scholarly journals Die drei Ortssprachen Estlands in Edzard Schapers Roman Der Henker und in seiner estnischen Übersetzung

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104
Author(s):  
Marin Jänes ◽  
Maris Saagpakk

The Three Local Languages of Estonia in Edzard Schaper’s novel The Executioner and in its Estonian Translation. This article analyses the reflection of everyday multilingualism in Edzard Schaper’s novel Der Henker (The Executioner, 1940) and its translation into Estonian by Katrin Kaugver (Timukas, 2002). The novel deals with the 1905 revolution in the current Estonian territory, which was at that time a province of the Russian Empire. The novel was written shortly before the outbreak of World War II and translated into Estonian 60 years later after the end of the Soviet era. The complexity and the fluctuation of the contextual elements between the storyline of the novel, the time of its writing and the time of the translation make the novel a rewarding object of research into settings of multilingualism in everyday life. The article focuses on the manifest and latent forms of multilingualism, on the functions of the local languages, as well as on the question whether it helps to analyse language use in real life situations. It also looks at how local multilingualism, dominated by three local languages – German, Russian and Estonian – has been translated from one local language (German) into another local language (Estonian). The examples chosen in the article highlight some regularities in the use of the local and other languages, and offer a cultural-historical and socio-political interpretation of the use of multilingualism.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Spissu

In the novel The Rings of Saturn (1995), the German writer W. G. Sebald recounts his solitary journey to the town of Suffolk (UK) at the end of his years, while he also reflects on some of the dramatic events that shaped World War II and his personal memories. In this work, he takes on a particular narrative tactic defined by the interaction between the text and images that creates a special type of montage in which he seems to draw from cinematic language. I argue that, drawing on Sebald’s work, we can imagine a form of ethnographic observation that involves the creation of a cinematic map through which to explore the memories and imagination of individuals in relation to places where they live. I explore the day-to-day lived experiences of unemployed people of Sulcis Iglesiente, through their everyday engagement with, and situated perceptions of, their territory. I describe the process that led me to build Moving Lightly over the Earth, a cinematic map of Sulcis Iglesiente through which I explored how women and men in the area who lost their jobs as a result of the process of its deindustrialization give specific meaning to the territory, relating it to memories of their past and hopes and desires for the future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 553-564
Author(s):  
Sabina Giergiel

Body, corpse and death in David Albahari’s Gotz and MeyerThe article investigates the broadly understood record of Jewish death that emerges from the text of the Serbian prose writer David Albahari. Emphasizing the dominance of economy in the Nazi system, the author indicates those procedures described in Albahari’s book which justify such an assessment e.g. human reification, the body as debris, technical syntax used by German officials. Additionally, these considerations on death representation are supplemented with an endeavor to establish the Belgrade dwellers’ attitude towards the fortunes of the Jews. According to the author, the novel explicitly marks the spatial opposition enclosure vs. opening, the camp vs. the city center that is reinforced by the river, which during World War II divided the capital into Zemun belonging to the Independent State of Croatia, also the place where the camp was situated and Belgrade’s Serbian center. This demarcation intensifies the victims’ feelings of separation and loneliness, at the same time enabling the capital’s dwellers to occupy a comfortable position of bystanders.  Telo, mrtvac, smrt u romanu Gec i Majer Davida AlbaharijaRad se bavi vidovima smrti u romanu Gec i Majer Davida Albaharija. Pokazuje mehanizme koje potvrđuju opštepoznatu činjenicu da je u nacističkom sistemu dominirala ekonomija. U te mehanizme se ubrajaju, između ostalih: reifikacija čoveka, tretiranje tela kao otpada i tehnička leksika koju upotrebljavaju nemački funkcioneri. Analiza uključuje i pokušaj odgovora na pitanje kakav je bio odnos stanovnika Beograda prema sudbini Jevreja. Istraživanje pokazuje prostornu opoziciju zatvoren i otvoren prostor, logor i centar grada. Nju naglašava reka koja je za vreme Drugog svetskog rata delila srpsku prestonicu na Zemun, gde je bio smešten logor, a koji je pripadao NDH, i srpski centar Beograda. Ova granica je vezana za osećaj separacije i usamljenost žrtava, s jedne starne, i udobnost i bajstander-efekat stanovnika prestonice, s druge strane


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-90
Author(s):  
Boris Valentinovich Petelin ◽  
Vladilena Vadimovna Vorobeva

In the political circles of European countries attempts to reformat the history of World War II has been continuing. Poland is particularly active; there at the official level, as well as in the articles and in the speeches of politicians, political scientists and historians crude attacks against Russia for its commitment to objective assessments of the military past are allowed. Though, as the authors of this article mention, Russian politicians have not always been consistent in evaluation of Soviet-Polish relationships, hoping to reach a certain compromise. If there were any objections, they were mostly unconvincing. Obviously, as the article points, some statements and speeches are not without emotional colouring that is characteristic, when expressing mutual claims. However, the deliberate falsification of historical facts and evidence, from whatever side it occurs, does not meet the interests of the Polish and Russian peoples, in whose memory the heroes of the Red Army and the Polish Resistance have lived and will live. The authors point in the conclusions that it is hard to achieve mutual respect to key problems of World War II because of the overlay of the 18th – 19th centuries, connected with the “partitions of Poland”, the existence of the “Kingdom of Poland” as part of the Russian Empire, Soviet-Polish War of 1920. There can be only one way out, as many Russian and Polish scientists believe – to understand the complex twists and turns of Russo-Polish history, relying on the documents. Otherwise, the number of pseudoscientific, dishonest interpretations will grow.


Author(s):  
Steven Earnshaw

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano places the committed drinker, in the form of ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin, in the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ festival, so that the main character encounters ‘hell’ in physical and spiritual dimensions. The novel is technically innovative in its aim to register the subjective experience of the Existential drinker: Geoffrey Firmin’s world is constructed through a highly-individualised, expressionistic symbolism, a mid-century representation of the modern, alienated self, abandoned and suffering despair in a Godless world – the latter made evident by the novel’s attention to the rise of totalitarianism, which forms the backdrop to the events here on a day close to the onset of World War II. There is discussion of the novel’s difficulty and form, and a comparison of some aspects of the novel with Kafka’s The Trial, and how these relate to representation of the Existential drinker.


2021 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Gillian Kelly

This chapter explores Power’s work within the Western genre. When Power was cast in the title role of Hollywood’s first ‘A Western’ of the 1930s: Jesse James (Henry King) in 1939 it marked the first major curve in Power’s career trajectory. When it became Twentieth Century-Fox’s biggest hit of the year this proved that audiences were ready to accept Power in more masculine roles at the close of the decade. Released in the period directly preceding America’s entry into World War II, the film was integral in developing a much-needed shift in Power’s screen masculinity, appearance and performance style, reflecting the shifting industrial and social context in which it was made. In advancing his star image away from a womaniser, and instead placing it within an overtly homosocial environment, Power was able to convincingly demonstrate male bonding and leadership through a tougher masculinity which was essential for both the historical timeframe and Power’s own upcoming real-life war service. Despite the film’s huge success, it was another 12 years before Power starred in another Western, and made just four in overall: Jesse James, Rawhide (Henry Hathaway, 1951), Pony Soldier (Joseph M. Newman, 1952) and The Mississippi Gambler (Rudolph Maté, 1953).


1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-81
Author(s):  
Stephen Fischer-Galati

The national minorities question in Romania has been one of crises and polemics. This is due, in part, to the fact that Greater Romania, established at the end of World War I, brought the Old Romanian Kingdom into a body politic (a kingdom itself relatively free of minority problems), with territories inhabited largely by national minorities. Thus, the population of Transylvania and the Banat, both of which had been constituent provinces of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, included large numbers of Hungarians and Germans, while Bessarabia, a province of the Russian empire, included large numbers of Jews. While the Hungarian (Szeklers and Magyars), Germans (Saxons and Swabians), and Jewish minorities were the largest and most difficult to integrate into Greater Romania, other sizeable national minorities such as the Bulgarians, Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Serbians, Turks, and Gypsies also posed problems to the rulers of Greater Romania during the interwar period and, in some cases, even after World War II.


2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
Sherman Cochran

Among American works of fiction about China before World War II, Alice Tisdale Hobart’s Oil for the Lamps of China (1933) was second only to Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (1931) in influence and sales. Hobart’s novel, evidently set during the Northern Expedition of 1926-28, also inspired a Warner Brothers film by the same name in 1935. Unlike the film, Hobart’s novel did not give a boosterish picture of American capitalism. In portraying the leading character, Steven Chase, a field agent for an American oil firm in China, Hobart drew on the experience of her husband, a field agent for Standard Oil Company. Her husband, like Chase, was callously fired after loyally serving the company and adapting to Chinese culture and protecting company property from anti-imperialist mobs. The novel is memorable for its vivid characterizations of Americans and Chinese working for an American corporation in China and for its dark view of American capitalism and Chinese revolution.


2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Hogenraad

McClelland has shown how passionate reformist zeal for social justice is often the link between an “imperial motivation pattern” (i.e., high need for power and low need for affiliation) and subsequent wars. If we could predict the outbreak of past conflicts from observing the gap between affiliation and power in stories and documents of the past, we could also analyze documents of the present and point at the gap as a signal of alert of future conflicts. With the help of the new computer-readable MOTIVE DICTIONARY, I content analyzed literary stories and real-life documents concerned with war and conflict. The dictionary rests on three axes, which are: the need for achievement, the need for affiliation, and the need for power. Examples of such narratives and documents are William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Tolstoy's War and Peace, a 373-page document produced in Washington in 1944 under the title of Events Leading Up to World War II. Chronological History Of Certain Major International Events Leading Up To and During World War II with the Ostensible Reasons Advanced For Their Occurrence. 1931-1944, and Robert F. Kennedy's Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. With close to impeccable precision, the gap between affiliation and power widens as the conflicts develop, with power higher than affiliation, and narrows if and when serenity resumes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 191-210
Author(s):  
Tomasz Nakoneczny

The heritage of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth is one of the most problematic residues of the Polish past. After World War II, Poland lost its so-called Eastern Borderlands, which meant a break with a specific state tradition, the most important link of which was the powerful Polish-Lithuanian state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The potential and significance of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remains an important topic of Polish identity discourse. One of the issues addressed in that context is the imperial character of that state. The importance of this issue goes beyond the space of historiographic debates. It also concerns the place and role of Poland in the world from both historical and contemporary perspective. A common element of various narratives around the national-state status is myth. Myth is a story told for the needs of a specific social group, but it also refers to some of the supra-class conditions that could be described as the ontology of national being. Thanks to this, it can be treated as one of the tools used to study not only self-perceptions of the community, but also the interactions that occur between these self-images and real determinants of the community’s status. According to the author of the article, postcolonial studies create a possibility of integrated research on Polish imperiality, since they combine a number of different competencies necessary to comprehensively cover this broad topic. The sphere of national mythology is combined from a postcolonial perspective with a vast sphere of social facts and real-life conditions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-92
Author(s):  
Lars Kristensen ◽  
Christo Burman

Abstract The article deals with the extradition of Baltic soldiers from Sweden in 1946 as represented in Per Olov Enquist’s novel The Legionnaires: A Documentary Novel (Legionärerna. En roman om baltutlämningen, 1968) and Johan Bergenstråhle’s film A Baltic Tragedy (Baltutlämningen. En film om ett politiskt beslut Sverige 1945, Sweden, 1970). The theoretical framework is taken from trauma studies and its equivalent within film studies, where trauma is seen as a repeated occurrence of a past event. In this regard, literature and moving images become the means of reaching the traumatic event, a way to relive it. What separates the extradition of the Baltic soldiers from other traumas, such as the Holocaust, is that it functions as a guilt complex related to the failure to prevent the tragedy, which is connected to Sweden’s position of neutrality during World War II and the appeasement of all the warring nations. It is argued that this is a collective trauma created by Enquist’s novel, which blew it into national proportions. However, Bergenstråhle’s film changes the focus of the trauma by downplaying the bad conscience of the Swedes. In this way, the film aims to create new witnesses to the extradition affair. The analysis looks at the reception of both the novel and film in order to explain the two different approaches to the historical event, as well as the two different time periods in which they were produced. The authors argue that the two years that separate the appearance of the novel and the film explain the swing undergone by the political mood of the late 1960s towards a deflated revolution of the early 1970s, when the film arrived on screens nationwide. However, in terms of creating witnesses to the traumatic event, the book and film manage to stir public opinion to the extent that the trauma changes from being slowly effacing to being collectively ‘experienced’ through remembrance. The paradox is that, while the novel still functions as a vivid reminder of the painful aftermath caused by Swedish neutrality during World War II, the film is almost completely forgotten today. The film’s mode of attacking the viewers with an I-witness account, the juxtaposition and misconduct led to a rejection of the narrative by Swedish audiences.


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