Postwar Europe

Rezension zu: Lowe, Keith: Furcht und Befreiung. Wie der Zweite Weltkrieg die Menschheit bis heute prägt. Aus dem Englischen von Stephan Gebauer und Thorsten Schmidt. Stuttgart  2019. ISBN 978-3-608-96265-9 [Titel anhand dieser ISBN in Citavi-Projekt übernehmen] , in: H-Soz-Kult, 31.07.2019, <www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-27971>.

Kult nieznanego żołnierza jest szczególnym przykładem kultu bohaterów narodowych. Narodził się na Zachodzie i rozpowszechnił na całym świecie, przyjmując w poszczególnych regionach lokalny charakter. Stało się tak również w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej. W niniejszym szkicu skupię się na konkretnym momencie historycznym i na tym, jakie znalazł odbicie w kulcie nieznanego żołnierza, a szerzej: w narodowych narracjach heroicznych. Momentem tym jest okres stalinizmu i odwilży połowy lat pięćdziesiątych – czas przełomowy w rozwoju środkowoeuropejskiego kultu. To wtedy uległa podziałowi spójna, powstała w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym, narracja heroiczna, a władze w każdym z krajów wybrały różne strategie narracyjne względem kultu, odpowiadające bieżącym potrzebom legitymizacyjnym. W latach sześćdziesiątych doszło jednak do jego ponownej uniformizacji, gdy kult nieznanego żołnierza wszędzie uzyskał nowy, komunistyczny kształt. Ten krótki esej może stać się przyczynkiem do refleksji nad kultem bohaterów narodowych, nad jego wymiarem środkowoeuropejskim i specyfiką narodową. Jako że punktem wyjścia do analizy będą topograficzne miejsca pamięci, groby nieznanego żołnierza, tekst jest również próbą uchwycenia różnych metod ideologizacji przestrzeni miejskiej. Dokładniej przyjrzę się trzem grobom: bukareszteńskiemu, warszawskiemu i budapeszteńskiemu.

Tegen veler verwachting in is na 1945 een joodse gemeenschap in Nederland blijven bestaan. Die is in
de loop van de decennia echter wel ingrijpend veranderd. Naast interne joodse ontwikkelingen speelde
daarbij een belangrijke rol de ruimte die de Nederlandse samenleving aan joden gaf. Een terugblik in
drie fases: van de marge naar het centrum en weer terug.

The history of American expatriation in post-World War II Paris offers a rich archive through which to explore historical tensions between notions of freedom and citizenship. Less known is that this history offers a valuable lens through which to explore national security and domestic intelligence-gathering practices in free, democratic societies such as the United States. The American government’s surveillance of American writers living and working in post-war Paris infringed upon their freedoms and complicated their notions of civic responsibility to and for the United States. This article will use the Gibson Affair (Paris, 1958), a major forgery case that French and American literary scholars have long suspected was instigated by American intelligence, to explore the “specter of surveillance” that existed between the two principal groups of American writers living and working in post-war Paris, namely the community of black American writers known collectively as Paris’s Rive Noire or Black Bank (Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes) and the founders of the Paris Review (George Plimpton, Peter Ma hiessen, Harold L. “Doc” Humes).

In 1968, a group of architecture students at West Berlin’s Technical University formed Aktion 507 in order to critique post-war planning policies within the city. Following modernist principles, post-war policy makers began separating the city by function, with residential developments relocated to the suburbs. The general belief was that nineteenth century tenements were responsible for the ‘undemocratic spirit in the city’ and not suitable for the new ‘democratic’ Germany. Thus, the action taken was to demolish tenements and replace them with prefabricated satellite housing developments. In reaction, Aktion 507 curated an exhibition, ‘Diagnosis on Building in West Berlin’, focusing on the ‘critical analysis of current construction activities’. The exhibition centred on the Märkisches Viertel, a development containing 17,000 apartments, jutting the Berlin Wall to the north of the city. Aktion 507 argued that architects, speculators, the senate, and construction companies exerted a ‘totalitarian rule over the city’. I intend to argue that the ideology of the student movement in Berlin was in a symbiotic relationship with the post-war cityscape whereby readings of urban planners, Marxists, sociologists and others were translated through the lens of Berlin’s unique character and position in the post-war world. For example, Marcuse’s theory on the repressive mechanisms of society held special significance in a post-fascist era where former National Socialists still held positions of power, and where left-wing intellectuals flocked due to exemption from military service. Likewise, the Märkisches Viertel, with its ‘intolerable defects in social infrastructure’, highlighted the wider social implications of relocating inhabitants from the inner city under the guise of social housing. This paper documents the use of architecture as a vessel through which political, cultural and social conflicts were argued and contested which, through involvement with residents, Aktion 507 irreversibly changed West Berlin, both as a physical and political space.

Albeit growing interest in the “postwar” era, its cultural characteristics of the period after World War Two and its historical scope are still largely underdetermined. The purpose of this article is to offer a more nuanced use of the term ‘postwar’ and first insights into the cultural landscape of this enormously significant moment in the history of the West. In order to do so, it examines three major works of what is termed here the “immediate postwar.” These works are fundamentally dissimilar and yet, it is argued, share an emotional disposition. As shown, all three works exhibit complex dialectical coupling of horror and anticipation. In other words, this article demonstrates that the cultural production of the postwar period (in the exact sense of the word) is characterized, on the one hand, by a sincere depiction of suffering and depravity, but on the other by an intense engagement with questions about the moral and social future.

The paper is part of the ‘Back Home’ research project carried out by a group of PhD students from the Polytechnic University of Milan within the framework of the Paquebot Laboratory. The goal of the present research is to reveal historical premises and sociocultural circumstances that provided the basis necessary for the development of the British post-war housing.
As one of the major sociocultural and architectural phenomena in the modern history of Great Britain, the new residential development has been taking shape under the impact of new realities of the post-war life. A descriptive research method has been applied in order to determine the most significant among these realities, such as the exigency of rebuilding and reforming the country immediately after the World War II, economic upheaval of the next two decades, introduction of new governmental policies, multiple cultural tendencies – form the Swinging Sixties to the Electric Eighties – and an intense critical debate of the period.
The study aims to answer the following research questions: what are the preconditions of the British post-war housing phenomenon, and what has determined the emergence of a new generation of architects ready to exploit new approaches to modernism and avant-garde in Great Britain in the 1950s-1980s. Special attention is paid to revealing innovative tendencies of art, fashion, music and cinema, which have transformed the country into the world’s cultural trendsetter for several decades and become a cardinal requirement for the residential development in post-war Great Britain.

In the course of its triumphant conquest of European stages, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945) received its Austrian premiere – to mixed reviews – during the 1947 Grazer Festwochen, a festival organized in cooperation with British occupying forces and borne out of the latter’s policy of political re-education.

Unlike early observers such as Edmund Wilson, who deemed the opera an allegory of “bombing, machine-gunning, mining, torpedoing, ambushing humanity” (1947), reviewers of the Graz performances opted not to mention the war, and their descriptions of the music certainly intimate the country’s wartime isolation from international musical developments. While Hans Keller diagnosed British resistances to Britten’s music as the result of “group self-contempt” in the face of a dominant Austro-German tradition (1950), a reverse spectacle may be observed in Austrian responses to Peter Grimes within the attendant social context: I will argue that critical resistances were thinly veiled by a distinctly Austrian ethos of the country as an “island of the blessed” (Insel der Seligen) that curbed engagement with the moral questions arising from the new work’s violent themes, incidentally mirroring the image of society portrayed in the opera itself, in which the borough’s hatred towards Grimes is obscured – though, again, thinly – by social homogeneity (“We live and let live, and look / We keep our hands to ourselves”).

A case study in how cultural identity influences aesthetic judgement of opera, this paper fills lacunae in relation to the post-war reception of a key work of the twentieth century.

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Presses de Sciences Po. © Presses de Sciences Po. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

The 1934 World Cup helped project the global image of fascist Italy. After the victory of the Azzurri, many protagonists of this event entered the mass-media imagery as icons of the Mussolini regime and as prototypes of the fascist ‘New Man’. Paradoxically, their status as national heroes came out unscathed from the fascist period, and many of the players continued to be viewed as paradigms of virtue even after the Second World War. Likewise, symbols of the 1934 World Cup survived the end of the fascist regime. The aim of this article is to analyse how the memory of the first Italian World Cup evolved after the fall of the fascist regime. Specifically, we will first focus on memory of the 1934 World Cup in the years immediately after the end of the War. We will then look at the years around Italy 1990 and finally bring out some revelations identified in the national football museum in Florence.

Since its founding in 1947, the legendary Magnum Photos agency has been telling its own story about photographers who were witnesses to history and artists on the hunt for decisive moments. Based on unprecedented archival research, The Decisive Network unravels Magnum’s mythologies to offer a new history of what it meant to shoot, edit, and sell news images after World War II.
Nadya Bair shows that between the 1940s and 1960s, Magnum expanded the human- interest story to global dimensions while bringing the aesthetic of news pictures into new markets. Working with a vast range of editorial and corporate clients, Magnum made photojournalism integral to postwar visual culture. But its photographers could not have done this alone. By unpacking the collaborative nature of photojournalism, this book shows how picture editors, sales agents, spouses, and publishers helped Magnum photographers succeed in their assignments and achieve fame. Bair concludes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when changing market conditions led Magnum to consolidate its brand. In that moment, Magnum’s photojournalists became artists and their assignments oeuvres. Bridging art history, media studies, cultural history, and the history of communication, The Decisive Network transforms our understanding of the photographic profession and the global circulation of images in the predigital world.

En junio de 1959, la España franquista adopta un plan de estabilización económica. Este conjunto de medidas económicas no sólo sienta la base para el llamado «milagro económico español» de los años sesenta sino también para la incorporación definitiva de la dictadura en el Mundo Occidental.

Western Allied and German agricultural experts largely agreed on both the desirability of reinvigorated industry and on the changes needed to maximize agricultural output in hungry occupied western Germany after the Second World War. I draw on the reports and correspondence of American and German economists and agronomists to explore the continuities between American and German ideas of agricultural efficiency both during and after the war, and show that the Allies had three key goals in mind in managing postwar German agriculture: to maintain stability; to keep Germans fed; and to encourage agriculture’s market orientation. Keeping Germans fed would enhance stability, while encouraging agriculture’s market orientation would – they hoped - undercut the danger of German militarism once and for all by tying German farmers to a global economy and mitigating the possibility of agricultural autarky. While Allied planners feared that German farmers hewed to an autarkic ideal that protected their rural way-of-life above all, they were mistaken: German farmers prioritized their livelihoods, whether or not they were able to practice them along traditional lines.

“The greatest photographic exhibition of all time—503 pictures from 68 countries—created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art,” says the cover of the photo-book accompanying exhibition The Family of Man. The exhibition took place at the Museum of Modern art (MoMA), New York, from January 24 to May 8, 1955. It was highly popular—the press claimed that more than a quarter of million people saw it in New York. But it gained its central role in the twentieth century photography history largely because of its international exposure. The U.S. Information Agency popularized The Family of Man as an achievement of American culture by presenting ten different versions of the show in 91 cities in 38 countries between 1955 and 1962, seen by estimated nine million people But, contrary to the popular reception, scholarly criticism of the exhibition was—and continues to be—scathing.

In the eyes of its inhabitants, post-war Sweden was by all accounts a unique country. With its peaceful, evolutionary character, the course of modern Swedish history was certainly very different from the brutal developments on the European continent. Much of this was thanks to the simple fact that Sweden, as one of few major European countries, had been spared the horrors of the Second World War. At the same time, the Swedish narratives of the war underwent a post-1945 transformation that held close to wider European currents, as of the late 1980s in particular. In an international perspective, the northern neutral democracy is therefore particularly interesting.

The Swedish case stands out in various ways also in the Nordic framework. In contrast to the neighbours, the Swedes had not been directly affected by the war through occupation, bombardment or devastation. The year 1945 did not mark an absolute turning point in Swedish history, and Sweden remained neutral in the Cold War.

Moreover, since the early 1990s, the controversies seem to have been more passionate and the assault on the dominating post-war narrative more fundamental than in the other Nordic countries. This text explores this historiographical transformation in Sweden during the last two decades.

In the spring of 1946, Jean Dubuffet presented the series Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie., Hautes Pâtes at the galerie René Drouin.  This exhibition has rightly been cast as a breakthrough event in the cultural landscape of the immediate postwar period; it was the first public unveiling of Dubuffet’s matter painting and the press erupted with cries of “cacaïsme” and “peinture à la merde,” pronouncing him a “peintre en excréments.”  The critical reception of this exhibition is part of the historical record.  This article examines the popular (and even less sanitized) reception of Dubuffet’s contentious “hautes pâtes,” as recorded in several completely overlooked documents from the period, most notably the exhibition’s “livre d’or” or Guest Book.  Littered with swastikas and the Vichy francile, the anonymous comments inscribed in the pages of the Guest Book charge Dubuffet with “décadence totale,” characterizing his art as “judéo-décadent.”  Despite the fact that the series avoids any reference to contemporary events, the materiality of his work raised anxious references to the polemic on decadence waged during the Occupation as well as to the postwar political purges of Nazi collaborators.

The First World War in the province of Vicenza: the action of the Committee for war damages (1916-1922) ​

Nascita, sviluppo e proposte del "Comitato vicentino per i danni di guerra" 1916-1922. La tesi narra la costituzione del comitato, l'attività del comitato vicentino e la sua partecipazione alla stesura del rapporto  "La riparazione dei danni di guerra" a cura dei comitati per i danni di guerra per il governo e il parlamento

The Bosnian Case: Art, History and Memory concerns the representation of historic and traumatogenic events in art through the specific case of the war in Bosnia 1992-1995. The research investigates an aftermath articulated through the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, rebounding on the nature of representation in the art as always in the space of an "afterness". The ability to represent an originary traumatic scenario has been questioned in the theoretics surrounding this concept. Through The Bosnian Case and its art historical precedents, the research challenges this line of thinking, identifying, including through fieldwork in Bosnia in 2016, the continuation of the war in a war of images.

How was heritage understood and implemented in European socialist states after World War II? By exploring national and regional specificities within the broader context of internationalization, this volume enriches the conceptual, methodological and empirical scope of heritage studies through a series of fascinating case studies. Its transnational approach highlights the socialist world’s diverse interpretations of heritage and the ways in which they have shaped the trajectories of present-day preservation practices.

Egon Eiermann’s (1904-1970) work shaped the German search for a new and progressive identity after World War II. He remained in Germany during the time of the Nazi regime but kept close ties with Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius and others who were seminal to the American reception of Modernism. Eiermann’s oevre includes single family homes, office buildings, factories as well as churches.
As a teacher, he educated several generations of students through his teachings at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Eiermann’s architecture is characterized by the precise exploration of steel structures creating light and multilayered spaces that offer gradual transitions from interior to exterior. Functionality, order and performance harnessed to fulfill technical requirements is at the heart of his design attitude. For Eiermann, design is not the search for a formal system representative of a political and cultural order. He concentrates on finding solutions at all scales, creating a system of parts that comes together as a whole. This design strategy reflects the optimistic goal of political neutrality supported by industrialized production of spaces and buildings.
A building for Eiermann has to feel “right” and he achieved this by tracking consistent geometric patterns and detailed relationships among all the parts. Transparency and a clear structural rhythm is present especially in structures that were commissioned by the government such as the Expo Pavilion in Brussels and the German Embassy in Washington DC – both results of collaborative efforts and a lively exchange of conceptual thinking between Germany and the US. This clarity of see-through and a constructive order represented a new friendly (and ultimately democratic) Germany, a Germany that one could understand and that had nothing to hide.
This paper examines the tendencies of modern architecture that reinterpreted German culture at the beginning of the 20th Century and showcases Eiermann’s work as the basis of late 20th Century architecture in Germany and beyond. It reviews the political and narrative qualities of transparency, modularity and strict ordering systems based on the performance responsibilities of individual parts. Seemingly removed from the building tradition, Eiermann's work serves as a case study for the political message of an architecture that attempts to being apolitical in a time of cultural and political redefinition.

The concept of “landscape” in the works of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, far from being an ideological one, is strictly intertwined with its concrete use, physical perception and anthropological meaning. The two Philadelphian architects referred to that more often as “urban context”, implying not only its spatial qualities—such as scale and proportion—but also suggesting the spontaneous generation of relations—both material and immaterial—of the city. Through a selection of writings and buildings, my paper investigates the evolution of the reflections on urban landscape by Venturi and Scott Brown, from their earlier thoughts on the qualities of Italian cities, to the “survey” of the city of Las Vegas in the Sixties, and the resulting ways those ideas became interpreted and materialized in their architectural and urban projects.