ANA BELÉN MARTÍNEZ GARCÍA is Associate Professor at ISSA School of Applied Management, University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain). She teaches Business Communication, Academic Writing, and World Literatures in English.
Victory in Europe Day is the day celebrating the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces on Tuesday, 8 May 1945, marking defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of Second World War in Europe.
In recognition of the day Berghahn is pleased to offer a selection of our WWII History books, including a selection of Open Access titles. In addition, Berghahn Journals would like to highlight relevant special issues from select history journals.
Continue reading “In recognition of VE Day”
Browse our February and March 2020 releases in Anthropology, Archaeology/Heritage Studies, History, Memory Studies, and Mobility Studies and see what’s new in paperback.
This week marks the fifty-eighth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall. The Iron Curtain was assembled in the middle of Berlin in August 1961 and expanded over the following months to ultimately divide West Berlin from the surrounding East Germany, prohibiting East Germans to pass into West Germany for decades. Browse our relevant titles on the history and ramifications of a divided Germany.
Continue reading “A Divided Germany”________________________________________________________________________
In Paperback
EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY
The Second World War in Europe
Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens
Volume 7, Contemporary European History
CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC BOOK OF THE YEAR 2011
Continue reading “Victory Day to commemorate the end of WWII”
My book Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film was first published in 2016, and Berghahn Books just published a paperback edition.
Since the book concerns militant and radical film and film-making and the events of 1968, I very much wanted it to be out before 2018. My intention was that the book could contribute to the discussions that marked the 50th anniversary of 1968, and indeed it did. The ideal, in thinking about 1968, would not be commemoration and nostalgia but an engagement with the ideas of 1968 and their relevancy and challenge to today – that the collective desire to change our realities still, of course, remains, and film-making can still be considered in this context.
While the book deals with many of the now commonly accepted “classics” of that period, it also attempts to recover some still obscure films. In fact, it’s the existence of this divide – between the canonical and the Curate’s Eggs – that was a point of investigation. And, after the book was first published, the reactions to the November 2018 deaths of two film directors who featured heavily in it – Nic Roeg at 90 and Bernardo Bertolucci at 77 – further illustrated this sense of a divide. Their ’68 films are Performance (which Roeg co-directed by Donald Cammell) and Partner respectively. Continue reading “Reverse Angle: Fifty Years of the Cinema of 1968”
On August 13, 1961, Berlin woke up to a shock: the East German Army had begun construction on the infamous Berlin Wall. The Wall was initially constructed in the middle of Berlin, and expanded over the following months. It entirely cut off West Berlin from the surrounding East Germany, prohibiting East Germans to pass into West Germany.
The Eastern Bloc claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people” in building a socialist state in East Germany. In practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that marked East Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period. The Berlin Wall came to symbolize the “Iron Curtain” that separated Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.
Browse Berghahn relevant titles on History of divided Germany:
MEMORIALIZING THE GDR
Monuments and Memory after 1989
Anna Saunders
The year 1968 brought a wave of anti-authoritarian political activity across Europe and beyond which may have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The protests and social movements of 1968 comprised a worldwide escalation of social and political conflicts and marked the climax of protests that simultaneously captured most industrialized Western countries.
To mark the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on the 27th of January, the United Nations has recognized this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in memory of the people murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. For more information on developing educational programs to instill the memory of the tragedy in future generations to prevent genocide from occurring again please visit The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme webpage.