College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item The "Europa-Gedanke" and the Transformation of German Conservatism, 1930-1955(2019) Klein, Joshua Derren; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following dissertation is a political-intellectual history of German conservatism and national identity from the 1930s to the 1950s. It explores the published and private documents of prominent conservative intellectuals, propagandists, journalists, and military elites who before, during, and after the Second World War developed a new concept of European nationalism which they called the “Europa-Gedanke,” or “Europe-concept.” This dissertation traces the evolution of this political ideology by assessing what Europe meant for these thinkers, how this meaning changed over the course of a volatile historical time period, how it differed from other concepts of Europe, and how it informed the transformation of German conservatism. The figures analyzed in this dissertation had in common a professional and intellectual trajectory that began in the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar period. Part 1 of this dissertation dissects their path to intellectual complicity in National Socialism and the propaganda apparatus behind Hitler’s “New Order of Europe.” Part II traces their postwar professional rebirth as widely publicized journalists and influential military reformers in the first decade of West Germany. Surprisingly, after 1945 these figures were able to bridge their European ideology with the postwar Christian Democratic politics of European integration and anti-Communism. This alliance opened the door for liberals in West Germany and the American intelligence community to accommodate a previously hostile milieu into their postwar liberal politics. The primary thesis of this dissertation is three-fold: a) the conservative Europe-concept is a hitherto neglected and dismissed ideology which was highly influential across all three examined time periods of German history; b) this influence was a result of the Europe-concept’s explicit reformulation of the enduring German völkisch tradition in such a way that expanded the definition of the historical ethnic community (from Germany to Europe) and thereby addressed the perceived political inadequacy of nationalism during and after the Second World War; and c) the Europe-concept contributed to the de-radicalization of German conservatism by assisting a transition from the anti-democratic Conservative Revolutionary impulse to the postwar West German politics of liberal democracy – a convergence that moderated the instinctive illiberalism of German conservatism.Item COLD WAR II: UKRAINIAN SOVEREIGNTY AND IDENTITY(2017) McCloskey, Thomas Laurence; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity showcases tensions between nationalism and internationalism in a post-Cold War era. Ukraine’s political leaders and ordinary citizens express opposing views about the identity and sovereignty of their nation, as some want closer ties with the European Union, while others seek closer relations with the Russian Federation. The myths and memories of Ukraine’s Cossack past, as well as its time in the former Soviet Union, animate discourses throughout the conflict. These debates result in no clear consensus about Ukrainian identity. The inability of Ukraine to find a unified nationalist identity in the conflict highlights a post-Cold War paradox. Ukraine is unable to articulate a unifying identity because the myths and memories of the Cold War continue to circulate in public discourse. International organizations are largely unable to legitimize either side’s claims of identity in the conflict. This chaos has invited outside intervention, as both the Russia Federation and the United States attempt to influence Ukraine’s decisions about sovereignty and identity in ways benefitting Russian or American interests. These discourses mirror Cold War debates over Soviet satellite countries, as a propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people rage on in political speeches, online forums, and in international organizations. Ukraine is thus mired in a cycle of unrest, as corruption and language issues continue to prevent the nation from articulating a unified nationalist identity. Ukraine’s crisis showcases the inherent conflict within notions of sovereignty, as both self-determination and freedom from outside intervention often contradict the expected obligations of nations to protect not only their citizens but also those of other nations whose human rights are threatened. This project challenges the notion that post-Cold War states can easily move beyond the legacies of the Cold War, as their past myths and memories continue to define their sovereignty and identity well after the conflict ends.Item Someone Else's Textbooks: German Education 1945-2014(2016) Abney, Ann; Kosicki, Piotr; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 20th century, German education repeatedly transformed as the occupying Americans, Soviets, and western-dominated reunification governments used their control of the German secondary education system to create new definitions of what it meant to be German. In each case, the dominant political force established the paradigm for a new generation of Germans. The victors altered the German education system to ensure that their versions of history would be the prevailing narrative. In the American Occupation Zones from 1945-1949, this meant democratic initiatives; for the Soviet Zone in those same years, Marxist-Leninist pedagogy; and for the Bundesrepublik after reunification, integrated East and West German narratives. In practice, this meant succeeding generations of German students learned very different versions of history depending on the temporal and geographic space they inhabited, as each new prevailing regime supplanted the previous version of “Germanness” with its own.Item Early Innovations in Shakespearean Performance: Ludwig Tieck, William Poel, and Their Relationships to the Nazarenes and Pre-Raphaelites(2012) Tenner, Natalie; Hildy, Franklin J.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation attempts to reanalyze the Elizabethan stage work of Ludwig Tieck and William Poel through a historically cultural lens, instead of within the frame of Shakespearean performance. Connecting these men personally and idealogically to two artistic groups, the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites, reveals, through their respective productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Measure for Measure, their positions as Romantic artists in changing societies. The German Romantics used their art to progress towards a unified German nation. Tieck, who knew Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and Schleiermacher, exhibited more political awareness than he is usually give credit for. His production of A Midsummer Night's Dream on an attempted recreation of an Elizabethan stage can be read as a theatrical event in which Tieck displayed, both by product and by procedure, his ideal nation in which all classes are connected intellectually and culturally, but at the same time understand the specific role they must fill in society. Poel's production of Measure for Measure on an Elizabethan stage, when viewed in relation to Pre-Raphaelite thought, reveals a tension in Poel's work between his pristine Victorian aesthetic and his appreciation for the flawed human being. This manifested itself in Poel's producing a play with sexually explicit and morally difficult themes, which he then heavily cut to soften some of the discomfort. Under the influence of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, Poel would have been exposed to ideas which praise humans over machines, and accept a wider range of human emotion and expression than was typically acceptable to his Victorian society. If Poel did not share some of the Pre-Raphaelite fascination with more difficult subjects, he could easily have stayed far away from this difficult play. His choice of the play, and his connections with the Pre-Raphaelites, cause me to question the typical view of Poel as overly prudish. I argue instead that he was negotiating a new place for the artist in society, using Shakespeare and Elizabethan practices, which exalted the full range of human capacity through such tools as the noble grotesque, while keeping the ultimate goal of elevating and improving his audience.Item Public Works, Modernity, and Chinese Nationalism in Shanghai, 1911-1941(2009) Nalezyty, Nancy; Gao, James Z; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis focuses on the roads and public services created by the SMC because they are a topic which clearly illustrates the ambiguity of colonial modernism in Shanghai. This colonial modernism, which in Shanghai was largely instigated by the SMC, is a process which not only made the Chinese victims of colonial modernity, but also taught the Chinese the value of this Western modernity. This thesis explores these thoughts in terms of the actual use of land in Shanghai to build roads and the administration of these roads, but also includes the use of land for other public services. While much of the recent literature on Chinese modernity has moved to cultural areas such as film, architecture, and fashion, this essay will attempt to re-examine the urban expansion of Shanghai by focusing less on the diplomatic aspect of this topic and instead on examining the use of each parcel of land as a part of the urban infrastructure and how this affected the modernization and nationalism in China. It will do so by exploring the urban expansion of Shanghai, especially the building of roads and other public services, during the majority of the Chinese Republican Period. The essay is divided into four chapters based on major changes in the expansion of the International Settlement and the relationship between the SMC and its Chinese and other counterparts. The first chapter discusses the time period from 1911-1915 when the SMC continued to expand as they had previously done during the Ch'ing dynasty. The second chapter focuses on the years 1916-1927 when formal expansion was no longer a viable option and the SMC turned to building extra-Settlement. The third chapter discusses the years between 1928-1936 when the KMT created a new administration in Shanghai and the SMC slowly began to lose control of the roads to the new Chinese administration. The final chapter discusses the disruption of urban expansion during the Japanese war and occupation from 1937-1941. This essay will attempt to examine the urban expansion of Shanghai by focusing less on cultural aspects and instead on use of land, construction of roads, and the development of urban infrastructure, which gave rise to colonial modernism and Chinese nationalism.Item IGNACIO ZULOAGA AND THE PROBLEM OF SPAIN(2009) Crosson, Dena; Hargrove, June; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: IGNACIO ZULOAGA AND THE PROBLEM OF SPAIN Dena Crosson, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Dissertation directed by: Professor June Hargrove Department of Art History and Archeology This dissertation examines the career of Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945), a highly successful and influential artist during his lifetime, in the context of nationalism and the political and cultural conditions that informed his artistic persona. Positioning himself to both Spanish and foreign audiences as the "painter of Spain," his style and subject matter simultaneously exploited foreign preconceptions about Spain while serving as a lightning rod for the critical nationalist discourse preoccupying Spanish political and cultural leaders during the first decades of the twentieth century. In the 1910s and 1920s the vernacular nationalism he practiced was not opposed to modernism. But by the 1930s, nationalism had become associated with rising fascist movements both in Europe and in Spain. Through a series of case studies this dissertation problematizes the issue of modernism in art and fills an important gap in the study of the critical role of nationalism for the struggle between tradition and modernity in the arts in early twentieth-century Spain. Chapter One examines Zuloaga's influence in France through his affiliation with a group of French artists known as La Bande Noire and describes his important contribution to the rediscovery of El Greco in the last years of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two explores Zuloaga's discovery of the province of Castilla in 1898 as a subject for his work. It charts the significance of Castilla for the nationalist project of the Generation of 98 as well as for the regenerationist Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Learning). Chapter Three maps the growing links between Zuloaga and traditionalist and fascist ideologies, both in France and in Spain, in the 1910s and 1920s. Chapter Four investigates Zuloaga's career both in the context of the foundation and fall of Spain's Second Republic (1931-1939) and the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. Zuloaga's career provides a significant case study for the gradual alignment, of what became traditionalism, with right-wing political ideology, an alignment by no means necessarily apparent before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.Item The Intersection Between Nationalism and Religion: The Burghers of Calais of Auguste Rodin(2009) Lee, Jung-Sil; Hargrove, June Ellen; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As a republican, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) conveyed political ideology in his public sculpture, but due to his interest in religion and spirituality, his interpretations differed from contemporary artists. He grafted national myths and symbols onto Catholicism and its rituals to facilitate the sacralization of the Republic. Yet, the tension between Catholicism and republicanism in his work persisted because of his religiosity and his adherence to secularism. Rodin's conflict and compromise between the two fields were not only his personal dilemma, but also that of the Third Republic. This dissertation focuses on how Rodin internalized republican ideology in his public sculpture, and how he appropriated Catholic ritual to promote political messages. In spite of the republican government's constant struggle to separate from Catholic domination, Catholicism was so deeply imbedded in French culture, Rodin recognized this complex paradigm which he co-opted to construct an ideological matrix for his public work. Aware of the powerful social role of religion, the First Republic tried to create a new religion based on deistic tradition, The Cult of Supreme Being, to unite all French people who were severely divided by factions, languages, and regionalism. This precedent tradition further proved the importance of religion's social reach in constructing national sentiment. Based on research in Rodin museums in Paris and Meudon in 2004 and 2006, this study examines how Rodin merged Catholic practices and contemporary social ideologies into the fiber of nationalist identity that served to reconcile political oppositions in France and to heal wounded civic pride after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Similar to the public sphere proposed by Jürgen Habermas, Rodin's public sculpture suggests ideal democratic communicative field. The Burghers of Calais is a prime example of the republican ideal of heroic martyrdom. At the same time, its overall form, figural arrangement, and poignant expressions invoke the Catholic practice of pilgrimage, drawing the audience into the scene's emotional landscape. This interpretation of The Burghers of Calais as a religious and psychological catharsis paves the way for public sculpture to function as a healing tool to rebuild personal and national subjectivity.Item After Empire: Ethnic Germans and Minority Nationalism in Interwar Yugoslavia(2008-11-30) Lyon, Philip; Lampe, John R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study traces the (ethnically German) Danube Swabians' embrace of national identity in interwar Yugoslavia with attention to the German national movement's antecedents in Croatia-Slavonia and Vojvodina under the Habsburgs. We examine the important role of German national activists in Yugoslavia and survey the institutions they built to stimulate, shape and mobilize Yugoslavia's German population as a specifically national minority based on the Swabians' history and collective memory as colonists in the region. Thereafter, we discuss the rift that emerged inside the German minority during the 1930s, when the German leadership and its conservative variety of German nationalism were confronted by brash, young challengers who sought to "renew" the German minority in a Nazi image. These young enthusiasts for National Socialism directed their extreme nationalism not at the repressive Yugoslav authorities, but rather at their older rivals in the Germans' main cultural and political organization, the Kulturbund. German culture and national authenticity became key criteria for German leadership in this struggle to control the Kulturbund. Meanwhile, German Catholic priests also resisted the Nazi-oriented Erneuerungsbewegung insurgency. Ultimately, we see in this clash of generations both support for and resistance to local manifestations of Nazism in Southeastern Europe. One of this study's major finds is the stubborn endurance of national indifference and local identity in Southeastern Europe throughout interwar period, when national identity was supposed to be dominant. Many Germans embraced national identity, but certainly not all of them. The persistence of this indifference confounded the logic of twentieth century nationalists, for whom national indeterminacy seemed unnatural, archaic, and inexplicable. Even after years of effort by German nationalist activists in the nationalized political atmosphere of interwar Yugoslavia, some ethnic Germans remained indifferent to national identity or else identified as Croats or Magyars. There were also those who pined for Habsburg Hungary, which had offered a dynastic alternative to national identity before 1918. Still others' identity remained shaped by confession as Catholic or Protestant. We conclude therefore by observing the paradoxical situation whereby Nazi-oriented extreme nationalism coexisted with instances of German national indifference in Yugoslavia until the eve of the Second World War.Item Brazil after Humboldt - Triangular Perceptions and the Colonial Gaze in Nineteenth-Century German Travel Narratives(2008-01-30) Diggs, Cerue Kesso; Frederiksen, Elke P.; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a study of nine German travel narratives on Brazil written between 1803 and 1899, identifying their contribution to the discourses on German national identity in the nineteenth century. Famous German explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1834) influenced travelers to explore Brazil, the part of South America that he was not able to enter for political reasons. I approach their accounts from new historicist and post/colonial perspectives. My thesis is that these narratives help construct a German national identity that occupies a fluid (colonial) position in response to diverse "Others" encountered in colonial Brazil. While contributing to the study of travel literature, my dissertation contributes significantly to the field of German Cultural Studies by applying a post/colonial approach to the reading of German texts. Chapter I locates my investigation theoretically at the intersection between post/colonialism - the critique of colonization and colonial ideology - and new historicism - the reading of texts within their historical contexts, identifying discourses by juxtaposing them with various other contemporary texts. Katrin Sieg's concept of triangular thinking and Susanne Zantop's idea of colonial fantasies are instrumental in my reading. Chapter II places my selection of travelogues in the historical contexts of nineteenth-century Germany and Brazil, underscoring their paths to nationhood and changes in Wissenschaft. Chapter III shows that Alexander von Humboldt's influence on German explorers of Brazil is more evident in the scope of their research than in their writing styles. Chapter IV interprets German travelers as surprised yet critical flâneurs in Rio de Janeiro, as skeptical listeners to the stories of German immigrants, and seekers of Germania in their responses to Brazilian women. Chapter V shows how a German understanding of 'race' as an ingredient of national identity colors the travelers' anthropological observations of blacks and native populations in Brazil. Through various triangulations, German travelers to Brazil ambivalently identified with Portuguese colonizers and, at times, with colonized subjects (native populations, blacks), constructing diverse colonial/nationalistic fantasies in their narratives. All of these texts bare witness to specific historical events, and provide a comparative view of nationalism in nineteenth-century Germany and Brazil.Item "The Sacred Cause of State Rights": Theories of Union and Sovereignty in the Antebellum North(2006-08-09) Esh, Christian R.; Belz, Herman J.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"The Sacred Cause of State Rights" examines the problem of federalism as the central issue in U.S. constitutional history before the Civil War. Drawing on Keith Whittington's insight into the political construction of the Constitution, the argument focuses on the role of state legislatures and courts, particularly in the North, relative to their claims of co-equal authority to the national government in the struggle to determine constitutional meaning. The project seeks to rescue the political history of federalism from the post-Civil War view that the Union had been polarized into patriotic nationalists and traitorous defenders of state rights. In fact, most Northerners occupied a middle ground between the arch-nationalism of Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun's exposition of nullification. Martin Van Buren appealed to Northern moderates when he fought to defend "the sacred cause of state rights" against the heresy of nullification in 1833. Analytically, the dissertation strives to establish the core theoretical components of representative debates. It begins with the formulation of the first national Union under the Articles of Association (1774) and then moves to the constitutional compromise of 1787 and the debate over its meaning in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions (1798). These chapters analyze the revolutionary political grammar of association and its importance to American constitutional deliberation. Subsequent chapters treat the issue of sovereignty through a study of the Olmsted Crisis in Philadelphia and the issue of concurrent state powers in New York by examining the Steamboat Cases. Then, the dissertation explains how Northern states' claim to interpret the Constitution for themselves was sorely discredited by the national attention given to Calhoun's radical theory of nullification in 1833. Finally, it examines the North's turn away from state rights and social contract theory and toward the organic nationalist theories of the Union espoused by Daniel Webster and Joseph Story.