scholarly journals ACTIVITIES CARRIED OUT BY THE CAST OF LENINGRAD OPERA AND BALLET THEATER NAMED AFTER S.M. KIROV IN THE FIRST HALF OF 1941

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Andrey V. Mankov

The relevance of the research topic is due to the fact that 80 years ago – on June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people began. In the second half of 1941, millions of Soviet people unexpectedly became defenders of the Fatherland: commanders and political workers of the Red Army, ordinary Red Army soldiers and Red Navy men, partisans and members of the underground, some of them were captured and turned into prisoners of nazi concentration camps. The author focuses on the most interesting episodes from the creative and social life of the world-famous Leningrad State AcademicOpera and Ballet Theater named after S.M. Kirov (GATOB) and its artists. How did they meet the beginning of the war? What happened in the theater in the pre-war months of 1941, as well as in the first hours and days of the war? What was the theater’s repertoire in 1941? In his work, the author primarily uses the materials of a number of issues of the theater newspaper «For the Soviet Art», published in January – September 1941 in Leningrad and stored in our time in the funds of St. Petersburg State Theater Library, for the first time introducing them into scientific circulation. He tells about the details of the theater’s creative activity, which today are of undoubted interest to all amateurs of the Russian culture. It is concluded that the outbreak of the war made significant adjustments to the repertoire of the on-stage performance group, radically changed the entire life of Leningrad State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater. It is particularly emphasized that the last pre-war opera premiere of the great theater on the stage in Leningrad was the performance to the music of the German composer R. Wagner «Lohengrin». In those years, Wagner was considered in Germany one of the symbols of the «Aryan culture» of the Third Reich. Today, the author believes, it can be supposed that staging of the German «Lohengrin» in Soviet Leningrad in June 1941 had a political nature, and the decision to work on the performance was made at the highest state level.

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-49
Author(s):  
Cora Sol Goldstein

In December 1945, less than six months after the unconditional defeat of the Third Reich and the military occupation of Germany, two anti-Nazi German intellectuals, Herbert Sandberg and Günther Weisenborn, launched the bimonthly journal, Ulenspiegel: Literatur, Kunst, und Satire (Ulenspiegel: Literature, Art and Satire), in the American sector of Berlin. Sandberg, the art editor, was a graphic artist. He was also a Communist who had spent ten years in Nazi concentration camps—the last seven in Buchenwald. Weisenborn, a Social Democrat and the literary editor, was a playwright, novelist, and literary critic. He had been a member of the rote Kapelle resistance group, was captured and imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1942, and was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.


Author(s):  
Michael I. Shevell

Abstract: It is commonly thought that the horrific medical abuses occurring during the era of the Third Reich were limited to fringe physicians acting in extreme locales such as the concentration camps. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there was a widespread perversion of medical practice and science that extended to mainstream academic physicians. Scientific thought, specifically the theories of racial hygiene, and the political conditions of a totalitarian dictatorship, acted symbiotically to devalue the intrinsic worth to society of those individuals with mental and physical disabilities. This devaluation served to foster the medical abuses which occurred. Neurosciences in the Third Reich serves as a backdrop to highlight what was the slippery slope of medical practice during that era. Points on this slippery slope included the “dejudification” of medicine, unethical experimentation in university clinics, systematic attempts to sterilize and euthanasize targeted populations, the academic use of specimens obtained through such programs and the experimental atrocities within the camps.


2019 ◽  
pp. 212-242
Author(s):  
Brandon M. Schechter

This chapter focuses on all manner of trophies, from German prisoners of war to objects looted from houses in the Third Reich. Between 1941 and 1945, soldiers of the Red Army were confronted with an enemy who was often better dressed, wealthier, and initially much more effective. First on Soviet territory and then abroad, Red Army soldiers confronted an alien culture. For average citizens, this trip abroad was a unique chance to go beyond Soviet borders, one that came at great personal risk and with a clear objective—to destroy Fascism and the Third Reich. What soldiers saw along the way was puzzling. They not only reckoned with material objects and institutions that the Soviet Union had purged but were also left to wonder why people who lived materially so much better than they did had waged a genocidal war against them, marked by systematic rape, pillaging, and wanton destruction. The chapter then shows how a Soviet understanding of jurisprudence and a particular perception of the bourgeois world combined with a desire for vengeance to both justify looting and frame Soviet understandings of the Third Reich.


2021 ◽  
pp. 46-64
Author(s):  
Edward B. Westermann

This chapter evaluates the significance of ritual and symbolism to the construction and manifestation of power under National Socialism. It underlines the importance of practices such as the mammoth party rallies at Nuremberg, the universal displays of the swastika on flags, pins, and armbands and the ubiquitous use of “Heil Hitler” as the standard greeting of the Third Reich under the Nazi regime. The chapter also contends that the creation of Nazi power was accomplished in no small measure by the use of ritual, and, in fact, ritual in the Third Reich served as an expression of “social power” that extended into virtually all aspects of German society. These celebratory events of Nazi power involved daily acts of verbal or physical humiliation of Jews, communists, and socialists, as well as organized and exemplary episodes of abusive behavior. Ultimately, the chapter studies the symbiotic relationship between violence, competition, and male comradeship and how it became manifest in the actions, rituals, and celebratory practices of Nazi paramilitary organizations through acts of humiliation by SS and policemen on the streets, in the concentration camps, and in the killing fields.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanghan Yea

North Korea still exists. The majority of researchers today tend to attribute the nation’s surprising resilience to the total social control the regime exerts. There are telltale signs, however, that the information cordon that once surrounded the country is deteriorating and that the outside world is filtering in through such means as cell phones. It is therefore reasonable to assume that North Koreans already have accumulated enough information to judge how miserable and hopeless their lot is. A true mystery of North Korea thus becomes the question of why the regime has survived, when so many North Koreans hate it. There is some parallelism between the present-day North Korea and the final days of Germany under the Third Reich. At that time, although Germans knew how despicable the Hitler regime was and how that regime was bound to end, they nonetheless supported Hitler and fought to the end. This has been ascribed to their fear of the Soviet Red Army. In this vein, we could assume that North Koreans see no alternative to the current regime and instead opt to be inert because they believe they face an overwhelming threat to their existence, as the Germans did 70 years ago.


2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Goeschel

Too often histories of the concentration camps tend to be ignorant of the wider political context of nazi repression and control. This article tries to overcome this problem. Combining legal, social and political history, it contributes to a more thorough understanding of the changing relationship between the camps as places of extra-legal terror and the judiciary, between nazi terror and the law. It argues that the conflict between the judiciary and the SS was not a conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as existing accounts claim. Rather, it was a power struggle for jurisdiction over the camps. Concentration camp authorities covered up the murders of prisoners as suicides to prevent judicial investigations. This article also looks at actual suicides in the pre-war camps, to highlight individual inmates’ reactions to life within the camps. The article concludes that the history of the concentration camps needs to be firmly integrated into the history of nazi terror and the Third Reich.


1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-46
Author(s):  
Eugen Kogon ◽  
R. A. Gutman

Something the human mind can hardly grasp took place among the German people during the twelve years of the Third Reich. In that corner of Bavarian-Austrian earth that lies between the rivers Inn and Danube, Hitler's home, the legend of the twelve terrible nights (Rauhnaechte) between Christmas and Epiphany is still alive. The legend tells us that wild hordes ride on horses through the air during these nights, bringing storms, unrest and destruction. The people say that it is dangerous to be outdoors alone, lest one be picked up and carried away into the air and made to join the wild riders above.


2020 ◽  
pp. 426-440
Author(s):  
Barbara Stelingowska

The article undertakes the topic of forced population displacement seen through the eyes of a child from Zamojszczyzna along with war-time fates of Polish families deported duringthe Second World War. The history of Zamojszczyzna lands is composed of tragic experiences of people forced out of their family households, imprisoned in the transit camps, deported to be involuntary labourers in the Third Reich, or murdered in concentration camps KL Auschwitz and KL Lublin (Majdanek). The survivors had to carry on throughout their lives with an indelible mark left by war-time childhood reflected by the name “a Child of Zamojszczyna” (the said status was granted to persons who were prisoners of the transit camps in Zamość and Zwierzyniec [solely children until the age of fourteen] and those imprisoned in concentration camps [for at least one day]).


2020 ◽  
pp. 59-67
Author(s):  
ALEXEY IPATOV

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of Belarusian collaboration during the World War II and the fight against it during the operation «Bagration» to liberate the territory of the Belarusian SSR. The main attention is paid to the activities of its individual representatives and a number of organizations that attempted to cooperate with Nazi Germany for «liberation» from the «Soviet yoke». It emphasizes the interest of the military and political elite of the Third Reich in cooperation with such organizations and the desire to fully control their activities. The author comes to the conclusion that thanks to the actions of Red Army, a significant part of the Belarusian collaborators was eliminated. The remaining supporters of «independence» after the end of World War II often continued their anti-Soviet activities during the cold war, actively cooperating with the special services of Western countries.


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-144
Author(s):  
Markus Wahl

By using the workhouse of Dresden as a microstudy, this article explores local continuities in postwar East Germany. It argues that this example not only illustrates the persistence of mentalities towards ‘sexual and social deviance’, not least as a legacy of the Third Reich, but also questions the assumption of a strictly centralized state and 1945 as a caesura. In a first step, the article shows the continuity of personnel at the state level, who decided that the workhouse as an institution should have a future in the new East German state after 1945, before revealing that local authorities were also unable to dissociate themselves with the views towards this institution of the past. In the end, the article enters this institution with help of archival sources, architectural plans, and photographs, exploring the impact of this state and local continuity on the everyday lives of inmates in this workhouse in Dresden. In doing so, it contributes to the historiography of East Germany by revealing the agency of different individuals, even if confined to a ‘total institution’.


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