scholarly journals Mirant al cel/Eyes on the Sky: The (Im)possible Expiation of the Spectral Other

Periphērica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Jaume Olivella
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
World War ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
The Family ◽  
Second World ◽  
Special Relevance

This article analyzes the contribution of the new Catalan documentary in the current process of reclaiming the collective historical memory repressed by Francoism and by the Silence Deal established during the political transition to democracy after Franco’s death. This analysis will consider some films that use the family metaphor as a national allegory to represent the plight of the Catalan nation. The main thesis of this study is to underline the need for reparation regarding the crimes committed by Francoism during and after the Spanish Civil War and the fact that such a reparation has not taken place neither in fiction nor in historical terms. This essay relies on the post-Derridian concept of “hauntology” as a theoretical framework to study the spectral textual encounters that mark the symptoms of an uninterrupted mourning process that appeals to the historical memory in search of dignity and closure. Methodologically, this study offers a close textual reading of Jesús Garay’s film Mirant al cel (Eyes on the Sky, 2008) as a perfect case study where the spectral conflict between victims and victimizers is acted out in the context of Barcelona and Catalonia and the series of urban mass bombings carried out by the Italian Royal Legion under the direct supervision of Il Duce, Mussolini. Garay’s film special relevance lies in the fact of its being one of the few documentaries that revisits those three dramatic days in March 1938 that became a tragic rehearsal of the massive urban aerial raids of the Second World War.

Turning Aliens into Socialists

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Jessica Moberg
Keyword(s):  
Outer Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Swedish History ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Highly Evolved

Immediately after the Second World War Sweden was struck by a wave of sightings of strange flying objects. In some cases these mass sightings resulted in panic, particularly after authorities failed to identify them. Decades later, these phenomena were interpreted by two members of the Swedish UFO movement, Erland Sandqvist and Gösta Rehn, as alien spaceships, or UFOs. Rehn argued that ‘[t]here is nothing so dramatic in the Swedish history of UFOs as this invasion of alien fly-things’ (Rehn 1969: 50). In this article the interpretation of such sightings proposed by these authors, namely that we are visited by extraterrestrials from outer space, is approached from the perspective of myth theory. According to this mythical theme, not only are we are not alone in the universe, but also the history of humankind has been shaped by encounters with more highly-evolved alien beings. In their modern day form, these kinds of ideas about aliens and UFOs originated in the United States. The reasoning of Sandqvist and Rehn exemplifies the localization process that took place as members of the Swedish UFO movement began to produce their own narratives about aliens and UFOs. The question I will address is: in what ways do these stories change in new contexts? Texts produced by the Swedish UFO movement are analyzed as a case study of this process.

Metamorphoses of memory of the the Russian-Serbian Brotherhood of War in Modern Serbia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Party System ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Second World

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.

scholarly journals Vera Lynn on Screen: Popular Music and the ‘People's War’

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATE GUTHRIE
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

AbstractBy the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle,We'll Meet Again(1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

scholarly journals Kriegsliteratur aus der DDR und die Zensur in der Volksrepublik Polen in den ersten Nachkriegsjahren

2017 ◽  
pp. 253-262
Author(s):  
Marek Rajch
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Important Criterion ◽  
World War ◽  
Nineteen Fifties ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Second World

From all of the German literature distributed in Poland during the first half of the nineteen fifties, that of the GDR was the most strongly represented, because like the People's Republic, it was part of the Eastern Bloc. A substantial part of this literature touched upon the themes of the Second World War. As some prominent Eastern German authors had taken part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939, this subject also couldn't be ignored.The introduction in 1949 of socialist realism as the most important criterion of art, and particulary strong political pressure, led to a great deal of confusion and insecurity, not only for Polish publishing houses, but also among the censors, whose task was to take decisions about what literature could be printed. Censors’ opinions in this period often differed, not only in terms of detailed matter, but also in the final decisions about the eventual fate of the title submitted for evaluation.

The Etappe Kanaren: A case study of the secret supply of the German Navy in Spain during the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan J. Díaz Benítez
Keyword(s):  
Active Role ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
World War ◽  
The One ◽  
Intense Activity ◽  
German Navy ◽  
Second World

The secret supply of the German Navy during the Second World War has scarcely been studied until now. The goal of this article is to study one of the more active supply areas of the Etappendienst at the beginning of the war, the one known as Etappe Kanaren, as part of the Grossetappe Spanien-Portugal. In this research primary sources from German Naval War Command have been consulted. Among the main conclusions, it should be pointed out, on the one hand, the intense activity to support the Kriegsmarine during the first years of the war, despite the distance from mainland Spain and the British pressure, which finally stopped the supply operations. On the other hand, we have confirmed the active role of the Spanish government in relation to the Etappendienst: Spanish authorities allowed the supply operations, but pressure from the Allies forced the Spanish government to impede these activities.

Can Events Facilitate Intercultural Understanding?

2021 ◽  
pp. 218-237
Author(s):  
Karen Davies ◽  
Caroline Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Ethnographic Case Study ◽  
Intercultural Understanding ◽  
World War ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
Second World

The founding philosophy of many cultural events established after the Second World War was to enhance the dynamics of peace through supporting and developing multicultural understanding. Over 50 years after their establishment, this chapter investigates the potential of such iconic events to achieve this aim and contribute to the concept of peace through tourism, based on a longitudinal ethnographic case study of Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod. The results show that this aim can be achieved by such events if they provide enough time and space for participants (performers and audiences) to interact. However, the study also identifies current cultural, political, and fiscal challenges in providing these temporal and physical spaces.

scholarly journals The Massigli Affair and its Context: Turkish Foreign Policy after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-296
Author(s):  
Onur Isci
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Turkish Foreign Policy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Second World ◽  
English I

This article examines Turkey's wartime diplomacy between the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and Hitler's unleashing of Operation Barbarossa. Rather than a survey of Turkish foreign policy as a whole, it takes a critical episode from July 1940 as a case study that – when put in context – reveals how fear of Nazi power and even greater fear of the Soviet Union created in Turkey a complex view of a desired outcome from the Second World War. Juxtaposing archival materials in Turkish, Russian, German, and English, I draw heavily on the hitherto untapped holdings of the Turkish Diplomatic Archives (TDA). Overall, this article demonstrates both the breadth and limits of Nazi Germany's sweeping efforts to orchestrate anti-Soviet propaganda in Turkey; efforts that helped end interwar Soviet-Turkish cooperation. Against previously established notions in historiography that depict Soviet-Turkish relations as naturally hostile and inherently destabilizing, this article documents how the Nazi–Soviet Pact played a key role in their worsening bilateral affairs between 1939 and 1941. The argument, then, is in keeping with newer literature on the Second World War that has begun to compensate for earlier accounts that overlooked neutral powers.

scholarly journals Propaganda Music in Second World War Britain: John Ireland's Epic March

2014 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Guthrie
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Total War ◽  
Problematic Relationship ◽  
Music And Politics ◽  
Second World

ABSTRACTWhile biographical studies of British composers' experiences in the Second World War abound, little attention has been paid to how the demands of ‘total’ war impacted on music's ideological status. This article sheds new light on how composers and critics negotiated the problematic relationship between art music and politics in this period. John Ireland's Epic March – a BBC commission that caused the composer considerable anxiety – provides a case study. Drawing first on the correspondence charting the lengthy genesis of the work, and then on the work's critical reception, I consider how Ireland and his audiences sought to reconcile the conflicting political and aesthetic demands of this commission. With its conventional musical style, Epic March offers an example of a ‘middlebrow’ attempt to bridge the gap between art and politics.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document