The 'lost child' as figure of trauma and recovery in early post-war cinema: Fred Zinnemann's The Search (1948) and Natan Gross's Unzere Kinder (1948)

The article examines the figure of the ‘lost child’ in feature films of the immediate post-war period. The figure’s enormous symbolic value as innocent victim and future generation, granted the ‘lost child’ a key position in post-war discourse, including films which tried to grapple with the moral and physical destruction of the continent after 1945. National film industries, particularly of the perpetrator nation, employed the ‘lost child’ for genre stories in which the post-war chaos is being mastered and a new, masculine national self is re-built. However, films made by victim groups outside a national context rely on the ‘lost child’ to broach the destruction of their identity by war and persecution. Analysing two films, Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948) and Nata Gross’s Unzere Kinder (1948), I argue that they use the child figure to deal with traumatization and make it part of the reconstruction of communal intergenerational relations. This does not result in stories of masculine mastery but in narratives that incorporate moments of trauma process emerging around destroyed mother-child relations. The films, encoding traumatization in film language, develop a rich cinematic language along questions of identity and form a first instance of posttraumatic cinema

Stability index for orbits with nonvanishing diffusion

The known concepts of Lyapunov exponent, moment Lyapunov exponents, and stability index for stationary points of stochastic systems are carried over for invariant orbits with nonvanishing diffusion. The obtained general results are applied to investigating stochastic stability and stabilization of orbits on the plane. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RR 5549(359)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

The probability approach to numerical solution of nonlinear parabolic equations

A number of new layer methods for solving semilinear parabolic equations and reaction-diffusion systems is derived by using probabilistic representations of their solutions. These methods exploit the ideas of weak sense numerical integration of stochastic differential equations. In spite of the probabilistic nature these methods are nevertheless deterministic. A convergence theorem is proved. Some numerical tests are presented. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RR 5549(380) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

Evaluation of moment Lyapunov exponents for second order linear autonomous SDE

Deterministic methods for evaluation of moment Lyapunov exponents are derived for two-dimensional systems with non-degenerate noise. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RR 5549(216)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman