The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery

This book is a tour de force in comparative history. Essentially unexplored among the vast number of treatises on war have been the psychological and cultural sequelae emerging from defeat. The author identifies a sequence of societal structural changes following defeat of the Confederate States of America, the Second French Empire (of Napoleon III), and the German Empire (of Wilhelm II). First come shock and denial, then rejection and humiliation of the former leaders, who are held responsible for the debacle. The term "dreamland" describes this situation when the nation feels cathartically cleansed, free of guilt, and hopeful for a return to the status quo ante. There is usually strong identification with the victor and adoption of many of his ideas and practices. However, the defeated nation may deny responsibility for its own defeat, invoking a betrayal from within or a "stab in the back." Next follows a desire and planning for revenge or "revanche." Perhaps the most powerful message conveyed by Schivelbusch is this: The 50 years spanned by the three studies mark the final transition from more or less "civilized" notions of war and peace to the unlimited and unsparing pursuit of 20th Century war--a REBARBARIZATION of the world! In this process, economic forces (massive production) have taken precedence over the military. In his epilogue, Schivelbusch asks if America's post-September 11 war fever is the belated response (revanche) to defeat in Vietnam. Is the situation analogous to that of the Weimar republic? I am a systems theorist (consider my own writings), and I was delighted that Shivelbusch's analysis fits well into the systems framework.

Germans made a lot of mistakes during World War 11 but defeat is not one that the Germans should have accepted. The Germans had such good strategy the only problelm was that they did not persue the goal to the end. They gave up a fight without much of a struggle, so to speak or half way through the war. It is a good book, it shows that Germany had accepted their defeat blame themselves, and the United States, harbor some resentment of the United States and move on to become an admirer of the United States and its free capitalist enterprise.

THE CULTURE OF DEFEAT, an appraisal of the sociocultural similarities apparent in the American South after the aftermath of the Civil War, France after the Franco Prussian War, and Germany after WWI, is an extraordinary performance. Much more than mere sociology or social psychology, it ranges with bracing erudition and insight across the realms of intellectual history, cultural criticism, and political and economic history, synthesizing across these disciplines to elucidate its main thesis: that these "losing sides" went through nearly the same stages of national consciousness as they sought to come back from defeat, that each put forth an explanation of their failure in similar terms, and each, in the fullness of time, came back as more powerful after their defeats.Dreamworld, scapegoating, revenge -- these are just a few of the parallel stages these defeated states went through. For instance, Germany, France, the American South, all cultivated a "dreamworld" in the immediate aftermath of their defeats, a period of time where leaders are blamed for misleading the people into a war that could not be won, a time when the defeated nation looks to the victors for recognition of their true goodness and their unfortunate victimization by a corrupt elite. In licking their wounds, new more powerful "us vs. them" discourses were created and served to bind the defeated together in seeking their redemption among nations. The Southernization of U.S. politics, for example, over the past 25 years is emblematic of how the South has indeed risen again. In the short term, it took only a few years (with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as the enforcement arm of Southern elites) to rewrite the Reconstruction codes as Jim Crow laws and the "lawful" suppression of the African American to be de facto reinstituted against the early injunctions of the victor. As Schivelbusch points out, in a terrible irony, the Nazis looked to these codes for instruction as they planned the demonization and destruction of the Jews. Unlike Kubler-Ross' famous (and in danger of becoming as trite and omnipresent as the 12 step program) stages of grief, nation states do not apparently move toward acceptance. In the nation state new discourses must be hammered together out of the wreckage of defeat, and new goals and national purposes must be forged out of the ashes. One assumes it is difficult to mobilize a citizenry under the banner of acceptance. Schivelbusch, to this point, interestingly, takes issue with the notion that the cycle of defeat and revenge was broken at last after the Second World War through American munificence with Japan and Germany. Schivelbusch suggests that a form of revenge has indeed been in play in the economic arena. In his conclusion, Schivelbusch notes it is not much of a stretch to suggest that these same patterns may hold true in the wake of the current U.S. war and that a new, more virulent culture of defeat may be created in the Middle East. In le