Transnationale Geschichte
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In 1967, an exhibition opened in East Berlin that proposed, through an overload of images, to unite the histories of the Soviet Union and the GDR, and to confront international photography exhibitions produced in the United States and West Germany. More than the design principles and methods of this show, entitled Vom Glück des Menschen or On the Happiness of People, directly connect it with Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibition, first presented at MoMA in New York in 1953. Its original title was in fact The Socialist Family of Man, and its designers addressed Steichen’s show directly with a scathing critique that echoes the critical discourse in general around The Family of Man. Ultimately, and despite the acknowledged relationship of the exhibition to its Western model, Vom Glück des Menschen also departed from it, crafting a narrative through photographs specifically designed for a socialist society under construction.
Modeled after the Soviet propaganda magazine SSSR na stroike (›USSR in Construction‹, published 1930–1941, 1949), the Japanese overseas propaganda photo magazine FRONT (1942–1945) provided visual propaganda for the so-called ›Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere‹, a concept that was proclaimed in 1940 and served to disguise Japan’s quest for hegemony in Asia. Employing the aesthetics of Russian Constructivism and Socialist Realism of SSSR na stroike, FRONT created a visual aesthetic that could be termed Japanese Co-Prosperity Realism. Its dynamic and modernistic design was a transculturally inspired practice by Japanese photographers, graphic designers, journalists and producers of visual media, some of whom had been left-wing intellectuals or had lived and worked in the Soviet Union. In a comparative perspective, this paper carves out the political, cultural and gendered semantics of the (in)visibility of power, political religion and ethnic diversity that such aesthetics entailed. It explores some of the shifting backgrounds against which photographic techniques were enacted, from their avant-garde beginnings to their application in authoritarian regimes.
Milton Friedman hung up the phone in disgruntlement. The most influential economist of the postwar era had just called three different banks, one in Chicago and then two in New York, in order to initiate a financial transaction. He wanted to sell short $300,000 in pound sterling. Short selling is a technique for speculating on falling prices. Initially, speculators can only speculate on rising prices: they buy something and hope that it gains value, so that they can sell it at a profit. If the price for this asset goes down instead, the speculator incurs a loss when he resells it. So in order to profit from falling prices, speculators need to sell first and buy later – which is indeed possible if what is sold now is in fact only to be delivered a few weeks later. If the speculator is right and prices fall in the interim, he can buy cheap just before delivery is due and thus profit from having already sold what, at the time, he had not yet owned.
In spite of the prevailing myth, neither the political self-conception of West Berlin that emerged soon after the war nor the city’s international image were mere by-products of the Cold War. They resulted, rather, from a binational campaign that was based on strategic considerations. Returned Social Democratic émigrés, sympathetic American officials, and certain journalists convinced the German and the American public of West Berlin’s heroic defence of democratic ideals with remarkable speed and success. They could rely on both tangible and intangible resources for their campaign of erecting an ›Outpost of Freedom‹ in what was left of the former Reichshauptstadt. While the heady Weimar days of pre-war Berlin provided countless images that appeared to authenticate this new narrative, the transatlantic network was also able to draw on considerable financial resources and media outlets to promote it. This article seeks to outline the historical actors behind the project and the narratives on which they drew.
This article examines the rise of aeromobile sprawl, which is defined here as aviation’s socio-environmental impact on people, places, and things, in Canada during the 1970s. It links aeromobile sprawl largely to state-led airport development and the effect that upgrading, expanding, and building new airports had on communities and landscapes. Accordingly, it shows that while aeromobile sprawl was to some extent an outcome of postwar developments not limited to aviation, the Canadian government and its partners also contributed to sprawl by endorsing various policies and strategies that shifted over the period in question. At the same time, these actions did not go unnoticed. Public critiques of aeromobile sprawl emerged as people increasingly objected to larger and busier airports operating near populated and non-industrial areas. This article demonstrates that debates in Canada about airport development and the rapid growth of aviation revealed sharply diverging views about how to best accommodate the mobility requirements of mass air travel within the country’s natural and built environments in the 1970s.
Gendered critiques by historians and feminist international relations scholars have been animating international history for a good thirty years by complicating the supposedly binary relationships between states and societies, private and public, and local and international that traditionally structured the discipline. In this essay we would like to ask what a sensitivity to gender might add to international histories that are shifting their focus away from intergovernmental relations towards a reassessment of internationalisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through studies of transnational social movements, international organizations and norms, or practices of global governance. We are especially interested in how gender might contribute to a major emerging theme of international history today: the history of internationalism and international organizations as a struggle between competing or converging universalisms – ‘imperial and anticolonial, “Eastern” and “Western”, old and new’ – that sought to speak in the name of all humanity, rather than as the triumph of an international order imposed by the “West” on the rest.
After a seven-year period of military dictatorship and following the reestablishment of parliamentary democracy in 1974, historical studies have been a continuously developing field in Greece. Similarly as in Spain and Portugal at much the same time, archives became accessible for academic historians. The general public’s expectations about the establishment of historical ‘truth’ concerning the recent past were pressing.1 It is against this backdrop that we propose to review the changing conditions of historical research and especially the challenges involved in gaining access to primary sources, in particular those related to ‘national matters’. We will try to show the ways in which the particularities of the Greek case have to do with the history of civil rights in the country in the twentieth century, both during the interwar years and – more dramatically – during the Cold War period.
I first came across Harlan Lane’s work towards the end of my PhD, which I was undertaking at University College London, UK. My dissertation was on the construction of ›difference‹ in the British Empire, particularly the differences ascribed to race and gender. Using nineteenth-century medical missionaries as a way in, I had started to think about differences evoked by health, disability, and the body. In particular, I noted the way in which missionaries used the language of disability as a discourse of racialisation. The African and Indian colonial subjects they encountered were described throughout missionary literature as ›deaf to the Word‹, ›blind to the light‹ and ›too lame‹ to walk alone. I have two d/Deaf cousins, one of whom is the sign language sociolinguist Nick Palfreyman, and around about this time Nick had started to familiarise me with some of the issues surrounding Deaf politics. Becoming interested and wanting to know more, I began to learn British Sign Language (BSL) and contemplate the connections between the historical work I was doing and contemporary struggles of Deaf politics and disability politics (I was particularly interested in DPAC – Disabled People Against Cuts – given the contemporary climate of austerity in the UK). As I did so I became acquainted with the work of Harlan Lane. Here, although acutely aware of my own positionality as a white, British, hearing woman, I have taken up the challenge set by the editors of this special issue to re-read his work twelve years on from my initial encounter with it, using the insights into postcolonial study I have gained through my historical work.
The blossoming of military history in Germany offers the chance to set new agendas beyond conventional narratives. The notion of a distinct authoritarian Prusso-German militarism, set against political modernity and civil society, has long served as the master narrative of modern German military history. But this narrative no longer holds any promise. It fails to situate the German experience within a common European and transatlantic military political realm and war culture; it ignores the centrality of technocratic reasoning and industrialized warfare for any understanding of the German military; it offers too overblown and simplistic a portrayal of societal militarization; and it downplays militarist multiplicities and the transformations of the early 20th century. This narrative has the additional disadvantage of cutting off the history of the military and war after 1945 from what came previously.
What is the link between consumer society, fear of a nuclear war, design, modernity and utopia? According to the curators David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, the answer can be summarized in one concept: the Cold War. ‘Cold War Modern’ is an exhibit intending to show how the two postwar superpowers, the US and the USSR, engaged in aggressive contests in art, architecture and design in order to ‘demonstrate a superior vision of modernity’.