The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

The Invisible Other

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Vetter
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Other ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Existential Psychology ◽  
World War ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Other Woman

Chapter 8 turns to the figure of the spy, a recurrent trope of her 1956 novel Magic Mirror and the accompanying memoir Compassionate Friendship. If the “other woman” is predicated on a position of alterity, the therapist-spy feigns an identification—and an empathetic connection—that does not in fact exist. At the level of the private sphere, H.D. uses espionage as a mode of critiquing Freudian psychoanalysis, offering in its stead the short-lived existential psychology, a movement which grew out of the trauma of World War II and emphasized an empathetic rather than transferential model of therapy. Shifting outward to the public sphere, her analysis of the figure of the spy becomes an examination of the politics of nationalism.

Churchill, women and the politics of gender

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Toye
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
World War ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Post War

This chapter investigates how Churchill related to women at the political level, and how women voters in turn related to him. Churchill had a blurred Conservative-Liberal identity, and this affected his approach to ‘the woman question’. Hostile to female enfranchisement at the start of his career, he became a reluctant convert during his Edwardian Liberal phase, provided that it could be done in such a way as to benefit his own party electorally. As a renegade Tory during the 1930s he drew on the services of a range of female anti-appeasers such as Shiela Grant Duff. During World War II, however, he controversially opposed equal pay for women teachers. It is well-established that, in the post-war years, the Conservative Party benefitted from its gendered approach to rationing and austerity, Churchill himself did little to appeal explicitly to women voters. Although he did accept a role for a limited number of ‘exceptional’ women in the public sphere, he was never an enthusiast for substantive gender equality.

Editor's Introduction

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
World History ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

It is tempting to tell the story of Europe in the twentieth century in two halves: the first, a sorry, bleak tale of poverty, war, and genocide; and the second, a happy narrative of stability and the triumph of boring normality over dangerous activism and exuberant politics. When one examines the ‘return of memories’ which could not be articulated in the public sphere during the Cold War, one can see that the years since 1989 are intimately connected to World War II and its aftermath. In many ways, we are only now living through the postwar period. The impact of World War II, the largest and bloodiest conflict in world history, did not end in 1945. This book modifies the emphasis usually placed on the Cold War as the main historical framework for understanding the postwar period. It questions the extent to which 1945 was really a ‘zero hour’ and examines various facets of postwar life – from high politics to economics to tourism and consumerism.

Carl Schmitt in Plettenberg

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Linder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
The Public ◽  
Gottfried Benn ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
City State

This chapter focuses on Carl Schmitt’s years in post–World War II Germany. After being released from the Nuremberg prison for war criminals, Schmitt returned to his birthplace, Plettenberg, and named his house “San Casciano,” invoking a village in Tuscany where Machiavelli spent his final years. Like Schmitt, Machiavelli too was deprived of public office, in the Florentine city-state. While other intellectuals who had sympathized with the Nazis—Martin Heidegger, Gottfried Benn, and Ernst Jünger, among others—returned to the public sphere soon after 1945, Schmitt’s fate was different. This chapter reconstructs Schmitt’s Plettenberg years in letters, journals, and reports from companions and shows how his reputation changed from a “monster” to a myth. Even in his private years, Schmitt remained a public figure, fascinating to friends and foes. The controversies with his fiercest enemies in particular renewed his fame.

scholarly journals UNDERSTANDING LAW AND RELIGION AS CULTURE: MAKING ROOM FOR MEANING IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1, 2 & 3) ◽  
pp. 2006
Author(s):  
Benjamin L. Berger
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Important Relationship ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between law and religion in contemporary civil society has been a topic of increasing social interest and importance in Canada in the past many years. We have seen the practices and commitments of religious groups and individuals become highly salient on many issues of public policy, including the nature of the institution of marriage, the content of public education, and the uses of public space, to name just a few. As the vehicle for this discussion, I want to ask a straightforward question: When we listen to our public discourse, what is the story that we hear about the relationship between law and religion? How does this topic tend to be spoken about in law and politics – what is our idiom around this issue – and does this story serve us well? Though straightforward, this question has gone all but unanswered in our political and academic discussions. We take for granted our approach to speaking about – and, therefore, our way of thinking about – the relationship between law and religion. In my view, this is most unfortunate because this taken-for-grantedness is the source of our failure to properly understand the critically important relationship between law and religion.

scholarly journals HOW SOCIAL MEDIA AFFORDS POPULIST POLITICS: REMARKS ON LIMINALITY BASED ON THE BRAZILIAN CASE

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 404-427
Author(s):  
Leticia Cesarino
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Online Ethnography ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
And Linguistics

ABSTRACT In the past decade or so, populism and social media have been outstanding issues both in academia and the public sphere. At this point, evidence from multiple countries suggest that perceived parallels between the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist discourse may be more than just incidental, relating to a shared structural field. This article suggests one possible path towards making sense of how the dynamics of social media and the mechanics of populist mobilization have co-produced each other in the last decade or so. Navigating the interface between anthropology and linguistics, it takes key aspects of Victor Turner’s notion of liminality to suggest some of the ways in which social media’s anti-structural affordances may help lay a foundation for the contemporary flourishing of populist discourse: markers of social structure are suspended; communitas is formed; the culture core is addressed; mimesis and anti-structural inversions are performed; subjects become influenceable. I elaborate on this claim based on Brazilian materials, drawn from online ethnography on pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups and other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook since 2018.

Locals

2017 ◽  
pp. 256-279
Author(s):  
Will Hanley
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
The Public ◽  
Government Employment ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Political Membership

The public sphere of the bourgeois effendiya, reflected in the sources that dominate the historiography Egypt before World War One, engaged only a narrow set of ideas about political membership. But police and legal records show that many residents of Egypt relied on a more generic and flexible label—“local”—which they refined in contradistinction to foreign nationalities. The term had a clear social meaning, particularly in imperial context, where it was a polite synonym of “native.” Localness began to gather a legal garb, particularly in the sphere of social rights such as education and government employment, until it began to resemble a nationality. This chapter argues that one key to explaining Egypt’s political quiescence between 1882 and 1919 is recognizing identity formation taking place under the banner of “local” status, rather than the more familiar category of Egyptian national citizen, which emerged only in the decades that followed.

Problems of the Present

Teen Spirit ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
Paul Howe
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
The Public ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Society Perspective ◽  
Traditional Norms ◽  
Adolescent Society

This chapter explains that what it means to be a normal adult has changed down the years as a result of normal adolescent qualities slowly migrating upward into adulthood. These changes in basic character traits and their diverse consequences certainly have not gone unnoticed — they just have not typically been identified as reflections of the adolescent nature of today's society. There is no shortage of references in current social commentary to problems that have crept up on us over time and which appear to stem from the gradual erosion of traditional norms and practices of adulthood. Among the most commonly cited trends: we do not participate in politics or civic affairs the way we used to; we have become overly materialistic, hedonistic, and detached from the more meaningful aspects of our lives; our shared cultural life has been hollowed out and dumbed down; and civility in personal relations and the public sphere has fallen by the wayside. Such laments are sometimes countered, rightly so, by noting that we have also left behind much of the rigidity and dogmatic thinking that characterized the adult world of the past. The adolescent society perspective casts these diverse trends in a new light by linking them to a common source of social change.

Soviet Selves

2019 ◽  
pp. 60-81
Author(s):  
Justine Buck Quijada
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Religious Actors

Chapter 2 presents the Soviet chronotope embodied in Victory Day celebrations. Victory Day, which is the celebration of the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II, presumes the familiar Soviet genre of history, in which the Soviet Union brought civilization to Buryatia, and Buryats achieved full citizenship in the Soviet utopian dream through their collective sacrifice during the war. The ritual does not narrate Soviet history. Instead, through Soviet and wartime imagery, and the parade form, the public holiday evokes this genre in symbolic form, enabling local residents to read their own narratives of the past into the imagery. This space for interpretation enables both validation as well as critique of the Soviet experience in Buryatia. Although not everyone in Buryatia agrees on how to evaluate this history, this genre is the taken-for-granted backdrop against which other religious actors define their narratives.

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