Entangled memories of violence: Jean Améry and Frantz Fanon

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-67
Author(s):  
Victoria Fareld
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Narrative Frame ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
The 1960S

In this article I discuss the entangled memories of the Holocaust and the anticolonial struggles in Western Europe in the 1960s by relating the writings of Jean Améry and Frantz Fanon. My aim is to show how Améry’s retrospective narrative of his lived experience in the Nazi camp was formed by his reading of Fanon’s experiences of colonialism, and how Fanon’s narrative of the colonial trauma was transposed and translated into Améry’s public testimony as a Holocaust survivor. The article argues that Améry’s individual memories found a certain mediated cultural form and narrative frame in the contemporaneous situation of decolonisation. The multilayered weave of fascist and colonial violence constituting Améry’s testimony highlights questions of memory’s multidirectionality and casts new light on how cultural memorial forms are shaped and shared.

Conclusion: The 1960s and Beyond

2015 ◽  
pp. 346-356
Author(s):  
David H. Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Summer Camps ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Institutions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

This concluding chapter addresses the impact of the Holocaust on established forms of collective Jewish identity and commitment in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The profound rupture in both Jewish and general life during the war and the physical dislocation that followed meant that thousands of survivors in western Europe had to rediscover or discover for the first time their place among other Jews and among their fellow citizens. In attempting to find a new rationale for Jewish survival, leading Jewish figures of all stripes recognized that there could be no simple return to what they believed were the pre-war polarities of religious orthodoxy on the one hand and assimilationism on the other. With the aid of money from reparation payments and the guidance of organizations like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), French, Belgian, and Dutch Jewish leaders created new institutions, such as Jewish community centres, summer camps, and sports clubs, to appeal to a mobile and unsettled population. While not all of these efforts were immediately successful, what slowly emerged were new forms of Jewish consciousness that enabled young men and women to express their commitment to a shared fate outside the traditional framework of formal religious and educational institutions.

Remembering “Planet Auschwitz” During the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 144 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-153
Author(s):  
Kathryn L. Brackney
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Racial Conflicts ◽  
Adolf Eichmann ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

During one of the most famous moments of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, author and Holocaust survivor Yehiel Dinur took the witness stand in the summer of 1961 to deliver a brief and enigmatic testimony about what he termed “the Auschwitz planet.” Over the next two decades, as international Holocaust consciousness re-emerged in the shadow of the Cold War, writers, thinkers, and filmmakers would elaborate on the topography of “Planet Auschwitz,” figuring the Holocaust as an alien world at the limits of modernity. Drawing on a number of sources not always included in canons of art and theory of Holocaust memory, this article shows how the genocide of Europe’s Jews, ongoing global racial conflicts, and the penetration of the “final frontier” became overlapping sites of philosophical speculation during the 1960s and 1970s about the nature of modernity and what it means to be a human being.

Prześladowania Żydów w Holandii, Francji i Belgii, 1940–1945 w ujęciu porównawczym: podobieństwa, różnice, przyczyny

2015 ◽  
pp. 90-130
Author(s):  
Pim Griffioen ◽  
Ron Zeller
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Local Police ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Police Forces

At the beginning of the occupation, France, Holland and Belgium found themselves in a similar situation. But when we look at the ratio of victims and survivors during the Holocaust in Western Europe, France and Holland are polar opposites: in France 25 percent of around 320,000 Jews did not survive the persecutions, whereas the ratio in Holland was 75 percent of 140,000. Belgium lies in the middle of the scale – 40 percent dead out of 66,000 Jews. In order to understand the source of these differences, the authors compare the methods applied by the occupation authorities and their anti-Jewish policies, the involvement and the size of the local police forces and German police, as well as the jurisdictional disputes between these formations.

scholarly journals Illuminating Vestige: Amateur Archaeology and the Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Rural France

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 474-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Hodges
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Historical Ethnography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Rural France

AbstractThis article provides a historical ethnography of an abrupt and transient awakening of interest in Roman vestige during the 1970s in rural France, and explores its implications for comparative understanding of historical consciousness in Western Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Languedoc, and particularly the commune of Monadières, it details a vogue for collecting pottery shards scattered in a nearby lagoon that developed among local inhabitants. The article frames this as a ritualized “expressive historicity” emergent from political economic restructuring, cultural transformation, and time-space compression. It analyses the catalyzing role of a historian who introduced discursive forms into the commune for symbolizing the shards, drawn from regionalist and socialist historiography, which local people adapted to rearticulate the historicity of lived experience as a novel, hybrid genre of “historical consciousness.” These activities are conceptualized as a “reverse historiography.” Elements of historiographical and archaeological discourses—for example, chronological depth, collation and evaluation of material relics—are reinvented to alternate ends, partly as a subversive “response” to contact with such discourses. The practice emerges as a mediation of distinct ways of apprehending the world at a significant historical juncture. Analysis explores the utility of new anthropological theories of “historicity”—an alternative to the established “historical idiom” for analyzing our relations with the past—which place historiography within the analytical frame, and enable consideration of the temporality of historical experience. Findings suggest that the alterity of popular Western cultural practices for invoking the past would reward further study.

scholarly journals Activity of Albanian emigration in the West towards the issue of Kosovo and Metohija (1945-1969)

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-255
Author(s):  
Igor Vukadinović
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
National Committee ◽  
The West ◽  
Health Institutions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World

After the Second World War, a large number of members of the fascist regime of the Kingdom of Albania found refuge in Italy, Turkey and the countries of Western Europe, where they continued to politically act. The leading political options in exile - Balli Kombetar, Zogists and pro-Italian National Independent Bloc, decided to cooperate with each other, so they have formed the Albanian National Committee in 1946. The turning point for the Albanian extreme emigration in the West is Operation Valuable, by which the United States and Great Britain sought to overthrow the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha in Albania. Although the operation failed, strong ties were forged between US and British intelligence and Albanian nacionalist emigration, which were further intensified in the 1960s. Xhafer Deva, who was dedicated to act on the annexation of Kosovo and Metohija to Albania, immigrated to the United States in 1956 and established cooperation with the CIA. Albanian emigration in the West applied different methods in politics towards Kosovo and Metohija. Some organizations, such as Xhafer Deva's Third Prizren League, have focused on lobbying Western intelligence. The Bali Kombetar Independent, headquatered in Rome, paid particular attention to working with Albanian high school and student youth in Kosovo and Metohija. The Alliance of Kosovo, formed in 1949, was engaged in subtle methods of involving Albanian nationalists in Yugoslav state structures, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav People's Army, and educational and health institutions in Kosovo and Metohija. Albanian emigration was also involved in violent demonstrations in Kosovo and Metohija in 1968, and cooperated on this issue with the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha in Albania.

scholarly journals Intelektualiści zachodnioeuropejscy od wybuchu II wojny światowej do współczesności

2015 ◽  
pp. 145-164
Author(s):  
Maria Tomczak
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
World War 2 ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Formula

This study aims to show the forms of political involvement of Western European intellectuals. In doing so, the paper attempts to answer the question about the role they played in Western and Central Europe in the discussed period. The paper also demonstrates the cultural and political causes of their decline.streszczenieFor the intellectuals of Western and Central Europe, World War 2 was an extremely difficult period. The genocidal policies of the totalitarian states induced them to take a position, while at the same time depriving them of the ability to express their views publicly. This engendered a sense of helplessness; also, apart for a few exceptions, only emigrants could actually perform the function of intellectuals. Among those, an important role to play fell to two groups: German emigrants who distanced themselves from their nation, and Jewish emigrants, who addressed the subject of the Holocaust. After the war, the Iron Curtain also restricted the actions of intellectuals. It soon turned out that the tenor of spiritual life was set by left-wing authors, fascinated with the USSR. The fascination petered out after the disclosure of Stalin’s crimes in 1956. It was terminated definitively by the ruthless suppression of the Prague Spring. It was at that time that conservatism and right-wing intellectuals returned to Europe. Their aim was to reverse the trend and prevent Western Europe from drifting leftward. The change of the paradigm served to settle the scores with the leftist intellectuals. They were accused of subversive activities against the state and nation or treason. Also, in the intellectual circles there emerged a conviction that the previous formula had been exhausted. A new formula of activities of intellectuals was considered particularly in France, by authors of such eminence as R. Aron, M. Foucault, or P. Bourdieu. The deconstruction of the figure of the intellectual was completed by J.-F. Lyotard, who pronounced the death of intellectuals. Involvement of intellectuals remained a valid notion only in the countries of the Eastern bloc. In post-Cold War Europe, the decline of intellectuals became even more discernible. This was occasioned by a number of political and cultural factors. In this respect, particular role should be attributed to postmodernism which, by disproving the Enlightenment understanding of culture, undermined the role played by intellectuals.

scholarly journals “Viajando em Jesus”: os evangélicos norte-americanos e a contracultura

2020 ◽  
pp. 924
Author(s):  
Axel R. Schäfer
Keyword(s):  
Christian Right ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Conservative Protestant ◽  
New Christian Right ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

The political mobilization of conservative Protestants in the United States since the 1970s is commonly viewed as having resulted from a “backlash” against the alleged iniquities of the 1960s, including the excess-es of the counterculture. In contrast, this article maintains that conservative Protestant efforts to infiltrate and absorb the counterculture contributed to the organizational strength, cultural attractiveness, and politi-cal efficacy of the New Christian Right. The essay advances three arguments: First, that evangelicals did not simply reject the countercultural ideas of the 1960s, but absorbed and extended its key sentiments. Second, that conservative Protestantism’s appropriation of countercultural rhetoric and organizational styles played a significant role in the right-wing political mobilization of evangelicals. And third, that the merger of evan-gelical Christianity and countercultural styles, rather than their antagonism, ended up being one of the most enduring legacies of the sixties. In revisiting the relationship between the counterculture and evangelicalism, the essay also explores the larger implications for understanding the relationship between religion and poli-tics. The New Christian Right domesticated genuinely insurgent impulses within the evangelical resurgence. By the same token, it nurtured the conservative components of the counterculture. Conservative Protestant-ism thus constituted a political movement that channeled insurgencies into a cultural form that relegitimized the fundamental trajectories of liberal capitalism and consumerist society.

The 45-rpm dress revolution: Competing temporalities in 1960s fashion

2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Juneko J. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Marked Change ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Human Potential ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Age Of Aquarius ◽  
Aesthetic Values

Perhaps no artefact is as evocative of temporality (i.e. the lived experience of time), as fashion and, arguably, no other period in history represents such a marked change in our notions about the relationship between the two as the 1960s did. In contrast to the Platonic-Apollonian fashion ideals of the 1950s, as exemplified by Dior’s New Look, the mod and the hippy came to represent competing bodily ideals. Their Dionysian fashions aestheticized time in three complementary ways: first, the celebration of the now, with its emphasis on the ephemeral, the physically pleasurable and the situated body in motion; second, the re-appropriation of the past, which involved the postmodern rejection or subversion of grand historical narratives that privileged certain iterations of race, class and gender and touted imperialism and cultural hegemony; and third, a utopian optimism about the future based on a belief in the increased possibilities of individual human potential as well as the prospect of societal transformation into a post-bellum, post-racial, post-classist, post-gender ‘Age of Aquarius’. These aesthetic values had political implications. Although the most radical of street fashions was worn by comparatively few 1960s youth, the deeper reasons why they came to be viewed with suspicion and outright anger were not so much due to particular styles, but rather what they revealed about our changing relationships to temporality and the postmodern fracturing of metanarratives concerning the proper existential comportment towards tradition and change, while laying the symbolic groundwork for what would later be referred to as the ‘culture wars’ in popular media.

‘Time is Over’: Postmodern Times

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-219
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
International Travel ◽  
Graham Swift ◽  
Malcolm Lowry ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Martin Amis ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Ian Mcewan ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War and the nuclear threat made it as difficult, after 1945, to look forward affirmatively as to look back. Enlightenment ideas of a ‘project of modernity’ gave way to postmodern scepticism and stasis, reflected by Samuel Beckett and the nouveau roman, and in other ways in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann and the repetitive chronologies of Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell and others. After the 1960s, authors such as Muriel Spark confronted the Holocaust and recent history more directly, as in later decades did Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and others. In this fiction, and generally later in the century, concerns with the clock’s constraints were diminished by long familiarity and by several new factors. These included technologies of film, video, globalised media and the internet, along with increased international travel and encounters with less industrialised cultures. Science fiction, too, and imagination of time-travel, was both symptomatic yet partly redemptive of horological stress. There remained, however, numerous (often historical) novels by authors such as Gabriel García Marquéz, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray and Thomas Pynchon – re-examining, in Mason & Dixon, C18th practices of global measurement – still concerned with the stresses clockwork chronology imposed on modern history.

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