scholarly journals Religion, Patriotism and War Experience in Digitized Wartime Letters in Finland, 1939–44

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942110660
Author(s):  
Ilari Taskinen ◽  
Risto Turunen ◽  
Lauri Uusitalo ◽  
Ville Kivimäki

This article examines religious and patriotic languages in digitized letters written by ordinary Finnish people in the Second World War. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse how religious and patriotic languages were used throughout the war years. Our findings show that the frequency of religious and patriotic vocabulary fluctuated widely during the war. Religious words were most notably connected to the intensity of the warfare, peaking during the periods of heated combat and dropping in the period of stationary warfare. Patriotic words were likewise common during the early periods of combat, but their use waned in the later war years. The analysis of words occurring in close proximity to the religious and patriotic words suggests that this was due to the different functions of the two languages. Religious parlance was essentially a vehicle of private emotional coping, while patriotic style gave a collective meaning to the sacrifices of the war. Religion and patriotism diverged during the war because the collective meaning of the war vanished but the need for emotional comfort persisted until its end.

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-691
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Djokic ◽  
Guillaume Pichelin

For decades, Croats and Serbs lived together in a common political construction: Yugoslavia. It is difficult to date the appearance of animosity between Croats and Serbs. Nevertheless, two events proved particularly traumatic for their relations. The Second World War, when the Ustasha led a genocide against the Serbs, and the 1991-1995 war, when the two sides fought a merciless civil war. This article examines the evolution of relations between Serbian and Croatian civil societies from the beginning of the Yugoslavian project to 2021 and how the rise of civic identity in the future might help the process of reconciliation. The main hypothesis of the article is that the failure to construct a viable Yugoslavian civic identity in the past is the cause of ethnic tensions during the 90s. The article entails both qualitative and quantitative methods through which the authors offer explanations about the failure to construct a common Yugoslavian civic identity, how this failure impacted the relations between Serbian and Croatian civil societies, and, finally, what are the prospects of reconciliation and constructing civic identities in the newly formed countries of Serbia and Croatia. Today, relations between the two civil societies remain tense. Serbs in Croatia and Croats in Serbia are subject to unsystematic discrimination, which hinders exchanges between the two countries. This study shows that Serbian and Croatian citizens under 35 years of age, mainly agree that tensions exist. Nevertheless, two-thirds of those questioned in Serbia and three-quarters of those questioned in Croatia believe that reconciliation is possible. This reconciliation becomes even more realistic since an overwhelming majority in both groups want reconciliation.


Tekstualia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (51) ◽  
pp. 127-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Więckiewicz

The point of departure in the present article is a discussion of the concept of multidirectional memory, the category proposed by Michael Rothberg in his book ANGIELSKI TYTUŁ. The article then analyzes the memoirs by Jewish-Austrian Ruth Klüger and Afro-German Hans-Jürgen Massaquoia, as examples of transnational narratives. It thus highlights the problem of the war experience of black Germans, concomitantly tracing the process of identity formation resulting from an ethnic person’s dialogue with the representatives of other marginalized and oppressed groups within the Nazi system


2002 ◽  
Vol 147 (3) ◽  
pp. 92-94
Author(s):  
George C Kieffer ◽  
Claire Harder

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
NILS ARNE SØRENSEN

After the liberation in 1945, two conflicting narratives of the war experience were formulated. A consensus narrative presented the Danish nation as being united in resistance while a competing narrative, which also stressed the resistance of most Danes, depicted the collaborating Danish establishment as an enemy alongside the Germans. This latter narrative, formulated by members of the resistance movement, was marginalised after the war and the consensus narrative became dominant. The resistance narrative survived, however, and, from the 1960s, it was successfully retold by the left, both to criticise the Danish alliance with the ‘imperialist’ United States, and as an argument against Danish membership of the EC. From the 1980s, the right also used the framework of the resistance narrative in its criticism of Danish asylum legislation. Finally, liberal Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen started using it as his basic narrative of the war years (partly in order to legitimise his government's decision to join the war against Iraq in 2003). The war years have thus played a central role in Danish political culture since 1945, and in this process the role of historians has been utterly marginal.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Gann

Erle Sinclair Miller enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in 1940. While his initial attitude towards the conflict was one of personal invincibility and an eagerness for action, much of Miller's Second World War experience was spent in five prisoner of war camps, enduring physical as well as psychological hardship. The following thesis engages with the contents of the Miller Collection, a series of 297 letters, two prisoner of war journals, one flying log book and one scrapbook, in order to reveal the details of a young man's experiences of war and the critical relationship he retained with his mother in Canada. The key themes in this analysis, that of identity, community, and coping, are drawn out in each of the following three chapters, and offer an intimate appreciation of the impact that the Second World war had on families, sharper insight into the dynamics of the RCAF and prisoner of war experiences, the intersection of communities of war, and the role of mothers on the home front.


Author(s):  
Marta Kowerko-Urbańczyk

This article reviews Irena Grudzińska-Gross’s book Miłosz i długi cień wojny [Milosz and the Long Shadow of War], which was published by Pogranicze in 2020. The reviewer analyses the definition of violence and its relation to Polish narratives of wartime solidarity seen as heroism. To this end, she examines the work of Czesław Miłosz, written during the Second World War, and later texts thematising the war experience. An additional layer of the publication is the poet’s take on the Jewish question – both in the context of Miłosz’s poetic works and the subsequent discussions they provoked. The author, taking into account Miłosz’s autobiogeographical predispositions, also analyses the changing images of Warsaw in his works as a space where the poet spent most of the war. For this reason, she examines the poet’s attitude to the Warsaw Uprising and the public perception of his decision not to join the cause. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-344
Author(s):  
Claire Gorrara

This article will examine representations of the Liberation of France in the war reports of Lee Miller, an accredited photographer and correspondent for American and British Vogue during the Second World War. Miller’s frontline reports framed Liberation France in idealised images of feminine beauty and elegance, making use of fashion as a primary conduit for understanding the war and occupation for readers on the home front. As this article will argue, examining Miller’s choices and perspective as a female photographer sheds new light on the intersection of fashion, war photography and the female body. In Miller’s work, fashion becomes a site for imagining liberation in ways that foreground the gendering of war experience and the legacies of conflict for women. By charting Miller’s representations of French women at the Liberation, and above all the chastised figure of the femme tondue, this article will analyse how French women function as carriers of multiple messages about war, liberation and reconstruction in Miller’s work. Unlike the sensationalist images of the femmes tondues published in the British picture press and newspapers in the summer of 1944, Miller’s war reports in Vogue construct an empathic relationship with such underprivileged female subjects. Miller’s work opens a space, therefore, for speculation on the role of fashion in shaping how the Second World War was understood by a first generation of female memory producers and consumers.


1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
G Zoványi

National urban-development strategies represent government attempts to influence one or more of the following features of urban development in a national context: (1) a country's rate of urbanization; (2) the size of particular urban places within a country; and (3) the city-size distribution of a country's national urban hierarchy. Hungary's post-Second-World-War experience with a national urban development strategy is presented via a description of government efforts to affect each of the aforementioned features of urban development.


2021 ◽  
pp. 72-92
Author(s):  
Stein Kuhnle ◽  
Anne Sander

The chapter provides a perspective on the early development of the welfare state in the countries of the European cultural complex, including the European (English) settler nations. The focus is on the emergence of the institutions of social insurance since the 1880s until 1945. First, an overall picture of early collective solutions to social problems is presented, followed by a depiction and discussion of why state-initiated social insurance came about, why Germany was a forerunner, and why national authorities reacted differently to the new challenge of social policy. The second part of the chapter covers the phase of consolidation, expansion, and geographical diffusion of social insurance and protection legislation after the First World War. A comprehensive tabular overview of the first statutory social security schemes in the forty-two ILO member countries that had introduced at least three out of five insurance pillars by 1945 is included. The chapter ends with a brief look at the Second World War experience.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document