IFK – Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften an der Kunstuniversität Wien (Web), Conveners: Michael Geyer, Helmut Lethen, Lutz Musner
Date: 06.-08.10.2011
Venue: IFK, Reichsratstraße 17, 1010 Wien
Contact: soellner-poetz@ifk.ac.at
World War I was a European war over the future of the world. But the futures of the world that emerged from the war, including a yet more deadly war and a long period of cold confrontation, were quite unlike anything the belligerents, high and low, had expected. It is to the futures of this violent past that the series of three conferences on The Time of Destruction is dedicated.
Historically minded observers, who have begun to remove themselves from the tense confrontations of nostalgia and utopia this war had generated, have begun to step out of the fog of archives in order to contemplate what happened in the light of what came of it. The latter is so important, because we cannot act as if the war has yet to happen, its consequences have yet to unfold, and its shadows have yet to lift. We now know — or, should we say, we could know if we took on the challenge
of seeing this age of catastrophe as sediments of embattled futures — the kind of world that after even greater turmoil has become our world. Rather than looking in on World War I from the nineteenth century and consequently seeing it as a catastrophic flame-out of a prosperous, bourgeois age, we propose looking back on World War I from the other shore of the twenty-first century in order to see what the war begot.
The first conference is concerned with the shifting tectonics of European civilization between 1900 and 1930. The image of shifting force fields that collide to explode in horrific bursts to give way to a new layout of the land serves as a one of the most potent metaphors for what happened in World War I. This war was fought in defense of civilization, but it was evident to many, even foreshadowed in dreams of violence to come, that utter destruction not only was a product of a deep disquiet with, but also would inexorably change civilization. The nature of this tectonic shift is the subject of a first conference that takes the excess of destruction as a measure for the forces and movements that remade European civilization. The total nature of the war impacted all aspects of civilization in its material reality and its imagination: the
spatial order of Europe and the world; the order of social bonds in and between communities and societies; the interiority and subjectivity of the human sense of self. These civilizational spaces-the way the world was configured-were the battlefields of a „greater war,“ a struggle over civilized life that came to a head in the utter destruction of the Great War.
PROGRAMME
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Venue: IFK
9.30 Address of Welcome: Helmut Lethen
Introduction: Michael Geyer, Helmut Lethen, Lutz Musner
Tectonics of Space, Regimes of Life, and Moral Orders in a Time of
Destruction
Chair: Oliver Rathkolb
THE TECTONICS OF SPACE
10.00  Hew Strachan : Heartlands vs Rimlands, Continental vs Maritime power: Mackinder confronts reality
11.00  Coffee Break
11.30  Michael Geyer: The „Great“ and the „Greater“ War: Wars – Revolutions – Rural Émeutes
12.30 – 14.30 Lunch Break
14.30 Lutz Musner: Varieties of Battlefield Dynamics
Chair: Oliver Rathkolb
15.30 – 16.00 Coffee Break
16h Karl Schlögel: The Tectonics of Borders
17.00 – 18.00
Kathleen Canning: Imaginaries of Governance:  Gender, Citizenship and
Revolution 1917-1918
Thursday, 6. October 2011, 19h
Venue: Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Dachfoyer, Minoritenplatz 1, 1010 Wien
19.00 Jay Winter: The Degeneration of War: 1914-1919
 
Friday, 7 October 2011
Venue: IFK
Chair: Helmut Konrad
REGIMES OF LIVING
10.00 Richard Bessel: Migration  and Forced Removal
11.00 Coffee Break
11.30 Tamara Scheer: Nations, Borders, Peoples: The believe in the power of order
12.30 – 14.30 Lunch Break
14.30 Christian Geulen: Rationalities of War: Gender, Race and the Dawning of the 20th Century
15.30 – 16.00 Coffee Break
16.00 Christa Hämmerle: Home Front / Frontlines: Gender and the New Geography of War
17.00-18.00 Patrick J. Houlihan: The Religion of War and Peace
Saturday, 8 October 2011
Venue: IFK
Chair: Peter Becker
MORAL ORDERS
10.00 Helmut Lethen: Men with Nerves and Men of Steel
11.00 Coffee Break
11.30 Elisa Primavera-Lévy: La grande désillusion: Heroic Pain after 1914 in France and Germany
12.30 – 14.30 Lunch Break
14.30 Laura Engelstein: The New Man and the Old: Habits of War in the Russian Revolution
15.30-16.30 Ute Frevert: The Moral Economy of Honour and Shame: Making Sense
of War and Defeat
Participants:
Peter Becker, University of Vienna
Richard Bessel, University of York
Kathleen Cannning, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Christa Hämmerele, University of Vienna
Patrick Houlihan, The University of Chicago
Laura Engelstein, Yale University
Ute Frevert, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
Christian Geulen, University of Koblenz
Helmut Konrad, University of Graz
Elisa Primavery-Lévy, The University of Chicago
Oliver Rathkolb, University of Vienna
Tamara Scheer, Andrassy Universität Budapest
Karl Schlögel, Viadrina University at Frankfurt/Oder
Hew Strachan, University of Oxford
Jay Winter, Yale University