A Time for Destrucion

Vienna IFK_Conference Series
A time for Destruction

The Geo-Politics, Techno-Politics and Sensory Politics of World War I

First Conference „Geo-Politics in the Age of the Great War 1900–1930″
6 – 8 October 2011
IFK – Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Wien

World War I was a European war over the future of the world. But the futures of the world that emerged from the war, including a yet more deadly war and a long period of cold confrontation, were quite unlike anything the belligerents, high and low, had expected. It is to the futures of this violent past that the series of three conferences on The Time of Destruction is dedicated.

The first conference is concerned with the shifting tectonics of European civilization between 1900 and 1930. The image of shifting force fields that collide to explode in horrific bursts to give way to a new layout of the land serves as a one of the most potent metaphors for what happened in World War I. This war was fought in defense of civilization, but it was evident to many, even foreshadowed in dreams of violence to come, that utter destruction not only was a product of a deep disquiet with, but also would inexorably change civilization. The nature of this tectonic shift is the subject of a first conference that takes the excess of destruction as a measure for the forces and movements that remade European civilization. The total nature of the war impacted all aspects of civilization in its material reality and its imagination: the spatial order of Europe and the world; the order of social bonds in and between communities and societies; the interiority and subjectivity of the human sense of self. These civilizational spaces—the way the world was configured—were the battlefields of a ―greater war,‖ a struggle over civilized life that came to a head in the utter destruction of the Great War.

IFK
Thursday, 6 October 2011 – 10.30

Address of Welcome

Helmut Lethen
Introduction
Michael Geyer
Chair: Oliver Rathkolb

THE TECTONICS OF SPACE 11.00

Hew Strachan Heartlands vs Rimlands, Continental vs Maritime Power: Mackinder confronts Reality

12.00Lunch Break
14.30 Michael Geyer The ―Great‖ and the ―Greater‖ War: Wars – Revolutions – Rural Émeutes
15.30 Coffee Break

Chair: Maureen Healy
16.00
17.00 Lutz Musner The Myriad Faces of Battlefield Dynamics

Karl Schlögel
The Tectonics of Borders
18.00 End
Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Dachfoyer, Minoritenplatz 1,
1010 Wien

Thursday, 6 October 2011
18:30 Jay Winter

The Degeneration of War 1914-1919
IFK

Friday, 7 October 2011

Chair: Helmut Konrad

REGIMES OF LIVING

10.00 Richard Bessel

Migration and Forced Removal
11.00
Coffee Break
11.30
Tamara Scheer
Nations, Borders, Peoples: The Believe in the Power of Order
12.30
14.30
Lunch Break
Christian Geulen
Rationalities of War: Gender, Race and the Dawning of the 20th Century
15.30
16.00
Coffee Break
Christa Hämmerle
Home Front / Frontlines: Gender and the New Geography of War
17.00

Patrick J. Houlihan The Religion of War and Peace
18.00
End

IFK

Saturday, 8 October 2011

Chair: Peter Becker
Moral Orders
10.00
Helmut Lethen The Discourse about Nerves and the Phantasm of
„Men of Steel― Ernst Jünger’s war diaries

11.00
Coffee Break
11.30

Elisa Primavera-Lévy
La grande désillusion: Heroic Pain after 1914 in France and Germany
12.30
14.30
Lunch Break
Laura Engelstein The New Man and the Old: Habits of War in the
Russian Revolution
15.30
Ute Frevert
The Moral Economy of Honour and Shame: Making Sense of War and Defeat
16.30
End

Conveners: Michael Geyer, University of Chicago
Helmut Lethen, IFK
Lutz Musner IFK

Participants:

• Peter Becker, University of Vienna
• Richard Bessel, University of York
• Laura Engelstein, Yale University
• Ute Frevert, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
• Christian Geulen, University of Koblenz
• Michael Geyer, University of Chicago
• Christa Hämmerele, University of Vienna
• Maureen Healy, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon
• Patrick Houlihan, The University of Chicago
• Helmut Konrad, University of Graz
• Helmut Lethen, IFK
• Lutz Musner, IFK
• Elisa Primavery-Lévy, The University of Chicago
• Oliver Rathkolb, University of Vienna
• Tamara Scheer, Andrassy Universität Budapest
• Karl Schlögel, Viadrina University at Frankfurt/Oder
• Hew Strachan, University of Oxford
• Jay Winter, Yale University

Techno-Politics in the Age of the Great War (2012)

Sensory Politics in the Age of the Great War (2013)

IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften an der Kunstuniversität Linz

Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Wien, Tel.: (+43-1) 504 11 26, Fax: (+43-1) 504 11 32, E-Mail: ifk@ifk.ac.at, Web: www.ifk.ac.at

The Geo-Politics, Techno-Politics, and Sensory Politics of World War I – PART 1:

Geo-Politics in the Age of the Great War 1900 – 1930

06.10.2011 – 08.10.2011

Historically minded observers, who have begun to remove themselves from the tense confrontations of nostalgia and utopia this war had generated, have begun to step out of the fog of archives in order to contemplate what happened in the light of what came of it. The latter is so important, because we cannot act as if the war has yet to happen, its consequences have yet to unfold, and its shadows have yet to lift. We now know — or, should we say, we could know if we took on the challenge of seeing this age of catastrophe as sediments of embattled futures — the kind of world that after even greater turmoil has become our world. Rather than looking in on World War I from the 19th century and consequently seeing it as a catastrophic flame-out of a prosperous, bourgeois age, we propose looking back on World War I from the other shore of the 21st century in order to see what the war begot. The first conference is concerned with the shifting tectonics of European civilization between 1900 and 1930. The image of shifting force fields that collide to explode in horrific bursts and ultimately give way to a new layout of the land serves as one of the most potent metaphors for what happened in World War I. This war was fought in defense of civilization, but it was evident to many, even foreshadowed in dreams of violence to come, that utter destruction not only was a product of a deep disquiet with, but also would inexorably change civilization. The nature of this tectonic shift is the subject of a first conference that takes the excess of destruction as a measure for the forces and movements that remade European civilization. The total nature of the war impacted all aspects of civilization in its material reality and its imagination: the spatial order of Europe and the world; the order of social bonds in and between communities and societies; the interiority and subjectivity of the human sense of self. These civilizational spaces — the way the world was configured — were the battlefields of a “greater war”, a struggle over civilized life that came to a head in the utter destruction of the Great War.

CONCEPTION: Michael Geyer (Departmentof History, University of Chicago), Helmut Lethen (IFK, Vienna), Lutz Musner (IFK, Vienna)

PARTICIPANTS: Richard Bessel (Department of History, University of York), Laura Engelstein (Department of History, Yale University), Ute Frevert (Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development, Berlin), Christian Geulen (Department of History, University of Koblenz), Michael Geyer (Department of History, University of Chicago), Christa Hämmerle (Department of History, University of Vienna), Patrick Houlihan (Department of History, University ofChicago), Helmut Lethen (IFK, Vienna), Lutz Musner (IFK, Vienna), Elisa Primavera-Lévy (New York, IFK_Research Fellow),Tamara Scheer (Andrássy Universität Budapest), Karl Schlögel (Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder), Hew Strachan (Faculty of History, All Souls College, University of Oxford), Jay Winter (Department of History, Yale University)