Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Laffan is professor of history at Princeton University. His books include The Makings of Indonesian Islam (Princeton). Max Weiss is assistant professor of history and Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi‘ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon.

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"The history of the emotions has become one of the most dynamic fields in historical research in the twenty-first century. By focusing on one emotion--fear--this volume adds another dimension to our understanding of the way people negotiated their encounters with other people and events in the past. It is a riveting read."--Joanna Bourke, author of Fear: A Cultural History

"Ambitious and timely, this book truly advances the discussion of fear across considerable time and regional space. This result is an important next step in emotions history, and a direct link to a variety of developments in the political and religious sphere."--Peter N. Stearns, provost of George Mason University

"Fear is the condition we live in. Or is it? In this timely book, a stellar cast of experts uncovers a perplexing array of concrete historical instances of fear, from the eighteenth-century Tupac Amaru Rebellion in colonial Latin America to Dutch Islamophobia in 2010. The reader will come away with a sense of the mind-boggling diversity of practices by which fear has been experienced. This book harbors a small hope that the current politics of fear might become history."--Jan Plamper, Goldsmiths, University of London

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Facing Fear

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface...............................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Fear and Its Opposites in the History of Emotions MAX WEISS............................................................................11 Fear of the Thirty Years War DAVID LEDERER.........................................................................................................102 Conceptions of Terror in the European Enlightenment RONALD SCHECHTER...............................................................................313 "When Fear Rather than Reason Dominates": Priests behind the Lines in the Tupac Amaru Rebellion (1780–83) CHARLES WALKER.....................544 Fear in Colonial California and within the Borderlands LISBETH HAAS................................................................................745 Weimar Cinema between Hypnosis and Enlightenment ANDREAS KILLEN....................................................................................916 Italian Fascism's Wartime Enemy and the Politics of Fear MARLA STONE...............................................................................1147 The Persecuted Body: Evangelical Internationalism, Islam, and the POLITICS of Fear MELANI MCALISTER................................................1338 Danger, Media, and the Urban Experience in Delhi RAVI SUNDARAM.....................................................................................1629 Fear of the Past: Post-Soviet Culture and the Soviet Terror ALEXANDER ETKIND.......................................................................18310 White Hajjis: Dutch Islamophobias Past and Present MICHAEL LAFFAN.................................................................................202Notes.................................................................................................................................................217Contributors..........................................................................................................................................265Index.................................................................................................................................................267

Chapter One

DAVID LEDERER, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH

Does fear generate crisis or do crises trigger fears? The Thirty Years War can undoubtedly be described as a crisis of the highest magnitude, accompanied in Central Europe by an almost ubiquitous state of fear. Contemporaries depicted the war and its accompanying atrocities with visceral horror. Any inclination to quantify their fear by cliometrically trawling through eyewitness accounts from the destruction of Magdeburg (e.g., those by Daniel Friese, a boy of twelve at the time; or the scientist and future mayor of Magdeburg Otto von Guericke; or the Protestant mercenary Georg Ackerman, who served the Catholic League under Tilly) or Friesseneger's Chronicles for references to shock and angst is obviated by fear's looming presence on nearly each and every page. Indeed, contemporary diarists and chroniclers lamented the impossibility of describing the fears they suffered, which were either too horrible for words, would require far too many words than it would ever be possible to compose, or simply because not enough words existed in their vocabulary to adequately describe the multifarious range of their terrors. Even after three centuries, fear of the Thirty Years War continues to haunt the German psyche. At the beginning of the twentieth century, mothers still threatened children with ominous tales of vicious Croatian mercenaries; as late as 1962, rural Hessians responding to a government questionnaire still ranked the Thirty Years War as first among German catastrophes, ahead of the Second World War, the Nazi reign of terror, the Black Death, and the First World War.

In an attempt to address the relationship between fears and crises on the basis of the example of the Thirty Years War, we might consider how the first European total war evoked a universal fear response. We can also point to expressions of preexisting apocalyptic fears in the material context of a long-term crisis. Therefore, my present interest lies chiefly in the identification and analysis of both universal and traditional elements in contemporary portrayals of fear aroused by the specific events of the war itself. Taken altogether, the present analysis suggests that the linchpin of the relationship between crises and fear during the Thirty Years War was their literal embodiment by contemporary political culture and a peculiar understanding of history.

Understanding the relationship of fears to crises holds special significance in this case, since historians used to regard the Thirty Years War as one manifestation of the so-called General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. After several decades, the crisis debate became mired over its nature (i.e., as an economic conjuncture, a constitutional crisis related to innovations in military technology, a social struggle between the nobility and the parvenus, or part of the structural shift from feudalism to capitalism) and fell out of fashion in the 1990s. However, a recent forum in the American Historical Review puts it back on our agenda, featuring a keynote article by Geoffrey Parker. Parker figured among the earliest and most vocal proponents of the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century as an interpretive model. In its current incarnation, he embellishes crisis theory with data emerging from climatic history on the impact of the Little Ice Age, effectively adding a global/empirical dimension to an originally Eurocentric social-historical explanation. The immediacy of the twenty-first-century scientific debate over climate change resonates throughout his argument for adding the Little Ice Age as an integral component of the Seventeenth-Century Crisis, endowing Parker's provocative renovation of crisis theory with new life.

Most relevant to our current inquiry into the relationship between fears and crises are the concluding remarks to the aforementioned AHR forum offered by J. B. Shank. Etymologically, Shank unmasks "crisis" as an ancient Greek medical term reintroduced into contemporary parlance by humanist physicians during the Renaissance to describe a serious trauma to the body. Only gradually did it shed its original medical meaning and evolve into modern usage, at first metaphorically, as a depiction of social tensions. Shank expresses grave reservations about forensic methods adopted by historians and masquerading as natural science. As he astutely points out:

Among those assumptions [i.e., historical consensus after 1954 on the Seventeenth-Century Crisis—DL] was the idea that historical entities akin to the human body existed in the past (in this case an entity called "seventeenth-century society"), and that these entities could be objects of scientific historical analysis. Also assumed was the applicability of the conceptual tools used by medical science to understand health in human bodies (in this case "crisis theory") when trying to understand the cognate objects of historical science (in this case "seventeenth-century society").

In other words, Shank criticizes the epistemological implications of historians applying medical terminology to history. Usage...