The Middle Ages and the Holocaust
Will he at some point in the future trot out the hoary old chestnut about just following orders. Probably wont have to as they seem to be going out of their way to forgive him as we speak.
This doesn’t mean he’s likely to be walking the streets anytime soon, or ever. Depending on how Norway works, this may even mean he’s far less likely to ever be free.
Laurie
Anna, I agree with everything you said here, except I do think the attraction is still there in the fascist aesthetic, despite all of this. Disney is not nearly distrusted enough. It is exactly the sort of thing that does appeal to the masses. Star Wars, Starship Trooper, and John McCain’s set for his election night party all attest to how much attraction there is, even in the US. I don’t think that contradicts anything you said above really. That said I do think Sontag could be pushed on some of these points, though we don’t have the word allowance to do it here.
anna klosowska
It seems to me that “parasite” is an anachronistic proposition. Rather, worms are asexual and they are not individuated: see Karl Steel’s work on the topic, some of it published online at In the (medieval) Middle.I signal this is because the essay is so dependent on etymology and accurate historical reading, and in that context, a mistake would be particularly inopportune.
anna klosowska
It would have been interesting to include the readings of the battle of Tours that tell a different story, including the popularizing accounts such as the one included in Francois Reynaert’s Nos ancestries les Gaulois et d’autres fadaises: l’histoire de France sans les clichés (Fayard). And, it would be good to include, in footnotes, short bios (1-2 sentences) of the figures mentioned in the essay.
anna klosowska
oops. . .never mind: that was a hoax. Still living.
anna klosowska
deploy (present) doesn’t work here since one of them is dead.
anna klosowska
There is an unnecessary () around biological. Also, in the last 3 paragraphs, there are a lot of repetitions which should be revised.
anna klosowska
should it be “the Jews” or should the be dropped?
Source: https://mcpress.media-commons.org/postmedieval_middleages_holocaust/all-comments/
Comments on the Pages
Exegetical History: Nazis at the Round Table—Martin Shichtman and Laurie Finke (43 comments)
photograph to the door of his home! that’s…weird.
not that you need to consider this, but I wonder if there’s a kind of de-eroticization of the barbarian warrior from sword-n-sorcery fantasy, a kind of pre-Raphaelite reaction against Boris Vallejo’s Conan book covers and in-text line illustrations (which I think would have been big in the late 60s, early 70s; I know that one of my religious fanatic aunts confiscated one from my c. 1980)
Just free-associating here, Marty and Laurie, so ignore, but now reminded of my first encounter with de-romanticized chivalry, which is in an Daniel Pinkwater book, Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, where they realize knights were just smelly killers and thieves. This was, again, c. 1980. Of course, Hartman von Aue has his wild herdsman make virtually the same point early in Iwein
again, just free associating, but I have a hunch that one of the key differences between totalitarian art and the ‘nationalist’ art of, say, François Rude, is the amount of clothes. So, again, Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta, because their work is so eroticized, don’t participate in the fascist sublimations of desire. I’m not about to google naked Hitler, so maybe we’ll have to take this on faith.
again, just ignore me if you like, but I’m reminded of Ridley Scott’s White Squall (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118158/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_17), which is the most obvious and horrifying use of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will aesthetic I can think of in a postwar Hollywood film. Of course, it’s ALSO highly eroticized, which means…I think I have my own argument forming. Carry on!
notable to me that the return to an earlier technology of hand-to-hand combat participates in the fantasy of authentic hand-to-hand labor of peasants and other ‘real’ men against decadent unreal modern warfare of poison gas and bombing.
I guess what I’m saying is that there’s also a coalescence of the knight and the peasant in modern ‘anti decadent’ right wing imagination
to add to that, I think it’s arguable that the knight is the SPIRIT of the farmers, their ‘true self’ projected, rather than distinct from them
wondering what their archives were? just drawing on the general ‘knowledge’ about the ‘german’ Middle Ages?
this seems exactly right. the attempt to discover the ‘real’ of desire of course runs counter to psychoanalytic insights
wondering if the freemason discussion could be better integrated into the larger trajectory of the argument. feels a bit like a long parenthesis currently
that is, there may be a weirdly anti-aristocratic fantasy at the core of Nazi chivalry
again, just noting that weird combination of ‘naked’ and ‘chaste’
” ‘a new nobility.’”
just observing this weird dynamic of ‘newness’, since nobility tends to claim its privileges by virtue of the fantasized antiquity of its family line (or even ‘bloodline’).
this may be more than you can do, but I wondering if you can stress more the attitudes towards redemptive warrior suffering &c at the heart of the chivalry’s groundwork for fascism. that is, the antisemitism matters, of course, but what differentiates chivalric antisemitism from, say, clerical or mercantile antisemitism, is the warrior body.
in fact, in some cases, Christian clerics defended the Jews against these massacres (and in some cases, quite the opposite)
see more recently Susan Crane, Animal Encounters
It might be interesting to engage here Leslie Fiedler’s 1979 essay “Why is the Grail Knight Jewish?,” in Fiedler on the Roof? and Lisa Lampert’s 2007 piece on Jewishness and the Grail in JEGP.
Karl, I think all of these interpretations work pretty well, which is as much to say as that perhaps we can’t think the knight without the peasant. Perhaps they are an assemblage of the organic middle ages which seems to be what the image is going for.
Karl, I think all of these interpretations work pretty well, which is as much to say as that perhaps we can’t think the knight without the peasant. Perhaps they are an assemblage of the organic middle ages which seems to be what the image is going for.
How awesome is that title Fielder on the Roof!
It’s really a semantic point but aren’t Moore and Boswell interested in the construction and self-definition of the dominant hegemony; ‘growing intolerance’ and ‘persecution’ were side-effects of the advent of hegemonic culture: i.e. perhaps this clause would better be phrased ‘the development of a dominant hegemony which was intolerant towards, and even persecuted, those who lay outside its self-defined bounds’ or something like that. I know it’s a small thing, but I think it’s important that we don’t take ‘difference’ or ‘the normal’ for granted, but rather things that are constructed.
Agree with Karl – seems like a bit of a swerve
Don’t you want to make a point about the exile in Tel Aviv? This interesting aside kind of dangles – was there an element of crusiading, philosemitism, Christian Zionism here?
Are these the Templars who then ended up being expelled by the British during WWII and going to Melbourne?
I think this is a wonderful and important essay: I very much enjoyed reading it and learnt a lot from it
I absolutely love this opening. What a perfect way to word this. Oh, it does a soul good to hear a good voice.
I love “Shwartzeneggian in physique”.
I mean “Shwatrzeneggerian.” oops:o)
The Teutonic knights, when portrayed in Polish/Lithuanian historical fiction/art, are often contrasted with the guerrilla fighters, to make sure that the knight ethos is cordoned off as the unjust violence (guerrilla is the just violence in this equation), and create grounds for an ontological distinction between good and bad violence. Just as you say here, the good violence is less muscly and macho. This reminds me, also, of Montaigne’s essay on the Cannibals, where he shows that the virtue of the South American fighters is the greater since the European invaders have the technology (horse, guns) on their side. Montaigne sets the 300 at Thermopyle as the original scene of this contest between virtue and its opposite (=the Persian army, the European invaders).
OK I love Karl’s comment! Also: Filippo I wonder (just to worry the objectifying one thing as a metaphor for another) if someone may not be interested in commenting on Sontag. Communist art provoked one reaction under communism: hate and derision of Communist art. I am not 100% sure this was also true of fascist art.An excellent piece by VLADIMIR SOROKIN in the last NYRofBooks (May 8, 2014, 61, no.8) has this gem: the statue of the hated secret police head torn down in Moscow and (unlike in the Ukraine where they were scrapped) installed in the “park of dismantled Soviet monuments next to th new Tretiakov Gallery. Not long ago, a member of the Duma [parliament] presented a resolution to return the monument to its former location. Given events currently taking place in our country, it’s quite likely. . .” (4).In the center of Warsaw, at one of the main public transport interchanges, the corresponding giant statue would (in spite of vigilant police surveillance) find itself in the morning with hands painted red up to his elbows with amazing and cheering regularity.
Again, I am thinking Sontag is going a bit fast here. It all sounds good but is not exactly revelatory. I think people generally hate being taken advantage of, including being used as the taxpaying base of imperialism, but they settle into moral torpor (like possums) unless provoked so grievously that they act rather than lie low. Again I am reminded of Sorokin’s piece cited above, where he contrast the Russian silent opposition’s inertia and passivity (“no real revolution has happened in Russia,” 4) with Ukrainians “fighting the OMON special forces day and night. . .and facing snipers’ bullets with wooden shields.” In other words, I totally distrust Sontag’s statement that there is attraction in fascist aesthetic. I think “nobody wants to stick their neck out” is the main force operating here, the MAIN attraction. Making the art mandatory actually helps organize opposition: it’s as if Sontag misunderstood the first things she’s talking about, the whole principle. Along the same lines, I think Disney is distrusted to the extent it is mandatory (monopolizes the scene of childhood). Personally for me, if there is anything scary about animation, it’s the amount of outsourced labor going into it: for earlier films (before computers), the design is Disney but the animation is executed by live people in Eastern Europe and Asia. With the computers, I would assume minimally rewarded pixel pushers are mobilized. . .
Having just read Halsall’s Barbarian Migrations with my students, I am also extremely interested in the possible similarities between Arthurian, knight, chivalry and romance or epic on one hand, and on the other Roman treatment of the concept of the Barbarian: a complex network of macho practices, dress, and mannerisms enacted in the context of the military and descried, ridiculed and despised in other contexts (as childlike, unmanly, irrational, base, etc.), often by the same individuals at the same time, without any apparent or perceived contradiction.At the same time, the extension of citizenship to the whole population within the borders of the empire made the right performance of Romanness more important.I wonder if a similar non-linear logic does not operate in Arthurian romance. There is a lot of unresolved self-contradiction in Arthurian material, and a parallel that comes to mind is the Old English Andreas (which Eileen Joy explicated in the Newberry Seminar last year), where the arrow swerves widely back and forth and then points to the “undecided” area on the spectrum between macho worship and condemning war and violence. I think the logic is somewhat like the Roman simultaneous condemnation and glorification of the Barbarians: it is obviously absurd and illogical, but that’s because identity is not linear: it never seems like self-contradiction in the context. The logic of identity is not either/or, but either AND or.
At the same time, as the Roman Barbarians example shows, the victims do not have to be in any logical opposition to the government: they serve a purpose, but there need not be an economic, political or any other reason for persecution here. Just as, in the Midwest, gays and sharks are feared, in spite of the fact that they are thin on the ground. In fact, hate thrives and grows in the absence of its victims (ex. the monstrous and unashamed anti-Semitism in communist Eastern Europe, before it became possible or common to openly manifest being Jewish after the fall of the Soviet empire, among numerous other examples). I see that detachment of hate from reality along the lines of what you said above about the need for Arthur to have fearsome (not our neighbors and relatives) enemies and glorious (not horrifying, unjust and cruel) battles.
Love the formulation here (“His gigantic size”). There is no match for you two in the whole of medieval studies, in terms of fun.
The horse and plow reminds me of (fascist) Heidegger: the attachment to the proper way to interact with the field. Come to think of it, mechanization was touted by the Soviets. There may well be idyllic intent behind the glorification of the farmer in this image that, as Heidegger shows, is also in bed with fascism.
I was also struck how the phrase blood and soil corresponds to the way citizenship is granted (right of blood and right of soil), at least in French (droit de sang et droit de sol). Until the 1990s, the “soil” was no ground for French citizenship, the opposite of US. This is another direction that this choice of this image encourages to undertake, in terms of motivating others to do further research.
Fascinating! I just heard Thangam Ravindranathan (Brown U, French) talk about her book project, where one chapter centers on the horse (as an animal that marks the beginning of mechanization–engines measured in horse power –and end of an era, for obv. reasons): it will be great to see, when her book comes out, how it can help focus on that (chivalrous) “horse fantasy” or “20th c. deliberately living in the past” point. I can already see a conference/book on the “man-horse assemblage, after animal studies”.
I disagree with Karl and Anthony (if I may) — I think this is an excellent example that shows “knight” is a contested territory, and it strikes me as well placed where it is and working v. well. . .:o)
. . . and in 1938 ordered, as a Christmas present, the books on Genghis Khan by Michael Prawdin: Tschingis-Chan, der sturm aus Asien, 1934, Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-anstalt.Tschingis-Chan und sein Erbe, 1935. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul as The Mongol Empire: its rise and legacy, 1937.
. . .and in 1938 Himmler ordered as a Christmas present for SS Michael Prawdin’s book on Genghiz Khan, published in 1934 and ’35. . .
The footnote 8 is brilliant. Just a suggestion: I have not heard of Gobineau before, and I would have liked a 1-2 sentence footnote introducing him.
Anna, I agree with everything you said here, except I do think the attraction is still there in the fascist aesthetic, despite all of this. Disney is not nearly distrusted enough. It is exactly the sort of thing that does appeal to the masses. Star Wars, Starship Trooper, and John McCain’s set for his election night party all attest to how much attraction there is, even in the US. I don’t think that contradicts anything you said above really. That said I do think Sontag could be pushed on some of these points, though we don’t have the word allowance to do it here.
Defending the West: Cultural Racism and Pan-Europeanism on the Far-Right—Daniel Wollenberg (21 comments)
No comment here except to mark the “traditional Western European culture”! I love the double move of rightwingers that at once refers to the ‘history’ of Europe while homogenizing Europe in a way no one with any detailed historical knowledge could ever do. that double, paranoid reflex of ‘knowing the truth’ and decrying the professionals as ‘selling a false truth’ fascinates.
although I’ll just want to note that there’s also a new “biological” racism in the Human Biological Diversity movement, which, while making various claims about the “genetic” basis for intelligence, also defends or promotes the supremity of “European culture”: for some examples, see this http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2014/03/just-be-reasonable-science-toeing-line.html and http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/
“grandiose”: word choice?
for what it’s worth, here’s an example of the European far right that considers Jews, as is usual, not ‘really’ European (while having nothing to say about, say, the Hungarians): http://aramaxima.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/europeans-in-europe/
again, not a request for change, but just observing how fascinating this is, since in Germany, of all places, the notion of some DEEP ROOT of nation is particularly absurd.
reminded again of the HBD (human biological diversity) set, who claim to be anti-racist because of their ‘scientific’ basis in genetic studies that, of course, leave “Northerners” (by which they mean Europeans but also (some) Jews and the Chinese and Japanese) in the supreme position.
while the irony is 13th-century European ideals of courtliness and virtue themselves develop in the 11th and early 12th centuries as part of crusade, and partly borrowed from “Islam”
okay, here’s an actual recommendation: you repeat some version of “not biological but cultural” about 3 or 4 times in the space of two paragraphs. you’ll want to rewrite to reduce repetition
” with its shared history and traditions, has the right to its cultural distinctiveness”
if you’ll look at my blog post, you’ll see that this HBD set (against whom I’ll be speaking in a paper this Fall) accuses people like me of forcing ‘diversity’ ‘on them’: their larger argument is that white leftists demand ONLY that ‘white nations’ integrate, which makes this, of course, a one-sided kulturkampf, at least from their fevered perspective
“Joan of Arc’s fifteenth-century mission to drive the English out of France is paralleled with Le Pen’s mission to expel North African immigrants from modern-day France”
Here you might want a brief reference or cite of some of the work Joan of Arc did for the French right in Vichy (eg http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/260683?uid=3739832&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103819014053) and also in the 19th century.
notable again that we have this double movement of defending ‘French’ particularity which also then becomes a European particularity which then by extension becomes a global White particularity. This relationship between the fantasy of a homogenized national culture, based on a medieval fantasy, and bounded by modern national borders, and a fantasy of an international white culture, also fascinates. nothing that you have to respond to, just noting this.
again, that irony of defending the Christian values of “pluralism” by defending its cultural particularity. basically, “europeans” are the only ones who have free choice, while others are driven by instinct, etc.
kind of a mise-en-abyme?
great article! thanks. definitely going to be using this in my own work. I’m noticing a VERY strong “genetic” racism that hails a return to “biological” racism, so I actually disagree with the thrust of this argument, BUT that’s perfectly fine, and I can see us occupying a panel discussion on these issues at some point.
Thanks very much for your feedback and for the links!
There is an unnecessary () around biological. Also, in the last 3 paragraphs, there are a lot of repetitions which should be revised.
deploy (present) doesn’t work here since one of them is dead.
oops. . .never mind: that was a hoax. Still living.
It would have been interesting to include the readings of the battle of Tours that tell a different story, including the popularizing accounts such as the one included in Francois Reynaert’s Nos ancestries les Gaulois et d’autres fadaises: l’histoire de France sans les clichés (Fayard). And, it would be good to include, in footnotes, short bios (1-2 sentences) of the figures mentioned in the essay.
This doesn’t mean he’s likely to be walking the streets anytime soon, or ever. Depending on how Norway works, this may even mean he’s far less likely to ever be free.
Will he at some point in the future trot out the hoary old chestnut about just following orders. Probably wont have to as they seem to be going out of their way to forgive him as we speak.
‘Modern and Genuine Mediaevalism’: Guido Kisch’s Romance with the German Middle Ages—Mitchell B. Hart (10 comments)
I think “timely” is not necessary here (timely themes).
It would be good to include in footnote 3 some information about Salo Baron, as well as a brief definition of the three contrasted legislations (emancipation, exceptional status, medieval legislation) to justify the pertinence of Baron’s statement.
It would be good to have, at the beginning of this essay, a short paragraph that describes the evolution of laws concerning Jews in Germany from the MA to the nazi state, with just the important turning points, but also including the references listed in this essay (such as the list of kings in () in the paragraphs above).
There are spacing issues throughout the essay, and in this paragraph, an issue with citation marks inside citation marks (please see journal style sheet for reference).
I really like this paragraph. I think a footnote about political geography would be useful (Saxen vs. Schwaben).
Again, a political geography note may be useful (Eastphalians).
A political geography note may be useful (Sachsen, Schwaben, Eastphalians).
drop however
need translation for the German citation
should it be “the Jews” or should the be dropped?
‘The History of an Incorrect Term’: Agamben, Etymology, and the Medieval History of the Holocaust—Heather Blurton (10 comments)
Missing words in the penultimate sentence of this paragraph? I love your emphasis on etymology here.
Maybe break up final sentence into two?
I was waiting for this!
Really, really interesting.
Is Richard thus implying the “Jewishness” or paganism of the attackers?
Yes, yes, yes.
Indeed.
Cite Hannah Johnson’s recent work on ethics and scholarship on antisemitism?
Not being a medievalist, I’m quite out of my depth here in terms of these latin sources. I have a few thoughts as someone who works a lot on biblical literature.
A key use of holocaustum occurs in Genesis 22, the Binding of Isaac, which provides an almost instant connection of the term to Jesus’ sacrifice. In fact, Augustine earlier in his commentary on John compares Isaac bearing the wood for his own sacrificial pyre to Jesus bearing his wood cross. This might short-circuit the etymological history Agamben proposes. Could Devizes’s use of holocaust not be a generic “sacrifice” (with fire), but one also already informed by Christ as figure of Isaac. I notice that Augustine and Benedict of P. use the term positively for examples of self-sacrifice – as opposed to the sacrifice of animals/others dismissed in Mark 12.33. Isaac, Christ, Becket, all offer themselves. In John, which Augustine is commenting on, the Jews demand Jesus’ death, agents of another’s sacrifice, rather than of their own. Devizes’s text is interesting in this light. Skipping ahead to your rereading of this text in par.28, the pogrom is an inversion of John: the Christians of London are agents of sacrifice; Jews the victim (not the 1st Christian); Devil, the recipient. This holocaust is not a self-sacrifice, closer to Mark 12.33. A quick question: is the antecedent of “their” in “their Devil” unambiguous?
It seems to me that “parasite” is an anachronistic proposition. Rather, worms are asexual and they are not individuated: see Karl Steel’s work on the topic, some of it published online at In the (medieval) Middle.I signal this is because the essay is so dependent on etymology and accurate historical reading, and in that context, a mistake would be particularly inopportune.
Jean-Claude Milner, “Remarks on the Name Jew and the Universal”—translated by Robert S. Kawashima (2 comments)
I don’t think the first sentence is necessary in this paragraph.
Commen? Perhaps a typo?
Issue Editor's Preface—Nina Caputo and Hannah Johnson (1 comment)
Perhaps a bit self-centered on my part, but (Evans) after “Philosophical reflections . . . historical accounting”?
One or Several Jews? The Jewish Massed Body in Old Norse Literature—Richard Cole (1 comment)
N.B. Kirsten Wolf has shown that Stjórn III is probably not the work of Brandr, although Kirby maintains the suggestion in his article in Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia (p. 611). See: Kirsten Wolf. “Brandr Jónsson and Stjórn“, Scandinavian Studies 62, 2 (1990) p. 185.