Three Guineas and the Cassandra Project – Christa Wolf’s Reading of Virginia Woolf during the Cold War

2020 ◽  
pp. 115-131
Author(s):  
Henrike Krause
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Christa Wolf ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
East German ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Feminist Community ◽  
The Cold War

Against the background of the Cold War and a period of elevated tension between the East and West Bloc states at the end of the 1970s, this chapter explores the fascination of the East German writer Christa Wolf for Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. By introducing findings from Christa Wolf’s private library, the chapter offers evidence that Wolf turned her attention to Woolf’s book-length essay while she started to write her novel Cassandra and pre-pared her Lectures on Poetics, also known as the Cassandra Project. I argue that Woolf and Wolf were strongly influenced by their reflections on politics under the threat of war. In order to promote new ideas both writers searched for innovative literary forms that involved their audiences and readers with their arguments. The essay and autobiographical forms become crucial parts of their writing. Both writers drew their attention to female protagonists from ancient mythology like Cassandra and Antigone and brought these stories into communication with their own questions during intense political contexts. I show how both writers put feminist community-building at the centre of anti-militarism and were both convinced that writers have a social responsibility, and how literature can bring about a change in thinking.

Envoi

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Suez Crisis ◽  
The Cold War

It is 1956, the height of the Cold War. The year will end in the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising. Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf have both been dead for a while, Jean Rhys is all but forgotten and Rosamond Lehmann’s career as a novelist is on the wane....

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.

scholarly journals Children’s Literature and Translation Under the East German Regime

2003 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 241-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Thomson-Wohlgemuth
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
The Status ◽  
East German ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This paper describes the status of translation and publication of East German children’s literature during the period of the Cold War. It briefly gives an indication of the high value placed on translation and translators in the socialist regime. Finally it focuses on the main criteria influencing the translation and publication of children’s books with the economic and ideological factors being the most significant and gives brief examples from the East German censorship files.

“Football More Important Than Berlin”

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-137
Author(s):  
Heather L. Dichter
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
National Interest ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
East German ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Foreign Ministries

In the early 1960s Portugal and the Netherlands confronted the problem of East German participation in the UEFA Junior Tournament and Olympic qualification. Although not very important tournaments, domestic governments feared they would cause a public backlash against themselves and NATO should the East Germans not be allowed to participate. These games became tied up with debates over NATO policies, national interest, and public opinion. The popularity of football prompted some states to attempt to use the national interest exception to the East German travel ban. These football matches brought the Cold War into the smaller NATO member states’ national boundaries. By hosting sporting events the Netherlands and Portugal engaged directly with their NATO allies over Cold War policies with which they did not fully agree or which they believed would cause public opinion problems at home and abroad. NATO diplomats, foreign ministries, and the leaders of national and international football federations spent months in protracted negotiations over whether minor football matches involving the German Democratic Republic would even take place during the height of the Cold War as each group attempted to appear blameless in the court of public opinion.

The Myth of Triumphalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth A. Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Moral Leadership ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Us Military ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Insight Into

Virtually no one anticipated the ending of the Cold War. Understanding how this long-standing conflict was peacefully resolved can give us insight into how to conclude other seemingly intractable conflicts. Triumphalists believe that President Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War by building up US military power and threatening the USSR. His hard-line policies forced Moscow to reduce its arsenal, adopt democratic reforms, withdraw from its war in Afghanistan, and ultimately collapse. Triumphalists assert that contemporary leaders should follow Reagan’s example bycompelling adversaries into submission. However, triumphalism is a myth, a series of falsehoods about Reagan’s intentions, his policies, and the impact his administration had on the USSR.Drawing upon American and Soviet sources,this book demonstrates that Reagan’s initial hard-line policies brought the superpowers to the brink of war and made it more difficult for Moscow to disarm and reform. Compellence failed miserably. The Cold War was resolved through diplomacy, not threats. President Reagan eventually engaged in dialogue so as to ease Moscow’s security concerns, build trust, and focus on the superpowers’ mutual interest in eliminating nuclear arms. For his part, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to end the arms race so as to divert resources to democratization. He too sought dialogue and trust. The ending of the Cold War demonstrates the importance of moral leadership. Reagan and Gorbachev both rose above their differences and introduced radical new ideas about nuclear disarmament. Consequently, both encountered domestic opposition. Each persevered, however, leading their nations toward a safer, more humane future.

From Stalin to Mao

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elidor Mëhilli
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Small Country ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This book interprets socialism as a form of globalization by telling the unknown history of a small country that found itself entangled in some of the biggest developments of the Cold War. Within two decades, Albania went from fascist Italian rule to Nazi occupation, a brief interlude as a Yugoslav satellite, and then to a heady period of borrowings—government advisers, brand new factories, school textbooks, urban plans, and everything in between— from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. With Soviet backing, Albania’s regime launched a bold experiment: turn illiterate peasants into conscious workers. Ambitious but poor, the country also turned into a contact zone between East German engineers, Czech planners, and Hungarian geologists who came to help build socialism from scratch. Then, the socialist world shattered. During the Sino-Soviet conflict of the 1960s, Albania’s party clique switched allegiance to China, seeing in Mao’s patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Combining an analysis of ideology with a keen sense of geopolitics, this book explores this strange connectivity of socialism, showing how socialism created a shared material and mental culture—still evident today across Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity.

scholarly journals «THE STRUGGLE IS CONTINUING TODAY, WITH ADDED RALLYING CALL: ‘KYIV AGAINST MOSCOW!’»: CONCEPTS OF UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTS IN THE TIME OF COLD WAR

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-107
Author(s):  
Kateryna Kobchenko
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Organizational Challenges ◽  
National Leader ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Political Realities

The author proposes the overview of the ideas of Ukrainian nationalism after WWII on example of one of the nationalistic organizations, revolutionary or Bandera’s OUN. It is done through the analysis of three program documents published during the period from 1948 till 1968 with every time 10-years distance (two of them of S. Bandera’s authorship), which shows the ways of thinking of its leaders and points of institutional development of this organization. Ukrainian integral nationalism was formed as an ideology and found its institutionalization in the interwar period and in the context of time marked with spreading of authoritarianism and the idea of a strong national leader. During WWII the OUN and the UPA became the main power of the Ukrainian national resistance to the occupational regimes. But in the new political realities after WWII and in the situation of emigration the Ukrainian exile parties incl. nationalists were faced with the new ideological as well as organizational challenges and had to search for the new methods and attitudes to the struggle for Ukraine’s liberation. The key point for the formation of new ideas and political program became the resolutions and declarations of the Fourth Grate Meeting of the Bandera’s OUN in 1968, the first so important party’s assamble in the after war time. The views and ideas of J. Stetsko played a significant role on it, he appeared to be not only a participant of an international anticommunist movement, but also a political thinker who managed to integrate the nationalistic ideology with the new political realities and with the context of international policy of that time. In the questions of anticolonial discourse and anticommunist critic his theses corresponded to the most important ideas of the Cold War period and allowed to actualize the nationalistic ideas on their new stage of development.

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