The Myth of the Eastern Front

The Myth of the Eastern Front

Book cover of The Myth of the Eastern Front; image adopted from cover art of the 1987 game The Last Victory: Von Manstein's Backhand Blow, February–March 1943, which depicts the Third Battle of Kharkov.
Author Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies
Country United States
Language English
Genre History; Historiography
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Publication date
 2008
Media type Print
ISBN 978-0-521-83365-3

The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture is a 2008 book by the American historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies of the University of Utah. It discusses perceptions of the Eastern Front of World War II in the United States in the context of historical revisionism. The book traces the foundation of the post-war myth of the clean Wehrmacht, its support by U.S. military officials, and the impact of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS mythology on American popular culture, including at the present time.

The book garnered largely positive reviews, for its thorough analysis on the creation of the myth by German ex-participants and its entry into American culture. The book was described as a "tour de force of cultural historiography" that “present[s] a discomforting portrait of the American views of the Eastern Front” and was praised for its compelling analysis of contemporary war-romancing trends. Several reviews noted limitations of the book in its discussion on the myth's role in the contemporary culture and the extent of its impact on wide popular perceptions of the Eastern Front, outside of a few select groups.

Structure

The first section of the book focuses on the prevailing American attitudes towards Nazi Germany, the Wehrmacht, and the SS in the period during World War II and its immediate aftermath. Their sources involve newspapers, magazines, and other American media of the period. The book also discusses the role of the war-time American propaganda in shaping a positive image of the Soviet Union as the United Kingdom's and the United States' ally.[1]

The book then covers positive views on the Germans, produced early in the Cold War era. These arose due to the changing geopolitical climate, the appearance of German military sources which vindicated their side of the conflict, and support of this effort by the American military. A review for H-Net finds that "the authors do a thorough job discrediting the claims made by the German officers in their memoirs, which can no longer be viewed as even minimally respectable".[1]

The third section of the book covers the appearance of a new generation of "devotees of the German army and its campaigns in the east".[1] They included new authors, wargaming fans, and World War II reenactment participants. The review in H-Net finds that this section provides "insightful and exciting research" and that "Smelser and Davies astutely identify a set of sources historians have rarely tapped and survey it thoroughly." They identify the so-called "gurus" of this generation, influential authors and speakers which present "a heroic, sanitized picture of the German army in the east".[1]

Themes

The book introduces several themes, which are, in the authors' opinion, important to the understanding of the myth of the Eastern Front:

Reception

Lawrence Freedman in Foreign Affairs magazine called the book a "fascinating exercise in historiography", highlighting the book's analysis of how a "number of Hitler's leading generals were given an opportunity to write the history of the Eastern Front to help develop lessons for the Americans on fighting the Russians, and in doing so they provided a sanitized version of events". However, Freedman also noted that the actual impact of this involvement on US perceptions of the Eastern Front is less clear.[4]

In reviewing the book, Joseph Robert White observed that it should provide food for thought in classroom discussions about the German army, but noted that an assumption of specialised knowledge and the concomitant lack of a chapter about war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht undermine the authors' efforts.[5]

The military historian Jonathan House, who, together with David Glantz, wrote the 1995 book When Titans Clashed on the Soviet-German war, reviewed the book for the The Journal of Military History, describing it as a "tour de force of cultural historiography". He notes Smelser's and Davies's analysis of the post-war mythology that presented the Wehrmacht and even the Waffen-SS as "above reproach, knights engaged in a crusade to defend Western civilization against the barbaric hordes of Bolshevism. (...) Ronald Smelser and Edward Davies have performed a signal service by tracing the origin and spread of this mythology". House recommends that military historians not only study the book, but "use it to teach students the dangers of bias and propaganda in history". They also note that in exploring its subject, the book provides a "one-sided view of the historiography".[2]

Benjamin Alpers, in the The American Historical Review, the official publication of the American Historical Association, notes that the book "present[s] a discomforting portrait of the American views of the Eastern Front. The authors are to be commended for exploring sources such as website and war games, that, while usually not studied by historians, are places where Americans encounter and enact World War II memory". However, the review also concludes that the authors' analysis of their material "is not entirely convincing", and also observes that they underplay key divergences in their analogy between neo-Confederate ideas of the American Civil War and the mythic views of the Eastern Front.[6]

David Wildermuth of Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania concurs with the author's argument regarding the potential danger of "depoliticizing a conflict which at its core was a war of racial subjugation and conquest". He finds authors' analysis of the present-day war-romancing trends to be "deep and compelling", but notes the book's limitations in assuming specialist knowledge, which makes it less accessible to the general public. For example, the lay reader would have benefited from the necessary context of the differences between Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht, along with an overview of the war crimes committed by the Waffen-SS, "especially in light of the falsehoods appearing daily in Internet website chatrooms". The reviewer also remarks on the occasional sniping which makes palpable the authors' frustrations with romantic notions of a "valiant German military". Despite this minor criticism, Wildermuth commends the book for its "fascinating analysis on how, far removed from its time and place, the echoes of this war still reverberate".[7]

Martin H. Folly provided a critical assessment of the book in a review published in the journal History. While he complemented the authors for setting out the main myths concerning the Eastern Front, he argued that they did not provide convincing evidence to support their argument that most Americans accept such an account of the German-Soviet war. Moreover, Folly states that the book overlooks the influence of prominent and more accurate accounts of the war on the Eastern Front. His overall summary is that "the book therefore delivers a rather weak conclusion, which dilutes the impact of the useful analysis earlier in the book on the creation of the myth by German ex-participants and its entry into American culture with the help of the US Army".[8]

American historian Dennis Showalter, in his review of the book for the journal Central European History, describes the book as "incomplete", noting that "Eastern Front romanticism has cultural as well as intellectual matrices that are a good deal more complex than Smelser and Davis acknowledge", such as the appeal of "individual struggle against overwhelming odds" in the German narratives of the war, vs the Soviet emphasis on the collective. He also describes how the Soviet World War II historiography, overly dogmatic and propaganda-driven, remained untranslated in the West, allowing the German view of the conflict to dominate academic and popular perceptions.[3]

Showalter acknowledges that the romanticised views described in the book exist, but argues that they remain limited in their impact on the wider popular culture: "Third Reich military memorabilia thrives—but in a niche market. (...) Eastern Front enthusiasts—who buy a disproportionate number of the books romanticizing the Eastern Front—are a minority within a minority, and, as a rule, are at some pains to deny sympathy with the Third Reich". The reviewer concludes that opening of the Russian archives since the fall of the Soviet Union has enabled "balanced analysis at academic levels", leading to a new interest in the Red Army operations from the popular history writers and the World War II enthusiasts.[3]

See also

References

Citations

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 McFall 2010.
  2. 1 2 House 2008.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Showalter 2009.
  4. ↑ Freedman 2008.
  5. ↑ White 2008.
  6. ↑ Review: The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma. The American Historical Review December 2008
  7. ↑ Wildermuth 2016.
  8. ↑ Folly 2010.

Bibliography

External links

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