scholarly journals Censura y oídos sordos ante la literatura sobre los campos de la muerte en la posguerra europea: Joaquim Amat-Piniella y Primo Levi = Censorship and deaf ears faced with the literature on the death camps in post-war Europe: Joaquim Amat-Piniella and Primo Levi

Author(s):  
Alejandro Pérez Vidal

Resumen: Esta comunicación estudia algunos aspectos de la memoria de experiencias concentracionarias en los años inmediatamente posteriores a la II Guerra Mundial. En la primera parte se centra en la historia editorial de K.L. Reich, novela de Joaquim Amat-Piniella, señalando en particular su publicación parcial en una revista del exilio y un proyecto de publicación completa en Barcelona en 1948. La segunda parte intenta explicar el limitado éxito inicial de K.L. Reich por comparación con lo que sucedió con obras parecidas en otros países europeos, y en particular con Se questo è un uomo, de Primo Levi; se intenta mostrar que el anticomunismo de la guerra fría dejaba poco espacio para la memoria pública de los campos de concentración y que fue en los ambientes de la izquierda antifascista en los que ésta tendió a cultivarse.Palabras clave: Joaquim Amat-Piniella, Primo Levi, testimonios de los campos de concentración, recepción, guerra fría.Abstract: The present study considers some aspects of the remembrance of concentration camp experiences in the years immediately following World War II. The first part focuses on the publishing history of K.L. Reich, by Joaquim Amat-Piniella, pointing out specially its partial publication in France in 1945 and a project to publish the whole novel in Barcelona in 1948. The second part seeks to explain the limited success of K.L. Reich when it was first published, by considering what happened to similar works in other European countries and, in particular, Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo. It argues that the anti-communism of the Cold War left little room for the public remembrance of the concentration camps and that it was the anti-fascist leftists who were most inclined to keep this memory alive. Keywords: Joaquim Amat-Piniella, Primo Levi, concentration camp testimonies, reception, Cold War.

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.


Author(s):  
Dora Vargha

Concerns over children’s physical health and ability were shared experiences across post–World War II societies, and the figure of the child was often used as a tool to reach over the Iron Curtain. However, key differences in how children with polio were perceived, and as a result treated, followed Cold War fault lines. Concepts of an individual’s role in society shaped medical treatment and views of disability, which contributed to the celebrated polio child in one environment and her invisibility in another. Thus, through the lens of disability, new perspectives have emerged on the history of the Cold War, polio, and childhood.


Author(s):  
Andrew Preston

Assessing the application of the liberal consensus idea to postwar foreign policy, this chapter contends that myths about the bipartisan spirit of U.S. foreign policy have too long found ready acceptance from historians. Politics did not stop at the water’s edge, even when bipartisanship was at its supposed zenith during World War II and the early Cold War. While there was unanimity during the post-war era that the growth of international communism was a threat to U.S. interests, this did not mean that foreign policy was free of political conflict, and partisan charges that the government of the day was losing the Cold War were commonplace. Meanwhile, non-elite opinion evinced little support for confrontation with the main Communist powers, reluctance to engage in another land war like Korea, and concern about survival in the nuclear era. The divisiveness wrought by Vietnam was supposed to have brought an end to the “Cold War consensus,” but uncertainty over its meaning was evident well before this.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE SACKLEY

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.


Muzikologija ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 171-198
Author(s):  
Sanja Radinovic

Miodrag A. Vasiljevic (1903-1963) was given a unique opportunity to span two great developmental stages in the history of Serbian ethnomusicology, occurring in the middle of the 20th century. The first of them was between the two World Wars, the stage in which Serbian musical folklore became Vasiljevic?s life passion and in which he accomplished his early professional achievements. In the next stage, which started after World War II, he reached the zenith of his creation in slightly less than twenty years, setting new standards of the discipline, and providing fundamental directions for his successors, thereby immeasurably enlarging the corpus of collected material. Due all of these revolutionary innovations from the post-war period, Vasiljevic is rightly considered to be not only the founder of modern Serbian ethnomusicology, but also the first person in Serbia worthy of being called an ethnomusicologist in the full sense of the word. Of the numerous results by which Vasiljevic permanently indebted his people, the most pronounced does not belong to the category of pioneering endeavours, but is manifested in his melographic opus - an achievement which even today has not been surpassed in Serbia in terms of its span, scope and value. Such great productivity in recording resulted from the fact that Vasiljevic had been devoted to melography from his childhood, and most intensely from 1932 to the end of his life. The exact number of examples which Vasiljevic transcribed directly in the field before 1951 and those which he recorded on a tape-recorder after that time is still unknown, since many of them are still unavailable to the public, but it can be assumed that there are several thousand melodies in total. Among them are 3,198 which have already been published. That precious corpus of Vasiljevic?s available material is contained in twelve collections (the largest number ever regarding any collector in Serbia so far), issued from 1950 to 2009. The first four collections offer comprehensive material from Kosmet, Sandzak, Macedonia and the region of Leskovac, and they were edited by Vasiljevic himself during the last ten years of his life or so. Posthumous publications were devoted to Montenegro, Vojvodina, Resava and various parts of central Serbia, as well as to the repertoires of the famous singer Hamdija Sahinpasic (1914/16-2003) from Sandzak, and gypsy female singer Malika Jeminovic Kostana (1872?-1945) from the vicinity of Vranje. Until now there have still not been any comprehensive studies on Vasiljevic?s ethnomusicological activity, although there are valuable articles. In these, Vasiljevic?s melographic contribution is usually emphasised much more than his scientific one, which is much more modest in its scope. Since the existing writings mostly deal with collections published during his life, this paper results from the intention to give a complete picture of the material, so all Vasiljevic?s collections were critically considered according to the chronology of their publication. Each of the publications emerged to witness to both Vasiljevic as a field worker and to some of the important stages of his own ethnomusicological development. The last part of the text focuses on the fact that a decline in production of ethnomusicological collection publications has been evident in Serbia over the last few decades. Nowadays, this negative trend is conditioned by two key reasons. One is the perfected and easily available technology of digital audio recording and the copying of sound recordings. The second is reflected in the general developmental orientation of the discipline.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-193
Author(s):  
Richard Pipes

After the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, some of the closest study of the new Communist regime and Soviet state was conducted by Polish scholars, whose country had a long history of troubled relations with Russia. Polish scholars had long been studying the Tsarist regime, but the advent of Soviet rule forced major adjustments. Some of the literature that emerged in Poland about the Soviet Union was perceptive, but other works were warped by anti-Semitism and an obsession with alleged Bolshevik-Judeo conspiracies. By the time of World War II, a substantial body of expertise about the USSR had accumulated in Poland. The war and the subsequent establishment of Soviet hegemony largely brought an end to this tradition, which could not truly be revived until after 1989.


2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 341-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Wang

This essay brings together and builds upon histories of cold war American science and studies of objectivity, scientific personae, and the self by exploring the physicist Merle A. Tuve‘s career in the late 1940s and 1950s as a history of selfhood and the emotional dimensions of scientific identity. As director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington after World War II, Tuve followed a convoluted path through the institutions, politics, identities, and sensibilities of science in the cold war, and he struggled to preserve a sense of meaning and identity centered on the humanistic and aesthetic possibilities of scientific inquiry in an era of rapidly growing instrumentalism. His predicament highlights not just the political and institutional shifts within postwar science, but also the intricate entanglements between feeling, selfhood, and the cold war order.


Author(s):  
George Blaustein

This chapter is a centrifugal history of American Studies in the United States and abroad. There have been many crises within American Studies, including calls to rename it, internationalize it, or abandon it altogether. But what was American Studies? What were the original preoccupations of this unusual field, and what were the historical conditions that enabled its establishment and international diffusion? American Studies operated in the knotty terrain of military occupation, reconstruction, and democratization after World War II, but the Americanist century has many points of origin, and it transcends the binaries of the Cold War. This chapter brings together the histories of American Studies in the United States with the less familiar histories of American Studies in Europe and Japan, stretching from the early twentieth century to the Cold War. It also offers a more cosmopolitan history of “American exceptionalism.”


Author(s):  
Ana Barahona

Although their history can be traced further back to the study of heredity, variability, and evolution at the beginnings of the 20th century, studies on the genetic structure and ancestry of human populations became important at the end of World War II. From 1950 onward, the tools and practices of human genetics were systematically used to attack global health problems with the support of international health organizations and the founding of local institutions that extended these practices, thus contributing to global knowledge. These developments were not an exception for Mexican physicians and human geneticists in the Cold War years. The first studies, which appeared in the 1940s, reflect the emerging model of human genetics in clinical practice and in scientific research in postwar Mexico. Studies on the distribution of blood groups as well as on variant forms of hemoglobin in indigenous populations paved the way for long-term research programs on the characterization of Mexican indigenous populations. Research groups were formed at the Ministry of Health, the National Commission of Nuclear Energy, and the Mexican Social Security Institute in the 1960s. The key actors in this narrative were Rubén Lisker, Alfonso León de Garay, and Salvador Armendares. They consolidated solid communities in the fields of population and human genetics. For Lisker, the long-term effort to carry out research on indigenous populations in order to provide insights into the biological history of the human species, disease patterns, and biological relationships among populations was of particular interest. Alfonso León de Garay was interested in studying human and Drosophila populations, but in a completely different context, namely at the intersection of studies on nuclear energy and its effects on human populations as a result of World War II, with the life sciences, particularly genetics and radiobiology. In parallel, the study of chromosomes on a large scale using newly experimental techniques introduced by Salvador Armendares in Mexico in 1960 allowed researchers to tackle child malnutrition and health problems caused by Down and Turner syndromes. The history of population studies and genetics during the Cold War in Mexico (1945–1970s) shows how the Mexican human geneticists of the mid-20th century mobilized scientific resources and laboratory practices in the context of international trends marked by WWII, and national priorities owing to the construction movement of postrevolutionary Mexican governments. These research programs were not limited to collaborations between research laboratories but were developed within the institutional and political framework marked at the international level by the postwar period and at the national level by the construction of the modern Mexican state.


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