<Reverb Effect’s theme music, lively and interrogative, plays behind the voice of a narrator, interspersed with historical clips of other voices>
Narrator [a woman’s voice]: How do past voices resonate in the present moment?
Man A: …hear the stories of your parent’s…
Woman A: yeah
Man A: …and your grandparents’ and stuff, so I’m living through them or the stories they told.
Narrator: And how do we make sense of those voices?
Woman B: No, and that’s the story of my life [echo]
Man B: And a case has been made!
Woman B: No I am not trying to void the question, I am trying to clarify the position…
Narrator: What were they trying to say? And whose job is it to find out? This is Reverb Effect.
<Intro theme slowly fades out>
Paige Newhouse: Three men play scat, a card game popular in Germany. They wear suits. In contrast, their bodies are mutilated, marked by missing limbs, marred faces, and red swollen skin. They have glass eyes, mechanical jaws, prosthetic arms and hands, and pegged legs. One man uses a contraption resembling an ear trumpet, an early form of a hearing aid. These men are German war veterans, signified by the Iron Cross worn by one of the card players on his left breast. They sit in front of three newspapers, the Dresdner Anzeiger, the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, and the Berliner Tageblatt. Illuminating the scene is a lamp with a skull inside.
This is the scene in Otto Dix’s 1920 painting, Die Skatspieler (The Scat players), one of the artist’s commentaries on the First World War: the disfigured bodies show the outcomes of militarization and of years of trench warfare; the glass eye, mechanical jaws, and hearing apparatus signify the medical innovation and new technologies created out of mass destruction. The newspapers in the background refer to a German press that celebrated militarism, called for war, and depicted it as inevitable. That the mangled veterans wear polished, intact suits and ties while playing cards invokes the business class holding the proverbial deck in their hand, gambling on war.
This painting and its themes—militarization, modernization, technological advance, and the destruction of bodies—is relevant today, as leaders use new technologies like artificial intelligence for policing and military operations, despite their promises that AI will improve our lives, making for a better future.
Welcome to Season 5 of Reverb Effect, a podcast brought to you by the History Department at the University of Michigan. I’m Paige Newhouse, this year’s season producer. This episode features a conversation between three experts on World War I.
Matthew Hershey graduated with a PhD from the History Department here at Michigan in 2024. Congratulations, Matt. His dissertation explored meanings and experiences of soldiers’ suicide in the First World War. Cheyenne Pettit and Lediona Shahollari are currently PhD candidates in the History Department. Cheyenne studies Canadian and British conflicts over the treatment of venereal disease during World War One. Lediona focuses on the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange during the partition of those two states in the aftermath of the First World War.
<Slow, mournful music fades in>
<Voice actor Kat Brasuch reading the poem “Does It Matter?” by Siegfried Sassoon>:
Does it matter?—losing your legs?…
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter?—losing your sight?…
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit?…
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.
Paige: Siegfried Sassoon, 1917
<Slow, mournful music fades out>
Cheyenne Pettit: I’m curious what got you interested in the First World War?
For me, it was a very personal sort of trying to figure out how do we have these like cultural scripts where we say, yes, veterans are important, and yes, we will provide for them. What I saw in reality was my dad being sick and no one helping. And especially he struggled with psychological distress, which by the end of his life, he was seeing a psychiatrist and psychologist weekly. His needs were quite high. And so that had me thinking historically, how did we get here? Has it always been this way? And that’s how initially my MA project became a First World War project studying the history of shell shock in the Canadian forces. What did they make of it? Did they—was there empathy for these men? Were they cast out? How were they cared for after the war?
And I did that, and I did a wonderful shellshock project for my MA, and while I was in the archives, someone misfiled a folder of syphilis documents alongside shellshock documents. But what I found was a, a series of letters between a British county clerk, so from a town in Buxton, Britain, and he was complaining about a recent ship full of Canadian servicemen who were shipped to a Canadian hospital in Buxton who had syphilis. And the county clerk was incredibly angry, and in fact had written a petition to have these soldiers removed. He said explicitly, oh, we believe that syphilis needs to be cured, and in fact it’s an incredibly important thing that we give these people access to health, but we don’t want them in our community. And I was struck in that moment, and I couldn’t let it go. I had to know what it was about syphilis that caused this sort of dysfunction within the imperial hierarchy.
Matthew Hershey: I think that’s really interesting because actually it’s quite similar to the project I pitched to get into Michigan, actually, which was quite different from the one I ended up completing, because for my MA project, I ended up looking at British representations of the campaign in East Africa during the First World War and what’s now Tanzania and Kenya primarily. And what I was so interested in was the ways that imperial hierarchies, even just in the kind of representational sphere, were necessarily reconfigured to meet the new demands of the war.
After my first year, I was in Berlin with a friend of mine. And full disclosure, we were very hungover because we hadn’t seen each other in a long time, we’d gone out the night before, and the next day, we were getting lunch with a former professor of his, from his time studying abroad there and his wife, who is also a historian. And so we show up and we’re not in our best form, but so, Bob Waite starts asking me, what are you thinking about? What are you working on? I told him about the imperial project, and he thought it was interesting. I said, well, I also have this other idea about studying suicide in Germany during the war, but I don’t know how feasible it is, what sources there would be. And I sort of saw his eyes light up as I started talking about, you know, he’s like, well, why, why that? What, what interests you about that?
In [Stephane] Audoin-Rouzeau [and Annette] Becker’s 2000 thematic analysis of the war, they open it with a discussion of violence, actual battlefield violence. And there’s a subsection where they talk about battlefield violence and the things left unsaid in history books, things that were self-censored that were not necessarily prohibited. And one of the things that they talk about in that is suicide. And they talk about it in this way that I found really compelling, where they talk about, we know this occurred, but it’s not, it doesn’t find sort of representation in memory. And so that memory is also hidden and occluded in different ways.
Lediona Shahollari: It’s really fascinating to hear how both of you have gotten to your projects and the ways that just like personal relationships and interactions have really shaped and sparked a lot of the questions that you’re thinking about throughout your kind of career as a historian. It’s also very much the personal in terms of the personal connection. So I grew up a first generation immigrant in Brooklyn and New York City. So I grew up around a lot of around immigrant communities. So I was always intrigued and interested about questions around migration when I started exploring history in the study of history in undergrad. It’s actually my great-grandfather’s migration story that made me think about, how do we write about histories of migration? How do refugees and different forms of migrants appear in the archive? Because a lot of these stories can appear fragmented.
My great-grandfather migrated from Albania to New York City in the early 1910s. He was working in New York City, and he spent about—roughly—around 20 years, about 20 years, in the US until he went back to Albania to essentially get married. His initial plan, as my grandmother describes it, is that they were going to go to the United States. World War II happened. And essentially my grandma was born at that time and he was trying to book their tickets on the boat to get to the United States. The Abanian government under Italian occupation at this time was essentially like, you know, you are allowed to go, but you cannot take your family with you.
So he made the decision to stay. So after the war ended, and Enver Hoxha’s socialist, communist, regime took over, he tried again to leave with his family. And this time, he was not allowed to leave. And one of those reasons was because he was a US citizen, and he held a US passport, which was also news that my grandmother and her siblings did not know about this until the system collapsed—it was that he was a US citizen. And essentially he was imprisoned and he was seen as [an] enemy of the state, because of that. And Hhe never made it back to the United States. He ended up passing away in Albania.
In 1946, the American diplomats were asked to leave Albania, the American Council in Albania was closed down. So there was no US presence, but eventually my family and I did make it to the United States in a set of coincidence and just after the borders opened up in the 1990s. So it always sparked questions in me about the limitations of migration. Also the fact of migration and the way that we talk about it or the way that it’s written, migration is not a—or displacement—is not point A to point B. There are so many levels of decisions that happen, some that are in the control of the individual, but some that are very much dictated by the state. For me it was more about understanding what is migration as a human condition, but also how is it possible or how can we as historians write about the topic of migration that doesn’t flatten out these different complex experiences that human beings have trying to navigate the world.
<Slow, mournful music fades in>
<Voice actor Kat Brasuch reading the poem “Glory of Women” by Siegfried Sassoon>:
You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
You can’t believe that British troops “retire”
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
Paige: Siegfried Sassoon, 1917
<Slow, mournful music fades out>
Lediona: In both of your cases you’re studying soldiers, and the concept of being both a victim and a perpetrator is, I think, something that’s incredibly difficult to capture and to discuss. My own research and my own work, I think, some of the questions that I come about is the fact that how do we talk about these different kinds of atrocities hand-in-hand together without minimizing one, and not privileging another? So how do we talk about where one form of violence is not used to perpetuate violence to another community?
For example one of the ways that the Armenian genocide is denied, continuously is the argument that, well, over 2 million Muslims were ethnically cleansed out of the Balkans from 1878 throughout the Balkan wars. And there’s been this mass exodus and mass atrocity. And this is used to cover and deny part of the massacres and the genocide of the Armenians in 1915, but also like other local Christian populations in Anatolia. So I think one of the challenges, and one of the things that I’m struggling with as I’m writing is thinking about how do we address these local atrocities, hand-in-hand, together? And I think this is a practice of writing. It makes writing incredibly difficult to be able to get across the message of one, not minimizing certain forms of violence, but also not privileging others, to recognize them for what they are and have them stand side-by-side together.
Matt: I completely agree with your point about the writing. Some of it is about how you write about it. I know it’s a thing. We’ve all taught, History 195 here, writing of history, the intro writing course. I know one of the things I go over with my students is not just, okay, avoid passive voice, but why? You can use easy examples. People were killed. Well, how? By whom? For what reason? All of this is elided? Just through that sentence, construction? Whereas if you say, well, Nazis killed Jews, there is an identified perpetrator and victim in this sentence, and it tells you more. And that is down, as basic as that is, these are things about how we write about them.
For me some of it is trying to think about, this was a person, and maybe all that’s left is three sentences I have in a fragmentary kind of initial report. And oftentimes in my case, that’s what I found. But to try and look at that with the fullest human lens possible, that also recognizes, well, what is the actual thing I have in front of me, and why do I have it? Even this official document was preserved for a reason, and in my case, I have an entire chapter actually about, well how are these documents, quote unquote, meant to be read?
One, they cared enough to preserve these records, right? There was a reason they wanted to hold onto them, but out of this, they’re also trying to create a narrative of a certain kind. One, it’s clear that the questions about service-related reasons show they are concerned about whether a soldier’s military service could be plausibly seen as an explanation for a suicide, presumably, because it would implicate them, it would implicate the army. And it would therefore implicate the state more broadly in not only failing to care for its citizens, but actively destroying them in the course of what’s supposed to be national service. But then we also see in that same regulation, precisely how they’re trying to deflect that attention by saying, well, if you find that a soldier had, let’s say, difficult financial straits, or had a parent who was in a psychiatric hospital, well now you had a purely individualized reason for why that man and not some other man laid hands on himself.
But all of that was just to say, was to realize, like, all of these documents I was looking at were all downstream of that. And so that told me several things, both about the people and about the state.
Cheyenne: Lediona, you and I have talked a lot about our concerns about creating a hierarchy of victims and how problematic that is, and how do you avoid doing that? How do you as a historian tell stories of atrocity or tell stories of mass death without flattening them? And I think the way that I do that, or the way that I try and do that in my work, is by leaning into the nuance and—as you say—writing honestly to my readers about it. Say that some of those things that I work with in the archive, for example, are lists. So these are lists created by doctors, Canadian doctors, working in Canadian hospitals on the British Isles during the war. And once Canadian syphilis numbers started rising, literally two weeks after they landed in Britain, and they continued to rise throughout the war and maintained the highest syphilis numbers throughout the war, which became a huge, huge problem back home in Canada, because it’s embarrassing, right?
As Canadians were being painted as sort of violent or uncivilized colonials who were probably getting syphilis from equally uncivilized people, British women were saying they’re not really British. And Canadian people were saying, no, you’re not really British because you’re not living up to British morality. But when it comes to what do I then say about these documents, I know that these documents do not provide the women’s perspective at all. And in fact, she’s not there. And so I have to say that. I have to say, I have no idea if the soldier is describing an actual woman or if he’s just trying to get this thing done with. But I do know that there are these things that are motivating his portrayals or these things that are animating why he’s making these decisions. And those are things that the state put on him.
And these are ways that I try to provide nuance for when people are making mistakes and are doing things that harm people, why are they doing it? How are they doing it? And not to say that it’s, it lessens the blame that they, they’re still responsible for what happened to the women that they called out. They’re still responsible for that. And I want my readers to know that. But I also want them to know that there was a system in place that encouraged him to behave that way. And if we want the world to be different, we have to look at what we are enticing people to do and motivating them to do and take that seriously. And I think if you do that, there’s a way of making sure that no one gets off the hook, but they are similarly not blamed for things that were outside their control.
Lediona: Cheyenne, you bring up a really interesting point about—I think both of you do—about thinking about also the ways in which to approach your archives or to think about your sources, but also the limitations they also provide you. And one of the types of sources that I work with, I found quite a bit of perspectives of refugee voices, for lack of a better word, but like individual perspectives trying to negotiate with the state or with the League of Nations or with some other institution to either get their land back or get resettled somewhere else. So one of the cases that I’m still parsing through, and I’m still trying to think through quite a bit about, the ways in which these petitions are formed, is an Albanian Muslim village that was deported from Greece and to Turkey and was resettled in Ezine. And what I’m looking through, and I’m trying to parse through, are the petitions that come out of the Albanian State Archive. They’re petitions that essentially are being written to the League of Nations, but also to the mixed commission who, essentially, the mixed commission was a neutral body, assigned by the the League of Nations, but also by the Treaty of Lausanne, a byproduct of the Treaty of Lausanne, essentially to administer and move / liquidate properties, give back the people their value and resettle them and relocate them in the said place that they would be in.
One of the restrictions I find is that they’re writing in a particular kind of language, and someone is also to some extent helping them come up and formulate a lot of their claims and also requests. So there are these limitations of the ways in which how you can become visible in the archive, that you need to present a certain narrative or you need to write in a certain way, and that perhaps is facilitated by somebody in the institution who knows how to write these petitions. But also on the other hand, it’s thinking about, well, how do I stay true or get at the essence of what these individuals actually want? And whether some of this is coerced in a way that it’s legible to state institutions. And I think that’s one of the aspects of documents, at least with petitions that I’ve been struggling with parsing out.
<Slow, mournful music fades in>
<Voice actor Kat Brasuch reading the poem “Grass” by Cark Sandburg>:
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work
Paige: Carl Sandburg, 1918
<Slow, mournful music fades out>
Matt: One of the other things that I know I’m curious to hear is how your research and your study of this period of this war of studying the First World War in the different ways that we do, with our different particular focuses, how has that shaped or inflected your view of the contemporary world of current events? What has being a First World War historian done to your understanding of the present day?
Cheyenne: So I think there’s really, for me, two or three lessons that come out of my project that I think are useful for understanding the world and are shaped by my understanding of events. First of course is this concept of war. And obviously I am anti-war. What I see in all of my work is the massive suffering and the massive, obviously loss of life, but also loss of possibility, loss of hope, devastation These things that have a history so much longer than they are and the devastation that they reap. So I guess part of my dissertation is about showing that we have to disengage from war as a principal political move. We have to think differently.
The other one is sort of connected. Veterans issues are complicated because they are incredibly traumatized individuals, but they’ve also in many cases been involved in horrible, horrible crimes. And we’re putting them in that position by continuing to engage in war efforts. So how can we avoid doing that? And if there is a war, how do we think about caring for veterans after a war is something we really have to talk about. Because our country’s VA system is a nightmare, and veterans are only receiving less and less care and resorting to class action lawsuits more and more.
So many of the people facing homelessness right now are veterans who are undercared for. These are huge social and cultural problems that stem from warfare and our inability to deal with the consequences realistically. And so I want us to deal with them realistically. And then third is honestly this question of policing, and especially policing as it’s applied to gendered concerns. Because in my instance, there are invasive gynecological exams being done on these women who are brought in under 40 D. And that is their only defense is to prove that they don’t have syphilis. And so they have to undergo these incredibly invasive exams by prison doctors—I will mention it is not their doctor, it’s prison doctors who are notoriously undereducated at this period in Britain and notoriously, frankly, abusive. And so it’s a horrible position we put them in.
Lediona: So, because I study population exchanges, it makes me think about population management. And I mean population exchanges or the concept of like population management is not something that is particularly new to nation-states, but it’s also a mechanism that European empires have used to resettle certain territories, to colonize, to move certain populations in one certain space in order to cultivate unused land, for example.
But I think for me what really sticks out is this concept that Lord Curzon, who was essentially a colonial administrator for India but also he was one of the allied negotiators at the table at Lausanne, is this concept that he referred to as unmixing. And that has a lot of presumptions, that societies that are essentially mixed in quotes, cannot coincide and coexist together, that the only mechanism and quote unquote future piece of a region is to unmix certain populations.
So in the Greek and Turkish case, it was Muslims that were living in Greece need to all be deported to, to Turkey. And all orthodox Christians living in Anatolia, in Turkey, need to be deported to Greece. And this caused, I mean, the displacement of over 1.8 million people and destroyed several generations. This number does not take into account the multiplicity of displacements that occurred because of the exchange itself. And I think the concept of using the idea that society, certain ethnic groups or certain communities cannot live or coincide together, I think, is something that we really, really need to think about where these narratives come from, but why the international system or whatever international system there is, solution, in quotes, is to promote these ideas of population deportation or to move one population in a certain territory for quote unquote future peace.
Matt: One of the reasons the First World War I think resonates in its history is that it grows out of the multipolar world. World War II In some ways from the allied perspective is rightly remembered as, quote unquote, the Good War, where there was a clear sense of moral purpose in destroying fascism and the imperial Japanese militarist state that imbued it with a sort of inherent sense of purpose that didn’t necessarily always need to be stated. I think the first World War was much like most other wars in that there is a moral framing, but it is not inherent to it. It has to be imposed, it has to be cultivated and made, and it’s cultivated and made not just by states right?—and their representatives and various people in official positions of military or political power, but also people in informal positions of social and cultural power, and also people below—below, quote unquote here, right?—but you’re talking about people on the ground. They’re also making their own meanings out of bringing all of these things together.
So when I pull all of that and I sort of synthesize all of that, and I, I look at the contemporary world, it’s more that it gives me things to look for and premises to understand them. So, it’s not incidental that some commentators have said, you know, well the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war there right now is essentially continuation of the first World War. It’s a war of attrition. It’s mostly being fought with artillery and shelling and—right—this gradually grinding down. Casualty numbers are being hidden on both sides, which is another common feature.
It isn’t that you could only discover these things from studying the First World War, but it does offer a particularly valuable lens to think about, like, is there any good news <laugh>, right? Is there a sort of positive thing that comes out? I can say I actually ended my dissertation on this note of horror and possibility. And the horror, of course, is what we’ve just been discussing. But there is possibility in there as well, because I think the other thing certainly that I found in my research and is the thing I realized I’ve, I’ve sort of gone away from, but, just at the beginning is, the state collapses in the end, and Germany loses, and that bill comes due and they can’t pay it.
And so for all of these attempts to—not just with mass conscription, but with different forms of disciplinary action and the different attempts at emotional mobilization and financial mobilization and the literal making mobile of people and goods and moving them—this inherently shatters social ties, it necessarily must do this even if everyone involved survived, you were physically removed from all of these places, right? You’re broken, you’re sent apart. And the state says this, and it says, you are at our, you are operating at our behest. You are operating under our control. Only to discover come 1918, that when the German offensives failed, German soldiers just started leaving. And it didn’t mean they could do it all at once. It didn’t mean that it collapsed the state all at once. But in the end, the German revolution in the end of the war illustrates where actual power lies, and it lies in people.
Cheyenne: On a similar note to that, so to tell my good side, my silver lining to my dissertation, I have to go back a little bit, before the First World War period, to Britain and the 1860s where there’s again, another syphilis problem, but this time it’s just Britishers on the British Isles. And they pass through legislation, so through parliament, they pass the Contagious Diseases Acts, which basically makes it illegal for anyone to have sex with a sailor or soldier from His Majesty’s rmy and give them venereal disease, broadly construed. And what happened is that there was huge, huge abuses under this law where primarily any woman out at a time that a police officer felt that she shouldn’t be could be brought in and examined by force—gynecologically examined—to prove their innocence of having syphilis or venereal disease writ large.
And they could either walk right back out being humiliated and traumatized, or they could be stuck there and treated under a lock hospital for months until they’re finally released. Either way, there was huge, huge backlash from both working class communities across Britain, but also what were protofeminists and feminists across Britain. And it took them 20 years of agitation, but they repealed the Contagious Diseases Acts. And not only did they repeal them, but they repealed them with such ferocity that there was an institutional memory in Parliament of this fight. And so when Canadian and Dominion pressures came during the First World War and went to the legislature first and asked them for similar legislation, they were turned away at every chance, not because these men in Parliament felt differently towards underserved women in Britain. They felt the same way that the military commanders felt, but they knew for their seats that they did not want to deal with what they knew was going to be a huge backlash.
And so they didn’t in 1916, they chose not to in 1917, they chose not to again. And when that became clear that Parliament could not act because the people would not let them, Canada had to go around to daddy and mommy and say, oh, please, please Privy Council, we’re doing the right thing. And the Privy Council was too worried about their war effort to anger Canadian officials. And so they put forward 40 D and there was momentous backlash, which destabilized Britain during the time and caused huge consequences post-war, where they were continually dealing with questions about gender and responsibilities to the state and policing and health.
And so the silver lining here is go to your protests, engage civically with things that are not right in our state, in our society, continue to make noise, continue to push because it doesn’t seem like it matters, but the Contagious Diseases Acts and that backlash mattered so much that it saved women in Britain from a wartime of discrimination. And it led to the immediate end of 40 D once the war ended, which would not have been possible without this history of agitation around feminist issues. So that is my call to everyone out there. If there’s something that you think is wrong, fight against it and you will be surprised what you can do.
<Slow, mournful music fades in>
<Voice actor Kat Brasuch reading the poem “The Drum” by John Scott of Amwell>:
I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
And lures from cities and from fields,
To sell their liberty for charms
Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms;
And when Ambition’s voice commands,
To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands.
I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To me it talks of ravag’d plains,
And burning towns, and ruin’d swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widow’s tears, and orphans moans;
And all that misery’s hand bestows,
To fill the catalogue of human woes.
Paige: John Scott.
Paige: Thank you for listening. Thank you to Matthew Hershey, Cheyenne Pettit, and Lediona Shahollari. Thank you to our voice actor, Kat Brasuch. Our editorial board is Enrieth Martinez Palacios, Talitha Pam, Cheyenne Pettit, and Sophie Wunderlich. Gregory Parker is our executive producer, and I’m your host and season producer, Paige Newhouse.
<Slow, mournful music fades out>
This is my last episode, and it has been a pleasure hosting Reverb Effect this season. Please stay tuned for new episodes in the fall with our new host, Cheyenne. This is Reverb Effect.
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