Pedagogy in exile. On the (non)discussion of educational thought from exile in Germany after the Second World War

During the First and Second World Wars, women’s wartime service became increasingly important for the functioning of the home front and battlefront in Britain, Germany, Russia, the United States, and other war-powers. Hundreds of thousands of women served in the militaries of the belligerents during World War II. Scholars estimate that the percentage of women in the Allied armed forces reached up to 2–3 percent. The number of women in military service in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was especially high, but only in the latter were they officially enlisted as soldiers. Despite their numbers and importance, until recently, mainstream historiography and public memory have largely ignored women’s military service. This chapter takes a closer, comparative look at women’s wartime service in the Age of the World Wars in history and memory and explains the paradox that while it was increasingly needed, it has long been downplayed and overlooked in public perception and memory in all war powers and across the ideological divide of the Cold War.

This article offers new insight into the stories behind the creation of the “Fondo Caduti” in Cesena, a collection of letters, postcards, and photographic portraits gathered by Dino Bazzocchi, the director of Biblioteca Malatestiana, in view of a memorial publication entitled Album d’Oro , devoted to the city’s soldiers fallen in the First World War. Through the analysis of the photographs’ materiality and the reconstruction of their “cultural biography,” this study investigates the social meanings implicit in photographic objects that are carriers of private grief as well as public memory.

As Timothy Snyder, historian of Ukraine, reminds us, the myths, memories, and stories about a nation’s past shape its understanding of the present and the future. Further, public memory can obscure the complexities of history; as he writes, “there is a difference between memory, the impressions we are given, and history, the connections that we work to make—if we wish.”1 This insight—that mythic public memory can both create a deceptive understanding of history and have serious and often violent consequences in the present—is something that public historians have long understood. Lost causes and mythic beliefs continue to haunt us.War, conflict, and memory are central to the contributions in our current issue. In “Memorializing Conflict and History in South Thailand through Museum, Art and Poetry,” Mala Rajo Sathian makes the case for centering artists as creators of counter-histories. Sathian argues that the sometimes-violent conflict between the Malay Muslim minorities of southern Thailand (known as the Deep South) and Thai government is presented in official histories (including textbooks and museums) from the viewpoint of the state. Private and local museums, often those commemorating figures in the arts, offer an alternative understanding of the conflict, through creating a “collected public history of a restive region as presented through the arts, which has helped create increased visibility for the region.”Our first Report from the Field, Stephan Fender’s “The Squat-Museum: Public Urban History in Autonomous Spaces: The Hamburger Gängeviertel,” also engages with public art and public history, and examines a collaboration, still rare in Germany, between university students, professional historians, and community members. The historic Gängeviertel, central to working-class and Bohemian cultures in Hamburg, Germany, were long-neglected in official accounts of the city as prosperous and business-oriented. Although much of the neighborhood has been torn down to make way for office buildings, in 2009 antigentification activists and artists occupied surviving structures and created a self-governing, cooperative community. Fender worked with undergraduate students and residents to create an onsite, interactive museum interpreting the rich history of the neighborhood and the founding of the present community. The result demonstrates that, in Fender’s words, “student and public participation can significantly improve the development of small-scale public history projects and contribute to the blurring of the border between academia and the public.”Lucy Noakes and James Wallis return to public memory and war in “The People’s Centenary? Public History, Remembering and Forgetting in Britain’s First World War Centenary.” Examining the thousands of projects that marked the centenary of the First World War, both nationally and locally sponsored, they found that overwhelmingly, a narrative that emphasized the experience of the Western Front soldier and viewed the war as tragic and futile shaped the commemoration of the war. Although this understanding of the war as individual tragedy did inspire many in Britain to become active in researching the experience of their family or community members, this affective, personal perspective of the conflict also served to obscure its wider significance and the experience of people other than young, white, male soldiers.In “Making Public Memory: The Public History of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist Dictatorship in the Basque Country (1936–2015),” Unai Belaustegi and Xabier Irujo consider how public history organizations “investigate, (re)interpret, and publicize the historical events of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–75).” Similar to Sathian’s findings in Thailand, local, grassroots organizations in the Basque Country have created public histories in regional communities long viewed as problems by the central state. They have offered an alternative understanding to what Belaustegi identifies as official “indifference” to Franco-era violence in Basque Country.A final report from the field, coauthored by public historian and curator Adina Jocelyn Langer and Sandra Kollen Ghizoni, research specialist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, examine a time of violence to learn lessons about survival. Langer and Ghizoni together conducted oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors in the Atlanta area that focused specifically on questions of how people build economic systems in traumatic situations. As they argue, “Much can likely be learned from these extreme economic conditions that could have value for present and future situations, including those affecting people currently displaced from their normal economic environment due to war, persecution, or natural disaster, all of whom who are trying to build up their economic lives after leaving most of their assets and livelihoods behind.” Their interviews with survivors also sought to open up conversations that moved beyond the practiced stories long told to schoolchildren and other groups, to enhance “meaningful interaction and new insights in the co-creation of oral history.”Together, these articles underline the importance of determining the distinction between myth and history, and the complex ways each shape our understanding of the present.

This article investigates the developments of public memory of the First World War as it is written into the national narratives of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia on the way to the centennial of the war’s outbreak. The First World War constitutes both a shared and a divided memory in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Though the war was a catastrophe everywhere, to Serbia it also became a triumph on the allied side, whereas in Bosnia and Croatia it was mainly a state collapse. Yet, the First World War also provided the immediate conditions for the creation of the first Yugoslav state, and consequently the history of the war was narrated within a Yugoslav context, echoing the triumphant Serbian narrative. With the fall of socialist Yugoslavia, the memory of the First World War developed quite differently in the three states. Different lessons are being drawn from war history, often with the aim of situating the nation within a European context. In Serbia, First World War narratives remain national and heroic and are framed as a virtuous, pro-democratic, and European legacy. In Croatia and Bosnia, First World War history is being created anew and, at least in the Bosnian case, with an aspiration to present Bosnia’s war experience within a discourse of European reconciliation. Based on analyses of popular history books, history debates in newspapers and media, and political commentary, the article shows how the First World War as public memory has moved from Yugoslav to national narratives with an increasingly European aspiration.

Commemoration of the Second World War in Southeast Asia varies significantly, from countries that have chosen to use the memory of Japanese occupation as a means of strengthening national unity, to those that pay little attention because doing so would distract from their own independence struggle. Thailand is one of those countries that downplays its official memory of the Second World War. This article investigates why, given that the Second World War saw significant loss of life and damage to Thai sovereignty, as well as acts of heroism, it occupies a marginal position in Thailand’s public memory. While Second World War history is not suppressed in history textbooks, Thailand’s Second World War monuments and commemorative ceremonies are either dispersed or disguised. To explain why this is the case, I examine firstly sensitivity to foreign perceptions, and secondly domestic politics in the aftermath of the Second World War. I argue that domestic politics offers a more convincing explanation, particularly with regard to the relatively obscure place of the Seri Thai resistance movement. Using the concept of mnemonic hegemony, and through analysis of the spatial distribution of Second World War monuments, I argue that Thailand’s Second World War history remains challenging and uncomfortable for Thailand’s dominant institutions, the monarchy and the military.

In the mid-summer of 2012, a sort ofHistorikerstreitbroke out in Hungary. The main topics of the controversy were the language of and the attitude to the history of the Holocaust. In what follows I will argue that the HungarianHistorikerstreitis closely related to both the renaissance of the Horthy era (1920–1944) in current Hungarian politics and the ambivalent attitude towards the Holocaust in public memory. Since 2010, Hungary has celebrated ‘Trianon commemoration day’, remembering on the peace treaty of Trianon after the First World War. In today’s Hungary, Trianon seems to be a permanent trauma of the nation not only in the public memory but also in history writing. In spite of the fact that many respected scholars argue that currently the construction of the trauma of Trianon has a hegemonic position in Hungarian social memory and that the Holocaust cannot compete with it, I will show that the Trianon trauma is a construction of the current politics of history, which overshadows the tragic experiences of the First World War. Moreover, Trianon and the Holocaust are strongly interconnected historical events, which cannot be understood separately.

Greater love has no one than this; that one lay down their life for their friends - John 15:13 As we contemplate laying down of one's life-for family, for friends, for country, for ideals-the ideal of freedom strikes a responsive chord for Americans. It is ingrained in our collective psyche and supported by our nation's founding documents. The United States of America's Declaration of Independence confirms our commitment to that ideal: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness (The Declaration, par. 2). Because we such a high value on freedom for ourselves, we are willing to extend that unalienable right to others, whether on our own continent or elsewhere in world-and that course of action can lead to military conflict. When conflict ends, those who have given ultimate sacrifice of life to maintain principle of freedom are usually honored publicly in some commemorative fashion. The focus of this article is to illustrate how one Alabama county memorialized its honored dead from not one, but from five wars: Civil War, World War I, World War , Korean War, and Vietnam War. Giving Voice to Place Beiden C. Lane states: A curious transformation of consciousness occurs when 'an ordinary place' ... - a mere dot on map-becomes gradually (or perhaps even suddenly) a of extraordinary (53). This transformation from a mere neutral location (topos) to one suggestive of energizing forces and imagination (chora) has been debated since of ancient Greeks. Aristotle considered place (topos) as an inert container, as a point of no significant influence on human beings who inhabited it (Lane 54; Aristotle 59-60). On other hand, Plato proposed place (chora) to be the wetnurse, suckler, and feeder of all things, which finds its center in human experience and calls human beings to a common dance or 'choreography' most appropriate to their life together (Lane 54; Aristotle 59-60; Plato, 48, 51). Lane further intimates that when individuals experience common dance in deliberate ritual activity, such as commemorating human events, it is involvement in ritual activity that transforms a from topos to chora for participants (54). In that mutual experience, becomes sacred, offering an opportunity for reflection and connection to things present and past. That shared experience is linked to a Greek word for time: kairos. In contrast to another Greek word for time -chronos, which corresponds to passage of repetitive equal divisions of time, such as minutes -kairos indicates an unrepeatable moment when events of great significance come to be gathered in life of an individual or people (55). In instance of experiencing a public memorial, it is a rare opportunity to experience both kairos and chronos simultaneously-connected across (55). The conflict in experience, however, often arises from conception of public memorial's form. Public Memorials In his article, Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age, Andreas Huyssen indicates that remembrance as a vital human activity shapes our links to past, and ways we remember define us in present. As individuals and societies, we need past to construct and to anchor our identities and to nurture a vision of future (qtd. in CaIo, par. 3; Huyssen 249-61). No contemplation of American past can exclude Revolutionary War, because it united a group of unlikely individuals who formed a nation committed to freedom and justice for all of its citizenry. Nor can Civil War be excluded, because it ripped our nation apart as we dealt with issue that all were not free. The conflict caused our nation to reconsider its priorities and to build anew American identity, inclusive of all freedom-loving people. …

Memorials and the Mine Disaster in Monongah, West Virginia: From Trauma to an Italian Global Memoryscape

This essay examines two examples of the commemoration of World War I, one a written text, La beffa di Buccari (1918), by Gabriele D'Annunzio, and the other a 1921 proposal for a war memorial entitled Monumento al Fante by sculptor Eugenio Baroni. Before the war, both men had produced deeply patriotic works and availed themselves almost exclusively of female personifications of the nation and images of motherhood when commemorating the heroic deeds of the Italian people. However, during and after the war, when the majority of public literary and sculptural memorials still relied on maternal rhetoric to articulate the mourning process, D'Annunzio and Baroni deviated from these norms. Yet La beffa di Bucari augmented D'Annunzio's reputation as a hero, while the Monumento al Fante was, after several controversial years, eventually deemed unacceptable as a public memorial and remained unrealized. The similarities between the two post-war works under consideration — particularly their reliance on male figures as mourners and bearers of memory — respond to the intensity of the relationships formed at the front and the closeness that developed between men. I will argue that the differences between the two — the fact that D'Annunzio's narrative takes place entirely within the war zone and Baroni's breaks the barrier between battle front and home front — as well as their particular historical contexts, account for the success of the former and the rejection of the latter as an official memory of the war.

In his stimulating study In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans sets out to rebut ‘the postmodernist treatment of history as a form of literature’, arguing for example that ‘Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text’ (Evans, 2000: 244, 124). My argument in this book has essentially been the reverse: that literary and cultural representations of past events are a form of history. While there is no need to cast doubt on the factual reality of past events, our attempts in the present to recapture and interpret the traces of the past can only be expressed in some type of partial, mediated discourse. What is most striking about such reconstructions of events as catastrophic as the Second World War is not so much their triviality as their persistence and multiplicity. As Evans himself remarks, ‘Public knowledge of the past — public memory, in other words — has always been structured by influences other than historians, from folksong, myth and tradition to pulp fiction, broadsheets and the popular press’ (2000: 207). Although all interpretations of the past are by definition retrospective, this does not mean they are purely arbitrary or equally valid: we need to distinguish the trivialising and tendentious from the more complex and persuasive.KeywordsJewish IdentityMass MurderResistance AgentHistorical PhenomenonPublic MemoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: The British Slave Trade & Public Memory, and: India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, and: Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum Peter H. Hoffenberg The British Slave Trade & Public Memory. By Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. By Saloni Mathur. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum. By Stephanie Moser. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). Europe continues to be haunted by the ghosts of its past, whether those are memories of the Shoah, slavery and the slave trade, and, among other nightmares from which it has yet to awake, overseas conquest and colonial rule. Tony Judt recently noted that post-1945 Europeans lived in a “House of the Dead” after the horrors of Fascist and Communist rule, genocide and the two World Wars, a continent dominated by Hannah Arendt's twin focal points of memory and evil.1 That remains the case today for many reasons on both sides of the English Channel and the Elbe, and whether one walks the streets of Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, or Sarajevo. But reactions to such ghosts vary among and within generations, nations, and classes. Whereas only a few years ago French school teachers were required to teach about the virtues of French imperialism, their colleagues in Germany are prevented by the law from denying the Holocaust. Monuments to the murderers of local Jews are raised in some of the Baltic States while no English grammar school’s curricula is complete without lesson plans on the “Middle Passage.” It is as if William Faulkner were as correct about the Europe and Britain of today as he was about his beloved and tragic South half a century ago: the past is not even in the past and some people have too much history. Or, as German historians would add, where in Europe have men and women truly mastered or come to terms with their past, as the Germans continue to struggle with their own Vergangenheistbewaltigung? Apparently not in England, where its own “History (if not Culture) Wars”' continue to be fought, as they have, perhaps, been for several centuries. The trinity of well-written and provocatively-argued monographs under review are each in their own way about England’s struggle to master its own and others’ pasts, as well as that struggle on the part of those living in independent countries formerly under England’s informal, or formal hubristic grasp. Readers will better understand how English men, women, and students wrestle with their histories, as well as how South Asians, Americans, and Egyptians, among others, grapple with similar if not the same living ghosts. In the cases of these three books, those pasts continue to resonate in various sites of memory about slavery and the slave trade, British rule in South Asia, and the preservation, if not outright theft, and display of Ancient Egypt’s material culture. Such discussed sites of memory include the British and South Kensington Museums, major department stores, popular monuments and festivals, guided walks and, among others, the visual and performing arts. They can even include the televised version of a prominent eighteenth-century novel. Each in their own way addressed and continues to address the powerful and contested relationship to a constantly moving past, if not an equally dynamic present. That was the case with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeologists and “the antiquities” of Ancient Egypt; it is also true today with museums displaying the artifacts of the slave trade. Readers interested in topics such as the politics of display, tourism, memory and representation will not be disappointed; nor will those more attracted to the study of the ideas and practices of race and, for want of a better term, “Orientalism.” The three books contribute to not only how the English thought about and represented other people, but also, not surprisingly, how and what they thought about themselves. As slavery was an often distorting mirror reflecting English liberty; traditional India was a complementary mirror for modern Britain. As Saloni Mathur reminds us, such mirrorings overflow with powerful and at times tragic ironies. Mathur’s India...

If Canada is famously said to have more geography than history, Germany has more history than geography. What Canada really lacks, though, is not history but memory. Survey after survey shows how little Canadians know about the people and events that have shaped them. We do not teach our history and we do not celebrate our founders. It has made us a nation of amnesiacs, blissfully ignorant of our past, stumbling about in a poetic fog.The same cannot be said of Germany. Memory matters here. If Germany has too much history, which may well be true, it is trying to overcome it. This is particularly so in its public memory, a byword for presenting the past in monuments, memorials, and museums. Or, put differently, how society remembers, what it remembers, and who it remembers. Materially, we measure this in the exhibitions in museums, the signs on buildings, the statues in parks. All reflect a people's self-understanding.Germany is obsessive about its past. There may be no country that is more committed to writing its history in bricks and mortar. And there may be no city more committed than Berlin, its storied capital where so much of that history was made. It is a layered history, divided into periods going back generations. It begins with the monarch s of imperial Germany, represented in the royal palaces, gardens, and statutes of Potsdam and Charlottenburg, and the art and treasures of the five magnificent institutions of Museum Island, collections that are being restored and unified at great cost. Of interest here, though, is the last 90 years: the Weimar Republic (1918-33); national socialism (1933-45); the Cold War (1945-89); and reunification to the present. All are represented in Berlin in eclectic ways.This is especially true when it comes to marking the Holocaust. Nothing is more painful to Germans than the mechanized murder of the European Jews, and nothing is more fundamental to its public memory. While this genocide was a signal event for Germany and humanity, too, it does not necessarily ensure that it will be remembered that way - or even remembered at all - in the place it originated. Children do not always recognize the sins of their parents, let alone atone for them. Indeed, there are countries guilty of atrocities in the last century that have made little effort to address their past. They remain silent, ignoring or even denying it. Their museums do not address the big questions; if they do, they disparage or distort them. They have few memorials or monuments. This is generally true of Japan, Russia, and Austria, each of which sees itself as victim more than perpetrator.Not so Germany. If what the Germans did in the Second World War was unique in its size and horror, their commitment to remember it is unique in its depth and honesty. Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame? asks Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany. Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility. His incredulity is real. It has led essayist Wolf Jobst Siedler to suggest that if Germans were once world-class sinners, they are now worldclass penitents.How do the Germans remember? They make big statements, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which opened in 2005. It fills some eight acres in the heart of Berlin, in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, close by Unter den Linden, the city's historic boulevard. Its 2 711 square, dark-grey pillars of differing heights evoke the dense tombstones of Prague's ancient Jewish cemetery. While there is nothing identifiably Jewish about where the memorial sits, it is at the centre of things, not on the periphery. Nor is it small or understated. The Holocaust memorial is a stark expression of a nation's shame.More than a monument, it chronicles the Holocaust. Photographs, letters, and stories here illuminate history's darkest moment. This is reinforced a few blocks away in the Jewish Museum of Berlin. …

Hungarian-born actress Franziska (or Franciska) Gaal was an interwar star whose film career spanned different countries and continents. Contemporary trade press and newspaper articles reveal her international fame during the 1930s, and trace her attempts to conquer Hollywood, where the studio system dictated that she lose weight and dye her hair. As she was unable to continue her career in Europe due to her Jewish heritage, this article examines her trajectory in Europe and the United States in the context of exile. It also interrogates how one of Europe’s top stars for an entire decade could fade from public memory and drift into oblivion, especially in the German-speaking countries where she was once so successful.

Discussions about representations of World War II and the 1990s war in history curricula and textbooks have had a deep impact on the teaching of history in Croatia. Both wars were (and still are) considered as a starting point for the emergence of the (new) state, socialist Yugoslavia in 1945 and present-day Croatia at the beginning of the 1990s. Since 1945, both topics have been used as a means of political legitimization and as an instrument to promote patriotism. The 1941-1945 war was the topic of particular significance in communist Yugoslavia because it was meant to provide the basis of legitimacy for the Yugo-slav Communist regime. During the 1990s, the teaching of this topic underwent dramatic modifications – the manner in which this entire question was treated served as a strong impetus for historical revisionism. In the last couple of years another war has come into the focus of debates about the content of school’s history education: the 1991-1995 war, which is called in Croatia the “Homeland War”. The conflicting viewpoints of these wars have caused several public debates which have continuously reflected the clash of interpretations and a divided memory that exists in the Croatian society.

Sindbaek Andersen and Dedovic investigate the public memory of the First World War in Croatia. By analysing historiographies, history schoolbooks and public debates, the authors aim to trace the development of Croatian First World War memory: they argue that this memory was rather vague and often almost absent in Croatia before 2013, and that this was largely caused by the absence of a Croatian national tradition of remembering the First World War during the Yugoslav period. This chapter proposes to explain this void by discussing Croatia’s status as a “memorial shatter zone,” a region where public memory narratives are fissured and unstable as a result of changing political conditions leading to disputes and shifting demands of history and memory.