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Presentations of war and violence in museums generally oscillate between the fascination of terror and its instruments and the didactic urge to explain violence and, by analysing it, make it easier to handle and prevent. The museums concerned also have to face up to these basic issues about the social and institutional handling of war and violence. Does war really belong in museums? And if it does, what objectives and means are involved? Can museums avoid trivializing and aestheticising war, transforming violence, injury, death and trauma into tourist sights? What images of shock or identification does one generate – and what images would be desirable?
When the Hapsburg monarchy disintegrated after World War I, Austria was not considered to be a viable entity. In a vacuum of national identity the hapless country drifted toward a larger Germany. After World War II, Austrian elites constructed a new identity based on being a "victim" of Nazi Germany. Cold war Austria, however, envisioned herself as a neutral "island of the blessed" between and separate from both superpower blocs. Now, with her membership in the European Union secured, Austria is reconstructing her painful historical memory and national identity. In 1996 she celebrates her 1000-year anniversary. In this volume of Contemporary Austrian Studies, Franz Mathis and Brigitte Mazohl...
Since the late nineteenth century, museums have been cited as tools of imperialism and colonialism, as strongholds of patriarchalism, masculinism, homophobia and xenophobia, and accused both of elitism and commercialism. But, could the museum absorb and benefit from its critique, turning into a critical museum, into the site of resistance rather than ritual? This book looks at the ways in which the museum could use its collections, its cultural authority, its auratic space and resources to give voice to the underprivileged, and to take an active part in contemporary and at times controversial issues. Drawing together both major museum professionals and academics, it examines the theoretical concept of the critical museum, and uses case studies of engaged art institutions from different parts of the world. It reaches beyond the usual focus on western Europe, America, and ’the World’, including voices from, as well as about, eastern European museums, which have rarely been discussed in museum studies books so far.
The essays contained in this volume were originally delivered as papers to a conference on the German-language broadcasting of the BBC, held in London in 2002. For over sixty years, the BBC German Service was Britain's most authoritative voice to the German-speaking world, representing a virtual paradigm of British cultural and political attitudes towards Germany and Austria - and helping to define their perceptions of Britain and the British. Despite the BBC's enormous cultural standing and influence, however, this volume is the first to evaluate the Corporation's German-language broadcasting since the BBC German Service was closed down in 1999. The essays fall into three broad categories: German-language broadcasting during the Second World War, broadcasting to Germany and Austria during the Cold War, and finally a series of personal accounts from former employees of the Service. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of broadcasting (including media studies) as well as those involved in German Studies and in German and Austrian Exile Studies.
German-speaking Exiles in Ireland 1933-1945 is a pioneering study of the impact the German-speaking exiles of the Hitler years had on Ireland as the first large group of immigrants in the country in the twentieth century. It therefore adds an important yet hitherto virtually unknown Irish dimension to international exile studies. After providing an overview of the topic and an analysis of current developments in exile studies the volume devotes two chapters to Jewish refugees and another to the considerable number of Austrian exiles, investigates the relationship between Irish government policy and public opinion, and explores the problems of identity faced by so many in exile. It then focus...
This new volume in the series Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, entitled Exile and Gender: Literature and the Press, edited by Charmian Brinson and Andrea Hammel, focuses on the work of exiled women writers and journalists as well as on gendered representations in the writing of both male and female exiled writers. The contributions are in English or German. The seventeen contributions set out to both celebrate and critically examine the concepts of gender and sexuality in exile in a wide range of texts by well-known and lesser known authors, and throw light on many different aspects of gendered authorship and gendered relations. Our volume also looks at ...
Austria joined the European Union in 1995, with the overwhelming support of its citizenry. In June 1994, a record 66.6 percent of the Austrian population voted in favor of joining the Union, and Austria acceded on January 1, 1995. Only three years later, in the second half of 1998, Austria assumed its first presidency of the European Union. Its competent conduct of the Union's business enhanced its reputation. The sense that Austria was a role model collapsed overnight, after a new conservative People's Party (iVP/FPi) coalition government was formed in Austria in early February 2000. Austria became Europe's nightmare. This volume has two purposes. The first is to assess Austria's first five...
Immortal Austria was the title of a theatrical pageant devised by Austrian refugees in wartime London, the name summarizing their collective memory of their homeland as a country of mountain scenery, historical grandeur and musical refinement. The reality of the country they had left, and the one to which some of them returned, was very different. This volume contains various studies of the representations of their homeland in the cultural production of Austrian exiles, including those projected by émigrés working in the British film industry, those portrayed in the historical novel and in the literary works of such notable authors as Stefan Zweig, Elias Canetti and Robert Neumann. It opens with a survey of the make-up of the Austrian exile community and concludes with a study of attitudes to returning exiles, as reflected in the post-war literary journals. The volume thus offers students and teachers a vital cultural link between the pre-1934 Austria of the First Republic and the post-1945 Austria of the Second.
The internment of ‘enemy aliens’ by the British government in two world wars remains largely hidden from history. British historians have treated the subject – if at all – as a mere footnote to the main narrative of Britain at war. In the ‘Great War’, Britain interned some 30,000 German nationals, most of whom had been long-term residents. In fact, internment brought little discernible benefit, but cruelly damaged lives and livelihoods, breaking up families and disrupting social networks. In May 1940, under the threat of imminent invasion, the British government interned some 28,000 Germans and Austrians, mainly Jewish refugees from the Third Reich. It was a measure which provoked lively criticism, not least in Parliament, where one MP called the internment of refugees ‘totally un-English’. The present volume seeks to shed more light on this still submerged historical episode, adopting an inter-disciplinary approach to explore hitherto under-researched aspects, including the historiography of internment, the internment of women, deportation to Canada, and culture in internment camps, including such notable events as the internment revue What is Life!
The Second World War is omnipresent in contemporary memory debates. As the war fades from living memory, this study is the first to systematically analyze how Second World War museums allow prototypical visitors to comprehend and experience the past. It analyzes twelve permanent exhibitions in Europe and North America – including the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the House of European History in Brussels, the Imperial War Museums in London and Manchester, and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans – in order to show how museums reflect and shape cultural memory, as well as their cognitive, ethical, emotional, and aesthetic ...