Fascinating. Can't wait for the next installment. I'm learning more history now than since my school days decades ago. I helps me understand the growing madness at home and abroad.
I'm on the last few pages of Robert Gerwarth's _The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923_ (2017), and had already decided that _The Red Prince_, which has been on one of my shelves since early 2020, was going to be next. What an interesting coincidence!
Gerwarth is an excellent historian and that would be very good backdrop. In these little capsules I am leaving out 1919-1922, when Wilhelm took part in some of the conflicts G describes.
Oh that's interesting. I'm going to have to look farther into that. I've read his _November 1918_, and have collected just about all the books in his Greater War series. I've been impressed with him. In keeping with my interest in Eastern European history that started when I was required to take that course in ethnomusicology and chose "Music and Politics in Eastern Europe" when I was studying historical musicology exactly 30 years ago, I've moved farther and farther into Eastern Europe. As Alexander Watson said (in a youtube video), the eastern front is arguably the more important front in the Great War. I would add WWII as well, which is of course not to deny the importance of the western front in either war, but dang it, it's way past time for historians in the West to start looking at Eastern Europe. I can't tell you how much I loved Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's _War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I_. He showed such great sympathy for the native peoples of Ober Ost and their complex webs of social relationships. And how is it possible to fully understand the Weimar Republic without understanding the eastern front? I looked up the Hutsul clan, and when I saw this photograph, I thought, "What did that music sound like?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutsuls#/media/File:Hutsul_musicians.jpg
By the way, when I read that Wilhelm occasionally wore a dress, my mind wandered back to a book I had read years ago, Caroline Walker Bynum's (Columbia U.) _The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336_ (1995), in which she writes that one of the Church Fathers (can't remember which one) advised men not to wear dresses, not because of any moral concerns, but because he thought that if Jesus were to return while a man is wearing a dress, He might not recognize him and would very likely get thrown into the fiery pit by mistake.
Thinking about Ukraine.
The Lord's Prayer
Kyiv Chamber Choir
https://youtu.be/sG_Dz2TLLt0
Fascinating. Can't wait for the next installment. I'm learning more history now than since my school days decades ago. I helps me understand the growing madness at home and abroad.
Nothing better than history!
I'm on the last few pages of Robert Gerwarth's _The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923_ (2017), and had already decided that _The Red Prince_, which has been on one of my shelves since early 2020, was going to be next. What an interesting coincidence!
Gerwarth is an excellent historian and that would be very good backdrop. In these little capsules I am leaving out 1919-1922, when Wilhelm took part in some of the conflicts G describes.
Oh that's interesting. I'm going to have to look farther into that. I've read his _November 1918_, and have collected just about all the books in his Greater War series. I've been impressed with him. In keeping with my interest in Eastern European history that started when I was required to take that course in ethnomusicology and chose "Music and Politics in Eastern Europe" when I was studying historical musicology exactly 30 years ago, I've moved farther and farther into Eastern Europe. As Alexander Watson said (in a youtube video), the eastern front is arguably the more important front in the Great War. I would add WWII as well, which is of course not to deny the importance of the western front in either war, but dang it, it's way past time for historians in the West to start looking at Eastern Europe. I can't tell you how much I loved Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's _War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I_. He showed such great sympathy for the native peoples of Ober Ost and their complex webs of social relationships. And how is it possible to fully understand the Weimar Republic without understanding the eastern front? I looked up the Hutsul clan, and when I saw this photograph, I thought, "What did that music sound like?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutsuls#/media/File:Hutsul_musicians.jpg
By the way, when I read that Wilhelm occasionally wore a dress, my mind wandered back to a book I had read years ago, Caroline Walker Bynum's (Columbia U.) _The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336_ (1995), in which she writes that one of the Church Fathers (can't remember which one) advised men not to wear dresses, not because of any moral concerns, but because he thought that if Jesus were to return while a man is wearing a dress, He might not recognize him and would very likely get thrown into the fiery pit by mistake.