Exporting Culture
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 158

Exporting Culture

Is European culture visible enough in the globalized world? Why is culture from this continent often perceived as ‘old-fashioned’ or even worse as ‘out-dated’? Is the export of national cultural products and services – in most European countries subsidized by the taxpayer – no longer relevant, or more relevant than ever before? Is it a huge waste of money, time, and effort or an attempt to create another form of globalization? Culture – in its broadest sense – is often viewed and accepted in ways that differ completely from those of other internationally traded goods. This might be one of the reasons why so many institutions, foundations and cooperations invest time, power, and money in cultural projects. Is this an exaggerated approach or an intelligent recognition of the genuine values of the 21st century – creativity and cultural sensitivity? These and several other questions concerning the export of culture are addressed by authors from different countries in order to initiate a debate about the role European cultural products and services are able to play globally.

For Russia with Hitler
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 325

For Russia with Hitler

The Bolshevik takeover of Russia created an alternative Russia in exile that never laid down its arms. For two decades, expelled White Russians sought ways to retaliate against the Soviet Union and return home. Their irreconcilability was galvanized by a superstructure, the dominant military organization, the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS). Eventually, militant anti-Bolshevism led the exiled Russians into alliance with Nazi Germany, despite the latter’s anti-Slavic stance. For Russia with Hitler tells the story of how thousands of White Russian émigrés joined the German invasion of the Soviet Union as soldiers, translators, and civilian workers. Oleg Beyda investigates and contextuali...

Peace at All Costs
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 392

Peace at All Costs

Although it was characterized by simmering international tensions, the early Cold War also witnessed dramatic instances of reconciliation between states, as former antagonists rebuilt political, economic, and cultural ties in the wake of the Second World War. And such efforts were not confined to official diplomacy, as this study of postwar rapprochement between Poland and West Germany demonstrates. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Peace at All Costs follows Polish and German non-state activists who attempted to establish dialogue in the 1950s and 1960s, showing how they achieved modest successes and media attention at the cost of more nuanced approaches to their national histories and identities.

Suprahumanism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 268

Suprahumanism

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2014-08-09
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  • Publisher: Arktos

We are at a crucial point in time: a moment of transition as important as the emergence of Homo sapiens, or the beginning of civilisation after the Neolithic Revolution. Paradoxically, the triumph of the West - also called 'globalisation' - means the death of Europe and European man. Our destiny hangs between two options: either to complete the triumph of the egalitarian conception of the world, which will bring about the end of history, or to promote a historical regeneration. Nietzsche prophesied that the Earth will eventually belong to either the last man or to the superman. There are no other alternatives.

Holocaust Scholarship
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 273

Holocaust Scholarship

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2015-07-13
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  • Publisher: Springer

Leading international Holocaust scholars reflect upon their personal experiences and professional trajectories over many decades of immersion in the field. Changes are examined within the context of individual odysseys, including shifting cultural milieus and robust academic conflicts.

Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 243

Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2009-03-02
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  • Publisher: Springer

In one consequential volume, Crisscrossing Borders in Literature of the American West presents the cross-section of a fast-changing and greatly expanded field. Through interdisciplinary essays, this volume on the post-national West challenges the idea of a unified national story sustained by strategic exclusions. Contributors analyze the economic and environmental exploitation depicted in working-class Western literature, emphasize the transnational by approaching both the North/South and cross-Atlantic axes grapple with the role of Mormons, and dissect the new masculinity of "Silicon Gunslingers." Each essay successfully and compellingly models a new and fruitful way of engaging the West.

Politics, Ethics and Culture in Our Time
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 306

Politics, Ethics and Culture in Our Time

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2023-01-30
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  • Publisher: BRILL

Global capitalism is effecting changes in human life as momentous as those that occurred during the Neolithic Revolution, the Axial Age (700-300 BC), and the modern era post-1500, when industrial capitalism, state power, and science reshaped the civilized world. The transformation is paradoxical, however. Science and technology ensure material progress but the market promotes cultural obsolescence and erodes belief in the Enlightenment ideals that inspired the quest for progress. In Western democracies, liberty and equality are proving irreconcilable, citizens becoming demoralized, fraternity fractured; meanwhile despotic Eurasian states are recycling old faiths and concocting neo-imperialist ideologies. These contradictions must be confronted if the cultural values that sustain civilized life are to be conserved.

A Poet's Reich
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 380

A Poet's Reich

A re-examination of the George Circle in the cultural and political contexts of Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi Germany. Stefan George (1868-1933) was one of the most important figures in modern German culture. His poetry, in its originality and impact, has been ranked with that of Goethe and Hölderlin. Yet George's reach extended beyond the sphereof literature. In the early 1900s, he gathered around himself a circle of disciples who subscribed to his vision of comprehensive cultural-spiritual renewal and sought to turn it into reality. The ideas of the George Circle profoundly affected Germany's educated middle class, especially in the aftermath of the First World War, when their critique of ...

'Intimately Associated for Many Years'
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 593

'Intimately Associated for Many Years'

The Anglican Bishop George Bell (of Chichester) and the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, Willem A. Visser’t Hooft (of Geneva) exchanged hundreds of letters between 1938 and 1958. The correspondence, reproduced and commented upon here, mirrors the efforts made across the ecumenical movement to unite the Christian churches and also to come to terms with an age of international crisis and conflict. In these first decades of the World Council, it was widely felt that the Church could make a noteworthy contribution to the mitigation of political tensions all over the world. That’s why Bell and Visser’t Hooft talked not only to bishops and the clergy, but also to the prime ministers and presidents of many countries. They raised their voices in memoranda and published their public letters in important newspapers. This was the World Council’s most successful period.

Liberty and Landscape
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 360

Liberty and Landscape

This book ​explores the importance of freedom and liberalism in the context of socialities, individualities and materialities. The authors provide a highly unusual and innovative blending of concepts about space and landscape through a deeply theoretical exploration of liberalism. Liberalism is often problematized in contemporary discussions with regard to gentrification, environmental problems and inequality. In contrast, this book refers to a liberalism that maximizes life chances in the context of dealing with spaces. A connection between freedom and space, based on liberal ideas, provides a much needed theoretical intervention in the fields of social and spatial sciences.