scholarly journals Symbolically burying the six million: post-war soap burial in Romania, Bulgaria and Brazil

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Joachim Neander

During the Second World War and its aftermath, the legend was spread that the Germans turned the bodies of Holocaust victims into soap stamped with the initials RIF, falsely interpreted as made from pure Jewish fat. In the years following liberation, RIF soap was solemnly buried in cemeteries all over the world and came to symbolise the six million killed in the Shoah, publicly showing the determination of Jewry to never forget the victims. This article will examine the funerals that started in Bulgaria and then attracted several thousand mourners in Brazil and Romania, attended by prominent public personalities and receiving widespread media coverage at home and abroad. In 1990 Yad Vashem laid the Jewish soap legend to rest, and today tombstones over soap graves are falling into decay with new ones avoiding the word soap. RIF soap, however, is alive in the virtual world of the Internet and remains fiercely disputed between believers and deniers.

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.


2000 ◽  
pp. 273-296
Author(s):  
Peter N. Davies

This chapter describes the reconstruction of Elder Dempster’s company structure and development after the Second World War. It states the company’s losses in terms of vessels and staff, and assesses the changes made in management and head office accommodation in order to allow Elder Dempster to meet the level of success it had achieved in the early 20th Century. The chapter also addresses the changing composition of the West African trade after the war, which included alterations in the determination of freight rates; the extension of the West African Lines Conference; and the intrusion of Scandinavian lines into the West African trade market. The chapter concludes with Elder Dempster’s purchase of the British and Burmese Steam Navigation Company Limited.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2 (18)) ◽  
pp. 126-136
Author(s):  
Vicky Tchaparian

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations pinpoints his Victorian literary heritage. On the other hand, David Lean’s film adaptation of Dickens’ novel conveys it realistically in a period of post War II cinematic modernization. In the present paper, different points are discussed and presented; First, different critical opinions, by earlier and modern critics, as well as David Lean’s personal opinion about film adaptation are revealed and discussed. Second, Dickens’s eccentric and grotesque Victorian characters that are presented through Lean’s visually and thematically rationalized postwar characters. Third, Dickens’s extraordinary characters are contrasted with Lean’s realistic ones. Moreover, Lean’s modernistic touches to the Dickensian novel which cater the postwar audience’s need (for which reason Lean’s film is a completely intellectual one and not at all Dickensian) are also unveiled. Thus, trying to put some hope in the hopeless hearts of his audience in the aftermath of the Second World War, Lean’s modernization of the Dickensian era to fit in the world of his contemporary audience is proven.


Author(s):  
Stefano Musso

The present contribution is divided into two parts: the first is the transformations of the world of labour between the two wars, tracing the context in which totalitarian impulses of a fascist nature were affirmed; the second, closely connected to the first, tries to outline the methods and contents with which counter-democracy tried to gain consensus, even in the world of labour. We will try to retrace, in broad terms, some trajectories of change induced by the First World War, their evolution in the inter-war period, the influence that these changes exerted on the Second World War and beyond, with some reference to the post-war period.


2013 ◽  
pp. 28-42
Author(s):  
Petro Yarotskiy

Cathedrals of the Catholic Church, as a rule, are gathering at the turning points of the development of the world and the life of the Church. II Vatican Council took place after the curves of the second drama of humanity in the Second World War, in the conditions of the post-war split of the world, first of all in Europe, in two opposing camps and the establishment of totalitarian regimes in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, the collapse of the colonial system and the appearance on the political map of the world (first of all in Africa and Asia) of young independent countries. At the same time, the world was once again faced with the threat of a new, already thermonuclear war, which, like the Damocles sword, hangs over humanity. The problems of the post-war world development in the conditions of the growing scientific and technological revolution, the launch of the space era, as well as the uneven economic and social development of the world in the coordinates of the North-South, arose.


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-106
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Newman

AbstractThis article describes the work of the Youth Section of the WUPJ (the World Union for Progressive Judaism) in Europe soon after the Second World War and the establishment of the State of Israel, with especial attention to the influence of Rabbi Lionel Blue. It covers tensions between generations over how to ‘teach’ Judaism; the astonishing numbers of rabbinical students recruited; ways we ‘encountered’ the Bible; the first post-war youth conference in Germany; early meetings with young Jews from Eastern Europe; first encounters with Muslims; and particularly the Six-Day War. The changes this brought about through Netzer and the shift in focus towards a more Israel-centred ideology are described. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that only ongoing messianic or prophetic ideals keep Judaism alive.


Author(s):  
Lewis Johnman

This chapter studies the collapse of British shipbuilding, in attempt to determine how directly it was linked to the internationalisation of the shipping industry. Lewis Johnman asserts that the lack of response from the British shipbuilding industry to the post Second World War boom in the international industry is a core reason for its decline. To prove this, the chapter considers the globalisation of shipping in post-war context; the second phase of the internationalisation of the world economy; the Norwegian market; the Japanese presence in the industry; and the failure of British Shipbuilding in both international and domestic markets during the period.


Author(s):  
Axel Schneider ◽  
Daniel Woolf

This concluding volume in The Oxford History of Historical Writing covers a very small period in comparison with some of its companions: barely two‐thirds of a century. As with the other volumes, the boundary dates are both fluid and imprecise: 1945 is a watershed date for the world in the sense that it marked the end of the Second World War and the division of Europe into a Western and an Eastern bloc. Elsewhere in the world, other dates are more meaningful: for China, 1949 is the critical year; and in much of Africa the decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s marked a significant rupture with past, colonial historiography. Unlike the earlier volumes, our period is also an unfinished one, for though some obvious sub‐periods are broken at points such as the early 1960s, the fall of European communism at the end of the 1980s, and the rapid rise of both globalization and radical Islam during the 1990s, it is difficult to predict, in early 2010 as this introduction is written, just where the story of post‐war historiography will end, or how. What ...


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev

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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document