scholarly journals Imaginer une Allemagne socialiste : le rôle du cinéma dans la construction de l’identité nationale est-allemande

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Perrine Val ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Central Place ◽  
Film Distribution ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
German Identity ◽  
East German ◽  
Post War

"DEFA, the company responsible for film distribution and production in the Eastern part of Germany, was founded in 1946, three years before the GDR. This shows the central place of cinema in the GDR, which seeks to build a socialist German identity in the ruins of post-war and fascism while asserting itself against the neighboring FDR. The DEFA’s cinema first served the official socialist ideology by proposing historical productions depicting communist heroes fighting against fascism. Whether the film directors agree with this ideology or not, their films also illustrate the flaws that characterize East German identity until the fall of the wall in 1989."

Making War upon the Chart

2018 ◽  
pp. 166-201
Author(s):  
Jason W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Western Pacific ◽  
American Empire ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Western Pacific ◽  
Hydrographic Surveying

This chapter examines the place of charts and hydrographic surveying in the consolidation of a formal American empire after 1898 and the central place of environmental knowledge in the broader strategic debates concerning American empire in the post war period, 1899-1903. It follows the work of surveying vessels off Cuba and the Philippines, the emerging role of the Hydrographic Office and its leaders, and the strategic debates among officer-students at the United States Naval War College and the Navy’s top leadership in the General Board of the Navy in recognizing and debating the importance of the marine environment generally and the specific strategic features of various harbors and coastlines from the Caribbean to the Western Pacific. The chapter argues that charts, hydrographic surveying, and a larger cartographic discourse were central to the geography of American empire, particularly in projecting American sea power into the Western Pacific and the Caribbean.

scholarly journals The Enduring Influence of Female Special Operations Executive Agent Biopics on Cultural Memory and Representations in France and Great Britain

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. WLS144-WLS168
Author(s):  
Sylvie Pomiès-Maréchal
Keyword(s):  
Central Place ◽  
Specific Aspect ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Special Operations ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
Fictional Representations

Seventy-five years have elapsed since the end of World War Two. Yet, the memory of the conflict still occupies a central place in British and French collective consciousness. Fiction and film representations of the war act as powerful ‘vectors of memory’, to borrow an expression from French historian Henry Rousso, and as such, they have deeply contributed to shaping popular and cultural memories of the war. This article investigates a specific aspect of World War Two representations, namely the cinematic representations of the female agents from the SOE F section, focusing on the ‘generic’ or archetypal figure of the female SOE agent as generated by the post-war cultural industry. After a brief contextualisation focusing on Churchill’s clandestine organisation, the article will analyse the contribution of Odette (Herbert Wilcox, 1950) and Carve Her Name with Pride (Lewis Gilbert, 1958) to the construction of a World War Two ‘mythology’. It will then address more recent films, concentrating on Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong, 2001) and Female Agents (Jean-Paul Salomé, 2008). How did the fictional construction of the female spy come to influence the social and cultural perception of the SOE agent? Are the tropes developed in such post-war films as Odette or Carve Her Name with Pride still current or have they evolved with time? The analysis of these fictional representations will reveal the permanence or evolution of certain representational patterns and also allow us to approach different perspectives on the cultural representation of World War Two on both sides of the Channel.

Longing for Purity: Fascism and Nazism in the Italian and German Satirical Press (1943/1945–1963)

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 464-494
Author(s):  
Dario Pasquini
Keyword(s):  
German Society ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The Other ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The West ◽  
Allied Occupation ◽  
East German ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Post War ◽  
Sources Of Contamination

This article compares Italian and German memory cultures of Fascism and Nazism using an analysis of Italian and West- and East-German satirical magazines published from 1943 to 1963. In the early post-war period, as a consequence of the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi policies in Italy and in Germany that had been put into effect by the Allied occupation authorities, a significant part of the Italian and German public felt anxiety regarding the Fascist and the Nazi past and feared these past regimes as potential sources of contamination. But many, both in Italy and Germany, also reacted by denying that their country needed any sort of ‘purification’. This article’s main argument is that the interaction between these two conflicting positions exercised different effects in the three contexts considered. In Italy, especially during the years after 1948, the satirical press produced images that either rendered Fascism banal or praised it, representing it as a phenomenon which was an ‘internal’ and at least partly positive product of Italian society. I define this process as a sweetening ‘internalization’ of Fascism. In East Germany, by contrast, Nazism was represented through images linking the crimes committed in the Nazi concentration camps, depicted as a sort of ‘absolute evil’, with the leadership of the FRG, considered ‘external’ to ‘true’ German society. I define this process as a ‘demonizing’ externalization of Nazism, by which I mean a tendency to represent Nazism as a ‘monstrous’ phenomenon. In the West German satirical press, on the other hand, Nazism was not only ‘externalized’ by comparing it to the East German Communist dictatorship, but also ‘internalized’ by implying that it was a negative product of German society in general and by calling for public reflection on responsibility for the Nazi crimes, including West Germany as the Nazi regime’s successor. The demonization of the regime also played a crucial role in this self-critical ‘internalization’ of Nazism.

Genesis and Other Biblical Events Depicted in Postmodern Drama.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-300
Author(s):  
Ana-Magdalena Petraru
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
German Culture ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
East German ◽  
Post War ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Great Code

Abstract A complex person (novelist, playwright, screenwriter, translator), George Tabori, pen name of György Tábori, born in Budapest in 1914, was little acclaimed in North America where he spent twenty years of his life and left a mark on the German culture of the 20th century. Due to his cathartic black humour, he overcame the tragic experience of the Holocaust that took away from him almost all his family. Known in post-war drama especially by means of his anti-Hitler farce Mein Kampf (1987) which he authored, directed and acted in, Tabori even took the East-German public by surprise with his special, yet less familiar perspective on history.1 Mein Kampf was the first play that had a Romanian staging, at Cluj; however, Die Goldberg-Variationen (1991), a real international success2, became known to our public at the theatre Radu Stanca in Sibiu under the same title and as Goldberg Show at the National Theatre of Iasi (TNI). Our aim, in this paper, is to analyse the biblical events in the play from a postmodern perspective as homage to the author’s contribution to the philological sub-field of Bible and literature, already consecrated by N. Frye’s Great Code and more recent studies.

Occupational Opportunities in the GDR: A Privilege of the Older Generations?

1994 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Huinink ◽  
Heike Solga
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Country ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Max Planck ◽  
East German ◽  
Post War ◽  
High Level ◽  
Work Histories ◽  
State Socialist ◽  
Life History Study

AbstractCompared to the amount of information available concerning the other former state socialist countries there is a research deficit regarding the rates and patterns of occupational mobility in the GDR. This deficit is especially unfortunate since the GDR can be characterized as having been a state socialist country par excellence where many crucial features of state socialism were realized in a more consequential way than, for example, in Poland or Hungary. In this article the authors try to give a more thorough analysis of occupational opportunities and their historical change in the GDR. The analysis is based on work histories of 1141 East German men born in four cohorts: 1929-31, 1939-41, 1951-53 and 1959-61. These retrospective data are taken from the East German Life History Study of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education, Berlin. Based on descriptive analysis and logit regression models the main conclusion is that starting at a high level in the post-war period, occupational opportunities of men decreased over cohorts, but by the 1980s they were not completely eliminated by any means. Overt system loyalty, i.e., party membership or having an official function in a proparty organization, improved the chances of upward mobility in all cohorts.

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