Pub Date : 2017-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2017.1412725
Magdalena Baran-Szołtys
{"title":"Lwów. O odczytywaniu miasta na nowo; Львiв: Пepeчитyвaння мicтa","authors":"Magdalena Baran-Szołtys","doi":"10.1080/14790963.2017.1412725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2017.1412725","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41396,"journal":{"name":"Central Europe","volume":"8 1","pages":"88 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85863756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2017.1412718
Galyna Spodarets
Abstract This article discusses the role that the Dnipro River (formerly Dnieper River) plays in the discursive construction of Yurii Andrukhovych’s idea of East-Central Europe. In his essays ‘Like Fishes in Water’ (Yak ryby u vodi. 29 richkovykh pisen’, 2004) and ‘Atlas. Meditations’ (Atlas. Medytatsiyi, 2005), the author chooses to emphasize the Dnipro’s function as a border between two distinct regions of Ukraine. In his portrayal, the right bank (the western part of Ukraine) seems culturally traditional, whereas the left bank (the eastern part of Ukraine) appears to be uncultivated, proletarian, nomadic and generally an area of wilderness. The author concludes: ‘At least in the context involving this specific map the two Ukraines are divided’. Is this a hidden ideologization or a new mythologization of the Dnipro? Certainly, the conceptualization of the river transcends its mere physical dimensions and provides the landscape with a symbolic function. Andrukhovych’s essay volumes Disorientation on Location (Dezoriyentatsiya na mistsevosti, 1999), The Devil’s Hiding in the Cheese (Dyyavol khovayet’sya v syri, 2006) and The Lexicon of Intimate Cities (Leksykon intymnykh mist, 2016) provide additional insights into this imagined geography. The research presented in this article discusses Andrukhovych’s ideas with reference to the concept of ‘Two Ukraines’ by Mykola Riabchuk and ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ by Samuel Huntington. Central European discourse, post-colonial studies and geopoetical theory complement the discussion and enable its integration into a larger context.
摘要本文探讨了第聂伯河(原第聂伯河)在尤里·安德鲁霍维奇东中欧思想的话语建构中所起的作用。在他的随笔《水中之鱼》(Yak ryby u vodi)中。29 richkovykh pisen ', 2004)和' Atlas。冥想”(阿特拉斯。Medytatsiyi, 2005),作者选择强调第聂伯罗作为乌克兰两个不同地区之间的边界的功能。在他的描述中,右岸(乌克兰西部)在文化上似乎是传统的,而左岸(乌克兰东部)似乎是未开垦的,无产阶级的,游牧的,通常是一片荒野。作者总结道:“至少在涉及这张特定地图的背景下,两个乌克兰是分开的。”这是隐藏的意识形态化还是第聂伯罗的新神话化?当然,河流的概念化超越了其单纯的物理维度,并为景观提供了象征性的功能。安德鲁霍维奇的文集《地理定位的迷失》(Dezoriyentatsiya na mistsevosti, 1999)、《魔鬼藏在奶酪里》(Dyyavol khovayet 'sya v syri, 2006)和《亲密城市词典》(Leksykon intymnykh mist, 2016)为这种想象中的地理提供了更多的见解。本文提出的研究参照米科拉·里亚布丘克的“两个乌克兰”和塞缪尔·亨廷顿的“文明的冲突”概念讨论了安德鲁霍维奇的思想。中欧话语,后殖民研究和地缘政治理论补充了讨论,使其融入更大的背景。
{"title":"One River, Two Ukraines? Yurii Andrukhovych’s Imagined Geography of East-Central Europe","authors":"Galyna Spodarets","doi":"10.1080/14790963.2017.1412718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2017.1412718","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article discusses the role that the Dnipro River (formerly Dnieper River) plays in the discursive construction of Yurii Andrukhovych’s idea of East-Central Europe. In his essays ‘Like Fishes in Water’ (Yak ryby u vodi. 29 richkovykh pisen’, 2004) and ‘Atlas. Meditations’ (Atlas. Medytatsiyi, 2005), the author chooses to emphasize the Dnipro’s function as a border between two distinct regions of Ukraine. In his portrayal, the right bank (the western part of Ukraine) seems culturally traditional, whereas the left bank (the eastern part of Ukraine) appears to be uncultivated, proletarian, nomadic and generally an area of wilderness. The author concludes: ‘At least in the context involving this specific map the two Ukraines are divided’. Is this a hidden ideologization or a new mythologization of the Dnipro? Certainly, the conceptualization of the river transcends its mere physical dimensions and provides the landscape with a symbolic function. Andrukhovych’s essay volumes Disorientation on Location (Dezoriyentatsiya na mistsevosti, 1999), The Devil’s Hiding in the Cheese (Dyyavol khovayet’sya v syri, 2006) and The Lexicon of Intimate Cities (Leksykon intymnykh mist, 2016) provide additional insights into this imagined geography. The research presented in this article discusses Andrukhovych’s ideas with reference to the concept of ‘Two Ukraines’ by Mykola Riabchuk and ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ by Samuel Huntington. Central European discourse, post-colonial studies and geopoetical theory complement the discussion and enable its integration into a larger context.","PeriodicalId":41396,"journal":{"name":"Central Europe","volume":"7 1","pages":"45 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82523529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2017.1412730
Anna Nakai
{"title":"The Significance of the Lvov-Warsaw School in the European Culture","authors":"Anna Nakai","doi":"10.1080/14790963.2017.1412730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2017.1412730","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41396,"journal":{"name":"Central Europe","volume":"1 1","pages":"96 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89777363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2017.1355514
P. Miller
We all know the image. Many of us first saw it in our school texts or local newspaper whenever the First World War was on the lesson plan or another anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination rolled around. It has adorned book covers and album covers, appeared in serious works of scholarship, university-level textbooks, museums, children’s books, and comic strips. And today it is all over the Internet. It is, one could say, iconic. Taken just minutes after the murder, the photograph forces our eye to the far right, where a dapperly dressed man is being brutally propelled towards an open doorway by an Austrian gendarme and plain-clothes policeman. Although the man’s face slants downward with the rest of his resisting body, its grimace is palpable, and pained. The jostling crowd behind, meanwhile, bolsters the scene’s forward momentum, while in the centre of the image a second, sabre-wielding gendarme is pushing aside a man in a fez. As everyone knows and even Wikipedia confirms, it is the arrest of Gavrilo Princip.1 Or is it? On the tenth anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination, one Ferdo Ber (Ferdinand Behr) allegedly saw the photo in the Vienna paper Das Interessante Blatt and recognized himself.2 It is unclear why Ber would wait until 1930 to publish an article in the Sarajevo journal Pregled describing his surprise at first spotting the picture. Perhaps it was beginning to become ubiquitous, though the photo had appeared on the cover of Wiener Bilder as early as July 5, 1914, with the caption: ‘The arrest of the murderer Princip’.3 Then, too, Ber used the occasion to describe how he had grabbed the arm of a gendarme who was beating Princip and, ‘with colorful language’, bellowed in German
{"title":"‘The First Shots of the First World War’: The Sarajevo Assassination in History and Memory","authors":"P. Miller","doi":"10.1080/14790963.2017.1355514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2017.1355514","url":null,"abstract":"We all know the image. Many of us first saw it in our school texts or local newspaper whenever the First World War was on the lesson plan or another anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination rolled around. It has adorned book covers and album covers, appeared in serious works of scholarship, university-level textbooks, museums, children’s books, and comic strips. And today it is all over the Internet. It is, one could say, iconic. Taken just minutes after the murder, the photograph forces our eye to the far right, where a dapperly dressed man is being brutally propelled towards an open doorway by an Austrian gendarme and plain-clothes policeman. Although the man’s face slants downward with the rest of his resisting body, its grimace is palpable, and pained. The jostling crowd behind, meanwhile, bolsters the scene’s forward momentum, while in the centre of the image a second, sabre-wielding gendarme is pushing aside a man in a fez. As everyone knows and even Wikipedia confirms, it is the arrest of Gavrilo Princip.1 Or is it? On the tenth anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination, one Ferdo Ber (Ferdinand Behr) allegedly saw the photo in the Vienna paper Das Interessante Blatt and recognized himself.2 It is unclear why Ber would wait until 1930 to publish an article in the Sarajevo journal Pregled describing his surprise at first spotting the picture. Perhaps it was beginning to become ubiquitous, though the photo had appeared on the cover of Wiener Bilder as early as July 5, 1914, with the caption: ‘The arrest of the murderer Princip’.3 Then, too, Ber used the occasion to describe how he had grabbed the arm of a gendarme who was beating Princip and, ‘with colorful language’, bellowed in German","PeriodicalId":41396,"journal":{"name":"Central Europe","volume":"75 1","pages":"141 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2016-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88177940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2016.1357163
Karen Painter
examples from the Balkan War to make arguments about the nature of the special Serb sacrifice for the creation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In the third section, John Paul Newman, Petra Svoljšak, and Christoph Mick explore the ways in which Croatian, Slovene, Polish, and Ukrainian veterans and families struggled — and generally failed — to develop an effective voice to commemorate sacrifices that had often been made for the Habsburg state, and thus went unrecognized and unrewarded in Yugoslavia and Poland. All three authors detail the many problems faced by disabled or impoverished veterans who had fought for the ‘wrong’ side, and often did not qualify for state benefits, meagre as those were. Despite their attempts to organize themselves in statewide interest groups or to work in tandem with nationally privileged veterans’ groups (something that only occasionally worked), disabled and impoverished veterans not only faced hostility from nationalists, but also the inability of insolvent states in the 1930s to expand their meagre welfare programmes. In a final chapter in this section, Laurence Cole analyses the ways in which local people and communities in the Tyrol — both North and South — attempted to commemorate their war dead and war sacrifice, while avoiding the hostile attention of the Italian Fascist and Austrian Corporatist regimes. By including among his research the most local of efforts, Cole’s article suggests useful ways to approach open questions posed by this volume about so-called ‘silent commemorations’. Those attempts — when they involved semi-public efforts — often memorialized intimately human issues of comradeship and death, rather than assigning any grander nationalist or imperial significance to the actions of the war’s dead and its survivors. In some cases, Germanspeaking communities examined by Cole in the South Tyrol were able to commemorate wartime sacrifice in this way even under the watchful eye of their Fascist rulers. Both the editors and Berghahn books are to be congratulated on having produced an exceptional collection of essays for three reasons in particular. First, these essays address common questions in a highly coherent fashion. Secondly, despite their common focus, the essays offer a range of creative and sometimes new approaches to a difficult set of questions that are only now beginning to be addressed by historians. Third, this collection offers an excellent attempt to go beyond the imperial fragmentation of 1918 that created several often mutually antagonistic historiographies, and to relativize the meaning of 1918 for the region. Thus the volume helps the reader to understand several critical and influential continuities that survived the official end of empire.
{"title":"Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe","authors":"Karen Painter","doi":"10.1080/14790963.2016.1357163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2016.1357163","url":null,"abstract":"examples from the Balkan War to make arguments about the nature of the special Serb sacrifice for the creation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In the third section, John Paul Newman, Petra Svoljšak, and Christoph Mick explore the ways in which Croatian, Slovene, Polish, and Ukrainian veterans and families struggled — and generally failed — to develop an effective voice to commemorate sacrifices that had often been made for the Habsburg state, and thus went unrecognized and unrewarded in Yugoslavia and Poland. All three authors detail the many problems faced by disabled or impoverished veterans who had fought for the ‘wrong’ side, and often did not qualify for state benefits, meagre as those were. Despite their attempts to organize themselves in statewide interest groups or to work in tandem with nationally privileged veterans’ groups (something that only occasionally worked), disabled and impoverished veterans not only faced hostility from nationalists, but also the inability of insolvent states in the 1930s to expand their meagre welfare programmes. In a final chapter in this section, Laurence Cole analyses the ways in which local people and communities in the Tyrol — both North and South — attempted to commemorate their war dead and war sacrifice, while avoiding the hostile attention of the Italian Fascist and Austrian Corporatist regimes. By including among his research the most local of efforts, Cole’s article suggests useful ways to approach open questions posed by this volume about so-called ‘silent commemorations’. Those attempts — when they involved semi-public efforts — often memorialized intimately human issues of comradeship and death, rather than assigning any grander nationalist or imperial significance to the actions of the war’s dead and its survivors. In some cases, Germanspeaking communities examined by Cole in the South Tyrol were able to commemorate wartime sacrifice in this way even under the watchful eye of their Fascist rulers. Both the editors and Berghahn books are to be congratulated on having produced an exceptional collection of essays for three reasons in particular. First, these essays address common questions in a highly coherent fashion. Secondly, despite their common focus, the essays offer a range of creative and sometimes new approaches to a difficult set of questions that are only now beginning to be addressed by historians. Third, this collection offers an excellent attempt to go beyond the imperial fragmentation of 1918 that created several often mutually antagonistic historiographies, and to relativize the meaning of 1918 for the region. Thus the volume helps the reader to understand several critical and influential continuities that survived the official end of empire.","PeriodicalId":41396,"journal":{"name":"Central Europe","volume":"79 1","pages":"166 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2016-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75229727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2016.1356999
Jonathan L. Owen
encapsulated within the borders of the GDR, but communicating with the rest of Europe and more importantly with West Germany. Methodologically, the book is grounded in a well-balanced variety of local and central archival sources, with the addition of newspaper sources and interviews. The author divides the book into three large parts, focusing on ‘Player’, ‘Fans’, and ‘The People’s Game’, and thus offering three different, but complementary, views on the interrelationship of football and society. The focus of the first section is on professional players and the so-called ‘Leistungsfußball’ (performance football). The ‘from above’ perspective engages, amongst others, with the above-average privileges of footballers and the negation of their lifestyle(s) in a socialist society. These privileges were, however, often accompanied by state surveillance, leading the book to examine the phenomenon of ‘Republiksflucht’, the escape from the GDR, amongst top footballers and why it nonetheless remained a relatively marginal phenomenon. A particular interest is devoted to the national team and its struggles to foster an East German national identity, as well as to professional club football localisms, which undermined the ideological credo of a unified GDR national culture. The second section offers a juxtaposed ‘from below’ perspective, illustrating what it was like to be a football fan in the GBR, with special attention dedicated to the country’s issue with football hooliganism in the 1970s and 1980s. McDougall demonstrates how the lack of political grip on the game provided a relatively low risk opportunity to express opposition to the state and to reassert, at times radical, ‘Eigen-Sinn’. The third segment deepens the ‘from below’ perspective by examining the role of football in everyday GDR life. Touching upon widely neglected topics such as women’s football, amateur footballing encounters across the East–West divide or state-deficiencies in providing material needs for grassroots football, McDougall shows how these were spaces ‘outside the spotlight’ with significant autonomy from the state. Concluding, the red thread throughout The People’s Game is that football in the GDR (and same is to be said about other totalitarian contexts) can neither be described as a subversive tool in the hands of people opposing the socialist system, nor a political instrument for power holders to propagate their ideological agenda. As shown by McDougall, particularly in its early days, institutional football was far from a central interest for the state, which left organizations rarely staffed with ideologically trained people who were also suitable for the requirements of the job. As a result, grassroots initiatives on a local level as well as local power holders were the driving force of GDR football. That does not mean that the state did not exercise its power. McDougall, however, argues that top-down decision-making, such as club relocations, re-naming, player transfe
{"title":"Army Film and the Avant-Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military","authors":"Jonathan L. Owen","doi":"10.1080/14790963.2016.1356999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2016.1356999","url":null,"abstract":"encapsulated within the borders of the GDR, but communicating with the rest of Europe and more importantly with West Germany. Methodologically, the book is grounded in a well-balanced variety of local and central archival sources, with the addition of newspaper sources and interviews. The author divides the book into three large parts, focusing on ‘Player’, ‘Fans’, and ‘The People’s Game’, and thus offering three different, but complementary, views on the interrelationship of football and society. The focus of the first section is on professional players and the so-called ‘Leistungsfußball’ (performance football). The ‘from above’ perspective engages, amongst others, with the above-average privileges of footballers and the negation of their lifestyle(s) in a socialist society. These privileges were, however, often accompanied by state surveillance, leading the book to examine the phenomenon of ‘Republiksflucht’, the escape from the GDR, amongst top footballers and why it nonetheless remained a relatively marginal phenomenon. A particular interest is devoted to the national team and its struggles to foster an East German national identity, as well as to professional club football localisms, which undermined the ideological credo of a unified GDR national culture. The second section offers a juxtaposed ‘from below’ perspective, illustrating what it was like to be a football fan in the GBR, with special attention dedicated to the country’s issue with football hooliganism in the 1970s and 1980s. McDougall demonstrates how the lack of political grip on the game provided a relatively low risk opportunity to express opposition to the state and to reassert, at times radical, ‘Eigen-Sinn’. The third segment deepens the ‘from below’ perspective by examining the role of football in everyday GDR life. Touching upon widely neglected topics such as women’s football, amateur footballing encounters across the East–West divide or state-deficiencies in providing material needs for grassroots football, McDougall shows how these were spaces ‘outside the spotlight’ with significant autonomy from the state. Concluding, the red thread throughout The People’s Game is that football in the GDR (and same is to be said about other totalitarian contexts) can neither be described as a subversive tool in the hands of people opposing the socialist system, nor a political instrument for power holders to propagate their ideological agenda. As shown by McDougall, particularly in its early days, institutional football was far from a central interest for the state, which left organizations rarely staffed with ideologically trained people who were also suitable for the requirements of the job. As a result, grassroots initiatives on a local level as well as local power holders were the driving force of GDR football. That does not mean that the state did not exercise its power. McDougall, however, argues that top-down decision-making, such as club relocations, re-naming, player transfe","PeriodicalId":41396,"journal":{"name":"Central Europe","volume":"2016 1","pages":"162 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2016-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87782983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2017.1357161
P. Judson
army, after all, was the home of that ultimate Czech icon of anti-establishment mockery, the Good Soldier Švejk, and Švejk proves a point of reference in more than one Army Film production (p. 162). Again, though, Lovejoy stresses how such qualities arose in large part from a specific institutional identity, from Army Film’s conception of its specific role. What gained ground among Army Film leaders in the 1960s was a belief in the unit’s natural responsibility to address social issues and the concerns of young people, given that it represented an institution with which virtually all Czechoslovak youth came into contact through military service. ‘Auteurist experimentation’ and anti-war sentiment emerged as strategies of rapprochement between military and civilian spheres, attempts at preserving the Army’s legitimacy before a critically oriented youth (p. 165). Taken together, Lovejoy’s analyses offer a forceful qualification to the shopworn dichotomy, often invoked in commentary on East European cinema, that pits the creative agency of the individual artist against the negative, essentially limiting input of the state institution. Lovejoy also challenges the notion of the monolithically coordinated national film industry, detailing the way Army Film jockeyed with Czechoslovakia’s State Film bodies for its share of cultural prestige. A third important idea Lovejoy’s study brings to light is the presence of tradition — typified in enduring tropes like the ‘myth’ of the Western border — in a cinema whose history is easily defined as one of ruptured continuity and diktat-imposed doctrine. Such reassessments would, of course, carry little weight without solid research to support them. Lovejoy’s scholarship is impeccable throughout, with in-depth archival study and new interview material sitting alongside sensitive, careful textual analysis that coaxes multiple meanings from this often highly concentrated material. I would have welcomed more detail on the fate of Army Film after the cultural hammer blow of post-1968 ‘normalization’, while the title’s reference to the ‘avant-garde’ does not strictly apply to all the works covered here, with space left perhaps for further elaboration on the distinctions broached early on between cultural–political ‘vanguardism’, experimental film, and the avant-garde proper. But any such issues pale beside the importance of this book’s specific discoveries and its wider implications. As if Lovejoy’s scholarly labours were not enough, she has also curated and co-subtitled the DVD that accompanies this volume, an invaluable selection of thirteen Army Film productions spanning from the 1930s to the 1960s.
{"title":"Sacrifice and Rebirth. The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War","authors":"P. Judson","doi":"10.1080/14790963.2017.1357161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2017.1357161","url":null,"abstract":"army, after all, was the home of that ultimate Czech icon of anti-establishment mockery, the Good Soldier Švejk, and Švejk proves a point of reference in more than one Army Film production (p. 162). Again, though, Lovejoy stresses how such qualities arose in large part from a specific institutional identity, from Army Film’s conception of its specific role. What gained ground among Army Film leaders in the 1960s was a belief in the unit’s natural responsibility to address social issues and the concerns of young people, given that it represented an institution with which virtually all Czechoslovak youth came into contact through military service. ‘Auteurist experimentation’ and anti-war sentiment emerged as strategies of rapprochement between military and civilian spheres, attempts at preserving the Army’s legitimacy before a critically oriented youth (p. 165). Taken together, Lovejoy’s analyses offer a forceful qualification to the shopworn dichotomy, often invoked in commentary on East European cinema, that pits the creative agency of the individual artist against the negative, essentially limiting input of the state institution. Lovejoy also challenges the notion of the monolithically coordinated national film industry, detailing the way Army Film jockeyed with Czechoslovakia’s State Film bodies for its share of cultural prestige. A third important idea Lovejoy’s study brings to light is the presence of tradition — typified in enduring tropes like the ‘myth’ of the Western border — in a cinema whose history is easily defined as one of ruptured continuity and diktat-imposed doctrine. Such reassessments would, of course, carry little weight without solid research to support them. Lovejoy’s scholarship is impeccable throughout, with in-depth archival study and new interview material sitting alongside sensitive, careful textual analysis that coaxes multiple meanings from this often highly concentrated material. I would have welcomed more detail on the fate of Army Film after the cultural hammer blow of post-1968 ‘normalization’, while the title’s reference to the ‘avant-garde’ does not strictly apply to all the works covered here, with space left perhaps for further elaboration on the distinctions broached early on between cultural–political ‘vanguardism’, experimental film, and the avant-garde proper. But any such issues pale beside the importance of this book’s specific discoveries and its wider implications. As if Lovejoy’s scholarly labours were not enough, she has also curated and co-subtitled the DVD that accompanies this volume, an invaluable selection of thirteen Army Film productions spanning from the 1930s to the 1960s.","PeriodicalId":41396,"journal":{"name":"Central Europe","volume":"6 1","pages":"164 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2016-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88529716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-07-02DOI: 10.1080/14790963.2017.1305701
U. Grashoff
‘Was there a Communist psychiatry?’ This is the overarching question of this edited volume. Previous studies have emphasized the misuse of the profession, the forced hospitalization and involuntary drugging of dissidents, or they dealt with ideologically informed approaches such as the rejection of psychoanalysis and the simultaneous devotion to physiological approaches to mental illness. This book provides nuanced views from within Communist psychiatry. The editors’ expert introduction concedes that psychiatric abuse for political and other purposes did happen, although both the scale and the motivation of Soviet psychiatrists involved in this practice remain highly controversial. The focus on this issue has led to an incomplete picture of psychiatry in Communist Eastern Europe, and the objective of this book is to fill some of the gaps. Perhaps the most interesting insight of the volume is that the dogmatization of Ivan Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity did not result in a homogenization of Communist psychiatry. Neither in Romania, in Hungary nor in the Soviet Union did the ‘Pavlovian turn’ displace previously practised therapies. The various ramifications of Pavlovism in different socialist countries demonstrate the variety of Communist psychiatries. In Czechoslovakia, researchers harnessed Pavlovian ideas in creative ways and, for instance, used it to draw inspiration for environmental psychiatry. They were ‘committed to the Marxist project’, but ‘by no means dogmatic ideologues’ (Sarah Marks). In Budapest, on the other hand, psychiatrists paid lip service to Pavlov while psychotherapy, psychology, and psychoanalysis persisted in informal educational groups and private networks, as Melinda Kovai points out. In the USSR, the insulin coma therapy, a Western method, had been adopted, reframed, and widely used. Although ineffective, it did not disappear after 1950. As Benjamin Zajicek shows, insulin coma therapy was even more frequently practised for a while since ‘Pavlov’s doctrine’ rejected other brutal therapies such as lobotomy and electroshock which were used in the West. Another main theme of the book is the construction of diagnoses within the context of a Communist regime. In Romania, the rebranding of the diagnosis of neurasthenia in Pavlovian terms (called ‘asthenic neurosis’) turned out to be a success story. Corina Dobos considers ‘asthenic neurosis’, which bundled up fatigue, boredom, apathy, conflicts, and stress, a ‘creative translation’ of the experiences in state-socialist societies ‘into medical language and daily practice’. In Central Asia, the term ‘narcomania’ became a weapon of Soviet psychiatrists to fight native Islamic medical practices. Other contributions highlight knowledge transfer which did not stop at the Iron Curtain: East European practitioners strove to actively contribute to Western psychiatry, too. Matt Savelli describes how illegal drug-taking was treated as a social problem in Yugoslavia. The re-soci
{"title":"Psychiatry in Communist Europe","authors":"U. Grashoff","doi":"10.1080/14790963.2017.1305701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2017.1305701","url":null,"abstract":"‘Was there a Communist psychiatry?’ This is the overarching question of this edited volume. Previous studies have emphasized the misuse of the profession, the forced hospitalization and involuntary drugging of dissidents, or they dealt with ideologically informed approaches such as the rejection of psychoanalysis and the simultaneous devotion to physiological approaches to mental illness. This book provides nuanced views from within Communist psychiatry. The editors’ expert introduction concedes that psychiatric abuse for political and other purposes did happen, although both the scale and the motivation of Soviet psychiatrists involved in this practice remain highly controversial. The focus on this issue has led to an incomplete picture of psychiatry in Communist Eastern Europe, and the objective of this book is to fill some of the gaps. Perhaps the most interesting insight of the volume is that the dogmatization of Ivan Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity did not result in a homogenization of Communist psychiatry. Neither in Romania, in Hungary nor in the Soviet Union did the ‘Pavlovian turn’ displace previously practised therapies. The various ramifications of Pavlovism in different socialist countries demonstrate the variety of Communist psychiatries. In Czechoslovakia, researchers harnessed Pavlovian ideas in creative ways and, for instance, used it to draw inspiration for environmental psychiatry. They were ‘committed to the Marxist project’, but ‘by no means dogmatic ideologues’ (Sarah Marks). In Budapest, on the other hand, psychiatrists paid lip service to Pavlov while psychotherapy, psychology, and psychoanalysis persisted in informal educational groups and private networks, as Melinda Kovai points out. In the USSR, the insulin coma therapy, a Western method, had been adopted, reframed, and widely used. Although ineffective, it did not disappear after 1950. As Benjamin Zajicek shows, insulin coma therapy was even more frequently practised for a while since ‘Pavlov’s doctrine’ rejected other brutal therapies such as lobotomy and electroshock which were used in the West. Another main theme of the book is the construction of diagnoses within the context of a Communist regime. In Romania, the rebranding of the diagnosis of neurasthenia in Pavlovian terms (called ‘asthenic neurosis’) turned out to be a success story. Corina Dobos considers ‘asthenic neurosis’, which bundled up fatigue, boredom, apathy, conflicts, and stress, a ‘creative translation’ of the experiences in state-socialist societies ‘into medical language and daily practice’. In Central Asia, the term ‘narcomania’ became a weapon of Soviet psychiatrists to fight native Islamic medical practices. Other contributions highlight knowledge transfer which did not stop at the Iron Curtain: East European practitioners strove to actively contribute to Western psychiatry, too. Matt Savelli describes how illegal drug-taking was treated as a social problem in Yugoslavia. The re-soci","PeriodicalId":41396,"journal":{"name":"Central Europe","volume":"22 1","pages":"159 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2016-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90986581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}