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Notes from the Field: Crnojević’s Shelves. Exploratory research in the archives of Montenegro

As people in the past lived out their lives, did they realize the ways in which they would help create the archive of the future? Did the owner of a particular stack of newspapers deliberately label it “Borba Zagreb 1949” to preserve a record of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia’s official gazette from that year, or was the note atop the pile simply an act of routine organization? How does an archive—filled with countless documents chronicling the lives of so many—capture the beauty and complexity of the human experience? These questions swirled in my mind as I explored the halls of the Đurđe Crnojević National Library of Montenegro, or the Nacionalna biblioteka Crne Gore, “Đurđe Crnojević,” this past summer, an experience I later reflected upon in Notes from the Field: Crnojević’s Shelves.

In a short time, the library’s massive collection and meticulously cataloged documents led me to experience firsthand the reason why an archive can become such a cherished part of a people’s cultural identity. At the Đurđe Crnojević National Library, it was the always friendly, knowledgeable, and extraordinarily diligent curators of the collections who formed the heart of the historization process, shaping the archive as a reflection of collective lived experience. My time in Montenegro also taught me the significance an archive plays preserving and defending a people’s history—serving as a fortress wall, safeguarding it against forces that would see their history either destroyed or delegitimized.

The bloody history of archives in former Yugoslavia

A little over 30 years ago, in a territory once unified as the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia, a devastating wave of violence swept across the region. Nationalist politicians and warmongers ignited a series of wars fueled by ethnic and religious divisions, ultimately leading to the country’s destruction. During these Yugoslav Wars of Succession, nationalist state-building projects sought to create ethnically “pure” nation states, resulting in widespread violence, ethnic cleansing, and the delegitimization of history. This is on clear display in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the three-and-a-half-year long siege of the country’s capital, Sarajevo, Serbian-backed forces relentlessly terrorized the civilian population, attacking the city with artillery and sniper fire. Their goal was to force the coalition of Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces to surrender the city.

This image was taken during the war in 1992 in Sarajevo in the partially destroyed National Library. The cello player is local musician Vedran Smailović, who often came to play for free at different funerals during the siege despite the fact that funerals were often targetted by Serb forces. (Mikhail Evstafiev) — *This image was taken during the war in 1992 in Sarajevo in the partially destroyed National Library. The cellist is local musician Vedran Smailović. (Mikhail Evstafiev). Source: Wikimedia Commons*

On the night of September 25, 1992, Bosnian Serb guns deliberately fired incendiary shells upon the National Library of Bosnia, affectionately known as the Vijećnica, with the intent to destroy a rich archive of the Bosnian peoples. A former city hall built in the time of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Moorish-style building housed over 1,500,000 volumes and 150,000 old manuscripts, all of which were devoured by the flames. Naza Tanović-Miller, a university professor who wrote about her experiences during the siege, described the scene of horror as the cultural symbol of her people was destroyed, “Our treasure was burning. The Bosnian past was burning… The shelling never stopped for three days. Burned pages and pieces of paper were flying in the front and back of our house… I collected a few ashes and held them gently in my hand. All of Sarajevo cried.”

Coming to Montenegro

Thirty-two years later, at the start of summer 2024, I found myself preparing to explore a key regional archive for the first time in my academic career. While I am no stranger to the Balkans—I have lived and studied in the territory of former Yugoslavia several times before—this was my first visit to Montenegro. When in the Balkans, however, the memory of the wars are never far from my mind, especially the story of the Vijećnica and its brutal destruction.

Image of Montenegro landscape — *Image taken by the author.*

My journey into the Montenegrin archives emerged from a research project I had been developing in the spring of 2024. The project’s central question examines how Yugoslav perception of gender—amongst both women and men—changed after Tito’s Partisans’ victory in World War II. Specifically, I am investigating how the socialist revolution changed wider views of gender and gender roles in the newly formed socialist Yugoslavia. In what ways did the socialist revolution inspire hope and progressive change for women, even if those changes were eventually hindered by patriarchal paternalism?

Picture of author's notes and a coffee. — *Image taken by the author.*

Picture of author's material and notes in the archive's reading room — *Image taken by the author.*

My research led me to Ana Antić’s fascinating article entitled “The New Socialist Citizen and ‘Forgetting’ Authoritarianism”, which analyzed how new schools of psychiatric thought and practice in socialist Yugoslavia sought to apply the ideals of the revolution by expanding access to mental health services. Antić’s work, in turn, led me to the writings of various Yugoslav psychologists who worked with Partisan veterans afflicted with what they coined, “Partisan neurosis”—a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that afflicted soldiers after the war. I stumbled upon a fascinating discussion about these post-war psychologists, who implemented new psychoanalytical techniques designed to bring about a new Yugoslav socialism, including its goal of decolonization and solidarity within the Non-Aligned Movement solidarity.

However, there was a crucial gap in this literature. I discovered that no one seemed to analyze the complex dynamics of gender in this post-war, post-revolutionary socialist period. I felt excited realizing that my project could fit in the discussion by bringing a gendered analysis to the same discussions of this time period between 1945 and 1960. But in order to fill this gap and conduct a meaningful gender analysis, I needed firsthand access to the original sources and writings of these Yugoslav doctors and socialist theorists.

Exploring the Archive

View of The Nacionalna biblioteka Crne Gore, “Đurđe Crnojević”. Image owned by author. — *The Nacionalna biblioteka Crne Gore, “Đurđe Crnojević”. Image taken by the author.*

Spending time in Montenegro, you quickly become aware of the long struggle of its people to preserve their political and cultural independence. In 2006, Montenegro rallied its domestic and diasporic population to vote in a referendum for independence from the state union of Serbia and Montenegro, which had succeeded Yugoslavia. With a narrow 55.5% majority, they won their independence. However, recent development—particularly in Cetinje, home to both the National Library and Archives of Montenegro—have recently renewed calls to action to defend their sovereignty and cultural identity. These calls to action stem from concerns over potential absorption into a ‘Greater Serbian’ sphere of influence, highlighting the ongoing tension between national self-determination and regional political dynamics.

Image of index cards at archive. — *Image taken by the author.*

Between 2020 to 2022, protests erupted across Montenegro in response to the government announcing changes to citizenship, which the opposition claimed would enable the creeping ‘Serbianization’ of the country. Protests were refueled in August 2021 over what Dr. Šušanj described as the subtle colonization of Montenegro by the Serbian Orthodox Church, one that intended to eliminate the existence of a separate Montenegrin ethnic and religious identity. Protesters resisted the enthronement of the Serbian Orthodox Metropolitan Joanikije Mićović by setting up boulder and tire barricades in and around Cetinje in an attempt to block the ceremony from taking place. Youth leaders like Peđa Vušurović argued that by allowing the Serbian Orthodox Church to strengthen its grip around cherished Montenegrin historical sights—such as St. Peter’s chair in the Cetinje Monastery, a symbol of Montenegrin spiritual, state, and national freedom—risked subsuming Montenegrin identity and history within a larger sphere of Serbian world.

Images of protesters clashing with police, strangled by clouds of tear gas as their tire barricades burned behind them, taught me a great deal about the people of Montenegro. This rang especially true in my mind as the scars from the 1990s remain ever present, and the scourge of divisive nationalism still runs rampant through the other Ex-Yugoslav states. I will never forget the feeling in the pit of my stomach in June 2021 when I saw a banner celebrating convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić, the “Butcher of Bosnia”, as a Serbian hero draped over the Novi Sad football stadium.

Poster celebrating local heroes. — *Image taken by the author.*

Even today, Montenegro celebrates its anti-fascist past. In contrast to other former Yugoslav states, like Croatia, which have explicitly worked to denounce and destroy their connections to Yugoslavia and it’s anti-fascist monuments, history, and in some cases cemeteries, the opposite is true in Cetinje. In 2024, the country commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Cetinje from fascist occupation. Near the main square, a large banner honored female Partisan fighters from the 1st Battalion of the 4th Proletarian Brigade, and the famous Orden Grada Heroja, or the Order of the People’s Hero. This prestigious Yugoslav military decoration recognized acts of bravery during both peace and wartime, designating recipients as “people’s heroes” of Yugoslavia. Throughout my time in Montenegro, I encountered numerous Yugoslav plaques celebrating local heroes in every city and neighborhood, and statues honoring the anti-fascist resistance movement and its icons were consistently cared for and preserved. Some, as in the case of famous martyr Ljubo Čupić in the city of Nikšić, still had fresh flowers woven into the statue.

Moving forward

By the end of my time in Cetinje, I realized that my original research goals had not been fully met. I had expected to find a more overt discussion of socialist ideals with these new Yugoslav psychologists. In reality, the picture that emerged was slightly different. However, thanks to the many lessons taught to me by Crnojević’s library and the resilient people of Montenegro, I now have a new direction with which to progress my project on gender in the post-war socialist space. With the addition of various literature sources, I plan to use what I found in the archives to further explore my questions. I also hope to return to Montenegro many more times in the years to come.

David Castillo is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on the former communist Yugoslavia and its successor states. His research explores the links between inter-communal violence, toxic masculinity, gender dynamics, propaganda, and mass manipulation. With academic foundations from the University of Texas at El Paso and Indiana University, David combines cultural history with international politics. Drawing from his experience in the region, he aims to compare post-Yugoslav masculinity shaped by the 1990s wars with Chicano/a/e ‘Machismo’ in Mexican-American borderlands, investigating how violence becomes integral to both identities.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe by Lydia Barnett (2019)

Lydia Barnett’s first book, After the Flood, examines how early modern Europeans sought to understand the relationship between human activity, morality, and the environment through narratives of Noah’s flood. Barnett frames her post-Medieval history through the modern concept of an Anthropocene, or an era in which humans are a dominant influence on the environment. Although this term was coined to describe how man-made greenhouse gases have altered the planet since the Industrial Revolution, Barnett’s anachronous use of the term reveals a previously unexplored throughline in environmental history.

As a historian of science and religion, Barnett analyzes European texts from the 1570s to 1720s to expand upon two decades of scholarship on the advent of environmental consciousness in Europe and the relationship between religious and scientific knowledge. She contributes to academic conversations on the advent of the Anthropocene, arguing that a theological concept of man’s impact on nature and climate preceded the geological concept proposed in the twentieth century. Barnett also engages with foundational texts on the role of scale in environmental history—exploring early modern ideas of the flood on local, national, transnational, and global scales. Barnett argues that the search for evidence of a universal flood collapsed early modern Europeans’ conceptions of time and space and reflects prominent scholars’ acknowledgment of the human capacity “to instigate geologic change on human timescale” (21).

In the first chapter, Barnett explores different dimensions of gender in early modern Europeans’ conceptions of the biblical flood. Scholars of this time would often cite the flood as the end of the Edenic period of Earth, during which men were giants who lived for hundreds of years and fathered many children. Thus, the flood epitomizes the era’s focus on the effects of sin on male bodies and masculinity. Barnett highlights the rather obscure work of Camilla Erculiani, the only woman known to have published a text on natural philosophy in Renaissance Italy. A Paduan philosopher and apothecary, Erculiani conceived of both supernatural and natural explanations of the biblical flood and suggested that the disaster’s moral implications apply only to men. Barnett argues that, paradoxically, Erculiani’s gender allowed her to voice controversial opinions about sacred texts during a time of religious persecution but also limited her ability to fully engage in European scientific communities.

Next, Barnett investigates the motivations behind the desire to globalize the flood—both in a geographical and a moral sense—as part of the European imperial project and Christian evangelism. Early modern Europeans fixated on reconciling a universal flood narrative with a perception of their own moral and racial superiority. Efforts to collect fossil evidence of a universal flood provided both Protestant and Catholic scholars a mode of participating in a diverse (though primarily European) exchange of fossils across the Republic of Letters, a transnational community of intellectuals. Barnett’s synthesis of scholarship on the Republic of Letters, the biblical flood, and European environmental consciousness demonstrates a unique approach, as it falls somewhere between environmental history and the history of knowledge.

Deluge (anonymous, after Hans Bol, 1579), a print from an illustrated sixteenth-century Bible. Source: Rijksmuseum

Finally, the end of After the Flood returns full circle to Italy—where Erculiani was one of the first scholars to merge natural and supernatural explanations of the flood—to describe how scientist Antonio Vallisneri combined theories from Swiss Protestants and Italian Catholics to challenge English scholars and deemphasize a natural explanation for the biblical flood.

An expert of early modern European history, Barnett deftly weaves different European narratives of Noah’s Flood together over the span of a century and a half. Although beyond the scope of this text, Barnett’s analysis would benefit from a contextualization of the ways in which other forms of Christianity across the globe—such as the Egyptian Coptic Church and Ethiopian Orthodox Church—and other Abrahamic religions depicted Noah’s flood around the same time. Contrasting flood narratives between European and African Christians would yield more nuanced insights into Protestant and Catholic Europeans’ motivations for debating the scale and significance of the biblical flood, which Barnett herself acknowledges in her introduction. Furthermore, Barnett sometimes sacrifices broader accessibility of her book in favor of obscure Latin words and religious terms, potentially excluding readers less familiar with early modern Europe and Christianity. But overall, she has crafted a sophisticated argument with highly readable prose. After the Flood has wide appeal to historians and graduate students from different fields—such as geography, ecology, theology, gender studies—and deftly explores the intersection of these different disciplines.

Emily Cantwell is a Master’s in Global Policy Studies Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter Judson (2016)

By Jonathan Parker

This excellent work by historian Pieter Judson shows how the Hapsburg empire was a modernizing force that sustained a complex but often mutually beneficial relationship with the various nationalist movements within its borders. To support this argument, Judson synthesizes an impressive number of existing works on narrower topics into a cohesive narrative history of the empire from the late eighteenth century until its demise at the end of World War I. Judson claims that the empire was hardly doomed prior to 1914, arguing against long-standing nationalist histories of the empire’s inevitable collapse. While The Habsburg Empire is not without its flaws, it will surely remain required reading for anyone interested not only in the empire itself, but more broadly in the history of state-building, modernization, and nationalism in the nineteenth century.

The Habsburg Empire is not intended to be a blow-by-blow account. Instead, it tries to build an updated framework for thinking about the empire over its final century. Judson achieves this by borrowing from works on peasant life and the lives of oil workers in Galicia, on Slavic nationalist movements in what would later become Yugoslavia, and on industrialization and its consequences in Bohemia, Moravia, Lower and Upper Austria, and Silesia. He also draws on the complex political history of Vienna and Budapest, as the nature of the Habsburg state was debated, negotiated, and repeatedly hammered out over the course of an entire century. Consequently, Judson covers a lot of ground while touching on a limited number of key issues.

The discussion of industrialization is a good example. Despite the leadership’s conservative commitment to monarchy and its rejection of the French Revolution in the decades between the Napoleonic Wars and the 1848 revolutions, the empire underwent dramatic economic and social change. The imperial government was deeply suspicious of any potentially revolutionary or democratic activity, and yet it was also strapped for cash and resources. New technologies and techniques, including the building of railroads and capitalist institutions, encouraged not only economic growth, but also a kind of civil society as private middle-class and noble actors sought to address problems the government could not or would not face. As Judson argues, this period was not one of economic stagnation that laid the groundwork for so-called “East European backwardness,” but rather one in which subjects and citizens took an active role in social and economic change. In other words, this period of political conservatism saw grassroots development of democratic institutions and market forces. This point meshes with Judson’s broader argument that Habsburg imperial citizens took an active role in government and society, and that the empire held intrinsic value as a vehicle, rather than an obstacle, for public improvement.

The Hofburg, 1897 (via DPLA)

How then does Judson explain the final collapse of the empire, if it really was not doomed long before the First World War? In his final chapter, Judson argues that the imperial state lost a great deal of its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens during the war. Prior to the war there had been a sense in many quarters that the empire essentially served its citizens, and that even nationalists and Marxists could promote their agendas through its institutions. However, shortly after the war began, martial law was declared and many democratic governmental organs were suspended along with citizens’ rights by conservative, anti-democratic forces in the military. Combined with shortages of food and other essentials as well as catastrophic tactical failures on the battlefield (which virtually wiped out the empire’s entire corps of professional soldiers within the first months), these actions severely undermined faith in the empire’s ability to provide for its people. Even though democratic rule of law was restored half-way through the war, the damage had already been done. Nationalist organizations were then able to capitalize on the situation by organizing welfare relief, vastly improving their own legitimacy in citizens’ eyes and in contrast to an apparently failing state. Judson goes further and claims that the “doomed long ago” narrative was promoted by nationalists and arch-conservative imperialists alike, one in order to legitimize the post-war order of nation-states, and the other to put the blame for the empire’s sudden collapse on someone else. With this book, Judson offers a corrective.

In The Habsburg Empire: A New History, Pieter Judson has set a standard for general histories of the empire and produced a framework with which future specialist monographs can productively engage. This eminently readable book will be appreciated by students and scholars of European history as well as the general reading public.

More By Jonathan Parker:

The Refugees of ’68: The U.S. Response to Czechoslovak Refugees during Prague Spring

Historical Perspectives on Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness (2011)

Did Race and Racism Exist in the Middle Ages?

For generations, race studies scholars—historians and literary critics alike—believed that race and its pernicious spawn racism were modern-day phenomena only. This is because race was originally defined in biological terms, and believed to be determined by skin color, physiognomy, and genetic inheritance. The more astute, however, came to realize race could also be a matter of cultural classification, as Ann Stoler’s study of the colonial Dutch East Indies makes plain:

“Race could never be a matter of physiology alone. Cultural competency in Dutch customs, a sense of ‘belonging’ in a Dutch cultural milieu . . . disaffiliation with things Javanese . . . domestic arrangements, parenting styles, and moral environment . . . were crucial to defining . . . who was to be considered European.”*

Yet even after we recognized that people could be racialized through cultural and social criteria—that race could be a social construction—the European Middle Ages was still seen as outside the history of race (I speak only of the European Middle Ages because I’m a euromedievalist—it’s up to others to discuss race in Islamic, Jewish, Asian, African, and American premodernities).

This meant that the atrocities of the Medieval Period—roughly 500-1500 CE—such as the periodic extermination of Jews in Europe, the demand that they mark their bodies and the bodies of their children with a large visible badge, the herding of Jews into specific towns in England, and the vilification of Jews for putatively possessing a fetid stench, a male menses, subhuman and bestial characteristics, and a congenital need to ingest the blood of Christian children whom they tortured and crucified to death — all these and more were considered to be just premodern “prejudice” and not acts of racism.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, Christ Accused by the Pharisees, c. 1308-11.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The exclusion of the medieval period from the history of race issues derives from an understanding of race that has been overly influenced by the era of scientific racism (in the so-called Age of Enlightenment), when science was the magisterial discourse of racial classification.

But today, in news media and public life, we see how religion also can function to classify people in absolute and fundamental ways. Muslims, for example, who hail from a diversity of ethno-races and national origins, have been talked about as if their religion somehow identified them as one homogenous people.

“Race” is one of the primary names we have for our repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through selected differences that are identified as absolute and fundamental, so as to distribute power differentially to human groups. In race-making, strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices. Race is a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

Rather than oppose premodern “prejudice” to modern racisms, we can see the treatment of medieval Jews—including their legalized murder by the state on the basis of community rumors and lies—as racial acts, which today we might even call hate crimes, of a sanctioned and legalized kind. In this way, we would bear witness to the full meaning of actions and events in the medieval past, and understand that racial thinking, racial practices, and racial phenomena can occur before there’s a vocabulary to name them for what they are.

We can see medieval racial thinking in art and statuary, in maps, in saints’ lives, in state legislature, church laws, social institutions, popular beliefs, economic practices, war, settlement and colonization, religious treatises, and many kinds of literature, including travel accounts, ethnographies, romances, chronicles, letters, papal bulls, and more.

English Jew wearing the Jewish badge on his chest in the form of the tablets of the Old Testament (BL Cotton MS Nero, D2, fol.180, 13th century. British Library, UK, reproduced from The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages).

Accordingly, the treatment of Jews marks medieval England as the first racial state in the history of the West. Church and state laws produced surveillance, tagging, herding, incarceration, legal murder, and expulsion. A popular story of Jews killing Christian boys evolved over centuries, showing how changes in popular culture helped create the emerging communal identity of England. England’s 1275 Statute of Jewry even mandated residential segregation for Jews and Christians, inaugurating what would seem to be the beginning of the ghetto in Europe; and England’s expulsion of its Jews in 1290 marks the first permanent expulsion of Jews in Europe.

Similarly, Muslims in medieval Europe were transformed from military enemies into non-humans. The renowned theologian, Bernard of Clairvaux, who co-wrote the Rule for the Order of the Templars, announced that the killing of a Muslim wasn’t actually homicide, but malicide—the extermination of incarnated evil, not the killing of a person. Muslims, Islam, and the Prophet were vilified in numerous creative ways, and the extraterritorial incursions we call the Crusades coalesced into an indispensable template for Europe’s later colonial empires of the modern eras.

Even fellow Christians could be racialized. Literature justifying England’s colonization of Ireland in the twelfth century depicted the Irish as a quasi-human, savage, infantile, and bestial race—a racializing strategy in England’s colonial domination of Ireland that echoes from the medieval through the early modern period four centuries later.

Statue of the Black African St. Maurice of Magdeburg, at Magdeburg Cathedral, Germany, 1220-1250 (The Menil Foundation, Houston; Hickey and Robertson, Houston; and Harvard University’s Image of the Black Project, reproduced from The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages)

The treatment of Africans in medieval Europe tracks the pathways by which whiteness ascended to primacy in defining Christian European identity from the mid-thirteenth century onward. Sub-Saharan Africans were grimly depicted as killers of John the Baptist and torturers of Christ in medieval art. Africa also allowed European literature to fantasize the outside world, and imagine what the world outside could offer—treasure, sex, wealth, supremacy—and consider how to make the rest of the world into something that better resembled Latin Christendom itself.

After Greenlanders and Icelanders encountered Native Americans in the early eleventh century, when the Norse founded settlements in North America, Icelandic sagas gleefully show the new colonists cheating Native Americans in exploitative trade relations half a millennium before Columbus. The colonists also kidnap two native boys and abduct them back to northern Europe, where the children are Christianized and taught Norse—an account of forced migration that may help explain why, among the races of the world today, the C1e DNA gene element is shared only by Icelanders and Native Americans.

Europe’s evolving relationship with the Mongol race is traced in Franciscan missionary accounts, the famous narrative of Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa, Franciscan letters from China, the journey of a monk of the Church of the East from Beijing to Europe, and other travel narratives, that transform Mongols from a terrifying alien race into an object of desire for the West, once the Mongol imperium’s wealth, power, and resources became known. Mongols even offered a vision of modernity, of what that future might look like—with a postal express, disaster relief, social welfare, populace-maintained census data collection, independent women leaders, and universal paper money. Unlike the other races encountered by Latin Christendom—Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, and the Romani—Mongols were the only race representing absolute power to a fearful West.

Detail from the Catalan Atlas showing Marco Polo traveling the Silk Road. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Slavery in the medieval period was also configured by race: Caucasian slave women in Islamic Spain birthed sons and heirs for Arab Muslim rulers, including the famed Caliphs of Cordoba; the ranks of the slave dynasties of Turkic and Caucasian sultans and military elites in Mamluk Egypt were regularly resupplied by European, especially Italian slavers; and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in southeastern Europe became enslaved by religious houses and landowning elites who used Romani slaves as labor well into the modern era, making “Gypsy” the name of a slave race.

In the Middle Ages and today, it is the Romani—who consider themselves an ethnoracial group, despite considerable internal heterogeneity among their peoples—who best personify the paradox of race and racial identification. Romani self-identification as a race, despite substantial differences in the composition of their populations, suggests to us that racialization—by those outside, as well as by those who self-racialize—remains tenacious, well into the twenty-first century.

* Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth.” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 183-206

Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

Recommended reading:

Madeline Caviness, “From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2008).
A key study on the ascension of whiteness to centrality in European identity, as depicted in medieval art, with fifty-nine full-color images.

Jean Devisse, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery.” Trans. William G. Ryan. Vol. 2 Pt. 1: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood (2010).
An extraordinary, indispensable volume, with a vast collection of images of objects, illustrations, and architectural features depicting blackness and Africans in medieval European art. Part of an invaluable multi-volume series on blackness and Africans in art history, that ranges from antiquity to the modern period.

Ian Hancock, We are the Romani People (2002). A major study on the Romani, and Romani slavery, by a distinguished Romani studies scholar at the University of Texas in Austin.

Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (2003).
An important study showing us the implications of the iconography that visualized Jews, Muslims, Mongols, and monstrous humans for medieval audiences. Strickland reminds us that the human freaks depicted in art, cartography, and literature—often celebrated as wondrous and marvelous—shouldn’t teach us that medieval pleasure is pleasure of a simply and wholly innocent kind.

John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002) and Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (2008).
Two indispensable studies on portrayals of Muslims in medieval Christian Europe.

Header image: Alexander encounters the headless people —Historia de preliis in French, BL Royal MS 15 E vi, c. 1445.

IHS Talk: Beyond “Crisis” and Headlines: The History of Humanity as a History of Migration

On Monday, September 18, 2017, José C. Moya of Barnard College delivered a talk considering migration not as a current concern or “crisis” but as an intrinsic element of the human condition. Moya discusses migration as the very origin of our species, of its “racial” and cultural diversity, its global dispersion, and an engine of opportunity, innovation, and socioeconomic growth but also a source of disparities, inequalities, and conflict at global and local scales.

José C. Moya is professor of history at Director of the Forum on Migration at Barnard College, Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University, and Professor Emeritus at UCLA, where he taught for seventeen years and directed an equal number of doctoral dissertations. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Paris, San Andres (Argentina), and Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and invited speaker or research fellow at the universities of Berlin, Vienna, Krakow, Oxford, Leiden, Louvain, Fudan in Shanghai, Tel Aviv, Sao Paulo, the London School of Economics, and the Colegio de Mexico, among others.

Professor Moya has authored more than fifty publications, including Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930, a book that received five awards, World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century, co-authored with Adam McKeown, and The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, an edited volume on Latin American historiography. He is currently working on a book about anarchism in Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World during the belle époque and editing a book titled “Atlantic Crossroads: Webs of Migration, Culture and Politics between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, 1800-2010.”

The talk was sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies, LLILAS Benson, and International Relations and Global Studies.

Angela Merkel: Europe’s Most Influential Leader (2016) by Matthew Qvortrup

by Augusta Dell’Omo

With a sly smile, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, lets his black Labrador Koni off the leash and it immediately begins to approach German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Merkel, who was bitten by a dog in 1995, attempts to hide her visible discomfort, lips pursed and legs tightly crossed. Putin, well aware of the effect he created in the German Chancellor, appears smug and amused. The first Putin-Merkel visit in 2006 got off to a rough start. As one of many revealing anecdotes in Angela Merkel: Europe’s Most Influential Leader, political scientist and professor Matthew Qvortrup seeks to introduce an American audience to the woman fondly known in Germany as “Mutti.” Qvortrup’s work remains one of the few English language biographies of “the new leader of the free world.” Serving as the Chancellor of Germany since 2005, Merkel represents the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the major center-left party in Germany. On September 24, 2017, Merkel won a remarkable fourth term in office, heading off a nationalist surge to maintain control of the German Bundestag, the legislative body at the federal level in Germany. Merkel’s success begs the question: how did a woman, born in relative obscurity in East Germany to a Lutheran pastor rise to become the protégée of Helmut Kohl and arguably the most powerful woman in Europe? Qvortrup, relying on original sources and archives never made available in English, in combination with his powerful storytelling abilities, creates a compelling narrative of Merkel’s rise.
The first half of Angela Merkel details both the solidification of Merkel’s power in the CDU, but also the solidification of Merkel’s “brand.” As she herself would admit, Merkel relies far more on substance and consistency than flashy speeches and charm. Political pundits in Germany and abroad often criticize Merkel as “boring.” She prefers to exude calm, rationality, prudence, and unflappability. For much of her early life, says Qvortrup, Merkel “was not consumed by a passion for dissent,” instead nurturing a deep love of the sciences, eventually achieving a doctorate in quantum chemistry. Qvortrup attributes Merkel’s political awakening to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the process of German reunification. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Merkel became involved in the new democracy movement through the Demokratischer Aufbruch (DA), which would eventually merge with the East German CDU. Merkel rapidly rose through the ranks, eventually receiving an appointment by Kohl himself as federal Minister for Women and Young People. Merkel’s early years coming up in the ranks of the CDU solidified in her mind the important of grassroots organization, effective team members, and loyalty to the party hierarchy. While Merkel discovered her commitment and passion on issues of capitalist oriented economic development and reunification, Merkel also revealed a political pragmatism many of her colleagues did not initially suspect. According to Qvortrup, Merkel proved perfectly willing to let other members of the party fail if it advanced her own progress. Early on in her career in November 1991, Merkel declined requests to speak out in favor of the Prime Minister of the German Democratic Republic (DDR), Lothar de Maizière, after calculating that his fall opened the door for her career advancement.

Angela Merkel at a Christian Democratic Union (CDU) campaign event in 2013 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The second half of Qvortrup’s work really picks up speed as Merkel, after consolidating power in the CDU, gains control of the chancellorship. Here, Qvortrup launches into the crux of his argument: Merkel’s success, he believes, rests in her unique ability to recognize others’ perceptions of her, and then either reinforce or upend them as needed. This, in combination with her pragmatism, willingness to compromise on the international stage, and promotion of modernization and globalization at home, made Merkel not only popular, but effective. Her sole guiding principle, it seems, is the preservation of European unity with Germany’s preeminent position in it. In Qvortrup’s calculations, Merkel’s handling of almost every major political crisis, from the Eurozone crisis to Russian aggression in Ukraine, reflected her ability to calmly and rationally assess the situation. Her interactions with Putin are perhaps the most famous and powerful example of her rationality. According to Qvortrup, Merkel manipulated Putin’s expectations of her as a matronly, unassuming woman in order to drive concessions out of him, and put herself in his situation. As an East German, Merkel possessed a unique ability to recognize the Russian geopolitical uncertainty. Furthermore, Qvortrup hints at the clear gender politics of much of Merkel’s reign: she not only remains above the fray in the masculine political games of Europe’s male leaders, but she also manipulates their expectations of her.

Merkel arrives at the Supporting Syria and the Region conference, London, 2016 (via Flickr)

Qvortrup ends with his most interesting discovery of all: Merkel’s support for refugees represents a stark departure from her usual approach to politics. Merkel, traditionally governed almost entirely by pragmatism and a commitment to a united Europe, finally “discovered an issue that was more important than her own career.” Here, Qvortrup comes full circle to the young girl who grew up in a divided nation, finally finding an issue on which she is willing to expend her political capital and stake her own reputation. Angela Merkel offers an insightful, enjoyable read to those seeking to understand the woman Qvortrup describes as part Mother Courage, part Machiavelli.

Also by Augusta Dell’Omo on Not Even Past:

History Calling: LBJ and Thurgood Marshall on the Telephone
Review of Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler (2016)

By Natalie Cincotta

A German novelist and screenwriter, Norman Ohler first happened upon the topic of drug use in the Third Reich through a Berlin-based DJ, who told him that drugs were widespread at the time. Intending to write a novel on the subject, Ohler went into the archives in search of historical detail for his book. What he found in military records and the personal papers of Hitler’s physician was so astounding that Ohler left the world of fiction to write a work of history.

The result is the highly readable, bitingly ironic Blitzed, that, although not without problems, lends a fresh perspective on Hitler and the Second World War. In sum, Ohler aims to show that drug use was rife in Nazi Germany. From its rise through to its collapse, German citizens were high, German soldiers were high, and Hitler was high.

In the 1920s, many Germans turned to artificial stimulants to cope with the trauma of WWI, Ohler argues, and eventually Nazi promises of collective ecstasy and euphoria became like a drug itself. In 1937, in a pharmaceutical factory not far from Berlin, the pharmacist Dr. Fritz Hauschild found a drug to match the social intoxication of the time: Pervitin.

The first German methylamphetamine, Pervitin was a performance-enhancing drug that gave the consumer an “artificial kick” of heightened energy, alertness, euphoria, and intensified senses, often lasting more than 12 hours. Pervitin was marketed to Germans as a panacea cure for anything from depression to “frigidity” in women. By 1939, the drug was also distributed among German army battalions as they swept through Poland and France without sleep and without halt.

The “people’s drug:” Pervitin (Karl-Ludwig Poggemann via Flickr)

Ohler even goes so far as to say that the use of Pervitin was crucial to Germany victory in France in 1940. The German surprise-strategy to drive tanks through the Ardennes – later coined the “sickle cut” by Winston Churchill – was a near-impossible operation, argues Ohler, that only stood a chance if the Germans could drive day and night without stopping. Learning from the use of Pervitin during the Polish campaign, army officials realized that overcoming fatigue was just as crucial as tactic and equipment. The Wehrmacht ordered 35 million tablets for the campaign.

Critics have pointed out that Ohler tends to make sweeping generalizations. Does the evidence he presented, in fact, allow Ohler to say that many or most German citizens and soldiers were taking methylamphetamines? In a scathing review, historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Ohler severely overstates the role of drugs in both civil society and the military effort. “To claim that all Germans, or even a majority of them, could only function on drugs in the Third Reich,” writes Evans, “is wildly implausible.” While it may be difficult to pinpoint how many ordinary Germans took Pervitin, Ohler makes a convincing case for its methodical use and central role in the 1940 campaign.

Hitler and his entourage at the Wolf’s Lair, June 1940. Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, stands in the second row, second from the right (via Bundesarchiv)

The second issue that Ohler addresses is that of Hitler’s drug use. Fearing illness and an inability to perform, Hitler sought out performance-enhancing remedies that came in the form of vitamin injections and glucose solutions from Dr. Theodor Morell, his personal physician who saw and treated him more or less daily from 1936 until the end of the war. By 1944, Ohler argues, Hitler was addicted to a mix of cocaine and Eukodal (an opiate), assumed to be marked by an ‘X’ in Morell’s charts. When Eukodal supplies began to run out by February 1945, Hitler began suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Ohler’s assertion that Hitler was a drug addict has roused the ire of some historians, notably Evans, who has dismissed Ohler’s claims as a “crass,” “inaccurate” and morally problematic account that excuses Hitler of his own behavior and crimes. But, that does not seem to be Ohler’s argument here. Blitzed does not propose to reshape our understanding of Hitler’s psyche or ideology, but rather to understand the elements – including drug consumption – that held Hitler firmly in a world of delusion that ultimately prolonged the Second World War. Historians including Anthony Beevor and Ian Kershaw consider Blitzed a valuable addition to scholarship that is not apologetic, but illuminative.

Perhaps the debate about Blitzed is not only about our understanding of Hitler and National Socialism, but also about who gets to contribute to the already well-trodden scholarship. In his review, Evans expressed concern that Ohler’s background as a novelist gives him a “skewed perspective.” But the perspective of an outsider may be what the discipline needs. Blitzed allows the general reader to learn about a well known period in a new light, while also offering new lines of inquiry for scholars. A meticulously researched and bold work, Blitzed is a must-read for the general reader and scholar alike.

More by Natalie Cincotta on Not Even Past
Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia (Review)

Kevin Baker reviews Omer Bartov’s Hitler’s Army
David Crew discusses the work of German propaganda photographers during the Second World War
Chris Babits on finding Hitler (in all the wrong places)

Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present, edited by Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (2016)

This review was originally published on the Imperial & Global Forum on May 22, 2017.

By Ben Holmes (University of Exeter)

What does it mean to belong to the human race? Does this belonging bring with it particular rights as well as responsibilities? What does it mean to act with humanity? These are some of the big questions lying at the heart of a new edited collection from Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin, Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present (2016). Based on a 2015 conference at the Leibniz Institute in Mainz, the book, as the title suggests, is not a purely conceptual history of the term “humanity.”[1] Rather it looks to discover “the concrete implications of theoretical discourses on the concept of humanity.” In other words, how did ideas of “humanity” guide European practices in areas like humanism, imperialism, international law, humanitarianism, and human rights?[2] The editors argue that despite the implied timeless, universal nature of the term, humanity is both a changing, dynamic concept, and has been prone to create divisions as much as it promotes commonality. Although the volume is a study of European conceptions of humanity, the contributions are transnational, displaying how conceptions of humanity were practiced in Europe and in the continent’s interactions with the wider world over the course of five-hundred years.

Leibniz Institute of European History (via Wikimedia Commons).

The volume is divided into four sections. The two chapters in section one explore how ideas of humanity developed over the volume’s five-hundred year period. Francisco Bethencourt demonstrates how, since antiquity, ideas of the humanity or sub-humanity of different categories of people have created legal and political divisions between the rights of free man and slave, civilized and barbarian, or man and woman. Although these distinctions have gradually eroded in response to more inclusive notions of humanity, Bethencourt warns that hierarchical ranking of peoples remains “one of the persistent realities of [the] human condition,” thus disabusing “triumphalist narratives” which would portray modern notions of “humanity” as the culmination of an inevitable progress of enlightened beneficence.[3] Paul Betts looks more closely at the politicization of humanity during the twentieth century. He also shows humanity was not the sole property of progressive politics; throughout the century “humanity remained a slippery term, and could be aligned to various causes,” including fascist, communist, or racist ones which legitimated what many would consider inhuman practices like apartheid. Betts provocatively concludes by suggesting that an intellectual estrangement exists between the aspirational notions of common humanity today and those notions that characterized previous generations of internationalists.

The rest of the chapters in the book are structured according to what the editors describe as”‘three essential areas” that constitute sub-topics of humanity. Thus, Part II revolves around the development of ideas and debates surrounding morality and human dignity in the context of major transnational movements like humanism, colonialism, or missionary activity. Compared to the later sections, some of the chapters in Section II study humanity in a slightly more theoretical fashion than as a “concept in practice.” Mihai-D. Grigore’s chapter situates Desiderius Erasmus’s (1466-1536) sixteenth-century political writings as emblematic of a wider transition from theological to political understandings of humanity, and Mariano Delgado’s chapter presents the Spanish Franciscan friar Bartolmé de Las Casas’s (1484-1566) arguments for recognizing the humanity of indigenous populations of Spain’s “New World.” In doing so, they provide a study of the changing ideological conceptions of humanity rather the practical implications of these ideas. This should not detract from two very useful case studies of sixteenth-century debates about human nature; but it does raise the question of how far one pushes the idea of a “concept in practice” In contrast, Judith Becker’s contribution on nineteenth-century German Protestantism in India illustrates the practical implications of ideas of humanity by showing how the missionaries’ belief in the unity of mankind guided both the evangelistic and humanitarian aspects of their missionary work in India.

Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1523 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Section III examines themes around humanitarianism, violence, and international law, and illustrates how theories of humanity practically affected European attempts to remedy or restrain the violence of warfare or slavery. Thomas Weller provides an intriguing case study on the contributions the sixteenth-century Hispanophone world made to the arguments later famously espoused by eighteenth-century Anglo-American abolitionists in their protests against the transatlantic slave trade. While questioning any straightforward evolution between the arguments of sixteenth-century writers like Tomás de Mercado (1525–1575) or Luis de Molina (1535-1600) and eighteenth-century transatlantic abolitionists like William Wilberforce (1759-1833), Weller does highlight an under-researched topic concerning what he considers “humanitarianism before humanitarianism.” Picking up the antislavery story, Fabian Klose shows that while British abolitionist narratives about African humanity helped shape the national and international legislation that ended the transatlantic slave trade, these same appeals to protect humanity also legitimated new forms of violence, like armed intervention and colonial expansion in order to enforce the ban. Further emphasizing that the relationship between humanity and humanitarianism is far from straightforward, Esther Möller shows the tensions over the concept in the Red Cross Movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Specifically, the implementation of humanity as the first of the seven Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross precipitated debates in the movement between those who saw humanity as a politically neutral concept, and those national societies involved in anti-colonial struggles, which argued that engagement with politics was a humanitarian duty. Humanity, intended as a principle to unite national societies, actually highlighted the regional and political divisions in the movement.

American Red Cross Society Building, 1922 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The final section focuses on how humanity has influenced social and benevolent practices like charity, philanthropy, and solidarity movements. Picking up the themes of Möller’s chapter, Joachim Berger shows the difficulties of using humanity as a rhetorical device to unite a transnational movement like international Freemasonry. In international forums for European Freemasons, humanity acted as an “empty signifier” which papered over national differences, but these regional differences were re-exposed whenever practical action to support “universal brotherhood,” like transnational charity, was proposed. Studying nineteenth century Catholic philanthropic groups’ promotional campaigns for child-relief in Africa and Asia, Katharina Stornig highlights the at-times dissonant nature of European conceptions of humanity. These philanthropic campaigns used universalist rhetoric of a common humanity to present a moral imperative to save distant children, while simultaneously emphasizing the “barbarity” and “inhumanity” of these children’s parents, who they deemed responsible for this suffering. Gerhard Kruip’s chapter, using church documents to explore the Catholic Church’s attitudes towards solidarity and justice, is part history and part call-to-arms. Kruip exhorts the current Catholic hierarchy to do more to promote global justice by becoming less western-centric, less centralized, “and more open to all the different cultures of the human family,” while also calling for greater state regulation and collective action to ensure a fairer distribution of “common goods for humanity as a whole.”

Cardinals leaving St. Peters (via Wikimedia Commons).

Johannes Paulmann concludes the volume by tying the big themes together with his four main perceptions on humanity. Firstly, humanity has often been defined by its antonyms, most obviously by behaviors of inhumanity. Secondly, the abstract nature of humanity allowed the concept to fulfill a diverse array of functions for a multiplicity of causes. Paulmann’s third and fourth perceptions question the static nature and universality of humanity. Not only was humanity dynamic, which its proponents often understood as a process and goal rather than a fixed reality, but many of these ideas of ‘progress’ implied notions of hierarchies in terms of civilization or development. Paulmann’s conclusion provides a welcome theoretical summary, bringing together the volume’s diverse collection of topics.

The volume’s scale and scope will make this book attractive to scholars of humanitarianism, international law, and human rights. The structure of the volume, while generally clear, could have been explained in more depth for the benefit of non-specialists. For instance, dividing humanitarianism and charity into two separate sections may require clarification to anyone unfamiliar with the theoretical difference between the two. Moreover, some chapters occasionally skirted between themes of humanitarianism, charity, and missionary, which created a bit of confusion. Nevertheless, this is a very important collection of case studies exploring the European concept of humanity and its spread, and leaves the door open to future works focusing on non-European conceptions of the term and how non-Europeans may have actively re-shaped and reinterpreted European ideas.

[1] For such histories, see Hans Erich Bödeker, ‘Menscheit, Humanitӓt, Humanismus’, in Otto Brunnter et. al. (eds.) Geschtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen in Deutschland vol.3 (Stuttgart, 1982).

[2] A vast corpus of works exist on each of these areas, which are too many to list here. For humanitarianism see Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, 2011). For humanitarianism’s relationship with imperialism see Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40:2 (2012), 729-747. On human rights see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011).

[3] For more criticism on ‘triumphalist narratives’ of human rights see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (London, 2012).

Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment, By Kelly Donahue-Wallace (2017)

How can the life of an artisan who specialized in punchcutting and engraving help us shed light on “the idea of the Spanish Enlightenment”? Donahue-Wallace offers an illuminating perspective on the Enlightenment through the biography of an expert medal caster, Jerónimo Antonio Gil, whose career took him from provincial Zamora to Madrid and ultimately to Mexico, where he became the founder of the first royal academy of the arts in the New World.

Had Gil lived in the seventeenth century he would have become a painter, churning out religious canvasses in his native Zamora. Had Gil moved to Madrid, he would have become a criado (servant) for a stonecutter or a wood carver or an oil painter, never an artisan letrado (intellectual). When Gil left Zamora in the 1740s, however, he got a stipend to attend the new Academia de San Fernando in Madrid where he learned to cast dies for commemorative medals, to cut letter punches and counterpunches for typesetting, and to carve copper plates for engravings. He was also trained to master a literary and historical national canon in the vernacular. Gil got an education to copy the great masters but also to produce his own original designs in neoclassical style. In short, Gil was educated to become a civil servant, one of many officials in the Bourbon dynasty charged with creating a new specialized national print culture and regalist media. Donahue-Wallace explores the many medals, engravings, drawings, and typographic samples Gil produced in a career that spanned more than fifty years, twenty of which in Mexico.

Letter punches for the Royal Print. Jerónimo Antonio Gil, from *Catálogo de la exposición Imprenta Real. Fuentes de la tipografía española*. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Public Domain).

Donahue-Wallace uses Gil’s career to make several larger arguments. First, she demonstrates the newfound importance of print culture in mid-eighteenth-century Spain. An ancien regime that had long been centered on literacy and the pushing of paperwork suddenly realized that modernization, renewal, and geopolitical survival demanded a turn to print as reason-of-state. The Bourbon invested heavily in the training of artisans (either at home or overseas) to eliminate Spain’s secular dependency on the expertise of typographers and engravers from France and the Low Countries. The new culture of print pushed a “national” and regalist project via the promotion of historical, religious, scientific, and literary texts. Gil, for example, carved and designed many copperplates to illustrate collections of national architectural monuments, antiquities, and coins as well as to illustrate books of anatomy, engineering, religion, and literature (including editions of El Quijote and the Bible). Gil also designed dozens of commemorative medals and coins to celebrate the lives of monarchs as well as the myriad institutions these monarchs had created. Coins were not only currency but also non-ephemeral media to circulate like engravings.

*Don Quixote knighted by the innkeeper at the inn*. Jerónimo Antonio Gil design and engraving. Don Quijote (Ibarra, Madrid, 1780), via author.

Second, Donahue-Wallace shows that in the second half of the eighteenth century poor provincials could accumulate wealth, honor, and political power as artisans. Donahue-Wallace offers the biography of a metal caster, cutter, and engraver whose status did not come from originality and genius. Gil nevertheless became prestigious enough to direct a national art academy and wealthy enough to amass one of the largest private collections of paintings, books, scientific apparatus, and curiosities in late-eighteenth-century New Spain. A poor Zamorano punchcutter rose through the ranks of the state bureaucracy to achieve nobility and wealth.

Third, Donahue-Wallace suggests that there was greater room for pedagogical innovation in Mexico than in Madrid. Donahue-Wallace follows Gil both as a student of the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid and as the founder and director of the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico. Both academies were named after the monarchs that decreed their creation (Ferdinand VI and his half-brother Charles III, respectively). San Fernando operated both as a public school to train painters, sculptors, architects, and engravers and as the recruiting space of apprentices for professors. The young Gil received a public education in the evenings at San Fernando, where teachers checked his drawing skills before live models, casts, or prints. During the day, however, Gil went to the household of the school’s leading printer-medal caster. Gil worked for almost a decade as the criado of Tomas Francisco Prieto, one of the teachers of San Fernando. To declare independence from Prieto, the master patriarch, Gil had to create an alternate network of patrons. When Gil went to Mexico to lead the Academy of San Carlos, he deliberately eliminated the master-criado traditions of San Fernando. Going against the authority of the professors of architecture, painting, sculpture, and engraving, Gil created in Mexico an academy in which masters could not recruit students as apprentices. Gil engaged in a twenty-year long battle, until his death, with second-tier Spanish artists who saw themselves entitled to use the academy to get pliant, skilled labor. Gil created an academy of art in Mexico in which teachers received large enough salaries to be expected to be full-time professors, not freelance agents in search of apprentices and commissions.

Façade of the original Academy of San Carlos (built as a new school to train minters in the 1780s). Today it is the Museo Nacional de las Culturas (via author).

Fourth, Donahue-Wallace shows that Enlightenment modernity emerged organically out of the institutions of the ancien regime; it was not an outside competing force. The idea of a public sphere of circulating prints, for example, was a Bourbon strategic initiative. Artisans relied on the good will of patrons for employment, commissions, and success, not bourgeois anonymous market forces. Finally, those struggling to liberate the youth from the clutches of master-apprentice guilds behave like old-fashioned patriarchs themselves. Donahue-Wallace demonstrates that, for all the novelty of his pedagogy, Gil remained embedded in the patriarchal values of the ancien regime. Gil arrived in Mexico with the blueprints to build a mint school right next to the stables of the viceregal palace. He also arrived with an entourage of four students, two of whom were his own children. The original school immediately transmuted into the Art School of San Carlos, to train not only printers but also sculptors, painters, and architects. San Carlos went up as two-story elongated rectangular building, one-half of which was occupied by horse stalls and storage rooms for food, forage, and wood. The upper quarter was Gil’s residency, which included salons and cabinets for San Carlos’ official acts. The lower quarter held the school’s workshops and tool rooms. It also included four tiny rooms for criados. Gil kept his sons and assistants tied to his patriarchal control for some twenty years. For these four “students,” the Academy became a boarding school. As Gil’s criados they were not allowed to set up their own households.

Miguel Costansó, *Plano y projecto de una nueva oficina para la talla y troqueles de la Real Casa de Moneda*, 1779 (Archivo General de Indias,MP-MEXICO,770 – 1)

Donahue-Wallace has written an important text on the relationship between artisans and the Spanish Enlightenment on both shores of the Atlantic. The book follows Gil and his artifacts in painstaking detail and offers a wide panorama of an ancien regime struggling to catch up while unwittingly devouring itself.

Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017).

Also by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra on Not Even Past:

Magical Realism on Drugs: Colombian History in Netflix’s Narcos
Seeds of Empire, By Andrew Torget (2015)
Whose Classical Traditions?

Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler, by Stefan Ihrig (2016)

By Kelly Douma, Penn State University

Stefan Ihrig closes this book with a quote that encompasses his argument from Raphael Lemkin, the father of the word genocide: “Genocide is so easy to commit because people do not want to believe it until after it happens.” All the signs and symptoms of Nazi-perpetrated genocide existed throughout the decades leading up to the Holocaust, but were ignored by the greater public. Ihrig’s evidence takes the form of German reactions to the Armenian genocide. He argues that the pro-Ottoman nature of World War I Germany and the open genocide debate of Weimar Germany contributed to a “pragmatic” approach to “human rights, life, and liberty,” ultimately laying the groundwork for the virulent anti-Semitism of the Third Reich. Through extensive use of contemporary newspapers as well as court trials and military correspondence, Ihrig creates an image of German politics and culture beginning in the 1890s that makes the Holocaust seem – although still far from inevitable –a product of building tension rather than a sudden explosion of anti-Semitism.

Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, 1930 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ihrig begins his argument by elucidating an often overlooked connection in modern European history between the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. He does not attempt to compare their causes or results, but rather investigates Germany’s political involvement with the Ottoman Empire and Turkey both during the massacres of the 1890s and the genocide of the 1910s. From there he teases out an intricately woven political fabric connecting Germans and the Ottomans, resulting in a pro-Ottoman stance despite the rumors of anti-Armenian activity. He identifies several pro-Armenian Germans stationed in the Ottoman Empire whose correspondence stands against the bulk of material, which typically did not comment on genocidal activities. The most notable of these men was Max Erwin Scheubner-Richter, a German consul in Erzurum province. Scheubner’s correspondence, among others, helps Ihrig answer his question, “What could Germany have known about the Armenian genocide?” He finds that, in fact, the German military and government must have known nearly everything about the Armenian Genocide, although he does not go so far as to suggest that they were actively involved. He states that Germany knew what was happening, but was willing to “sacrifice the Armenians as the price of preserving Ottoman goodwill toward Germany.” This is a bold claim that has strong repercussions for the study of Germany in WWI and the interwar period.

After establishing German military and political knowledge of the Armenian Genocide, Ihrig tackles the much more difficult question: how much did the German public know of the Armenian Genocide and what was the cultural reaction to it? The second half of the book proves that Germans during the interwar period knew a great deal about the Armenian Genocide. Ihrig describes the emergence of a German cultural script that included pragmatic and extended debates on both the justification and the denial of the Armenian Genocide. Through intensive reading of German newspapers across the political spectrum during the interwar years, Ihrig defines what he calls “The Great Genocide Debate” of 1921-1923. His detailed analysis shows that pro-Armenian writers were consistently at odds with those who claimed the necessity of the Turkish reaction to the “Armenian problem” or reinterpreted the events to justify the genocide in terms of Armenian aggression. He also identifies two men, Franz Werfel and Armin Wegner, who wrote novels and open letters about the Armenian Genocide, but were ultimately too late to warn the German public about the genocidal capability of the Nazi party.

The German–Turkish Non-Aggression Pact was signed between Nazi Germany and Turkey in 1941 and lasted until 1945 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In the last section of his book, Ihrig finally answers the question that has been burning throughout his research: how did this cultural, political, and governmental response to the Armenian Genocide influence the events of the Holocaust? He could not be more clear in his answer. He states that the Nazis were inspired by the Armenian Genocide. He firmly critiques historians who argue that interwar Germany did not “come to terms” with the Armenian Genocide. Rather, he asserts, “Germany came to terms in a manner that we would perhaps not expect and cannot morally condone.” In his eyes, Germany recognized the events and, in a term he coined for this book, practiced a form of “justificantionalism,” or intellectual justification of the events of the genocide.

Deported Armenians leaving their town (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ihrig’s book is written for both experts of the field and general historical readers. The book leaves room for continuing research on the connections between Germany and the Armenian Genocide, such as why Germany was able to cross confessional lines to support the genocide of a Protestant Christian minority by a Muslim government. Ihrig also does not focus specifically on Hitler’s experience with the Armenian Genocide and instead assumes his knowledge of the events as a product of the developing cultural discourse and his position as an avid newspaper reader. This answer doubtless will not convince some readers of his connection and it could use further fleshing out. However, the work stands overall as a thorough treatment of to otherwise missed connection between the first and second acknowledged genocides of modern history.

You may also like:

The Tatars of Crimea: Ethnic Cleansing and Why History Matters.
Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman (1992).
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007).

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