Linguistic, cultural and history-related studies on Jews in Finland:  a look into the scholarship in the twenty-first century

There has been a significant growth in volume and disciplines working on Jewish history and culture in Finland for the past fifteen years, yet no systematic overview of scholarly efforts have been available. This article aims to fill this gap. Our focus is on the disciplines of linguistics, cultural studies and history. Our overview covers monographs and articles that have appeared in academic publications since 2000, with a focus on Finland. Consequently we have left out Finnish research on Jews in other parts of the globe from our review. About half of the works introduced in this article have been published in Finnish and will now be briefly introduced to a wider Nordic scholarly community. The article consists of four parts. First we discuss Jewish studies and social history pursued in Finland. We then discuss studies focusing on antisemitism in Finland. The third part introduces the relevant literature on Finland’s role in the Second World War and its responsibility towards the conflict’s Jewish refugees and prisoners of war, after which studies on Finnish history culture and memory politics are presented. The final part presents biographies and general studies about the Jewish community in Finland.

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The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

Journal of Beckett Studies ◽

10.3366/jobs.2019.0253 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 28 (1) ◽

pp. 52-66

Author(s):

Julie Bates

Keyword(s):

Second World War ◽

First Century ◽

Environmental Crisis ◽

The Political ◽

Algerian War ◽

Material Resources ◽

The Social ◽

The Everyday ◽

The Last Man ◽

Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

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Restoring Four-Power Rights, Reviving a Confederation in 1989

10.23943/princeton/9780691163710.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Mary Elise Sarotte

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Social Order ◽

Second World War ◽

First Century ◽

State Sovereignty ◽

World War ◽

German States ◽

Divided Germany ◽

Second World ◽

Restoration Model

This chapter examines the Soviet restoration model and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's revivalist model. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) hoped to use its weight as a victor in the Second World War to restore the old quadripartite mechanism of four-power control exactly as it used to be in 1945, before subsequent layers of Cold War modifications created room for German contributions. This restoration model, which called for the reuse of the old Allied Control Commission to dominate all further proceedings in divided Germany, represented a realist vision of politics run by powerful states, each retaining their own sociopolitical order and pursuing their own interests. Meanwhile, Kohl's revivalist model represented the revival, or adaptive reuse, of a confederation of German states. This latter-day “confederationism” blurred the lines of state sovereignty; each of the two twenty-first-century Germanies would maintain its own political and social order, but the two would share a confederative, national roof.

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The European Union and Diplomatic Law

10.1093/oso/9780198795940.003.0018 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Graham Butler

Keyword(s):

European Union ◽

External Action ◽

Legal Framework ◽

Second World War ◽

First Century ◽

The European Union ◽

Nation States ◽

Supranational Institutions ◽

Second World ◽

The Eu

Not long after the establishment of supranational institutions in the aftermath of the Second World War, the early incarnations of the European Union (EU) began conducting diplomacy. Today, EU Delegations (EUDs) exist throughout the world, operating similar to full-scale diplomatic missions. The Treaty of Lisbon established the legal underpinnings for the European External Action Service (EEAS) as the diplomatic arm of the EU. Yet within the international legal framework, EUDs remain second-class to the missions of nation States. The EU thus has to use alternative legal means to form diplomatic missions. This chapter explores the legal framework of EU diplomatic relations, but also asks whether traditional missions to which the VCDR regime applies, can still be said to serve the needs of diplomacy in the twenty-first century, when States are no longer the ultimate holders of sovereignty, or the only actors in international relations.

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Numbers

10.1093/oso/9780198798156.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Mark Edele

Keyword(s):

Second World War ◽

Prisoners Of War ◽

World War ◽

Quantitative Evidence ◽

Methodological Problems ◽

Second World

How many Soviet soldiers defected to the Germans? Vague statements abound in the literature, but few scholars have tried to systematically investigate the available quantitative evidence. This chapter discusses the available numbers on defectors from both Soviet and German sources. It discusses the methodological problems involved in establishing the total number and the share of defectors among Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). It also compares these numbers with comparative cases in other fronts of the Second World War in Europe. It shows that despite methodological and source problems we can be confident that defection was much more prevalent at the German–Soviet front than elsewhere.

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Appointment

International Review of the Red Cross ◽

10.1017/s0020860400063282 ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 9 (102) ◽

pp. 491-491 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Keyword(s):

International Committee ◽

Second World War ◽

Prisoners Of War ◽

International Humanitarian Law ◽

Humanitarian Law ◽

World War ◽

East European ◽

Middle East Countries ◽

Wide Experience ◽

Second World

Mr. Raymond Courvoisier has since 1 August 1969 taken over the appointment of special assistant to the President of the International Committee, thus bringing it his wide experience in the field of international humanitarian law. It should, in fact, be recalled that from 1936 to 1945 he undertook a large number of missions in ICRC service as delegate in Spain, Turkey, in East European and Middle East countries. Furthermore, he was in charge of a section in the Central Prisoners of War Agency in Geneva during the Second World War.

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Book Reviews

German Politics & Society ◽

10.3167/gps.2020.380406 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 38 (4) ◽

pp. 97-121

Author(s):

Thomas Klikauer ◽

Norman Simms ◽

Helge F. Jani ◽

Bob Beatty ◽

Nicholas Lokker

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

European Union ◽

Second World War ◽

First Century ◽

New Right ◽

Academic Press ◽

The European Union ◽

World War ◽

Second World

Jay Julian Rosellini, The German New Right: AfD, PEGIDA and the Re-imagining of National Identity (London: C. Hurst, 2019).Simon Bulmer and William E. Paterson, Germany and the European Union: Europe’s Reluctant Hegemon? (London: Red Globe Press, 2019).Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).Stephan Jaeger, The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020).Robert M. Jarvis, Gambling under the Swastika: Casinos, Horse Racing, Lotteries, and Other Forms of Betting in Nazi Germany (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2019).

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