<span class=“paragraphSection“><span style=“font-style:italic;“>An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality and Ordinary German Soldiers in the First World War</span> . By CrouthamelJason . Basingstoke and New York : Palgrave Macmillan . 2014 . 233 pp. £60 (hardback). </span>
<span class=“paragraphSection“><div class=“boxTitle“>Abstract</div> In 824 the monk and teacher Wetti of Reichenau experienced a terrifying vision in which an angel led him through an afterlife where monks, clerics and laypeople experienced a variety of temporal and eternal punishments. Only the intercession of saints, martyrs and virgins saves Wetti, who would have been irrevocably doomed because he had corrupted his students through his teaching, his bad example and his deeds. Wetti’s fellow monk Heito wrote a widely circulated prose version of this vision, which the Carolingian scholar Walahfrid Strabo later turned into an apparently metric version. Both versions extensively address the <span style=“font-style:italic;“>scelus sodomiticum</span> (the crime of sodomy) but express fundamentally different viewpoints on the nature, the moral assessment and the dangers of same-sex sexuality in a monastic context. Heito implies that Wetti exposed himself and his students to the danger of eternal damnation through practising or at least facilitating sodomy. Walahfrid manages through a number of subtle alterations to acquit Wetti and his school from allegations of sodomy and to turn the <span style=“font-style:italic;“>scelus sodomiticum</span> into an individual fault rather than a threat to the community and to monastic purity in general. Comparing the two versions of the <span style=“font-style:italic;“>Visio Wettini</span> provides new insights into the medieval monastic classroom as a queer space, medieval assessments of same-sex desire, the role of classical learning in the monastic curriculum and the construction of monastic purity. </span>
10.1080/00905992.2016.1179726<br/>Ian T. Lanzillotti
<span class=“paragraphSection“>As the rebuilding of Berlin’s eighteenth-century <span style=“font-style:italic;“>Stadtschloss</span> nears completion, <span style=“font-style:italic;“>German History</span> turns its attention to the phenomenon of historicism: to the recreation of historical artefacts and practices (sometimes at astonishing expense). Historicism reached its high point in the nineteenth century, when individuals and communities turned to the medieval period to address some of the challenges of modernization. But the urge to revive extended back into the medieval period itself and continues into the twenty-first century. What motivated and what continues to motivate such recreations? As a theme, historicism provides an opportunity for fruitful dialogue between premodern and modern scholars. It also challenges us as historians to consider the value of revivals, whether produced by Berlin politicians, by Hollywood filmmakers or by medieval re-enactors. What happens—or what should happen—when academic scholarship encounters public representations of the past? Preservation and recreation aid historical imagination and empathy: at their best, they can result in the creation of monuments such as the <span style=“font-style:italic;“>Neues Museum</span> in Berlin, a building restored to its nineteenth-century form in a manner that leaves the violence of its twentieth-century history visible. Historicism may sometimes, however, stand in the way of meeting contemporary needs or seek to erase the more recent past, as the <span style=“font-style:italic;“>Palast der Republik</span> did to the original <span style=“font-style:italic;“>Stadtschloss</span> and as its recreation has done to the GDR building. Beyond these aesthetic and political battles over whether to preserve the diversity of heritage, there are other ways in which historicism is subject to contemporary demands. The complexity of the past may be imagined away, as when ‘medieval’ is invoked in the political discourse of today as the antipode of modernity, suggesting that the whole of the premodern period formed a monolithic unity. The editors invited <strong>Bettina Bildhauer</strong> (St Andrews), <strong>Stefan Goebel</strong> (Kent), <strong>Stefan Laube</strong> (HU, Berlin), <strong>Sue Marchand</strong> (Louisiana State University) and <strong>Astrid Swenson</strong> (Brunel) to discuss these and other questions.</span>
Miscellaneous Central European History, Volume 49 Issue 02, pp b1-b7Abstract
Miscellaneous Central European History, Volume 49 Issue 02, pp f1-f5Abstract
Book Reviews Noel D. Cary, Central European History, Volume 49 Issue 02, pp 300-301Abstract
Book Reviews Timothy Scott Brown, Central European History, Volume 49 Issue 02, pp 298-299Abstract
Book Reviews Mark Fenemore, Central European History, Volume 49 Issue 02, pp 296-297Abstract
Book Reviews Donna Harsch, Central European History, Volume 49 Issue 02, pp 294-295Abstract
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