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Cuteness and aggression in military picturebooks

Author(s): Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer,Jörg Meibauer / Language(s): English Issue: 3 (34)/2016

As a subspecies of ideologically loaded picture books, this chapter focuses on military picture books. This term encompasses picture books dealing with war and the roles of soldiers. In the first part, taxonomy of military picture books is created which is exemplified by telling examples. The second part focuses on a particular narrative problem of military picture books that is of interest to a cognitive theory of picture books (as pursued by Kümmerling-Meibauer & Meibauer 2013). On the one hand, it is not possible to represent war as a good thing across the board; on the other hand, war is depicted with respect to certain scenarios of self-defense. The narrative solution seems to be that “cute” characters (that is, anthropomorphic animals and vehicles) are introduced who serve as positive military protagonists that have to fight against aggressive characters representing the enemy. In military picture books, there is a contrast between cuteness and aggression that is astonishing when regarding the typical pedagogical demands on the accommodation of picture books to the child’s cognitive abilities.

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Wojna Strzemińskiego

Author(s): Luiza Nader / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2017

Nader treats selected cycles from Władysław Strzemiński’s so-called “war drawings” (1939-1944) as a particular mode of visual testimony where a liminal experience is constructed from an observer’s position. Nader reads the drawings as an “abstract” or “universal” idiom. Her interpretation is based on Strzemiński’s “empirical method” as outlined in his The Theory of Sight. She examines the autobiographical and referential value of the works discussed, exploring each cycle of drawings with reference to the artist’s experience and understanding, as well as the particular framework of wartime events that Strzemiński witnessed – deportations under the Soviet Occupation of the Eastern Borderlands, the resettlement of the Polish population of Litzmannstadt and the mass murder of Jews. Using both historical and neuroaesthetical frameworks (based on the work of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein), Nader proposes to describe Strzemiński’s wartime drawings in terms of neurotestimony: a visual image that supposes not only an active process of seeing but also a process of understanding that must begin on the level of the body’s neurological phenomena.

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JUGOSLOVENI U KONCENTRACIONIM LOGORIMA I ZATVORIMA FAŠISTIĆKE ITALIJE U TOKU DRUGOG SVETSKOG RATA

Author(s): Enes Milak / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 1+2/1986

During the Second World War more than a hundred thousand Yugoslavs had been kept in fascistic concentration camps, prisons and places of „free internment”. The prisoners mostly came from the areas occupied by Italian forces. The group of Yugoslav internees was made both from the War-prisoners of the Yugoslav Royal Army and the members of the People’s Liberation Movement. According to the former research, the Yugoslavs had been kept in about two hundred different places throughout Italy. The conditions of living varied from place to place. In the camps of „free internment” they were almost acceptable. The prisoners lived in rented village houses and were allowed a small sum of money for food to buy, although this sum was too scanty for words. They were not allowed to move around freely and were closely watched by the Carabiniers. They did not enjoy health care and never got any supplies of new clothes. Many of them saw the end of the War in the same garments in which they had been taken into captivity. Living in the concentration camps and prisons was much harder. The prisoners often suffered physical and mental torture for the smallest violation of the camp discipline. Death rate among the Yugoslav prisoners was much higher in the camps in Northern Italy than in other parts of the country, which was partly due to the specific climate of this area. According to the records of the camp Sonars, deaths of dozens of Yugoslavs were reported every month. After the fall of the Fascistic Government and capitulation of Italy Yugoslav internees met different fates, Many of the camps were taken over by the Nazis so that Yugoslavs continued living in captivity in Germany. Some of them managed to get free and return to Yugoslavia where they joined the People’s Liberation Movement, but there were many who joined the Italian Resistance Movement.

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The Activity of the Ukrainian Theatre in Peremyshl During the Nazi Occupation (1941–1944)

Author(s): Vasyl Ivanovich Ilnytskyi,Mykola Dmitrovich Haliv / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

The purpose of the research is to discover the organizational-administrative and creative-artistic aspects of the activity of the Ukrainian Theatre in Peremyshl in the years of the Hitlerite‘s occupation of the town. The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism, system-formation, scientific character, verification, the author‘s objectivity, moderated narrative constructivism, and the use of general scientific (analysis, synthesis, generalization) and specially-historical (historical-genetic, historical-typological, historical-systemic, etc.) methods. The scientific novelty of the article consists in the argumentation of the fact, that, for the first time, in the historiography of the Ukrainian theatrical art on the basis of the previously unknown archival documents, the genesis, organizational development, repertoire, administration, and actors‘ staff of the Ukrainian Theatre in Peremyshl in the years of its occupation by the Hitlerites are clarified. Conclusions. Summing up, the fact is that the historical genesis of the Ukrainian Theatre in Peremyshl was connected with the activity of "Lesia Ukraіnka theatrical society" (1925–1939) and the Soviet State regional drama theatre (1940–1941). The history of the Ukrainian Theatre in Peremyshl can be divided into three stages: 1) the stage of the formation of the theatre in a form of the Theatrical circle and Drama section of UAC (1942 – first half of 1943), 2) the stage of the theatre‘s reorganization into a professional establishment (August-October, 1943), 3) the stage of the theatre‘s vigorous activity on professional bases (November of 1943 – July of 1944). The Ukrainian Theatre‘s artistic experience was manifested by several dozens of first-night performances and almost one hundred of other productions in Peremyshl and the neighboring villages and towns.

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Features of the Use of Children's and Women's Images in the Depiction of Victims in Soviet Propaganda Materials in the Second World War

Author(s): Svitlana Volodymyrivna Pavlovska,Valerii Mykolayovych Hrytsiuk / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

The aim of the study. Identify the peculiarities of designing artistic images of women and children in agitation and propaganda Soviet production during the Second World War and representing them ideological settings and values. The methodology of the study involves the use of a set of approaches and methods that achieve the goals of the study, in particular, the analytical method, comparative, with the help of which identify the common features in the formation of imagery proparadist and agitation posters using images of women and children; typology - to find out the gradation of the main ideological types of visual images and their representational value concepts; general-historical approach, which allowed to reveal general tendencies in the functioning of the Soviet ideological apprentices during the Second World War. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the fact that for the first time the research of ideological propaganda of the Durgoi of the World War with the current tendencies of the informational and ideological confrontation, which involves exercising influence on the human psyche using a certain information product, was actualized. Conclusions. As a result of the study, it was found that during the Second World War the Red Army was one of the most common methods of demoralizing the enemy and forcing him to stop armed resistance was a campaign postcard with a strong emotional subtext. Typically, the image of victims of war - members of the families of servicemen was used. The most frequent themes for postcards that were supposed to raise the spirit of Soviet soldiers were the images of raped and killed women with children who cry near them; images of female prisoners; children behind barbed wire who beg for help. These images were intended not only to inspire the continuation of the war to a victorious end, but to serve as motivators for each Red Army in the fight against the enemy.

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„Meine Familie hatte es gut in Auschwitz“ - Das Leben der Lager-SS in Auschwitz-Birkenau nach Dienstschluss

Author(s): Anna-Raphaela Schmitz / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2018

For SS personnel, the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp was a workplace and residence. This article focuses on the lives of the male perpetrators after official hours and explores what influence this had on their work within the camp complex and vice versa. Family structures as well as comradeship among perpetrators were meant to help maintain a subjectively experienced sense of ‘normality’. Retrospectively, it seems difficult to imagine that the SS families managed to have a ‘normal’ life in close proximity to the concentration camp. They benefited from the amenities of the infrastructure that developed around the camp complex. They often took advantage of the practice of robbery and appropriation of the prisoners’ goods. Since work life and private life in Auschwitz-Birkenau were intertwined in this way, the Holocaust and the mass crimes should also be examined from this perspective.

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Zwischen investigativer Recherche und Kollaboration - Ausländische Journalisten im ,Dritten Reich‘

Author(s): Norman Domeier / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2017

Historical research has surprisingly until now largely ignored the activities of accredited foreign correspondents in Berlin during the ‘Third Reich’. Instead it has focused almost exclusively on ‘the other side’ of journalism, the state public relations and propaganda apparatus. This is even more surprising taking into consideration that foreign correspondents working in Berlin contributed to the international image of National Socialist Germany. By researching foreign correspondents working in the ‘Third Reich’ we can discover numerous new insights into the transnational perception of National Socialist Germany; not only through the extremes of rejection and approval the regime received internationally, but also fundamentally through the significance given in journalistic everyday life to news and commentary from National Socialist Germany. To date only a few individual biographies on foreign correspondents working at that time exist, although many of them wrote memoires soon after they were foreign correspondents and a surprising number of bequests have been preserved. Alongside these, classic state documents and records have been passed on. By interpreting these records of state propaganda attempts from a critical distance and comparing them with the testimonials of foreign correspondents especially from the United States, Great Britain and France, it is possible to create a comprehensive analysis of their work. It will cover their investigations, often using the assistance of local informants and stringers, their text production and the reception of printed articles and radio broadcasts in their home countries and worldwide. Until its downfall the ‘Third Reich’ wooed, persuaded, deceived and threatened its foreign correspondents. If all means of ‘direction’, ‘prescribed terminology’ and ‘press control’ failed, the regime did not hesitate to isolate, imprison and expel foreign journalists. Nevertheless, they remained a power which the National Socialist regime from a media historical perspective took account of in a modern way until the very end: different from the public spheres of the Allies it never formally introduced pre-censorship, except for radio broadcasts. This is yet another reason to focus on foreign correspondents in the ‘Third Reich’ as independent creators of and actors in media events.

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The ‘Visible’ and the ‘Invisible’ Jews - A Comparative View on the Treatment of Palestinian Prisoners of War, Jewish Penitentiary Prisoners, and Inmates of the Forced Labour Camp for Jews/Auschwitz Sub-Camp in Blechhammer, 1941–1945

Author(s): Susanne Barth / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2017

This paper highlights two groups of Jews, Palestinian prisoners of war and Jewish penitentiary prisoners, who remained largely ‘invisible’ within the Nazi camp system as, unlike Jewish camp inmates, they were not visibly marked by the yellow star and German authorities kept their Jewish identities secret. In the industrial camp complex of Blechhammer in Upper Silesia, Palestinian POWs, Jewish penitentiary prisoners and inmates of the forced labour camp for Jews coexisted for over a year, while three different sets of legal frameworks determined their status and respective treatment: the Geneva Conventions, the Prison Regulations for Poles and Jews and Nazi anti-Jewish legislation. Compared to the ‘visible’ inmates, the two ‘invisible’ groups had significantly higher survival rates, partly the result of their (temporary) protection from the regime’s annihilationist policy. While the workforce of all three was exhaustively exploited and food was limited, POWs and penitentiary prisoners received better medical attention and, most importantly, did not fall victim to selections for the Auschwitz death camp. However, it also became evident that their ‘invisibility’, the fact that they could not be distinguished from non-Jews, contributed to their survival.

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Gefeierte und Verdammte - Der Slowakische Nationalaufstand 1944 als nationaler Erinnerungsort

Author(s): Miroslav Michela / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2017

The Slovak National Uprising in 1944 was an important act of military resistance against the collaboration of the Tiso regime with Nazi Germany. It was initiated by members of the Civic movement and to a lesser extent by the Communists, and was eventually brutally crushed by the SS, the Wehrmacht, and pro-Nazi Slovak forces. The insurrection is hardly remembered outside of Slovakia although it became an important lieu de mémoire for Slovak nation-building. Nevertheless, academic studies as well as public history and remembrance of the event was and still is highly controversial. The reason for these disputes are manifold. They are rooted on the one hand in the entrenched hegemonic Communist reading, which created a partisan myth around the uprising while minimising the role of the Civic resistance, and on the other hand in the different representations and interpretations in Czech, Czechoslovak, and Slovak historiographies, which in their respective orientations and ideologies attribute different functions to the uprising. Slovak ultra-nationalist narratives also play their role, seeing the revolt as an international conspiracy against independent Slovakia to re-establish a centralist Czechoslovak Republic. In different periods and power constellations – 1945, 1945–1948, 1948–1968, 1968/1969, after 1969 and 1989 – these various inter- pretations prevailed or stood at stake, and the fighters of the uprising were either “celebrated” or “cursed”.

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The Fédération Internationale des Résistants (FIR) - Its Activities During the Breakdown of the Soviet Bloc

Author(s): Maximilian Becker / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

This paper offers an analysis of the activities of the communist-dominated Fédération Internationale des Résistants (International Federation of Resistance Movements, FIR), the inter- national umbrella organisation of associations of victims of Nazi persecution from both Eastern and Western Europe between the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this time, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc led to a deep crisis for the Eastern European organisations like the Polish Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację (Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy) representing the former anti-fascist resistance fighters and political prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, which had been part of the communist power apparatus, and therefore of FIR. The organisation, which had been mired in growing financial difficulties for at least two decades, then lost much of its influence and of its potential to spread its message among the public. Nevertheless, FIR tried to maintain its activities with a special focus on dealing with right-wing extremism, the preservation of the rights and pensions of former resistance fighters, a commitment to peace and disarmament, as well as to the politics of memory.

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The Things that Affectively Live On - The Afterlives of Objects Stolen from Mass Graves

Author(s): Zuzanna Dziuban / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

The problem of grave-robbery at the sites of the former Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland has received increasing academic interest recently. Rediscovered in historical research and brought to public attention by the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s and Irena Grudzińska-Gross’s Golden Harvest (2012), this practice, undertaken by local villagers searching for gold and other valuables allegedly hidden among and in the human remains of the camps’ victims, has since been engulfed in controversy around its meaning and social causes. At the same time, the objects stolen from the mass graves at the sites of the extermination camps have begun to resurface – sometimes they are even brought back to the sites from which they were taken. Focussing specifically on the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ extermination camp at Bełżec, this paper traces the material afterlives of the stolen objects and the transformations of the affective, political and symbolic economies structuring their handling. Providing an interpretative gaze on the circumstances of their theft, their integration into the daily lives of the inhabitants of Bełżec, and finally their return, this paper brings to the fore the effective afterlives of those objects, and investigates their potential to challenge the cultural economies of science surrounding practices of grave-robbery at the sites of the former Nazi camps in post-war Poland.

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Wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen…

Author(s): Béla Rásky,Werner Michael Schwarz / Language(s): English,German Issue: 2/2016

Lueger Memorial, 1010 Vienna, Dr. Karl-Lueger-Platz, KiP - Kunst im Prückel, 1010 Vienna, Biberstrasse 2, May 10, 2013

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The Hunger Letters - Between the Lack and Excess of Memory

Author(s): Joanna Tokarska-Bakir / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

After examining thousands of letters written between 1940 and 1944 by Polish Jews in ghettos on the verge of starvation, the author approached a visual artist to assist with processing the emotional aspect of the letters. The goal was to reflect the voices of their senders and addressees. Between October 2008 and spring 2010, two sample letters, reproduced from originals in the archive, were sent together with an explanatory letter to 3,000 randomly selected Varsovians. The Hunger Letters Project, the ‘letter in a bottle’, had repercussions that exceeded all expectations. Finally, the specific understanding of this public intervention is elaborated upon in the context of its ethnographic results.

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Die Heeresgruppe Mitte - Ihre Rolle bei der Deportation weißrussischer Kinder nach Deutschland im Frühjahr 1944

Author(s): Johannes-Dieter Steinert / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2016

Based on German and Belorussian archives as well as on testimonies, this paper examines the deportation of Belorussian children as forced labourers to Germany by units of Army Group Centre in 1944. It analyses the decision-making process, the imprisonment of thousands of children, their deportation, employment in Germany, the role of Belorussian collaborators, and finally the liberation of the children by the Red Army. By focussing on the participation of German military units in deporting child forced labourers, the article sheds light on the contemporary and post-war web of lies to create and maintain the myth of the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht.

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The Past and Promise of Jewish Prisoner-Physicians’ Accounts - A Case Study of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Multiple Functions

Author(s): Sari J. Siegel / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

Seeking to demonstrate how the unique perspectives of Jewish prisoner-physicians can yield valuable insight into Nazi camps, this article first examines how scholars have used these medical functionaries’ accounts to inform their portrayal of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s exterminatory capacity and horrific conditions. It subsequently explores how these individuals’ memoirs and legal statements can also speak to the camp’s functions as a labour camp and transit camp. The article reinforces the significance of this relatively obscure prisoner group through an examination of Nazi documents, and it indicates that the prisoner-physicians’ parallel assignments to and experiences in Birkenau and concentration camp subcamps reveal that both institutions were simultaneously engaged in the Nazis’ dual missions of exploiting Jewish labour and annihilating European Jewry.

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Pogrome in Polen 1918–1920 und 1945/46 - Auslöser, Motive, Praktiken der Gewalt

Author(s): Eva Reder / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2015

The paper focuses on the fundamental aspects of my dissertation project: triggers of pogroms, dynamics of violence and the role of the respective emerging statehood as well as the perpetrators’ self-perception. In both reference periods, pogrom violence referred closely to the establishment of Polish statehood, even though this happened under divergent circumstances. Both phases involved exceptionally large numbers of pogroms. In both cases profound socio-political ruptures and paradigm shifts took place, where the need to create enemies was tremendous. An examination of the perpetrators’ verbal utterances and actions during and after the pogrom allows to identify their symbolic reference points, which express anti-Semitic stereotypes and show how the pogromists defined their relations towards state authorities. The project will offer insights about prejudices during transitional phases, the dynamics of pogroms and how narratives of violence are preserved. The pogroms are reconstructed by means of eyewitness accounts, military records and court files.

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Zuflucht und Utopie - Österreichisch-jüdische Emigration in die Dominikanische Republik

Author(s): Susanne Heim / Language(s): German Issue: 2/2014

The Dominican Republic is nowadays considered an ultimate holiday paradise by most Europeans. It is less known that this small state in the Antilles served as a place of refuge from Nazism for Austrian, German and Czech Jews during the Second World War. While most countries closed their borders to the flood of refugees after the ‚annexation’ of Austria, it was - of all places - this dictatorial Caribbean island state that offered refuge to the persecuted. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee built an agricultural model project in Sosúa on the country’s northern coast, which was modelled on Kibuzzim and was laid out for tens of thousands of refugees. However, only a few hundred reached the island; they included many Viennese. The history of this settlement project reveals the developmental lines of the twentieth century: the democratic states’ capitulation in the face of the German anti-Jewish policies, the concept of an agricultural project based on socialist ideas and its failure and, finally, migration as a modernising catalyst.

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Culture, Trauma, Morality and Solidarity - The Social Construction of ‘Holocaust’ and Other Mass Murders

Author(s): Jeffrey C. Alexander / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways. While this new scientific concept clarifies causal relationships between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions, and actions, it also illuminates a neglected domain of social responsibility and political action. By constructing cultural traumas, social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations, not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering, but may also take on board some significant moral responsibility for it. Insofar as they identify the cause of trauma in a manner that assumes such moral responsibility, members of collectivities define their solidary relationships that allow them to share the suffering of others. Is the suffering of others also our own? In thinking that it might in fact be, societies expand the circle of the ‘we’ and create the possibility for repairing societies to prevent the trauma from happening again. By the same token, social groups can, and often do, refuse to recognise the existence of others’ suffering, or place the responsibility for it on people other than themselves.

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Opening the Archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) - How did it happen? What does it mean?

Author(s): Paul A. Shapiro / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2014

Until the end of 2007, ITS was the largest collection of inaccessible records any where that shed light on the fates of people from across Europe – Jews of course, and members of virtually every other nationality as well – who were arrested, deported, sent to concentration camps, and even murdered by the Nazis; who were put to forced and slave labour under in-human conditions, calculated in many places to result in death; and who were displaced from their homes and families, and unable to return home at war’s end. These were documents that Allied forces collected as they liberated camps and forced labour sites across Europe in the last months of the war and during their post-war occupation and administration of Germany and Austria. The archives of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, contains over 50 million World War II era documents relating to the fates of over 17.5 million people. Using samples and case studies, the author, who led the campaign to open the archives, provides an insider’s view of the years-long effort to open the collections for research and discuss the importance of this recent event for Holocaust survivors, other victims of National Socialism, and scholars.

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Völkermord und die Aufarbeitung von Vergangenheiten aus globaler Sicht

Author(s): Dirk A. Moses / Language(s): German Issue: 1/2014

Holocaust and Genocide Studies emerged as a new discipline during the 1990s, particularly so in the Anglo-Saxon world. This development also established a new culture of remembrance and treatment of the collective past and public apologies for historical crimes. Since then, several countries have institutionalized Holocaust memorial days and similar institutions in a range of formats, several governments have apologized for historical injustices in various manners. Yet, there remains the question of a precise definition of a genocide – and in what way the term is connected to the Holocaust, the murder of the European Jews. How are these two related? What is the social function of such official or semi-official remembrances, and what is their role in society? In his lecture, Dirk Moses endeavored to clarify whether the insights gained from the history of the Holocaust and other genocides in general – namely, the imperative of ‚tolerance‘ – really does provide an adequate answer to this challenge.

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