The Culture of Defeat

The Culture of Defeat

Introduction

The New York-based literary scholar, philosopher and sociologist Wolfgang Schivelbusch, presented under the title "The culture of defeat" a book that seems at first glance very promising. He directed his attention to that is the way the vanquished with its defeat in war. Now, although the days are long gone, he highlights the story of war and its consequences throughout the victors. It is nevertheless an interesting and exciting approach that presented here in a comparative perspective and on a high level of reflection (John, 1938, 187). In his book, Wolfgang mentioned several myths that are historically assoiated with the war. These myths are Lost Cause, French revanche and the German stab in the back legend. This unusual study compares societies that lost major wars and survived, as opposed to being dismantled by their conquerors. Schivelbusch (Disenchanted Night, etc.) addresses the question of how the American South after 1865, France after 1871 and Germany after 1918 came to terms with what happened to them. He Describes a two-level coping process, in each case directed by pre-war elites that successfully manipulated postwar Mentalities in order to retain power. The first level involved creating myths that mitigated the psychological impact of defeat: the former Confederacy carefully tended the "Lost Cause"; France scapegoated the empire of Napoleon III, Germany turned to legends of an army undefeated at the front but betrayed by domestic weakness. The aim and objective of this paper is to talk about these myths and present the examination of the treatment of Wolfgang Schivelbusch of these myths.

Myth of Lost Cause

The traditional representation of the war for the South is that of the "lost cause", which seeks to reconcile the white population of the former Confederate states with the defeat during the Civil War: this is one that is already developed in the large classic film Gone With the Wind (1936).

In his book, the culture of defeat Schivelbusch talked about the phenomenon of the lost cause in a clear way. Schivelbusch realtes the concept of the lost cause with the reconstruction in America. In a very simple way, Schivelbusch made an attempt to describe the era of the end of the Reconstruction in America. In his book, Schivelbusch reflected his understanding about the position that southern version of the Civil War occupied as the national or northern version. This position occupied by the southern version ...