Transitions Online_Around the Bloc - 24 September
News highlights: Russia’s Olympic nightmare; Serbia’s unwelcome patriarch; tourism in Uzbekistan; Holocaust remembrance in Lithuania; and the Russian-Estonian border.
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News highlights: Russia’s Olympic nightmare; Serbia’s unwelcome patriarch; tourism in Uzbekistan; Holocaust remembrance in Lithuania; and the Russian-Estonian border.
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News highlights: In the news today: Germany, Poland, and WWII; Ukrainian women in the military; a hidden gem in Zagreb; vintage cars in Prague; and Tajik family ties.
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Regional highlights: controversial wartime celebrations; Uzbekistan and Afghanistan; a new old Chisinau synagogue; a Russian humanoid robot; and Ukrainian boxer Vasyl Lomachenko.
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Travelling by air is perceived to be the safest way of transportation. Since the very beginning of the evolution of this amazing industry, safety aspect was one of the highest priority. Taking into consideration the specifications and features of aviation, it is no wonder why it relied from the very beginning on how safe it would look like for the public opinion. The standards have been developed over decades by each country as well as in the order of international cooperation. That led to the establishment of common policies, guidelines and standards that were agreed to be uphold in the sky. Such standards are not easy either to create or to maintain and execute. An example of the European Union and the United States of America in that matter shows how complex those regulations has to be and how complicated is to establish such relations.
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The article presents one of the most recent (victimless) ethnic conflict between the Hungarian minority from Romania (more precisely the Székelys/Szeklers from Harghita county) and members of the Romanian majority over a war cemetery where both sides had claims of ownership and former combatants/war heroes interred. The conflict is put in the general context of nowadays Romanian-Hungarian relations, using the theoretical “triadic nexus“ (national minority – nationalizing state – external national motherland) of interacting political fields provided by Rogers Brubaker. We can thus see the reciprocal influence between the three mentioned elements, and how they can work for both complicating and/or simplificating an already intricate reality.
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The political significance of the Trifolium is questioned by some historians. The Trifolium — a three-leaf clover — was an informal political agreement between chancellor Jakub Zadzik, Bishop of Chełmno, hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski and Stanisław Lubomirski, voivode of Ruthenia. In the years 1631–1632, the Trifolium successfully supported the issue of emoluments for the members of the king’s family in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but failed to reform the elections, opposed by representatives of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. During the interregnum of 1632, the Trifolium did not allow to restrain the authority of the king and the Senate for the benefit of the chamber of deputies. The Trifolium also supported the election of Prince Władysław Vasa for the Polish king in exchange for concessions regarding the elect’s titles of the tsar and Swedish king. This allowed the conclusion of peace with Russia in 1634 and a truce with Sweden in 1635. The king, dissatisfied with the Trifolium “guardianship”, enforced Zadzik’s resignation from the Chancellery in 1635 and the Trifolium began to lose its political significance.
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Personal reflection honoring the progressive cultural heritage of the city of Tuzla.
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Personal reflection honoring the progressive cultural heritage of the city of Tuzla.
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Review of the war documentary "Miss Sarajevo" and the tragedy of the double-bind position of the subaltern.
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Review of the war documentary "Miss Sarajevo" and the tragedy of the double-bind position of the subaltern.
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Le circostanze in cui si sono svolte le dimissioni di monsignor Stanisław Wielgus il 7 gennaio 2007 sono state definite ‘molto polacche’. Di domenica, la domenica stessa che avrebbe dovuto sancire il suo investimento, Wielgus fa rinuncia al suo ruolo di arcivescovo di Varsavia all’inizio della solenne cerimonia di insediamento nella cattedrale della capitale, rinuncia preceduta da una sofferta confessione sulla sua passata collaborazione come informatore dei servizi segreti polacchi e corredata da una pubblica richiesta di perdono. Tutto l’episodio è stato “molto polacco nell’orgoglio d’una decisione che rattristerà e turberà la Polonia intera, ma che ha anche le connotazioni d’un beau geste compiuto in una cornice di abbagliante solennità”.
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This article reconstructs the role of heroisation in the context of coming to terms with the Holocaust. It does so by looking at verbal discourse and music in the context of Holo-caust remembrance in the years around the turn of the millennium. It focusses on two compositions that were premiered during the annual liberation celebrations at the Maut-hausen concentration camp memorial site: Helmut Rogl’s Memento (1995) and Helmut Schmidinger’s Drei Momente – über Motive aus dem Lied ‘Die Moorsoldaten’ (20 05). The focus on musical works results from the fact that music – sound events, texts set to music, explanations in programme notes, and its performance contexts – is well suited for re-searching heroic ideas. This is so because, since the Baroque period, music has served as ‘accompaniment’ for events with a heroic character, and listeners ascribe a ‘heroic ex-pression’ to some musical styles. On this basis, the article shows that heroic thinking has always played a complex role in the Holocaust, ranging from auto-psychotherapy to the formation of moral identity to the propaganda of political ideologies, albeit the latter is to be distinguished from the actual confrontation with the murder of the European Jews.
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Utószezon today numbers among the forgotten or hardly acknowledged works on the Holocaust, yet it reveals interesting aspects of the politics of memory in the Kádár era. At the same time, the film illustrates Zoltán Fábris’s approach – still a strange approach by present standards of Holocaust memory – which places the question of guilt and co-responsibility in a larger context. To Fábris, the contemporary societal relevance of his themes and their meaning for the present were more important than empty memorial rituals.
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This article examines A. Sutzkever’s series of Yiddish prose poems, Green Aquarium (1953– 1954), as an exemplar of an alternative, surreal tradition of Holocaust remembrance that stands in contrast to more austere modes of witnessing. Sutzkever can be understood as one of several refugee poets and artists in the early post-war period whose works mapped out highly imaginative liminal spaces between the past and present, living and dead.
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Today, the focus on Maly Trostenets very much evolves around the fact that it was until quite recently an ‘unknown’ or ‘forgotten’ site due to the very few who survived there. However, by underlining this ‘unknownness’, the focus seems to shift to how Maly Trostenets has been remembered, instead of what happened at this site. For example, the very interesting travelling exhibition on Maly Trostenets which is now on display in the Haus der Geschichte Österreich has a large section on the commem-oration of Maly Trostenets in different countries. Although it is indeed interesting to understand how it is remembered, I do wonder whether we already know enough about this place to make a step from the history of Maly Trostenets to the memory of Maly Trostenets.
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Review of: Meike Wulf: Shadowlands. Memory and History in Post-Soviet Estonia. Berghahn. New York – Oxford 2016. X, 246 S., Ill., graph. Darst. ISBN 978-1-78533-073-5. ($ 90,–.). Reviewed by Lars Fredrik Stöcker.
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Review of: Česká paměť. Národ, dějiny a místa paměti [Tschechisches Gedächtnis. Nation, Geschichte und Erinnerungsorte.] Hrsg. von Radka Šustrová und Lubomíra Hédlová. (Historie, Bd. 1.) Academia [u. a.]. Praha 2014. 457 S. ISBN 978-80-200-2411-4. (CZK 395,–.). Reviewed by Frauke Wetzel.
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Review of: Geschichtspolitik in Europa seit 1989. Hrsg. von Etienne François , Kornelia Kończal, Robert Traba und Stefan Troebst. (Moderne europäische Geschichte, Bd. 3.) Wallstein. Göttingen 2013. 560 S., Ill. ISBN 978-3-8353-1068-1. (€ 42,–.). Reviewed by Klaus Ziemer.
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The “Memorial turn” actualized discussions around a number of concepts that have become established in historical science, including such an analytical category as the event. The paper considers this category in the “history-memory”, turning to the study of mechanisms of transformation of the historical fact into a symbol and an image that defines the structure of a national-state narrative. In this paradigm, the social context of the event, as well as its perception by active participants, witnesses, descendants, historians of different generations, are equally focused on, and the principle cognitive setting is to take into account the probabilistic nature of events and the subjectivity of the actors. The patterns of using the images and symbols of historical events in the politics of memory and the practice of official commemorations were determined; their characteristic features were revealed: a close connection with the political process, a surge of activity in referring to images of the past, their conscious choice, increasing their influence on the mass historical consciousness of society. It was emphasized that the limitations of the impact of professionals on mass consciousness are not least determined by the social functions of a modern historical myth.
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