Introduction: On Being Defeated
- 沒有希望的人或事：: 當我們說某人或某事是「lost cause」時，表示這個人或這件事已經沒有成功的可能性，或者不值得去努力爭取。
- 敗局命定論（Lost Cause of the Confederacy）是美國內戰後在南方興起的一種文學運動，旨在讓南方社會接受聯盟國戰敗的結局。
- 此運動通常描寫聯盟國的偉大成就，並將其領導人描繪成如同老派騎士，因寡不敵眾而失敗，而非將才不如人。
The vanquished are the first to learn what history holds in store.
Heinrich Mann
In the beginning was the fall of Troy, the prototype for all Western defeats. The ancient myths attest to how little the Greeks gained from their conquest: the victorious captains meet the death they escaped in battle (Ajax), are strewn about the globe for years (Menelaus, Odysseus), or return to their homes only to be murdered (Agamemnon). Troy is lost, it’s true—but with one crucial exception. The myths allow Aeneas and his family to escape and, after an odyssey of their own, to land on Italian soil and become the ancestors of the founders of Rome. Trojan lineage was an established part of Roman mythology even before Virgil used it as the basis for his national epic, the Aeneid, and after Rome’s own demise the founding myths of early medieval Western Europe adopted it as well. According to a sixth-century legend, France was founded by Francio, one of Priam’s sons, while England, if we believe Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, owed its existence to Brutus, one of Aeneas’s grandsons and an early ancestor of King Arthur.1
The myth of Troy as both an end and a new beginning is one of the many expressions of the ancient idea, common to all the world’s great cultures, that war, death, and rebirth are cyclically linked. The major myths of death and rebirth do not allow for absolute eradication. Life goes on in the afterworld much as it had in the realm of the living; it merely “changes venue,” as the philosopher Ernst Cassirer puts it.2 In many contemporary Western versions of the death-rebirth dynamic, negation appears as the driving force behind all progress. Without the eternally negating spirit of Mephistopheles, or the Hegelian antithesis, or the Freudian reality principle, there can be no Faustian bargain, no dialectical understanding of history, and no construction of the ego from the id. Defeat, at its most abstract, is nothing more than the negation of a will that has proven unable to realize its aims, despite using all the means at its disposal. Hegel’s maxim that world history is the court of world justice regards victory as a verdict—the end result of a previous struggle—that remains in force only until an opponent’s challenge begins a new struggle. Similarly, another Hegelian precept—the real is the rational—applies only for as long as the victorious side is able to assert its power. In the classical liberal system, the winners at any one point in history must always be prepared to face challenges from rivals, who are often yesterday’s losers, whether the contest occurs in industry or the marketplace, in the world of fashion or ideas, in sports competitions or political elections.
To give up illusions of permanent triumph, to understand world history as a series of rises and falls, is to adopt the outlook of the jester Till Eulenspiegel, who relished the difficult path up the mountainside because of the easy downward slope that was sure to follow. The recognition that what triumphs today will be defeated tomorrow does more than just reverse the traditional tendency to identify with the great and powerful. Whereas the concept of hubris is primarily concerned with the demise of a supercilious and arrogant power, an empathetic philosophy of defeat seeks to identify and appreciate the significance of defeat itself.
There are two types of defeat empathy: the “interested” reflection of the vanquished themselves and the “disinterested” observations of third parties. A good example of the first is Carl Schmitt. Hitler’s leading legal expert, Schmitt ended up as a defendant before a denazification tribunal. In the summer of 1946, he wrote an essay about Alexis de Tocqueville, whom he characterized as the paradigmatic loser: “Every sort of defeat was crystallized in his person, and not just accidentally but as a kind of existential destiny. As an aristocrat, he lost out in the revolution.… As a liberal, he anticipated the revolution of 1848 and its divergence from liberalism, and he was cut to the core by the onset of the terror he knew it would bring. As a Frenchman, he belonged to a nation that was defeated after twenty years of coalition warfare.… As a European, he was again in the role of the defeated since he foresaw the development of two new powers, America and Russia,… that would push Europe to the margins. Finally, as a Christian,… he was overwhelmed by the scientific agnosticism of his era.”
For Schmitt in 1946, Tocqueville was a great historian because he “did not, like Hegel and Ranke, seat himself next to God Almighty in the royal box in the theater of the world” but rather took his place among the ranks of the losing side.3 In 1934, when Schmitt, who drafted the legal justifications for the Night of the Long Knives, shared the box with Hitler, he no doubt saw things differently.
Some forty years later, Reinhart Koselleck drew a comparison between the historiography of victors and of the vanquished that reads like a paraphrase of Schmitt’s commentary on Tocqueville. “While history may be temporarily made by the victors, who hold on to it for a while,” Koselleck writes, “it never allows itself to be ruled for long.” Koselleck goes on to characterize victors’ history as “short-term, focused on the series of events that, thanks to one’s merits, have brought about one’s victory.… The historian who stands on the side of the victorious is easily tempted to interpret triumphs of the moment as the lasting outcomes of an ex post facto teleology.” As examples, Koselleck cites Johann Gustav Droysen and Heinrich von Treitschke in Germany and François Guizot in France. The historiography of the defeated is another matter entirely: “Their defining experience is that everything turned out other than they hoped. They labor under … a greater burden of proof for having to show why events turned out as they did—and not as planned. Therefore they begin to search for middle- or long-term factors to account for and perhaps explain the accident of the unexpected outcome. There is something to the hypothesis that being forced to draw new and difficult lessons from history yields insights of longer validity and thus greater explanatory power. History may in the short term be made by the victors, but historical wisdom is in the long run enriched more by the vanquished.… Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible wellspring of intellectual progress.”4
The Frondists, who opposed French absolutism and, after their defeat, traded the sword for the pen, were typical “losers” of this reflective sort. The memoirs and aphorisms of Saint-Simon and La Rochefoucauld were ultimately both a sublimated form of revenge and a social critique that led directly to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.5 In the twentieth century, Russell Jacoby made a similar point about West European Marxism. Stumbling from one political defeat to the next, it retained a critical potential—a flexibility, an openness, and a humanity—that Soviet Marxism, its twin brother, lost while triumphantly marching forward.6
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DISINTERESTED OBSERVERS OFFER another kind of defeat empathy. Most prominently, these oberservers include the minority within the victorious nation who recognize the danger of hubris. The best-known expression of such a view is Nietzsche’s 1871 warning that great victories pose great dangers and that the triumph of the German empire would entail the demise of German culture. Arnold Toynbee, too, credits defeat with mobilizing the energies of a nation. In his system of “Challenge and Response,” defeat represents the “stimulus of blows,” one of the five stimuli that set historical action in motion.7
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DEFEAT FOLLOWS WAR as ashes follow fire. At the heart of both defeat and war lies the threat of extinction, a threat that resonates long past the cessation of hostilities. From prehistoric tribal feuds through the wars of antiquity and the Middle Ages, this threat was directed at all members of the enemy people, not just its soldiers.8 While the cabinet wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries restricted violence to the direct participants on the battlefield, the scorched-earth policies of twentieth-century total war once more universalized the threat. Limited warfare, conducted by a professional military apparatus and carrying no real or imagined peril to the populace at large, was thus a phenomenon that lasted a mere two centuries—or only one, if we narrow our definition of cabinet warfare to the pre-1792 period. For though the nineteenth century continued the tradition of limited warfare militarily, in that the forces of destruction were contained within the armies doing battle, emerging mass societies in the age of nationalism returned, in psychological terms at least, to an earlier epoch of collective threat. While the actual consequences for civilians were relatively mild, war and defeat nevertheless took on the dimensions of a social Darwinist struggle for national survival. With war imagined as a battle of life and death, not only between armies but between entire populations, defeat became tantamount to the nation’s death agony.9 Jakob Burckhardt was one of the first to recognize this changed aspect of war: “A people only becomes acquainted with its full national strength in warfare, in tests of strength against other peoples, for it is only in war that such strength emerges.”10 He also identified the next step in the ongoing escalation, namely politicians’ adoption of this annihilationist psychology. Of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Burckhardt wrote, “A novel element has arisen in politics, an additional level, of which earlier victors knew nothing or at least made no conscious use. One seeks to humiliate the vanquished enemy as much as possible in his own eyes so that he henceforth lacks any confidence whatsoever.”11
The passions excited in the national psyche by the onset of war show how deeply invested the masses now were in its potential outcome. Propaganda had reinforced their conviction that “everything was at stake,” and the threat of death and defeat functioned like a tightly coiled spring, further heightening the tension. The almost festive jubilation that accompanied the declarations of war in Charleston in 1861, Paris in 1870, and the capitals of the major European powers in 1914 were anticipatory celebrations of victory—since nations are as incapable of imagining their own defeat as individuals are of conceiving their own death. The new desire to humiliate the enemy, noted by Burckhardt, was merely a reaction to the unprecedented posturing in which nations now engaged when declaring war.12
The deployment of armies on the battlefield is the classic manifestation of collective self-confidence. If both sides are not convinced of their military superiority, there will be no confrontation; rather, those who lack confidence will simply flee the field. Accordingly, the battle is decided the moment the confidence of one side fails. The will to fight (“morale”) evaporates, the military formation collapses, and the army seeks salvation in flight or, if it is lucky, in organized retreat. The Greek term for this point in space (on the battlefield) and time (the course of the battle) was trope.13 The victors demarcated the spot with the weapons of the vanquished and later with monuments, yielding the term tropaion, from which we get our word trophy. The nineteenth-century German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who defined battle as the “bloody and destructive measuring of strength, physical and moral, between enemies,” characterized the trope from the perspective of the defeated: “The spirit of the whole is broken, nothing is left of the original obsession with triumph or disaster that made men ignore all risks; for most of them danger is no longer a challenge to their courage but harsh punishment to be endured.”14
The outcome of each confrontation—down to a single hand-to-hand skirmish—exerts a subtle cumulative influence on the course of the battle as a whole. If individual defeats accrue to the point where they reach a critical mass, the experience of defeat is communicated to the collective and the entire battle is lost. A similar relationship exists between individual battles and wars: a critical mass of lost battles results in a lost war. In wars of attrition, this critical mass is reached not through decisive battles but through the gradual exhaustion of national resources. Aside from the dynamics of defeat, however, the outcome in both cases is the same.
Just as skirmishes affect battles and battles affect wars, defeat at the front has repercussions on the home front. Clausewitz, who witnessed the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, again provides a memorable commentary: “The effect of all this outside the army—on the people and on the government—is a sudden collapse of the most anxious expectations, and a complete crushing of self-confidence. This leaves a vacuum that is filled by a corrosively expanding fear, which completes the paralysis. It is as if the electric charge of the main battle had sparked a shock to the whole nervous system of one of the contestants.”15
As the news is conveyed to the home front, the fact of defeat takes on a monstrous and overwhelming dimension that was missing on the battlefield. Whereas soldiers experience lost battles, even lost wars, as painful but comprehensible outcomes given their firsthand experience and exhaustion, the news of defeat, as Clausewitz writes, plunges the home front into “panicked terror.” The home front has lived, in the words of a Paris commentator after Sedan, en plein roman, or under an illusion, in the unshaken conviction of certain victory.16 The intensity of the shock increases in direct proportion to the distance from the actual site of defeat, a phenomenon that stems from the experiential and psychological differences between battlefront and home front. This discrepancy may lead to nervous breakdowns, such as have frequently been recorded among otherwise hard-bitten politicians in response to their troops’ defeat, or alternatively to a mobilization of the home front to continue the fight at the very moment that its war-weary army has surrendered. In 1792, after a series of setbacks inflicted by invading foreign armies, the revolutionary government raised an army of volunteers to meet the growing threat. This development, which since 1792 has been known as the levée en masse (mass mobilization), or people’s war, is the spontaneous self-deployment of the entire nation as the last line of defense. The levée en masse thus represents the end of the cabinet-war era, with its strict separation of military and civilian populations, and points the way toward total warfare. In terms of psychology, the levée en masse appears to be a mechanism for restoring equilibrium between the military front line, which has collapsed, and a civilian society as yet untouched by the consequences of war, in that it replaces the troops’ exhausted morale with the still vital spirit of the nation itself.
This psychological dynamic is the national equivalent of what Clausewitz calls “the instinct for retaliation and revenge” among troops who have suffered setbacks. “It is a universal instinct,” writes Clausewitz, “shared by the supreme commander and the youngest drummer boy; the morale of troops is never higher than when it comes to repaying that kind of debt.… There is thus a natural propensity to exploit this psychological factor in order to recapture what has been lost.”17 Mass mobilization on the home front and political revolution usually go hand in hand—a significant conjunction since the new regime, having arisen from external defeat and internal coup d’état, may well require a surge of popular support to deflect accusations of illegitimacy and to prevent the spread of a legend of betrayal. The comparison between France in September 1870 and Germany in November 1918 is particularly instructive in this regard.
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AFTER THE BATTLE of Sedan in 1870, the provisional republican government continued the war as levée en masse, something that was viewed by most contemporaries as crucial to the survival of the Third Republic and by later historians as the positive counterexample to the failed postdefeat Weimar Republic in Germany. Colmar von der Goltz, himself a soldier and later the author of the influential pamphlet Das Volk in Waffen (The People under Arms), was the first German to recognize that the military importance of the levée en masse was secondary to its political and psychological significance. “Above all, the spectacle was intended to impress,” he wrote about the défense nationale organized by Léon Gambetta. “The German barbarians were to be defeated not by armed force but by their amazement at free France’s tremendous capacity for sacrifice.” The final sentence of Goltz’s 1877 study of Gambetta reads: “Should it come to pass that, God forbid, our German fatherland suffers a defeat like that of the French at Sedan, I would wish that a man emerges who knows how to inspire the sort of absolute resistance Gambetta tried to organize.”18
Industrialist Walther Rathenau’s call for a German levée en masse in October 1918 echoed such sentiments, as did Adolf Hitler’s reverential appraisal of the Third Republic, which he regarded, unlike the despised “November Republic” of Weimar, as a shining example of patriotic nationalism: “With the collapse of France at Sedan,” Hitler proclaimed, “the people rose in revolution to save the fallen tricolor! The war was continued with new energy! The revolutionaries bravely fought countless battles. The will to defend the state created the French republic in 1870. It was a symbol not of dishonor but of the upstanding will to preserve the nation. French national honor was revived by the Third Republic. What a contrast to our republic!”19 These words were part of a speech Hitler gave on September 12, 1923, two months before his attempted Munich putsch, when the Weimar Republic seemed on the brink of disintegration. The crisis was provoked by France’s military occupation of the Ruhr region as leverage for its receipt of reparations payments. Moderate nationalists considered the passive resistance organized by the government as a German version of the levée en masse, a necessary if belated means of restoring the honor of the nation.20 But Hitler dismissed the “Ruhr War,” as it was commonly called, as ineffectual and dishonorable. “[The politicians] want to turn Germany into India, a people of dreamers,” he said, “… so that it can be peacefully bounded under the yoke of slavery.”21
Only wars that mobilize the nation to a high degree but end too abruptly for the losing side to adapt emotionally result in true levées en masse. In the American South and Wilhelminian Germany, both of which had exhausted the home front as well as the battlefront in long wars of attrition, the end was simply collapse. Yet even in these cases, the “flat conclusion of the war,” as Southerner Edward A. Pollard puts it, was experienced as an unacceptable void.22 The American South in 1865 and Germany in 1918 both clung to visions if not of ultimate victory then at least of a glorious defeat with flags flying. And both societies produced belated caricatures of levées en masse in the form of terrorist groups composed of discharged soldiers—the Ku Klux Klan and the Freikorps, respectively—who portrayed themselves as avengers of national honor.
Dreamland
Every society experiences defeat in its own way. But the varieties of response within vanquished nations—whether psychological, cultural, or political—conform to a recognizable set of patterns or archetypes that recur across time and national boundaries. A state of unreality—or dreamland—is invariably the first of these.
The deep and widespread depression caused by lost wars in the age of nationalism is as obvious as the joyous public celebrations of victorious ones. It is all the more surprising, then, how briefly the losing nation’s depression tends to last before turning into a unique type of euphoria. The source of this transformation is usually an internal revolution following military collapse. The overthrow of the old regime and its subsequent scapegoating for the nation’s defeat are experienced as a kind of victory. The more popular the revolt and the more charismatic the new leadership, the greater the triumph will seem. For a moment, the external enemy is no longer an adversary but something of an ally, with whose help the previous regime and now deposed system has been driven from power.23 Seized by a mood of universal brotherhood, the masses look toward the future with confidence. “Beaming faces and joyous celebrations abound,” recorded one Parisian in 1870. “Workers and national guardsmen arrive with ladders and pry the sculpted eagles and imperial crowns from the building facades. The cafés are bursting with people. From every corner, cries can be heard: Long live the republic! And at sundown, at the end of this lovely autumn day, the night life begins. Businesses and theaters are alive and humming; everywhere there is the same joy and gladness.”24
Just as the declaration of the Third Republic in Paris on September 4, 1870, caused waves of elation to ripple through the assembled masses, allowing them to forget the two-day-old news of the French defeat at Sedan, the demonstration organized by the Bavarian socialist Kurt Eisner in Munich on November 7, 1918, served not to mourn Germany’s imminent military collapse but to celebrate the overthrow of the monarchist regime. The mood of both gatherings was reminiscent of the carnivalesque festivities that historian Roger Caillois describes as typical of declarations of war. Even when, as in Berlin on November 9, 1918, the transfer of power takes place soberly and with minimal popular participation, the people are suffused, after their initial depression, with feelings of relief, liberation, and salvation that mirror their exhilaration at the beginning of war.25 Their initial enthusiasm celebrates a departure from the regulation and discipline of normal society into the sacralized community of the warrior nation; similarly, the end of war is greeted as a comparably intense release from the constraints and privations of wartime. Contributing to the elation are the end of the mortal threat that oppressed the nation, the sense of triumph at having survived, and the humiliation of the former rulers, who will henceforth be held solely responsible for defeat. The outbursts of condemnation directed at Napoleon III’s Second Empire after 1870 and Wilhelm II’s Kaiserreich after 1918 are practically interchangeable. The old regime is accused of everything from materialism and corruption to laziness and selfishness and is blamed for the fact that, “believing in nothing more than money and pleasure, [the nation] lost sight of higher values.”26 Defeat thus becomes synonymous with liberation. The French bon mot “Praised be our defeats … they freed us from Napoleon” was resoundingly seconded in Germany in 1918 with regard to Wilhelm II, often by the very individuals who had been the loudest to exult at the beginning of the war. In the American South, too, foreign observers were surprised at the swift unanimity with which former slave owners condemned the old system as amoral and welcomed defeat as deliverance.
On the physical level, this sense of liberation was often expressed in what contemporaries described as a manic, even feverish epidemic of dancing. Most immediately, dance mania can be seen as part of a general explosion of sensuality and hedonism in response to the restrictions on pleasure and entertainment during wartime—a response shared by the victorious side. As the critic V. F. Calverton puts it, “Dance was an inevitable outgrowth of war-madness.… It was the mad, delirious dancing of men and women who had to seize upon something as a vicarious outlet for their crazed emotions.”27 A passage from Edmond de Goncourt’s diary of 1870–71 suggests another significance of dancing for the loser: “France is dancing … as a form of revenge. It is dancing to forget.”28 In Germany, contemporary cultural-historical and medical observers drew connections between what they witnessed in 1918 and the St. Vitus dances and hopping processions that erupted in times of crisis during the late Middle Ages. Compulsive dancing, their analyses propose, was both a symptom of a hysterical disruption of motor coordination (the medical term is chorea hysterica rhythmica) resulting from a collective trauma and an unconscious therapeutic response to that condition.29 Yet if dancing is treated not as a physical compensation for the trauma of defeat but rather as an expression of triumph over the deposed, humiliated father-tyrant, it loses its pathological quality and takes its place within the long tradition of victory dances. What the waltz was to the Revolution of 1789 and the cancan (not to be confused with the dance popular in turn-of-the-century variety shows) was to the July Revolution of 1830, the so-called jazz dances were to the November Revolution in Berlin in 1918–19.30
The elation that follows the initial postdefeat depression thus signals a recovery from collective psychological breakdown, a recovery triggered by the overthrow of authority. In the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War I, Ernst Troeltsch coined the term dreamland for this phenomenon, in which all blame is transferred to the deposed tyrant and the losing nation feels cathartically cleansed, freed of any responsibility or guilt.31 In the wishful thinking of the dreamland state, nothing stands in the way of a return to the prewar status quo. The expectation in the American South after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox was that the Southern states would resume their former place in the Union as equal partners. In France after Sedan, many believed that peace would be concluded with Bismarck without their country’s having to give up an inch of territory. In Germany after November 11, 1918, the empire was expected to return to the relations and borders of August 1, 1914. In all these conceptions, the nation was represented as the mother who, having been duped, deceived, even defiled by the father-tyrant, was now, with the help of her sons, about to regain her freedom, innocence, and sovereignty. In turn, the former adversary was expected to honor this act of self-purification, since to revenge himself upon and punish a nation that was deceived by its leaders would be to commit an injustice on a par with that of the leaders themselves.32
The dreamland period typically lasts several weeks or even months. The incidence of civil unrest during this time (the Paris Commune, the Spartacist street battles in Berlin, the revolutionary councils and their suppression in Munich) is merely one of the many expressions of the eschatological state of anticipation and illusion. Meanwhile, the expectations vis-à-vis the victor remain undiminished. The unusually long duration of the dreamland condition in the American South—almost two years from Lee’s surrender to the beginning of congressional Reconstruction—can be explained by the special situation of civil war, in which the external enemy is simultaneously a long-lost brother.
Awakening
“The victor has freed us from despotism, for which we are very grateful, but now it’s time for him to go.” Such is the prevailing sentiment within the dreamland state. Should the victorious nation turn out not to be content with this role—if it holds its defeated enemy liable for wartime damage and calls him to account, instead of treating him as an innocent victim—the mood shifts dramatically. The enmity that had been transformed into conciliation reemerges with all its former force or is even intensified by the feeling of having been doubly betrayed. In the dreamland state, memories of the real circumstances of defeat fade away, replaced by the losers’ conviction that their nation laid down its arms of its own free will, in a kind of gentleman’s agreement that placed trust in the chivalry of the enemy. The German myths of 1918 portraying Woodrow Wilson as the honest broker in whose hands Germany entrusted its future are the most striking example of this phenomenon, and there are corollaries in France and the American South after their defeats.33
The change in mood and the accusation of deceit or betrayal leveled against the external enemy are accompanied by an internal shift of a slightly different sort. Once the dreamland state has passed, the postwar revolution loses its aura of liberation and salvation. The revolutionaries find themselves gradually being cast in the role previously played by the deposed regime, whose counterrevolutionary representatives don’t hesitate to take their revenge. Their best weapon is the accusation that the revolutionaries are putschists and mutineers who deserted the nation in its hour of greatest need, delivering it up, bound and helpless, to the merciless conqueror. In post-1918 Germany, the idea of the Dolchstoss, or “stab in the back,” became the most successful counterrevolutionary myth of betrayal. In the American South, which did not experience an internal revolution, and the Third Republic, which legitimized itself through the défense nationale, no comparably drastic myths arose, but numerous accusations of betrayal were leveled at individual figures. The scapegoating of failed military leaders such as Confederate general James Longstreet and French marshal Achille-François Bazaine proved to be a relatively simple and effective mechanism for clearing the collective conscience, one that had few consequences except for the individuals concerned.
The absence of a stab-in-the-back legend in America after the Vietnam War shows that accusations of betrayal can grow only if the political and historical soil in which they are planted is fertile.34 One important element is the role played by betrayal in the mythology of the nation. Nineteenth-century national legends were heavily based on medieval or pseudomedieval epics: the Song of Roland and the myth of Joan of Arc in France, the Nibelungenlied and Wagner’s Ring in Germany, and the novels of Walter Scott in the American South. Taking up Hamilton James Eckenrode’s appellation for the South, Walter Scottland, one could characterize nineteenth-century France in terms of its mythological disposition as Rolandland or Joan of Arcland and its German equivalent as Nibelungenland or Richard Wagnerland. Since nations shape, experience, and judge their wars, their defeats, and their heroes, traitors, and dissidents according to the models set out in their great epics, the connections between these fictional narratives and historical reality merit close attention.
Unworthy Victories
The military ethos envisions victory in heroic terms, as the subjugation of the enemy through superior martial skill and ability, mythologically exemplified by the hand-to-hand combat between Hector and Achilles. Although real war proceeds according to very different rules, as the Trojan horse and Paris’s shot at Achilles’s heel demonstrate, the distinction between civilized and barbaric warfare remains very much alive, especially in the losers’ perennial claims that the victors cheated and that their victories were therefore illegitimate. The massacre of French knights in 1346 by English archers at Crécy, for example, is considered even today less a military defeat than chivalric martyrdom, in which the actual losers were the moral winners and vice versa. “With their emphasis on individual heroism, the French succumbed to the plebeian collective discipline of the English.… Our enemies were anonymous, mechanical, soulless assembly-line workers, devoid of any imagination, who were only victorious because of their greater numbers.”35 These sentiments from a French textbook account of the events at Crécy recur in the rhetoric of every defeated nation: the enemy owes its victory not to soldierly virtue and military acumen but to the deployment of masses of soldiers and matériel that crush one’s own hero warriors by their sheer weight. “Make it a fair fight and we’d [have] whipped you all the way through,” a Northern correspondent quoted an ex-Confederate soldier as saying after Lee’s surrender. The post-1918 German equivalent goes: “Ten times outnumbered and twenty-seven times deceived.”36
Along with the size of the opposing force, what most often comes in for pillory is the “unworthy” deployment of “unsoldierly” techniques and technology—everything from tanks, submarines, bombers, and mustard gas to economic blockades, propaganda, and psychological warfare. This accusation is inevitable, since every major war is ultimately decided by a technological innovation that the losing side either does not possess or, misjudging its effectiveness, fails to utilize. Thus, the defeated party can always declare the decisive factor to have been a violation of the rules, thereby nullifying the victory and depicting the winner as a cheater.37
Despite its pejorative, propagandistic intent, Werner Sombart’s distinction between the (German) heroes and (English) shopkeepers of World War I contains a kernel of sociological insight into the divergent character of military-authoritarian and bourgeois-liberal societies. The derisive term shopkeeper already appeared in French anti-English propaganda during the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic campaigns and was a variation of the centuries-old stereotype of “perfidious Albion.” In the semifeudal Confederacy, the Civil War was similarly viewed as a struggle between the heroic cavaliers and the mercantilist Yankees. And the French stereotype of the Prussian schoolmaster who emerged victorious at Sedan once again expressed the resentment of a military culture at unsportsmanlike behavior—in this case that of a likewise militaristic but technologically modernized culture. Given that wars between “military” and “bourgeois” nations often begin with glorious victories for the former, only to be decided after a prolonged battle of attrition by the material and economic superiority of the latter, the losing side’s resentment at being cheated of ultimate triumph is not completely incomprehensible.38
It is a short step from the idea that victory achieved by unsoldierly means is illegitimate (or deceitful, swindled, stolen, and so on) and therefore invalid to an understanding of defeat as the pure, unsullied antithesis of false triumph. Christian concepts of victim-hood and martyrdom coincide here with their classical counterparts. The more victory becomes a matter of winning in the sense of profiting, the more it becomes, from the perspective of the militarily oriented culture of the loser, the realm of tradesmen and merchants. Once material gain supplants the laurels of victory, the heroic loser is left with little more than the materially disinterested beau geste—the satisfaction of having fought bravely and honorably, if hopelessly, to the bitter end. The loser becomes a Leonidas, a Judah Maccabee, a Brutus who plays out the tragedy with his comrades by his side, in the face of certain death. In view of this sacrifice, the losing side attains a dignity in its own eyes that is as inaccessible to the victor in the age of profitable triumphs as the kingdom of heaven is to the rich man in the New Testament. The German saying after 1918, “im Felde unbesiegt,” or “undefeated on the field of battle,” was consolation and self-aggrandizement in one. In the myth of the “Lost Cause,” the post-1865 American South celebrated its demise as both a heroic and a sacral event: “The war has purified and elevated our natures, taught us to respect ourselves, and has won for us the respect of foreign nations,” wrote one prominent Southern commentator.39 In a speech to the returning troops a few days after Sedan, Victor Hugo struck a similar tone: “You will always be the world’s best soldiers.… The glory belongs to France.”40 The war memorial by Antonin Mercié that was erected in 1874 in Paris’s Montholon Square bears the inscription “Gloria victis”—“Glory to the Conquered”—and the Weimar Republic’s first president, Friedrich Ebert, would repeat much the same sentiment forty-five years later in a speech to the returning troops after Germany’s defeat in World War I.41
From glory to justice. If the victors’ triumph is seen as illegitimate profiteering and thus can stake no claim to glory or honor, defeat is not an outcome that must be acknowledged and accepted but an injustice to be rectified. In the wake of every forced capitulation, therefore, a new struggle begins, a kind of ethical and juridicial levée en masse in which the loser, casting himself as the personification of defiled purity, tries to score a “moral victory” against the winner. It makes no difference whether the victor attempts to justify his postwar punitive measures in moral and legal terms, as the Union did in 1865 and the Entente in 1918, or forgoes all such legalism, like Bismarck in 1871. The losers’ propaganda will stop at nothing in pressing accusations of injustice and protestations of innocence.42 If the vanquished make any acknowledgment of a failing of their own, it is only the sarcastic admission that they were perhaps too much like Rousseau’s noble savage, punished by civilization for not joining in its hypocrisy. Conservative author Arthur Moeller van den Bruck wrote of German responsibility for the First World War that Germany’s “congenital and cultivated naïveté” misled it into declaring war, with the result that “the peoples who actually started the war are exonerated, while we stand accused,… a guileless people whose only guilt resides in [our] innocence.”43
Losers in Battle, Winners in Spirit
The fear of being overrun and destroyed by barbarian hordes is as old as the history of civilized culture itself. Images of desertification—of gardens ransacked by nomads and of decrepit palaces in which goatherds tend their flocks—have haunted the literature of decadence from antiquity to Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler, and Gottfried Benn. In reality, however, highly developed cultures do not usually perish when defeated. Instead, the victors are often assimilated into the vanquished civilization, as the Dorians were in Mycenae, the Macedonians in ancient Greece, the Germanic tribes in the Roman Empire, the Mongols in China, and the Arabs in Persia. Even if too weak to repulse the barbarian advances militarily, developed cultures possess sufficient seductive qualities and civilizing resources to absorb their conquerors. The vanquished nation’s culture thus becomes a trophy in a dual sense: its strengths and capabilities are symbolically transferred to the conqueror, along with the material spoils of victory—a fate that, incidentally, befalls all losing elites in collapsing cultures as they are replaced by the homines novi who buy their castles and boxes at the opera and marry their daughters.44
The one great consolation for the defeated is their faith in their cultural and moral superiority over the newly empowered who have ousted them. At its most primitive, this conviction manifests itself in the opposition of the vanquished culture to victorious barbarism. The image of the Yankee in the American South, of the Prussian German in France in 1870, of the post-1918 Afro-French occupiers in the Rhineland—all conform to the negative stereotype of the “savage.” With his hulking size, animalistic physiognomy, searing glare, coal-black beard, and weapon bared in his hand, the savage menaces defenseless women and children, who nonetheless lead him around by the nose thanks to their superior intelligence, courage, and wit.45
Probing deeper, we come upon another element in the mentality of the defeated—the conviction that the loser is, in terms of knowledge and insight, a step ahead of or, rather, a half-turn further on the wheel of fortune than the victor. The loser knows what the winner does not yet even begin to suspect: that the triumph won’t last since the positions of victor and vanquished are in constant rotation. The loser thus casts himself as a figure of warning, whose claim to authority is that he speaks as yesterday’s winner. “Vae victoribus” (Woe to the victors!), Ernest Renan and other French intellectuals warned Prussian Germany in 1870, recalling France’s own hubris under Louis XIV and Napoleon, whose reign marked the beginnings of French decline. Likewise, the liberal Heinrich Mann spoke in November 1918 of the “curse of victory” in 1870–71, which had plunged Germany into the abyss, and warned the victorious Entente not to follow the same path. “You will find it more difficult,” he wrote, “to overcome the consequences of your victory than we will to overcome those of our defeat.”46
To see victory as a curse and defeat as moral purification and salvation is to combine the ancient idea of hubris with the Christian virtue of humility, catharsis with apocalypse. That such a concept should have its greatest resonance among the intelligentsia can be explained in part by the intellectual’s classical training but also by his inherently ambivalent stance toward power. To see one’s own father-ruler overpowered by another is invariably a source of satisfaction. Indeed, the sons’ vision of liberating the mother-nation—a stage of the dreamland state—transforms the fathers’ defeat into the sons’ own victory.
At this point, all previous loyalties are annulled. Just as there are international affiliations of pacifists and occasional fraternization between enemy soldiers on the front lines, cross-border alliances of intellectuals arise after large-scale wars under the motto Vae victoribus. Oddly enough, the phrase itself originated among the victors. Coined at the end of August 1870 by a German liberal, it was within days taken up by the French intelligentsia as a means of making sense of France’s defeat.
The progenitor of the first of these alliances was Germaine de Staël. Her image of Germany as a land of thinkers and poets held sway among French intellectuals as the counterimage to imperialist Napoleonic France until Sedan. This idealized view revealed for the first time the susceptibility of intellectuals on the victorious side to the notion that victory threatens culture, whereas defeat might enhance it. A critical minority within the German intelligentsia after 1871 thought in much the same terms about France. Nietzsche was not alone in prophesying that France would only gain in culture while Germany, the land of thinkers and poets and now a great power, would decline.47 Criticism of imperial Germany’s power-bred arrogance, materialism, and hostility toward intellect and culture contrasted with the oft-noted respect for the mores, spiritual values, and cultural dignity of defeated France. A similar picture of the defeated was painted by the intelligentsia in the victorious American North. Disgusted by the vulgarity of the Gilded Age, writers like Henry James, Henry Adams, and Herman Melville cast the figure of the Southern gentleman as a moral hero in a deeply immoral world.48 In slightly skewed form, the scenario was repeated after World War I. America’s “Lost Generation” took refuge from the prevailing political intolerance, intellectual dessication, and commercial superficiality of their homeland not in the defeated capital of Berlin but in nominally victorious Paris. Nonetheless, since in their eyes the actual loser of the war was not just Germany but all of Europe, their choice followed the familiar pattern.49
The empathy felt for the vanquished by a minority of intellectuals within the conquerors’ camp should not be confused with the appropriation by the victor of the losing side’s cultural symbols, which is yet another aspect of the culture of defeat. The romantic plantation of the Old South, which, if indeed it ever existed, became extinct with the North’s victory, was re-created in the 1880s by New York publicists and theater producers for Yankee literary and dramatic audiences. In Wilhelminian Germany, the image of the French was likewise appropriated, feminized from a threatening military power into the supplier of high fashion, luxury perfumes, and haute cuisine. The view of Germany in the United States, the two-time winner of world wars, suggests a third form of trophy taking. Postwar America holds two contradictory images of Germany. The first diminishes the once-threatening enemy into a peaceful junior partner and producer of high-quality beer. The second and deeper of the two tendencies echoes the wartime propaganda that portrayed Germany as the ultimate public enemy. Although present-day Germany is by no means the chief representative of evil for present-day Americans, the concept of ontological evil in the United States since 1945 bears distinctively German or, more precisely, Nazi features. This stereotype acts as a moral lightning rod, preventing the purity and innocence of America’s own motives from being seriously called into question.
Revenge and Revanche
A few days after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, the rumor went around Hiroshima hospitals that Japan had exploded a similar weapon over one of America’s major cities. A doctor who was present noted: “For the first time since Hiroshima … everyone became cheerful and bright. Those who were most seriously injured were the happiest. Jokes were made, and some began to sing the victory song.”50 That same summer, a group of Jewish former members of the Polish resistance, under the leadership of Abba Kovner, planned to poison the water supplies of several German cities until six million Germans had been killed. Twenty years later, the Israeli writer Hanoch Bartov wrote of the sense and purpose behind a similar, fictional act of reprisal: “We’ll all go into one city and burn it, street by street, house by house, German by German. Why should it just be us remembering Auschwitz? Let them remember the one city that we’ll destroy.”51
The instinct for revenge is as elementary as thirst or sexual desire. It is also part of that larger behavioral complex of exchange that Marcel Mauss describes as a fait social total, or total social phenomenon.52 According to Mauss, the ritual exchange of objects and actions is generally well-intentioned. Since every gift must be requited with a somewhat greater gift, however, the result is a never-ending spiral of exchange, a competition, like a test of strength or battle. Much like someone who fails to return a greeting, whoever ultimately receives more than he gives disrupts the equilibrium and becomes either an enemy or, if he acknowledges his weakness, the inferior in the social relation.53 The idiom to pay back in the sense of requiting one favor with another—for example, a dinner invitation—can also mean “to take vengeance.” Nietzsche’s definition of gratitude as revenge is the most concise formulation of the insight that even a good deed or a gift represents an encroachment on the autonomy of the recipient, one that the recipient cannot leave unanswered.
If gifts and good deeds follow the law of unyielding reciprocity, one can imagine how much more stringently that law is enforced when it comes to injustice, pain, or violence. The Iliad and its surrounding myths form one long chain of revenge. Hera and Athena plot revenge against Paris. Menelaus calls for a war to recover Helen after her kidnapping. In retaliation for their desecration of his temple, Apollo visits a plague on the Greek army. To avenge the injustice done him by Agamemnon, Achilles provokes a military crisis by refusing to fight. By killing Hector, he avenges Patroclus.
The situation is much the same in the medieval epic. Ganelon, whose betrayal of the hero sets the Song of Roland in motion, is motivated by his desire to avenge his belittling demotion by Roland. The Nibelungenlied is the great epic of feminine vengeance: Brunhilde takes her revenge for Siegfried’s infidelity; Kriemhild exacts hers for Hagen’s murder of Siegfried. In Shakespeare, too, Richard, duke of Gloucester, declares in his very first scene that he is bent on bloodshed as retribution for his misshapen form, and vengeance is the core theme of Hamlet. The means and conditions for revenge within the modern centralized state, which claims a monopoly on justice and violence, can hardly be more vividly depicted than in the figure of the murderer-king Claudius, who merely looks on as a spectator while his surrogate is killed. Hamlet, on the other hand, exemplifies the corruption of revenge: his vengefulness begins to dissolve as he broods on it, and his melancholy itself may be seen as the neurotic reaction of one who is burning with vengeance but is no longer allowed to act on that impulse.
Beginning in the sixteenth century and parallel to the modern state’s prohibition on private acts of vengeance, retribution was decisively formalized and ritualized. In military conflict between sovereign states, the motivations for revenge—restitution for an injustice, punishment for acts of violence—were codified into laws of “legitimate” warfare.54 At the same time, war itself was rationalized, refined, made to obey rules, and, in Johan Huizinga’s formulation, “played” like a game. Eighteenth-century warfare was a seasonal military contest conducted according to set rules, barely distinguishable from an exercise or a tournament, without any great concern for its largely peasant victims, but with an extraordinary degree of cultivated reserve among the officer caste. The central operative mechanism for this culture of war was revanche—which was more like redress than revenge. The universally acknowledged ideal of a balance of power proved to be an invisible guiding hand ensuring that no side was ever driven completely from the field of battle and that all parties would be around to take part in the next contest of strength.
Ironically, this culture of war was based on precisely the institution that the state had forbidden within the private sphere: the duel. Although persisting as an archaic relic, dueling had become so formalized and ritualized that it served not to perpetuate but to dissipate the emotional impulse toward revenge. The ideal of the modern duel was not the destruction of an enemy but a sporting encounter free of emotion. “The duel is a contest between men free from hate and passion for revenge,” says François Billacois. “The duelists respect and have regard for each other, for the opponent’s honor is the sine qua non of one’s own.”55
From its very beginnings, hand-to-hand combat contained something of this cathartic element, as we can observe in the indecisive encounters in the Iliad between Hector and Ajax or Diomedes and Glaucus, with their exchanges of gifts, armor, and professions of friendship. The warrior caste of the nineteenth century still lived by the French general Galliffet’s words: “In order to be reconciled, we must fight again or, better still, fight together against a common enemy.”56 Victor Hugo writes of two hostile soldiers who fraternize as the best of friends after inflicting wounds on each other: “First they tried to kill each other, then each of the combatants proclaimed his willingness to die for his adversary.”57 The fact that such incidents occurred even in twentieth-century total warfare indicates a kind of anthropological continuity.
For such reconciliation to occur, however, the act of redress has to follow immediately, blow for blow, without any Hamlet-like postponement or reflection. Clausewitz characterizes the psychodynamics of score settling during battle as the “recapture of what has been lost.” If the response is not immediate, the result is not catharsis but a psychodynamic block. Freud, who defines a successful (that is, spontaneous) act of revenge as the cathartic abreaction of a traumatic effect, categorizes such a block as hysterical neurosis.58 Max Scheler calls the decision to wait for a later and more promising opportunity for revenge or retribution, in contrast to immediately striking back, “ressentiment,” and Karen Horney’s term vindictiveness applies to a similar notion.59 Whatever one calls it, this pattern of behavior serves to create an imaginary (in clinical language, “neurotic-hallucinatory”) fantasy world into which the traumatized ego—incapable of either countering the injury or accepting the loss—can retreat and live out its desires.
What neurosis is to the individual, the creation of myths is to the collective. Our three losers’ myths—the Lost Cause, the dream of revanche, and im Felde unbesiegt (undefeated on the field of battle)—all deny that the nation has been defeated and postpone the settling of accounts (most explicitly in revanche and most obliquely in the Lost Cause) to an indefinite, messianic future.60 Such myths (or, in the Freudian term, fantasies), arising from frustrated desires for revenge, are the psychological mechanisms for coming to terms with defeat. Moreover, they are not merely neurotic fictions of the imagination but also healthful protective shields or buffer zones—emotional fortresses—against a reality unbearable to the psyche. Their function can be compared to the coagulation of blood and formation of scabs necessary for wounds to heal, or to the convalescent world of the sanatorium, or lastly (Freud’s analogy) to the “reservations” or “nature reserves” in the industrial landscape.61
Not all lost wars unleash the impulse toward revanche, only those where the losing side is defeated by a single enemy. Defeat at the hands of a coalition lacks the single object necessary for revanche. In that situation, the loser concludes that the greater the number of enemies, the greater the honor. “Our newly won honor,” wrote Eugen Rosenstock of Germany in 1918, “is to have been vanquished by the entire world, so that we needn’t acknowledge the power of any one people over us.”62 His words apply equally well to France after 1815. In both cases, the losing side did not call for revanche but demanded revision of the war’s outcome, making that a central point of its postwar policies and propaganda.63
Where revanche is not an option—when defeat comes at the hands of a coalition—yet another possibility for psychological compensation presents itself. The losing side can define itself as the equal of the strongest member of the victorious coalition. The loser thereby degrades the other winners as mere hangers-on and scroungers for scraps at the main victor’s table and claims the title of runner-up in the order of power, directly behind the leading opponent and ahead of all others. Post-1815 France liked to view itself as the primary power after Great Britain and Russia, one whose continental hegemony was not seriously challenged by “ancillary victors” like Prussia and Austria. Post-1918 Germany took this self-conception one step further, insisting that it had succeeded in subduing its European enemies before America intervened at the last minute to save them. The converse holds true for the junior partners of victorious coalitions. Should they be rewarded with less than what they see as their due, as was the case with Italy in 1919 at Versailles, they quickly come to view themselves as the losers among the winners. Such feelings also arose after 1815 when Prussia, at England’s insistence, was denied its private revanche for Jena-Auerstedt and Tilsit and in 1918–19 when France was not allowed to indulge its long-standing desire for revanche, which included invading Germany, forcing a peace treaty in Berlin, and establishing the Rhine as the new Franco-German border.64
From Revanche to Unconditional Surrender
Revanche, with its overtones of a gentlemanly settling of accounts, has no place in the total warfare of mass democracy. In total war, military confrontations are fought no longer between mutually respectful warrior castes and ruling dynasties but between the unconstrained popular wills of opposing nations, which see the adversary as the incarnation of evil, an archenemy with whom there can be no common ground or compromise. The only option is to destroy or at least permanently incapacitate the enemy. In its insistence on irreconcilability, the total war of modernity is closer to the religious crusades of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the annihilatory campaigns of antiquity, such as the Third Punic War, than it is to the national conflicts of the nineteenth century, its immediate predecessors, which still largely followed the rules of classic cabinet warfare.65
The modern legal term today for the total subjugation of the enemy is unconditional surrender. In contrast to classic surrender, which was a contractually negotiated, “honorable” laying down of arms by one warring party, unconditional surrender can only to a limited extent be considered an instrument of international law since it essentially liquidates the losing side as a legal entity. This contradiction dates back to the Civil War, when Lee’s unconditional surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 had bearing not just for his army but for the entire Confederacy. Although almost a century would pass until the next unconditional surrenders—by Germany and Japan after the Second World War, which has been described as a “world civil war”—the American Civil War paved the way for total warfare driven by mass democracy and mass media.66 With its explicit interactions between military strategy and journalistic agitation, the Civil War functioned, according to Eric L. McKitrick, “almost as an expanded political platform.” McKitrick draws some remarkable conclusions about the psychology of triumph and subjugation in mass democracies: “The victor needs to be assured that his triumph has been invested with the fullest spiritual and ceremonial meaning. He must know that his expenditures have gone for something, that his objectives have been accomplished, and that the righteousness of his principles has been given its vindication.… He must have ritual proofs. The conquered enemy must be prepared to give symbolic satisfactions as well as physical surrender; he must … ‘act out’ his defeat.”67
Should the conquered enemy, like the post-1865 South, not fulfill this “protocol of defeat,” the victor will feel cheated of his triumph and react by imposing punitive measures. These, in turn, demand a counterreaction from the losing side, leading to a progressive hardening of the fronts, a kind of cold war.68 McKitrick describes the ressentiment-free unconditional surrenders by Germany and Japan in 1945 as having lived up to the protocol of defeat. Here, however, he risks confusing cause with effect. The two societies in question were indeed free of ressentiment toward the victor, but not because they wanted to live up to their unconditional surrenders; rather, having been utterly destroyed both physically and morally, they were simply too exhausted to generate the energy needed for ressentiment. There are thus degrees of defeat and capitulation. As long as losing nations have an intact national identity at their command, they will stubbornly refuse to comply with the victor’s demands for moral and spiritual surrender through demonstrations of regret, conversion, and willingness to be reeducated. The situation is different when, together with the physical properties of a nation, its spiritual and moral backbone has been broken. The losers in 1865, 1871, and even 1918 had not yet reached this nadir.
Renewal
After the initial shock has passed and defeat is seen no longer as a national catastrophe but as a kind of liberation and salvation, its forward-looking, almost missionary aspect comes to the fore. In the dreamland state, the loser describes the world from which defeat has freed him much like a convert recalling his former life of sin. In post-Sedan France, observers spoke of the “complete paralysis,” the “forty years of torpor,” and “the Chinese lethargy into which the empire had plunged us,” declaring that it had taken Krupp-manufactured cannons to awaken the nation from decadence and stagnation.69 William Gilmore Simms described the prewar corruption of the American South as a “scum” that could only be skimmed off by war and defeat.70 In Germany, the collapse of the Wilhelminian empire was similarly greeted as an opportunity for national renewal.
The conception of war as a purifying and renewing force is the most important legacy granted to the defeated. Although the dreamland euphoria may not last any longer than the feelings of elation at war’s outbreak, it does not vanish altogether. Instead, it becomes part of the ongoing, long-term interpretation of events. Alongside their perennial identification with the Passion of Christ, defeated nations look for connections with history to provide a point of orientation. Anchoring one’s defeat within the tradition of history’s great losers offers both meaning and consolation. For one thing, it is an honor to join the ranks of tragic-heroic forefathers. In addition, the lesson is quickly learned that defeat has its advantages. Naturally, only those past defeats that have led to periods of national renewal are invoked. In both German and French nineteenth-century historiography, Jena-Auerstedt became a symbol for the demise of Old Prussia and the birth of the new reformed state. After 1871, the Third Republic declared Sedan to be the Jena-Auerstedt of the Second Empire and justified its reforms with reference to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich von Stein, General Gerhard Johann Scharnhorst, and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the modernizers of Prussia. In Germany, November 1918 was compared to October 1806, and hopes were offered that the post-Jena sequence of reform and war of liberation would be repeated. In this way, France and Germany traded off the lead part in their duet between 1806 and 1918, with each side’s cycle of damnation, purgatory, and rebirth alternately setting the tone. The opponent’s latest victory was seen as the direct result of the defeat that had preceded it. The current loser was thus cast as the author of his enemy’s victory, just as the current victor (and inevitable loser of the next round) would sire the other side’s future victory.
If defeat is understood as a national crisis of infirmity and decadence from which the nation, having purged itself, emerges healthier and stronger than before, the question remains: What of the poisons that prompted the crisis in the first place? It is astonishing how easily the goals and agendas for which nations go to war are forgotten. In the post-1865 American South, no serious resistance was mounted to the abolition of slavery. No one in post-1871 France voiced any further desire to advance the Franco-German border to the Rhine or expressed any yearning for continental hegemony. Likewise, post-1918 Germany abandoned its “Weltmacht” aspirations and dismissed the construction of a naval fleet to rival England’s as an unfortunate idiosyncrasy of Emperor Wilhelm II’s.
While defeat is denied on one level of consciousness, it can at the same time result in extraordinary mental flexibility on another, a paradox that is explained by the vanquished nation’s postwar embrace of a glorious past at the very moment when defeat draws the curtain on a collectively dreamt imperialist future. By rejecting the path that led to war and defeat as an error, a nation is able at the same time to declare the stretch of history before the mistaken detour to be more consonant with its spirit, destiny, and true character. Jeffersonian America, post-1789 France, the Germany of the anti-Napoleonic campaigns, and the Revolution of 1848—these legacies were, for the generations of 1865, 1871, and 1918, respectively, signposts from an untarnished past that pointed the way toward a harmonious future.71
This future promised not only internal renewal but a new role for the nation in the international community. It is a short step from understanding defeat as an act of purification, humility, and sacrifice—a crucifixion of sorts—to laying claim to spiritual and moral leadership in world affairs. The three loser nations discussed here took this step by transforming their philosophies of defeat into a moral bulwark for the protection of all humanity. To accept their own defeat as a verdict by the court of world history was one thing; to sit idly by while all humanity was threatened by future disaster was quite another. Who, they reasoned, was better equipped to act as moral standard-bearer against such evils than those who had only recently stared them in the face?
What the American South had to offer the world, along with its embracing the end of slavery, was the warning that the political equality of blacks must be resisted at all costs. “When [the South] defended Slavery by her arms,” wrote one Southerner following the war, “she was single-handed, and encountered the antipathies of the whole world; now, when she asserts the ultimate supremacy of the white man, she has not lost her cause, but merely developed its higher significance, and in the new contest, she stands with a firm political alliance in the North … and with the sympathies of all generous and enlightened humanity upon her.”72 Swearing off its imperialist past, post-1871 France recommended itself as a bastion of humanity and civilization against the German barbarie scientifique that threatened the whole of the civilized world. Post-1918 Germany, having denounced its Wilhelminian mistake, offered its threefold services as a bulwark against the flood of Russian Bolshevism, a bastion against American commercialism, and a champion for the colonial world—in short, as the guide to a “third path” between capitalism and communism.
All three cultures aspired to the role of moral authority that the rest of the world—including the victors—would find indispensable. Only the losers, they argued, commanded such authority because only they had suffered through the Passion and emerged on the other side, beyond all considerations of earthly power. However, while the problem of moral force could be satisfactorily solved by this deft if quixotic twist, the question of how to regain real power was infinitely more difficult. As even the most impassioned defeat moralists had to acknowledge, the world of realities was determined by the victor.
Learning from the Victor
It is well known that the United States’s intervention in 1917 transformed the Great War into a world crusade. What is less well known is the fact that the two men most responsible for this crusade both came from the South and had both experienced the demise of the Confederacy in childhood. Woodrow Wilson, whose name is forever connected with the introduction of moral considerations into international relations, was the first Southerner elected to the presidency since the Civil War. Walter Hines Page, before becoming Wilson’s ambassador in London, had made a name for himself as a leading spokesman for the New South reform program. And it was Page who was the main driving force behind American intervention in World War I.
The careers of Wilson and Page help elucidate how losers learn from their conquerors. For the United States, intervention in 1917 on the side of the good (liberal-democratic) Entente against evil (militaristic) Germany recapitulated Abraham Lincoln’s crusade against the South, which had sinned against both the North and humanity. Wilson’s call for the abolition of the Central European military monarchy echoed the abolitionists’ demand for the eradication of slavery.73 Fifty years later, the opportunity arose to transfer the moral blight incurred by the South onto the contemporary world enemy Germany. By taking to the field of battle side by side with its former conqueror against the new enemy of humankind, the South could confirm its own long-coveted acceptance into the ranks of the victors.74 This was the same mechanism that West Germany happily applied after the demise of Nazism, in its passionate identification with the West during the Cold War, and imposed even more happily on East Germany after 1989, this time itself gleaming with the shine of victory.
Losers imitate winners almost by reflex, as shown by the New South’s emulation of the Yankee model, the reforms of the French army and educational system along Prussian-German lines, or the imitation of America by Germany after 1918 and 1945.75 For decades, the New South, of which Wilson and Page were both fervent adherents, had been little more than a program of modernization and industrialization along Northern lines. Page’s nickname at the time, the “Southern Yankee,” derisively underscored his obsession with learning lessons from the victor, and figures similar to Page and Wilson emerged in France and Germany to set the tone after those countries’ defeats.
Earlier examples of victor imitation abound. With Scotland’s decisive eighteenth-century defeat in its long war of independence against England, the Scottish intelligentsia had no qualms about embracing the modernity represented by England. The result was the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith, as well as of the philosopher Dugald Stewart and the historians Adam Ferguson and William Robertson, who all, like the German idealist philosophers after 1806, subjected the new commercial order created by England to theoretical reflection.76 France, whose bourgeoisie was perennially open to English influences and trends in its struggle against absolutism, experienced its two greatest waves of Anglomania after its defeats in the Seven Years War and at Waterloo.77 And even as the French Republic conquered one part of Germany after another during the 1790s, German patriots and Francophobes like Ernst Moritz Arndt called on their nation to learn from the republican institutions and virtues of France.78
As these examples suggest, learning from the victor involves not just simple adoption or imitation but a complex, multivalent process of assimilation and cultural adaptation similar to what Thorstein Veblen describes in the context of technology and economics as “borrowing.” The only superiority that “borrowing” societies grant their “creditors” is that of greater material progress and modernity, above all in technology and organization. The borrower is not interested in the soul, the spirit, or the cultural identity of the creditor nation. On the contrary, modernization along the lines set by the victor is, from the perspective of the borrower, nothing more than a useful means toward his own spiritual and cultural revitalization and regeneration. The goal of all borrowing is ultimately to bankrupt the creditor—to demonstrate that his technological, organizational, and economic innovations achieve their true purpose and attain absolute fulfillment only when adapted and enriched by the spirit and the culture of the loser. To invoke Karl Marx, one could almost say that the task of the downtrodden is to rescue innovation from its masters, delivering it from alienation.79
One last word on the choice of the three national defeats I treat in this book—the American Confederacy’s in 1865, France’s in 1870–71, and Germany’s in 1918. The fifty years they span witnessed the final transition from the “civilized” pursuit of war and peace to the unsparing and unlimited warfare of the twentieth century. While this history of rebarbarization has been chronicled and reflected on exhaustively—there are entire libraries on each of the three wars in question—its psychological and cultural fallout remains largely unexplored.
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