scholarly journals Holdninger til de fremmede - forestillingen om bosniske flygtninge i den danske offentlighed

1998 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Aggergaard Larsen

The image of Bosnian war refugees in the Danish public This article discusses sociological inve¬stigations of attitudes towards immi¬grants and refugees in Denmark. In¬stead of viewing attitudes as an attribu¬te of individual psychology or as deter¬mined by social class, the article sug¬gests examining the context of varying understandings and imaginations which set the frame for the meaningful presentation of a concrete event. This approach is exemplified by a study of the reception of refugees from the former Yugoslavia in Denmark ba¬sed on articles from the Danish press from May 1992 to January 1995. These articles indicate that different attitudes towards refugees can be connected to representations based on different nar¬rative imaginations and collective me¬mories as well as other themes of cur¬rent interest in the public. These con¬texts have set different meaningful fra¬mes for understanding refugees and thereby influenced attitudes towards this group in the Danish public. In summer 1992, before the arrival of larger groups of refugees, there was a positive attitude towards them in the press. There was general indignation to¬wards the war in Europe and a wide¬spread willingness to help the people suffering from ethnic persecution and cleansing. There were explicit referen¬ces to World War II which were unambi¬guously supportive of a positive attitu¬de toward these refugees. By the autumn of the same year the¬re was a drift towards a more negative attitude. Episodes of thefts in the regi¬ons where refugee centres were located resulted in demands that criminal refu¬gees from the former Eastern Europe (the Baltic and exYugoslavia) be expel¬led. There were also reports from Ger¬many that neoNazis set fire to refugee camps, and this produced concern that the many foreigners in Denmark would provoke „German conditions“ with eth¬nic and racist problems. Many Danish neighbours to these refugee centres we¬re surprised to see refugees from war torn Yugoslavia arriving wellfed and in new clothing. These refugees didn’t fit the image of suffering which had been the basis for the unambiguous support the preceding summer. These people didn’t appear to be „real“ refugees. The many media reports about the war in Bosnia helped create an understanding that refugees have a reason for being Denmark and that Denmark has an obligation to help. The referen¬ces to ethnic persecution during World War II have been superseded by an un¬der¬standing that the new refugees have es¬caped from a life that was similar to the Danish. „They are like us“ is a sen¬tence that becomes more common in the media, and an understanding that the Bos¬nian war refugees have been forced to leave a life style similar to the Danish one emerge „it could have been us“. This is the basis for development of a public understanding of the Bosnian re¬fugees as a new type of „real“ refugees. The positive attitudes that have de¬veloped towards the predominantly Muslim refugees from Bosnia point to the possibility that the widespread anta¬gonism in the Danish public towards immigrants with a Muslim background is not due to the religion itself, but rather the traditionalistic and nonmodern way of life that this religious affiliation symbolizes for many Danes.

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Henrietta Bannerman

John Cranko's dramatic and theatrically powerful Antigone (1959) disappeared from the ballet repertory in 1966 and this essay calls for a reappraisal and restaging of the work for 21st century audiences. Created in a post-World War II environment, and in the wake of appearances in London by the Martha Graham Company and Jerome Robbins’ Ballets USA, I point to American influences in Cranko's choreography. However, the discussion of the Greek-themed Antigone involves detailed consideration of the relationship between the ballet and the ancient dramas which inspired it, especially as the programme notes accompanying performances emphasised its Sophoclean source but failed to recognise that Cranko mainly based his ballet on an early play by Jean Racine. As Antigone derives from tragic drama, the essay investigates catharsis, one of the many principles that Aristotle delineated in the Poetics. This well-known effect is produced by Greek tragedies but the critics of the era complained about its lack in Cranko's ballet – views which I challenge. There is also an investigation of the role of Antigone, both in the play and in the ballet, and since Cranko created the role for Svetlana Beriosova, I reflect on memories of Beriosova's interpretation supported by more recent viewings of Edmée Wood's 1959 film.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-504
Author(s):  
Peter Tammes ◽  
Peter Scholten

This article examines what assimilation trajectories were manifest among present-day Mediterranean Muslims and pre–World War II Jews in Dutch society. Alba and Nee conceptualized assimilation in terms of processes of spanning and altering group boundaries, distinguishing between boundary crossing, blurring, and shifting. This study carves out to what extent assimilation processes like boundary crossing, shifting, and blurring had taken place for those two non-Christian minority groups in Dutch society. This research is based on findings of recent (quantitative) empirical research into the assimilation of pre–World War II Jews in the Netherlands and on the collection of comparable research and data for the assimilation of contemporary Mediterranean Muslims. Our study suggests that processes of boundary crossing, such as observance of religious practices and consumption of religious food, and blurring, such as intermarriage, residential segregation, and religious affiliation, are much less advanced for Mediterranean Muslims in the present time. Though several factors might account for differences in boundary-altering processes between pre–World War II Jews and contemporary Mediterranean Muslims such as differences in length of stay in the Netherlands, the secularization process, and globalization, Jewish assimilation might provide us some reflections on assimilation of Mediterranean Muslims. The continuous arrival of Muslim newcomers might affect attitudes and behavior of settled Mediterranean Muslims, while policy to restrict family migration might be insufficient to stimulate Muslims to integrate in Dutch society given the quite negative mutual perceptions, the slow process of residential spreading, the continuation of observance of religious practices, and the low intermarriage rate.


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 327-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Federman

Mass atrocity requires the participation of numerous individuals and groups, yet only a few find themselves held accountable. How are these few selected? This article offers a framework that is useful for understanding how the condemned often embody attributes that keep them in the spotlight. Because norms used to identify perpetrators can set the context for future violence, long-term security requires interrupting both the actions of perpetrators and the discourses about them. A form of praxis, this study of the contemporary conflict over the French National Railways’ (SNCF) amends-making for its World War II transport of deportees towards death camps considers how certain perpetrators come to stand for the many. The SNCF remains in the spotlight not because of greater culpability or an unwillingness to make amends but because it embodies attributes of an ‘ideal’ perpetrator: it is (1) strong, (2) abstractable, (3) representative of the nature of the crime, and (4) has a champion-opponent who focuses attention on the perpetrator. Understanding the labeling process makes visible who and what we ignore at our own peril.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 287-293
Author(s):  
Daniela Vallega-Neu ◽  

This paper is about my latest book on Heidegger’s non-public writings on the event. It begins with a discussion of Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) and ends with The Event, spanning roughly the years 1936 to 1941. I pay primary attention to shift of attunements, concepts, and movement of thought in these volumes. Thereby a narrative emerges that traces a shift from a more Nietzschean pathos emphasizing the power of beyng to a more mystical approach in which Heidegger thinks “the beingless,” “what is without power,” and speaks of originary thinking as a thanking rather than a questioning. The shift begins to happen in 1939, the year World War II broke out but becomes clearly visible in 1940 in the volume On Inception (GA 70). Heidegger’s path of thinking is one of downgoing into the most concealed dimension of the truth of beyng and an attempt at thinking more radically without primacy of the human being. Among the many questions my book engages, I am focusing especially on the articulation of both the difference and simultaneity of beyng and beings in relation to attunement, body, history, and Heidegger’s errancies.


2019 ◽  
pp. 150-204
Author(s):  
Jelena Subotić

This chapter turns to the Baltics. It focuses in particular on the case of Lithuania, the country with the highest numbers of both prewar Jewish populations and Jewish victims in the Holocaust in the Baltic region. Lithuania is also the country that has most aggressively pursued a strategy of memory conflation, by which the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Lithuania are considered, together, as a “double genocide” and not as distinct historical events with their own tragic trajectories and consequences. Lithuania has also been at the helm of a creative use of post-World War II architecture of international justice, where the state is prosecuting individuals for genocide—not for the Holocaust, but for the “genocide” of Soviet occupation. This chapter begins with the overview of the Holocaust in the Baltic states, then describes Holocaust remembrance practices in the Baltics during Soviet communism, and finally analyzes postcommunist strategies aimed at explicitly using the legal and political structure designed to deal with crimes of the Holocaust to instead criminalize the Soviet past.


Author(s):  
Sabine Lee

This chapter explores the relationship between soldiers and local women in various theatres of war during World War II, tracing in particular nationalistic and racial undercurrents in the development of national policies vis-à-vis,military-civilian relations. It traces in particular Nazi policies in both East and West with view to eugenics, as well as Allied policies in preparing for and implementing post-war occupations in Germany and Austria, including guidance for soldiers on relations with the (former) enemy. The final part of the chapter gives a voice to children born of war themselves. Using a variety of sources ranging from ego-documents including autobiographies and memoirs as well as interviews and narratives as well as contemporary media reports, it analyses the CBOW reflections on their lifecourses.


1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
Ernst van Alphen

Abstract Charlotte Salomon's painted life history took shape in an extremely gruesome period: World War II. But Salomon's personal family history is also excep-tional: Almost her whole family committed suicide. This article explores the question of whether it is meaningful, or even legitimate, to refer to a work emerging from such a violent reality as a work of art. The article focuses on the many self-reflective passages in the images and text that deal with the function of art and the ways it is made. It is argued that Salomon did not provide the fate of her family and the horrible war with a deeper meaning in order to liberate herself from their horror. She did not write a realistic account of her reality, nor did she create an alternative world for it. Rather, her life history is a performance in the strictest sense: doing the work of working through her reality. (History; art criticism) A "life-testimony" is not simply a testimony to a private life, but a point of conflation between text and life, a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life. (Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub, 1992, Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, p.


Author(s):  
Joan R. Gundersen

Episcopalians have built, reimagined, and rebuilt their church at least three different times over the course of 400 years in America. From scattered colonial beginnings, where laity both took major roles in running Church of England parishes and practiced a faith that was focused on worship, pastoral care, and good works, Anglicans created a church that blended hierarchy, democracy, and autonomy. It took time after the disruptions of the American Revolution for Episcopalians to find their place among the many competing denominations of the new nation. In the process women found new roles for themselves. Episcopalians continued to have a large impact on American society even as other denominations outpaced them in membership. As individuals they shaped American culture and became prominent advocates for the social gospel. Distracted at times as they tried to balance catholic and Protestant in their thought and worship, they built a church that included both religious orders and revival gatherings. Although perceived as a church of the elite, its members included African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, and union members. Episcopalians struggled with issues of race, class, and gender throughout their history. After World War II, their understandings of the teachings of Jesus pulled a majority of Episcopalians toward more liberal social positions and created a traditionalist revolt eventually resulting in a schism that required new rebuilding efforts in parts of America.


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