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Exchanging Objects and my broader research agenda considers how and why certain objects left museums, institutions so often associated with preservation, archiving, and keeping. It can be an odd thing, to go to a museum to intentionally study things that aren’t there. When the idea for this research was suggested to me by anthropologist Nancy Parezo, I admit I was first puzzled, then intrigued.
Continue reading “On Archival Access in a Pandemic”
Love-locking, the attachment of a padlock to a public structure, is the forte of the traveler. Although not exclusively a tourist custom, it is a popular practice for people visiting a new place and wanting to leave their mark on it. The love-lock has become the inverted souvenir: left behind rather than taken away, but still a token of experience. And social media brims with photographs and videos of tourists locking their love on bridges and monuments – photos and videos that become the modern-day postcard, conveyed to family and friends back home.
Continue reading “Ceri Houlbrook: Love in the Time of Covid”
Mark-Anthony Falzon
My interest in, and love for, nature go back to my early childhood. There was something Victorian about the books I read on butterflies: they contained descriptions and beautiful illustrations of (British, usually) species, but they also taught you how to catch butterflies, kill them using potassium cyanide, and set them on mounting boards. I wondered why our local chemists would not supply me with potassium cyanide, and experimented with alternative methods. My butterfly collection became a source of mounting unease in my teens, when I joined two societies for nature and bird conservation. I realised that, while both were rooted in the same passion, collecting and conservation could be hard to reconcile. By the time I joined the Malta Ornithological Society (now Birdlife Malta), I knew which side I was on. I wrote angry missives to the press, joined street protests and did everything I could to thwart the murderous designs of Malta’s thousands of hunters.
Continue reading “Birds of Passage: Hunting and conservation in Malta”Raul Hilberg’s path-breaking 1961 study The Destruction of the European Jews rightfully remains on the reading list of any serious student of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Hilberg’s insistence on European Jews‘ alleged “almost complete lack of resistance” has been subjected to frequent scholarly criticism. He partially based this claim on a cursory reading of petitions: “Everywhere, the Jews pitted words against rifles” and “everywhere they lost.”
Continue reading “Do Petitions matter? Rethinking Jewish Petitioning during the Holocaust”Dr. Gaëlle Fisher’s recent monograph, Resettlers and Survivors: Bukovina and the Politics of Belonging in West Germany and Israel, 1945–1989, explores some of the more complex reverberations of World War II. It is the third volume in Berghahn’s growing Worlds of Memory series, published in collaboration with the Memory Studies Association.
Continue reading “Meet the Author: Gaëlle Fisher”Michael Meng and Adam R. Seipp
The writing of German history since 1945 has often, if not excessively, been shaped by critical and negative attitudes; or, as Baruch Spinoza would put it, by excessive fear and sadness in the face of human suffering. Ruination, mourning, absence, destruction, and failure are the leitmotifs of postwar German historiography. Amid this chorus of negativity, however, a few exceptions stand out. One of whom is our mentor, Konrad Jarausch, who over the past decade or so has written several books on Germany’s transformation into a rational democratic society––the very society that Spinoza suggests can achieve peace insofar as it frees people from the negative and divisive emotions of sadness and fear.
Continue reading “Freed from Fear and Sadness: The New Germany”TIMOTHY E. PYTELL
The recent United Nations General Assembly declaration that the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – January 27 – be designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day reflects the reality that the Holocaust has become a touchstone in global memory. Given the magnitude of the “unprecendented” destruction, this is not surprising. However, the conflation of the Holocaust with Auschwitz also distorts our understanding. For example, although Auschwitz is the culmination of the Holocaust, by the time the gas chambers came onto line at Auschwitz in April of 1943 three quarters of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were already dead. The vast majority of the Soviet and Polish Jews were killed east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line and often by bullets. In Timothy Snyder’s words “Auschwitz is the coda to the death fugue.” (Snyder Bloodlands p. 383).
Continue reading “Viktor Frankl: 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz”
Neriko Musha Doerr’s recent monograph Transforming Study Abroad gives a thought-provoking and insightful look into the practice of study abroad, and discusses how employing theoretical frameworks that elucidate global power structures can deepen experiences and give new meaning to buzzwords like “global citizen” and “cultural competence.”By SUSAN BETH ROTTMANN, Özyeğin University
