Making History to/as the Main Pillar of Identity: The Assyrian Paradigm

Belleten ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 76 (276) ◽  
pp. 631-646
Author(s):  
Bülent Özdemi̇r

In the 20th century Assyrians living in Diaspora have increased their search of identity because of the social and political conditions of their present countries. In doing so, they utilize the history by picking up certain events which are still kept fresh in the collective memory of the Assyrian society. World War I, which caused a large segment of the Assyrians to emigrate from the Middle East, has been considered as the milestone event of their history. They preferred to use and evaluate the circumstances during WW I in terms of a genocidal attack of the Ottomans against their nation. This political definition dwarfs the promises which were not kept given by their Western allies during the war for an independent Assyrian state. The aspects of Assyrian civilization existed thousands of years ago as one of the real pillars of their identity suffer from the artificially developed political unification around the aspects of their doom in WWI presented as a genocidal case. Additionally, this plays an efficient role in removal of existing religious and sectarian differences for centuries among Assyrians. This paper aims at showing in the framework of primary sources how Assyrian genocidal claims are being used pragmatically in the formation of national consciousness in a very effective way. Not the Assyrian civilization but their constructed history in WWI is used for the formation of their nation definition.

2015 ◽  
pp. 188-211
Author(s):  
Joanna Niewiarowska

The article summarizes and compares the two biographical texts by writers who are difficult to compare in terms of aesthetics and political-ideological dimension − fragments of journals by Karol Irzykowski devoted to illness, death and remembrance of his daughter Basia and biographical memory of the dead of tuberculosis son Adam by Stefan Żeromski. The comparative perspective of both narratives of loss is present in their reflection on Polishness, increased in the circumstances of World War I. The analysis and interpretation shows that bearing witness to such a difficult personal existential experience paradoxically involves the necessity of re-positioning in and to Polishness. The memory of Adam Żeromski is subordinated to the social perspective, frame of collective memory, which makes it understandable why in Żeromski’s story he is the ‛little Poleʼ, and Basia is the subject to psychological and individual memory, collected memory, so she can be called the great Poland. In this sense, both texts are the media of culture of remembrance, which inherently clarifies and determines the experience of the Great War that seems to confirm the researchers’ diagnosis of a breakthrough significance of the period 1914–1918, also in the perspective of Polish identity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-305
Author(s):  
Selim Hilmi Özkan

Abstract Migration has been common throughout human history and has been part of Armenian history for many centuries in varying degrees. However, at the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century, Armenians experienced an unprecedented rate of migration. The large outflow caused complications that affected many aspects of the social life of Armenians. They had lived in peace throughout the Anatolian territory without any geographical limitations until the last period of the Ottoman Empire when they began to be radicalized by some countries that wished to make Christian Armenians and Muslims enemies. Consequently, Armenians started to migrate abroad from Anatolia. This article examines the reasons for the migration of the Ottoman Armenians before World War I by reference to Ottoman archival documents.


Author(s):  
Odile Moreau

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.


2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-793
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury

I write this piece as Iraq, following Syria, descends into a civil war that is undermining the post–World War I state system and reconfiguring regional and transnational networks of mobilization and instrumentalizations of violence and identity formation. That the Middle East has come to this moment is not an inevitable product of the artificiality of national borders and the precariousness of the state system. It is important to avoid this linear narrative of inevitability, with its attendant formulations of the Middle East as a repository of a large number of absences, and instead to locate the current wars in a specific historical time: the late and post–Cold War eras, marked by the agendas of the Washington Consensus and the globalization of neoliberal discourses; the privatization of the developmental and welfare state; the institutional devolution and multiplication of security services; and the entrenchment of new forms of colonial violence and rule in Israel and Palestine and on a global scale. The conveners of this roundtable have asked us to reflect on the technopolitics of war in the context of this particular moment and in light of the pervasiveness of new governmentalities of war. What I will do in this short piece is reflect on the heuristic and methodological possibilities of the study of war as a form of governance, or what I call the “government of war,” in light of my own research and writing on Iraq.


2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-568
Author(s):  
Johann Strauss

This article examines the functions and the significance of picture postcards during World War I, with particular reference to the war in the Ottoman Lands and the Balkans, or involving the Turkish Army in Galicia. After the principal types of Kriegspostkarten – sentimental, humorous, propaganda, and artistic postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) – have been presented, the different theatres of war (Balkans, Galicia, Middle East) and their characteristic features as they are reflected on postcards are dealt with. The piece also includes aspects such as the influence of Orientalism, the problem of fake views, and the significance and the impact of photographic postcards, portraits, and photo cards. The role of postcards in book illustrations is demonstrated using a typical example (F. C. Endres, Die Türkei (1916)). The specific features of a collection of postcards left by a German soldier who served in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq during World War I will be presented at the end of this article.


Author(s):  
S. S. Shchevelev

The article examines the initial period of the mandate administration of Iraq by Great Britain, the anti-British uprising of 1920. The chronological framework covers the period from May 1916 to October 1921 and includes an analysis of events in the Middle East from May 1916, when the secret agreement on the division of the territories of the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I (the Sykes-Picot agreement) was concluded before the proclamation of Faisal as king of Iraq and from the formation of the country՚s government. This period is a key one in the Iraqi-British relations at the turn of the 10-20s of the ХХ century. The author focuses on the Anglo-French negotiations during the First World War, on the eve and during the Paris Peace Conference on the division of the territory of the Ottoman Empire and the ownership of the territories in the Arab zone. During these negotiations, it was decided to transfer the mandates for Syria (with Lebanon) to the France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Great Britain. The British in Iraq immediately faced strong opposition from both Sunnis and Shiites, resulting in an anti-English uprising in 1920. The author describes the causes, course and consequences of this uprising.


Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port

The ‘long 1950s’ was a decade of conspicuous contrasts: a time of dismantling and reconstruction, economic and political, as well as cultural and moral; a time of Americanization and Sovietization; a time of upheaval amid a desperate search for stability. But above all, it was a time for both forgetting and coming to terms with the recent past. This article focuses on the two forms of government that controlled Germany, democracy, and dictatorship. The Cold War was without doubt the main reason for the rapid rehabilitation and integration of the two German states, which more or less took place within a decade following the end of the Second World War. This article further elaborates upon the political conditions under dictatorship and its effect on the social life. East Germany, under the Soviet control underwent as much political upheaval. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Germany became a democracy.


2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 776-785
Author(s):  
M. F. Jacobs

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 543-560
Author(s):  
Funda Kızıler Emer ◽  
Esma Şen

Hermann Hesse, one of the most renowned and well-known Nobel laureates in German literature, is the first years of the 20th century, described in his novel, Beneath The Wheel (Unterm Rad, 1906). The film The White Ribbon. A German Children's Story. (Das Weiße Band. Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, 2009) of Michael Haneke, one of the world-renowned screenwriters and directors of contemporary German cinema, covers the years of World War I 1913-1914.The main point of criticism in both works is the criticism of education and ideological education policies that dominated the period. In the two works of which one is a novel and the other is a film, we choose them as a  thematic aspect, cover the period between 1900 and 1914. In other words, in the first quarter of the 20th century, the criticism of education in Germany and all over Europe is criticized. In this study, we will compare the two German works with each other on the basis of this ‘common subject’. We will limit the comparative analysis of the education problem in selected works to the first quarter of the 20th century based on the time periods described in the works. Within the scope of our study, we will present a critique of the ideological education concept that dominated this period Germany and at the same time laid the foundations of World War I.In the analysis of these two works, which we compare in the common theme axis, we will use the comparative literature method. In the study, we will use an eclectic method in which we will harmonize the methods of text analysis (werkimmanent) and non-text extern (werk extern) in a balanced way.Extended English summary is in the end of Full Text PDF (TURKISH) file. ÖzetAlman edebiyatının Nobel ödüllü ve dünya çapında tanınmış çok yönlü yazarlarından biri olan Hermann Hesse’nin Çarklar Arasında (Unterm Rad, 1906) adlı romanında anlatılan zaman dilimi 20. yüzyılın ilk yıllarıdır. Çağdaş Alman sinemasının ödüllü ve dünya çapından ün salmış senarist ve yönetmenlerinden biri olan Michael Haneke’nin Beyaz Bant. Bir Alman Çocuk Öyküsü. (Das Weisse Band.  Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte, 2009) adlı sinema filmi ise I. Dünya Savaşı’nın patlak verdiği yılları 1913-1914 kapsar.Her iki eserde de temel eleştiri noktası, döneme egemen olan eğitim anlayışı ve ideolojik eğitim politikalarına yöneliktir. Çalışma konusu olarak seçtiğimiz biri roman, diğeri film türünde olan iki eser de tematik açıdan, 1900 ila 1914 yılları arasındaki dönemi kapsar. Yani eserlerde 20. yüzyılın ilk çeyreğinde Almanya’da ve tüm Avrupa genelinde egemen olan eğitim anlayışının eleştirisi yapılır. Biz de bu çalışmada, her iki Almanca eseri, saptadığımız bu ‘ortak konu’ ekseninde birbiriyle karşılaştıracağız. Seçtiğimiz eserlerdeki eğitim sorunsalının karşılaştırmalı analizini, eserlerde anlatılan zaman dilimlerini temel alarak yalnızca 20. yüzyılın ilk çeyreğine sınırlandıracağız. Çalışmamız kapsamında, bu dönem Almanya’sına egemen olan ve aynı zamanda I. Dünya Savaşı’nın temellerini atan ideolojik eğitim anlayışının eleştirisini sunacağız.Ortak tema ekseninde karşılaştıracağımız bu iki eserin analizinde temel olarak karşılaştırmalı edebiyat bilimi yöntemini kullanacağız. Çalışmada, ayrıca metiniçi (werkimmanent) ve metindışı (werkextern) metin inceleme yöntemlerini dengeli biçimde harmanlayacağımız eklektik bir yöntemden yararlanılacaktır.


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