In Sometimes, to the Victor Belongs a Host of Problems, Edward Rothstein reviews The Culture of Defeat:
In some cases, defeat itself may have several stages. In 1870, Prussia’s initial military defeat of france’s Second Empire was followed by France’s futile attempt to rewage the war in the name of the new Third Republic. But whatever the process, once defeat is acknowledged there arrives, Mr. Schivelbusch says, a “unique type of euphoria.” The old regime is discredited, its demise celebrated. Defeat is marked by dance crazes; old forms are cast off. In the 1870′s, a diarist noted, France was “dancing to forget.” In Weimar Germany, jazz dancing was admiringly called “the Bolshevism of the ballroom.” Mr. Schivelbusch even traces the development of major bicycle and automobile races — which until 1914 ended and began in Paris — to the lasting reverberations of a defeated French culture and its physical aspirations for ethereal supremacy.But there are also recriminations and justifications. The victor, after all, is a barbarian: the mercantile Yankee who, instead of fighting fair, torched towns, or the militant Prussian who lacked the cultivated sensitivities of the French, or the massed armies of decadent Europeans who could win only by drafting brash Americans into a worldwide war against Germany. Pride is taken in one’s defeated virtue. “Glory to the Conquered,” read the war memorial erected in 1874 in Paris.
Defeat may also be seen as the result of a betrayal — the corruption of the old order or the disloyalty of a general or the “stab in the back” that many Germans began to imagine took place during World War I. Such beliefs, Mr. Schivelbusch shows, reshape the culture of the defeated. The view that the Germans were stabbed in the back even fed evolving Nazi ideology: defeat was a failure of communal will, a betrayal engineered by social and racial saboteurs.