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James
Retallack University Professor Emeritus |
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email: james.retallack@utoronto.ca |
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News
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Online Lecture November
2023
In 2022–23 I was privileged
to be a Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellow, when the Jackman
Humanities Institute’s annual theme was “Labour.” Besides co-organizing the
international conference that convened in Toronto in May 2023 on “Work,
Class, and Social Democracy” (see below), I was asked to deliver an online
lecture about my research, which I was happy to do. In this lecture I consider
the challenges of writing the biography of a working-class political
superstar. August Bebel was leader of the world’s largest socialist party
before 1914. The modern medial age had made him into a global celebrity, an
“anti-Kaiser.” His origin story as an impoverished child and humble craftsman
created a public image of mythical proportions. How best to grapple with that
image? Perhaps the biographer should try less to puncture the myth than let
out just enough air to settle the man back to earth. ______________________________________________ Published March 2023
Synopsis: Electoral politics in Imperial
Germany reflected two kinds of democratization. Social democratization could
not be stopped, but political democratization was opposed by many members of
the German bourgeoisie. Frightened by the electoral success of the Social
Democrats after 1871, they battled socialists, liberals, and Jews at election
time, but they also strove to rewrite the electoral rules of the game. Das rote
Sachsen devotes
special attention to various semi-democratic voting systems whereby a general
and equal suffrage (for the Reichstag) was combined with limited and unequal
ones for local and regional parliaments. It also illustrates how bourgeois
and aristocratic Germans grew to fear left-wing “terrorism” in the age of
mass politics. Certainly twists and turns lay ahead, yet that fear made it
easier for Hitler and the Nazis to win elections in the 1920s and to entomb
German democracy in 1933. ______________________________________________ Published Online March 2023
Synopsis: The documents and images in this
Open Access online collection of primary sources – presented on mirror sites
in German and English – allow us to look beneath the surface calm of
Bismarckian Germany. What we see there is a picture shot through with contradictions,
conflicts, and crises. This revised 2nd edition advances the
hypothesis that Imperial Germany’s highly dynamic economy, society, and
culture were embedded within an authoritarian political system. That system
was also dynamic, not sclerotic. Yet, many of its bourgeois defenders tended
to prize stability and prestige over the principles of equity, inclusiveness,
and fairness. If portents of a calamitous future tempt us to read history
backwards, we should pause for a moment and attune ourselves to the views of
Germans at the time, who did not know how the story would end. These
documents and images allow readers to do just that.
(Legacy
site for 1st edition, 2007) ______________________________________________ Published 2022
Synopsis: On the eve of the First World War,
the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the largest and most powerful
socialist party in the world. This book examines the SPD’s rise using British
diplomatic reports from Saxony, the third-largest federal state in Imperial
Germany and the cradle of the socialist movement in that country. Rather than focusing on the Anglo-German
antagonism leading to the First World War, it peers into the everyday
struggles of German workers to build a political movement and emancipate
themselves from the worst features of a modern capitalist system:
exploitation, poverty, and injustice. The documents raise the question of how
people from one nation view people from another nation. They also illuminate
political systems, election practices, and anti-democratic strategies at the
local and regional levels, allowing readers to test hypotheses derived only
from national-level studies. This collection of primary sources shows why,
despite the inhospitable environment of German authoritarianism, Saxony and
Germany were among the most important incubators of socialism. Advance
Praise here. |
General Background
After attending Trent University in Peterborough, I
studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and received my D.Phil. in
1983. I joined the University of Toronto in 1987, and was promoted to the rank
of University Professor in 2019. I served as chair of the Department of
Germanic Languages and Literatures from 1999 to 2002.
My work has been assisted by research grants,
fellowships, and prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the German Academic
Exchange Service (DAAD), the German-American Academic Council Foundation, the
Killam Program at the Canada Council for the Arts, the Connaught Program and
the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, and the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
In 1993–94 I spent a year with my family at the Free
University Berlin as a Humboldt Research Fellow and Visiting Professor in the
Political Science department. I also held a Visiting Professorship in History
at the University of Göttingen in 2002–03 when I was awarded the
Friedrich-Wilhelm-Bessel Research Prize by the Humboldt Foundation, and I was a
Visiting Scholar at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal when my prize was renewed in 2014. I became an elected Fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada in 2011. See below for a number of international conferences
and workshops I have organized.
Even though I retired from the University of Toronto
in June 2024, I am affiliated with the following units:
o
University Professor Emeritus, Department of History
and Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
o
Senior Fellow, Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International
History
o Affiliated Faculty, Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, Centre for European and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy
o
Associate
Faculty Member, Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies
Current professional positions (selection):
o
General Editor, Oxford
Studies in Modern European History, Oxford University Press
o
General Editor, German
and European Studies, University of Toronto Press
o
Member, Editorial Board, German History in Documents and Images,
German Historical Institute, Washington, DC
o
Member, Editorial Advisory Board, German
History, journal of the German History Society, UK
Current Research and Writing Interests
My research interests include German regional history,
nationalism, antisemitism, socialism, electoral politics, biography, and
historiography. I am currently writing a full-scale biography of the German
Social Democratic leader August Bebel:
|
Synopsis: August Bebel (1840-1913) was the
celebrated leader of the first million-member party in Germany, Europe, and
the world. How did workers come to revere a man who began adult life in the
1860s as an itinerant journeyman turner producing doorknobs and window-pulls
from buffalo horn but by 1900 exercised unassailable authority within
Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD)? This book asks how German workers
found Bebel, embraced him as their emperor (Arbeiterkaiser), and came to put their faith in Social
Democracy’s message. Conversely, it examines middle- and upper-class Germans
who believed instinctively that Bebel and his followers sought the total
overthrow of the existing state and society and hence ascribed them pariah
status within Germany’s political system. It also asks how much celebrity
really mattered in the age of mass politics, mass culture, and the mass
press. (Image: undated photograph, ca.
1880, New York Public Library, Digital Collections, public domain.) On this project, view my November 2023
online lecture: “August
Bebel, Social Democracy, and the Art of Biography.” __________________________________________ |
|
In this essay
I explore graphical depictions of the socialist leader August Bebel in the
Social Democratic and middle-class satirical magazines of his age. Exploring
the grammar of visual communication through satirical caricatures, I ask
what, if anything, they might tell us about Bebel, his party, and the
emergence of mass politics, mass culture, and the mass media in Germany
before 1914. In an age of media politicians and “ocular democracy,” was the
“voice of the people” expressed in part through the “eyes of the people”? By
considering the way Bebel’s image was deployed and understood by artists,
writers, and readers of these magazines, and by his fellow politicians, I
follow the lead of Lucy Riall, whose biography of Giuseppe Garibaldi
illustrated how political celebrity can be manufactured and manipulated—with
and without the active participation of the celebrant. (Image: August Bebel
caricatured in the Humoristische Blätter (Vienna),
1877. Source: Ilse Fischer and Werner Krause, eds, August Bebel 1840-1913
(Cologne, 1988), 58.) ____________________________________________
A special
issue of selected conference papers will be published as “Forum: European
and Global Perspectives on Social Democracy and State Violence,” edited
by Simone Lässig, James Retallack, and Swen Steinberg, in the German
Historical Institute Bulletin, Issue 74, Fall 2024. In press. |
Graduate Supervisions
As well as supervising research projects and
comprehensive field preparations, I have worked with most of the students and
postdoctoral fellows listed below: organizing workshops, symposia, and
conferences, preparing monographs and co-edited volumes for publication, and
conducting field research in German archives.
Current Ph.D. Dissertation Supervision
1. Lief Dubin, “Icons and Antonyms
of the Nation in German Satirical Cartoons, 1848–1918” (entered PhD program
2019, ABD)
Completed
PhD Dissertations Supervised (sole
supervisor)
1.
Eriks Bredovskis,
“Columbia’s Shadow: The Pacific Northwest and the German Imagination,
1880–1914.” PhD diss. 2023 (Currently: Independent scholar and president, CUPE
3092, Toronto)
2. Michael Weaver, “Political
Friendship: Liberal Notables, Networks, and the Pursuit of the German Nation–State,
1848–1866,” PhD diss. 2022, published (Open Access) as Political
Friendship: Liberal Notables, Networks, and the Pursuit of the German Nation
State, 1848–1866
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2024). (Currently: Quality review
editor, Control Risks, Washington, DC).
3. Gavin J. Wiens, “In the Service of Kaiser and King: State Sovereignty, Nation-Building,
and the Imperial German Army, 1866-1918.” PhD diss. 2019, published as The
Imperial German Army between Kaiser and King: Monarchy, Nation-Building, and
War, 1866-1918 (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). (Currently:
Independent scholar, Toronto).
4. Anthony Cantor, “Our Conservatories? Music Education, Social Identities and Cultural Politics in
Germany and Austria, 1840-1933.” PhD diss. 2015 (Currently: Producer/Director, Efran
Films, Toronto).
5. Geoffrey Hamm,
“British Intelligence and Turkish Arabia: Strategy, Diplomacy, and Empire,
1898-1918.” PhD diss. 2012. (Currently: Scientific Publications Coordinator,
Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Berkeley, CA).
6. Deborah J. Neill, “Transnationalism in the Colonies: Cooperation,
Rivalry, and Race in German and French Tropical Medicine, 1880-1930,” PhD Diss. 2005, published as Networks
in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical
Specialty, 1890-1930 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012). (Currently: Associate Professor of History, York
University, Toronto).
7. Lisa M. Todd,
“Sexual Treason: State Surveillance of Infidelity and Immorality in World War I
Germany,” PhD Diss. 2005, published as Sexual
Treason in Germany During the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan,
2017). (Currently: Professor of History and Chair, Department of History and Department of Classics &
Ancient History, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB.)
8. Erwin D. Fink, “Region and Nation in
Early Imperial Germany: Transformations of Popular Allegiances and Political
Culture in the Period of Nation Building,” PhD Diss. 2004. (Currently:
owner/operator, TransMedia Translations, Freiburg i. Br.)
9. Richard
Steigmann-Gall, “The Holy Reich: Religious Dimensions of Nazi Ideology,
1919-1945,” PhD Diss. 1999, published as The
Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 19191945 (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). (Currently: Associate Professor of
History, Kent State University, OH.)
10. Marline
Otte, “Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890-1930,” PhD Diss. 1999, published as Jewish
Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890-1933 (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). (Currently: Associate Professor of
History, Tulane University, LA.)
11. Marven H. Krug, “Civil Liberties in
Imperial Germany,” PhD Diss. 1995. (Currently: Senior
Product Manager, Spryker, Berlin.)
12. Thomas
M. Bredohl, “Parishioners, Priests and Politicians: The Centre Party in the
Rhineland, 1890-1914,” PhD Diss. 1995, published as: Class
and Religious Identity: The Rhenish Center Party in Wilhelmine Germany (Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press, 2000). (Currently: Professor Emeritus of History, University of Regina,
SK.)