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At first glance, the Catholic identity of a Cardinal should not be a complicated topic, particularly if we are dealing with a person who became one of the most famous symbols of Catholic resistance against communism during the Cold War Era. In the 1950s Cardinal József Mindszenty was regarded as one of the most prominent martyrs of the Catholic Church. This reputation emerged again in the early 1970s all over the world, particularly in North and South America, but also in Western Europe, Austria, and Germany. He was arrested, put on trial in 1949, imprisoned, allegedly tortured, was freed during the revolution of 1956, and spent the next 15 years of his life as an exile in the U. S. Embassy in Budapest. He died only four years later, in 1975, in his last exile in Vienna. But József Mindszenty, born József Pehm in 1892, stood also for a very specific understanding of Hungarian Catholicism: a particularly conservative, anti-liberal, legitimist, pre-Vatican II, reactionary, traditionalist and nationalist Catholicism. In my paper, I look at the case of Cardinal Mindszenty in order to explore the most important aspects and changes of Hungarian Catholic identity during the 20th century. I want to show that, contrary to the common view, most questions regarding Mindszenty and Hungarian Catholicism are still open and require further research.
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The author – inspired by the notion of “phantasm” as proposed by Maria Janion, and using the concepts of, among others, German Ritz (the poetics of inexpressible homosexual desire and “complex of corporality”), Marc Ferro (film as a symptom revealing the “hidden side” of power and society) and Michel Foucault (“arrangement of sexuality”) – examines the attitude of Czechoslovak cinema towards male nudity and sexuality in a broader context of socio-political history and filmmaking in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. An analysis, centred on two films: the Labakan (The False Prince) by Václav Krška (1956), and Kluci z bronzu (Boys of Bronze) by Stanislav Strnad (1980), is to comparatively examine how homosexual phantasms were sublimated and transferred to the screen in two historical moments – in the second half of the fifties, i.e. when the country was going out of the Stalinist and socialist realism period, and at the turn of the eighties, that is in the middle of the period of normalization and the regime of Gustáv Husák. The main purpose of the analysis is to examine a symptomatic change in quality – called by Szymański as “degeneration” – of the way in which homosexual imaginations were disclosed and functioned in films, that reflected their appropriation, “reorientation” and exploitation by the totalitarian authorities. In the rich literary, dramatic and film achievements of Krška we find many homosexual “hidden signals” as well as clear connotations and indications, expressing themselves in, among other things, spectacularization and erotization of the male body, a peculiar construct of protagonists-outsiders, questioning of gender stereotypes, stylisation modelled on antiquity, oriental or expressionistic one, etc. Special place in his creativity is occupied by the Czechoslovak-Bulgarian film super-production titled Labakan (The False Prince), in which the adaptation of the fairy tale about a tailor’s apprentice who wanted to take the place of the vizier’s son became for the director a vehicle for his personal, author’s commentary. The homosexual (homotextual) character of Krška’s film reveals itself in its transgressive plot open to a “double reading”, in its specific pansexuality and the “complex of male corporality”, governed by the logic of covetous look, and in the paracamp aesthetic associated today with queer style. In Szymański’s opinion, the materialization of homosexual phantasms on the screen offered both for the author and the spectators an area of freedom and “artistry of life”: on the one hand it offered them shelter and was an escape from the oppressive cultural reality, on the other – it was becoming the means to contest and the practice of resistance to the heteronormative and totalitarian world. Whereas a barracks-sports farce titled Kluci z bronzu (Boys of Bronze) by Stanislav Strnad belongs to a bigger group of films which in this popular form were taking up the subject of exceptional and unique on the world scale events – Czechoslovak Spartakiads, with their most spectacular part in the form of mass gymnastic compositions performed at the Strahov Stadium in Prague. The fictional history of soldiers, who – overcoming their limitations and reverses of fortune, were preparing a composition of artistic gymnastics for the Spartakiads, was combined with documental shots of the real performing sports compositions at the Strahov in 1980. It inscribes into the normalized film “formats”, that is the tested and “patented” stylistic and genre formulas used by the authorities as “soft” means of propaganda and indoctrination. The way in which Strnad presents military and sport homosocial relations, together with a domination in the film of the element of masculinity and the specific “complex of male corporality”, imply some special interrelation between the erotisation of the male body, ideological directives, and political needs. What is more, according to Szymański, they also indicate that the purpose of the communist authorities was not only the “standard” creation and propagation of “appropriate” models of “real” masculinity, but also such shaping of male corporality and eroticism that they would support the existing political order instead of subverting it, and replicate the normalized “arrangement of sexuality”. In this context the author looks closely at the Spartakiada’s mass gymnastic exercises demon- strated by male gymnasts, and especially at the hugely popular shows performed by almost fourteen thousand of half-naked soldiers, which were an unprecedented in the communist public space celebration of male physicality and sensuality, characterised by special idealisation and aestheticisation, outstanding choreography and spectacular figures of the performers, erotic dialectics of clothes and nudity, and the condensation of tension which was gradually and sophisticatedly built. In these shows, the instrumentalisation of gender and eroticism, characteristic of Spartiakiads in general, was followed by the instrumentalisation of codes of homosexual look and desire, neutralisation of inversive connotations – were harnessed for the use of normalization. Homosexual phantasms which in the time of Krška could have been a stimulant of personal expression and practice of opposition, and at least an internal shelter and refuge, twenty years later were appropriated, manipulated and instrumentalised by the communist authorities, becoming part of their system normalizing procedures, a tool for ordering or “arranging sexuality” in accordance with political lines, and an instrument of self-totalitaring and self-harnessing actions.
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Розвиток соціологічної теорії повоєнних десятиліть в цілому та еволюція соціології розвитку та модернізації зокрема засвідчили, що в академічному середовищі разом із суто науковим поділом праці (як-от зосередження на певних проблемах та/або регіонах світу) існує ще й „поділ” праці, заснований на ідеологічних розмежуваннях. Науковці, які захищають парадигму - в найширшому розумінні цього терміну - ліберального капіталізму, - зазвичай, демонструють євроцентристську поставу, позаяк для них саме Захід був і залишається джерелом привабливих ідей та суспільних практик (неперевершений ступінь суспільного динамізму, диференціації, автономії індивіда та свободи), які повинні відтворюватися Рештою. За найпромовистіший приклад такої орієнтації править дослідницька програма модернізації, особливо її перша, оптимістична, фаза [1, 66-98].
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This paper makes an attempt to analyze the mindset of creative Hungarian intellectuals who accepted various influential roles in Stalinist Hungary. It uses contemporary and other Hungarian and non-Hungarian patterns of intellectual behavior as a basis of comparison. The argument is shaped with the help of the conceptual framework of scapegoating.
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“The Impact of 1956 on the Hungarians of Transylvania”, provides a 50-year retrospective analysis of the political consequences of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 on the Hungarians in neighboring Romania. It focuses on the inter-ethnic knock-on effects in the Romanian Workers Party, the “Hungarian/Mures-Hungarian Autonomous Region” of Transylvania, and the cultural institutions of the Hungarian minority. It links these developments to present-day Romanian-Hungarian relations, both on the interstate and the intrastate levels.
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Christian churches both Catholic and Protestant experienced a renewal of their theology and a revival of their impact on society in the interwar period; and they could count on the continuous good will of the conservative Horthy regime. Convinced that the leading role of Jewish intellectuals in the 1918–1919 revolutionary upheaval resulted the near ruin of the traditional society and amidst the shock caused by the collapse of historical Hungary, some leading members of Protestant churches endorsed various forms of political anti-Semitism, including the acceptance of some type of curtailment of religious equality, which had once been acclaimed as a significant achievement of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism. While maintaining their sympathy for the Horthy regime till the very last, the leaders of the churches opposed the persecution and deportation of Hungarian Jews, which began escalating after March 1944. This paper will discuss some of the possible contexts of the Reformed Church’s public statements concerning the Holocaust after 1945 and will focus mainly on the writings and sermons of the leading figure of the Reformed Church Bishop László Ravasz (1882–1975).
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The fate of East-Central Europe until the fall of the communist regimes was determined by the status quo that the allies set up in 1945. Despite the fact that it has never been formally recorded in any official document, both superpowers, which controlled the bipolar world order after World War II – namely the United States and the Soviet Union – attributed a pivotal role to this tacit agreement in the East- West relationship. Their mutual consent started to work as an automatic rule of thumb in the chilliest years of the Cold War era, and developed afterwards, when the sporadic East-West conflicts needed to be managed. On the basis of this conception, the passivity of the West at the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is not as surprising and incomprehensible as contemporary public opinion in Hungary regarded it. The Hungarian uprising was not merely inconvenient for the western powers but it totally contradicted their policy, which especially after 1955 aimed at a compromise with the Soviet Union through the mutual acquiescence of the existing status quo.
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The series of events that began in early 1989 and culminated in the free elections in March 1990 have been characterized as "revolution" of one of four kinds. According to the British journalist T. G. Ash, it was a "refolution" suggesting that what happened in Hungary was more than reform but less than a revolution. Though intended as a clever oxymoron, the term is grossly misleading as it obscures and trivializes the qualitative difference between the point of departure and the point of arrival, that is, the difference between dictatorship and democracy According to the former democratic oppositionist ideologue János Kis and several others who chose this formulation, the Hungarian events amounted to a "lawful revolution." The term stresses the notion of legal continuity and the nonviolent and non-confrontational nature of events. In my view, it is a misnomer as it deliberately overlooks the essentially politics- and power-driven substance of the process and, by design, fails to make any kind of moral distinction between the "before" and "after" spirit and normative content of laws and institutions.
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Some say that the event, which the Croatian parliament sponsors, has become the largest annual gathering of neo-Nazis in Europe.
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The article is an attempt to scratch the biography of Adam Plesnar. The analysis was subjected to the activity of the protagonist until 1977. Plesnar was an active member of the Club of Young Catholics at the University of Wroclaw, co-founder of the Young Democrats (ZMD). Already in the sixties he was convicted for opposition activities. In the seventies he was an activist of Polish Esperanto Association. He participated in protests against changes in the Constitution of the PRL. Since 1977 belonged to the members of the Movement in Defense of the Rights of Man and Citizen (ROPCiO) and the leader of the Movement of Free Democrats (RWD), an activist of the Wroclaw opposition. Within the Movement sought to participation of the opposition in legitimate forms of political activity, including in the elections to the Sejm PRL, while remaining critical of the existing system.
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Państwo polskie jeszcze w trakcie walk w 1945 r. przeciwko III Rzeszy znalazło się pod rządami komunistów. Część patriotycznie nastawionej młodzieży nie pogodziła się z tym faktem i zaczęła przeciwstawiać się procesowi indoktrynacji. Młodzież podjęła z ustrojem komunistycznym walkę, której główną formą była dzia- łalność propagandowa. Młode pokolenie starało się w ulotkach pokazać prawdę o rzeczywistości czasu stalinizmu, np. opisywano brak swobód obywatelskich. Niektóre ugrupowania podejmowały także trudne kwestie stosunków polsko-żydowskich.
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Moscow seems indeed to be a centre of world tourism. On the one hand, its tourism attractiveness for Russians and foreigners, as well as the wide opportunities it offers to its own inhabitants, stimulates trips for tourism and recreational purposes. On the other hand, it is determined by a number of historical, geographical, demographic, geopolitical, economic and socio-cultural factors.
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Slovakia and the structures of Communist Party of Slovakia (CPS), local branch of statewide Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), played an important role in the period of attempts to reform the communist political system in Czechoslovakia in the years 1968–1969. The effort to gain an equal position to Slovakia in the common state catalyzed the crisis in the ruling establishment that led to election of Slovak communists‘ leader Alexander Dubček to the post of First Secretary of CC CPC. Dubček became a symbol of reform movement in the party. In Bratislava he was succeded by Vasil Biľak, one of the main supporters of Warsaw Pact‘s military intervention in Czechoslovakia. After invasion in the August 1968 the leadership in CPS was taken over by Gustáv Husák, who suppressed the freedoms in Slovakia, and after becoming First Secretary of CC CPC in April 1969 continued the „normalization” in the rest of the country. The situation in Slovakia was observed by the diplomats of People’s Republic of Poland and functionaries of Polish United Workers’ Party especially from regions bordering with Slovakia, who maintained contacts with Slovak comrades.
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Édouard Herriot was one of the leading European politicians, who became involved in propagating the idea of the European integration in the 1920s. He closely collaborated with the main figures of the European unification movement – the author of the Pan-european project – Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, and Aristide Briand, Franch Prime Minister who proposed the conception of the United States of Europe in 1930. Herriot was the first governing politician to officially support Paneuropa in 1924. Afterwards in subsequent public speeches and articles he called for bringing this plan into effect. Few years later he also became involved in propagating the Briand Plan. At the same time he created his own concept, differing in some important aspects from the Pan-european project and the Briand Plan. He presented its details in the book „Europe” published in 1930. After Briand’s death he became the main figure of the European unification movement, however, in the mid-1930s, he broke with it because of the conflict with Coudenhove- Kalergi. After World War II he become once more involved in the actions for European integration. He continued it until the beginning of the 1950s. Despite the important role he played in the European unification movement, his actions usually remain in the shadow of his fa
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Moscow seems indeed to be a centre of world tourism. On the one hand, its tourism attractiveness for Russians and foreigners, as well as the wide opportunities it offers to its own inhabitants, stimulates trips for tourism and recreational purposes. On the other hand, it is determined by a number of historical, geographical, demographic, geopolitical, economic and socio-cultural factors.
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The article is devoted to the linguistic image of an angel – a good spirit – depicted in the lyrics of contemporary secular Polish songs. The analyzed research material included 70 lyrics of songs released in the period from 1985 to 2012. The songs represent different music styles: from pop and folk music to blues and sung poetry to hip-hop, various genres of rock and so-called gothic metal. The analysis of the linguistic image of those supernatural beings involved the following categories: 1) appearance, 2) location, 3) features, 4) functions, 5) emotions and behavior. Special attention was paid to the figure of a guardian angel and its unusual variant – a winged protector who no longer fulfill their duties, as well as ‘humanized’ angels, resembling humans in their physical and behavioral characteristics. It was stated that the figure of an angel in the analyzed lyrics is characterized by extensive functionality. The linguistic portrait of that spiritual being is an interesting combination of concepts present in the collective consciousness (to some extent originating in the Bible and angelic iconography) and individual ideas developed by the songwriters.
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Antique myth about Pigmalione and Galateee is interpreted in M. Gofajzen’s poem Teogonija. The eternal plot is transformed in the tideway of postmodernist tendencies. The invariant is exposed to a reduction (the motive of love of the artist and the statue which was created by him disappears) and a inversion – as a result of the creation certificate revived Galatea dies and leaves the world which is created by Pygmalion, but exchange she has an opportunity of eternal life in the uncountable worlds of addressees of art under condition of successful communicative interaction between the creator and the recipient. The artist who has given freedom to the product cannot influence its destiny and should continue creative activity. Thus the author assimilates to God-founder who creates own world by the Universe example. Interpretation of an antique plot in the postmodernist text shows the aesthetic complexities accompanying creative process, and confirms the new status of the Creator, removing the thesis about “Death of the Author” in its traditional understanding.
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For many years, a history handbook has been the most popular didactic object, during lessons and homework alike. Until recently, such handbooks have been in the form of traditional books, but the technological development and common digitization have lead to attempts to replace such books with computer software. The article presents various ideas of modernization of the didactic concept of a history handbook, proposed by the pedagogic and didactic-historic circles in the second half of 20th C. and the beginning of 21st C. (e.g. handbooks with audio / video carriers, audio-visual handbooks, educational sets). On the basis of abridged history of the handbook, from the end of 18th C. until today’s e-handbooks, the author analyses individual elements of the didactic concept of handbooks for teaching history, highlighting the symptoms of the most important changes with specific examples. The author concludes that it is the publishing market that forces, to the biggest extent, the changes in the didactic concept of a history handbook; hence, it is necessary to conduct scientific research on the efficiency of the proposed changes and consequently to determine what the real impact of the new elements of the handbook’s didactic history will be on better results of education.
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