scholarly journals Imagining Africa in Eastern Europe: Transcultural Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in Cold War Yugoslavia

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-251
Author(s):  
Ana Antić

This article seeks to write Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe into the history of post-Second World War global psychiatry and to explore the significance of Marxist psychiatry in an international context. It traces Yugoslav psychiatrists’ transnational and interdisciplinary engagements as they peaked in the 1960s. Focusing on the distinguished Belgrade psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vladimir Jakovljevic (1925–68), it looks at Yugoslav psychiatry’s clinical and anthropological research in the global South to shed light on its contributions to Western-dominated transcultural psychiatry. Through this lens the article also explores how Eastern Europe’s intellectuals engaged with decolonisation and the notions of race, ‘primitivism’ and modernity. Jakovljevic’s involvement in transcultural psychiatry demonstrated the inherent contradiction of Eastern European Marxist psychiatry: its dubiously colonial ‘civilising mission’ towards the subalterns in its own populations and its progressive, emancipatory agenda. Jakovljevic’s writings about Africa ultimately turned into an unprecedented opportunity to shed light on some glaring internal inconsistencies from Yugoslavia’s own socio-political context.

1986 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 896-901 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Lachs

To write of Philip Jessup means to survey the history of the teaching of international law in the United States throughout the last half century; to cover all important events concerning the birth of international organizations on the morrow of the Second World War; to visit the halls of the General Assembly and the Security Council; to attend meetings of the American Society of International Law and the Institute of International Law, where he so frequently took the floor to shed light on their debates; to attend sittings of the International Court of Justice in the years 1960-1969. I could hardly undertake this task; there are others much more qualified to do so. What I wish to do is to recall him as a great jurist I knew and a delightful human being; in short, a judge and a great friend whom I learned to admire.


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

This chapter explores how the outbreak of the Second World War initiated a new and tragic period in the history of the Jews of north-eastern Europe. The Polish defeat by Nazi Germany in the unequal campaign that began in September of 1939 led to a new partition of the country by Germany and the Soviet Union. Though Hitler had been relatively slow to put the more extreme aspects of Nazi antisemitism into practice, by the time the war broke out, the Nazi regime was set in its deep-seated hatred of the Jews. Following the brutal violence of Kristallnacht on November 9–10, 1938, when up to a hundred Jews were murdered in Germany and Austria and over 400 synagogues burnt down, Hitler, disconcerted by the domestic and foreign unease which this provoked, decided to entrust policy on the Jews to the ideologues of the SS. They were determined at this stage to enforce a ‘total separation’ between Jews and Germans, but wanted to do so in an ‘orderly and disciplined’ manner, perhaps by compelling most Jews to emigrate. The Nazis did not act immediately on the genocidal threat of ‘the annihilation of the Jews as a race in Europe’, but during the first months of the war, a dual process took place: the barbarization of Nazi policy generally and a hardening of policy towards Jews.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 49-73
Author(s):  
Michael Antolović

This paper analyzes the development of the historiography in the former socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991). Starting with the revolutionary changes after the Second World War and the establishment of the «dictatorship of the proletariat», the paper considers the ideological surveillance imposed on historiography entailing its reconceptualization on the Marxist grounds. Despite the existence of common Yugoslav institutions, Yugoslav historiography was constituted by six historiographies focusing their research programs on the history of their own nation, i.e. the republic. Therefore, many joint historiographical projects were either left unfinished or courted controversies between historians over a number of phenomena from the Yugoslav history. Yugoslav historiography emancipated from Marxist dogmatism, and modernized itself following various forms of social history due to a gradual weakening of ideological surveillance from the 1960s onwards. However, the modernization of Yugoslav historiography was carried out only partially because of the growing social and political crises which eventually led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.


Author(s):  
Dean Vuletic

Immediately following the Second World War, Eastern European communist parties employed censorship against Western popular culture, such as film and popular music, which they regarded as politically inappropriate. From the late 1950s, most parties increasingly sought to satisfy their citizens’ desires for consumption and entertainment, and they promoted the development of local cultural alternatives. The parties were not uniform in their policies, as a comparison between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia demonstrates. However, they did seek to appropriate popular culture to advance their political interests, and they similarly faced resistance from some domestic artists who criticized the government. The reluctance of the parties to allow as much freedom of consumption and expression as existed in the West, together with their inability to provide cultural goods that could keep up with Western fashions, points to popular culture as a factor that contributed to the demise of communism in Eastern Europe


Author(s):  
Molly Pucci

The secret police were one of the most important institutions in the making of communist Eastern Europe. Security Empire compares the early history of secret police institutions, which were responsible for foreign espionage, domestic surveillance, and political violence in communist states, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany after the Second World War. While previous histories have assumed that these forces were copies of the Soviet model, the book delves into the ways their origins diverged due to local social conditions, languages, and interpretations of communism. It illuminates the internal tensions inside the forces, between veteran agents who had fought in wars in Spain and Germany, and the younger, more radical agents, who pushed forward the violence, arrests, and show trials inside Eastern European communist parties in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In doing so, the book traces the role of political violence, ideological belief, and surveillance in building communist institutions in Europe by the mid-1950s.


2021 ◽  
pp. 62-83
Author(s):  
Marlene Laruelle

This chapter argues that the perception of Russia as an antifascist power has been reinforced by memory wars that have reshaped the relationship between Russia and its Central and Eastern European neighbors. It examines how the emergence and gradual visibility gained by the narrative of the Soviet Union as an occupier with a totalitarian ideology shocked the Russian elite and public opinion. Given the context of memory wars, the chapter focuses on the issue of defining who was fascist and who colluded with Nazism — the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 or the collaborationist forces in Central and Eastern Europe. This chapter then presents Russia's response to the new memories articulated by Central and Eastern European countries on two fronts: legal and historiographical. Ultimately, the chapter highlights how the Ukrainian crisis demonstrated that memories have been instrumental in “real” wars, as all parties claim that their martyrdom and heroism during the Second World War entitle them to some recognition today.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-224
Author(s):  
Jörn Lindner

AbstractTechnical innovation as protection against economic decline? The development of the Rickmers shipyard from 1945 to the late 1960sThe article covers the history of the Rickmers-Shipyard in Bremerhaven from the end of the Second World War up to the end of the 1960s. An initial glance into the interwar years establishes that the shipyard’s restructuring in the 20s and subsequent shift into the production of warships during the 30s and 40s had considerable impact on its afterwar development. Despite the involvement with the Kriegsmarine, Rickmers was able to reopen for business very quickly after the end of the war. Yet, the shipyard was barred from new building projects and relegated to repair jobs for a considerable amount of time. In the 1950s, Rickmers began building new ships and was able to somewhat profit from the shipbuilding boom of the time. Still, most projects proved unprofitable and the onset of the crisis of European shipbuilding in the late 1950s hit the shipyard hard. This set the stage for Rickmers’ decline and ultimate closure in 1986.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Samuel Garrett Zeitlin

This article situates Carl Schmitt's The Tyranny of Values (1960/1967/1979) within the context of Schmitt's 1940s and 1950s op-ed campaign for full amnesty for Nazi war criminals as well as the context of the Veit Harlan trials and the 1958 Lüth judgment of the German Constitutional Court. The article further examines the revisions to Schmitt's 1967 version of the text in the light of Karl Löwith's criticisms of Schmitt in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1964. The article argues that The Tyranny of Values is a work of post-Second World War Nazi apologetics, in which Nazi racial theory can be seen being put to polemical ends in the 1960s and 1970s. The article concludes with broader reflections on the relation of Schmitt's The Tyranny of Values to Nazi discourse in the aftermath of the Second World War and the history of Nazism post-1945.


Author(s):  
Kirsten Leng

The Conclusion accounts for the fate of the women whose ideas are examined in this book, and takes stock of the legacies of their sexological work. It further lays out the benefits of pursuing a larger twentieth century history of women’s sexological work, one that is international in its scope and grapples with the rupture in female sexual knowledge production affected by the Second World War and its geopolitical realignments, the reshuffling of the ideological landscapes after 1945, and the rise of new social movements in the 1960s. Finally, the Conclusion argues that the history of women’s sexological work is especially significant at this particular moment in time, as twenty-first century feminist theorists positively embrace science and nature as intellectual and rhetorical resources once again.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Ana Antić

Abstract This article offers a transnational account of the historical origins and development of the concept of ‘global psyche’ and transcultural psychiatry. It argues that the concept of universal, global psyche emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War and during decolonization, when West European psychiatry strove to leave behind its colonial legacies and lay the foundation for a more inclusive conversation between Western and non-Western mental health communities. In the second half of the twentieth century, leading ‘psy’ professionals across the globe set about identifying and defining the universal psychological mechanisms supposedly shared among all cultures (and ‘civilizations’). The article explores this far-reaching psychiatric, social and cultural search for a new definition of ‘common humanity’, relating it to the social and political history of decolonization, and to the post-war reconstruction and search for stable peace. It provides a transnational account of a series of interlinked developments and trends around the world in order to arrive at a global history of the decolonization of mental health science.


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