Fragmented memories in a fragmented country: memory competition and political identity-building in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 910-935 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Moll
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Second World ◽  
Historical Periods

Bosnia and Herzegovina is politically fragmented, and so is the memory landscape within the country. Narratives of the 1992–1995 war, the Second World War, Tito's Yugoslavia, and earlier historical periods form highly disputed patterns in a memory competition involving representatives of the three “constituent peoples” of Bosnia and Herzegovina - Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks – but also non-nationalist actors within BiH, as well as the international community. By looking especially at political declarations and the practices of commemoration and monument building, the article gives an overview of the fragmented memory landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, pointing out the different existing memory narratives and policies and the competition between them in the public sphere, and analyzing the conflicting memory narratives as a central part of the highly disputed political identity construction processes in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper also discusses the question whether an “Europeanization” of Bosnian memory cultures could be an alternative to the current fragmentation and nationalist domination of the memory landscape in BiH.

scholarly journals A lost war in living memory: Japan’s Second World War

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 573-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
HARUKO TAYA COOK ◽  
THEODORE F. COOK
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Second World

We examine the strata of memory in Japan’s recollections of the wartime experience and explore the shaping and releasing of memory in Japan, seeking to penetrate and recover individual Japanese experience. Individual memories that seemed tightly contained, when released were told with great emotional intensity and authenticity. That there has been little public discourse does not mean that individual Japanese have forgotten that war, but that the conflict – a war with no generally accepted name or firmly fixed start or end – seems disconnected from the private memories of the wartime generation. Japan was defeated thoroughly and completely, and in the history of memory we see no well-established narrative form for telling the tale of the defeated. In Japan's public memory of the war, War itself is often the enemy, and the Japanese its victims. Such a view is ahistorical and unsatisfactory to nations and peoples throughout Asia and the Pacific. The prevailing myths during Japan's war, developed and fostered over 15 years of conflict, and the overwhelming weight of more than three million war dead on the memories of the living forged a link between a desire to honour and cherish those lost and the ways the war is recalled in the public sphere. Enforced and encouraged by government policies and private associations, protecting the dead has become a means of avoiding a full discussion of the war. The memorials and monuments to the Dead that have been created throughout Japan, Asia, and the Pacific stand silent sentry to a Legend of the war. This must be challenged by the release into the public sphere of living memories of the War in all their ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction without which Japan’s Memory can have no historical veracity. Moreover, the memories of the Second World War of other peoples can never be complete without Japan’s story.

scholarly journals “Fuldtud korrekt og værdig Optræden”. Politik, social kontrol og offentlighed under besættelsen af Danmark 1940-45“

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (65) ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels Wium Olesen
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
National Unity ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Second World

Niels Wium Olesen: “‘Completely Correct and Dignified Behaviour’: Politics, Social Control and the Public Sphere During the Occupation of Denmark 1940-45”In order to secure the survival of the Danish state and society during the Second World War, extensive social control was exercised by the Danish government, the political parties and the civil society. The social control supported national unity and set the limits of what was acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in the public sphere.

Science and the Press

2020 ◽  
pp. 612-625
Author(s):  
Robert Bud
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Press ◽  
Public Engagement With Science ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The One ◽  
Second World

Repeated press discussion of the upturning of traditional civilisation through science underlies the chapter’s treatment of science and the press explored through three sections. The first summarises an historical scholarship which has gone beyond old categories of popularisation to show how the press constructed science in the public sphere, principally before the Second World War. Secondly, the chapter explores the coverage of ‘applied science’ by the press during that period. It deals with the contributions of such journalists covering ‘modern life’ as Vera Brittan and Storm Jameson as well as celebration of local industrial research laboratories on the one hand and warnings of the danger of new weapons on the other. Finally, there is a treatment of science in the press and its ‘medicalisation’ during the post Second-World-war period. Increasingly, contrasting enthusiasms and terrors have been mapped and analysed by the literature that has grown out of the new scholarship in public engagement with science, and by the broader study of science, technology and society.

Germany on the Couch: Psychology and the Development of British Subversive Propaganda to Nazi Germany

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-507
Author(s):  
Kirk Robert Graham
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
World War ◽  
New Developments ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Warfare ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Second World ◽  
Insight Into

New developments in social psychology proliferated in Britain and the USA throughout the 1930s. With the advent of war, psychology promised insight into the Nazi mind. Some war departments were particularly enthusiastic about these intellectual developments. The USA’s OSS can claim credit for bringing Frankfurt School neo-Freudianism onto the public stage. In Britain meanwhile, the Ministry of Information turned to behaviourism in order to better understand the British public. But the propagandists of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), charged with the subversion of enemy morale, were wary of new perspectives. Psychology was valuable only so long as it was practical. For PWE, this meant that psychopathological orientations, which emphasized ahistorical German distinction, were for much of the war favoured over behaviourism or neo-Freudianism. This article examines the role that psychology played in British subversive propaganda directed at Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Did psychology offer any answers to the ‘German problem'? And what made PWE distinct from contemporary propaganda organizations? PWE's particular engagement with psychology demonstrates the diverse and often culturally contingent ways in which psychology transitioned from the academy to the public sphere, and offers new insight into British wartime perspectives on Nazi Germany.

scholarly journals Recessive Action in Colm Tóibín’s "Brooklyn"

Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Camelia Raghinaru
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Transnational Identities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Female Immigrant ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Second World

Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel Brooklyn accompanies Eilis Lacey, a native of Enniscorthy, Ireland of the 1950s on a reluctant voyage across the Atlantic. Her passage reconstructs a common experience of immigration and exile to New York for the Irish working class seeking to escape the lack of prospects in small-town Ireland after the Second World War. Caught as she is between two homes—the traditional Irish culture she emerges from and the new capitalist society of America to which she emigrates—Eilis is placed in a polemical relationship to the public sphere, staked on multiple grounds of in-betweenness: she is a woman, Irish, and an exile. Belonging, for her, is posited on a complex understanding of the tensions between national and transnational identities. Eilis’s parochialism, at first, and cosmopolitanism, later on, are both decisive characteristics that become driving forces behind her social integration and marriage prospects. She is initially barred from promising job and marriage opportunities due to her naivety and lack of sophistication. As an Irish female immigrant, Eilis becomes in the course of the novel a cosmopolitan from the margins, one of the newly uprooted, and ultimately a split self.

scholarly journals Is Hatred a Major Factor Determining the Contemporary Social Imaginary? / Ist der Hass ein bestimmender Faktor des gegenwärtigen sozialen Imaginären?

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 303-312
Author(s):  
Andrzej Leder
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Second World

Summary In my paper, I analyze hate as one of the important factors that influence and structuralize the symbolic sphere. In the first step, I define the notion of “symbolic sphere”. Then, I analyze hate from the phenomenological and psychoanalytical points of view. My next step is a historical digression, concerning the place of hate in the social order. Next, I describe some important phenomena of the contemporary societies conditioned by the influence of hatred. Finally, I investigate which notions of the social theory are adequate to describe this kind of phenomena. Hate has been most frequently apprehended as a sudden eruption of bare violence. It was supposed to transform the symbolic sphere through sharp, directly aggressive, and often unexpected actions. Nevertheless, in societies wherein the symbolic legitimization of the political and social order was established as the consequence of the Second World War, a deep change in the attitude toward the bare and direct expression of violence took place. Acts of hate in the public sphere became morally delegitimized and symbolically repressed. We should ask then: if the bare violence and the hate determining this violence disappeared from the sphere of social praxis, although they still shape the social imaginary, how are they really founded? Thus, to answer these questions, I will have to ask not about the direct impact of hatred, but about its hidden influence.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

Development of Interethnic Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the First Decades after the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
Elena Yu. Guskova
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Interethnic Relations ◽  
The Republic ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
First Time ◽  
Second World

The article is devoted to the analysis of interethnic relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the 1940s and 1960s. The article is based on materials from the archives of BiH, Croatia, Slovenia, Yugoslavia. The documents show the state of affairs in the Republic – both in the economy and in ideology. In one or another way, all of them reflect the level of tension in the interethnic relations. For the first time, the article presents the discussion on interethnic relations, on the new phenomenon in multinational Yugoslavia – the emergence of a new people in BiH under the name of “Muslim”. The term “Muslims” is used to define the ethnic identity of Bosniaks in the territory of BiH starting from the 1961 census.

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