Jewish Soldiers in the Collective Memory of Central Europe: The Remembrance of World War I from a Jewish Perspective. Edited by Gerald Lamprecht, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, and Ulrich Wyrwa. Vienna: Böhlau, 2019. Pp. 377. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-3205207221.

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 670-672
Author(s):  
Sarah Panter
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
World War

Making History to/as the Main Pillar of Identity: The Assyrian Paradigm

Belleten ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 76 (276) ◽  
pp. 631-646
Author(s):  
Bülent Özdemi̇r
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Large Segment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Conditions

In the 20th century Assyrians living in Diaspora have increased their search of identity because of the social and political conditions of their present countries. In doing so, they utilize the history by picking up certain events which are still kept fresh in the collective memory of the Assyrian society. World War I, which caused a large segment of the Assyrians to emigrate from the Middle East, has been considered as the milestone event of their history. They preferred to use and evaluate the circumstances during WW I in terms of a genocidal attack of the Ottomans against their nation. This political definition dwarfs the promises which were not kept given by their Western allies during the war for an independent Assyrian state. The aspects of Assyrian civilization existed thousands of years ago as one of the real pillars of their identity suffer from the artificially developed political unification around the aspects of their doom in WWI presented as a genocidal case. Additionally, this plays an efficient role in removal of existing religious and sectarian differences for centuries among Assyrians. This paper aims at showing in the framework of primary sources how Assyrian genocidal claims are being used pragmatically in the formation of national consciousness in a very effective way. Not the Assyrian civilization but their constructed history in WWI is used for the formation of their nation definition.

Jews in German Society: Prague, 1860–1914

1977 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary B. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
German Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Liberal Culture ◽  
Fertile Area

The development of social interaction between Jews and Gentiles offers a fertile area of research to historians of modern Central Europe. Examining the place of Jews in Gentile society, of course, furthers understanding of both the proponents and victims of political anti-Semitism. Yet such study is also needed to deepen our knowledge of the values and social structures that characterized German and Austrian liberal society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Too often in recent years historians have studied Central Europe in the half century before World War I merely to seek the roots of the traumatic events of the 1930s and 1940s. Consequently, the rise of the radical right and left has been examined in some detail, and historians have generally emphasized the fragility of liberal culture. One tends to assume that in the late nineteenth century few among the Central European middle classes took liberalism seriously enough to accept extensive or sustained Jewish participation in Gentile society, but in fact little systematic work has been done on the actual social relations between Jews and Gentiles.

Literary Reflections on Postimperial Violence in East-Central Europe after 1918: Wittlin – Hašek – Vančura

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1 (464)) ◽  
pp. 65-79
Author(s):  
Alfrun Kliems
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Rhetorical Figures ◽  
Remarkable Degree ◽  
World War I Novels ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Jaroslav Hasek

This paper discusses questions like the irony of history, the lack of illusions, and the prophecy of violence in three classic World War I novels by Jaroslav Hašek, Vladislav Vančura and Józef Wittlin, written in the decades after 1918. The novels have at least three aspects in common: first, the poetics of each is marked in a compressed way by the style of narrating the assassination in Sarajevo in 1918; second, three picaresque figures – Švejk, Řeka and Niewiadomski, respectively – standing in the centre of each novel; and, third, in addition to the war itself, each novel looks proleptically at its consequences, even if the narrated time does not extend to the end of the war. The paper tries to reflect on the novels as the literature of post-imperialist violence. Rhetorical figures of barbarization and self-barbarization, inversion of subject and object, fragmentation of space are particularly significant in the books, demonstrating the aesthetic processing of the reversal from euphoria, over the end of the war, to frustration, over the continuing violence. More specifically, these figures correspond with a remarkable degree with the unfulfilled peace after 1918.

The Stifled Renaissance of Urbanity: Urban Preservation and the Collapse of Czechoslovak and East German Socialism

2020 ◽  
pp. 009614422090888
Author(s):  
Matěj Spurný ◽  
Brian Ladd
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Inner Cities ◽  
East German

Concern with the decay or demolition of inner cities was an underappreciated factor contributing to the discontent preceding the revolutions of 1989 in east-central Europe. Although there has been some scholarly work on the topic, particularly on the German Democratic Republic (GDR), multinational studies are lacking. This examination of parallel developments in the GDR and Czechoslovakia identifies similar trajectories of discontent and activism in the two socialist states. It follows the evolution of architectural and planning theories and practices from the high point of postwar modernism to the widespread embrace of the very styles and districts once despised. By the 1980s, this acceptance of pre–World War I buildings, districts, and urban scale had pervaded expert circles and reached even the highest levels of party and government. However, both states’ failure to carry out policies that satisfied residents and defenders of old districts fueled the discontent that exploded in 1989.

Abattoirs-Usines, the Modernizing Project for the French Meat Trade, and World War I

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 116-137
Author(s):  
Kyri W. Claflin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Reform ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cattle Market

In the early twentieth century, French academic veterinarians launched a meat trade reform movement. Their primary objective was the construction of a network of regional industrial abattoirs equipped with refrigeration. These modern, efficient abattoirs-usines would produce and distribute chilled dead meat, rather than livestock, to centers of consumption, particularly Paris. This system was hygienic and economical and intended to replace the insanitary artisanal meat trade centered on the La Villette cattle market and abattoir in Paris. The first abattoirs-usines opened during World War I, but within 10 years the experiment had begun to encounter serious difficulties. For decades afterward, the experiment survived in the collective memory as a complete fiasco, even though some abattoirs-usines in fact persisted by altering their business models. This article examines the roadblocks of the interwar era and the effects of both the problems and their perception on the post-1945 meat trade.

Borderland of the Mind: The Free City of Danzig and the Sovereignty Question

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Clark
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
Free City Of Danzig ◽  
The Mind

The transformation of the Free City of Danzig after World War I both exemplified and contradicted the interwar borderland experience in Central Europe. Although Danzig was linked closely to the Second Polish Republic, cultural and diplomatic challenges to the city’s status played out in Berlin and Geneva. The vocabulary of sovereignty and reconciliation became a battleground between German nationalists and center-left politicians. This article analyzes diplomatic correspondence and propaganda pamphlets to argue that regions and cities become a metaphor for broader questions and concludes that borderlands, however permanent on the maps of treaty negotiators, are largely in the mind.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document