We know the idea of invented traditions (or at least arose inorganically? due to external forces. Think of an example from your own life of something presented to yo

other writing question

We know the idea of invented traditions (or at least arose inorganically? due to external forces. Think of an example from your own life of something presented to you as traditional?? Do you know far back this tradition goes? What kinds of connections between people are nurtured by this tradition (or who is excluded)?
In what ways (if any) might you feel or think differently about that tradition in light of things presented and discussed in lectures and sections? Please make specific reference to at least one concept or case study from Week One (the invention? of the folk and folk music, Herder, 19th-century nationalism) and at least one concept or case study from Week Two (Czech nationalism) museums of modernity,? the Berlin Phonogram Archive, recording difference,? Béla Bartók) in this short paper.
This short paper should be 600 words.
Requirements: 600 words

Central EuropeEnemies, Neighbors,FriendsLONNIE R. JOHNSONNew York OxfordOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS1996

130 CENTRAL EUROPEthe difference between these two different kinds of freedom during thenineteenth century, arid it turned the Polish-Lithuanian Republic into agreater democracy than it ever had been.Polish Romantics also compared the fate of Poland to the Passion ofChrist: A chosen nation, Poland was scourged, crucified, and buried, but itwould rise in glory from the dead. The political ideals of the French Revo-lution and the messianic vision of the Resurrection became the leitmotifs ofPoland’s national struggle. For example, after an uprising in the Russianpartition of Poland in 1863, which was brutally squelched, the Polish eaglemounted on a black crossÑPoland crucifiedÑbecame a national symbolthat women wore as jewelry on chains around their necks, and after theproclamation of martial law by the Jaruzelski regime ended the initial phaseof the Solidarity movement in December 1981, women started wearing thisPolish cross again.Poles flocked into the Napoleonic armies because they identified theirnational cause with the French revolutionary principles of liberty, equality,and fraternity. Nonetheless, the Poles did not fare any better under the aus-pices of the Napoleonic empire than they did under the Prussian, Russian,or Austrian ones. Poland was merely a pawn that Napoleon ruthlessly ex-ploited in his imperial strategy, and he had no reservations about abusingthe Poles’ freedom-loving potential. In 1801, for example, Napoleon sent alegion of Polish volunteers to Haiti in the Caribbean to put down a rebel-lion of black slaves. Ironically, the Poles contributed to Haiti’s independenceby contracting swamp fever and dying nearly to the last man.Central European Soul: VolksgeistIf one had to identify a thinker responsible for giving Central European na-tionalism its peculiar twist, it would bejohann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803),an innovative philosopher who exerted tremendous influence on the de-velopment of German Romanticism. Although Herder had several prede-cessors, he was responsible for popularizing the idea of the Volksseek, or Volks-geist, the “soul” or “spirit” unique to each people.5 His observations andgeneralizations about collective attributes of the various peoples of Europe,as well as his prescriptions for discovering and preserving their respective”national souls,” made a profound impression on his contemporaries.As a proto-Romantic, Herder rejected many of the fundamental princi-ples of the rationalistic version of the Enlightenment and also the Fran-cophile and cosmopolitan form of civilization it propagated. He had greatreservations about the mechanical and linear idea of progress because hesaw it as a destructive agent that was leveling the differences between peo-ples, each of which had its own authentic nature or soul. Enlightened abso-lutism showed how homogeneous and restrictive new forms of rationalitycould be, and the modern centralized state was robbing people of their nat-ural freedoms. Manifestations of unadulterated human nature and “soul”Ñlike the emotive spontaneity of empathy or the creativity of the artistÑwerethe supreme expressions of humanity for Herder, not enlightened reason,
NATIONS WITHOUT STATES, STATES WITHOUT NATIONS 131science, or technology. Herder came to view civilization and culture as con-cepts almost antithetical in this context, and the most genuine manifesta-tions of a culture were to be found in its least “civilized” representatives: com-mon men and women living traditional ways of life.Each people had a unique collective soul, a Volksgeist, which was mani-fested in their collective voice: not merely in a common language, but alsoin the poems, stories, songs, and melodies of the common folk. Herder em-phasized the role of language and tradition in the formation of collective or”national” souls, and he popularized the idea of different “linguistic and cul-tural nations” without propagating the creation of nation-states. The mod-ern state was a perfect example of a rationalÑand hence “artificial”Ñformof organization for Herder, who entertained arcadian ideas about life in or-ganic, smaller communities. Herder also helped popularize the assumptionthat the common folk who lived traditional ways of life were the most pris-tine carriers and the most important curators of national culture.Herder’s fascination with language as a nation’s creative medium andcollective voice, as well as his conviction that the most authentic manifesta-tions of a people are to be sought in those traditions that had distancedthemselves least from the original nature or historical heritage of a people,made a deep impression on his Central European contemporaries. Herder’saesthetics of populism and romanticism added a strong retrospective and in-trospective dimension to the idea of belonging to a particular nation. He in-spired work in the fields of historical philology, the history of national liter-atures, medieval history, comparative ethnology, and an unprecedented in-terest in folk music and lore throughout Central Europe: all those things ofwhich national traditions are made.It would be difficult to underestimate the breadth and the depth ofHerder’s impact. Sir Isaiah Berlin, the famous British historian of ideas,maintained that “all regionalists, all defenders of the local against the uni-versal, all champions of deeply rooted forms of life, both reactionary andprogressive, both genuine humanists and obscurantist opponents of scien-tific progress, owe something, whether they know it or not, to the doctrineswhich Herder . . . introduced into European thought.”6It is important to distinguish here between Herder’s intentions and theconsequences of his work, because he was the sort of genius whose insightscould easily be misinterpreted. Herder, a Protestant minister, Christian hu-manist, and pacifist, thought that a natural harmony among all peoples andcultures based on empathy and understanding was possible. He was one ofthe first modern champions of cultural pluralism, or “diversity,” and a fore-runner of the contemporary multiculturalism. The critique of the white Eu-ropean and Eurocentric version of civilization by contemporary multicul-turalists is based to a considerable extent on the early-nineteenth-century,German Romantic concept of culture, or “roots.” Around 1800 Herder de-signed the methodological tools used for the discovery or rediscovery of eth-nic identities in the second half of the twentieth century. In this respect, hewas, for example, one of the intellectual fathers of the African American re-discovery of “Mother Africa.”
132 CENTRAL E U R O P EHerder was convinced that no one culture could be measured or judgedby the standards of another and that to “brag of one’s country is the stu-pidest form of boastfulness.”7 But Herder’s terminology and his observa-tions about the various peoples of Europe often were abused. In this respect,he helped create national stereotypes and those national feelings that, oncehurt, were to provide a breeding ground for conflict in the future.For example, Herder recognized that the Germans had played an am-biguous role in European history, or, as he formulated it, “more than all oth-ers have contributed to the weal and woe of this continent.”8 Some of the at-tributes that led to German success, often at the expense of their neighbors,were “their tallness and bodily strength, their bold, enterprising hardinessand valor, their heroic sense of duty that moved them to march after theirchiefs wherever they might lead and to divide countries as spoils of war.”(This passage merely shows how easy it was for the Nazis to draw up a na-tional genealogy “from Herder to Hitler.”)Although he disapproved of war, Herder described the “warlike consti-tution” of the Germans in terms of their national character. Germans hadbeen conditioned by a host of geographical and political circumstances ini-tially related to the Romans’ inability to subjugate Germany and subsequentlyby Germany’s glorious role as “a living wall against which the mad fury ofHuns, Hungarians, Mongols, and Turks dashed itself to pieces.” He also rec-ognized that the Germans’ eastern neighbors, “the poor Slavs,” frequentlywere on the cutting edge of the Germans’ warlike disposition, and heshowed a great deal of compassion for them.Herder admired the ancient Slavs as “charitable, almost extravagantlyhospitable, devoted to their rustic independence, yet loyal and law-abidingand contemptuous of pillaging and looting.” However, given the unfortu-nate position of the Slavs between the Germans and the various threats fromthe east, Herder observed: “All of this was no use to them against oppres-sion, it conduced it.” It is one of those quirks of history that a German wasone of the most influential figures in the development of Slavic historiog-raphy. Herder popularized the idea of peace-loving and protodemocraticSlavs as the victims of the aggressive, warlike, and autocratic Germans. Con-sequently, he played an essential role in the way the Slavs came to view theirown history, as a national struggle against German aggression that culmi-nated in the loss of ancient Slavic freedoms, and he envisioned a day whenthese “submerged peoples that were once happy and industrious” would risefrom their “long, languid slumber” and be “delivered from their chains ofbondage.”Herder also exerted great influence on Hungarian historiography. Hefelt that smaller peoples such as the Magyars were endangered by the threatof extinction via assimilation, a conjecture and insult that stimulated Hun-garian nationalism. The Hungarians also used Herder’s precepts to inter-pret their “conquest” of the Danube Basin at the end of the tenth centuryas a world historical event. The Magyars’ interpretation of their Drang nachWesten had certain affinities to the Germans’ rendition of their Drang nach
NATIONS WITHOUT STATES, STATES WITHOUT NATIONS 133Osten, and Hungarians found all sorts of similarities between their own no-ble traditions and martial virtues as warriors and victors and the Germanones. The glorification of national achievements and a sense of cultural su-periority became primary characteristics of Central European nationalism,and in this respect the Magyars were like the Germans, just smaller.Romanticism was politically ambivalent. Generally speaking, the pro-gressive and revolutionary aspects of Romanticism were and remained par-ticularly strong in France. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonicoccupations of Germany, however, the precepts of Romanticism evolved intoa set of a conservative, anti-Enlightenment, and antirevolutionary attitudesin the German-speaking world. Historians “discovered” the virtues of the po-litical and social order of the Middle Ages, and antimodernism became afashionable attitude that helped justify reactionary political measures.Czech political romanticism had more affinities to the French version,whereas both strains existed in the Polish and Hungarian traditions: a con-servative one for the aristocrats and magnates who glorified the freedomslost and wanted to restore the old order and a progressive or liberal one thataimed at the creation of democratic national states.The coalescence of romantic nationalism with the precepts of nineteenth-century liberalism allowed the “historical nations” of Central EuropeÑCzech, Polish, and HungarianÑto interpret their histories as a continuousstruggle for freedom and against foreign, and in particular German, hege-mony. Historical references to the Middle Ages and the ancient freedomsthat had been lost had the important function of equivocally legitimizingthe national struggles for modern freedoms that were substantially differ-ent, but freedom nonetheless. Herder’s assumption that the Slavs lost their”ancient freedoms” because their peace-loving dispositions made them un-able to contend with German aggression transformed those feelings of na-tional or cultural inferiority engendered by the history of German pre-dominanceÑand the Habsburgs were just as German as the Prussians fromthis perspectiveÑinto sentiments of moral superiority that helped define na-tional identities in the future.9Herder’s observations could be ambiguous. Taken out of context, a state-ment like “The Slavic peoples occupy a larger space on earth than they doin history” is full of devastating potential. Furthermore, although Herder’sconception of Volk was not biological or racialÑthe introduction of racialcategories for nations was one of the dubious achievements of the late nine-teenth centuryÑHerder interwove the concepts of nation, Volk, and Kulturin a manner that later lent itself to a racial interpretation. In one respect, itcontributed to the rise of modern anti-Semitism. Jews could not fulfill thelinguistic, cultural, or genealogical criteria for belonging to a nation, be-cause they spoke Yiddish or worshiped in Hebrew; possessed cultural andreligious traditions that were foreign to the larger national communitiesin which they lived; and had their roots, however remote, in the easternMediterranean world. Bastardizations of Herder’s historical observationsabout relationships between “dominating Germans” and “submissive Slavs”
134 CENTRAL EUROP Ealso led to the development of the concepts of “superior” and “inferior” peo-ples which culminated in the Nazi terminology of a Herrenvolk and Sklaven-volker: a German “master race” and the Slavic “slave races.”Despite Herder’s positive intentions, the Herderian model had disas-trous consequences in the long run. Each people in Central Europe as-sumed that it had the task of discovering or recovering its own soul, andsince Herder and his German Romantic contemporaries were among thefirst to do so, they established a paradigm that other Central European na-tions imitated. In this respect, the various national manifestations of theSlavic or Hungarian soul were ethnic imitations of the German Volksgeist, orto put it simply, some of the subsequent theoreticians of Slavic and Hun-garian nationalism used a German paradigm in an attempt to out-Germanthe Germans by making their national traditions at least as glorious andchauvinistic as the those of the Germans. Very few people exercised the typeof compassionate tolerance or empathy Herder had envisioned; no one wasinterested having a national past that did not surpass others in greatness;and Central Europeans have rarely demonstrated an ability to view them-selves as equals.From Nations to NationalismsInhabitants of the United Kingdom or the United States of America rarelyrefer to their sense of allegiance to the political institutions of their coun-tries or the sentiments that go along with them as nationalism. British sub-jects and citizens of the United States may consider themselves patrioticÑ”God Save the Queen” and “God Bless America”Ñbut not nationalistic.Nationalism is foreign to the Anglo-American understanding of democracy,and in English, the concept is imbued with negative connotations. Nation-alism is a “Continental” phenomenon.Part of the problem here is terminological. In English (as well as inFrench), the concept of nation is intimately associated and, in some casessynonymous, with the term “state.” Nationality refers to state citizenship andthe sense of allegiance to national institutions that goes along with it. Vir-tually anyone can become a U.S. citizen, as the history of emigration to theUnited States has amply demonstrated. The institutions of Great Britainunite the English, Welsh, and Scottish subjects of His or Her Majesty, despitetheir differences, and in France the idea of the republic has gone hand inhand with the concept of the French nation.The genealogy of modern nationalism is a complex topic,10 so it will haveto suffice here to observe that the liberal democratic Anglo-American andFrench revolutionary republican traditions identified the people’s allegianceto the institutions of the (democratic) state and the (democratic) politicalprinciples on which they were based as the primary criteria for being a mem-ber of the nation, whereas the Central and Eastern European ones did not.In other words, the Western European equations of state equals nationequals people (the presence of political institutions interested in promot-ing that mode of national identification from the top down) and people
304 NOTES TO PAGES 125-135trans. Lewis White Beck, Robert E. Anchor, and Emil L. Fackenheim (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 3.Chapter 71. ‘The last Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, saw the demise of the empire comingand followed the example of Xapoleon (who had proclaimed himself emperor of Francein 1804), by inventing a new imperial title, emperor of Austria, for himself and his dynasty.Then he disbanded the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 to save himself the embarrassment ofhaving Napoleon do it for him. Subsequently, Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, be-came Francis I, the first emperor of Austria.2. J.E.E.D. Acton, “Nationality,” Home and Foreign Review 1 (July 1862), reprinted io Acton’sEssays on Freedom, and Power, with a new introduction by Gertrude Hirnmelfarb (New York:Meridian Books, 1984), pp. 146-147. Lord Acton believed that institutions for the estab-lishment and preservation of liberty, such as those of the United Kingdom, not nations ornationalism, provided the only sound basis for a state. He explained that “those states aresubstantially the most perfect which, like the British and Austrian Empires, include variousdistinct nationalities without oppressing them” (p. 168). It is questionable whether the var-ious nationalities in the British and Austrian empires shared his opinion.3. Given the step-by-step liberalization of the Habsburgs’ imperial policies in Galicia, thesouthern portion of occupied Poland gradually became a center of Polish culture in thenineteenth century, and some historians have compared this ‘Ycemcrgence” of Poland withthe Hungarians’ achievement of more autonomy, the Compromise of 1867, in the Habs-bnrg Empire. However, the Poles achieved cultural autonomy in only part of Poland, where-as the Hungarians reali/ed a considerable amount of political autonomy in all of Hungary.4. Norman Davies, (rod’s Playground: A History of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1981), vol. l,p. 525.5. Herder and his contemporaries used a number of different but related terms such as “na-tional spirit,” “spirit or soul of the people,” “the spirit or genius of the nation,” and “nationalcharacter”: Nationalist, Ge.ist des Volkes, Seek des Volhfs, Ceist der Nation, Genius der Nation,Nalionalcharakler.6. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking Press,1976), p. 176.7. Cited in ibid., p. 157.8. This and (he following quotations from Herder are from the sixteenth book of Herder’sIdeas for the History of Mankind (1784Ñ1791), a portion of which is translated and reprintedin Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, ed. Hans Kohn (New York: Van Nostrand Rcinhold,1965), pp. 104-108.9. For the influence of I lerder and liberalism on Czech historiography, see Richard G. Plasch-ka, “The Political Significance of Frantisek Palacky,” in Nationalismus, 8taatsgewa.ll, Wider-stand, ed. Horst Haselsteiner et al. (Vienna: Vcrlag fur Geschichte und Politik, 1985), pp.163-179.10. See I.iah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1992), as well as the works of F-. f. Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and BenediktAnderson, cited in the following notes. In particular, Hobsbawm and Gellner address thedistinctiveness of the Central European situation.11. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 1.12. Croatia formed a union with the kingdom of Hungary in 1102, yet from the constitution-al point of view, it was a separate political entity in the kingdom of Hungary, with specialhistorical rights and privileges. The Croats then used their “historical rights” to bicker withthe Hungarians about their status in the kingdom of Hungary, just as the Hungarians usedtheir “historical rights” to argue with the Habsburgs about the status of the kingdom ofHungary in the Habsburg Empire.13. In this context, “nationality” does not refer to citizenship but, rather, the legal status of na-tional minorities in the empire and their relationship to its predominant political “histor-ical nations”: German-Austrians and Hungarians.
NOTES TO PAGES 136 Ñ 347 30514. E. J. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism, Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. 1990), p. 12. Hobsbawm refers to Miroslav Hroch’s three-phase periodi/ation in his Social Preconditions of National Revival in Eurojie (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1985).15. Hobsbawm, Nations find Nationalism Since 1780, p. 10.16. See the excellent study by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Rejections on the Ori-gin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).17. France is frequently cited as the prime example of the nation-state. But often the fact is over-looked that the homogeni/atiorr of France and the creation of a more uniform national cul-ture were a long and complicated process, which Eugcn Weber analyzed in his study Peas-ants into Frenchmen: The, Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, Calif.: StanfordUniversity Press, 1974). To Weber, mandatory public education, military conscription, andrailroads were the most important instruments and institutions of nation-building.18. “L’crrcur historique, sont un f’acteur essential de la formation d’unc nation” (Ernest Re-nan, Qu ‘est que c’esl urie nation? [Paris, 18821, pp. ‘-8, cited in Ernest Gellner, Culture, Iden-tity, and Politics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19871, p. 6).19. See Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, p. 37-38. Hobsbawm also mentions athird criterion which, with the exception of Germany, is hardly applicable to Central Eu-rope: “a proven capacity for conquest.”20. The kingdom of Bohemia, with its admixture of Czech and German nobles, had been partof the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation without, of course, being German. How-ever, in the nineteenth century Czech nationalists started to interpret the history of thekingdom of Bohemia in Czech national terms.21. Although the Habsburgs spoke German, they never pursued “Gcrmanization” policies.Rather, their main interest was in consolidating and increasuing their dynastic power’.22. Although there was a distinguished Hungarian literary tradition, Magyar lacked modernadministrative, technical, and scientific terms. For example, the Hungarian word lor”stale,” dlladalom (today, dllam), was invented in this period. The development of modernMagyar’ relied heavily ou borrowing from German or imitating Gerrrrarr constructions suchas compound words.23. See Gabor Pajkossy, “Problems of the Language of State in a Multinational Country: De-bales at the Hungarian Diets of the 1840s,” in Ethnicity and Society in Hungary, ed. FerencGlat/ (Budapest: Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1990), vol. 2,pp. 97-110.24. Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuri.es (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1983), vol. 1, p. 306.25. The standardization of Serbo-Croatian was asymmetrical in that it relied to a some-what greater extent on Serbian usage. However, vernacular Croatian maintained itsindigenous vocabulary despite standardization. Since the deterioration of Yugoslaviaand the proclamation of Croatian independence in 1991, the gap between the two lan-guages has increased because Croatian nationalists have promoted the use of “authentic”Croatian.26. Cited in Plaschka, “Political Significance of Frantisck Palacky,” p. 171.27. On the demographic: development of Central European Jews in the Habsburg Empire,see William O. McCagg Jr., A History of Habsburg fews, 1670-1918 (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1989), pp. 146-48, 190-191. The westward migration of Jews from the re-gion was not merely continental. For many reasons, millions of Jews from Galicia and Rus-sia emigrated at the end of the nineteenth century to the United States. They sought eco-rioniic opportunity, wished to avoid being conscripted into the army, and \vere fleeingpogroms.28. Sec Steve Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1967-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989), pp. 122-188.29. This is the conclusion that McCagg reaches in his comprehensive study, History of HabsburgJews, pp. 224-226.30. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of Books, April 26, 1984,p. 35.

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