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This book is the first comparative study of the novels written by five German-speaking women - Anna Gmeyner, Selma Kahn, Hilde Spiel, Martina Wied and Hermynia Zur Mühlen - who had to flee National Socialist Central Europe. Gmeyner, Spiel, Wied and Zur Mühlen found refuge in Britain and thus added - together with male colleagues such as Stefan Zweig and Robert Neumann - an important but rarely investigated new dimension to the British literary landscape. The aim of this study is to reassess the women refugee writers' narrative strategies and integrate their work within feminist literary studies. The author investigates the five writers' narrativisation of everyday life, used to subvert the dominant discourse, and their portrayal of the intersection between class, racial and gender oppression. She also shows their innovative ways of picturing the gendered tension between the experiences of exile and exile as a modernist metaphor as well as their search for ways to refute the Nationalist Socialist rewriting of history. The book situates the novels within the theoretical discussions surrounding exile studies, social history and women's writing.
Representations of violence surround us in everyday life – in news reports, films and novels – inviting interpretation and raising questions about the ethics of viewing or reading about harm done to others. How can we understand the processes of meaning-making involved in interpreting violent events and experiences? And can these acts of interpretation themselves be violent by reproducing the violence that they represent? This book examines the ethics of engaging with violent stories from a broad hermeneutic perspective. It offers multidisciplinary perspectives on the sense-making involved in interpreting violence in its various forms, from blatant physical violence to less visible forms that may inhere in words or in the social and political order of our societies. By focusing on different ways of narrating violence and on the cultural and paradigmatic forms that govern such narrations, Interpreting Violence explores the ethical potential of literature, art and philosophy to expose mechanisms of violence while also recognizing their implication in structures that contribute to or benefit from practices of violence.
This book shows how international criminal courts have paid only limited and inconsistent attention to atrocity crimes affecting children. It elucidates the many structural, legal, financial and even attitudinal obstacles, often overlapping, that have contributed to the international courts’ focus on the experience of adults, rendering children almost invisible. It reviews whether and how different international and hybrid criminal jurisdictions have considered international crimes committed against or by children. The book also considers how international criminal justice can help contribute to the recognition of the specific impact that international crimes have on children, whether as v...
The author offers an interdisciplinary examination of the German-speaking exile experience in Great Britain from the beginnings of the Nazi regime to the end of the Second World War. The book examines the contingencies of cultural production for German and Austrian exiles against the historical context of British immigration and internment policies. By investigating the influence and manipulation of trends in popular British culture in the English-language exile fiction by Ernest Borneman, Robert Neumann, Ruth Feiner, Lilo Linke and George Tabori, the author illustrates how a suspect minority voiced their socio-political concerns in the dominant culture, and presents a strong case for the fa...
The Greater Second World War challenges the traditional temporal and geographic frameworks of World War II, expanding the timeline to include a series of regional conflicts and revolutions that began in 1931 and continued into the mid-1950s. These conflicts bookended a "central paroxysm" defined by the intervention of the United States into every theater of the war, rendering it genuinely global. The essays within this volume bring top-level accounts of US, European, and Axis strategic maneuvering into conversation with social histories of "bottom-up" agency in ways that destabilize conventional narratives. Working with novel and overlapping scales of time and space and attuned to ongoing an...
The twentieth century has been called, not inaccurately, a century of genocide. And the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen little change, with genocidal violence in Darfur, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Syria. Why is genocide so widespread, and so difficult to stop, across societies that differ so much culturally, technologically, and politically? That's the question that this collection addresses, gathering a stellar roster of contributors to offer a range of perspectives from different disciplines to attempt to understand the pervasiveness of genocidal violence. Challenging outdated beliefs and conventions that continue to influence our understanding, Genocide constitutes a major contribution to the scholarship on mass violence.
This is a social history of refugees escaping Hungary after the Bolshevik-type revolution of 1919, the ensuing counterrevolution, and the rise of anti-Semitism. Largely Jewish and German before World War I, the Hungarian middle class was torn by the disastrous war, the partitioning of Hungary in the Treaty of Trianon, and the numerus clausus act XXV in 1920 that seriously curtailed the number of Jews admitted to higher education. Hungary's outstanding future professionals, whether Jewish, Liberal or Socialist, felt compelled to leave the country and head to German-speaking universities in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. When Hitler came to power, these exiles were to flee again, many o...
The first book in English to specifically address the sexual violation of Jewish women during the Holocaust
The Nazi genocide of the Jews, while unique in some ways, was not the only genocide of the twentieth century. This innovative book, the product of a year-long collaboration of scholars from many disciplines, is the first curriculum to systematically tie the teaching of the Holocaust to an analysis of the genocides in Armenia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and Rwanda. The book consists of five parts: introduction; history of the Holocaust; representations of the Holocaust in literature, film, and the arts; other genocides; and ethics. The curriculum, shaped with feedback from those who teach Holocaust studies, consists mainly of primary documents and their analysis. Each section includes a general intro...
As the young editor of the New York based Deutsches Voksecho, Stefan Heym had to reconcile his responsibility as a journalist with his personal animosity towards the Nazi State and the disillusionment felt by exiles during the Great Depression. The result of this reconciliation, which drew upon his experience as a writer in pre World War II Germany and the democratic ideals of his newly adopted country, was a philosophy of democracy, citizenship and public debate that guided Heym's literary and political activities through the rest of his life. Identifying this philosophy as a precursor to Habermas' theory of the public sphere, The Democratic Dream traces the development of Heym's beliefs through his writings at the Deutsches Volksecho and its further evolution through Heym's early American novels: Hostages, The Crusaders and Goldsborough.