20. Jahrhundert
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This article explores the connection between genocide, language and language consciousness by tracing the strange biography of one Yiddish neologism: shabreven. During the Holocaust, the word came to mean both ›looting‹ and ›taking ownerless property‹. It stoked moral and etymological debate among Yiddish speakers in the Warsaw ghetto, while also occupying a prominent position in postwar Polish and Zionist discourses. The term shifted between different semantic, ethical and cultural fields, navigating a delicate balance between various meanings and norms. The discussions around this term help to shed light on key questions: What were the motivations for the study of Holocaust Yiddish neologisms? How did this early postwar Yiddish philological discourse differ from its parallel in German? Shabreven became both a symbol of the genocidal collapse of language and a tool for regaining victim agency in speech.
Laughing at the Dictator. Franco and Franco’s Spain in the Spanish Blockbuster „Mortadelo y Filemón“
(2004)
The Spanish motion picture “La Gran Aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón” (2003) is not a historical film, no matter what definition of ‘historical film’ one might use. Instead, “Mortadelo y Filemón” (M&F) is the cinematic adaptation of the most successful Spanish comic book series ever published2 its significance to Spanish popular culture reflected by the spectacular box office records achieved by its cinematic counterpart. Moreover, and in contrast to the things we usually understand as ‘historical film’ - as well to the conventions of cinematic realism -, M&F is a cartoon-like histrionic comedy like no other; characters get smashed to the ground by a falling piano, only to later be “inflated” back to life, much in the style of the Warner Brothers’ „Loony Toons.“
"Global history" refers to a wide range of research approaches that are typically characterized by a rising interest in alternative conceptions of space beyond methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. It builds on a multitude of detailed research projects in all branches of historiography, ranging from economic history to cultural history and from gender history to environmental history.
The multi-faceted concept of authenticity became a ubiquitous catchphrase and a widely-recognised phenomenon in cultural studies in the second half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, it is becoming increasingly important in contemporary historical studies in methodological terms and as a research subject. But what does "authentic", or the attribution of authenticity, mean? The following article by Achim Saupe aims to investigate these aspects in greater detail.
Tom Scott-Smith is Associate Professor of Refugee Studies and Forced Migration, Fellow of St. Cross College Oxford, and Course Director for the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Previously, he worked as a development practitioner concerned with the education sector in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. The following interview discusses arguments and questions arising from his newest book (2020), historical and currents trends of hunger relief, important players, institutions and gender relations in the humanitarian sector – and more. It was conducted by Heike Wieters (Historical European Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Tatjana Tönsmeyer (Contemporary History, Bergische Universität Wuppertal) in a back-and-forth conversation via E-Mail.
Awkward Object of Genocide: Vernacular Art and the Holocaust in and beyond Polish Ethnographic Museums was a initiative carried out at the Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, by a group of four scholar-curators. The original aim of the project was to explore public and private Polish ethnographic collections in search of art objects referring to, representing, or commenting on the Holocaust. In our project we propose that this unique genre of the visual document, which has received little attention in studies regarding the Holocaust so far, could offer new insights, as well as forge new arguments, different from those commonly employed in attempts to understand the experience and memory of the Holocaust in Polish provinces.
As Hannah Arendt anticipated in 1951, refugees have become a major issue in contemporary societies. Writing just three years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been adopted in 1948, Arendt argued that refugees exposed a fundamental tension between universal human rights and the sovereignty of nation-states. For Arendt, human rights were an abstraction; the only real rights were those possessed by citizens.
The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) is widely considered to be one of the most important books which facilitated the ‘spatial turn’ in social and cultural theory by introducing space, as an interpretative concept, into sociological, political, economic, historical and cultural analysis. This reorientation was the programmatic objective of this book which aimed to relate and define ‘all possible spaces, whether abstract or real, mental or social’ (p. 299), and thus account for a wide range of spaces, from those of the body to those of the planet.
Beyond Nostalgia and the Prison of English. Positioning Japan in a Global History of Emotions
(2021)
This article interrogates the history of emotions at a pivotal moment in its growth as a discipline. It does so by bringing into conversation the ways in which scholars in Japan have approached ›nostalgia‹ (and emotions more broadly) as an object of study with concepts, theories, and methods prioritised by a predominantly Eurocentric field. It argues that Anglocentric notions of nostalgia as conceptual frameworks often neglect the particularisms that underlie the way that the Japanese language communicates and operationalizes cultural norms and codes of feeling. It also examines the aisthetic work of musicologist Tsugami Eisuke to help understand historical and psychological distinctions between ›nostalgia‹ and Japanese ideas of temporal ›longing‹, working towards a global history of emotions that meaningfully embraces multilateral and multi-lingual interaction. This article thus argues for a more nuanced way of discussing nostalgia cross-culturally, transcending dominant approaches in the field which are often grounded in a specifically Euro-Western experience but claim universal reach.
Anthropocene
(2024)
The “Anthropocene” has garnered much attention since the turn of the millennium, being widely and controversially discussed in the natural sciences and the humanities as well as in the media and the arts. Ariane Tanner explains the history of the term and shows how the concept enables contemporary historians to rethink temporality and agency in history, allowing them to expand their research questions, methods and narratives.
UNRRA (1943-1947) was an international organization that coordinated relief for victims of the Second World War in areas liberated from Axis control. Existing historical scholarship has put an unbalanced emphasis on global post-war reconstruction: European experiences have attracted much attention whereas scholars pay little attention to non-Western cases, with a few exceptions such as Japan. For long, not only in Western media, but also in Chinese historical scholarship, China has been either regarded as a passive recipient of international humanitarianism, or has simply been overlooked. But looking at UNRRA in China provides us with an opportunity to investigate how non-Western actors and motivations could shape a transnational humanitarian project, in a way different from European cases.
The article traces the collective term “living history” in its various definitions, forms and manifestations, offering an overview of this widespread phenomenon. It will consider developments in the United States and Europe, as well as taking a look at historical precursors of present-day forms. Whereas living history in the Anglo-American world has long been a well-established part of the educational and cultural work of museums, in Germany there is still a great deal of skepticism towards this form of historical representation. Finally, it asks how the fields of history and cultural studies might best engage with living history and which theoretical approaches exist for investigating and analyzing living history.
During the Holocaust 5.8 million people were killed; most of the victims did not leave behind any record that could help reconstruct their experience. While survivor history has been well studied in the last decades, how millions of voiceless victims experienced their persecutions has remained a terra incognita. Generally, while perpetrator history is well-documented, the voiceless victims’ perspective has resisted any form of documentation; their emotional and mental experiences conveyed through novels and memoirs have remained fragmented and they have often been dismissed as subjective and unreliable. Today Digital History and Digital Humanities offer new forms of inquiry and representations; they can unlock the emotional, mental, and physical realities which voiceless victims of the Holocaust or other genocides were forced to live in.
The ideological lines between the conservation movement and the Nazi regime have received much attention. This article explores a new perspective by focusing on the level of practical politics. After several setbacks and disappointments since 1933, the passage of the national conservation law in 1935 became the crucial turning point. The law instilled a secular boom of conservation work, which lasted until about 1940, nourishing an atmosphere of almost unlimited enthusiasm for the Nazi regime in conservation circles. At the same time, conservationists were crossing sensitive thresholds in their desire to use the law to
the greatest extent possible.
The Language of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Nazi German and Other Forms of German in the 1961 Trial
(2024)
The Eichmann trial granted the German language a degree of audibility unprecedented in the short history of the State of Israel, with the defendant, the judges, prosecutors, and witnesses frequently resorting to speaking in German. Drawing on archival materials, protocols, footage, and press reports, this article shows how the Eichmann trial brought to the surface several historical tensions around the postwar status of the German language. The various forms of German heard in the courtroom challenged notions of German as a Nazi language and contributed to a gradual mitigation of its status as a tainted language. The article concludes by reassessing Hannah Arendt’s 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem and specifically her postulate that Eichmann’s language faithfully reflected his mindset. It is argued that Arendt’s understanding of Eichmann’s language echoed prewar ideas on German’s distinctive power.
Debating Consumer Durables. Luxury and Social Inequality in Poland during the System Transition
(2015)
This essay aims to discuss how cultural meanings of modern consumer durables, such as colour TVs, stereos and automatic washing machines, were embedded in the public debate towards social equality before and after the change of 1989 in Poland. In state socialism, availability of affordable electric appliances was one of the agendas of the state politics of collective consumption. Along with the system transition, affordability of consumer durables became extensively discussed within the framework of emerging consumer capitalism. At that time purchases and ownership of consumer durables became an indicator of the emergence of a new consumption culture based upon individual lifestyles in a society where social diversification and income inequality were intrinsic elements of social order.
Access Activism. The Politicization of Wheelchairs and Wheelchair Users in the Twentieth Century
(2022)
For millions of disabled people around the world the wheelchair has been one of the most important technological innovations of the twentieth century. From its inception as a relatively cumbersome, heavy machine, designed principally for indoor use, the wheelchair has evolved into a sophisticated and highly technical mode of transport. Wheelchairs are, at least in the Global North, relatively widely used and universally recognizable – so recognizable that they have become the cultural symbol to represent all disabled people. Wheelchairs are often viewed with trepidation: as machines that disable, confine, and deprive their occupant of independence – as medical devices that doctors prescribe only to the sick, the wounded or the elderly. Such definitions and perceptions infiltrate the public lives of wheelchair users, cause considerable macro and micro political difficulties, and consequently disable users in a myriad of different ways.
How are people made into subjects, and how do they make themselves into subjects? - asks Wiebke Wiede and presents in the article the most important theoretical approaches to the functioning of "subjectification" in the 20th century. Subjects constitute themselves in historical space and are subject to institutional structures and subject definitions that are historically contingent. Accordingly, the cultural orientation needs of our present are also reflected in subject theories.
For centuries, nostalgia denoted homesickness, but current dictionary definitions indicate that these two concepts have parted ways and acquired discrete meanings. However, it is one thing to demonstrate that contemporary definitions of nostalgia and homesickness are distinct; it is another to show that the way people think about nostalgia and its characteristics corresponds to this lexicographic knowledge. In 2012, Erica G. Hepper and colleagues therefore asked laypeople to identify which features they considered most characteristic of the construct ›nostalgia‹ and found that respondents conceptualised nostalgia as a predominantly positive, social, and past-oriented emotion. In nostalgic reverie, one brings to mind a fond and personally meaningful event, often involving one’s childhood. The person tends to see the event through rose-coloured glasses and may even long to return to the past. As a result, he or she feels sentimental, typically happy but with a hint of sadness.
How have Jewish intellectuals reflected on the German language both in relation to and in the aftermath of the ›catastrophe‹? This essay explores one perspective, that of H.G. Adler (Prague, 1910 – London, 1988), a scholar, author, and survivor of the Shoah. Adler’s relationship to and reflections on the German language offer insights into the experience of persecution and survival as well as into the memory and representation of the Holocaust. His vast body of work testifies to both the possibility and the necessity of writing ›after Auschwitz‹, and indeed to the necessity of writing in German after the Holocaust. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two satellite camps of Buchenwald (Niederorschel and Langenstein-Zwieberge), Adler went on to write in various forms, from the analytic to the poetic, about National Socialism, antisemitism, and life and death in the concentration and extermination camp system. His scholarly work made an important contribution to establishing the international and interdisciplinary field of Holocaust Studies, and his poetry and novels bear witness to his own personal experiences in the camps, albeit not in a directly autobiographical form.
Secure and precise personal identification is essential for the continuation of socioeconomic activities during a pandemic. In Japan, the main region of focus for this research, this became even clearer between 2020 and 2021 when multiple cases of online fraud involving identity theft took place, including a series of document forgery to receive a financial relief package and taking online job tests for someone else. When the next pandemic and the next lockdown come in the future, our society needs to be better prepared to face this challenge of continuing life under severely restricted in-person communication.
A growing international interest in history, often referred to as the "history boom", has been evident since the 1970s. This is reflected in a quantitative increase in the demand as well as the supply of a range of products communicating history, products aimed at a broad public and not at a limited readership with specialist training. The number of visitors to historical exhibits is increasing as new museums and memorials are opened and new monuments are dedicated. Historical movies – feature and documentary films as well as docudramas – are aired on prime-time television, and cinema is rediscovering historical themes. The number of scholarly historical publications is growing, alongside works for general readers as well as historical novels.