| THEORIZING WITH THE STARS: EPISODE 3 |
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Lockwood: It has often been acknowledged that nations are born of war. Yet recent scholarship suggests that it is not the sacrifice of the enemy that creates a unified group identity, but the sacrifice of the group’s own. Described as being at the centre of national identity, the Australian Anzac tradition has remained an intrinsic cultural facet throughout the 20th century. Annually, on 25 April, Australians gather to commemorate the fallen in a day so filled with ritual, liturgy and solemnity as to have been described as serving to fill a religious need. Despite its Federation in 1901, Australia had not yet succeeded in producing a unique identity. Indeed, the power of blood and war to create a distinct national identity was a component of the zeitgeist: the years preceding World War I were filled with the hope and anticipation of conflict, Australians being urged to be ‘fit and ready for battle’. “The altar [had] not yet been stained with crimson as every rallying center of a nation should be.” After the huge loss of life at Gallipoli, Australia’s prophetic hopes of a national identity born of blood and sacrifice were realized. An offering of the group’s own flesh and blood demonstrated immense reverence, sanctifying the essence of a collective identity. |
| Gullace: On August 30, 1914, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald deputized thirty women in Folkstone to hand out white feathers to men not in uniform. The purpose of this gesture was to shame "every young 'slacker' found loafing about the Leas" and to remind those "deaf or indifferent to their country's need" that "British soldiers are fighting and dying across the channel." Fitzgerald's warned the men that "there is a danger awaiting them far more terrible than anything they can meet in battle," for if they were found "idling and loafing to-morrow" they would be publicly humiliated by a lady with a white feather. Gullace describes the recruitment campaign that called on women to motivate “slackers” and un-enlisted men by giving them a white feather, a symbol of cowardice and civic disloyalty. Men given the white feather were publicly shamed and humiliated, their courage and manhood called into question. What better incentive to join the war effort and atone for their cowardice by undergoing a collective maturation rite on the battlefield? Sexuality and sacrifice were thus joined by a brand of patriotism where “something as private as female sexuality took on a military significance at the expense of all those unenlisted men who appeared reluctant to defend its sanctity.” |
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O’Brien identifies metaphors used to describe immigrants to the US at the turn of the 20th Century. He writes that “Infection and disease-related metaphors were very much in keeping with the thinking of immigration restrictionists, and provided a rhetorically picturesque means of sharing these fears publicly.” Incoming immigrants were seen as polluting, impure, infectious and indigestible to the national body. They gathered in insular communities within cities, apparently refusing to be assimilated—bringing alien ideologies and practices that posed a threat to the health of the collective. Organism metaphors used in conjunction with assimilation included ‘digestion’ and ‘absorption.’ Just as the food we ingest benefits us because it is distributed throughout the body, what is not digested by or absorbed within the body is a threat to health. Americans, K. Roberts wrote—in support of 1924 immigration legislation—wanted a law that will ‘give America a chance to digest the millions of unassimilated, unwelcome and unwanted aliens that rest so heavily in her.’ Americans had discovered that the stomach of the body politic was “filled to bursting with peoples swallowed whole whom our digestive juices do not digest’.” “This metaphor was fostered by the perception that immigrants were increasing exponentially. They would eventually, many believed, take over communities and eventually the nation itself. |
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O’Donnell: “Inspired by Wagner, neo monumentality, and volkish ideology, Hitler crafted a Germany built on sacrifice and hero worship, the culmination of which contributed to a Nazi Totenkult; a powerful civil religion that ended in national suicide.” O’Donnell identifies mythological strains that composed the character of Nazi Germany, including Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen, the glorified ruins of ancient civilizations, and the “cult of the fallen soldier.” The idealized superiority of the Teutonic Race was bound up with the apocalyptic imagery of willing sacrifice on a massive scale, immortalization through death. The architecture of the Third Reich was based on the theory of “ruin value.” Even as the decayed monuments of the Western Classical World inspired awe in their ruin, so did Hitler wish the monuments of Nazi Germany to do the same. O’Donnell writes, “Like the Parthenon or the Coliseum, Germany’s dominion over the world would be a testament to its enduring greatness long after his Third Reich had disappeared through the decayed monuments of his empire.” Incredibly, Hitler envisioned “the construction of miles upon miles of mausoleums, colossal citadels for the dead, or Totenburgen,” a macabre monument to willing blood sacrifice. O’Donnell’s shows how symbolic influences became fused in Hitler’s imagination and projected into the collective psyche of an entire nation. |
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Demopoulos: In the last days of WWII, Albert Speer organized a final series of concerts for the Berlin Philharmonic, attended amidst rubble and falling bombs. The musical programme was poignant and appropriate: Wagner, Brahms, and Strauss were chosen in what became “a funeral march for the entire nation.” Demopoulos suggests that Hitler’s desire for “an army of suicidal faithful” marching to their dutiful death was fused with his Wagnerian fantasy of a burning Valhalla. In the last 4 months of the war, more than 1,500,000 Germans, including hundreds of thousands of civilians, lost their lives in an increasingly vain war effort. Music was a tool encouraging the German people to continue fighting. When the end came for Hitler, he staged his own Götterdämmerung in his Berlin bunker. He refused to surrender, preferring to take of his own life over an unheroic end. By his absolute refusal to even consider capitulation, he ensured vast, horrible destruction of lives and property long after these losses could have had any possible affect upon the outcome of the war. Hitler lived out his fantasy to the end; to the fullest; precipitating the realization of his favourite operatic scene, the final destruction of the gods and Valhalla. |
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Griffin: Allen Frantzen has explored the nexus between “chivalry, sacrifice, and the Great War“—where the soldier’s death is pictured as a gesture of “purification” and “love.” By extension the whole war may be seen as a collective act of redemptive self-sacrifice—transcendent meaning produced by the relentless flow of blood. This discourse expresses a modernist urge to turn the obscenely meaningless, mechanized slaughter into a holocaust—a “burnt sacrifice” that would infuse a decadent age with a new sense of transcendence. Richard Koenigsberg has explored this “sacrificial fantasy”—that the death of the soldier is vital to the revitalization of the “body politic.” He argues that the all-consuming sacralization of death in the First World War points to the survival into modern times of the same primordial logic that drove the elaborate ritual life of the Aztecs, which was constructed around the myth that war was a sacred necessity. The logic was simple: If no enemy warriors were captured in combat to immolate atop the pyramid-altar, no sacrificial blood could run down the steps to keep the sun alive. As Barak Rahimi puts it, the sacrificed blood of a soldier “bestows a new life for the community, as it identifies the reality of the nation displayed with the destruction of each body on the battle field.” |
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