Dina Gusejnova
Universität Leipzig, Leibnitz Institute for the History and Culture of East Central Europe, Member, European Network in Universal and Global History
I am an Assistant Professor in International History at the LSE. I have previously taught at the University of Sheffield and at Queen Mary University of London. From 2011 to 2014, I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Transnational History at UCL. From 2009 to 2011, I was a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
My university degrees, a BA in History, an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, and a PhD (2009), are from the University of Cambridge. As a graduate student, I was a Marie Curie and DAAD visiting scholar at the Universities of Groningen, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.
My research profile is at the intersection between political, cultural, and intellectual history. my first book, European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-57 (Cambridge UP), appeared in paperback in 2018.
Recently taught modules
(at the University of Sheffield)
HST 3148 Fugitive Culture: artists, scholars, and political activists in exile, 1917-1945'
HST 202 Historians and History
HST 120 The History Workshop ('Imagined Communities in global perspective')
HST 117 The Making of the Twentieth Century
HST 2502 Empires and Revolutions in Continental Europe, 1905-23
HST 3302 Cultural Encounters
(at Queen Mary, University of London)
Undergraduate
A Century of Extremes: Germany since 1890
Rewriting Europe: 1989 and the End of Communism
History in Practice
Europe in Global Contexts
Previously taught courses
Undergraduate teaching
At UCL
HIST 7357, The Intellectual History of Exile in the Twentieth Century
Graduate teaching
HIST G078A, Charismatic Cosmopolitanism: Intellectuals and International Institutions in the Interwar Period
My university degrees, a BA in History, an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, and a PhD (2009), are from the University of Cambridge. As a graduate student, I was a Marie Curie and DAAD visiting scholar at the Universities of Groningen, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.
My research profile is at the intersection between political, cultural, and intellectual history. my first book, European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-57 (Cambridge UP), appeared in paperback in 2018.
Recently taught modules
(at the University of Sheffield)
HST 3148 Fugitive Culture: artists, scholars, and political activists in exile, 1917-1945'
HST 202 Historians and History
HST 120 The History Workshop ('Imagined Communities in global perspective')
HST 117 The Making of the Twentieth Century
HST 2502 Empires and Revolutions in Continental Europe, 1905-23
HST 3302 Cultural Encounters
(at Queen Mary, University of London)
Undergraduate
A Century of Extremes: Germany since 1890
Rewriting Europe: 1989 and the End of Communism
History in Practice
Europe in Global Contexts
Previously taught courses
Undergraduate teaching
At UCL
HIST 7357, The Intellectual History of Exile in the Twentieth Century
Graduate teaching
HIST G078A, Charismatic Cosmopolitanism: Intellectuals and International Institutions in the Interwar Period
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Papers by Dina Gusejnova
Aufbruch zu Demokratie und Nationalstaatlichkeit in Mittel- und Ostmitteleuropa? Aktuelle Forschungen mit Fokus auf die lokale Ebene (1917-1923)
The Tarpaulin - A Biography (BBC Radio 4, 28 November, 8pm) Dina Gusejnova Producer: Sara Parker (@sparksproducer) On Monday, 28 November,
The 28-minute programme is called Tarpaulin – a biography and it explores the themes of citizenship, statelessness and belonging through a history of the fabric. 1
Tarpaulin – or tarp – is a piece of canvas, which is covered in oil, wax, tar or a synthetic material to make it water repellent. It has therefore always been widely used by anyone connected to the sea. There are also lots of other uses for it in a range of normal life situations. You probably have one at home, but you haven’t noticed it. The other day, when you were stowing away your barbecue or your bicycle for the winter. Perhaps you have a Burberry coat or a water-repellent hat. You’ve certainly seen it on the street: large sheets, in blue, white, or green, protecting from the rain things we value, as well as things we’d like to throw away.
The career of the English word ‘tarpaulin’, from practical object to the metaphor of the common sailor or Jack Tar, attracted the interest of someone who would become famous much later as the author of a book called The Civilising Process. At the time of the Second World War, as I found out at the National Archives, British tarpaulins, produced in India and Palestine, were used as supplies for the Soviet army. The story of tarpaulin is closely linked to histories of war and forced displacement, as its use for temporary shelters used by refugees today demonstrates.
In exile from Nazi Germany, the sociologist Norbert Elias became fascinated by the reported resilience of the Jack Tars, self-made men sleeping on deck under a sheet of tarpaulin who could be promoted to be captains of the British navy. As someone who was learning English, Elias noticed that tarpaulin was one of the words featuring in the so-called Seaman’s Grammars and naval dictionaries, which had proliferated since the seventeenth century.
The result of his research was a dry article called ‘Studies in the Genesis of the Naval Profession’, published in the first issue of the British Journal of Sociology in 1950. In his view, which echoed those of writers such as Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe and Thomas Macaulay, the tarpaulins had made the British empire great. I decided to follow Elias’s history by restoring the place of this fabric in the lives of others. At the time of writing, Elias was a stateless person; he would only be naturalised in 1952. 2 His mother had perished at Auschwitz. Elias himself was among thousands of Germans – most of them of Jewish origin – who had been interned on the Isle of Man as ‘enemy aliens’ in 1940.
Thanks to a fortuitous acquaintance with the rock singer Mitch Mitchell of the Wild Angels, whom I had met some time before that in a Cambridge pub, the producer Sara Parker and I were able to join him on one of his regular trips to Calais.
We found ourselves there as guests of a young Eritrean family who had cooked a delicious meal in the middle of the place we know as the Jungle. It was particularly difficult to speak to the refugees, who needed to protect their identity and who remain to a large extent without a voice. Could I invite Afghan law students Jami and Davi to apply for one of the refugee scholarships advertised at Sheffield and other British universities, if there was no legal way for them to cross the Channel?
On our return to London, 1960s Rock was blasting through the sound system of Mitch’s car, and he explained that the refugees in Calais made him think of his own great-grandmother, who had escaped the pogroms in Eastern Europe to settle in London´s East End. 3
Insofar as the radio programme is a work of histoire engagée, it asks: why have so many other Europeans – why have so many British people around us – become so heartless that they feel neither solidarity with the bombed-out populations of the Middle East and Afghanistan, nor understanding for the political disenchantments of their own fellow citizens living beyond the limits of London?
In this programme, listeners will hear a variety of dialects and accents which they might struggle to follow – whether they are foreign or merely regional. This difficulty is intentional, and requires an emotional and intellectual commitment. The radio is uniquely suited to imagine an absence of things which neither the listeners nor the speakers can see: the right to citizenship, for example, the attachment to home, however makeshift it might be, or the disengagement from one’s own state. Like tarpaulin, ideas like ‘citizenship’ might change their form over time, from flax and cotton to canvas and plastic mesh, but they never lose their essential human substance.
Radio, as Sara has taught me, can convey ideas through counterpoint as well as melody. If you listen carefully, you will catch the tango Flor de lino, Linen flower, woven into the background to the fairy tale called The Flax by Hans Christian Andersen. Sara imposed the sounds of a sewing machine onto this dialogue, turning the production of tarpaulin itself into a kind of waltz of globalisation. She also generously allowed me to use materials from one of the legendary Radio Ballads which her father, Charles Parker, had produced in the 1960s with folk singer Ewan MacColl. If this is not too presumptuous, I’d like to think of this tarpaulin programme as a kind of ballad without a singer.
By contrast to the radio form, writing a silent text is like playing piano with one hand. Being a kind of migrant myself, albeit a privileged one, I envy those native speakers who are able to inhabit their own language like a second skin. This tarpaulin ballad is my attempt to learn an English word. A fine word, carefully placed, can touch you before you understand what it means. I hope that recognising its presence in your life will connect you to that of others. The people living under tarpaulin might seem to belong nowhere, but, I would argue, they are in fact today’s true citizens of the world.
Dina Gusejnova is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history, and the history of Europe in global contexts. Her recent book, European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957, is available fully open access at Cambridge University Press. The Tarpaulin – A Biography has made it into the Guardian’s This Week’s Best Radio list.
Image: Tarpaulin in use in the Calais Jungle, courtesy of Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left via Flickr [Creative Commons Licence].
Notes:
Based on a script which I began researching in 2014, it features contributions by Alex Ntung, Mitch Mitchell, Simon Layton, Jeremy Hicks, Yvonne Cresswell, amongst original voices from the now dismantled refugee camp in Calais, from tarpaulin makers based in a small factory in Bury, near Manchester, and others. ↩
In fact, spectacularly, as I learned recently at Kew, his naturalisation certificate gets the spelling of his name wrong: it was spelt “Alias”, as if his new citizenship were in fact a mere alias. ↩
Mitch has also spoken about this in interviews. ↩
Gusejnova illustrates how a supranational European mentality was forged from
depleted imperial identities. In the revolutions of 1917 to 1920, the power of the
Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanoff dynasties over their subjects expired. Even
though Germany lost its credit as a world power twice in that century, in the global
cultural memory, the old Germanic families remained associated with the idea of
Europe in areas reaching from Mexico to the Baltic region and India. Gusejnova’s
book sheds light on a group of German-speaking intellectuals of aristocratic origin
who became pioneers of Europe’s future regeneration. In the minds of transnational
elites, the continent’s future horizons retained the contours of phantom empires.
Contents
Part I. Celebrity of Decline: 1. Famous deaths: subjects of imperial decline; 2. Shared horizons:
the sentimental elite in the Great War; Part II. Power of Prestige: 3. Soft power: pan-
Europeanism after the Habsburgs; 4. The German princes: an aristocratic fraction in the
democratic age; 5. Crusaders of civility: the legal internationalism of the Baltic Barons; Part III.
Phantom Empires: 6. Knights of many faces: the dream of chivalry and its dreamers; 7. Apostles
of elegy: Bloomsbury's continental connections; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
Reviews:
‘Drawing on an impressively wide array of primary and secondary materials, Gusejnova focuses on a group of German-speaking intellectuals dispersed across all three former empires, whose ideas of international order have largely been obscured after 1945: the Germans, Count Harry Kessler, Count Hermann Keyserling, and Baron Hans-Hasso von Veltheim; the Austrians, Prince Karl Anton Rohan and Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi; and the Russian, Baron Mikhail von Taube. Gusejnova is interested in how these figures “spoke, thought, and felt” about the end of empire, setting out to explain why revolution was not more widespread in Central Europe after 1917.’ – from the review in German Studies, 2018
‘In a sense, the book reverses Peter Gay’s take in his now classic Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968) by examining the fate of insiders who, after 1918, were outsiders. The men at the center of European Elites and Ideas of Empire found themselves adrift after the war in an era marked by multiplying international frontiers and fierce integral nationalism.’ - From H-Empire, 2017
‘Gusejnova’s book is quite unusual in conception. Unlike other books, it does not focus on nation-states or even national thinkers. Rather, she sets out to explore how a colourful group of declassé German-speaking aristocrats—including Harry Kessler, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Hermann Keyserling, Hans-Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau and even Alfred Rosenberg—developed highly divergent ideas of European unity from the ruins of vanished empires and political upheaval. Gusejnova persuasively argues that their ‘supranational European mentality’ was a forgotten species of internationalist thinking that flew in the face both the era’s nationalism and Wilsonian and Soviet-style versions of internationalism, and perhaps for this reason has attracted comparatively little scholarly attention.’ – from German History, 2017
‘Taking Europe’s revolutions and political transformations during and after World War I as her starting point, Dina Gusejnova uses the memoirs and letters of Europe’s pre–World War I elites to offer a striking new portrait of the world they felt they had lost. More importantly, in European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957, Gusejnova also offers a clear sense of the myriad political and personal projects undertaken by (particularly German-speaking)
ex-aristocrats in a Europe now missing the royal houses of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman empires. […] The clear value of the book lies in the microhistories themselves, which offer freshly excavated details revealing how once-privileged individuals adjusted (or not) to their new political contexts.’ – from American Historical Review, 2018.