Male Identity and Martial Codes of Honor: A Comparison of the War Memoirs of Robert Graves, Ernst Junger, and Kande Kamara
This article compares and contrasts the memoirs of three combatants from the First World War: Robert Graves, Ernst Jünger, and the West African Tirailleur Kande Kamara. Though the soldiers' distinctive cultural heritage and service in the British, German, and French colonial armies, respectively, informed each interpretation, they shared similar, though particular, concepts of male identity and military duty that were socially specific, which they strove to honor. Their interpretations addressed particular audiences—categorized as "the victorious," "the defeated," and "the exploited"—that contributed to and reflected the political liturgies informing mass movements—especially in Germany and the Third World—throughout the twentieth century.
Race, Empire and First World War Writing: France's legacy to Demba Mboup? A Senegalese griot and his descendants remember his military service during the First World War
During the First World War, approximately 2 million subject peoples from Africa, Asia, and North America (including African Americans and Amerindians) were recruited to serve as soldiers in European and American armies. Unlike their Western counterparts, who left over one thousand published memoirs and millions of letters, diaries, and other written accounts of their experiences, these men, who were usually drawn from pre-industrial and non-literate or semiliterate backgrounds, left precious few records of their wartime ordeal. This essay seeks to redress this imbalance by introducing the oral history of a young Wolof griot, Demba Mboup (Figure 3), who was one of approximately 140,000 West Africans recruited into the French army to serve as combatants on the Western Front. In a brief postscript, differing interpretations by his daughter and grandson about the significance of Mboup's wartime service are offered to illustrate how the meaning of the war for West Africans was transmitted and transmuted across multiple generations, and its shifting significance over time. Mboup's life history is only the third published memoir by a West African veteran of the First World War. Mboup's interview was one of 85 conducted in 1982–3 with Senegalese veterans or other witnesses of the First World War. Like Bernal Diaz's authoritative account The Conquest of New Spain , written in his mid seventies and with a preliminary note completed at the age of eighty-four, these African memoirs recorded in old age offer remarkable glimpses into their subjects' own youthful cross-cultural encounters.
Fascism and the right in Europe, 1919-1945
This new text places interwar European fascism squarely in its historical context and analyses its relationship with other right wing, authoritarian movements and regimes. Beginning with the ideological roots of fascism in pre-1914 Europe, Martin Blinkhorn turns to the problem-torn Europe of 1919 to 1939 in order to explain why fascism emerged and why, in some settings, it flourished while in others it did not. In doing so he considers not just the 'major' fascist movements and regimes of Italy and Germany but the entire range of fascist and authoritarian ideas, movements and regimes present in the Europe of 1919-1945.