Straddling the Iron Curtain?

Straddling the Iron Curtain? PDF Author: Machteld Venken
Publisher: Studies in History, Memory and Politics
ISBN: 9783631607534
Category : Immigrants
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This book neither researches structural integration, nor starts from ethnically defined categories. At the basis are two clearly distinguishable migration streams entering Belgium in the aftermath of World War II. First, there were about 350 soldiers from Poland who served with the Allies, had met Flemish young women during their liberation march through Flanders, married their financ?es in 1945 and 1946 and settled in their wives' hometowns and villages. And second, there were the Ostarbeiterinnen-- Soviet young women of Ukrainian, Russian, or Belarusian decent, who after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, were deported to Nazi Germany to do forced labor. While at work, the young women met Western European deported workers, volunteers, and prisoners of war. Although any off-duty contact between them was prohibited, numerous love affairs flourished and after their liberation by the Western Allies, about 4,000 Ostarbeiterinnen chose to migrate further to Belgium rather than be repatriated to the Soviet Union where they could be accused of collaboration ... The central question of this study is as follows: are the war experiences and war memories of these two migration streams similar because they were all displaced persons living in the 'same standardised refugee world'?"--Introd.

Straddling the Iron Curtain?

Straddling the Iron Curtain? PDF Author: Machteld Venken
Publisher: Studies in History, Memory and Politics
ISBN: 9783631607534
Category : Immigrants
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This book neither researches structural integration, nor starts from ethnically defined categories. At the basis are two clearly distinguishable migration streams entering Belgium in the aftermath of World War II. First, there were about 350 soldiers from Poland who served with the Allies, had met Flemish young women during their liberation march through Flanders, married their financ?es in 1945 and 1946 and settled in their wives' hometowns and villages. And second, there were the Ostarbeiterinnen-- Soviet young women of Ukrainian, Russian, or Belarusian decent, who after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, were deported to Nazi Germany to do forced labor. While at work, the young women met Western European deported workers, volunteers, and prisoners of war. Although any off-duty contact between them was prohibited, numerous love affairs flourished and after their liberation by the Western Allies, about 4,000 Ostarbeiterinnen chose to migrate further to Belgium rather than be repatriated to the Soviet Union where they could be accused of collaboration ... The central question of this study is as follows: are the war experiences and war memories of these two migration streams similar because they were all displaced persons living in the 'same standardised refugee world'?"--Introd.

Post-Communist Poland - Contested Pasts and Future Identities

Post-Communist Poland - Contested Pasts and Future Identities PDF Author: Ewa Ochman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135915938
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book explores the reinterpretations of Poland’s past which have been undertaken by Polish national and local elites since the fall of communism. It focuses on remembrance practices and traces the de-commemorating of communism to examine the ways in which collective remembering and forgetting shapes present power constellations in Poland and impacts on foreign and domestic policy. The book outlines the detail of the new hegemonic national myths which are being established but also investigates fragmentation and diversification of commemorative practices at the local level that has the most potential to challenge the dominant vision of national Polish identity, historically centred on martyrdom, heroism and independence, as less relevant to Poland’s new aspirations for the future.

New Images of Nazi Germany

New Images of Nazi Germany PDF Author:
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786469668
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
With its battlefields paved over and its bunkers crumbled, the Third Reich of Nazi Germany nevertheless lives on in countless photographs that record an era of extraordinary brutality. This collection of more than 500 photographs taken by amateurs and professional propagandists provides a panoramic overview of Nazi Germany, offering intimate glimpses into living rooms and killing grounds, kitchens and concentration camps, movie theaters and battle fronts. The explanatory text explores the context of the images. Together, these photographs, most never before seen, create a time capsule, capturing the faces of Hitler's soldier's as well as those who suffered under the Nazi onslaught on humanity.

Music from a Speeding Train

Music from a Speeding Train PDF Author: Harriet Murav
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477904X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe—one in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture. The book emphasizes the Soviet Jewish response to World War II and the Nazi destruction of the Jews, disputing the claim that Jews in Soviet Russia did not and could not react to the killings of Jews. It reveals a largely unknown body of Jewish literature beginning as early as 1942 that responds to the mass killings. By exploring works through the early twenty-first century, the book reveals a complex, emotionally rich, and intensely vibrant Soviet Jewish culture that persisted beyond Stalinist oppression.

The Patriotism of Despair

The Patriotism of Despair PDF Author: Serguei Alex. Oushakine
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457866
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union altered the routines, norms, celebrations, and shared understandings that had shaped the lives of Russians for generations. It also meant an end to the state-sponsored, nonmonetary support that most residents had lived with all their lives. How did Russians make sense of these historic transformations? Serguei Alex. Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in Russia. In Barnaul, a major industrial city in southwestern Siberia that has lost 25 percent of its population since 1991, many Russians are finding that what binds them together is loss and despair. The Patriotism of Despair examines the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, graphically described in spray paint by a graffiti artist in Barnaul: "We have no Motherland." Once socialism disappeared as a way of understanding the world, what replaced it in people's minds? Once socialism stopped orienting politics and economics, how did capitalism insinuate itself into routine practices? Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in noncosmopolitan Russia. He introduces readers to the "neocoms": people who mourn the loss of the Soviet economy and the remonetization of transactions that had not involved the exchange of cash during the Soviet era. Moving from economics into military conflict and personal loss, Oushakine also describes the ways in which veterans of the Chechen war and mothers of soldiers who died there have connected their immediate experiences with the country's historical disruptions. The country, the nation, and traumatized individuals, Oushakine finds, are united by their vocabulary of shared pain.

The Rise and Fall of Communism

The Rise and Fall of Communism PDF Author: Archie Brown
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061885487
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 756

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Book Description
“A work of considerable delicacy and nuance….Brown has crafted a readable and judicious account of Communist history…that is both controversial and commonsensical.” —Salon.com “Ranging wisely and lucidly across the decades and around the world, this is a splendid book.” —William Taubman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era The Rise and Fall of Communism is the definitive history from the internationally renowned Oxford authority on the subject. Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Archie Brown examines the origins of the most important political ideology of the 20th century, its development in different nations, its collapse in the Soviet Union following perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe. Fans of John Lewis Gaddis, Samuel Huntington, and avid students of history will appreciate the sweep and insight of this epic and astonishing work.

Gendered Violence

Gendered Violence PDF Author: Irina Astashkevich
Publisher: Jews of Russia & Eastern Europ
ISBN: 9781618116161
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
This is a groundbreaking study of an important and neglected topic--the systematic use of rape as a strategic weapon of the genocidal anti-Jewish violence, known collectively as pogroms, that erupted in Ukraine in the period between 1917 and 1921, and in which at least 100,000 Jews died and undocumented numbers of Jewish women were raped. The book is based on the in-depth study of the scores of narratives of Jewish men and women who survived the pogrom violence, but were then all but forgotten for almost a century. This book deconstructs the motives of perpetrators, the experience and expression of trauma by the victimized community, and how the genocidal objectives of the pogrom perpetrators were achieved and maximized through the macabre carnival of violence.

EBOOK: THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING

EBOOK: THEORIES OF SOCIAL REMEMBERING PDF Author: Barbara Misztal
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
ISBN: 0335226507
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
“brilliant… an impressive tour de force” Network *Why does collective memory matter? *How is social memory generated, maintained and reproduced? *How do we explain changes in the content and role of collective memory? Through a synthesis of old and new theories of social remembering, this book provides the first comprehensive overview of the sociology of memory. This rapidly expanding field explores how representations of the past are generated, maintained and reproduced through texts, images, sites, rituals and experiences. The main aim of the book is to show to what extent the investigation of memory challenges sociological understandings of the formation of social identities and conflicts. It illustrates the new status of memory in contemporary societies by examining the complex relationships between memory and commemoration, memory and identity, memory and trauma, and memory and justice. The book consists of six chapters, with the first three devoted to conceptualising the process of remembering by analyzing memory's function, status and history, as well as by locating the study of memory in a broader field of social science. The second part of the book directly explores and discusses theories and studies of social remembering. After a short conclusion, which argues that study of collective memory is an important part of any examination of contemporary society, the glossary offers a concise and up to date overview of the development of relevant theoretical concepts. The result is an essential text for undergraduate courses in social theory, the sociology of memory and a wider audience in cultural studies, history and politics.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty PDF Author: Victoria Smolkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691197237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Last Witnesses

Last Witnesses PDF Author: Svetlana Alexievich
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0399588779
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
“A masterpiece” (The Guardian) from the Nobel Prize–winning writer, an oral history of children’s experiences in World War II across Russia NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions . . . a history of the soul.” Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded—a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation. Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war. Alexievich gives voice to those whose memories have been lost in the official narratives, uncovering a powerful, hidden history from the personal and private experiences of individuals. Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Last Witnesses is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the twentieth century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war. Praise for Last Witnesses “There is a special sort of clear-eyed humility to [Alexievich’s] reporting.”—The Guardian “A bracing reminder of the enduring power of the written word to testify to pain like no other medium. . . . Children survive, they grow up, and they do not forget. They are the first and last witnesses.”—The New Republic “A profound triumph.”—The Big Issue “[Alexievich] excavates and briefly gives prominence to demolished lives and eradicated communities. . . . It is impossible not to turn the page, impossible not to wonder whom we next might meet, impossible not to think differently about children caught in conflict.”—The Washington Post