MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY & MEIJI UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF HUMANITIES INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP The First World War in Eurasia Historiography and Public Image 31 October - 1 November 2014 31 Ekim - 1 Kasım 2014 METU Cultural and Convention Center, Hall A ODTÜ Kültür ve Kongre Merkezi, Salon A ABSTRACTS The Organizing Committee Prof. Dr. Tetsuya Sahara Prof. Dr. Mustafa Türkeş Prof. Dr. Ömer Turan Assistants Canan Halaçoğlu Erol Ozan Yılmaz Contents Zafer TOPRAK, How to Finance the War: Economic Historiography of WWI 1 Elizabeth B. FRIERSON, Educating the Senses and Normalizing Total War in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America 1 Tetsuya SAHARA, “Rising East and Falling West”: Japanese Views on WWI and Their Impact on “Asianism”- the Ideology of Japanese Fascism 2 Tassos KOSTOPOULOS, From Civil War and Foreign Occupation to Oblivion, from “Persecution” to “Genocide”: WWI Greek Historiography and its Sociopolitical Background 2 Ayşe Pamir DIETRICH, Russian Historiography on the Battle of Sarykamysh 3 Maxime GAUIN, Between Trauma and Resistance: French Historiography of the First World War 3 Valery KOLEV, Bulgarian Historiography on the Great War in the Years of Transition, 1990 – 2014 4 Birten ÇELİK, British War Propaganda Used during the Gallipoli Campaigns 4 Predrag MARKOVIC, WWI on the Screen: The Yugoslav and Serbian Case 5 Zhanat KUNDAKBAYEVA, Kazakh National and Cultural Identity in Early Stalinist Period: Kazakhs during the First World War in M. Auezov’s Historical Novel “Hard Times”, 1928 5 Ömer TURAN, Turkish Memoirs of the First World War 6 H. Bayram SOY, The Ottoman Image in Germany during the First World War 6 Ulf BRUNNBAUER, Revising Revisionism: German and Serbian Reactions to Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers 7 HOW TO FINANCE THE WAR: ECONOMIC HISTORIOGRAPHY OF WWI Zafer TOPRAK Boğaziçi University, Turkey War financing is a branch of defense economics or war economics. From a historiographical point of view it usually consists of the fiscal and monetary measures that are used in meeting the costs of war, including basically three methods which are not mutually exclusive, i.e. a) taxation, b) domestic or foreign loans, and c) the creation of circulating medium, i.e. printing money. Belligerent countries during WWI differed in financing the war, depending on their financial depth i.e. efficiency in taxation and debt financing. Britain, the first “fiscal military state” capable of mobilizing a greater amount of financial resources, did manage to transfer the purchasing power from the civil population to warfare economics through war taxes. As for Germany, borrowing was the main method to fill the deficit in the war budget. The third “salvation” method, i.e. printing money, which is the most dangerous form and resorted to when no more taxes can be collected and the government’s credit has broken down, was implemented by the Ottoman Empire. When the war started, having a rigid taxation structure, and never attempting to issue bonds to the public at large the Unionist government shifted from hard currency to paper money and printed large quantities of it. Financing war expenditures through enlarged circulating media did fuel price rises to a level unseen in history. This made the Ottomans the inventor of “hyper-inflation”, as prices skyrocketed by % 400 in the third year of the war. From then on Ottoman social structure disintegrated and became class-based as it was made up of “haves” and “have-nots”. In fact, Ottoman inflation brought the internal Pax Ottomanica to an end and paved the way for a nation-state. EDUCATING THE SENSES AND NORMALIZING TOTAL WAR IN AFRICA, ASIA, EUROPE, AND NORTH AMERICA Elizabeth B. FRIERSON University of Cincinnati, USA How did civilian populations become accustomed to the grave costs of total war? Among other things this war changed about the world was the practice of battlefield medicine. In Britain, doctors and nurses had to fight the military command for the right to expand treatment of wounded soldiers. Military strategists feared the impact on civilian support of the war if civilians saw the wounds men were suffering, but medical practitioners won the struggle and soon great numbers of wounded bodies returned home for treatment and rehabilitation across the various fronts of the war in the UK and elsewhere. Thus not only combatants but also civilians in and outside of combat zones were well aware of the horrors of mechanized warfare on a grand scale. The vast gap between the old normal and the new was dealt with through narrative strategies in text, music, image, and the healing arts. This paper will present a comparative sampling of these narrative strategies and an analysis of the psychological adjustment to believing these horrors to be necessary and survivable. 1 “RISING EAST AND FALLING WEST”: JAPANESE VIEWS ON WWI AND THEIR IMPACT ON “ASIANISM” - THE IDEOLOGY OF JAPANESE FASCISM Tetsuya SAHARA Meiji University, Japan Japan entered into WWI as an ally of the Entente, but its war aim was the maximum use of the political vacuum created by the war in the Far East. For both of the Japanese government and society, a “European War” was a matter of no concern. This attitude enabled Japan to record and analyze the course of warfare with a stone-cold sober and objective point of view. In this regard, the Japanese assessment of Ottoman military operations merits special attention. In theory, Japan was an enemy of the Ottomans, but it is also true that it had no will to enter into war against the Turks. For most Japanese citizen at the time, the Ottoman Empire was an Asian state, and there existed considerable sympathy for the Turkish resistance to “Western colonialism.” This was typically expressed in regard to the Ottoman victories in the Gallipoli front and Kut-elAmara. My paper first examines the contemporary media coverage of the events, then, proceeds to elucidate the extent of the impact felt by the Japanese intellectuals and military specialists. Finally, the author tries to explicate the paradoxical rise of “Asianist” discourses in favor of the Turks. FROM CIVIL WAR AND FOREIGN OCCUPATION TO OBLIVION, FROM “PERSECUTION” TO “GENOCIDE”: WWI GREEK HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ITS SOCIO-POLITICAL BACKGROUND Tassos KOSTOPOULOS Independent Researcher, Greece For Greece, WWI was a rather minor military event in a decade of nearly constant warfare that began with the victorious Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and ended in total defeat in the Asia Minor Campaign of 1919-1922. The Greek army saw limited combat action in the trenches of a multinational Macedonian Front that was led by foreign Entente generals and staffed by a multitude of French, English, Serbian, Russian and Colonial troops, facing an equally colourful assembly of German, Bulgarian and Turkish military units; its casualties did not surpass a level of low thousands, compared with the tens of thousands of dead or missing soldiers who perished during the next round of hostilities. The most vivid experience felt by the Greek population at the time was foreign occupation (by the Central Powers in Eastern Macedonia and Entente troops elsewhere), famine (imposed by the Entente blockade of Southern Greece in 191617 and the harsh occupation regime on Eastern Macedonia) and, first and foremost, the “National Schism” between pro-Entente and theoretically “neutralist” (in fact, proGerman) political forces, a conflict that verged on low-intensity civil war. For the 2 million-plus “unredeemed” Orthodox Greeks living within the confines of the Ottoman Empire, whose remnants were transformed half a decade later into the substantial “refugee” component of Greek citizenry, WWI was, however, a far more traumatic experience, subjected as they were to various forms of organized state surveillance 2 and/or open persecution. My paper describes how all these collective memories were merged in Greek historiography during the 20th and early 21st century, the variety of the academic, official and/or “public history” approaches that ensued, as well as their interplay with a changing socio-political context that provided a succession of contradictory patterns for institutionalized “memory”, “oblivion” and interpretation. RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY ON THE BATTLE OF SARYKAMYSH Ayşe Pamir DIETRICH Middle East Technical University, Turkey The First World War was an event which had a decisive influence on the subsequent development of Russia, and played a major role in the history of the 20th century. By 1914, Russia was included in the system of international alliances that had developed in Europe, and could not remain aloof from a world conflict objectively; but also failed to meet her national interests by pulling out of the war. The war, known as the Second Patriotic War (Vtoraja otechestvennaja vojna) or the Great World Patriotic War (Velikaja vsemirnaja otechestvennaja vojna) in Russia, in many respects determined the historical destiny of the country. The Sarykamysh Operation was one of the most important and most tragic operations which took place as part of the Caucasus Campaign during the First World War. It was an engagement between the Russian and Ottoman empires which took place from December 22, 1914 to January 17, 1915. Leaving aside a general discussion of the war itself, historical information and sources about the events of the First World War that took place in the Caucasus, specifically in Sarykamysh, are extremely scarce for two main reasons: First, operations in these regions were minor compared to the main fighting on the Eastern Front and so were less written about; second, because the Bolshevik revolution took place during the First World War and the new Soviet government pulled out of the war and turned all their attention to the ongoing Civil War, more has been written about the events of the revolution and Civil War rather than about Russia’s participation in the First World War. However, there are some valuable sources, such as Maslovsky, E.V., Mirovaya voyna na Kavkazskom fronte, 1914-1917, Knigoizdatelstvo, Vozrozhdenie, La Renaissance, Parizh, 1933, Korsun, N.G., Pervaya mirovaya voyna na Kavkazskom fronte, Voennoie izdatelstvo, 1946 and Berhman, E. G., Sarykamyshskaya operatsya, 12-24 Dekabria 1914 goda, pod redaktsiey A. Andreeva, Parizh, 1934, related to the events took place in the Sarykamysh which we will examine in this presentation. BETWEEN TRAUMA AND RESISTANCE: FRENCH HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR Maxime GAUIN Middle East Technical University, Turkey Among the Western powers, France was the one who suffered the most in terms of human losses and material destruction. The trauma is perceptible in the historiography, and not only for the first generations of historians. This is one of the reasons for the 3 focus on the Western front. This is also why a recurrent question is: how was the war won? Gradually, the question expanded from debate on the top leaders to (sometime fierce) arguments on the ordinary soldiers. In spite of these seminal discussions, the Ottoman and post-Ottoman space have been comparatively neglected. Nevertheless, the French side was a pioneer in the interwar period for studying “the Turkish war in the world war” and recently, some researches have emerged from the Defense’s historical service. BULGARIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY ON THE GREAT WAR IN THE YEARS OF TRANSITION, 1990 – 2014 Valery KOLEV Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria The paper will deal with the gradual evolution in the perception of Bulgarian historiography on the theme of World War I during the 25-year-long period of transition from hard-line Marxism to a non-Marxist approach. The first part will examine the basic characteristics of the Marxist representation of the Great War in Bulgarian historical science in the 1980s and the first attempts to oppose it by shifting attention away from ideologically imposed dogmas to a more neutral narrative based on more numerous and complex historical sources. The second part will deal with the re-emergence of the nationalistic approach that gradually led to the disintegration of the monolithic Marxist construct by implementing new themes and perspectives on the levels of historic reconstruction, analysis and long term consequences. BRITISH WAR PROPAGANDA USED DURING THE GALLIPOLI CAMPAIGNS Birten ÇELİK Middle East Technical University, Turkey One of the important tools of that was effectively used during World War-I by the Allied Powers and the Central Powers was war propaganda. Propaganda leaflets were spread over enemy trenches by planes and propaganda was disseminated via news planted in newspapers published in both the Allied Powers’ and Central powers’ countries, as well as in other European countries or in the Allied Powers’ dominions to persuade their own people that they were winning victories on the battlefield, to demoralize their enemies, and to gain the support of the neutral countries. This method and tool was used by the British Army against the Ottoman Army during the Gallipoli campaign. There were two types of propaganda that the British Army used: one was aimed at British and ANZAC soldiers and the other was aimed at the Ottoman government and the Ottoman Army. The propaganda that British commanders used for their own soldiers was to encourage them to fight courageously and not to be taken as prisoners of war. For example, British and ANZAC commanders during the Gallipoli Campaign encouraged their soldiers by threatening them “not to be taken prisoner of war otherwise the Turks will kill you and eat you”. Worse than this, these commanders threaten their soldiers, 4 “do not be taken prisoner of war, otherwise the Turks will cut off your penis”. On the other hand, the British and ANZAC commanders tried to convince the Turkish soldiers with positive images of “the British Army” via the propaganda leaflets spread over the Turkish trenches by war planes. With these leaflets they were trying to undermine the morale of the Turkish soldiers (who were in fact suffering from disease, lack of food and lack of ammunition) and convince them to surrender. For example, in the British propaganda leaflets for the Turkish soldiers it was written that “we take good care of our Turkish prisoners of war. We feed them and they have better lives than before.” In addition to these leaflets the British government placed stories in the newspapers published in either Britain and other European countries, or in British dominions like Egypt indicating that they were victorious in the Gallipoli Campaign, while, in reality, they could not move even one kilometer from their own trenches in the Gallipoli Peninsula. These news stories were not used only to create a successful image of the British Army and to make a negative psychological affect on the Ottoman government, people and the army, but also to encourage and persuade the British people and dominions to support the government, create the impression that all was well on the battlefields, also to avoid public criticism. While the British army was busy with effective propaganda, the Ottoman government and army made counter-propaganda to meet the British allegations against the Turks while the Turkish Army was preparing to clear the Gallipoli Peninsula of the Allied armies. This paper will examine the British propaganda activities used against the Ottoman Army during the Gallipoli Campaign and show how the British Army carried out the war in this campaign. WWI ON THE SCREEN: THE YUGOSLAV AND SERBIAN CASE Predrag MARKOVIC Institute of Contemporary History, Serbia WWI has been a cinematographic topic since early days, and movies dedicated to the Great War were among the first Oscar winners. The cinematic representation of this war differs from country to country. While in the West the war was depicted in gloomy colors (Jean Renoir, etc.), in interwar Yugoslavia this conflict was described as a heroic struggle for liberation and unification. In Communist Yugoslavia the prevailing tone was not changed, although there were only a few movies on this topic, in comparison to 250 movies about WWII. In the 21st century there have been two major movies on the First World War, and their message has been very unusual. KAZAKH NATIONAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IN EARLY STALINIST PERIOD: KAZAKHS DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN M. AUEZOV’S HISTORICAL NOVEL “HARD TIMES”, 1928 Zhanat KUNDAKBAYEVA Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Kazakhstan In Kazakhstan from early Soviet times up to today the memory of the First World War was subsumed into the history of the 1916 Uprising. Soviet period scholarship was attuned 5 to party doctrine and assumed that the needs of Russia’s wartime economy became the burden borne by Kazakh people which exacerbated class tensions in Kazakh society. In official Soviet historical narrative the 1916 Uprising was evaluated as a revolt of the poor (without nationality) against the arbitrariness of the wealthy and higher (without distinction on ethnic grounds) after the eventual promulgation of a conscription ukaz in Central Asia in July 1916 (Kazakhs and Uzbeks had to serve in labor battalions). In the early Stalinist period the Kazakh Writer M. Auezov was not afraid to present his own vision of the Kazakhs’ pre-revolutionary past. In contrast with the Bolsheviks, M. Auezov clearly depicted the First World War as a time when the Kazakhs became aware of their social, psychological, and cultural inferiority in the Russian Empire. M. Auezov, with his artistic imagination of the 1916 Uprising, was far ahead of professional historians. Even post-soviet Kazakh Historians still have not seen that ordinary Kazakh peasants were those who recognized that exemption from the new conscription law of 1874 was sign of “their exclusion from the putative political community of the Russian Empire” (Morrison 2012). So M. Auezov, by giving voice to the ‘natives’’ hitherto silent and effaced figures of the other in Russian Empire and Soviet times, used literature to solidify, and reevaluate Kazakh national identity. His forbidden historical novel was a great contribution in preserving the historical memory, as well as the protection of national and cultural identity of the Kazakhs, which was suppressed by the Soviet policy of erasing national differences. TURKISH MEMOIRS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR Ömer TURAN Middle East Technical University, Turkey Memoirs are the most dangerous, but at the same time indispensable source for writing history. In particular, they are the most important source for the controversial evaluations of the First World War in Turkey. This paper aims to present the Turkish memoirs of the First World War by classifying them according to their writers (politicians, soldiers, foreigners etc.), subjects (Ottoman participation to the WWI, military history, Armenian deportation), and approaches (pro- and anti-Committee of Union and Progress). THE OTTOMAN IMAGE IN GERMANY DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR H. Bayram SOY Kırıkkale University, Turkey With Wilhelm II’s ascension to the throne in 1888, German concerns about the Ottoman Empire grew rapidly. Unlike his Chancellor Prince von Bismarck, Wilhelm II was very interested in the Eastern Question and always wanted a say in this issue. Of course this was a part of his general expansionist foreign policy: the Weltpolitik. It meant putting Germany directly at the center of world politics by every means. Pursuing Weltpolitik required a strong navy and overseas bases. In terms of this policy, the Ottoman territories were one of the very few opportunities where the Germans could peacefully 6 penetrate and expand their political, military and economic influence. These German aims coincided with the Ottoman foreign policy in which the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II was seeking for new backing, after the British had disappointed him in the 18771878 Ottoman-Russian War and the 1878 Berlin Treaty. The topic of Ottoman-German relations during the reign of Wilhelm II has been long debated because this relationship dragged them into a military alliance in 1914 and resulted in a final blow for both empires. Despite this fatal partnership, it is not easy to say that there was a complete unanimity between these two countries’ political and economic establishments. In particular, there was an apparent inconsistency among the German policy makers about the Ottoman Empire’s continuation. Some thought that the Ottoman Empire was a “sick man” who could not be revived, and others asserted that it was an important ally in case of a war against the Allied Powers. But German statesmen were in agreement on one issue: no matter what her fate, Germany must have a strong economic influence in the Ottoman Empire. Although the economic data of this period show that the Germans were not the primary importers or exporters of the Ottoman Empire, they worked to become it. All the Anatolian and Bagdad railway projects, agricultural breeding plans and port constructions etc. can be considered as the Germans’ penetration pacifiqué into the Ottoman Empire. When the First World War broke out, there was still confusion in Germany over whether the Ottomans could contribute the Central Powers, especially against the Russians. After crucial debates in Germany and in the German Embassy in the Ottoman Empire, a military alliance was signed with the Ottomans who were expected to stop the Russians in the Straits and in the Caucasus, and the British in the Suez Canal and in the Persian Gulf. REVISING REVISIONISM: GERMAN AND SERBIAN REACTIONS TO CHRISTOPHER CLARK’S SLEEPWALKERS Ulf BRUNNBAUER University of Regensburg, Germany Christopher Clark’s major new history of the outbreak of World War One triggered lively debates, in particular in Germany and Serbia. In both countries, many professional historians as well as parts of the educated (and sometimes also uneducated) public felt provoked by Clark’s challenges to the orthodoxies with regard to the narratives of the Great War, and in particular the question of “guilt”. In Germany, critical reviews stressed that Clark underestimated the importance of German imperialism. It seems that the German public has internalized the notion of German main responsibility for the outbreak of World War One to such an extent that it does not even feel relief when a historian from abroad seemingly exculpates Germany (at least to a degree). In Serbia, in contrast, historians, politicians and writers were angered by Clark’s portrayal of Serbia as a rogue state. The Serbian public fears that Serbia would be made responsible for the carnage of the war – in a situation in which the conventional Serbian master narrative describes World War One as a major tragedy, in which Serbia was one of the main victims but from which it eventually emerged victorious. My presentation has the following goals: identification of the main patterns of public perception of Clark’s book; explanation and contextualisation of the debates in Germany and Serbia around the book; and a discussion of the role of World War One in the ‘national’ memory of the two countries. 7