Pius XII Noel, Gerard
2009, 2009-10-13, 2010-01-06
eBook
A thoughtful and provocative biography of the controversial Pope who led the Catholic Church during World War II There is a claim that Hitler's rise to power was left unchallenged by the inaction of ...Pope Pius XII. In contrast, Gerard Noel's Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler is a highly original study of the exercise of political and religious power, of realpolitik and the extent to which politics is always the art of the possible. This book also offers an intimate portrait of a man at the pinnacle of the Catholic church. Noel contends that Pius XII was mother-fixated and dominated by a German nun, Sister Pasqualina, who became the real power behind the throne and who was ultimately more liberal and anti-Nazi than the Pope himself. Indeed, he says, it was Pasqualina who did most to shelter the Jewish population of Rome. As time advanced, Pius XII became more and more aloof and rigid in his views. By 1950 he promulgated the Doctrine of The Assumption, the ultimate expression of autocratic power, as infallible. Today there is a movement to canonize Pius XII which is predictably resisted by many influential people, and for this reason alone Pius XII continues to command much attention, debate, and controversy. Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler is neither a demolition job nor a piece of hagiography, as Gerard Noel explores the fatal effect of the Vatican's concord with Hitler and Pius XII's failure to condemn Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews.
This paper aims to investigate the discursive strategies that produce the effect of sense of reality and truth in the graphic novel.Through the analysis of a representative graphic novel, The Anne ...Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography, this paper proposes a reflection on the constitutive elements of the act of witnessing, in view of Ricoeur's concepts of document and archived memory (2000) and on the effort to ensure that what it is said will be recognized as authentic.From this perspective, we can reflect on the relationship between the construction of a fictional illusion and the unveiling of the artificiality of a complex text, characterized by a heterogeneity of elements, which calls into question the discourse on truth-believing and fiduciary contract.
Hundreds of German-speaking film professionals took refuge in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, making a lasting contribution to American cinema. Hailing from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, ...and the Ukraine, as well as Germany, and including Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, these multicultural, multilingual writers and directors betrayed distinct cultural sensibilities in their art. Gerd Gemünden focuses on Edgar G. Ulmer'sThe Black Cat(1934), William Dieterle'sThe Life of Emile Zola(1937), Ernst Lubitsch'sTo Be or Not to Be(1942), Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang'sHangmen Also Die(1943), Fred Zinnemann'sAct of Violence(1948), and Peter Lorre'sDer Verlorene(1951), engaging with issues of realism, auteurism, and genre while tracing the relationship between film and history, Hollywood politics and censorship, and exile and (re)migration.
Over the past six decades, South Africans have drawn on the symbol of Anne Frank in diverse ways in order to make sense of their own history and politics. The portrayal of Anne underwent several ...dramatic shifts during the apartheid period and after the transition to a non-racial political system, from a 1950s play foregrounding the young diarist's Jewishness to a 2009 exhibition promoting tolerance and democracy. Below, the author considers what such representations can tell us more broadly about how the legacy of Nazism informed understandings of and responses to apartheid, and explores how the Holocaust was appropriated for disparate political ends in the postwar world's quintessential racial state. Adapted from the source document.
World War II coincided with cinema's golden age. Movies now considered classics were created at a time when all sides in the war were coming to realize the great power of popular films to motivate ...the masses. Through multinational research,One World, Big Screenreveals how the Grand Alliance--Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States--tapped Hollywood's impressive power to shrink the distance and bridge the differences that separated them. The Allies, M. Todd Bennett shows, strategically manipulated cinema in an effort to promote the idea that the United Nations was a family of nations joined by blood and affection.Bennett revisitsCasablanca,Mrs. Miniver,Flying Tigers, and other familiar movies that, he argues, helped win the war and the peace by improving Allied solidarity and transforming the American worldview. Closely analyzing film, diplomatic correspondence, propagandists' logs, and movie studio records found in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the former Soviet Union, Bennett rethinks traditional scholarship on World War II diplomacy by examining the ways that Hollywood and the Allies worked together to prepare for and enact the war effort.
In this important and original interdisciplinary work, well-known environmental philosopher Eric Katz explores technology’s role in dominating, and thus destroying, both nature and human life and ...society. Katz’s argument innovatively connects two distinct areas: the fundamental goal of the Holocaust, including Nazi environmental policy, to heal the degenerate elements of society; and the plan to heal degraded natural systems that informs the contemporary environmental policy of ‘ecological restoration’. In both arenas of ‘healing’, Katz argues that technology drives action, while domination emerges as the prevailing ideology. Katz’s work is a plea for the development of a technology that does not dominate and destroy but instead promotes autonomy and freedom. Anne Frank, a victim of Nazi ideology and action, saw the titular tree behind her secret annex as a symbol of freedom and moral goodness. In Katz’s argument, the tree represents a free and autonomous nature. 'Anne Frank’s Tree' is rooted in an empirical approach to philosophy, seating complex ethical ideas in a powerful narrative of historical fact and deeply personal lived experience.
In The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII Peter Kent shows how the Catholic Church was able to continue to exist on both sides of the Iron Curtain in spite of the division of Europe after the Second ...World War. Although Christian democracy became increasingly influential in western Europe, the struggle to preserve the position and rights of the Church in the east was much more difficult. When east European governments, under Moscow's direction, began their offensive against the independence of the Church in 1948, the papacy found that it stood alone, with little assistance from the U.S.
Libelling the dead? Rini, Regina
TLS, the Times Literary Supplement,
01/2022
6200
Journal Article, Trade Publication Article
Rini discusses a new investigation, led by a retired FBI agent and a team of Dutch journalists, which claims to explain how the Nazis found Anne Frank and her family living behind an Amsterdam ...Netherlands bookcase in 1944. They were apparently betrayed by Arnold van den Bergh, a hitherto obscure Dutch businessman. Anne Frank's diary is famous around the world, but the identity of the person who doomed her has remained a mystery. Now, if this investigation is given lasting credence, Arnold van den Bergh will be plucked from the forgotten depths to attract the opprobrium of future generations. So long as we are remembered there is still something of us in the world, something our loved ones can honor and tend - not out of duty to the historical record but out of duty to us. Perhaps "gone but not forgotten" means not yet truly gone.
From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless, ...from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of their times while providing a diversion—sometimes entertaining, sometimes provocative—from the realities of their own lives.
In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which popular American films made between the 1930s and the 1980s depicted working-class characters, comparing these cinematic representations with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and the promises made to them by the country's political elites. Based on close and imaginative viewings of dozens of films from every genre—among them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Boyz N the Hood—this book explores such topics as the role of censorship, attitudes toward labor unions and worker militancy, racism, the place of women in the workforce and society, communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and faith in liberal democracy.
Whether made during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, or the Vietnam era, the majority of films about ordinary working Americans, Bodnar finds, avoided endorsing specific political programs, radical economic reform, or overtly reactionary positions. Instead, these movies were infused with the same current of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through the American imagination.
