The Sound of Life in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde (The Karnau Tapes)

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-381
Author(s):  
Arina Rotaru
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Mechanical Destruction ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Strong Resemblance ◽  
The Cold War

In Marcel Beyer’s celebrated Flughunde (1995), the discovery of an underground archive of sound in the aftermath of the Cold War—preserved despite strategies apparently calling for its mechanical destruction—reassigns agency and voice to instrumentalized victims of National Socialism. By highlighting the close connection between an alleged security custodian of the archive, the actual National Socialist sound cartographer Hermann Karnau, and Moreau, a character bearing a strong resemblance to the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Beyer’s novel draws attention to a utopian experiment with life that was carried out in the wake of the colonial enterprise in the Pacific and posits additional historical undertones manifested in Karnau’s National Socialist experiments with sound. Karnau’s attempt to master vocal timbre in particular foregrounds technologies that make it possible to manipulate voice and memory in the post-Fascist and post-Communist present. In spite of technological alteration, archived voices of colonial and National Socialist subjects manifest a vitalist aesthetic. With its concern for race, sound, and memory, the novel breaks new ground in telling the story of the National Socialist and colonial past in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Stereotypes and Jewish Musical Topics in East German Film: Ambiguities and Allosemitism in Hotel Polan und seine Gäste

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Frühauf
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
German Film ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
East German ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract The miniseries Hotel Polan und seine Gäste tells the story of three generations of a Jewish family of hoteliers in Bohemia from 1908 to National Socialist persecution. Produced by GDR television in the early 1980s, the series was subsequently broadcast in other European countries and met with a mixed reception. Later on, scholars evaluated it as blatantly antisemitic and anti-Zionist. This essay seeks to re-evaluate these prerogatives by centring the analysis of the miniseries on a close reading of its music—a method not often used in Jewish studies, but a suitable lens through which to interrogate the employment of stereotypes, especially in film, and in light of textual sources from the Cold War era often being reflective of ideologies rather than facts. Employing critical theories of cultural studies and film music, it seeks to identify stereotypes and their dramatic placement and to analyse their operation. It asserts that story, image, and sound constitute both synchronous and asynchronous agents that perpetuate various stereotypes associated with Jews, thereby placing Hotel Polan in the liminal space of allosemitism. Constructed through difference from a perceived norm, Hotel Polan ultimately represents a space in which the egregious stereotype and the strategic employment of types meet. Its deployment of Jewish musical topics specifically shows that it is less their dramatic function that is of relevance, but the discourse that they have the power to enable.

The New Knight: The French Far Right’s View of the Middle Ages

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49
Author(s):  
Stéphane François
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Model ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Modern Nation State ◽  
The Middle Ages

The far right has always taken an interest in the Middle Ages. For the French revolutionary far right, which shares an ideological matrix influenced by Julius Evola, fascination with the Middle Ages revolves around the image of the Holy Germanic Roman Empire as a political model for Europe opposed to the modern nation-state. The romantic image of the medieval knight also offers a watered-down way to celebrate and legitimize violence without having to allude to a taboo National Socialism. This obsession with the Middle Ages contrasts with the reality that these revolutionary far-right movements were rather pro-Arab during the Cold War decades. This shift reveals the transformation of their thinking and the new dominance of the Identitarian notion of ethnic withdrawal, with the knight as the symbol of a pure racial warrior defending his society against Muslim invasion.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-142
Author(s):  
Jane Caplan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
German History ◽  
The Core ◽  
German States ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Core Questions ◽  
The Cold War

The Epilogue considers the core questions raised in earlier chapters: the place of National Socialism in German history and what it meant to be ‘German’ after the defeat of Nazism. Trials of leading figures in the regime in 1945–9 were a first step, but addressing responsibility for Nazi crimes was a prolonged and uneven process. How Germans confronted the Nazi past was affected by the establishment of two separate German states in 1949, the Cold War, the unification of Germany in 1990, and the eventual development of an international culture of Holocaust.

scholarly journals Dr. Strangelove or How I Should Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Andre Dias
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Third ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Do So

This paper presents a Foucauldian discourse analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The analysis examines linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of both the film and the novel. It is composed of three parts: the first is an analysis of the Manichaeism during the Cold War period and how it turned the Soviets into mortal enemies of the United States; the second is how the nuclear threat and the Cold War paranoia could destroy the democratic system in the United States; and the third analysis explain how Fascistic relations could be cultivated through the discipline of bodies. It has been concluded that the movie is presenting a concept, here referred to as Strangelove’s Hypothesis, that a Strangelovian scenario (i.e., a nuclear holocaust, usually caused by incompetence or without the will to do so) could lead to the emergence of a Fascistic-like form of government in order to restore security. The solution presented to avoid such scenario is a sociopsychological change in order to pursue more peaceful relations.

Confronting the Monolith: Authority and the Cold War in Gravity's Rainbow

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN HAMILL
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

One of the notable aspects of Gravity's Rainbow, if we consider it as an historical novel of a special kind, is the way in which “great” political leaders are barely mentioned. The carnival lacks the mock king, and the historical novel lacks the leader who embodies history. The explanation here is paradoxically historicist. Gravity's Rainbow explicitly addresses a constructed audience (in the Orpheus Theatre) in the Cold War and is about the formation of the Cold War in its techno-bureaucratic context. The realpolitik of authority in the Cold War context has changed. Bureaucratic constructions of System operate as the modus operandi for authority in the novel and they parallel the historical formation of Systems theory and analysis with such US organizations as RAND. This development represents, in the technologies and the discourses of the military and political strategists, a response to Hitler and the supposed tyranny and threat of Communism. The series of characters we encounter within the novel reflects different forms of entrapment and/or lines of flight in response to the authority of the System in what John Johnston has called an assemblage, or postmodern multiplicity. Containment and counterforce become metaphors which Pynchon scurrilously uses to subvert the moral righteousness of the Western Cold Warriors in their defense of a “free world” (paradoxically) under siege from an ever threatening Communism. Pynchon is interested not in the great historical figure, but in the relation of the individual to the System, militarily, scientifically, socially, and sexually.

The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975

1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl E. Pletsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scientific Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Cold War

Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their places in the social scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of modernization theory. This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habits of mythological thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorientation of these ideas in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the novel division of the globe into three conceptual “worlds” in response to the Cold War.

scholarly journals Der Kalte Krieg und die Asienkrise

1998 ◽  
Vol 28 (111) ◽  
pp. 283-290
Author(s):  
Chalmers Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Capital ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Financial Measures ◽  
Asian Region ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Asian Tigers ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War relationships in Asia are an important reason for the present crisis. They caused serious overcapacities throughout the Asian region. Moreover, by devaluating their currency China and Japan had strongly improved their competitiveness against the »Asian Tigers«. When foreign capital was pulled out of these economies, it came to liquidity crunch. For overcoming the crisis not only financial measures but new relationships in the Pacific region are necessary.

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