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This chapter focuses on the dishonor of captivity against the backdrop of “normative” notions of manhood. More than 997,000 German soldiers fell into enemy hands from 1914 to 1918, and roughly 325,000 surrendered to the British. Soldiers who were subjected to the indignity of capture or surrender faced the possibility that their soldierly virtue might be called into question. Surrender threatened a soldier's attachment to a community at war by making him vulnerable to charges of cowardice or treason and damaging his sense of belonging to a larger entity. Within the German army, few military observers failed to recognize that it was not death tolls but unprecedented waves of surrender that led to military defeat in November 1918. In the postwar era, military prisoners would be closely linked with the shame of Germany's defeat, regardless of the circumstances of their capture.

This chapter outlines how responses to the catastrophic military collapse of 1940 cast it as proof of French physical failure, and considers how the Vichy regime, which invested more resources in sport and physical education than even the Popular Front, sought masculine renewal as part of its anti-republican reordering of French society. It also traces the fortunes of the protagonists examined across the book, showing how the physician-culturists of the 1920s and 1930s often brought their expertise to roles in Vichy administration, if not policy-making. The chapter argues that the regime's sustained engagement with the desire to rebuild French men in the wake of defeat shows — although not nearly so much as previously in the eugenicist language of the ‘regeneration of the race’ — not only a further instance of the political uses of male athleticism, but the purchase of interwar notions of the merits of ‘rational’ physical exercise.

After Germany's stunning military defeat in 1918, the physical fitness of its citizens became a national priority, and no one did more to heighten the level of self‐scrutiny and to establish ideals more commensurate with the demands of the era than competitive athletes. Male and female athletes provided templates for an explicitly modern body — powerful, streamlined, and engineered for maximum performance — that many Germans believed would liberate the hitherto latent potential in men and women alike. Boxers, sprinters, and tennis players exuded a distinctively postwar spirit, untethered from prewar norms and focused on the aggressive pursuit of self‐interest. They demonstrated to their legions of fans how to negotiate the fast‐paced, restlessly experimental, performance‐oriented world of the Weimar Republic.

This chapter concentrates on the expectation, revealed and manipulated in the orations, that men are guardians against shame in both the public and private realms, and the dilemmas attendant on that expectation. With some reservations, ancient Athens can be viewed as a shame culture, that is, a culture that emphasized the power of shame in guiding moral behavior. The rhetoric of military defeat is discussed. Athenian men were particularly vulnerable to deliberate attempts on the part of other men to shame them. Physical violence unconnected to war and sport could also tarnish manliness in ancient Athens. The use of shame to promote conformity and moral conduct was supposed to complement the wish of Athenian men to protect their honor. The speeches indicate that the injunction that Athenian men guard against shame was an unattainable ideal subject to manipulation.

This chapter examines the Nixon administration's 1968–1973 publicity campaign to call the public's attention to the plight of American prisoners of war (POWs) and their families and how it combined the themes of military defeat abroad and male absenteeism within the home by featuring ubiquitous images of families without fathers. It shows how these images, originally intended to sanctify the national cause with regard to the Vietnam War, took on new meanings as POW wives—influenced by the rise of feminism—became more independent in their husbands' absences and did not want to relinquish it upon repatriation. The chapter also discusses the theme of male absenteeism in relation to those missing in action, and how it translated into a critique of a supposedly weak and corrupt federal government that had “left men behind”.

This chapter discusses events surrounding the world of kabuki in 1943. These include kabuki artists' response to Japan's military defeats; the staging of forty-six programs of old and new kabuki plays in Kyoto; the formation of independent troupes: New Commando Kabuki, Shock Troop Kabuki, and Public Service Kabuki; kabuki censorship; decrease in the newspaper coverage of kabuki; kabuki's decline in play contests; kabuki' period of severe malaise, marked by the inability to find a suitable posture within wartime society; kabuki's passionate defenders; the Japan League of Touring Theaters; alternatives to kabuki; and different futures envisioned for kabuki in the waning months of 1943.

Compared to most other countries, Denmark was only marginally affected by the two world wars. However, this does not mean that war had no impact on the historical development of the Danish welfare state. First, the formation of the nation state is directly linked to war and military defeats. As a result, Denmark gradually went from being a medium-sized European power to a small nation state with a very homogeneous population. Second, being a small state, the overall Danish security strategy was a passive one from 1870 to the end of the Cold War with a focus on domestic issues. The welfare state is part of this story. Third, as a consequence of this, the voice of the military was marginalized in politics and almost completely absent in debates on social issues. Still, war was a reality and both world wars affected the Danish social security system in various ways.

Chapter 15 features Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s final speech which appeared in an Islamic State video titled ‘In the Hospitality of Amirul-Mu’minin’ on 29 April 2019. Three features are particularly noteworthy. First, Baghdadi uses the speech to demonstrate that he is closely monitoring not only global events and issues but the fortunes of the personnel within his organization. Second, his physical appearance in the video was markedly different to his last appearance in 2014. He was now the guerrilla caliph managing a global insurgency on the run. Third, Baghdadi was projecting his authority as not just Islamic State’s leader but ‘amirul-mu’minin’ (commander of the faithful). Less than six months later, Baghdadi would be killed in a special forces leadership decapitation raid on his hideout in northern Syria. Under his leadership, the Islamic State had become the flagship of the global jihad with provinces around the world.

This chapter discusses extracts of a speech by Abul Hasan al-Muhajir, then-spokesman of the Islamic State, which was published on 18 March 2019, just before its defeat in Baghuz, eastern Syria. Entitled ‘He Was True to Allah and Allah Was True to Him,’ it captures how the group attempted to navigate its supporters through material collapse by playing down the significance of its last stand in Baghuz and deriding its adversaries. Among other things, Muhajir ties together events which occurred on opposite ends of the earth, weaving them into an emotionally compelling narrative, one in which the slaughters of Muslims in Baghuz, Syria, and Christchurch, New Zealand were symbolic of an enemy conspiracy against Islam and a reminders of the righteousness of Islamic State’s global insurgency.