Historiography, Military, Speech, Social Sciences, Sociology, Nationalism, European, Europe, Political Ideologies 

Cummings Center series, 16 

This work examines the role of language in forging the modern subject. While social historians tend to regard language as a pragmatic tool, as much as an instrument of power, intellectual historians often treat language as a supra-human force that somehow grips men and turns them into brainwashed automatons. Taking issue with both these approaches, the contributors to this volume treat language as a force that imbues the historical protagonist with the horizon of his/her meanings, on the one hand, and that is used to acquire a new sense of identity, on the other. In the momentous reconfiguration of political and social identities brought about by the advent of modernity, individuals were relocated within new seats of discursive relations.
Focusing on the idea of the "New Man" that has animated all revolutionaries, the historians in the present volume ask what it meant to define oneself in terms of one's class origins, gender, national belonging or racial origins. Whether writing about the construction of class identity during the Russian Civil War, the transformations of Germans into Nazis or the making of citizens out of royal subjects in revolutionary France, the contributors here examine the way that revolutionary language shaped the realm of the possible during the momentous events that changed the face of Europe in the 19th century and early 20th century. 

This work examines the role of language in forging the modern subject. Focusing on the idea of the "New Man" that has animated all revolutionaries, the present volume asks what it meant to define oneself in terms of one's class origins, gender, national belonging or racial origins. 

Table of Contents
1. Liberty and Unanimity - The Paradoxes of Subjectivity and Citizenship in the
French Revolution by David Andress................................................... P. 27
2. The Desacralization of the Monarchy - Rumours and "Political Pornography"
during World War I by Boris Kolonitskii............................................... P. 47
3. Making Cossacks Counter-Revolutionary - The Don Host and the 1918 Anti-Soviet
Insurgency by Peter Holquist............................................................. P. 83
4. Modernity and the poetics of proletarian Discontent by Mark D. Steinberg.P. 105
5. Working, Struggling, Becoming - Stalin-era Autobiographical Texts by Jochen Hellbeck................................................................................................P.135
6. On Being the Subjects of History - Nazis as 20th-Century Revolutionaries by
Peter Fritzsche.................................................................................. P. 161
7. Intimacy in an Ideological key - The Communist Case of the 1920s and 1930s
by Igal Halfin ................................................................................... P. 185
8. Grigorii Aleksandrov's "Volga-Volga" by Katerina Clark.......................... P. 215
9. The Symphony as Mode of Production: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony and the
End of the Romantic Narrative by Boris Gasparov ...................................P. 235
10. Regarding the Modern Body: Science, the Social and the Construction of Italian
Identities by David G. Horn................................................................ P. 249
11.Bodies of Knowledge: Physical Culture and the New Soviet Man by David L.
Hoffmann ........................................................................................ P. 269
12. Discourse Made Flesh: Healing and Terror in the Construction of Soviet
Subjectivity by Eric Naiman............................................................... P. 287
13. Death in Auschwitz as 'Ugly Death' by Boaz Neumann........................... P. 317
14. A French Great Man's Last Rites: The National Funeral of Leon Gambetta and
the Transfer of His Heart to the Pantheon by Avner Ben-Amos .............. P. 341
15. Enshrined Oblivion: The POW Memorial Church in Bochum, Germany by
Elisabeth Domansky ........................................................................ P. 365
16. Varieties of Interpretation: The Holocaust in Historical Memory by Dan Diner. ........................................................................................................... P. 379