Autobiographical
Work
I had planned to finish my grading yesterday, but that has to happen today. I was just too exhausted. Looking at the wreckage around me that is my apartment, I wondered why. I also wondered about the incredibly fast passage of time. Ten weeks of a daily intensive history course in the afternoon (in two consecutive parts) and two four-week evening courses, three hours per evening, three evenings per week, with a three-hour minimum round trip commute on top of that help to explain both my exhaustion and temporal dislocation. But that came on top of twenty weeks non-stop ESL teaching at another place, sixteen of those weeks including morning and evening work. And I have continued my Saturday ESL. In other words, I have just finished thirty six-day weeks of teaching, with the exception of two days off over Memorial Day weekend and three days for the Fourth.
If this actually amounted to a living income in the DC area, I could be happy. Instead, it just lets me almost get by, sort of, because it is all paid by the course (history) or hour (ESL). Of course, in these economic times, survival is a pretty good achievement too. And I do like what I do.
There is a ton of planning to do for Mason this fall, because I will have three sections of Western Civ with fifty-five students each. I am supposed to have a grader for ten hours per week, which will lighten the burden, but I have to plan in such a way that I can survive if the grader doesn’t come through. The early morning section will be a killer, because of the commute, but I am looking forward to a semester with all the teaching in the same part of the day, in this case from morning until early afternoon. Putting that aside, though, I have three whole weeks where I can work but not commute or manage a classroom. I really need that.
Generous Farm Share Yesterday
Our weekly farm share feeds two people with room to spare, and often it works okay for three. There is less diversity than at the grocery store, because we eat what is in season, but a lot is in season in the summer. Yesterday’s share was particularly amazing: Asian greens, salad mix, spinach, kale, spring onions, cauliflower, beets with greens, zucchini, broccoli, kohlrabi, and turnips. These items from our farm were supplemented with couscous, black beans, maple yogurt, shell peas, and blueberries. Yummy!
Yesterday morning was my turn to help count out and set up the food for something like 200 CSA members. It was hot, so I don’t remember the exact number, but it was a lot. Still, five of us (including my wife) managed to get the bulk of the work done in something like three hours. Of course, this does not count all the organizational and logistical work to get the food there in the first place, or the work done on the farm.
The results are fantastic. High quality food that is good for the earth at affordable prices, and I get to work with good people too.
Work
Due to budget cuts, George Mason University did not book me ahead of time to teach history courses this semester. Hence, I took a couple more ESL courses at LADO. Of course, the History Department at Mason offered me something right before its semester started, but I was already working at LADO by that time. Saying no to LADO at the beginning of January on the mere chance of work at Mason was not an option.
The downside is money. Of course, that’s always an issue for teachers, but it’s particularly difficult for people teaching at private language schools. Universities pay adjunct professors by the course, which leaves financial gaps between semesters, but which also leaves time for other part-time jobs. ESL schools pay only by the hours one actually teaches, meaning five hours of actual teaching is only a “part-time” job, never mind preparation time.
Another downside is my crazy schedule. Besides teaching ESL in my DC neighborhood on Saturday mornings, as I did most of 2008, I am teaching mornings in Arlington and evenings in DC. This schedule can be a little disorienting, not to mention tiring. It has an upside too, however, insofar as it leaves me time during the day for job hunting. The trick is to switch gears between the classroom and this other side of my life, and to remember that the actual job search is the most important thing. That’s not easy for a teacher whose natural inclination is to give his classes the highest priority.
One practical upside to my current routine is the lack of long trips out to Fairfax. I have also been enjoying the break in my routine. Teaching ESL to students at a private language school often means the students really want to learn. They can see how the material affects their ability to interact with their environment, unlike students who take an introductory history class simply because it is mandated by the university.
It’s also fun meeting people from so many countries. Lumping my current courses together, my students come from Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Bolivia, Brazil, Poland, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, Japan, Algeria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. Many of them work as au pairs or nannies, and some come from the diplomatic community.
This summer I’m scheduled to teach Euro Civ I and II again at Georgetown University. I’ve also got two history courses at George Mason University, Western Civ again and also one on the Great War. The courses at each university are intensive, but they come one after the other, so I won’t be teaching more than two intensive history courses at a time, though I might also continue with the Saturday course at LADO.
Meanwhile, the search for a full-time job must pick up. It might be at university, but I am seriously considering history at private schools as well as possibly something that matches my skills in the government. The State Department could make sense, especially as a foreign service officer who does public diplomacy. Unfortunately, the process for getting that kind of job can take a very long time, as much as two years, if I understand correctly.
Meanwhile, life goes on.
Two of Two Million
On Sunday, January 18th, we attempted to see the concert at Lincoln Memorial. We took a bus down Wisconsin Avenue and got off at Foggy Bottom. Walking towards the memorial, we soon joined a mass of humanity heading in the same direction.
There was good will and a sense of expectation in the air. Unfortunately, there was also only one hour till the concert’s begin, and we had badly underestimated the time it would take to get through security. Exacerbating the situation were people cutting the lines, sometimes willfully, sometimes because the architecture of the lines was confusing.
We decided to give up at 2:00, when the concert was supposed to begin. We could chock it up to experience and be better prepared on Tuesday. Besides, just seeing the expectant crowds was a good thing. We also decided to walk to Memorial Bridge via Washington Monument, thinking we could at least see the crowds—and maybe hear some sounds—across the water. It turned out, however, that there were JumboTrons and loudspeakers at Washington Monument, no security checkpoints to go through, and the concert had not yet begun. We got within one or two hundred yards of a JumboTron and saw the whole thing from within a growing sea of humanity that reached as far back as the eye could see. The monument is on a hill, which means the crowd from my vantage point looked endless, since my view at the scene behind us reached only the monument, dropping off like the ocean does on the horizon at sea.
I choked up while singing the national anthem at the beginning. Catharsis. Healing after eight years of a leader who encouraged us to follow our worst instincts. The sense of joy and anticipation around me was palpable. We sang and we danced. Catharsis. Having the eighty-nine-year-old Pete Seeger there at the end made it that much sweeter—so did the whole choreography of the show, which brought not only different ethnicities on stage together, but also generations and genres. Garth Brooks’ singing “Shout!” was fine example of this tendency.
Afterwards we walked half of the way or more back home, though we found room in a bus for part of the trip. We talked with other passengers as if we all knew each other, which happens in DC, but seldom this easily.
That evening, my wife convinced me to volunteer for service the next day as Obama had been encouraging citizens to do, but my earlier hesitation meant all organized activities were already booked. So instead we signed up for a pledge drive next month for our local public radio station, which I had been planning to do anyway. And I reminded my wife of her other volunteering. She’s always been much better then me at stepping up when help is needed.
So Monday was a day at home. Sure, there were special events for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, but the next day would take a lot of energy and planning.
Told we had to choose between inauguration and the parade, and told the parade had security checkpoints, but a spot on the Mall for inauguration didn’t, the choice was easy. Moreover, being there was more important than having a chance to see Obama in the parade. What better way to bear witness than with two million people?
The decision to brave the crowds was easier, because we live in Glover Park, which is close enough to make it possible to avoid packed Metro stations.
This morning we took a bus to Dupont Circle and walked to Washington Monument. We left the apartment at 8:00 and had a spot with a view of a JumboTron by 9:00. They rebroadcast the concert to distract us, and they showed us the arriving guests. The wait passed by pretty quickly this way.
Our long-johns and other layers kept us reasonably comfortable. So did a folded yoga mat (for both sitting and standing on) and snacks and tea. The more crowded it got, the less the wind bit into us, though the breeze never completely went away on that small hill.
The mood reminded me of the Sunday concert, except we got past the anticipation to the main event. At times it felt like at a church, as some neighbors from Newport News responded to parts of the president’s speech with a rhythmic refrain of “Okay,” as if in a conversation with him. An “Amen” even slipped from my lips a couple times, including at the part where Obama denounced the false choice between security and our values. I was doubly impressed then when that Obama line drew a lot of extra cheers and applause where we were standing.
There will be more to ponder in the coming days and weeks. Right now I am exhausted from the cold and windy, but beautiful walk back from Washington Monument across to Lincoln Memorial, along the Potomac to Georgetown, and up Wisconsin Avenue to Glover Park. (Were we ever stiff after a short bathroom break at Barnes & Noble in Georgetown and then coffee at a small cafe on Wisconsin Avenue!)
Tired, beat, exhausted—the good kind.
Waiting by the Oven
It’s the end of a long day, or rather the beginning of a new one, if the passing of midnight means anything. Two squash pies are doing their thing in the oven. These were long in the making. I washed a bunch of dishes and cooked the squash this morning. Usually I make the pies for Thanksgiving with canned pumpkin, but we had the biodynamic squash from our farm share, so I did it the old-fashioned way. This included washing and laying out the seeds to dry. (They’ll make a good snack.) Afterwards, I did my weekly food run to Bethesda, where my CSA is. This evening I filled in for someone at LADO, where I’m teaching English to non-native speakers. Then I came back home, took a break, and began converting the cooked squash into two pies. I have leftover pie mixture too, so I’ll make more tomorrow or Friday.
In case you’re wondering, I used a recipe called Dolly’s Pumpkin Pie in Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book (p. 199). This is the same book that taught me how to bake whole grain bread.
At the Bus Stop
People who ride busses have to spend time waiting. I often use the time to think or read, but sometimes I observe the world around me while allowing myself simply to be. And sometimes I pull out a notepad and write down my thoughts.
The sun has started shining differently in the morning and evening. It’s lower in the sky, and it lends a different light to the objects it touches. The colors change, as if they were in pictures printed from slides. (What was the name of that process, when we made pictures from slides, which were basically the opposite of negatives?)
When the sunlight is like this, it becomes a pleasure to let it shine into my eyes as I almost—but not quite—look into it. It carries something that my being craves, the stuff of good moods and a friendly disposition, which can too easily go into hiding when days grow shorter and the nights longer. (How do people survive without the sun in the far north?) During much of the year I go out of my way to be in the shade, but this sun is different. It will disappear soon, giving way to the cold wind and darkness, but not before it has given me the strength I need for a journey in the cold tonight, after the warm feeling and my memory of it have passed.
Thursday
I had high hopes for today. I had no grading to do or lecture to prepare. I could take off my teaching hat and devote the day to a lot of pressing personal business, especially job applications. But I was nearly immobile for much of the day. Why? It’s not like I haven’t taught long evening classes before, I thought. But then I did the math. This is the first semester I have taught a daytime class and a long evening class. That in itself might be unremarkable, but then there’s the commute too. So maybe I should not feel guilty about Thursdays and just accept that at the moment it is my weekend. After all, I spent last weekend grading, and that will happen next weekend too. And I am teaching English as a Foreign Language on Saturdays to a group of au pairs at a school in my neighborhood called LADO.
But back to that math. Yesterday I got up at 7:00 and left the house a little after 9:00. The commute by bus and train and bus is 90 minutes on a good day, though usually a little longer. I lectured from 11:30 to 12:20. I advised students on an upcoming project for the next hour. I had lunch and caught up on the news via the web. Then I updated Blackboard, the online learning system that George Mason University uses. I returned to the office at 5:00, an hour earlier than usual, because I figured I’d have more visitors than usual, which I did, right down to 7:10. At that point I had to quit advising students and deliver a lecture beginning at 7:20. I managed to end that early, that is, at 9:50, and then I answered student questions until 10:15. I caught a bus at 10:30. Waited 15 minutes for a train. Got into DC about 11:30 and waited for a bus. I got home about midnight. That’s 15 hours on the move. And it really is on the move, because adjunct professors at Mason only have access to office space for office hours. There is not enough room to give us a work space too.
So maybe it’s okay to be exhausted on Thursday, which really is my weekend this semester. One good thing: I’ve been able to ride the train during non-peak hours. Another: I’ve started doing yoga again, and I intend to keep that up, regardless of whatever crazy work schedule I might have in future.
My 9/11
A lot of people get angry or sad or both on 9/11. Of course, the loss of life in this country was horrible, but for me that date always brings up the manner in which Bush used Americans' sentiments to go to war against a country that had nothing to do with the attack, Iraq. And in this political season, it brings to mind how McCain was ahead of the curve in calling for that war.
Call these sentiments mean-spirited, if you will. How dare I politick on this day of remembrance? Fair enough, but these sentiments have been with me for many years now. They are part of my 9/11, just as are the worries about friends in New York, the story of a colleague’s husband who missed work that day and whose general was killed in the Pentagon office my colleague’s husband usually also occupied, the tales told by people in my building streaming in from downtown reporting alleged bombs in cars around the city, the military helicopters and jets over the skies of DC and the absence of the usual noisy commercial airliners, a child sick at home and a wife working downtown, the activation of a friend in the DC National Guard for years of active duty in this city and Afghanistan, the quiet evening streets for weeks after the attack, the sudden departure of Arab students from my building because their parents back home feared for their safety, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the color-coded warnings, and the never-ending rhetoric and politics of fear.
Or talk about hindsight being twenty-twenty. Thing is, Bush didn’t need hindsight. All he and his advisors needed was a sense of how countries have reacted to attacks in the past. As a historian, I claim no special insights into the future, but I frequently have a fair idea of what we should be paying attention to in the present. I’m good at asking questions, even if my answers aren’t always right. Here’s what I told my shaken students in Washington, DC seven years ago. And still we don’t teach war and society as a fundamental aspect of the human experience in required undergraduate history courses. What a shame.
The Vocabulary of Grammar
Looking back, I am surprised at how easy it was for me to get through high school and many college courses without knowing a lot of basic vocabulary related to English grammar. I knew English grammar intuitively, and I could write, but I could not talk about grammar. I am lucky I knew enough intuitively, for this weakness could have become a real handicap for me in my studies.
In fact, it did become a weakness in one subject: Russian. We had to take a foreign language at Dartmouth College, and I fulfilled the requirement with Russian. But I was horrible. I do not believe that I ever rose above a C+. Part of the problem was study habits and discipline, but much of it related to my lack of appreciation of the nature of grammar. The professors used terms like genitive case, dative case, direct object, personal pronoun, possessive pronoun, conjugate, and decline, and it seemed like I had to devote too much energy to understanding that vocabulary and the things it indicated instead of learning Russian. Or I missed points entirely because I did not recognize their significance.
I only appreciated this dilemma later, after I took a break from Dartmouth and came back. During my time away I was in the army and stationed in Germany, where I learned to get by with rudimentary German. Upon returning to Dartmouth I decided I would like to learn German properly. My experience was enhanced considerably by a practical little book by Cecile Zorach entitled English Grammar for Students of German. It explained the way English grammar worked for certain situations and then compared it to German. It was through these comparisons that I began to gain an appreciation of the mechanics of English grammar and a vocabulary with which to talk about it. This knowledge later served me well when I found myself in Munich teaching English to Germans. Of course, the learning process never ended.
Orange Juice, Apple Juice and Applesauce
We get most of our fruit and vegetables through a local cooperative called a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Unlike a typical buying cooperative though, a CSA also works to support the producers of food, often one farmer. It binds producers and consumers together, so that producers know they have a certain income, and consumers get more or less food, depending on how things are going.
The one to which my wife and I belong is called Spiritual Food CSA. It supports biodynamic farming, which practices more stringent standards than regular organic farming, though I don’t know all the details. The word spiritual comes in, because the CSA is organized by a local yoga ashram, for whom healthy food, a healthy earth, healthy people, and a healthy spiritual life are inseparable. At least that’s what I think it means. I don’t get into the spiritual side of things, but I like taking yoga, and the people at the Shanti Yoga Ashram are just plain good folk. If only I had time for yoga right now. My commute from Northwest DC to Fairfax, VA and my teaching schedule has been keeping me away. Must change that.
Anyway, we pay one price for half a year and then pick up a share of food every week. Apples from the fall harvest had been accumulating in my fridge, as had oranges, which the CSA gets direct from Florida. Today, I decided to take action. I dug out the old juice maker and made orange juice and apple juice. I also made a large glass of apple sauce. Yum!
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
I’ve started reading Thomas Pynchon’s, Against the Day. I enjoy Pynchon, though there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to say anything meaningful about his novel because his narratives are often difficult to follow. Take, for instance, the cryptic but thought-provoking quote from Thelonius Monk at the beginning of the book: “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.”
This novel is set at the turn of the previous century, beginning with the Columbian World’s Fair in 1893 and running past the First World War. As usual, Pynchon sometimes seems to play fast and loose with historical facts, so it doesn’t feel like historical fiction in any traditional sense. That’s not a criticism, mind you, just something to keep in mind when reading it.
Maybe I will have to make use of the Thomas Pynchon Wiki, which I just discovered. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll check out some of the many reviews on the novel, though I don’t want to spoil it for myself, especially since I find my tastes are often out of sync with those of the reviewers.
One practical thing I like: with 1085 pages, this $18.00 paperback is a relative bargain; it’s going to keep me busy for a long time.
Perhaps after that I’ll go back and look at some of his earlier stuff. I read Vineland when it came out in paperback, but I hadn’t touched Pynchon before that since I was maybe only twenty-one. I read Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance, while in the field artillery on maneuver in Grafenwöhr, Germany. I still remember clinging to the book while bouncing up and down and eating dust on dirt roads on the back of a self-propelled eight-inch howitzer.
Baking Bread
We were out of bread, and my wife asked me if I would bake some. It had been a while, so I said yes. Now three small loaves of whole-grain wheat bread are rising on a cookie sheet with a clean thin cotton towel over them. They look beautiful too. If only I had a camera! Of course, then I’d also have to know how to use it. Food photography, I suspect, is not easy.
The bread contains whole-grain wheat flour, yeast, water, barley syrup, oil, and salt. Simple, healthy ingredients. Also good was all the kneading. There’s something satisfying about that. The bread tastes twice as good when I make it myself, maybe because it is part of a more authentic experience than going to the store represents.
One thing I would do, if I had my druthers, would be to grind the flour fresh from wheat berries. But we don’t have a mill like we used to when we were living in Augsburg, Germany back in the early 1990s. Also, wheat berries are expensive and not available here in DC in large quantities. In Augsburg my wife drove with a friend out to a farmer to buy sacks of grain—wheat, spelt, rye, barley, millet, and Grünkern (spelt harvested while only half ripe and then roasted). We ground the grain as we needed it with a little electric mill. We milled fine flour for baking or course stuff for cooking entrees of various kinds.
Now the bread’s in the oven.
Baking bread requires several periods of waiting. First I had to wait for the water and yeast mixture to bubble. During that time I made supper. Then I had to wait for the dough I made rise. During that time I made some whole grain ginger cookies. Then I punched down the dough, made the loaves and had to let them rise. Washed dishes, listened to the news, and began some blogging. Forty-five more minutes till nirvana.
I used to bake a great deal more, and then I went years without doing it. I started again last winter, but the heat in the summer put me off it. Well, winter’s here again, so a hot kitchen feels good.
Smoke Stinks
Some will call me a thankless twit. Invited to spend Christmas week in Davos, Switzerland, I have been miserable for much of the time. I am staying at the Hotel Schatzalp and I have had diner twice at the Steigenberger, luxurious home of the famous World Economic Forum. I am a guest of some very kind people. I don’t have to—and couldn’t possibly—pay for this vacation. Nonetheless, I am not liking it. The company, food, scenery, and service are all excellent. Attitudes towards smoking, on the other hand, are dreadful.
I used to put up with smoke when I lived in Europe, but things have changed. Some four years ago I came down with asthma. Now I have to worry about more than smelly clothes, burning eyes, and the long-term consequences of second-hand smoke. I have to weigh having an asthma flare-up against offending my hosts. And they don’t even smoke. I have been drawing the line at hanging out in the smoke-filled hotel lobby, but I could hardly say no to diner on Christmas Eve, which German speakers call Heiliges Abend, the most important family evening of the year in this part of the world. No one was smoking anywhere I could see, but there was smoke in the air. Result: I had to use my rescue inhaler twice after going to bed. Normally I do not need it at all.
Now I have to choose between being outside or hanging out in my room. The outdoor world is beautiful here, as is the view from my room, but sooner or later a body wants coffee or beer—and company too. I cannot hang out in the beautiful lobby of my hotel, which was built some 100 years ago. I cannot enjoy the ambience of a place made famous by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain. I cannot visit my hosts in the Steigenberger. On the other hand, the restaurant in the Hotel Schatzalp is smoke-free, even if I have to hold my breath to get to it.
There is more good news on the horizon. A woman at the reception desk at the Steigenberger was actually sympathetic enough to my problem to tell me that the Swiss canton of Graubünden will go smoke-free in March. Apparently that will be the the second smoke free canton in Switzerland. The first is in the Italian-speaking part of the country. Other parts of Europe with smoking bans include Italy and Ireland, and Germany has a law on the books that will take effect in January. France will also step up its efforts to limit smoking in public places.
I hope these bans work. I enjoy Europe and the company of my wife’s family, but I am unwilling to give up breathing in order to see them.
Stumbling onto a Dissertation Topic
Historical scholarship can be as much the result of accident as planning. How on earth did I come to write a dissertation on Wilhelm Groener? I thought I liked doing social history, not biography. If I studied the army, I was more apt to find common soldiers interesting, not a general who assumed operational control of the whole army at the end of the First World War and who people addressed as "Your Excellency." I was also not particularly interested in military-technical questions. Yes, I found the questions about humanity in warfare that I had explored in my M.A. thesis compelling. But German war planning for the First World War? And the German general staff's experience of the war? These were not my things either, or so I thought. Besides, were not many meters of library shelf-space filled with books on these problems?
I first looked at Wilhelm Groener in a research seminar whose theme was the German bourgeoisie in Imperial Germany. Historians were devoting much renewed attention to this social class in the 1990s, because earlier interpretations had blamed the German middle class for not being middle-class enough and not doing what any bourgeoisie supposedly should have done, which was to put Prussia's powerful nobility in its place and establish a proper constitutional monarchy. Germany's unfortunate authoritarian modern history was attributed to an abstract process of maldevelopment, a German special path or Sonderweg, along which the bourgeoisie had failed to do what it allegedly had done in Britain and France, that is, rise up in a bourgeois revolution that made everything normal. New research on the middle class was beginning to undermine this view. Far from aping the nobility, the bourgeoisie had developed a self-confident, vibrant class culture. Our task in the seminar was to examine this research and consider its implications for understanding the broader outline—or grand narrative—of modern German history.
I eventually decided to concentrate on the officer corps, because it played a key role in the narrative of German exceptionalism. The nobility had dominated the officer corps and made it an illiberal force in society more generally. According to this narrative, birth, not military know-how, had played a decisive role in military careers. Hence, not only had the military been illiberal, but its leaders had allegedly not kept up with the times. Parallel to this version of the officer corps, however, existed another in which the German general staff had been the preeminent professional military organization in the world. Which, if any, of these interpretations was right? Here was an opportunity to examine the military in a mainstream historiographical context. The German bourgeoisie was receiving a lot of attention in the historiography, but the military—so central to the German Sonderweg thesis—remained largely untouched by this research.
So I did a comparative research paper on August Keim, Erich Ludendorff, and Wilhelm Groener, all commoners and all general staffers in Imperial Germany. I chose these men because there were enough published primary sources in Washington, DC to make a research paper viable. I showed that these men all had adhered to the mainstream bourgeois values that the new historiography identified, and I demonstrated that no contradiction between a military and a bourgeois ethos had existed. These commoners had not been "feudalized" by their aristocratic comrades-in-arms.
Considering these issues without reference to the First World War was unthinkable, so I also explored Keim's, Ludendorff's, and Groener's images of war. After all, the feudal interpretation of the officer corps included a charge of aristocratic anachronism. Unfortunately, I was unable to link their social backgrounds and images of war, except to point out that their images of war comported with contemporary developments. Nonetheless, the work proved fruitful enough to suggest the possibility of a dissertation on one of these officers, Wilhelm Groener. I could use his biography as a vehicle for analyzing the sociology and culture of the Imperial German officer corps.
Photo taken by author while walking a family member’s dog in Germany.
Across Generations
When I went to the student coffee shop on Friday, the student at the cash register guessed my order before I could tell him what I wanted. I remarked that I had had similar experiences with regulars when I worked at a Dunkin' Donuts over twenty years ago. His response: “They had Dunkin' Donuts back then?”
For me there has always been a Dunkin' Donuts. Indeed, according to Wikipedia and the corporate website of Dunkin' Donuts, the first store opened in 1950, which is close enough to “always” for someone born in the early 1960s. So why did the student think Dunkin' Donuts was new? His own answer was eminently practical: “I haven’t even been alive for twenty years.” Still, his underlying assumption that so much of the world around him was new took me aback.
Maybe I should not have been surprised by his presentism. After all, the current generation of students has grown up hearing that they live in a completely different world than the one into which I was born. They have heard from their parents and teachers about a bygone world in the midst of a Cold War without personal computing, the internet, cell phones, iPods, and global warming. And then there are the many students who have grown up in new subdivisions, schools and strip malls.
What do these thoughts have to do with me and Clio? One of my main goals in undergraduate survey courses is to teach historical thinking, which in part entails helping students appreciate not only that the world has a past, but that the people in that past saw that world through different eyes. But it is not enough for me to ask them to see how the world looks when it is filtered through the experiences of earlier generations. In order to do my job, I find it helps if I meet them halfway and try to understand how the world looks when filtered through their experiences. Of course, I usually end up looking uncool in the process, but as the father of a teenager I am used to that.
Paradoxes
I was looking through Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, a play I have used a few times in a survey course on modern Europe. In the back of the English translation by James Kirkup are “21 Points to The Physicists,” one of which reads, “The more human beings proceed by plan the more effectively they may be hit by accident.” This quote sums up my recently completed dissertation on three levels that I would like to consider: the content of my research from the point of view of its historical subjects, the path my research takes from my point of view, and the shape of the narrative that eventually emerges. I plan to look at these paradoxes in future posts at irregular intervals. For now I will mention a different one that is not as difficult to resolve.
I spent four years in the U.S. Army during peacetime, and I disliked being a soldier. I also rarely found military history interesting. Nonetheless, my research has focused on war. My M.A. thesis is about Bavarian soldiers and French civilians in the Franco-Prussian War, and my Ph.D. thesis is about the Imperial German officer corps and war planning. How did a former soldier who hated his experience in the military come to enjoy studying military history?
At least part of the answer lies in my military experience. A kid from the woods of New Hampshire had a lot of learning to do in a unit in which most everyone else came from the inner city or rural south. Add class, race, and educational levels to this mix, and I got a first-rate education. You see, I was not just in the army, but combat arms, specifically, the field artillery. When I enlisted I made the naive assumption that the army was the army no matter what one did, and it was offering a substantial bonus for four years in the artillery. So why not? Without going into a longer story, let me say that I left the army in 1987 with an insight of which at the time I was unaware: studying the army can teach a person a lot about that army’s country.
Not until I was doing my M.A. in Augsburg, Germany did I realize that I knew this. I think it was late 1992 or early 1993 when I met Professor Stig Förster, who had just returned to Europe from a stint at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. Stig was editing On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871, and I, as an American there, was recruited as one of his student helpers. I found the topics interesting, because in a seminar I had recently taken with another historian, we had learned about the lead-up to the war and the postwar settlement, but the war just kind of happened. I remarked on this circumstance to Stig. One thing led to another and he suggested I could explore the Bavarians' treatment of civilians in 1870–71 for my master’s thesis. The topic sounded interesting, but also vaguely pornographic. Was it even decent to probe into such suffering? At the same time, scenes from Bosnia on TV suggested to me that such topics mattered. Before making up my mind, I asked if there was an historical treatment of these kinds of issues that might show me the historical value of examining atrocities. That led to Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict In Missouri During The American Civil War, as well as James M. McPherson, Battle Cry Of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Of course, I also dug into Michael Howard’s perennial The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870-71. These books showed me that the study of war was integral to mainstream history and vice versa. With war being fought once again on European soil (the Balkans), I not only was hooked, but I thought such studies were a moral imperative.
Having completed a PhD program and many years of teaching, I no longer see my research in such grandiose terms. Still, I try to integrate at least one lecture on broad trends in war and society into each survey course I teach. I think students need to know that human behavior in war is historically contingent. They need to know, for instance, that humanity and atrocities in warfare have a history. The list is much longer, of course, but I can revisit the topic another time.
Photo of an 8-inch howitzer under a camouflage net taken in Germany, probably in Grafenwöhr in the fall of 1983