LANGUAGE AND REVOLUTION: 
Making Modern Political Identities

Edited by Igal Halfin

The book examines the role of language in forging the modern subject. While social historians regard language as a pragmatic tool, as much as an instrument of power, intellectual historians treat language as a supra-human force which somehow grips men and turns them into brain washed automatons. Taking issue with both approaches, scholars contributing to the present volume treat language as a force that imbued the historical protagonist with the horizon of his meanings on the one hand and that was used by him or her to acquire a new sense of identity, on the other. During the momentous reconfiguration of political and social identities brought about by the advent of modernity, individuals were relocated within new sets of discursive relations. Focusing on the idea of the ‘New Man’ that animated all revolutionaries, historians whose work is collected in the volume ask what it meant to define oneself in terms of one’s class origins, gender, national belonging or racial origins. Whether they write about the construction of class identity during the Russian Civil War, the transformation of Germans into Nazis or the making of citizens out of his majesty’s royal subjects in revolutionary France, contributors ask in what way revolutionary language shaped the realm of the possible during the momentous events that changed the face of Europe in the 19th and early 20th century.

Contributors: David Andress, Avner Ben Amos, Katerina Clark, Dan Diner, Elisabeth Domansky, Peter Fritzsche, Boris Gasparov, Igal Halfin, Jochen Hellbeck, Peter Holquist, David Hoffman, David Horn, Boris Kolonitski, Eric Naiman, Boris Neumann and Mark Steinberg.

...[an] outstanding volume...an invaluable resource for practicing cultural historians, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates...

Slavic Review

CONTENTS

Introduction

Igal Halfin

1.   Liberty and Unanimity: The Paradoxes of Subjectivity and Citizenship in the French Revolution

David Andress

2.   The Desacrilization of the Monarchy: Rumours and ‘Political Pornography’ during WWI

Boris Kolonitski

3.   Making Cossacks Counter-Revolutionary: The Don Host and the 1918 Anti-Soviet Insurgency

Peter Holquist 

4.   Modernity and the Poetics of Proletarian Discontent

Mark Steinberg

5.   Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin Era Autobiographical Texts

Jochen Hellbeck 

6.   On Being the Subjects of History:  Nazis as Twentieth-Century Revolutionaries

Peter Fritzsche

7.   Intimacy in an Ideological Key: The Communist Case of the Twenties and Thirties

Igal Halfin

8.   Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volga

Katerina Clark

9.   The Symphony as Mode of Production: Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony and the End of the Romantic Narrative

Boris Gasparov

10.  Regarding The Modern Body: Science, the Social, and the Construction of Italian Identities

David G. Horn

11.  Bodies of Knowledge: Physical Culture and the New Soviet Man

David L. Hoffman 

12.  Discourse Made Flesh: Healing and Terror in the Construction of Soviet Subjectivity

Eric Naiman 

13.  Death in Auschwitz as ‘Ugly Death’

Boaz Neumann

14.  A French Great Man’s Last Rites: The National Funeral of Leon Gambetta and the Transfer of His Heart to the Pantheon

Avner Ben Amos

15.  Enshrined Oblivion:  The POW Memorial Church in Bochum, Germany

Elisabeth Domansky

16.  Varieties of Interpretation: The Holocaust in Historical Memory

Dan Diner

Notes on Contributors

Index