Music in the Dark: Soundscapes in Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in The Polar Night

In A Woman in the Polar Night (Eine Frau erlebt die Polarnacht, 1938), Christiane Ritter, a well-to-do Austrian housewife, describes her experience as the first central European woman to overwinter on Svalbard (1934–35). Ritter’s prose is extraordinary in its lyrical simplicity, and in German editions the text is interspersed with her paintings of the scenes that at first were so alien and changing, yet became so familiar and loved. Although stationed on the north coast of Svalbard with minimal human contact and without any recourse to the music with which Ritter had been surrounded in Austria, A Woman in the Polar Night is a text that is full of references to sound, natural sounds that are heightened by the absence of human music. This article offers a multimodal reading of Ritter’s depictions of the soundscapes of Svalbard in her memoir and shows how, 30 years before John Cage made the art world do it for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, Christiane Ritter spent 12 months listening to silence, and responding to it in words and paintings. In addition, the paper will also consider the silence of the text: what is not presented, but left to the reader’s imagination.

Exclusive Phlebosclerosis of Submucosal Veins Leading to Ischemic Necrosis and Perforation of the Large Bowel: First European Case

Phlebosclerotic colitis (PC) is a rare, potentially life-threatening disease of unclear pathogenesis almost exclusively reported in Asian patients of both genders. A fibrous degeneration of venous walls leads to threadlike calcifications along mesenteric vessels and colonic wall thickening, detectable by CT. This causes disturbed blood drainage and hemorrhagic infarction of the right-sided colonic wall. This is a report of PC in a Caucasian woman in Europe without Asian background and no history of herbal medications, a suspected cause in Asian patients. CT revealed no calcification of the mesenteric vein or its tributaries. Instead, submucosal veins of the left-sided colonic wall were calcified, leading to subsequent transmural necrosis. Clinically, the patient developed a paralytic ileus and sigmoidal perforation during a 2-week hospitalization due to a bleeding cerebral vascular aneurysm. This case of a European woman with PC is unique in its course as well as its radiologic, clinical, and pathologic presentation.

Unveiling the European Woman

In recent years, many biblical scholars have tried to uncover the unethical readings of scriptures. Despite the relatively high prevalence of ethical exegesis, the ramifications of biblical scholarship for people outside Judaism and Christianity have yet to be taken into account. In this essay, I will focus on the interpretation of the veil in ecclesiastical literature and what it entails for both European self-understanding and the exclusion of the veil from the public. I will start by a survey of the reception history of 1 Corinthians 11:5–16, where Paul admonishes women to cover their heads veil praying or prophesying. Then, I will show how the reinterpretation of this passage in modern literature was tantamount to the exclusion of the veil as foreign to European identity.

Our Lady of La Vang

In 1998, on the 200th anniversary of her first apparition, the image of the Virgin Mary, which had appeared to a group of martyrs in La Vang, Vietnam (and was known as Our Lady of La Vang), was transformed from a European woman into a Vietnamese woman. The change was initiated by Vietnamese Catholics in southern California, who then exported the Vietnamized image to Catholic communities in Vietnam and other parts of the world. Today, the image of Our Lady of La Vang has become a global representation of the Virgin Mary as an Asian woman

Is This Us? The Construction of European Woman/Man in the Exhibition It’s Our History!

On the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the non-profit organisation Musée de l’Europe staged the exhibition It’s our history!. The subject of It’s our history! was the history of European integration from 1945 to today. The exhibition was intended to make European citizens aware that – as the exhibition’s manifesto stated: ’The History, with a capital H, of European construction is inextricable from our own personal history, that of each European citizen. It is not the reserve of those that govern us. We all shape it, as it shapes us, sometimes unbeknown to us. It’s our history!’ One of the means that the Musée de l’Europe chose as an illustration of this supposed interrelation of History and history are video testimonies in which 27 European citizens (one from each European member state) tell their own life stories. The present article explores this use of autobiographical accounts as didactic means in It’s our history!. The article argues that through the 27 Europeans, an image of European woman/man and European integration is advanced that glosses over internal conflicts in Europe’s recent history, leads to the construction of a model European citizen and serves as a symbol for the slogan ’unity in diversity’ in which Europe appears as more united than diverse.