爱国运动中的自杀事件报道与社会动员:1919-1928年

现代中国的爱国运动能发展为大规模的群众性运动,与媒体参与的社会动员密切相关。1919—1928年爱国运动中,一些爱国者为了抗议外侮、动员民众,愤极自杀。在一些爱国运动组织者的呼吁下,媒体对自杀事件的信息有选择地报道,彰显自杀行动的社会动员价值,向民众传播爱国运动的思想和主张,引导社会舆论的走向,并将公众注意力吸引到运动中最需要解决的问题之上,以此增强民众对团结御侮、一致对外的认同感,进而推动爱国运动向良性的、纵深的方向发展。通过媒体报道,自杀事件成了爱国运动中的公共事件。媒体对自杀事件的报道,也逐渐成为现代意义上爱国运动的有机组成部分。     

Beyond Comfort: German and English Military Chaplains and the Memory of the Great War, 1919–1929

How did German and English military chaplains commemorate the Great War? The established historiography broadly interprets war commemoration in the post‐war period in two ways. One approach presents commemoration as a ritual of healing that soothed the bereft. The other emphasizes the political function of commemoration, interpreting it as a way of reshaping the war in collective memory to legitimize the status quo — by venerating sacrifices made for the nation, it put the nation beyond question to strengthen allegiance to the established order. Both interpretations treat the language of war commemoration as one of consolation and comfort. Military chaplains, however, espoused a more ambitious mission. For them, the purpose of war commemoration was to inculcate dissatisfaction, guilt, and discomfort. This was because they remembered the war as a contest of ideas embodied in the clash of nations, a contest that was still unsettled. Their purpose was therefore the antithesis to consolation and conventional patriotism: to mobilize the living to honour their “blood debt” to the dead through the language of agitation. They themselves had participated in a war regarded by the churches as a campaign of regeneration through blood, in which sacrifice and suffering would revitalize their nations by bringing them to repentance, piety, and social cohesion. Because they were implicated personally in that incomplete crusade, they were especially anxious to realize the mission and complete the sacrifices of the dead. Anglican ex‐chaplains predominantly implored their congregations to ensure a permanent peace that had been purchased by blood, whereas German Protestants invoked a resurrected Volk reclaiming its status as a chosen people. Each articulated a politics of remembrance, one formed on the vision of a war to end all wars, the other on a vision of a war to resurrect the Reich as the Kingdom of God. While the political content of their memories was different, they shared an attitude to the function of remembrance, as a ritual to mobilize and arouse rather than console. Both groups preached that the peace was a continuation of an unfinished moral and spiritual struggle. Furthermore, while always honouring the dead, they stressed that the worth of their sacrifices was no longer guaranteed but contingent upon the conduct of living and future generations. Despite the divergences that emerged from their different confessional and national traditions, and from their respective circumstances, they shared a common moral language.