scholarly journals German Expellee Organizations between “Homeland” and “At Home”: A Case Study of the Politics of Belonging

Refuge ◽  
2001 ◽  
pp. 52-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Organizations ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
Second World

Since the expulsion of more than ten million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe after the end of the Second World War, the political and cultural organizations of the expellees have advocated the interests of this segment of the Federal Republic’s population. The article examines the various ways in which activists in the expellee organizations have used the ambiguity of homeland and belonging in the political process in Germany and increasingly in Europe to further a political agenda that, while it has undergone major changes, remains deeply problematic in some of its objectives and many of its implications.

Memory in Post-communist Europe: Controversies over Identity, Conflicts, and Nostalgia

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 924-935
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The One ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Second World

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper Controversies over social memory form an important aspect of reality in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. On the one hand, there are debates about coming to terms with the communist past and the Second World War that preceded it (because important parts of the memory of the war were “frozen” during the communist era), and, on the other hand, and intimately connected to that, are discussions about the constant influence of communism on the current situation. This article presents some of the main trends in research on collective memory in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and reveals similarities and differences in the process of memorialization of communism in the countries of the region. Although there are works devoted to a comparative analysis of memory usage and its various interpretations in the political sphere in the countries of Eastern Europe, there are still many issues concerning daily practices (economic, religious, and cultural) associated with varying interpretations of the war and the communist past which needs further elaboration and analysis.

scholarly journals Distressed Glamour. Genres and Political-Social Context in Hungarian Cinema of the 1930s and 1940s

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Zsolt Pápai
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World

AbstractThe article focuses on Hungarian films produced between 1939–1944 by examining how they tend to refrain from representing conflicts, and scrutinizing the political as well as social issues. However, directors started to revise this avoidance of conflicts by employing a so-called noir sensibility from the beginning of the Second World War in certain films, especially in “doomed love movies” such as Deadly Spring (Halálos tavasz, 1939), Mountain Girl (A hegyek lánya, 1942), and A Woman Looks Back (Egy assszony visszanéz, 1942), or melodramas, such as At the Crossroads (Keresztúton, 1942), Lent Life (Kölcsönadott élet, 1943), and Black Dawn (Fekete hajnal, 1943). The essay also offers a case study of the banned Hungarian movie Half a Boy (Egy fiúnak a fele, shot in 1943, but only shown in February 1946) by D. Ákos Hamza, which represented and protested against the stigmatization of Jewish people. Half a Boy is an often-cited emblematic film of its era. It is also an enigmatic one: it is a work full of social and political-historical reflections. Its humanistic point of view makes it outstanding in its era, nevertheless it is also rather ambivalent in terms of its orientation of values.

scholarly journals The Semantics of Political Integration: Public Debates about the Term ‘Expellees’ in Post-War Western Germany

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-58
Author(s):  
IRIS NACHUM ◽  
SAGI SCHAEFER
Keyword(s):  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Semantic Change ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

In the immediate period following the Second World War the Western occupation zones of Germany received eight million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. Initially these newcomers were lumped in Western German discourse under the term ‘refugees’. Yet, within less than a decade, the term ‘expellees’ emerged as a more popular denotation. Scholarship has offered two explanations for this semantic change, emphasising the political influence of both the Allies and the ‘expellee’ leadership. This article presents a complementary reason for this discursive shift. We argue that ‘expellees’ marked the symbolic weight that the ethnic Germans offered as expulsion victims in order to balance out German guilt for Nazi crimes.

scholarly journals El teatral regreso de Celestina a Italia y las políticas culturales fascistas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-374
Author(s):  
MARÍA BASTIANES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
European Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Second World ◽  
Satisfactory Manner

The return of Celestina to Italian publishing houses during the Second World War has been examined in a series of recent research publications. These studies have not, unfortunately, described in a satisfactory manner the reasons underpinning this interest in a foreign piece; nor have they explained how it came to be one of the most regularly performed Spanish classic texts in twentieth-century Italy. The aim of this article is to settle this critical deficit, taking into account the political, cultural and theatrical contexts which enabled said return. Seen from this broader perspective, the reappearance of Celestina offers testimony to the cultural relationships between Spain and Italy in times of fascism, along with providing ways of approaching and appropriating a morally challenging text. Celestina, I argue, is a particularly revealing case study for understanding the role of classics in the construction of European identity throughout the twentieth century.

Turning Aliens into Socialists

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Jessica Moberg
Keyword(s):  
Outer Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Swedish History ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Highly Evolved

Immediately after the Second World War Sweden was struck by a wave of sightings of strange flying objects. In some cases these mass sightings resulted in panic, particularly after authorities failed to identify them. Decades later, these phenomena were interpreted by two members of the Swedish UFO movement, Erland Sandqvist and Gösta Rehn, as alien spaceships, or UFOs. Rehn argued that ‘[t]here is nothing so dramatic in the Swedish history of UFOs as this invasion of alien fly-things’ (Rehn 1969: 50). In this article the interpretation of such sightings proposed by these authors, namely that we are visited by extraterrestrials from outer space, is approached from the perspective of myth theory. According to this mythical theme, not only are we are not alone in the universe, but also the history of humankind has been shaped by encounters with more highly-evolved alien beings. In their modern day form, these kinds of ideas about aliens and UFOs originated in the United States. The reasoning of Sandqvist and Rehn exemplifies the localization process that took place as members of the Swedish UFO movement began to produce their own narratives about aliens and UFOs. The question I will address is: in what ways do these stories change in new contexts? Texts produced by the Swedish UFO movement are analyzed as a case study of this process.

scholarly journals Will the World’s Glass after the Coronavirus Pandemic Be Half-Empty or Half-Full?

Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-281
Author(s):  
Dubravka Stojanović
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Great Crash ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

AbstractThe author comments on the political and economic options in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic that started at the beginning of 2020. She revisits responses to the crises of the First World War, the Great Crash of 1929, and the Second World War, sorting them into ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ responses, and outlining their respective consequences.

scholarly journals SPIRITS, POWER AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION IN LATE-COLONIAL GABON

Africa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Cinnamon
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
World War ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Second World

ABSTRACTThrough narratives of an anti-‘fetish’ movement that swept through north-eastern Gabon in the mid-1950s, the present article traces the contours of converging political and religious imaginations in that country in the years preceding independence. Fang speakers in the region make explicit connections between the arrival of post-Second World War electoral politics, the anti-fetish movements, and perceptions of political weakening and marginalization of their region on the eve of independence. Rival politicians and the colonial administration played key roles in the movement, which brought in a Congolese ritual expert, Emane Boncoeur, and his two powerful spirits, Mademoiselle and Mimbare. These spirits, later recuperated in a wide range of healing practices, continue to operate today throughout northern Gabon and Rio Muni. In local imaginaries, these spirits played central roles in the birth of both regional and national politics, paradoxically strengthening the colonial administration and Gabonese auxiliaries in an era of pre-independence liberalization. Thus, regional political events in the 1950s rehearsed later configurations of power, including presidential politics, on the national stage.

scholarly journals Vera Lynn on Screen: Popular Music and the ‘People's War’

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATE GUTHRIE
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

AbstractBy the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle,We'll Meet Again(1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

The Etappe Kanaren: A case study of the secret supply of the German Navy in Spain during the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan J. Díaz Benítez
Keyword(s):  
Active Role ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
World War ◽  
The One ◽  
Intense Activity ◽  
German Navy ◽  
Second World

The secret supply of the German Navy during the Second World War has scarcely been studied until now. The goal of this article is to study one of the more active supply areas of the Etappendienst at the beginning of the war, the one known as Etappe Kanaren, as part of the Grossetappe Spanien-Portugal. In this research primary sources from German Naval War Command have been consulted. Among the main conclusions, it should be pointed out, on the one hand, the intense activity to support the Kriegsmarine during the first years of the war, despite the distance from mainland Spain and the British pressure, which finally stopped the supply operations. On the other hand, we have confirmed the active role of the Spanish government in relation to the Etappendienst: Spanish authorities allowed the supply operations, but pressure from the Allies forced the Spanish government to impede these activities.

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