In each case, the same constellation of notions emerges. Schivelbusch also examines how the American south coped with defeat in the civil war and in what fashion Germany survived the collapse of its armies in 1918. But it is more than comfort that is at issue here, rather a way of preserving the national idea and national self-esteem, whatever the costs to oneself or to others. The first reaction of France to defeat in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 was, Schivelbusch tells us, to "invent an alternate, more comforting reality" in which, somehow, it had not actually lost but merely suffered a reversal. It is a place where the political and intellectual energies of a people are largely devoted not to establishing the facts that led to defeat or to fairly apportioning any blame, but to the working up of fantasies and fictions. We are taken to a place where rationality and irrationality are mixed in a proportion of one part to three or more. ![]() What it shows is how much of the life of nations is a dream life, whether that is manifest in the intoxication of victory, in the production of excuses to explain defeat, or in the search for remedies to reverse it. Yet the concept of defeat as a driver is too often a broad brush, and the great virtue of Wolfgang Schivelbusch's book is that it so elegantly measures and elaborates the ways in which defeat has affected particular societies. ![]() We use it especially when we "explain" Islamic fundamentalism in terms of a response to the long-term decline of the Muslim world. The reaction of other civilisations to western victories is, after all, at the core of most interpretations of world events over recent centuries and indeed of most interpretations of today's international politics. Defeat in modern western history is the subject of this book, but the implications are global.
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