Unique, truthful, brutal... Neorealism is often associated with adjectives stressing its peculiarities in representing the real, its lack of antecedents, and its legacy in terms of film style. While ...this is useful when confronting auteurs such as De Sica, Rossellini or Visconti, it becomes problematic when examining a widespread cultural practice that realistic modes deeply affected. This cultural production included filmmaking, literature, visual culture and photography, as well as media discourses. It was internally contradictory but fruitful inasmuch as its legacy influenced national culture for many decades to come. The volume spotlights post-war Italian film culture by locating a series of crossroads, i.e. topics barely examined when discussing neorealism: nation, memory and trauma, visual culture, stardom, and performance. The aim is to deconstruct neorealism as a monument and to open up its cultural history.
The dominant public figure in Brazil from 1930 until 1954 was a highly contradictory and controversial personality. Getúlio Vargas, from the pampas of the southern frontier state of Rio Grande do ...Sul, became the dictator who ruled without ever forgetting the lower classes. Vargas was a consummate artist at politics. He climbed the political ladder through seats in the state and national legislatures to the post of federal Finance Minister and to the governorship of Rio Grande do Sul. His career then took him to the National Palace as Provisional President and as Constitutional President, and later as the dictator of his "New State." After his deposition in 1945 and a period of semiretirement, his continuing widespread popularity resulted in his successful come-back campaign in 1950 for the Presidency on the Labor Party ticket. Vargas' contributions to Brazilian political and economic life were many and important. Taking advantage of the power which his political magic provided him, he brought Brazil from a loose confederacy of semifeudal states to a strongly centralized nation. He was a great eclectic, welding into his social, political, and economic policies what he found good in various programs. He was also a great opportunist in the sense that he adroitly took advantage of conditions and circumstances to effect his ends. He was intimately related to the revolutionary changes in Brazilian life after 1930. Vargas, "Father of the Brazilians," attributed achievements such as these to power in his own hands. His foes, however, still feared the political wizard, and they cheered the military when it deposed him. After his return, "on the arms of the people," Vargas saw that the armed forces were determined to repeat history, and in 1954 he chose another path—suicide. All of these exciting events are related in John W. F. Dulles's Vargas of Brazil: A Political Biography. Despite its emphasis on Vargas the politician and statesman, the reader comes to know Vargas the man. For this portrait of Vargas and of Brazil the author has drawn much material from State Department papers in the National Archives and from other public sources, and from interviews with numerous persons who were participants in the events he describes or observers of them. The result is an interesting, revealing, valid account of an important people. Many illustrations supplement the text.
Thousands of testimonies were collected in the immediate post-war period from child survivors of the Holocaust. These testimonies tell us much about the children's Holocaust experience and about ...society's attitude to child survivors. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of two such testimonies on the backdrop of historical research of their setting and context. Through our analysis of two children's testimonies given in the Aschau DP Children's Camp, we demonstrate that it is crucial to explore the immediate context in which testimonies were given, because of its strong influence upon their content and structure. In fact, our research shows that the contemporary context enters into the very fabric of the testimonies. No analysis, therefore, is complete without an inquiry into this crucial aspect. The two testimonies were chosen because they make up a distinct subgroup within a larger collection of testimonies that were given concurrently and, therefore, they constitute each other's immediate context. This paper also demonstrates the indispensability of a multidisciplinary analysis that draws upon elements from the fields of historical, literary and linguistic scholarship.
Life in the Aftermath Avinoam Patt
Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust,
07/2020
Book Chapter
Some five months after the liberation in Germany, a group of young Holocaust survivors, barely removed from years of persecution and torture at the hands of the Nazi regime, moved to the estate of ...the virulently antisemitic Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher. As Streicher awaited trial in nearby Nuremberg, this group of young Zionists set about transforming his estate into an agricultural training farm or hakhsharah, in preparation for what they hoped would be their future lives in Palestine. The symbolic nature of the revenge exacted by the young survivors on Streicher’s estate was unmistakable. However, the powerful political value of
1. Kapitel: Frühe Überlegungen und Pläne zur Entschädigung von Verfolgten des Nationalsozialismus (1936-1945) 2. Kapitel: Erste Schritte nach dem Ende der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft - ...Fürsorge und Rehabilitierung (1945-1947) 3. Kapitel: Normierung der materiellen Wiedergutmachung in der US-Zone (1945-1949) 4. Kapitel: Die Praxis der Wiedergutmachung in der US-Zone (1949-1954) 5. Kapitel:Rahmenbedingungen der Wiedergutmachung in der Frühzeit der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 6. Kapitel: Ausbau der Wiedergutmachung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis 1953.
Die Neuordnung des Pressewesens nach 1945 war eine der erfolgreichsten Maßnahmen der Alliierten zur Demokratisierung Deutschlands. Anstelle der traditionellen Blätter, deren Zahl in die Tausende ...ging, gründeten die Besatzungsmächte insgesamt 156 Lizenzzeitungen. Mit dieser strukturellen Zäsur ging zudem ein personeller Neuanfang einher. Besonders die Amerikaner sahen in den Lizenzzeitungen ein Mittel zur Verankerung der Demokratie und betrieben dementsprechend die Auswahl ihrer Lizenzträger. Aber noch vor Abzug der Militärregierung und vor dem Ende der Lizenzpflicht im Jahr 1949 machten die von den Alliierten - oder bereits von den Nationalsozialisten - ausgebooteten Verleger ihre Forderungen geltend. Es begann eine Periode scharfer Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Alt- und Lizenzverlegern, die in den meisten Fällen jedoch bald in einem Interessenausgleich mündeten; denn die 1945 aus politischen Gründen eingeleitete umfassende Strukturreform entsprach auch einem seit langem erkennbaren Trend der ökonomischen-technischen Modernisierung. Norbert Frei zeichnet diese Entwicklung ebenso systematisch wie detailliert nach. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Geschichte des Bad Reichenhaller Südost-Kuriers, einer amerikanischen Lizenzzeitung, die mit ihrem Eintreten für demokratische Transparenz in einem traditionell konservativen Milieu bald auf heftige Ablehnung stieß. Die Auseinandersetzungen um den Südost-Kurier erhellen zugleich ein farbiges Stück lokaler Nachkriegsgeschichte.
In A Cross of Iron, one of the country's most distinguished diplomatic historians provides a comprehensive account of the national security state that emerged in the first decade of the Cold War. ...Michael J. Hogan traces the process of state-making as it unfolded in struggles to unify the armed forces, harness science to military purposes, mobilize military manpower, control the defense budget, and distribute the cost of defense across the economy. At stake, Hogan argues, was a fundamental contest over the nation's political identity and postwar purpose. President Harry S. Truman and his successor were in the middle of this contest. According to Hogan, they tried to reconcile an older set of values with the new ideology of national security and the country's democratic traditions with its global obligations. Their efforts determined the size and shape of the national security state that finally emerged.
The destruction during the Second World War made the city a crisis of looming proportions throughout Europe. In the case of France, over three-quartersof the country was struck by the war. Cities and ...towns were in ruins. Over 2 million buildings, a quarter of the housing stock, was destroyed or damaged (Croize, 1991, pp. 253-257). A million families were left homeless. Millions of others lived in temporary shelters and run-down apartments without access to basic services. This tragic situation made the housing crisis-that is finding a place of live-one of the most serious and explosive post-war domestic issues in France, as it was all over Europe. One way the crisis was addressed was for men and women to build their own homes, or to simply occupy vacant buildings. This paper looks at the role of the organised self-help housing movement within the massive effort of reconstruction and building after the Second World War, from 1945-1954. The movement comprised three phases: the squatter movement; the mouvement Castors or Beavers movement, which became a limited effort at auto-construction; and lastly, the housing campaign launched by the Abbe Pierre.
Understanding of the process and pattern of post-war industrialisation in colonial Zimbabwe can be significantly enhanced by paying close attention to the 1948 Customs Agreement between Southern ...Rhodesia and South Africa. Keen to expand and consolidate an export trade already worth over £10 million per annum by 1948, the South African authorities were prepared to foster industrial development north of the Limpopo precisely because the Southern Rhodesian government itself never envisaged more than limited support for a restricted range of secondary industries. While the Southern Rhodesians were convinced that their policy judiciously combined the interests of primary producers and secondary industry, the South African state was more than content to relinquish the fringes of its own light consumer good sector to Southern Rhodesian factories in return for bigger markets for South African enterprises higher up the industrial ladder. The paper suggests, moreover, that industrialisation in Southern Rhodesia was less a process of 'loosening' its ties of dependence than their reconstitution in the post-war era, and in doing so, attempts to shed additional light on South Africa's own process of industrial development.