Germany and History in Flux: The Generational Changes in Approaching Germany\u27s Past

Historical memory, how a people remember the past, is in a state of almost eternal flux. By following the development of historical memory in post-war Germany, historians can better understand the generational and contemporary impact on popular history. German history illustrates the importance of this concept, as German history has a great deal of 20th century historical baggage

An “Eternal Memorial for Canadian Heroes”: The Dutch Town of Putte Commemorates the Essex Scottish Regiment

Twelve members of the Essex Scottish Regiment were killed at the Belgian-Dutch border town of Putte on 5 October 1944 in one of the Scheldt campaign’s opening engagements. Three years later, as Prime Minister Mackenzie King passed through Putte at the start of his first official visit to the Netherlands, the town presented him with a china plate bearing the names of the men who had died there. Putte’s modest, heartfelt gesture was the first official tribute that Canada’s leader received on Dutch soil, and provides insights into little-explored ways in which the Second World War continues to be commemorated

Miguel de Unamuno and Heraclitus: from ‘The Eternal Elegy’ (‘La elegía eterna’) to ‘The Cut Flower’(‘La flor tronchada’)

Podeu consultar la versió en castellà del document a: http://hdl.handle.net/2445/33131The aim of this brief article is to demonstrate and analyze the influence of Heraclitus’s thought on some of the poems written by Miguel de Unamuno, in particular ‘La elegía eterna’ and ‘La flor tronchada’. At times –as in ‘La elegía eterna’– Heraclitus merely serves as a sort of a walking stick, an aid to his efforts to poetically reveal his anxieties. On other occasions –as in ‘La flor tronchada’– he genuinely needs Heraclitus’s philosophy to illustrate his view of human life and its relation to God as unending warfare

Postcolonialism and the study of anti-semitism

In recent years Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) has become a common point of reference for those within postcolonial studies—such as Paul Gilroy, Aamir Mufti, and Michael Rothberg—who wish to explore the historical intersections between racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. “Postcolonialism and the Study of Anti-Semitism” relates Arendt’s comparative thinking to other anticolonial theorists and camp survivors at the end of the Second World War—most prominently, Jean Améry, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, and Jean-Paul Sartre—who all made connections between the history of genocide in Europe and European colonialism. The article then compares this strand of comparative thought with postcolonial theorists of the 1970s and 1980s who, contra Arendt, divide the histories of fascism and colonialism into separate spheres. It also contrasts postcolonial theory with postcolonial literature by exploring the intertwined histories in the fiction of V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Caryl Phillips. Said’s late turn to Jewish exilic thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Erich Auerbach, and Sigmund Freud is also related to this Arendtian comparative project. The main aim of the article is to promote a more open-minded sense of historical connectedness with regard to the histories of racism, fascism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism

In and Out of Crisis:Chronotopes of Memory

Memory is key to understanding the temporal-spatial coordinates of producing ‘crisis’ and acting in it. By reshaping infrastructures of past, present, and future, and interlinking places and spaces of crisis, memory often appears to be instrumental for proclaiming, experiencing, and responding to states of emergency.This chapter scrutinizes the varied workings of memory in/of crises by examining mnemonic chronotopes and exploring their potential as conceptual figures. Thinking about crises through chronotopes of memory, that is, temporal-spatial frameworks of recall involved in imagining and narrating, can reveal the mechanisms behind cycles of oppression (spaces marked as sites of perpetual crises; times of dispossession conceived as eternal) as well as ways of breaking these cycles, creating openings within them.Drawing on various situated cases, the chapter reflects on the local and global dimensions of contemporary crises—of responses to migrants from the Middle East in the Greek borderlands and their ramifications within European politics; of post-truth politics in Russia in times of the war in Ukraine; of deepening structural inequalities and protest in South Africa; and of the ways in which post-transitional dystopian imaginations in the Global South and Eastern Europe are produced as well as countered through memory practices

THE RULE OF SÁNDOR PETŐFI IN THE MEMORY POLICY OF HUNGARIANS, SLOVAKS AND THE MEMBERS OF THE HUNGARIAN MINORITY GROUP IN SLOVAKIA IN THE LAST 150 YEARS

Sándor Petőfi was the greatest poet of the Hungarian romantic literature, but aft er his participation in the events of the Hungarian revolution of 1848 he became the legendary fi gure of the national liberty and republicanism. Petőfi ’s mysterious disappearance aft er the batt le of Segesvár further confi rmed the importance of his personal heroism and at the end of the 19th Century Petőfi became an emblematic fi gure of the national freedom and independence not just in Hungary, but in Europe too.Petőfi ’s cult was signifi cant in the period between the two world wars too, mainly at the time of hundredth anniversary of his birth. A memorial banknote was issued on this occasion and were staged a national commemoration in 1925.In the communist era Petőfi was the idol of the radical revolutionary republicans, who fought against the members of the oppressive ruling classes. His glorious and heroic image became one of the fi gures of the Hungarian communist pantheon. But also the anti-dictatorship young intellectuals viewed Petőfi as a role model and founded Petőfi Circle prepared for the events of the revolution of 1956.Until the end of the seventies Petőfi became again the emblematic historical hero of the antiregime democratic opposition movement. Th e square at Petőfi statue was the scene of many demonstrations. Th is square was also the favorite commemoration place also of the Hungarianliberal political party aft er the Hungarian political transition in the last decade of 20th Century