For next Thursday:

• Read:

  • pp. 130-141 in Berghahn

  • pp.585-594 in Textbook

  • Online Student Guide - focus on Section IV and V for the final class

  • The Existentialist Frame of Mind

April 14:   There is no class today as I will be in Belfast.  Instead I will create a Podcast on the Holocaust for this class an post the link here. This class will deal specifically with the Holocaust and how it fits into the processes begun in the 19th Century and became accelerated and warped by the Great War.  In essence, we will deal with Jay Winter's and the Accidental Historians contentions that:

• “Hitler couldn't have done what he did without the First World War. It isn't the Second World War that created images of piles of bodies being shoveled into trenches; it's the First World War. What was thinkable, what was imaginable about human brutality changed between 1914 and 1918, and without that shifting of perspective, in my view, the worst events of the Second World War would not have been possible.” Jay Winter

• "What really should be remembered and taught about the Western Front is that, for the first time, societies were reorganized to feed a killing machine. It would not be the last. My ghosts from the Great War tell me to get the word out: what happened to them can happen again. On June 10, 1991, I stood on lower Broadway in New York's financial district and saw joyful crowds hang people in effigy, as a way of greeting victorious troops back from Iraq. Celebration was in the air, but so too was the sulfur of hate, thick and unadulterated. Something as degrading as the Western Front no longer seemed so implausible. Lest We Forget -not just the dilemmas of our grandfathers, but the continual siren song of violence in uniform. The Serbs in Bosnia, the Hutus in Rwanda, even the Canadians in Somalia. The next century's short list for enforced amnesia is already lengthening." - The Accidental Historian