Nazi

Nowra says of his play The Golden Age:

It must be pointed out that The Golden Age is no polemic about civilisation and nature. The play is not saying that nature is good and civilisation is evil. It is also not saying that the group is innocent and wonderful and the civilised people are evil. Both groups have their good and bad aspects and the relationship between the two is more subtle than that. (Nowra, 1995:xii)

Nowra is saying that there is no good or bad, just differences between the cultures of the two societies: civilised and primitive. He argues that neither is 'evil', and it is with this quote as a premise that I have decided to analyse The Golden Age.

The Golden Age contains contemporary thematic emblems. Among these are the notions of primitive and civilised, who are outcasts, didacticism, and the power of language for use in dominance over, and historical preservation, of culture. It is intended that these topics will be discussed, supported with my own views as an academic and thespian. I hope that my own conclusions will support an argument that Nowra, in the statement provided earlier, is not entirely correct. I am not attempting to claim Nowra is a hypocrite - as the author of his own work. However, I am going to suggest that there are elements within The Golden Age that allow a distinctly different interpretation of the role of the two cultures. This thesis will be supported by other writers who have made invaluable contributions to the analysis of Nowra's works.

My doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of the Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS troops using in-depth interviews with former volunteers as the main primary source. This phenomenon, even if significant in size (depending on the source, some 15 000-20 000 Italian men volunteered in the Waffen-SS), has been hitherto largely unknown to historical research. The available literature on the Italian volunteers, mainly written by military history enthusiast journalists and methodologically weak, concentrates mainly on the combat operations and military organization, and offers a rather stereotypical profile of the volunteers.

My dissertation does not aim to reconstruct the military history of the different divisions of the Waffen-SS in which Italian volunteers operated but instead to examine the subjective, private and intimate experience of the volunteers in order to understand the motivations, attitudes, beliefs and cultural and family background, as well as their political ideas. The main objective of my doctoral dissertation is to discover the ideological precepts of the volunteers’ political credo. As the last phase of fascism and its ideology, often defined as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascism, is still the object of wide academic debate, a better understanding of the volunteers’ ideology also contributes to deepening overall knowledge of the nature of this last phase.

The theoretical frame of my dissertation lies in oral history, in particular in the postmodernist approach to oral history, through which I reconstruct the volunteers’ ideology. In-depth interviews with former volunteers are the main primary source, but multiple data collection methods have been adopted. Phone interviews and correspondence with the volunteers have also been considered as primary sources. In addition to interviews and correspondence, family archives consisting of diaries, correspondence with the volunteers’ relatives and photographic material have also been collected and examined. An ethnographic observation of the volunteers’ domestic spaces has been conducted during the in-depth interviews, and photo self-elicitation techniques have been used in cases where the volunteers were willing to share their photographs.

An exhaustive portrait of the ideological structure of the volunteers has been obtained, as well as of the cultural and social origins of the values that contributed to the rise and adoption of this ideology. Further, the volunteers’ motivations to enlist have been clearly reconstructed, together with their cultural, political, social and military backgrounds. The results of the research are particularly relevant both for comprehension of the Italian phenomenon of volunteering in the Waffen-SS and for the reconstruction of the ideological dynamics of the last phase of fascism. The volunteers’ political and ideological system, which can be defined as the Italian SS-fascist ideology, disagrees strongly with the vaguely described ideological profile offered by previous studies that describe volunteers as generically “super-fascist”. The research also offers the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the final fascist ideological trajectory, currently defined, not without a certain level of approximation, as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascist ideology.

Author(s): Cline, Shelly M | Abstract: Captured in a rare photograph, Commandant Richard Baer and former commandant Rudolf Hoss strode away from the dedication of an SS hospital in Auschwitz in late 1944. Following behind them, are officers of lesser note, and behind them- in the background- a few nurses. Mostly hidden behind these men, head down, glove in gloved hand is Maria Mandel, the chief overseer of the women’s camp. She is the most powerful, important woman in Auschwitz and yet she barely makes the shot. Mandel walks alone, not accompanied by her fellow Aufseherinnen subordinates. She is not in front with her colleagues of equal rank, nor is she at the back with the nurses who share her gender. Instead, Maria Mandel occupies a space of her own: an awkward, middle area that lacks a conceptual framework. Though her job was identical to that of a man’s, her gender kept her from being “one of the boys.” And though she was a woman, her job prohibited her from being “one of the gi...

El hundimiento del buque petrolero "Potrero del Llano" en mayo de 1942  precipitó la entrada de México a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. A los pocos días de este ataque circuló en  la opinión pública mexicana la versión de que el navío había sido hundido por submarinos de los Estados Unidos con el objetivo de provocar la entrada de México en la guerra. Con base en información del FBI, el autor confirma la tesis de que el hundimiento del navío fue producto de la agresión nazi, y añade que esta operación fue apoyada logísticamente por el sorprendente sistema de comunicación alemán de los “micropuntos de información”.

This paper does not attempt to deal with the legitimate ethical or moral debate on abortion. Utilizing abortion as a subject I will show how science and medicine in general, and abortion in particular, were used as weapons of mass destruction by Nazi physicians in their zeal to comply with the political climate of the time. Nazi policy on abortion and childbirth was just one of the methods devised and designed to ensure the extermination of those whom the Nazis deemed had "lives not worth living." Physicians implemented these policies, not with the fate of their patients in mind, but rather in the name of the "state." When discussing pregnancy, abortion and childbirth during the Holocaust it is imperative to include an essay of how these issues affected the Jewish prisoner doctors in the ghettos and camps. Nazi policy dictated their actions too. From an extensive search of their testimonies, I conclude that for these doctors ethical discourse comprised a fundamen...

This short essay discusses some of the ways in which the Aryan movement in America activates gendered beliefs for the goal of legal, political, and cultural transformation. In recent years, the community has moved from common law theories of white sovereignty to more robust forms of racial constitutionalism. The piece is drawn from "America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community" (forthcoming Harvard University Press, 2014).

... By the 1880s, however, the balance had tipped in favor of the Czech language ... This disjunctionbetween recorded language and recorded na-tionality was institutionalized further by two ... 12 The perception gap, which has major political consequences since it provides additional ...

The ghetto is at the same time the basis from which the Jewish expansion stems. From here, overpopulation and social misery push the Jews into the non-Jewish sectors of the economic and cultural life of the host countries. It is in the ghetto that the threads, not only of Jewish economic life, but also of the entire urban economic fabric, are woven together. This is where the merchants live, from the peddlers and rag-sellers through the middle-sized and large merchants and the exporters; this is the place from which the Jewish artisan who has been proletarianized finds his way to the factory; this is where the Jews' religious and political leaders are raised; this is where the Jewish essence is molded in its specific form, as it is found in Eastern Europe, in order to exert from here, from the business centers, an influence on the surroundings and on the nations among whom the Jews live. Peter-Heinz Seraphim, Das Judentum im osteuropaischen Raum (1938) A dramatic change in how the term “ghetto” was understood can be discerned in the book by Peter-Heinz Seraphim, Das Judentum im osteuropaischen Raum (Jewry in the Territory of Eastern Europe), published in the autumn of 1938. The Jews of Eastern Europe (the Ostjuden ) attracted the attention of scholars who worked in two disciplines – Eastern European studies ( Ostforschung , in Nazi jargon), which had developed since 1936, and study of the Jews ( Judenforschung ), which developed in tandem with it.