The Chico Historian California State University, Chico: Department of History The Chico Historian Editor Christopher Lasley Editorial Board Kevin Dewey Katie Fox Kayla Hudson Advising Faculty Dr. Stephen Lewis- The Chico Historian Dr. Jason Nice & Dr. Jessica Clark- Phi Alpha Theta: The History Honor Society 1 The Chico Historian This volume is dedicated to Dr. Lawrence Bryant 2 The Chico Historian Letter From the Editor It is my profound pleasure to edit and introduce the 2010-2011 edition of The Chico Historian. This volume represents the collaborative efforts between students and CSU, Chico’s dedicated faculty. The papers presented here are a small sampling of the student work done at Chico, but they highlight the diversity and the value of historical inquiry. For many of the authors in this volume seeing their work published is a new experience, while others are a familiar name to this journal. In either case, their work is appreciated and it is both my honor and that of this year’s editorial board, to highlight their writing. This volume was made possible through the continued enthusiasm and support for student work on the behalf of the entire history department. I would also like to specifically thank Dr. Stephen Lewis for his advice and support throughout this process. Dr. Laird Easton for his dedication to The Chico Historian. Dr. Jason Nice and Dr. Jessica Clark for their constant support to students. Professor John Boyle for his continuing support. Claudia Beaty for the million little things she has done to assist this journal. Finally, I would like to thank my editorial board for their hard work throughout this semester. Christopher Lasley Editor 3 The Chico Historian Table of Contents Bryce Havens “The Philosophy of Kurt Riezler.” 5 Kayla Hudson “The Black Death in Florence, Italy, 1348-1350: Impact on the Christian Religion.” 15 Christopher Lasley “Failure, Politics and Collective Memory in Ireland: A Century of “Commemorating the Easter Rising.” 21 Myriah Hill “The Spread of Pediatric AIDS in Romania.” 33 Matt Robertson “The German Occupations of Russia: Shifting Objectives and Ideologies from Germanization to Annihilation in the Occupied Slavic Lands, 1914-1945.” 41 Katie Fox “José Clemente Orozco: Painting the Cycle of Human Self-Destruction.” 52 Curtis Jeffords “’Cuba Si, Yanqui No!’: African American Response to the Cuban Revolution, 1959- 1960.” 64 Kevin Dewey “The Anti-Imperialist League.” 76 Meghan O’Donnell “Dangerous Undercurrent: Death, Sacrifice, and Ruin in Third Reich Germany.” 88 Michael Butcher “Macedonian Pharaohs: Greeks and Egyptians in Ptolemaic Egypt.” 98 Natalie Hollett “The Struggle to Create One Out of Many: An analysis of the conditions keeping modern-day Mexico from forming a united national identity.” 106 4 The Chico Historian The Philosophy of Kurt Riezler1 Bryce Havens With the exception of scholars of modern German history, the name Kurt RieZler is scarcely known to many people. Despite his relative obscurity, RieZler played a unique and significant role in German history. As the personal assistant and confidant of Theobald von Bethman-Hollweg, the Chancellor of the German Empire from 1909 to 1917, RieZler performed many political duties. He served as a speechwriter and advisor on foreign policy. He wrote the September Program, which stated the war goals of Germany for the First World War. During the war, he worked as a foreign attaché in Stockholm and in Moscow after the Bolshevik Revolution. After the war and the collapse of the Empire, he became a strong supporter of the Weimar Republic, going so far as to help undermine the conservative Kapp Putsch and the communist Bavarian Soviet Republic. In addition, he briefly served as the chief advisor to President Friedrich Ebert until finally leaving politics in 1920 to devote the rest of his life to writing philosophy and teaching.2 Although the events of his life have been well documented, RieZler’s written works have received considerably less attention. Historical examinations of German foreign policy, Imperial Germany, and Germany’s role in the First World War almost always mention RieZler, albeit briefly and generally without great detail.3 Wayne Thompson’s work In the Eye of the Storm: Kurt Riezler and the Crises of Modern Germany, published in 1980, remains to date the only book-length study of his life. Although the work is mostly biographical, it does provide a brief overview of some of RieZler’s most important pre-war works, though Thompson admits that an examination of these works “would be [a] study in itself.”4 One of RieZler’s most important, widely read, and somewhat controversial pre-war works was Grundzüge der Weltpolitik in der Gegenwart (The Fundamental Features of Contemporary World Politics).5 Written in late 1913 and published only months prior to the outbreak of war in July 1914, Grundzüge der Weltpolitik was a work of political philosophy. RieZler sought it to function both as a socio-politico-economic examination of contemporary European and world affairs and as support for the moderate political agenda of the Bethmann-Hollweg government. As such, Grundzüge der Weltpolitik was primarily concerned with the maintenance of peace in an industrial age fraught with growing political movements such as nationalism and socialism, imperialism, the economic interdependence of nations, and the decline of German power, prestige, and culture. RieZler juxtaposed sound political and economic observations with a philosophical worldview [Weltanschauung] deeply influenced by the traditions of German idealism, romanticism, and historicism. 1 This paper is actually Chapter Two of my MA thesis. The thesis as a whole is a philosophical and historical examination of Kurt Riezler’s work Grundzüge der Weltpolitik in der Gegenwart, though this portion focuses exclusively on RieZler’s personal philosophy. 2 Wayne C. Thompson, In the Eye of the Storm: Kurt Riezler and the Crises of Modern Germany (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1980), 98-99, 177, 182, 204-206. 3 See examples such as FritZ Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967); Immanuel Geiss, German Foreign Policy, 1871-1914 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1976); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 trans. Kim Traynor (New York: Berg Publishers Limited, 1985); and Wolfgang Mommsen, Imperial Germany 1867-1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Arnold Press, 1995). 4 Thompson, In the Eye of the Storm, 24. 5 Due to the length of the title, this work will be referred to in the text as Grundzüge der Weltpolitik. 5 The Chico Historian Despite these astute and practical observations, RieZler’s work suffers from many of the deficits of these traditions; namely philosophical ambiguity, a teleological view of history, and the primacy of the powerful nation-state as superior to that of individual rights. The purpose of this thesis is to offer a philosophical and historical study of Grundzüge der Weltpolitik by examining its intellectual influences and the political and social contexts in which it was written. The intellectual atmosphere in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century remained heavily under the influence of German idealism and romanticism. Reacting against the scientific empiricism, impersonal objectivity, and universal human ideals espoused during the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottfried Fichte, and romantic literary figures such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Novalis, and Friedrich Hölderlin articulated new views of politics, history, and philosophy, including the nature of the state, and the role of the individual in society. Rather than stressing the rational and objective method of science, they emphasized the primacy of human emotion, the uniqueness of peoples, and the spiritual quality of nature and individuals. Everything was subjective as the source of truth lay within the heart of each individual. Also central to idealist and romantic thinking was the shared inner striving of all peoples to find and identify with some higher, mystical element. These ideas took hold most strongly in the German-speaking states of central Europe and ultimately became the source of the nationalism that developed in Germany during the mid-to-late nineteenth century.6 In order to examine RieZler’s philosophy, it is first necessary to survey some of the critical ideas that deeply shaped the nature of his thought. RieZler’s greatest influence was undoubtedly the philosophy of Hegel. Combining Enlightenment ideals of reason and empiricism with romantic notions of spirit and emotion, Hegel sought to create a grand philosophy of everything.7 He was greatly concerned with human freedom, which he believed could only be obtained in its highest form when it was realized by means of the nation-state. As Friedrich Meinecke observed in Cosmopolitanism and the National State, “[Hegel] found himself with a type of individualism which judged historical life and the state according to the requirements…of the rational individual striving for intellectual and spiritual freedom.”8 Hegel also believed that the nation was an organic entity that developed out of smaller individual parts such as communities. Developing over time in a teleological progression of history, the nation represented the highest form of reason and the ultimate goal of history.9 With the purely rational nation-state as the final purpose of history, Hegel believed that individuals were ultimately dependent on the “supra- individual entity” of the nation. The purpose of the nation was to maintain itself and “reconci[le] the freedom of the individual to the authority of the state.”10 Hegel undoubtedly influenced RieZler’s conception of the state and his philosophy of history. Fichte seems to have equally affected RieZler regarding his view of the political struggle between the forces of 6 Brison D. Gooch, Europe in the Nineteenth Century: A History (New York: The McMillan Company, 1970), 131-37.