scholarly journals Analysis of the Oder–Neisse line status in British and American historiography (1945–1990)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iryna Kaviaka

The article analyzes British and American historical records dealing with the Polish-German border after World War II. The establishment of the Polish-German border along the Oder-Neisse line was one of the most widely debated topics in Germany’s post-war history. The article reviews the opinions of British and American historians. It analyzes different periods in the development of both histographies relating to the Polish western border, and discusses the main and key factors that had led to the evolution of the definition of the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish-German border.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Vladimir Vinogradov

This essay represents a fragment of a text devoted to issues of figurative representation in Soviet and Russian cinema. It briefly analyzes the evolution of the image of the scientist during the period of Stalinist cinema. The authors theoretical reasoning is based on the definition of nihilism given by Nikolai Berdyaev in his essay Russian Socialism and Nihilism. In their policy towards the intelligentsia, including the policy in the sphere of cinema, the Soviet authorities used those attributes of nihilism which constituted the main essence of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia. The author discusses four periods in the history of Soviet cinema: the 1920s, the 1930s, the World War II period and the consequent period of malokartinye (film scarcity). Beginning with the film Congestion (1919), an attempt had been made to convince representatives of the intelligentsia that the Soviet form of government carried the ideas of freedom, equality and fraternity, so there was no more reason for nihilistic attitudes towards reality as to a world ruled by evil. In the 1930s, the Soviet culture formed a full-fledged positive image of a scientist who accepted Soviet power. A most important domestic political task was outlined: the state was to carry out a tremendous job of bringing up its own Soviet intelligentsia and scientists who would not be tainted by the wrong nihilism of their pre-revolutionary predecessors. If it ever arose, nihilism was to be tightly controlled and transformed into the search for scientific truth and intransigence towards the enemies of the Soviet regime. During the World War II (the Great Patriotic War), intellectuals became the highest embodiment of spiritual aspirations and the denial of everything hostile to the nation; it may be said that their faith was deemed as an achievement comparable to the faith of Christian martyrs. And in the post-war period and the period film scarcity, cinema renewed the demonstration of the possibility of an ideal relationship between the scientists, the intelligentsia and the Soviet government. Film representation system included images of what the Soviet government gave to the scientists (and, more broadly, to the intelligentsia) and of their debt of gratitude for everything given to them.


2008 ◽  
pp. 177-205
Author(s):  
Adam Kopciowski

In the early years following World War II, the Lublin region was one of the most important centres of Jewish life. At the same time, during 1944-1946 it was the scene of anti-Jewish incidents: from anti-Semitic propaganda, accusation of ritual murder, economic boycott, to cases of individual or collective murder. The wave of anti-Jewish that lasted until autumn of 1946 resulted in a lengthy and, no doubt incomplete, list of 118 murdered Jews. Escalating anti-Jewish violence in the immediate post-war years was one of the main factors, albeit not the only one, to affect the demography (mass emigration) and the socio-political condition of the Jewish population in the Lublin region


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev

The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-3) ◽  
pp. 70-81
Author(s):  
David Ramiro Troitino ◽  
Tanel Kerikmae ◽  
Olga Shumilo

This article highlights the role of Charles de Gaulle in the history of united post-war Europe, his approaches to the internal and foreign French policies, also vetoing the membership of the United Kingdom in the European Community. The authors describe the emergence of De Gaulle as a politician, his uneasy relationship with Roosevelt and Churchill during World War II, also the roots of developing a “nationalistic” approach to regional policy after the end of the war. The article also considers the emergence of the Common Agricultural Policy (hereinafter - CAP), one of Charles de Gaulle’s biggest achievements in foreign policy, and the reasons for the Fouchet Plan defeat.


Author(s):  
Christel Lane

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.


2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-316
Author(s):  
Anne M. Blankenship

During the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, visions of a peaceful new world order led mainline Protestants to manipulate the worship practices of incarcerated Japanese Americans ( Nikkei) to strengthen unity of the church and nation. Ecumenical leaders saw possibilities within the chaos of incarceration and war to improve themselves, their church, and the world through these experiments based on ideals of Protestant ecumenism and desires for racial equality and integration. This essay explores why agendas that restricted the autonomy of racial minorities were doomed to fail and how Protestants can learn from this experience to expand their definition of unity to include pluralist representations of Christianity and America as imagined by different sects and ethnic groups.


Author(s):  
Tetiana Yelova

The new geopolitical realities after the World War II saw the revival of the Polish state in a new form. The Republic of Poland appeared on the map of Central Europe, with about half of its territory being the so-called Recovered Territories, while the state borders moved west. The new eastern border of the post-war Poland ran along the Curzon line. The new post-war eastern border of Poland was being negotiated and agreed upon by the Soviet and the Polish authorities starting from 1944 on an annual basis, up to 1948. The last exchange of territories took place in 1951. The debates about the political map of Europe and the new eastern border of Poland, which became a new reality after the World War II, were held both at politicians’ offices and in various media outlets. The most prominent debate about the new Polish eastern border could be found on the pages of the Kultura immigrant periodical. The Polish immigrant public intellectuals Jerzy Giedroyc, Juliusz Mieroszewski, Josef Czapski and other members of the Kultura periodical editorial board were adamant about the need to recognize the Polish borders drawn after the World War II. Such a stance was unacceptable for the Polish Governmentin-Exile based in London and some immigrant circles in the USA. Starting from 1952, the Kultura editorial staff is consistent in its efforts to defend the principle of inviolability of borders drawn after the World War II, urging the Poles to give up on the so-called Polish Kresy (Kresy Wschodnie) and to reconcile with the neighbours on the other side of the new eastern border.


2019 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Edyta Kahl

The problems discussed in the article concern the educational policy in Poland in the first years after World War II (1944-1948). The article presents the educational concepts and postulates of different political fractions and teachers’ circles, which already before the end of the War had formulated their own educational programmes. The discussions about the shape of the post-war educational system, particularly the organization of schools, the school structure, the ideological foundations, the syllabus, school handbooks and teachers’ training, were carried out, among others, between the representatives of the National Democrats, Christian-national groups, political parties, teachers’ organizations and school administration. Their attitudes to many problems varied considerably, and thus, the situation required social debate and confrontation of opinions. The quality of those discussions, the style in which the educational problems were solved as well as the direction of the structural and ideological transformations in the post-war educational system, were significantly influenced by the geopolitical post-war conditions and a strong position of the Left, consolidated by the Soviets, in the policy of the Polish state. In the expansive struggle for the political leadership in Poland, the Left used different forms of pressure and terror in order to eliminate the opposition. To achieve social legitimization for its pseudo-democratic activities, the Left undertook attempts to encourage other groups to co-operate. Particularly, the communists tried to attract cultural elites, including teachers, who they wanted to use to start the process of rebuilding social consciousness according to the rules of the ideology of Marxism and Leninism. These monopolistic ambitions, in the first years after World War II, were reflected in the destruction of the underground state and the development of administrative structures of the totalitarian system. As far as the educational system is concerned, the policy of the Left was manifested in more and more apparent actions taken to subordinate school to the communists’ interests, thus including education into the process of the transformation of the political system. All those activities, were part of the phenomenon of structural Sovietization, formed the foundations for the ideological offensive, planned by the communists and conducted on a massive scale after the formation, in 1948, of the monopolistic Stalinian party - PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party).


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