scholarly journals Emigration in Estonian Literature: “Self” and “Other” in the Context of European Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 341
Author(s):  
Anneli Mihkelev

The experience of emigration generated a new paradigm in Estonian culture and literature. After World War II Sweden became a new homeland for many people. Estonian culture and literature suddenly became divided into two parts. The political terror imposed restrictions on literature in homeland and the national ideology limited literature in the initial years of exile. Both were closed communities and were monolingual systems in a cultural sense because these systems avoided dialogue and the influence of other signs. It was a traumatic experience for nation and culture where the totalitarian political power and trauma have allied. The normal cultural communication was destroyed. But the most important thing at this time was memory, not just memory but entangled memory, which emigrants carried with them to the new homeland and which influenced people in Estonia. The act of remembering becomes crucial in the exile cultures.Estonian literature in exile and in the homeland presents the fundamental images of opening or closing, escaping or staying, and of flight or fight. Surrealism as well as fantasy and science fiction as the literary styles reveal what is hidden in the unconscious of a poet or a person or even in the collective memory of a nation. Surrealism has played a certain role in our literature, but it has been different from French surrealism, it is a uniquely Estonian surrealism. At the same time Estonia was already a new homeland for many refugees from Russia who had escaped during the Revolution of 1917 and World War I. August Gailit and Oskar Luts wrote about that issue in different literary works. Luts entangled different memories in his novel Tagahoovis (In the Backyard, 1933): the memories of Estonians and the memories of Russian emigrants. He also entangled historical narratives about World War I, the Russian revolution and the young Estonian state in the 1920s. Luts wrote about common people who interpret historical narratives. The novel was also published in exile in 1969 in Toronto.

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 203-212
Author(s):  
Miodrag Milovanović

Historian Jovana Babović claims that post-World War I Belgrade residents embraced different foreign cultural influences in an attempt to become citizens of western type metropolis. Various examples that support her claim were discovered through analysing a specific area of popular culture — science fiction — and enriched with interesting findings about surprisingly fast translations of certain stories, at the very beginning of the establishment of science fiction as an independent genre by Hugo Gernsback, publisher of the world’s first SF magazine Amazing Stories (1926). Several stories from its first issues appeared after only a few months in the Belgrade magazine Reč i slika [Words and Images], with faithful copies by domestic illustrators of original drawings by the leading US genre illustrator of that time, Frank R. Paul. Despite the relatively small number of translated stories, influence on domestic writers and illustrators of popular fiction was significant. The importance of these stories is reflected in the growing penetration of Serbian popular culture by US influences, which began to gain signifi cance in relation to the hitherto dominant French, German and Russian influences. Unfortunately, considering that most of the people involved in these activities died during World War II, and that there is no archived documentation, the pathways by which these stories reached readers in Serbia have yet to be uncovered.


Astraea ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-25

The study analyses Kate Atkinson’s novel “A God in Ruins” (2015) in terms of the multidisciplinary field of memory studies. Among the tasks that were set by the author of the study there are: 1) tracking the correlation of individual memory and collective memory; 2) outlining the traumatic experience of the Todd family, namely the “wounds of time” caused to the family by World War II; 3) comprehending the moments of “crystallization” of collective memory, its “thickening” in “places of remembrance”; 4) outlining the boundaries of the cultural archive reproduced in the novel. The study discusses the main message of the novel, which is focused on the theme of World War II, on its understanding and reflection in the collective memory of the British people. Through the image of the main character Teddy Todd, a military pilot, specially created by the author to describe war events, the reader can feel and experience the burden of air battles. Teddy Todd is a survivor who survived to preserve the memory of his fallen comrades, to testify war crimes and to raise a new generation of British people (post-war generation of children and grandchildren). The character realises that a peaceful life is not the final happy-end, because in addition to the need to arrange his own existence, it is necessary to heal the “wounds of time”, as well as to fulfil the duty of remembrance towards the dead men. These surviving memories should be embodied in “places of remembrance” (monuments, museums, military burials, works of art, etc.). The study outlines a conditional cultural archive that correlates with the text of Kate Atkinson’s novel. This arrangement of memorable dates, memories, and events can be tentatively described in the form of a scheme (the scheme is attached hereto), where the central place is occupied by the most catastrophic experience of people during the World War II. Other “places of remembrance” in connection with the war may be related to its causes or consequences. The main points of the conditional archive: World War I, coinciding with the birth of Teddy Todd; interwar period, which includes the childhood and adolescence of the character; World War II, which involves Teddy Todd in the Battle for Britain and the bombing of Germany; postwar reconstruction of Britain; pacifist movements and youth subcultures in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s that shaped Viola Todd’s worldview; The Queen’s Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee, coinciding with the death of Teddy Todd. The conditional archive of the novel, and the “places of remembrance” recreated in it correlate with the collective memory of people in Britain, thus encouraging the understanding of the traumatic experience caused by the World War II.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.


Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex examines how the American military has used cinema and related visual, sonic, and mobile technologies to further its varied aims. The essays in this book address the way cinema was put to work for purposes of training, orientation, record keeping, internal and external communication, propaganda, research and development, tactical analysis, surveillance, physical and mental health, recreation, and morale. The contributors examine the technologies and types of films that were produced and used in collaboration among the military, film industry, and technology manufacturers. The essays also explore the goals of the American state, which deployed the military and its unique modes of filmmaking, film exhibition, and film viewing to various ends. Together, the essays reveal the military’s deep investment in cinema, which began around World War I, expanded during World War II, continued during the Cold War (including wars in Korea and Vietnam), and still continues in the ongoing War on Terror.


Author(s):  
Mark Franko

This book is an examination of neoclassical ballet initially in the French context before and after World War I (circa 1905–1944) with close attention to dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar. Since the critical discourses analyzed indulged in flights of poetic fancy a distinction is made between the Lifar-image (the dancer on stage and object of discussion by critics), the Lifar-discourse (the writings on Lifar as well as his own discourse), and the Lifar-person (the historical actor). This topic is further developed in the final chapter into a discussion of the so-called baroque dance both as a historical object and as a motif of contemporary experimentation as it emerged in the aftermath of World War II (circa 1947–1991) in France. Using Lifar as a through-line, the book explores the development of critical ideas of neoclassicism in relation to his work and his drift toward a fascist position that can be traced to the influence of Nietzsche on his critical reception. Lifar’s collaborationism during the Occupation confirms this analysis. The discussion of neoclassicism begins in the final years of the nineteenth-century and carries us through the Occupation; then track the baroque in its gradual development from the early 1950s through the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.


2019 ◽  
pp. 096777201987609
Author(s):  
Liam McLoughlin

Dr Joseph Dudley ‘Benjy’ Benjafield qualified from University College Hospital Medical School, London in 1912. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I and was in charge of the 37th Mobile Bacteriological Laboratory serving with the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force when the Spanish flu struck in late 1918. He observed the features and clinical course of the pandemic and published his findings in the British Medical Journal in 1919. On return to civilian life, he was appointed as Consultant physician to St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, London where he remained in practice for the rest of his career. He was a respected amateur gentleman racing driver frequently racing at the Brooklands circuit from 1924 after buying a Bentley 3-litre and entering the Le Mans 24 h race seven times between 1925 and 1935, winning in 1927. He was one of an elite club of young men known as The Bentley Boys and went on to become a founding member of the British Racing Drivers Club (BRDC) in 1927. He rejoined the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II, serving briefly again in Egypt. He died in 1957.


2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Setran

AbstractIn the years between World War I and World War II in the United States, public and religious educators engaged in an extended struggle to define the appropriate nature of character education for American youth. Within a post-war culture agonizing over the sanctions of moral living in the wake of mass violence and vanishing certitudes, a group of conservative educators sought to shore up traditional values through the construction of morality codes defining the characteristics of the “good American.” At the same time, a group of liberal progressive educators set forth a vigorous critique of these popular character education programs. This article analyzes the nature of this liberal critique by looking at one leading liberal spokesperson, George Albert Coe. Coe taught at Union Theological Seminary and Teachers College, Columbia University, and used his platform in these institutions to forge a model of character education derived from the combined influences of liberal Protestantism and Deweyan progressive education. Coe posited a two-pronged vision for American moral education rooted in the need for both procedural democracy (collaborative moral decision making) and a democratic social order. Utilizing this vision of the “democracy of God,” Coe demonstrated the inadequacies of code-based models, pointing in particular to the anachronism of traditional virtues in a world of social interdependence, the misguided individualism of the virtues, and the indoctrinatory nature of conservative programs. He proposed that youth be allowed to participate in moral experimentation, adopting ideals through scientific testing rather than unthinking allegiance to authoritative commands. Expanding the meaning of morality to include social as well as personal righteousness, he also made character education a vehicle of social justice. In the end, I contend that Coe's democratic model of character education, because of its scientific epistemological hegemony and devaluing of tradition, actually failed to promote a truly democratic character.


1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”


2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-85
Author(s):  
Andrzej Wrobel ◽  
Malgorzata Korzeniowska ◽  
Agnieszka Polak ◽  
Marcin Szczygiel ◽  
Rafal Wrobel

AbstractThis is one of a series of articles about pharmacists in Lublin district, in the 19th and 20th c. The first recorded owner of the pharmacy in Adamów was Aleksander Biernacki (1851-1897), who passed it onto his son-in-law, Aleksander Rogoziński (1873-1941), and who, in turn, passed it onto his son, Stanisław Rogoziński (1913-1998), married to Tatiana (1918-1998). This family's history is an example of the history of Polish intelligentsia in the second half of 19th c., in the times of the Russian partition, World War I, 1918-1939, World War II and until contemporary times.


Author(s):  
Julie Hubbert

Much has been said about the Nazi appropriation of Wagner’s music in the 1930s and 1940s. As early as 1933, Hitler transformed the Bayreuth Festival into a celebration of National Socialist ideology and propagated miniature Wagner festivals to celebrate his own birthday. Wagner’s music also resounded throughout the culture and media at large. What has been less understood and examined, however, is how this same music was also used in nonnarrative films, newsreels, government documentaries, and industrial and advertising films of the period. Here the appropriation of Wagner is more complex and problematic. Master Hands (1936), the critically acclaimed, feature-length industrial film sponsored by the American car company Chevrolet, is an excellent example. As several film scholars have observed, the film is an artistic advertisement for the American automobile industry that borrows heavily from Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. But the film’s score, a compilation full of Wagner excerpts, arranged by composer Samuel Benavie and performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, about which almost nothing has been said, is equally propagandistic. By examining the music for this industrial advertisement for Chevrolet, this chapter not only re-examines the reception of Wagner in the United States between the World War I and World War II but also examines the integral role his music played in the creation of American films of persuasion. It explores the use U.S. industrial filmmakers made of Wagner’s music as an audible signifier not for German fascism but to advertise for American democracy, industry, and capitalism.


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