‘Tomb to Give Away’: The Significance of Graves and Dead Bodies in Present-Day Austria

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Weiss-Krejci
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Long Bone ◽  
Stream Channel ◽  
Small Stream ◽  
Small Glass ◽  
Great Speed ◽  
Water Container ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Northern Fringe

Several years ago, my son and I moved into an apartment on the northern fringe of Graz, the capital of Styria, Austria. One day I decided to take a walk in a nearby forest through which a small stream, the Gabriachbach, flows. As I walked along the stream, I noticed in the water coloured glass shards as well as many nicely cut stone blocks. I became increasingly more curious and started to search the stream bed systematically. Picking up more and more artefacts, my collection grew at a great speed and soon the pockets of my trousers and the plastic shopping bag that I happened to have on me started to burst. Among other items, I found a water container, a broken lantern, several small glass bottles, and the fragment of a human long bone. As I gradually moved upstream, I found more worked stones in association with the remains of an iron fence. At that moment the realization dawned upon me that I was standing in the midst of the cleared out and dumped remains from a cemetery. Inquiring about the provenance of the remains, I was told by a friend of mine that they derive from a nearby graveyard, most likely of St Veit, and date to the first half of the twentieth century; he found a gravestone with the inscription ‘1943’. The dumping probably took place at the end of the 1970s since at that time the stream channel had been reconstructed, apparently with stones and other materials deriving from the cemetery. To find myself amidst discarded cemetery remains did not particularly shock me at the time. I assume it is my cultural disposition as an Austrian—we have a reputation for concerning ourselves with death quite happily—not worrying about such types of confrontations with the inevitability of death. I remember feeling a bit sad about all the dead people, their grave stones, flower vases, candle holders, and all the other belongings. My thoughts also went to those who had cared for the graves and who were also long gone. What really stuck in my mind though, is that overwhelming feeling of the futility of any material accomplishment by the dead as well as the lack of remembrance for them.

THE DEAD STILL AMONG US: VICTORIAN SECULAR RELICS, HAIR JEWELRY, AND DEATH CULTURE

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lutz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Death Culture ◽  
The Moment

By the time the nineteenth centuryreached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because “today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death” (Illuminations94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion – that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance.

Begriffsgeschichte: between the Scylla of Conceptual and the Charybdis of Institutional History of Economics

2001 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Klaes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Other ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
History Of Economics ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead

According to a commonly held view, doctrinal history formed a largely uncontested part of the discipline of economics in the early years of the twentieth century. Economists like Edwin Cannan, Jacob Viner, and Joseph A. Schumpeter were at the same time respected economists and historians of economics. Contemporary historians of economics, on the other hand, tend to feel defensive about their field of study. The questions of why, how, and in which discipline one should pursue the history of economics is hotly debated among practitioners, while the number of universities and curricula still offering history courses is in steady decline. This is matched by a corresponding attitude among orthodox economists aptly summarized by Frank H. Hahn (1992, p. 165): “What the dead had to say, when of value, has long since been absorbed, and when we need to say it again we can generally say it much better.”

Modernism, Empiricism, and Rationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Dimensional Spectrum ◽  
Culture History ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rule Out

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.

Gewalt und Kommunikation

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Jens Bonnemann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Normal Case ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Philosophy Of Dialogue ◽  
The Individual

In ethics, when discussing problems of justice and a just social existence one question arises obviously: What is the normal case of the relation between I and you we start from? In moral philosophy, each position includes basic socio-anthropological convictions in that we understand the other, for example, primarily as competitor in the fight for essential resources or as a partner in communication. Thus, it is not the human being as isolated individual, or as specimen of the human species or socialised member of a historical society what needs to be understood. Instead, the individual in its relation to the other or others has been studied in phenomenology and the philosophy of dialogue of the twentieth century. In the following essay I focus on Martin Buber’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of intersubjectivity which I use in order to explore the meaning of recognition and disrespect for an individual. They offer a valuable contribution to questions of practical philosophy and the socio-philosophical diagnosis of our time.

State of Fashion: Searching for the New Luxury

APRIA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
José Teunissen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
The Other ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
The Public ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.

Notes on a New Necrology

1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 267-273
Author(s):  
Victor W. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Book Of The Dead

How does one review a book that both succeeds and fails spectacularly, that breaks new ground and then plants what is probably unfertile seed, that rather pretentiously stakes a claim to a “new area” of inquiry while grossly neglecting related extant work? The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead is a difficult book to read that has frustrated, excited, and stimulated me for enough weeks now that, though I still don't know how to review it, I am motivated to offer some advice to the naive reader which might at least assist him to read it (for it is indeed well worth the effort), and to add some comments of my own.

Kant, Marginal Cases, and Moral Standing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. Korsgaard
Keyword(s):  
Life Stage ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Identity Problem ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Moral Difference

According to the marginal cases argument, there is no property that might justify making a moral difference between human beings and the other animals that is both uniquely and universally human. It is therefore “speciesist” to treat human beings differently just because we are human beings. While not challenging the conclusion, this chapter argues that the marginal cases argument is metaphysically misguided. It ignores the differences between a life stage and a kind, and between lacking a property and having it in a defective form. The chapter then argues for a view of moral standing that attributes it to the subject of a life conceived as an atemporal being, and shows how this view can resolve some familiar puzzles such as how death can be a loss to the person who has died, how we can wrong the dead, the “procreation asymmetry,” and the “non-identity problem.”

Gender and Social Exclusion in European Migration Crisis

2018 ◽  
pp. 658-676
Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Other ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
The One ◽  
European Migration

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document