Required Background Materials

As you know, I made Orlow's A History of Modern Germany a "recommended" text. There, you will find the basic narrative of political, social, and some cultural history that lies behind the specific issues/themes/sources we are discussing. I will discuss the take-home assignment this week, but you will need to use Orlow, or some other basic history, to set up the background to the era that you write about more specifically. Lecture notes will help, but your exams will need to be more specific than my summaries.

I could scan portions of Orlow for you, in case you didn't buy it. But in this age of online resources, I'm not sure that is necessary. In the mean time, you can use a variety of general German histories online (or on paper = books). For the moment, I have added to your _required background readings_ links to this site: "German History in Documents and Images," which was a collaboration among some of the leading historians of Germany. It provides some basic information about each era we are covering, as well as some other primary sources.

The key think to realize is that Wikipedia is just the TIP OF THE ICEBERG. More and more _professional_ materials are now online, with more added every day. At least search Google Books when looking for references to use in any of your written course work. But even better, take advantage of the resources that the LUC libraries are using YOUR TUITION MONEY to purchase--these are VERY excellent resources that YOU ARE PAYING FOR. Impress your professors by citing these rather than the Wikipedia articles we read over and over!

For instance, I just did a search on the LUC libraries site, within the EBL database, which is getting more and more full e-books that you can use for all your classes. The keywords "history germany" brought up over 4,000 titles (!). I will look through these, but here are a couple of obvious sources to use on this excellent resource:

• Kitchen, Martin. A History of Modern Germany : 1800 to the Present. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. http://luc.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=706774
• Fulbrook, Mary. A History of Germany 1918-2008 : The Divided Nation. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. http://luc.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=819437
• Mustafa, Sam A.. Germany in the Modern World : A New History. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011. http://luc.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=662343
• McElligott, Anthony. Weimar Germany. Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2009. http://luc.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=1079712

EBSCO Search

ACLS Humanities Search Results: these are CLASSICS

• Modern Germany: society, economy, and politics in the twentieth century, Berghahn, Volker R. link to this item directly
• Germany, 1866-1945, Craig, Gordon Alexander, 1913-2005.link to this item directly

Cambridge Histories: unbelievable resources for any classes

Cambridge Handbooks unbelievable resources for any classes

Read on! -DD

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

Wilfred Owen

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Link to site on First World War Poetry

F. Scott Fitzgerald on First World War

“...This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
“You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence,” said Abe.
“All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently. “Isn’t that true, Rosemary?”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

Hemingway quote from A Farewell to Arms

"I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Course Lable List

Course Lable List