scholarly journals Wierzchołek świata. Aline Valangin i dolina Onsernone

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 90-100
Author(s):  
Monika Mańczyk-Krygiel

These considerations are devoted to literary pictures of the Onsernone Valley located on the Italian-Swiss border. It was here in the 1930s and 1940s that the Swiss writer Aline Valangin (1889– 1986) created an extraordinary oasis of freedom and peace in her estate in Comologno. She hosted famous figures such as Kurt Tucholsky, Elias Canetti, Ignazio Silone, or Wladimir Vogel, and provided shelter to many politically persecuted artists. The subject of detailed reflection is the question of the perception, experience and acquisition of the Ticino mountains both in works by Valangin and in biographical works about her; with a particular focus on narrative perspective — from the outside and the inside. Eveline Hasler in biographical novel Aline und die Erfindung der Liebe (2000) attempts to (re)construct an image of the Onsernone Valley as a specific “valley of poets”, presenting a subtle analysis of the interaction between the conservative inhabitants of the valley, attached to tradition, and the extravagant artists who found asylum and inspiration in the Ticino Alps. This novel is an example of a modern biography, which is characterized by narrative polyphony; the description of space becomes an important carrier of meanings and collective memory in the author’s concept. Aline Valangin sketches in her novels (Die Bargada, 1943 / Dorf an der Grenze, 1982) and short stories (Tessiner Erzählungen, 2018) an image of Onserone indigenous people’s everyday life in the thirties and forties, full of worries. Her stories include outsiders, misfits, social outcasts, guerrillas, smugglers, and exiles — and they all find haven in the Valley. Valangin’s works are also an important voice in the discussion of the essence of Swiss patriotism not only through strong criticism of Swiss immigration policy during World War II, but also by reflecting on the concept of the border as a place that unexpectedly proves to be a challenge and a particular kind of self-experience in the face of events that are tearing up the current existence.

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 77-89
Author(s):  
Monika Mańczyk-Krygiel

These considerations are devoted to literary pictures of the Onsernone Valley located on the Italian-Swiss border. It was here in the 1930s and 1940s that the Swiss writer Aline Valangin (1889– 1986) created an extraordinary oasis of freedom and peace in her estate in Comologno. She hosted famous figures such as Kurt Tucholsky, Elias Canetti, Ignazio Silone, or Wladimir Vogel, and provided shelter to many politically persecuted artists. The subject of detailed reflection is the question of the perception, experience and acquisition of the Ticino mountains both in works by Valangin and in biographical works about her; with a particular focus on narrative perspective — from the outside and the inside. Eveline Hasler in biographical novel Aline und die Erfindung der Liebe (2000) attempts to (re)construct an image of the Onsernone Valley as a specific “valley of poets”, presenting a subtle analysis of the interaction between the conservative inhabitants of the valley, attached to tradition, and the extravagant artists who found asylum and inspiration in the Ticino Alps. This novel is an example of a modern biography, which is characterized by narrative polyphony; the description of space becomes an important carrier of meanings and collective memory in the author’s concept. Aline Valangin sketches in her novels (Die Bargada, 1943 / Dorf an der Grenze, 1982) and short stories (Tessiner Erzählungen, 2018) an image of Onserone indigenous people’s everyday life in the thirties and forties, full of worries. Her stories include outsiders, misfits, social outcasts, guerrillas, smugglers, and exiles — and they all find haven in the Valley. Valangin’s works are also an important voice in the discussion of the essence of Swiss patriotism not only through strong criticism of Swiss immigration policy during World War II, but also by reflecting on the concept of the border as a place that unexpectedly proves to be a challenge and a particular kind of self-experience in the face of events that are tearing up the current existence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 90-104
Author(s):  
Michał Koziol

The aim of the article is to present the phenomenon of demographic crisis in Latvia and the problem with the broadly incoming Russian minority (often also defined as Eastern or non-native minority), throughout the country. In the face of World War II, Latvia lost its centuries-old multiculturalism, as well as progressive climate and tolerant society. The losses of the indigenous Baltic population reached almost 30%, therefore, with the effects of these events, the Republic of Latvia is struggling to this day using a multi-layered national policy. The characteristics of new actions, the participation of national minorities in the structures of society and the assessment of the effectiveness of implemented modifications are the subject of this study.


2022 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Andrea Borsari ◽  
Giovanni Leoni

The article consists of two parts. The first part (§§ 1–2) investigates the indiscriminate and absolute remembering and forgetting of everything, hypermnesia and amnesia as the extreme terms that research has used and uses for the different phenomena of memory, both in individuals and in social and political forms. In the face of these shifts it is thus indispensable to re-establish a critique of the paradoxical effects of memory aids and, at the same time, to seek new forms of remembrance that by mixing an experiential dimension and public sphere refocus the attention on the connection between latency, tension and experiential triggers of involuntary memory and on the ability to break through the fictions of collective memory. On this basis, the second part of the article (§§ 3–4) analyses how the experience of political and racial deportation during World War II drastically changed the idea of memorial architecture. More specifically, the analysis deals with a kind of memorial device that must represent and memorialise persons whose bodies have been deliberately cancelled. The aim is to present and analyse the artistic and architectonic efforts to refer to those forgotten bodies, on the one hand, and on the other hand to point out how for these new kind of memorials the body of the visitor is asked to participate, both physically and emotionally, in this somehow paradoxical search for lost bodies, offering oneself as a substitute.


1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Philip D. Beidler

Although the idea may be hard for us to imagine fifty years later, especially given the historical weight of the subject, the first of the great postwar entertainment classics to come out of the American experience of World War II took shape initially as a set of comic short stories by Thomas Heggen about the backwater Pacific Navy. Gathered into a slim 1946 novel, the stories became the basis of a hit Broadway play of 1948; and that play in turn became the basis of an extraordinarily popular 1955 movie. The classic so described, of course, was Mr. Roberts, with the titular hero eventually so thoroughly identified with the actor playing him on stage and screen that by the end of the decade in question, a New York Times Reviewer would observe of the actor, Henry Fonda, “it now appears he is Mr. Roberts.”


Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller

This chapter examines how Ray Bradbury extended his reading of mainstream modern and contemporary British and American writers in all genres during the final years of World War II and beyond. Bradbury's road to all his mature fiction was paved to a large extent by a great wartime shift in his personal reading agenda. The most surprising transition in his reading is his sudden and permanent shift away from reading new science fiction sometime in 1944. This chapter discusses Bradbury's broadening reading and maturing tastes in literature by looking at some of the stories he read, from Katherine Anne Porter's Flowering Judas and The Leaning Tower to Thomas Wolfe's The Face of the Nation, Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories of 1944, Cornell Woolrich's Rendezvous in Black, and A Touch of Nutmeg and More Unlikely Stories by John Collier.


Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.


1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”


1970 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard D. Hamilton

Any middle-aged member of the political science guild in a retrospective mood might ponder a question: “What ever happened to direct democracy?” In our halcyon student days the textbooks discussed the direct democracy trinity—initiative, referendum, and recall—described their mechanics and variations, explained their origin in the Progressive Era, told us that the United States, Australia, and Switzerland were leading practitioners of direct democracy, cited a few eccentric referenda, gave the standard pro and con arguments, and essayed some judgments of the relative merits of direct and representative democracy. Latter day collegians may pass through the portals innocent of the existence of the institutions of direct government. Half of the American government texts never mention the subject; the others allocate a paragraph or a page for a casual mention or a barebones explanation of the mechanics.A similar trend has occurred in the literature. Before 1921, every volume of this Review had items on the referendum, five in one volume. Subsequently there have been only seven articles, all but two prior to World War II. “The Initiative and Referendum in Graustark” has ceased to be a fashionable dissertation topic, only four in the last thirty years. All but two of the published monographs antedate World War II.


Author(s):  
Rodrigo Porto Bozzetti ◽  
Gustavo Saldanha

The purpose of this paper, considering the relevance of Shera thoughts and its repercussions, is to reposition, in epistemological-historical terms, Jesse Shera’s approaches and their impacts according to a relation between life and work of the epistemologist. Without the intention of an exhaustive discussion, the purpose is to understand some unequivocal relations between the Shera critique for the context of its theoretical formulation and the consequences of this approach contrary to some tendencies originating from the technical and bureaucratic roots of the field (before and after World War II). It is deduced that Shera, rather than observing the sociopolitical reality and technical partner in which the texture of alibrary-based thought (but visualized by him as documentaryinformational), establishes, in his own praxis, social epistemology as a sort of "critique of the future," that is, as a praxis of the reflexive activity of the subject inserted in this episteme. In our discussion, the epistemological-social approach represents a vanguard for the context of its affirmation, a reassessment for the immediate decades to its presentation(years 1960 and 1970) and a critique for the future of what was consolidated under the notion of information Science, anticipating affirmations of "social nature" of the 1980s and 1990s in the field of information.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Artur Gruszczak

This article aims to make an insight into the conditions of immigration policy and actions undertaken by the Swedish authorities and political parties in the face of the migration crisis in Europe after 2015. A hypothesis presented here assumes that a decisive evolution of the attitudes of the Swedish authorities, political parties, and society towards a restrictive approach to immigration arose from the awareness of the negative consequences of migration management for the Swedish socio-economic model and the political scene. The theoretical framework used in this article is the concept of policy responsiveness, including the ability of political authorities to respond effectively and lawfully to the needs and expectations of the citizens. Process tracing was applied as a research method useful for following the transformation process of Sweden’s immigration policy. Statistical data, documents issued by the government and political parties, as well as the subject literature were the sources utilised in the research. Conclusions drawn from the research point to the tightening of immigration policy as a result of the fear of a prolonged pull effect on foreigners and concern surrounding the appropriate handling of immigration in full accordance with the adopted model of immigration policy.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document