“The history of the emotions has become one of the most dynamic fields in historical research in the twenty-first century. By focusing on one emotion–fear–this volume adds another dimension to our understanding of the way people negotiated their encounters with other people and events in the past. It is a riveting read.”–Joanna Bourke, author of Fear: A Cultural History

“Ambitious and timely, this book truly advances the discussion of fear across considerable time and regional space. This result is an important next step in emotions history, and a direct link to a variety of developments in the political and religious sphere.”–Peter N. Stearns, provost of George Mason University

“Fear is the condition we live in. Or is it? In this timely book, a stellar cast of experts uncovers a perplexing array of concrete historical instances of fear, from the eighteenth-century Tupac Amaru Rebellion in colonial Latin America to Dutch Islamophobia in 2010. The reader will come away with a sense of the mind-boggling diversity of practices by which fear has been experienced. This book harbors a small hope that the current politics of fear might become history.”–Jan Plamper, Goldsmiths, University of London

Michael Laffan is professor of history at Princeton University. His books include The Makings of Indonesian Islam (Princeton). Max Weiss is assistant professor of history and Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon.

Facing Fear

The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15359-9

Contents

Preface……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..viiIntroduction: Fear and Its Opposites in the History of Emotions MAX WEISS………………………………………………………………….11 Fear of the Thirty Years War DAVID LEDERER……………………………………………………………………………………………102 Conceptions of Terror in the European Enlightenment RONALD SCHECHTER…………………………………………………………………….313 “When Fear Rather than Reason Dominates”: Priests behind the Lines in the Tupac Amaru Rebellion (1780–83) CHARLES WALKER…………………544 Fear in Colonial California and within the Borderlands LISBETH HAAS……………………………………………………………………..745 Weimar Cinema between Hypnosis and Enlightenment ANDREAS KILLEN…………………………………………………………………………916 Italian Fascism’s Wartime Enemy and the Politics of Fear MARLA STONE…………………………………………………………………….1147 The Persecuted Body: Evangelical Internationalism, Islam, and the POLITICS of Fear MELANI MCALISTER…………………………………………1338 Danger, Media, and the Urban Experience in Delhi RAVI SUNDARAM………………………………………………………………………….1629 Fear of the Past: Post-Soviet Culture and the Soviet Terror ALEXANDER ETKIND……………………………………………………………..18310 White Hajjis: Dutch Islamophobias Past and Present MICHAEL LAFFAN………………………………………………………………………202Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….217Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………265Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….267

Chapter One

Fear of the thirty years War

DAVID LEDERER, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH

Does fear generate crisis or do crises trigger fears? The Thirty Years War can undoubtedly be described as a crisis of the highest magnitude, accompanied in Central Europe by an almost ubiquitous state of fear. Contemporaries depicted the war and its accompanying atrocities with visceral horror. Any inclination to quantify their fear by cliometrically trawling through eyewitness accounts from the destruction of Magdeburg (e.g., those by Daniel Friese, a boy of twelve at the time; or the scientist and future mayor of Magdeburg Otto von Guericke; or the Protestant mercenary Georg Ackerman, who served the Catholic League under Tilly) or Friesseneger’s Chronicles for references to shock and angst is obviated by fear’s looming presence on nearly each and every page. Indeed, contemporary diarists and chroniclers lamented the impossibility of describing the fears they suffered, which were either too horrible for words, would require far too many words than it would ever be possible to compose, or simply because not enough words existed in their vocabulary to adequately describe the multifarious range of their terrors. Even after three centuries, fear of the Thirty Years War continues to haunt the German psyche. At the beginning of the twentieth century, mothers still threatened children with ominous tales of vicious Croatian mercenaries; as late as 1962, rural Hessians responding to a government questionnaire still ranked the Thirty Years War as first among German catastrophes, ahead of the Second World War, the Nazi reign of terror, the Black Death, and the First World War.

In an attempt to address the relationship between fears and crises on the basis of the example of the Thirty Years War, we might consider how the first European total war evoked a universal fear response. We can also point to expressions of preexisting apocalyptic fears in the material context of a long-term crisis. Therefore, my present interest lies chiefly in the identification and analysis of both universal and traditional elements in contemporary portrayals of fear aroused by the specific events of the war itself. Taken altogether, the present analysis suggests that the linchpin of the relationship between crises and fear during the Thirty Years War was their literal embodiment by contemporary political culture and a peculiar understanding of history.

Understanding the relationship of fears to crises holds special significance in this case, since historians used to regard the Thirty Years War as one manifestation of the so-called General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. After several decades, the crisis debate became mired over its nature (i.e., as an economic conjuncture, a constitutional crisis related to innovations in military technology, a social struggle between the nobility and the parvenus, or part of the structural shift from feudalism to capitalism) and fell out of fashion in the 1990s. However, a recent forum in the American Historical Review puts it back on our agenda, featuring a keynote article by Geoffrey Parker. Parker figured among the earliest and most vocal proponents of the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century as an interpretive model. In its current incarnation, he embellishes crisis theory with data emerging from climatic history on the impact of the Little Ice Age, effectively adding a global/empirical dimension to an originally Eurocentric social-historical explanation. The immediacy of the twenty-first-century scientific debate over climate change resonates throughout his argument for adding the Little Ice Age as an integral component of the Seventeenth-Century Crisis, endowing Parker’s provocative renovation of crisis theory with new life.

Most relevant to our current inquiry into the relationship between fears and crises are the concluding remarks to the aforementioned AHR forum offered by J. B. Shank. Etymologically, Shank unmasks “crisis” as an ancient Greek medical term reintroduced into contemporary parlance by humanist physicians during the Renaissance to describe a serious trauma to the body. Only gradually did it shed its original medical meaning and evolve into modern usage, at first metaphorically, as a depiction of social tensions. Shank expresses grave reservations about forensic methods adopted by historians and masquerading as natural science. As he astutely points out:

Among those assumptions [i.e., historical consensus after 1954 on the Seventeenth-Century Crisis—DL] was the idea that historical entities akin to the human body existed in the past (in this case an entity called “seventeenth-century society”), and that these entities could be objects of scientific historical analysis. Also assumed was the applicability of the conceptual tools used by medical science to understand health in human bodies (in this case “crisis theory”) when trying to understand the cognate objects of historical science (in this case “seventeenth-century society”).

In other words, Shank criticizes the epistemological implications of historians applying medical terminology to history. Usage of the loan-word implies an objective and factual credibility usually reserved for the natural sciences (though Shank expresses misgivings with the latter presumption as well). More to our point, he begs the question whether any society possesses enough of an organic life cycle to bear comparisons to the human body at all. Let’s now test this.

Crisis Embodied

Shank’s critique of the application of a Greek medical expression to a twentieth-century debate over the General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century notwithstanding, one can actually argue that seventeenth-century contemporaries may have been more comfortable with the term than perhaps we should be. Even if the word “crisis” seldom, if ever, appeared directly in their writings per se, early modern Europeans regularly depicted their society as a body that could suffer trauma. As a macrocosm of human nature, it was theoretically ensouled and able to experience emotions like fear. During the Thirty Years War, the body politic often appeared twisted, contorted, or monstrous in form, illustrative of a fearful condition affecting society as a whole.

For example, nearly two decades after the Peace of Westphalia, in 1667 the historian and political philosopher Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) wrote De statu Imperii Germanici. Vexed by terrible childhood memories of the war, he remained anxious about the health of the Holy Roman Empire. Like many contemporaries, Pufendorf embodied society and ascribed particular ailments to it. In chapter 6, “Of the form of the German Empire,” he commented on the physiognomy of its body politic:

As the health of natural bodies, and the strength and ability of artificial composures results from the harmony of their parts and their connexion or union with one another, so also moral bodies or societies are to be esteemed strong or weak, as the parts of which they are composed, are found well or ill formed and united together, and consequently as the intire form or whole of them are elegantly or irregularly and disorderly formed and united.

An enlightened interest in natural law prompted Pufendorf to rationally dissect the imperial body politic and the normalcy of its constitution. Frustratingly, he sought to isolate the character of its government. Despite the free cities, he noted, the empire deviated in form from a democratic commonwealth. And in spite of the authority of the electors to choose their own sovereign, subordination to the emperor subsequently deprived them of oligarchic status. Finally, although the emperor personified the titular head of the body politic, his elective succession deprived him of regular or even limited dynastic rights.

Horrified by the forensic evidence, Pufendorf arrived at his disturbing diagnosis of deformity in the political body: “There is now nothing left for us to say, but that Germany is an irregular body and like some mis-shapen monster (Germaniam esse irregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile), if it be measured by the common rules of politicks and civil prudence.” He digressed briefly to vent an anti-Habsburg spleen, blaming the empire’s woes on the house of Austria. Nonetheless, Pufendorf patriotically rebuked past appeals for invasive surgery through foreign intervention as an unsound solution to imperial malaise.

The terrible war had proven to him how the irregularity of the empire’s constitution “affords the matter of an inextricable and incurable disease and many internal convulsions,” leading to degeneracy and corruption—terms borrowed from religious and medical parlance linking moral and bodily decay. Appropriately, the title of chapter 7 (“Of the Strength and Diseases of the German Empire”) foreshadowed his prognostic intent. Despite a strong personal enmity toward the Habsburgs, Pufendorf pensively favored dynastic monarchy (if not an Austrian one) as the only suitably operative cure for imperial deformity.

Pufendorf’s bodily metaphor of crisis can offer us substantial clues to help analyze and contextualize our search for culturally unique fears. Briefly put, we might ask: Was Pufendorf’s monstro simile only a literary metaphor? And were other bodily representations of the war simply understood as allegories, or did they have deeper significance in political culture? Viewed as collective imaginings of fear and crisis, the war emerges as a complex of symbols crawling out from a baroque casket of monstrosities. In order to penetrate contemporary fears and unlock the corporeal code of the Thirty Years War through representations of crisis, the present analysis stretches orthodox chronological boundaries and tests notions of wartime realities as universally comprehensible.

Pufendorf was not alone in his fearful depiction of the empire as a body wracked by deformity and illness. Pathologies had already materialized in the thick of the war and he was surely cognizant of them. An Unanticipated Deliberation, published anonymously in 1643, commenced with this threatening corporeal image:

Just as in the human body, where serious illnesses occur from time to time and put it in such a sorry condition that one cannot help but believe there is nothing else to expect, but its death and complete ruin; no less can humans once again achieve their former health in such illness as through the grace of God, either through appropriate physic, or a good Diet [a conscious pun on the Imperial Diet—DL], or through proper council. So too can the political body be similarly afflicted.

While it foreshadowed Pufendorf’s description of a “moral body or society,” this earlier tract relied analytically on religious justification rather than natural law. The author blamed the war on sin and immorality and offered spiritual physic in the form of repentance and atonement. Like Pufendorf’s De statu Imperii Germanici, the Unanticipated Deliberation derived its concept of history from Daniel 2, the interpretation of the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel’s prophecy divided world history into four empires. The “four empires” theory continued to dominate early modern German academic historiography—especially among Evangelical Protestants—long after it had been discarded elsewhere in Europe. It embodied the empire’s special purpose, its manifest destiny.

For example, the Universal Chronicle (a collaborative effort by Joachim Carion and Philipp Melanchthon) became the standard history text at Evangelical universities in the empire after 1557. Combined with the medieval tradition of the translatio imperii, the Chronicle legitimized Charlemagne’s succession from the Caesars of antiquity. Through a transfer of power affected by the Bishop of Rome in the absence of temporal authority, the Holy Roman Emperors became legitimate heirs to the Roman Empire. 13 The French jurist Jean Bodin subsequently challenged this historical interpretation as parochial in his Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566), because it located the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation at the epicenter of a historical process so obviously repudiated by recent events. Still, the theory of the four empires continued to inform the historical understanding of imperial manifest destiny as the last world empire, and it retained common currency among university-trained German nobles, burghers, jurists, and clergymen alike. Indeed, in largely unreflexive fashion, one recent university text for history students still applied a body metaphor to the structure of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in a chapter titled “A Body Comprised of a Head and Limbs.”

The longevity and widespread reception of Daniel 2 is illustrated by a copper etching, Colossus, that appeared in 1667, the same year as Pufendorf’s De statu Imperii Germanici. The copper etching embodies all of world history as a giant statue, incorporating the four empires theory. The Holy Roman Empire represented its most recent and final incarnation (figure 1.1a). Different body parts symbolized the four empires from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream: the head (made of gold) is Assyria, Nineveh, and Babylon; the pectorals (of silver) are the Medes, Persians, and Greeks to the time of Alexander; the stomach (of bronze) represents the successor kingdoms in Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor. The fourth and final phase of history begins at the pelvis with the Romans, separating after Augustus into the legs and feet (of iron and clay), embodying on the one side the Holy Roman Empire to the reign of the melancholic Emperor Rudolf II (r. 1576–1612) in the West (iron) and on the other the Ottoman Empire to the reign of Selim II (r. 1566–1574) in the East (clay) respectively.

According to the biblical prophecy, the brittle clay feet of the Colossus are smashed by a rock (petra). The rock is Christ, destined to topple and destroy the hollow edifice of worldly power at the second coming. After Daniel interpreted his dream, Nebuchadnezzar reportedly had a huge Colossus of gold built near Babylon in the plain of Dura (Daniel 3). In a parallel vision, Daniel 7 tells of four terrible creatures (a lion with eagle’s wings, a flesh-devouring bear, a four-headed leopard, and, finally, a dreadful and horrible beast with ten horns and great iron teeth), each embodying another vision of the four empires. A hand-drawn image of the Colossus, sketched by a university student at a lecture in the sixteenth century, bears an unmistakable resemblance to the later copper etching (figure 1.1b), suggesting how the dominant image from German academic historiography had already been disseminated into popular culture a century earlier.

Daniel’s interpretation of dreams, also a popular theme in preaching, encouraged ordinary Europeans to decipher their own nightmares as portents. After the Thirty Years War, for example, an Alsatian tinsmith’s apprentice, Augustin Güntzer, wrote about interpretations of a nightmare he had as an eleven-year-old child in 1606. A horrifying black rider armed with spear and sword appeared in the dream, identified himself as the devil, and challenged the boy and four white angels to mortal combat. When he awoke, Güntzer confessed to his father “I fear, it shall come true,” whereupon his father incorrectly interpreted the dream as an evil omen. For many years, Güntzer complained of mental perturbations and anxieties. As the events of 1618 to 1648 unfolded, he interpreted them as the incarnation of his childhood fears. After the war ended, however, with society more or less intact, he divined the true meaning of the dream as an awe-inspiring portent sent to teach him a respectful fear of God (in German, Ehrfurcht). The Iron Empire had survived the test of the struggle.

(Continues…)

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