Jay Lockenour – författare
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2 produkter
2 produkter
Inbunden, Engelska, 2001
635 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
For centuries prior to 1945, the German officer corps constituted a social and political elite in Central Europe. And as this book shows, the debacle of the Second World War, the scorn of the German populace, and the control of the Allies did not entirely diminish the officers' critical role. By tracing the changing role of the officer corps from its position in the National Socialist dictatorship to its current status in a Western-style democracy, Soldiers as Citizens illuminates both the development of a democratic ideology in the Federal Republic and the influence of warfare in German society. Jay Lockenour details how former officers in West Germany founded quasi-legal organizations with memberships numbering in the hundreds of thousands; how they lobbied the German and Allied governments for their pensions, waged public relations campaigns to restore their lost "honor," and sought input into the rearmament plan after 1950; and how, as officers, they claimed to speak with the "voice of the soldier" whose wartime experiences and sacrifices earned him a special place in the new republic. In Lockenour's analysis, the officer corps provides an enlightening example of a social group, ravaged by war and defeat, trying to orient itself in a hostile world. In their alternative model for democracy based on "soldierly" values, they also give us a clearer, more complex understanding of postwar history.
Inbunden, Engelska, 2021
384 kr
Skickas inom 3-6 vardagar
In this fascinating biography of the infamous ideologue Erich Ludendorff, Jay Lockenour complicates the classic depiction of this German World War I hero. Erich Ludendorff created for himself a persona that secured his place as one of the most prominent (and despicable) Germans of the twentieth century. With boundless energy and an obsession with detail, Ludendorff ascended to power and solidified a stable, public position among Germany's most influential. Between 1914 and his death in 1937, he was a war hero, a dictator, a right-wing activist, a failed putschist, a presidential candidate, a publisher, and a would-be prophet. He guided Germany's effort in the Great War between 1916 and 1918 and, importantly, set the tone for a politics of victimhood and revenge in the postwar era. Dragonslayer explores Ludendorff's life after 1918, arguing that the strange or unhinged personal traits most historians attribute to mental collapse were, in fact, integral to Ludendorff's political strategy. Lockenour asserts that Ludendorff patterned himself, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, on the dragonslayer of Germanic mythology, Siegfried—hero of the epic poem The Niebelungenlied and much admired by German nationalists. The symbolic power of this myth allowed Ludendorff to embody many Germans' fantasies of revenge after their defeat in 1918, keeping him relevant to political discourse despite his failure to hold high office or cultivate a mass following after World War I.Lockenour reveals the influence that Ludendorff's postwar career had on Germany's political culture and radical right during this tumultuous era. Dragonslayer is a tale as fabulist as fiction.