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This paper discusses the presence of genocide and the persistent threat and possibility of its new eruption in Bosnia. Statements about this, not only in public policies, are dangerous but their more or less subtle involvement in educational programs guarantees the mentioned possibility of a new eruption in the future. Bosniaks are usually advised with bad intentions to look a head and not inwards as a kind of sleeping pill, i.e. anesthesia before amputation.The paper discusses what to do with Serbian ethno-religious nationalism in this context? What kind of ideology is that? What is the Serbian identity like after 1995? How are the contrasts between “us” and “them”painted, and what should be the response of Bosniaks to such challenges?What to do next and how to move on?
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Abstraction as a critical faculty has often been in use in philosophical and critical discourses. The frequency of its usage has often left unconsidered the myriad dimensions of the term pointing to the various centers of contemplation of abstraction. These range from looking at abstraction from the perspective of the invisible and non-deictic to minimalism in art. This paper seeks to explore the question of abstraction in relation to the ‘home’ and its equivalent terms in the poetry of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire to see how abstraction is a tool of empowering the diasporic identity. In other words, taking recourse to various facets of the term, this essay tries to show that abstraction identified as the absence of the concrete is a form of individual resistance in itself instead of simply being a tool for philosophers to ‘interpret the world,’ as Marx suggests in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. In doing so, this paper will also attempt to show how an idea such as dissidence could become qualitatively different in a non-European setting and how collectivist resistance might occlude the unique modes of conception of individual resistance.
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One recent scientific study shows once again what had been known to most insiders for years: in the prestigious journal Science, a team of western researchers examined the genetic health of children close to the Chernobyl liquidators (the people who were sent to remove substantial parts of radioactive fallout from the explosion and whose heroism is undisputed). What the researchers found might come as a surprise to the broader public: the genetic health of these children was in no way worse than in the general population. In other words, no statistically significant increase in mutations was found in the offspring of those most heavily affected by the accident.
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The early books by Mikołaj Grynberg containing conversations with survivors and their children allowed the writer to discover perspectives unknown to him before. With time these stories, combined with his own experiences, have become the basis for writing ‘Rejwach’. In the article, while introducing the author’s search for form, the author will show how the contemporary writing about the Holocaust has evolved. Grynberg, on the basis of testimonies he has heard, creates stories which many people affected by the Holocaust can identify with – people from the first, second and even third generation of survivors. Although fictitious, they have a universal value.
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Sacha Batthyany found out that in 1945 his aunt hosted a ball during which 180 Jews were shot by her guests. Their mass grave has not been found until today. She also helped many Nazis escape from Hungary. Sacha’s family kept these stories secret for years. For Sacha, the discovery of his family’s past becomes the beginning of a new life, recognizing the tormenting feeling of guilt as inherited from his ancestors. Can we define the sense of guilt as traumatic? We can certainly try to do it. Yet, trauma assumes different shapes and reveals its huge interpretative potential.
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In the 21th century, one of the representatives of the writers’ young generation, Pavel Sanayev, has written a novel related to the period of communism and at the same time, to his own family’s past. Many of his ancestors (grandfather, mother, stepfather) were involved with the film industry. As Sanayev has not considerably changed their surnames his book can be considered as an autobiography. The apartment where the eight-year old protagonist lived can be treated as a metaphor of a Soviet concentration camp. Sasha Savelyev was brought up by his cruel, crazy grandmother who did not allow him to leave home, play with other children or even go to school. She did that because she saw Sasha as a weak boy suffering from different serious diseases. Numerous injections, pills, drops, visits to doctors, nurses’ visits, sadness, disappointment… seem to be his torture and punishment. Limited space, regulations and orders can be seen to symbolise communist Russia.
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The plot of the novel ‘Madame’ by Antoni Libera takes place in Poland in the sixties, in the times of the real socialism. The author, through the statements and behavior of the characters, presents two different attitudes towards the Spanish Civil War: first, revealed by the official propaganda, and the second popular among the opponents of the regime. Therefore, the memory of the Civil War, modified and appropriated by the followers of two different ideologies, has become a tool used by the author to contrast two opposing discourses about history of the 20th century. In this way, the memory of the tragic events has come to the background, simply becoming part of the narrative strategy.
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The subject of this research is the book ‘El pecado nefando del obispo de Salamina’ (The deplorable sin of the bishop of Salamina) written in 2002 by the Spanish historian Francisco Núñez Roldán. In the context of post-memory I am interested in the origins of this book, which are connected with the Spanish Inquisition and the attempts to regard its author as a secondary witness. It is also important that the activities of the Holy Office (1478-1834) are not only the subject of continuing historical research but are also a rich source of inspiration for artists and scholars.
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The article contains analyses of several contemporary literary texts concerning the category of post-memory written in the background of the Kashubian culture. It mainly interprets prose works (Drewz, Bunda, Drzeżdżon) as well as the novel on which the film Kamerdyner was based. The analyses led to determining the phenomena defined by Sigmund Freud related to psychoanalysis and referring to the works by A. and J. Assmann, M. Hirsch and D. LaCapra. Thus Kashubian literature, written in Polish and Kashubian, shows post-memory mechanisms in the form of crowding out, transferring, repeating and overcoming the trauma of World War II.
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The aim of the paper is to show the dependence between language, collective memory (also post-memory) and sense of identity. This issue is analysed using the example of an ethnic minority living in the village of Ostojićevo (Banat, Serbia) called ‘Toutowie.’ Their ancestors came in the 19th century from Wisła (Silesian Cieszyn, Poland); they left their homes because of great hunger and were looking for jobs in Banat. Narratives about the past contain traumatic experiences of the past generations transmitted in the Silesian dialect and constituting communicative memory. At the same time, a new Polish national identity is being constructed, supported by institutions and authorities; it carries a new image of the world and creates a new cultural memory. This new identity – shaped on the basis of national categories – leads to changes of its self-identification and gives the opportunity to raise its social position in the multi-ethnic Banat community.
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Contemporary city incidentally becomes a non-accidental target of acts violating the primary sense of security and safety. The fundamental assumptions about social and interpersonal interactions that guarantee social life are severely disturbed. These events, primarily the ones related to terrorist attacks, leave in social memory traces associated with everyday places scattered in urban landscape. Should the trace of a catastrophe be preserved and exhibited, or should it be interpreted to give a new meaning to endangered places? What significance can one attribute to trauma narratives in everyday landscape? To what extent can spatial and ephemeral narratives related to dramatic events address the social need of coping with trauma and constructing a new approach to a given place? Spontaneous and official commemorative forms are created in response to terrorist attacks in Europe and the U.S.A. Official memorials are created over just a few years and sometimes even one year, which corresponds to a natural closure of mourning process leading to the acceptance of loss and reconstructing life. However, other representations – spontaneous memorials created in the aftermath of attacks, composed of objects left in urban space to honour victims and survivors – become an important element of collective mourning ritual and constitute a transition from informal commemoration to top-down representations. The article discusses how different forms of trauma narratives constructed in urban space can enhance trauma recovery.
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The article deals with the issue of repression experienced by the Germans from Serbian Vojvodina after World War II (mostly in the period of 1944-48). The author is particularly interested in the mode in which the stories of these traumatic experiences function in the cross-generational tradition. Thus, the causes of the occurrence of such stories in German families are pinpointed. These considerations are supplemented with the excerpts of the statements made by the German minority representatives still living in Serbia. They serve to illustrate the basic theses of the paper.
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Translation competence is not only a good command of the languages but also the knowledge about the reality, culture, and history of both communities of communication. The observations conducted during the process of developing translation competence on philological studies allow us to make a hypothesis. The knowledge about the reality, affairs, and trauma associated with the decline of the socialist period and political transformation in Poland should be stored in the young generation’s memory not only thanks to history teaching at school, but also their parents’ and grandparents’ memories. However, the knowledge is not sufficient for adequate translation from Polish to Russian. The article presents the results of questionnaire surveys conducted among primary schools pupils in the Rzeszów region and Russian Philology students at the University of Rzeszów. The young generation’s memory of the decline of Polish People’s Republic and the texts translated by students of the translation speciality are discussed.
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This article is based on the available philosophical and historical Holocaust studies and offers a critical review of the reception of Hannah Arendt’s philosophical concepts of antisemitism and Jewish history, including Shoah.
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The author of the article writes about the identity of Odessa as about the kind of local identity that manifests itself in the historical context. He researches the individual examples of the local cultural specificity, appealing to the thoughts of authoritative writers and scientists. Odessa’s identity was formed through the influences of different factors, some of which were even contradictory. This gave rise to its uniqueness. It is characterised by liminality, independence (autonomy), cosmopolitanism. But it is important to understand that those influences were not equal, and their effects were oft en used for creating the ideological doctrines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the presented research, the author reveals the formative mechanisms of some stereotypical images that the concept of identity consists of. These mechanisms express open or hidden Russian imperial strategy of colonisation. That is why the efforts to glorify the local and specific are questionable. In this context, the well-known Odessa cosmopolitanism is oft en explained. But sometimes it is incorrect to understand it as the effect of the historical process of assimilation by the national, linguistic, or religious denominational groups which took place in the city during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article is also about the discrimination against the culture of the national minorities, who in the so-called Odessa myth are represented in a fragmentary and incomplete way. Ukrainian element was also discriminated against. This may seem paradoxical, as Odessa and the Black Sea region are a natural part of the Ukrainian cultural space.
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In the three years after World War II, prominent Jewish organizations in the United States and in the Land of Israel made films aimed at promoting Zionist goals. The film Adamah (Helmar Lerski, 1948) was produced in the Land of Israel with the support of the Jewish-American volunteer women’s organization Hadassah. It tells the rehabilitation story of Benjamin, a Holocaust survivor in the Land of Israel. When the final version was sent to Hadassah for approval, the directorate felt that the American public would not relate to it. Hadassah altered the footage and distributed its own version entitled Tomorrow’s a Wonderful Day (1949). This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the main differences between the two representations of trauma, which were taken from the same footage but shaped into two differing narratives. Based on studies in Zionism and a great deal of archival material, it shows how these films epitomized the differences in the perception of trauma and its representations between the Zionist organizations in the Land of Israel and the USA.
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This article discusses the mechanism behind the formation in adolescents (representatives of the 4th generation) of an affiliative postmemory about one of the most controversial and complex subjects in Russian history – the era of political repression from the 1930s to the1950s. The first part of the article is devoted to questions of methodology and necessity, and to the possibilities of using an authentic space and an authentic artifact as mediators between past and present in memory practices. The basic ideas are the concepts of “postmemory” by Marianne Hirsch, “grief” by Alexander Etkind, and “affective management of history” by Sergey Oushakin. Additionally, there are the ideas of Varvara Sklez, Veronica Dorman, Olga Strelova, and Alexander Kotlomanov in relations to that very authentic space and/or artifact which helps to provoke and form the memory of complex pages of history, not from within, but from without, enabling the creation of a kind of “sensory laboratory” for the period. Thanks to this “feeling”, dry information is experienced and appropriated by a person through the strong emotions provoked, and the level of individual affiliative memory of the era of political repression is built up. The second part of the article describes two experiments which allowed me to analyse the effects of an authentic space (an immersive drama performance) and an authentic artifact (an archived investigation casefile) on adolescents.
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The article uses the review of a seminar, an exhibition, and a graduate conference, which took place at Tallinn University in the 2020–2021 academic year, as an occasion to reflect on the different ways in which illness has been represented in literature, the arts, and film across the history of Western culture. The specific focus of the article is on the theoretical contribution of the humanities to a more complex and adequate understanding of the phenomenon of illness. The study of illness narratives reveals different patterns and strategies of constructing the illness experience into a coherent and meaningful story, but also the resistance that the disruptive impact of illness on our everyday lives poses to narrativisation. The complex historical imagery which endows the biological fact of being sick with additional cultural and social meaning has also to be critically investigated in the humanities and social sciences. Metaphors about illness and the use of illness as a socio-political metaphor have often had a nefarious impact on sick people as well as entire social groups and communities. This is why the article also considers illness in its relations with politics and power and describes various attempts to empower sick people in their relations with medical institutions and their social environment. The article ends with a review of the “Illness: Narratives, Imagery, Politics” graduate conference (27–28 January 2021), which is a good illustration of the many literary and artistic works and of the plurality of methods that can be used in the study of the illness phenomenon from a humanities perspective.
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This obituary outlines the life and work of Kadri Yıldırım, a prominent Kurdish scholar and the first professor of Kurdish studies in Turkey. It focuses on his early life and medrese education and highlights his contribution to the field of Kurdish studies and his scholarly and political efforts for the Kurdish language to become a language of education in Turkey.
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