African Studies in East Germany

1964 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-290
Author(s):  
Ralph A. Austen

Up to World War II, Germany was a major centre for the development of African studies, arising out of her colonial interests and general academic traditions. African studies were among the casualties of the Nazi catastrophe; and even the more recent revival of German interest in Africa is handicapped by the continued division of the country. Thus, while the West German Federal Republic has been the more active in building economic and cultural ties with the new African states, it is in East Germany that academics have given greater prominence to Africa.

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-69
Author(s):  
Sebastian Fikus

CONCENTRATION CAMPS AS A MODERN FORM OF FIGHTING CRIME IN THE GERMAN FEDERAL REPUBLICThe problem of participation of the Nazi elites in the structures of the German Federal Republic is increasingly engaging for German historians. Popular, non-academic works also address the issue of joining the police force by former officials of the Third Reich. However, in the German texts it is consistently stressed that Nazi elites did not influence the social and political life of the German Federal Republic. Nevertheless, the debate on reintroducing concentration camps shows the high standing of national socialism ideology long after World War II.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amitav Acharya

While the West woke up to the threat to the liberal international order when Donald Trump was elected U.S. president, its decline was apparent even at the height of the Obama-Clinton era. What follows the end of the U.S.-dominated world order is not a return to multipolarity as many pundits assume. The twenty-first-century world—politically and culturally diverse but economically and institutionally interlinked—is vastly different from the multipolar world that existed prior to World War II. China and India are major powers now; and globalization will not end, but will take on a new form, driven more by the East than the West and more by South-South linkages than North-North ones. The system of global governance will fragment, with new actors and institutions chipping away at the old UN-based system. Liberal values and institutions will not disappear, but will have to coexist and enmesh with the ideas and institutions of others, especially those initiated by China. This “multiplex world” carries both risks and opportunities for managing international stability. Instead of bemoaning the passing of the old liberal order, the West should accept the new realities and search for new ways to ensure peace and stability in partnership with the rising powers.


1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-167
Author(s):  
S. Bernard

The advent of a new administration in the United States and the passage of seven years since the end of World War II make it appropriate to review the political situation which has developed in Europe during that period and to ask what choices now are open to the West in its relations with the Soviet Union.The end of World War II found Europe torn between conflicting conceptions of international politics and of the goals that its members should seek. The democratic powers, led by the United States, viewed the world in traditional, Western, terms. The major problem, as they saw it, was one of working out a moral and legal order to which all powers could subscribe, and in which they would live. Quite independently of the environment, they assumed that one political order was both more practicable and more desirable than some other, and that their policies should be directed toward its attainment.


2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 567-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Jackson

This article examines representations of imperialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and decolonization in US textbooks for American and World History courses between 1930 and 1965. Broadly speaking, 1930s and early 1940s texts lauded imperialism and associated European colonialism with American imperialist activities. Authors extolled the benefits for colonial peoples, including literacy, good government, and peace, and anti-colonial nationalists were caricatured as irrational and ungrateful. US global engagement during and after World War II gradually changed the narrative, particularly following Philippine independence in 1946, as texts subsequently portrayed the US as an enlightened decolonizer. Postwar textbooks tended to argue that nationalism was a product of Western ideas and that anti-colonial nationalism was a triumph for Western civilization. While constructing this narrative of the spread of Western values, textbook authors largely marginalized colonial actors, promoted unflattering and stereotyped views of Africans and Asians, and de-emphasized the extreme violence inherent in the decolonization process.


2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-282
Author(s):  
Laura Emmery

Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music (edited by Danijela Špirić Beard and Ljerka Rasmussen) is a fascinating study of how popular music developed in post-World War II Yugoslavia, eventually reaching both unsurpassable popularity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and critical acclaim in the West. Through the comprehensive discussion of all popular music trends in Yugoslavia − commercial pop (zabavna-pop), rock, punk, new wave, disco, folk (narodna), and neofolk (novokomponovana) − across all six socialist Yugoslav republics, the reader is given the engrossing socio-cultural and political history of the country, providing the audience with a much-needed and riveting context for understanding the formation and the eventual demise of Tito’s Yugoslavia.


2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-305
Author(s):  
Eric Fure-Slocum

Nicknaming his city “Dear Old Lady Thrift,”Milwaukee Journalwriter Richard Davis chastised city leaders for failing to build a “great city.” His unflattering portrait pictured post–World War II Milwaukee as a “plump and smiling city . … [sitting] in complacent shabbiness on the west shore of Lake Michigan like a wealthy old lady in black alpaca taking her ease on the beach.” He continued, “All her slips are showing, but she doesn’t mind a bit” (Davis 1947: 189, 191). Reprinted in theMilwaukee Journaltwo weeks before voters went to the polls to decide if the city would reverse its debt-free policy to finance postwar development, Davis’s depiction warned that Milwaukee was a chaotic andin efficient metropolis in danger of falling behind(“Not So Fair Is America’s Fair City”Milwaukee Journal[hereafterMJ], 16 March 1947). Her thriftiness bordered on stinginess, her complacency slipped into indolence, and her neglected femininity bespoke disorder. City leaders’ frugality, rooted in a tradition of cautious municipal fiscal policies, big city problems mismatched with small town attitudes, and public “indifference,” Davis contended, threatened the postwar city.


Author(s):  
Rosemary Scott

William Watson (1917–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was a scholar whose contribution to the field of Asian art and archaeology was both multifaceted and far-reaching. He earned a scholarship to Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge to read Modern and Medieval Languages (1936–1939), and it was at Cambridge that he met a fellow-student Katherine Armfield, whom he married in 1940. After World War II, Watson took up his first post in the arts in 1947, joining the staff of the British and Medieval Department of the British Museum. In 1966, he left the British Museum and moved to the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art to become its Director and take up the professorship of Chinese Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Watson travelled widely and often, and he became fascinated with the arts and language of Japan.


Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe

Modern dance and music for percussion are linked through the works of musicians who studied with the iconoclastic composer Henry Cowell. This chapter highlights the work of numerous artists who were involved in the dance and music scene along the West Coast of the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Cowell’s early publishing venture New Music helped launch the careers of composers Johanna Beyer, William Russell, Lou Harrison, John Cage, and others. The latter two composers, Harrison and Cage, also studied with the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg whose use of the twelve-tone technique became central to the music of the twentieth century. The chapter ends with a summary of percussion music’s development from the decades before World War I to the compositional hiatus caused by World War II.


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