The Violence of War: Images and Experiences of Conflict

战争在现代历史上发挥了重要作用。这个项目以一种新颖的方式调查了它们的影响。它的工作假设是，士兵和平民在征兵和大规模战争时代经历的军事冲突，造成了对战争的恐惧和抵抗，尽管很少被承认，但改变了战争被想象、宣布和发动的条件。民族主义的国防要务和围绕战争现实的禁忌在很大程度上掩盖了这种对战争的反对。我的发现将对历史社会学和国际关系等其他学科和领域产生影响。我自己对德国(人民战争)的研究认为，拿破仑战争(或称解放战争)、统一战争和第一次世界大战决定性地改变了欧洲大陆上的权力分配和国家之间的关系，并影响了一系列德国政权的建立和稳定。这项研究探讨了士兵和平民在战时如何经历这种冲突，以及随后在和平时期如何表现和理解这些冲突。如果没有这样的理解，就很难理解过去两个世纪德国和欧洲政治的戏剧性转变。我认为，德国人发动战争的轻松(或不情愿)，以及此类战争对国内政治的深远影响，与当代人对冲突概念的长期转变有关。我的研究重新评估了现代德国史学中的一种普遍观点，即民族国家时代的战争被视为一种光荣、必要或不可避免的集体努力，被达尔文式的竞争或大国的无政府状态证明是正当的。它询问如何将这种观点与士兵自身的恐惧和对战争的恐惧、他们不愿妖魔化敌人以及他们准备在大规模征兵期间质疑传统的国家理由相一致。该项目的个人和合作部分都调查了国外持续、被认为是英勇的和越来越不分青红皂白地使用暴力与扩大对国内暴力行为和杀戮的管制和禁止之间的紧张关系。在19世纪上半叶，随着内阁战争演变为国家冲突，平民作为士兵被要求代表他们的国家杀人，但作为公民，他们被期望过着和平、体面和克制的生活。在战时，十九世纪和二十世纪的进步、文明或文化的支持者面临死亡、不道德和生存的徒劳。技术虽然使凶手与受害者保持距离，但却增加了杀戮和致残的程度、随机性和破坏性。这项研究旨在为这些体验和表现的差异提供新的线索。该项目的协作部分将检验这些关于战争影响和公众对军事冲突的描述的假设。举办了两期讲习班和一次国际会议，从而出版了一本关于暴力和战斗(战争的恐怖)的经验和陈述的编辑卷，目的是促进跨学科议程：第一期讲习班将集中讨论文学批评、文化研究和艺术史以及历史的相关分学科的方法和结果；第二期讲习班将侧重于历史学、历史社会学、国际关系和战争研究。会议和编辑的卷将传播这种跨学科合作的成果。该项目的总体目标是将士兵和平民的战争经历研究转化为相关学科的研究，并建立长期的研究网络和小组，这些网络和小组将在获奖期后继续下去。

Wars have played a fundamental part in modern history. This project investigates their impact in a novel way. Its working hypothesis is that soldiers' and civilians' experiences of military conflict during an age of conscription and mass warfare created fears of and resistance to war that, though they were rarely acknowledged, altered the conditions under which wars were imagined, declared and waged. Nationalist imperatives of defence and taboos surrounding the realities of combat have obscured much of this opposition to war. My findings will have implications for other disciplines and fields such as historical sociology and international relations. My own research on Germany (The People's Wars) argues that the Napoleonic wars, or 'wars of liberation', the wars of unification and the First World War decisively altered the distribution of power and relations between states on the Continent, and affected the construction and stability of a series of German regimes. The study explores how such conflicts were experienced by soldiers and civilians during wartime, and how they were subsequently represented and understood during peacetime. Without such an understanding, it is difficult to make sense of the dramatic shifts characterising the politics of Germany and Europe over the past two centuries. I argue that the ease - or reluctance - with which Germans went to war, and the far-reaching consequences of such wars on domestic politics, were related to long-term transformations in contemporaries' conceptualisation of conflict. My research reassesses the common view in the historiography of modern Germany that war in the age of the nation-state was seen as a glorious, necessary or inescapable collective endeavour, justified by Darwinian competition or the anarchy of great powers. It asks how such a view can be reconciled with soldiers' own horror and fear of war, their unwillingness to demonize the enemy and their readiness to question traditional reasons of state during a period of mass conscription. Both the individual and collaborative components of the project investigate the tension between the persistent, supposedly heroic and increasingly indiscriminate use of violence abroad and the expanding regulation and prohibition of violent acts and killing at home. As cabinet warfare turned into national conflict during the first half of the nineteenth century, civilians-as-soldiers were asked to kill on behalf of their nations, yet as citizens they were expected to live peaceful, respectable and restrained lives. In wartime, nineteenth and twentieth-century supporters of progress, civilization or culture were confronted with death, immorality and the futility of existence. Technology, although distancing the killer from his victim, increased the extent, randomness, and destructiveness of killing and maiming. This research aims to shed new light on these disparities of experience and representation. The collaborative component of the project will test these hypotheses about the impact of warfare and the public portrayal of military conflicts. Two workshops and an international conference, leading to the publication of an edited volume on experiences and representations of violence and combat (The Horrors of War), have been designed to facilitate an interdisciplinary agenda: the first workshop will concentrate on the approaches and findings of literary criticism, cultural studies and the history of art, together with relevant sub-disciplines of history; the second workshop will focus on history, historical sociology, international relations and war studies. The conference and edited volume will disseminate the results of this interdisciplinary collaboration.The project's overall aim is to transform the study of soldiers' and civilians' experiences of warfare in relevant academic disciplines and to establish longer-term research networks and groupings that will continue beyond the period of the award.