003);
T. Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006);
K. Hagemann, ‘Military, War and the Mainstreams: Gendering Modern German Military History’, in K. Hagemann and J. Quataert, eds, Gendering Modern German History: Themes, Debates, Revisions (New York, 2007).
See M. Cooke and A. Woollacott, Gendering War Talk (Princeton, 1993).
See P. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York, 1998);
M. Levene and P. Roberts, eds, The Massacre in History (New York, 1999);
J. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001);
M. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, 2002);
S. Powers, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, 2002);
E. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, 2003);
G. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, 2004).
See S. Aschheim, ‘On Saul Friedlander’, History and Memory, 9, nos 1–2 (Fall 1997);
S. Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1998);
M. Geyer, ‘There is a Land where Everything is Pure, its Name is Land of Death’, in G. Eghigian and M. P. Berg, eds, Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth-Century Germany (Arlington, TX, 2002);
J. Matthäus, ‘Anti-Semitism as an Offer: The Function of Ideological Indoctrination in the SS and Police Corps During the Holocaust’, in D. Herzog, ed., Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Evanston, IL, 2006);
J. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York, 2007);
G. Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York, 2007).
See O. Bartov, A. Grossmann, and M. Nolan, eds, Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2003);
H. Heer and K. Naumann, eds, War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II (New York, 2004).
See P. Grosse, ‘What Does German Colonialism Have to Do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework’, in E. Ames, M. Klotz, L. Wildenthal, and S. Gilman, eds, Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln, NE, 2005);
I. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2005);
R. Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris, 2001);
C. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York, 2004).
The most influential early text was A. Stiglmayer, Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Lincoln, NE, 1994).
On the Soviet army’s rapes of German women at the end of World War II, see especially the pathbreaking issue of October, 72 (Spring 1995), guest coedited by Stuart Liebman: Berlin 1945: War and Rape/‘Liberators Take Liberties’. See also A. Petö, ‘Memory and the Narrative of Rape in Budapest and Vienna’, in R. Bessel and D. Schumann, eds, Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, UK, 2003);
B. Beck, Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt: Sexualverbrechen vor Deutschen Militärgerichten 1939–1945 (Paderborn, 2004);
A. Warring, Tyskerpiger under besœttelse og retsopgor (Copenhagen, 1994);
I. Bauer, ‘“Austria’s Prestige Dragged into the Dirt”? The “GI-Brides” and Postwar Austrian Society (1945–1955)’, in G. Bischof et al., eds, Women in Austria [Contemporary Austrian Studies, vol. 6] (New Brunswick, 1998);
K. H. Adler, ‘Reading National Identity: Gender and “Prostitution” during the Occupation’, Modern and Contemporary France, 7, no. 1 (1999);
as well as the recent transnational overview by Anette Warring, ‘Intimate and Sexual Relations’, in R. Gildea, O. Wieviorka, and A. Warring, eds, Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: Daily Life in Occupied Europe (Oxford, 2006).
See G. L. Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York, 1997).
See D. Herzog, ed., Sexuality and German Fascism (New York, 2004);
D. Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, 2005);
M. Sibalis, ‘Homophobia, Vichy France, and the “Crime of Homosexuality”: The Origins of the Ordinance of 6 August 1942’, GLQ, 8, no. 3 (May 2002);
C. Beadman, ‘Abortion in 1940s Spain: The Social Context’, Journal of Gender Studies, 11, no. 1 (2002);
M. Ebner, ‘The Persecution of Homosexual Men under Fascism’, in P. Willson, ed., Gender, Family, and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy (London, 2004);
M. Hoehn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill, 2002);
I. Bauer and R. Huber, ‘Sexual Encounters across Former Enemy Lines’, in G. Bischof et al., eds, Sexuality in Austria [Contemporary Austrian Studies, vol. 15] (New Brunswick, 2007).
M. Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1998).
See Shik, this volume; see also O. Lengyel, ‘Scientific Experiments’, in C. Rittner and J. Roth, eds, Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York, 1993);
W. Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, 1997);
G. Greif, We Wept Without Tears: Testimony of the Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz (New Haven, 2005).
See in this context also the important analyses of perpetrator motivation in Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (London: Virago, 2007);
J. Franco, ‘Rape: A Weapon of War’, Social Text, 25, no. 2 (Summer 2007).
See Vickers, this volume; see also Kühne, Kameradschaft; F. Rouquet, F. Virgili, and D. Voldman, eds, Amours, guerres et sexualité (Paris, 2007);
K. Williams, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (New York, 2005).
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© 2009 Dagmar Herzog
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Herzog, D. (2009). Introduction: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century. In: Herzog, D. (eds) Brutality and Desire. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234291_1
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