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Paths Are Made by Walking
(2021)
This paper examines the role of the conservative foreign policy establishment in the decision-making process leading to the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939. Post-war statements by German diplomats portrayed the conservative elite as reluctant participants in Hitler's drive to war. However, an examination of the foreign policy views of German conservatives reveals a significant degree of convergence with Nazi goals in their desire to revise Germany's post-Versailles borders with Poland. In order to understand the role of the German diplomatic elite, it is also necessary to understand the degree to which foreign policy was subject to the same "polycracy" of decision-making instances that characterised the structure of the "Third Reich" in general. While Hitler had relied on the conservative elites, including the Foreign Ministry and the military, their influence on decision-making was waning by 1938-1939
This special birthday issue for Christine Walde, co-founder and co-editor of thersites, features contributions from colleagues and friends. The articles, essays, and book reviews, centering around the honoranda’s research interests as well as focusing on core topics of thersites, form a thematically varied mosaic (tessellae): innovative constructions of literary genres and poetics (especially bucolic, elegy, epic, and epigram), images of the city of Rome and its counterparts, sleep and dreams, history of classical scholarship, gender studies, and classical reception studies.
Student association
(2022)
The Sino-Japanese War of 1894/95 is usually only briefly mentioned in studies on diplomatic history. Especially the war's impact on Wilhelmine foreign and world policy (Weltpolitik) has been largely neglected. However, the events in East Asia had a profound influence on the political leadership in Berlin. The Wilhelmstrasse's attitude towards the conflict changed rapidly when the course of the war in Northeast Asia made a collapse of the Qing Empire increasingly likely. Afraid of the prospect of being left empty handed in an upcoming scramble for China, German diplomacy got active in early 1895. Driven by a hectic activism which soon should become a dominant feature of Weltpolitik, Berlin concluded an ad-hoc alliance with St. Petersburg and Paris. In April 1895, this unlikely coalition intervened against Tokyo. While the Triple Intervention served primarily Russia's interest to maintain the status quo on the Chinese mainland, Germany aimed at the acquisition of a military and commercial base in Northeast Asia. Driven by public opinion, the naval leadership and the Emperor Wilhelm II., the formerly neutral and reserved German diplomacy changed towards an aggressive and unstable imperialist policy, which ultimately resulted in the acquisition of Qingdao in November 1897.
A quote from Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk, 1996) may seem unusual for a Classicist. Nevertheless, this famous sentence summarises the contents of this special issue of thersites perfectly. As specialists in classical reception frequently witness, there is a sort of déjà-vu effect when it comes to the presence of Antiquity within popular culture. In 2019, to try to better understand the phenomenon, Antiquipop invited researchers to take an interest in the construction and semantic path of these “masterpieces” in contemporary popular culture, with a particular focus on the 21st century.
Sociability and Hugo Grotius
(2015)
Grotius has a rudimentary theory of sociability. Only with hindsight has a remark about appetitus societatis been promoted to the starting point of a theory that flourished in the writings of later natural jurists. In this article, I address the issue of the appearance in Grotius's natural law of sociability [as the 1715/38 English translation of John Morrice renders appetitus societatis, following Barbeyrac's sociabilite]. Writing in the just war tradition, Grotius is first of all interested in finding out the conditions for peace, and although injustice is a condition of war, it is not per se true that injustice is a perversion of society. Apparently, not all societies are perfect and the violence of war and the legal actions of peace are both instruments for achieving a greater modicum of justice in this world. Yet appetitus et custodia societatis is called the foundation of justice. Grotius achieved this context for sociability in phases, through a series of writings from c. 1600 until De iure belli ac pacis of 1625, and its revision of 1631. In this development the notion of fides plays an intriguing role, through which we can obtain a better understanding of the meaning of appetitus societatis in the later work. The present article is a sequel to a previous publication, on fides in De iure praedae (Ms. 1604/5). Analysing the genesis of appetitus societatis in De iure belli ac pacis, I argue that Grotius was changing his strategy over the years, without however arriving at a definitive solution to the question of what commits men to the pursuit of justice.
More than Walls
(2019)
If Germany and Europe turned their attention to Latin America, they could extend the transatlantic partnership by adding new partners and focussing on new issues without breaking ties with Washington. However, the countries of the region have differing views of Europe. Mexico is a special case in Latin America because of its close ties with the US, and the economic, political, and strategic interests that it shares with Europe. There is a need for Europe and the US to work together more closely in order to counterbalance China’s growing influence.
In her writings on ancient myth, the British author Natalie Haynes moves women to the centre of attention. Her two latest books, A Thousand Ships and Pandora’s Jar – a fiction novel and a non-fiction one – approach this topic from two different perspectives. This interview takes stock of Haynes’ motives and methodology as well as of the challenges she faces in the process of writing.
It is well known that Western Europe and especially West Germany have been strongly influenced by the United States past 1945. Foreign correspondents played a crucial role in this field. One of the most influential postwar journalists in Germany, and the first permanent TV correspondent in the U.S., was Peter von Zahn (1913–2001). His weekly radio columns and his monthly TV documentary Bilder aus der Neuen Welt (Pictures from the New World) reached millions in the 1950s. Eli Nathans’s Peter von Zahn’s Cold War Broadcasts to West Germany: Assessing America is still the first book that analyzes the life and work of Zahn as an influential intermediary between America and West Germany. Luckily, many private letters of Zahn...
Taming Nuclear Power
(2017)
In 2011 a broad majority in the German Federal Parliament voted to abandon nuclear energy. This article explores the origins of the change in attitude towards nuclear energy and argues that seven years before the Chernobyl disaster, the accident at the U.S. power plant Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979, had a profound impact which nowadays seems to be largely forgotten in Europe. The article identifies the structural causes underlying the transnational reception of the Three Mile Island accident and explores international reactions, particularly in the Federal Republic of Germany. The accident near Harrisburg led to a loss of public confidence and created unease about nuclear expansion in many industrialized nations. Reactions to the accident can be understood as an attempt to tame nuclear energy both technically, by increasing safety measures and abandoning plans for new nuclear power stations, and politically, with a more critical appraisal of nuclear energy and with semantics that encouraged a long-term withdrawal from nuclear power. Critics were now also accepted as experts. Nuclear policy in all countries became closely dependent on public opinion, indicating a high level of political responsiveness. Various factors, however, including the contemporaneous oil crisis put the brakes on this critical approach to nuclear power, while safety improvements and the limited expansion of nuclear power created new confidence in the early 1980s.
Fighting ISIS in Syria
(2022)
This paper analyses the Operation Euphrates Shield (OES) al-Bab battle and presents the lessons learned. OES started with a mixed force of Free Syrian Army, Turkish special forces and armoured units. During the operation, the aims and the force structure gradually changed, yet not the command structure. When OES aimed to capture al-Bab, ISIS employed conventional active defence strategy. The OES commander's insistence on employing special forces increased own casualties and al-Bab was seized only after resorting to a conventional urban attack. OES presents tactical and operational lessons for the militaries on structure and execution of operations against an irregular adversary employing conventional means.
"Orfeo out of Care"
(2022)
The paper focuses on an example of multiple-step reception: the contribution of the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice and the mediaeval lay Sir Orfeo to Tolkien’s work.
In the first part, I compare the lay with Virgilian and Ovidian versions of Orpheus’ myth. This comparison shows the anonymous author’s deep knowledge of the ancient texts and complex way of rewriting them through stealing and hybridization.
The lay was highly esteemed by Tolkien, who translated it and took inspiration from it while describing the Elven kingdom in The Hobbit and building the storyline of Beren and Lúthien in The Silmarillion. Through this key tale, Orpheus/Orfeo’s romance has a deep influence also on Aragorn and Arwen’s story in The Lord of the Rings. The most important element that Tolkien takes from the Sir Orfeo figuration of the ancient story is undoubtedly the insertion of political theme: the link established between the recovery of the main character’s beloved and the return to royal responsability.
The second part of the paper is, thus, dedicated to the reception of Sir Orfeo and the classical myth in Tolkien. It shows how in his work the different steps of the tradition of Orpheus’ story are co-present, creating an inextricable substrate of inspiration that nourishes his imagination.
The Social War (91-88 BCE) is one of the most significant episodes in Roman history: from this war, in which Rome fought against her Italic allies, emerged the elite that would lead the Republic in the last decades of its existence and that would provide the senatorial aristocracy of the early imperial age. The Italic rebels were defeated militarily, yet they achieved their political aims. As such, this war – and its elaboration and memorialization in Roman cultural memory – provides a very interesting case study about how "victory" and "defeat" are constructed discursively after a disruptive war, and how its narration is "functionalized" for a re-foundation of the civic body.
Interview with Alana Jelinek
(2021)
Alana Jelinek is an art historian and artist — “an artist making art, and also writing about art”, in her words — , a former European Research Council artist in residence at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and currently teaching in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire. Her art has revolved mostly around the issues of post- and neocolonialism and their connections with neoliberalism — a more implicit topic in her works from the 1990s on the “tourist gaze” developed into an interest in museums, collecting and ethnography throughout the past two decades. In this interview, she talks to thersites about the role of classical heritage and ancient art in her own work.
It has been highlighted many times how difficult it is to draw a boundary between gift and bribe, and how the same transfer can be interpreted in different ways according to the position of the observer and the narrative frame into which it is inserted. This also applied of course to Ancient Rome; in both the Republic and Principate lawgivers tried to define the limits of acceptable transfers and thus also to identify what we might call ‘corruption’. Yet, such definitions remained to a large extent blurred, and what was constructed was mostly a ‘code of conduct’, allowing Roman politicians to perform their own ‘honesty’ in public duty – while being aware at all times that their involvement in different kinds of transfer might be used by their opponents against them and presented as a case of ‘corrupt’ behaviour.
Introduction
(2022)
Theme Park Imitations
(2022)
Theme parks frequently draw not only on historical themes, from antiquity to the roaring twenties, but also on their own history – that is, the history of the medium of the theme park itself. This article uses the example of the Happy World ride at Happy Valley Beijing (China) to discuss theme park imitations, that is, the fact that theme parks frequently borrow individual elements (themes, technologies, visuals, layouts, names) and/or entire units (rides, restaurants, themed areas) from each other. Opened in 2014 in the Greek-themed Aegean Harbour section of Happy Valley Beijing, Happy World may upon first sight look like an almost exact copy of Disney’s ‘it’s a small world’ (opened at Disneyland in California in 1966) but turns out to be, upon closer examination, a complex refunctionalization of central elements of ‘it’s a small world’ that establishes meaningful connections between (ancient) Greece and the city of Beijing via the theme of the Olympic Games: drawing on the origins of ‘it’s a small world’ in the 1964–5 New York World’s Fair and the latter’s motto of ‘Peace through Understanding’, Happy World takes visitors on a journey from the ancient Olympiad to contemporary Beijing (the site of the 2008 Summer and the 2022 Winter Olympic Games) to offer a theme park rendition of the 2008 Olympic torch relay as an homage to ‘the spirit [of peace, respect, and friendship] in the people’s [sic] of the world’.
This book offers a comprehensive, multidisciplinary introduction to theme parks and the field of theme park studies. It identifies and discusses relevant economic, social, and cultural as well as medial, historical, and geographical aspects of theme parks worldwide, from the big international theme park chains to smaller, regional, family-operated parks. The book also describes the theories and methods that have been used to study theme parks in various academic disciplines and reviews the major contexts in which theme parks have been studied. By providing the necessary backgrounds, theories, and methods to analyze and understand theme parks both as a business field and as a socio-cultural phenomenon, this book will be a great resource to students, academics from all disciplines interested in theme parks, and professionals and policy-makers in the leisure and entertainment as well as the urban planning sector.
Preface
(2020)
Studies on the “uses of the past” have steadily and consistently advanced over the past twenty years. Following the seminal studies by Hobsbawm and Ranger and Benedict Anderson on the role of narratives of the past in constructing (national) identities, and thanks the always more widespread practice of reception studies, the attention for cultural memory and lieux de mémoire, and following, many publications have investigated the role of nearer and further time layers in defining and determining structures of identity and senses of belonging across the world. Didactics of history has also contributed a great deal to this field of studies, also thanks to the always more refined methodologies of school book analysis. Classical Antiquity has obviously not been neglected, and multiple studies have been dedicated to its role in the development and reinforcement of modern identities. Yet, not only some areas of the world have remained less considered than others, but most attention has been dedicated to national identities, nationalistic discourses, and their activation through historical narratives. This special issues of thersites wants to contribute further to research on the role of Classical Antiquity within modern identities, asking scholars to focus especially on areas that have been less strongly represented in scholarship until now.
The Tetrarchy as Ideology
(2023)
The Tetrarchy as Ideology
(2023)
The 'Tetrarchy', the modern name assigned to the period of Roman history that started with the emperor Diocletian and ended with Constantine I, has been a much-studied and much-debated field of the Roman Empire. Debate, however, has focused primarily on whether it was a true 'system' of government, or rather a collection of ad-hoc measures undertaken to stabilise the empire after the troubled period of the 3rd century CE. The papers collected here aim to go beyond this question and to present an innovative approach to a fascinating period of Roman history by understanding the Tetrarchy not as a system of government, but primarily as a political language. Their focus thus lies on the language and ideology of the imperial college and court, on the performance of power in imperial ceremonies, the representation of the emperors and their enemies in the provinces of the Roman world, as well as on the afterlife of Tetrarchic power in the Constantinian period.
Introduction
(2020)
In 1932, Grace Harriet Macurdy, Professor of Greek at Vassar College, wrote about Cleopatra’s and Marc Antony’s lifestyle in Egypt: In a manner of living as though taken from the Arabian Nights Entertainment, they gambled, drank, hunted and fished together, and wandered about Alexandria by night in disguise. . . Even Macurdy – the author of a pioneering study on Hellenistic queens and ‘woman-power’, in which she stressed the necessity of evaluating powerful women by the same standards as their male counterparts – could not avoid using an Orientalist flair when describing the most famous Ptolemaic queen. It is the aim of this book to show that Macurdy was and is anything but alone, and that discourses and images developed by the Orientalist imagination have dominated the ways in which powerful ancient women have been represented in modern reception. The reason for this, we argue, is...
Introduction
(2020)