Tag: European history

The ‘Life-World’ of Translation

Some words escape translation—a fact Stephen Barlau discovered quickly when he set about translating Rudolph van Thadden’s novel, originally published as Trieglaff. Eine pommersche Lebenswelt zwischen Kirche und Politik 1807-1948. Barlau brought the work into English as Trieglaff: Balancing Church and Politics in a Pomeranian World, 1807-1945, which was published this month by Berghahn. Below, the translator shares the importance of care and nuance when translating five generations worth of stories to English.

 

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The breadth and depth of meaning of German Lebenswelt, used in the original subtitle of Trieglaff, escapes capture in English.

 

It refers to the world of daily life in all its elements. Setting is immanent, environment is conjured; life extends beyond daily to happenings for an extended period with its characterizing features; both dynamic living and graphic life are encompassed. All these elements are denoted, not connoted; meaning fails if any are absent—or perhaps the word is all connotation, all shadow implication of meanings.

 

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The Rise and Fall of Völkerpsychologie

Before there was cultural psychology, there was Völkerpsychologie. This social science was used as a way of looking at cultures and trying to make sense of them—an attempt often seen as stereotyping. But, in The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851-1955, to be released this month, author Egbert Klautke gives the often-overlooked social science due credit. He shares his thoughts about the volume and this particular form of psychology below.

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Berghahn Books: How would you define “Folk Psychology” and what drew you to the study of it?

 

Egbert Klautke: “Folk Psychology” is an awkward translation of the German term Völkerpsychologie. Originally, it referred to attempts to study the psychological make-up of nations, and as such is a forerunner of today’s social psychology. However, in today’s common understanding, Völkerpsychologie equals national prejudice: it is seen as a pseudo-science not worth considering seriously. Continue reading “The Rise and Fall of Völkerpsychologie” →

Bittersweet Europe: A Study of Albania and Georgia

Adrian Brisku connects two seemingly disconnected European experiences—those of Georgia and Albania—in Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe, 1878-2008, to be published this month. Brisku shares the triumphs and difficulties of the writing process, and what interested him in the area to begin with, below.

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of Albania and Georgia, especially as they exist within the larger European framework?

 

Adrian Brisku: I had written about Albanian debates on ‘Europe’ while living in Georgia—from the year 2001 to 2005.

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The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Activism or Scholarship?

The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, to be published this month, gives voice to the plight of the lesser-studied but still widely persecuted population of the Roma in Nazi-occupied Europe. Below, editor Anton Weiss-Wendt addresses the reception of the collection, which he says begs the question: “Is this scholarship or is it activism?” 

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Weiss-WendtThe mass murder of Jews and the mass murder of Roma during the Second World War are closely interrelated.

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New Perspectives on World War II and Central Europe

Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices is a collection of essays edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff, and Dieter  Langewiesche, and published by Berghahn Books in December 2012. In this blog post, the editors explain how the collection sheds new light on our understanding of Germany’s European allies during the Second World War.

Until now, research on the Second World War in Europe has focused on two main areas: on the one hand, the individual countries, and on the other, the two big “blocs”: the Allies and the Axis Powers. On the part of the Allies, historians made the point very early that states with different political systems and values managed to cooperate temporarily while still striving to achieve their respective goals. Awareness of this was heightened by the sudden shift from the partnerships in the Second World War, to the reality of the Cold War between previous allies the United States and the Soviet Union and the East/West division of the European continent by the Iron Curtain.

 

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Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi on 19th Century Celebrity

In the collection Constructing Charisma, editors Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi have brought together a series of essays exploring the growth of the idea of celebrity in 19th century Europe. In this lengthy interview, the editors discuss the roots of their ideas, and how the study of the 19th century is still significant for understanding celebrity today. 

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What drew you to the study of celebrity, especially in 19th Century Europe?

 

1. Both of us had been working on certain celebrated individuals in 19th century Europe. In Ed’s case, it was colonial figures like Henry Morton Stanley; in Eva’s it was the German Kaiser. We each saw that our historical subjects owed a large part of their renown to forms of media new to the 19th century, especially photography and the mass press. The Kaiser would, of course, have been well known in any case, but Eva showed that photography helped make him not just a household name, but a household object, as individuals collected pictures of him. As for Stanley and other “colonial heroes,” they became celebrities because the mass press obsessively promoted them and their exploits. Through our individual works, we both perceived that that celebrity became a hugely important social and cultural phenomenon in the 19th century; to investigate it further, we decided to bring together colleagues from a variety of disciplines with expertise in the key European countries.

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António Medeiros on the Border Between Spain and Portugal

Berghahn has just released Two Sides of One River: Nationalism and Ethnography in Galicia and Portugal, an English translation by Martin Earl of the original Portuguese volume by António Medeiros. This book explores the historical intersections between nationalism and the emergence of ethnographic traditions in Portugal and Galicia, and plays this history against the author’s own ethnographic research in both places at the turn of the 20th century.

Hot Off the Presses- New Book Releases

New in print from Berghahn:
After The History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and beyond Foucault, edited by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog

Cinema of Choice: Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies, by Nitzan Ben Shaul

Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919-1939, by Michael Wildt, translated from German by Bernard Heise

Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places, edited by Glenn Bowman

Behind the Cover: The Improbable Story of the Image on the Cover of Holocaust Survivors

Behind the Cover is an occasional series on book covers and the stories that accompany them.

Cover images: the all-important marketing tool that can perfectly capture the content and feel of a book—or cause people to glance over it, bored. Some images we toil over, going back and forth between options because co-editors disagree, we disagree, or the perfect image remains elusive despite our perseverance. Then there are the no-brainers when the authors have pre-picked images that work perfectly and after the original design is chosen the image hardly gets a second thought.

Holocaust Survivors by Dalia Ofer, Françoise S. Ouzan, and Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz was one of the latter. The editors had a number of images they found at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. In image after image of expectant, haunting faces of liberated concentration camp prisoners, their eyes shone with a glint of freedom. After everything, they still had some hope for life. Perfect.

A few months later when it was time to publish the book, we faced a typical scramble to get a high resolution picture with proper permissions and then the book was off to press! It was the end of the year and as I headed upstate for the holidays, the only things on my mind were those sugar plums.

But then four months later, I found an excited email in my junk mail box. It was a woman asking about the image on the cover of Holocaust Survivors. Continue reading “Behind the Cover: The Improbable Story of the Image on the Cover of Holocaust Survivors” →