10 research outputs found
Uwe Appold Plastiken, Bilder, Zeichnungen ; 1975 - 1980 ; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, 19. 4. - 11. 5. 1980 ...
No full textUwe Appold, Plastiken, Bilder, Zeichnungen 1975-1980 ; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, 19.4. - 11.5.1980 ; Kunstverein e.V. Flensburg, Städtisches Museum, 22.5. - 22.6.1980
No full textLife under siege: the jews of Magdeburg under Nazi rule
No full textThis regional study documents the life and the destruction of the Jewish community of Magdeburg, in the Prussian province of Saxony, between 1933 and 1945. As this is the first comprehensive and academic study of this community during the Nazi period, it has contributed to both the regional historiography of German Jewry and the historiography of the Shoah in Germany. In both respects it affords a further understanding of Jewish life in Nazi Germany. Commencing this study at the beginning of 1933 enables a comprehensive view to emerge of the community as it was on the eve of the Nazi assault. The study then analyses the spiralling events that led to its eventual destruction. The story of the Magdeburg Jewish community in both the public and private domains has been explored from the Nazi accession to power in 1933 up until April 1945, when only a handful of Jews in the city witnessed liberation. This study has combined both archival material and oral history to reconstruct the period. Secondary literature has largely been incorporated and used in a comparative sense and as reference material. This study has interpreted and viewed the period from an essentially Jewish perspective. That is to say, in documenting the experiences of the Jews of Magdeburg, this study has focused almost exclusively on how this population simultaneously lived and grappled with the deteriorating situation. Much attention has been placed on how it reacted and responded at key junctures in the processes of disenfranchisement, exclusion and finally destruction. This discussion also includes how and why Jews reached decisions to abandon their Heimat and what their experiences with departure were. In the final chapter of the community’s story, an exploration has been made of how the majority of those Jews who remained endured the final years of humiliation and stigmatisation. All but a few perished once the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ reached Magdeburg in April 1942. The epilogue of this study charts the experiences of those who remained in the city, some of whom survived to tell their story
The crisis of modernity : culture, nature, and the modernist yearning for authenticity
No full textThe Crisis of Modernity: Culture, Nature, and the Modernist Yearning for Authenticity This dissertation is situated at the intersection of two critical traditions: the discussion about Modernist literature in English and ecocriticism. By viewing a certain strand of literary Modernism through an ecocritical lens, it tries to offer an investigation of salient aspects that arise out of the experience of modernity. In order to stress the relevance of ecocriticism when dealing with Modernist motifs and themes, I chose authors associated with the so-called vitalistic or primitivist side of Modernism. The condemnation of technological progress, the alienation of the individual living in urbanized societies, and the fear of the widening gap of what is natural and what is cultural in ourselves inspire the work of Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Djuna Barnes and Claude McKay, and raise important questions for ecocritical consideration. Their severe critique of western civilization suggests that for these authors modernity constitutes a crisis of culture. One of the major aims of my work is to define the crisis of modernity as an environmental crisis. To gain recognition of the environmental aspects underlying this critique of modernity, I begin my analysis by focusing on the depiction of urban contexts as a source of profound conflict. The ensuing argument will center on the notion of the pastoral, which both Miller and Durrell recognize as the traditional mode to express an urban yearning for a utopian counterpoise to civilized life. But rather than promoting an idyllic return to nature, these authors primarily seek to unmask the artificiality of the pastoral enthrallment for the natural world. Instead, they try to revitalize their contact with nature by drawing attention to the individual’s physically embodied experience of his or her immediate environment. By focusing on the body as a medium to recuperate humankind’s original affinity with nature, Miller and Durrell represent a powerful alternative to the pastoral tradition. In my final chapter I extend my ecocritical reading of Modernist literature to Djuna Barnes and Claude McKay. Barnes’s struggle with the gendered landscapes of modernity and McKay’s thematization of ethnic difference offer alternative approaches to the crisis of modernity
Beyond the Pedagogical Illusion? Historical-Comparative Reflections on the Impact History of Moral Education of Children and Adolescents
No full textThis article can be broken down into two parts, perhaps somewhat unequally as far as its orientation is concerned. In the first part, the author takes the reader on a kind of exploration of the history of moral education, a subject which, at first glance and from the perspective of the years he spent studying educational historiography, appears to be rather undeveloped terrain. Since the piece is related to the awarding of the Comenius Medal, Comenius himself already provides a good starting point for this round of studies. As in the case of Herbart, another classic within the canon of educational history, Comenius held the opinion that morality plays a key role in upbringing of young people, which became increasingly scintillating in appearance from the Enlightenment onwards. For in a well-regulated society, it was by means of upbringing and education that individual freedom could be created. However, in the course of the 20th century and to the shame of humanity, people were forced to witness how the idea that people and society could be shaped by social engineering could equally give rise to a lack of freedom, as the aberrations of Nazism, fascism and ultimately Marxism-Leninism unequivocally demonstrated. So can such “reversals” of modern-day thought ultimately teach us any overall lessons about the content, manner and results with which moral curricula are imposed? Or must we first set out to identify the “abnormal” cases that society first branded as such and only subsequently extract those lessons? In other words, can extraordinary situations and events teach us something about the everyday reality of moral education as manifested in the so-called “civilising offensive” that took place from the end of the 18th century onwards? As far as the Low Countries are concerned, the author is, for that matter, setting foot on familiar ground. By utilising previous research on Belgium, Flanders and the (Belgian) Congo, the second part of the article wastes no time in examining what moral education meant in more specific terms in the 20th century. In that regard, the focus not only lies on contextualising the insights and questions raised by the first part, as a “tour d’horizon”, but equally on analysing them in greater depth. After all, the author’s years of research already provide three interesting points of reference: 1) the strong continuity of the patronising perspective; 2) the problematic nature of thinking about educational innovations and didactic innovations in binary terms, such as “old” and “new”, and 3) the lack of a straightforward link between parenting and educational goals on the one hand and their results and effects (including and especially in the long term) on the other. Which leads inevitably to the conclusion that education, important as it is, must not be overestimated. Nor should history for that matter. Perhaps both are nothing more than an opportunity to partake of a meaningful encounter that may be effective, but whose outcome one can never be sure of. Which in turn does not take away from the fact that we must still place our hopes on it. For hope is probably the most positive thing that human beings carry within them, just as Comenius himself proved in his lifetime, by the way
