Decent Man Research Articles

"It's probably an addiction-It can't be anything else": The role of addiction discourse in the self-identity of men who pay for sex.

This study is about the role of the addiction discourse in the self-identity of Israeli men who pay women for sex (MPWS). Using the theoretical framework of symbolic interaction, we identified two main contradictory themes regarding the role of the addict identity in the self-narratives of the participants: one presenting the addict identity as contributing to the participants' positive self-perception and the second as challenging it. Within a social context that often portrays MPWS as perpetrators and abusers, the addiction discourse was a useful source in helping the participants negotiate the dilemma of how to engage in "deviant" acts and still appear to be decent men. While not dismissing the reality of addiction or the distress experienced by some of the participants, we suggest that being "sick" and "having no control over one's actions" might be considered by some MPWS as preferable explanations to being an outlaw, or villain. However, the inconclusive nature of the sex addiction discourse intimidated some of the participants' self-identity, thus stressing the need for a clear definition and further theorization of sex addiction, particularly in the context of sex for pay. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Withdrawal of A Decent Man: On the Irony in “Running for Governor”

Mark Twain’s short story “Running for Governor” is threaded with irony, which achieves a structural effect and contributed a lot to the organization of the story on the macro-level, and achieves a strong rhetorical effect with artful linguistic devices on the micro-level, therefore forming a sharp contrast between truth and falsehood. Irony in the story is effectively penetrating and powerful in its function of plot development, characterization and the demonstration of authorial attitude. This paper aims to reveal how the artistic effect of irony is achieved in this story, and show that the artistry of Mark Twain’s irony lies in creating the tension between ambivalent feelings through which there comes a direct communication between the author and reader through the ingenious organization and masterful use of language.

Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman

The Inculcative Power of Australian Cadet Corps Uniforms in the 1900s and 1910s

The Inculcative Power of Australian Cadet Corps Uniforms in the 1900s and 1910s

The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams by Daniel Nayeri

Reviewed by: The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams by Daniel Nayeri Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Nayeri, Daniel The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams; illus. by Daniel Miyares. Levine Querido, 2023 [224p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781646143030 $21.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4-6 Twelve-year-old Omar is fleeing for his life from a pair of murderous monks (who were actually entrusted to care for him but are clearly failing at it) when he, quite fortunately and quite literally, stumbles into a caravan of merchants. Samir the Seller of Dreams trades six bolts of silk for Omar’s life and takes him on as a servant, renaming him Monkey. Initially, Samir seems like a decent man, but it turns out he has duped his fair share of buyers, and now at least six, if not more, groups of assassins are dead set on killing him. Monkey bargains his freedom for his efforts to save Samir, but his success depends on trickery he’s not yet comfortable with. The episodic nature of the tale would make this an excellent classroom or family readaloud, and the intriguing characters, richly described setting, and fast-paced action maintains reader/listener engagement with ease. A self-proclaimed true believer of love, Omar/Monkey is nonetheless clueless about its nuances, and his attachment to needing a clear and distinct line between good and evil prevents him from seeing the complexity of people. He’s also not a terribly reliable narrator, and it’s possible his early judgments of Samir were never his true feelings at all. Nayeri’s immersive writing style brings a you-are-there energy to the depiction of the harsh but gorgeous environment of the Silk Road, and an informative author’s note further details the geography of the trail, its economic and social value, and the many people who traversed it. The book ends with a simple but profound reminder that love comes in many forms, it is almost always messy and unpredictable, and it is almost always worth every effort toward it. [End Page 230] Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Good Things (About Bad Behavior) Come in Small Packages: Using the Short Story “Great Experiment” to Teach Business Ethics

We present a fictional short story about embezzlement, “Great Experiment” by Jeffrey Eugenides, as a resource for management classes. We begin by providing a brief description of the story, in which a decent and law-abiding 40-something man’s lack of professional success and envy of his wealthy neighbors contribute to his decision to accept a coworker’s invitation to participate in an embezzlement scheme to steal money from their employer. Then, we discuss how to use the story to prompt students to identify the antecedents and consequences of illegal, unethical behavior and consider ways organizations can prevent such behavior. We also suggest other ways to use this resource.

Jaki jest porządny człowiek? O wybranych użyciach przymiotnika porządny we współczesnej polszczyźnie

The aim of the article is an attempt to answer the question of what Polish speakers mean when describing someone as porządny [decent]. Over 2,000 sentences taken from the MoncoPL corpus were studied, containing combinations of the adjective under study with nouns: człowiek, osoba, mężczyzna, facet, chłopak, kobieta, dziewczyna [man, person, guy, boy, woman, girl]. The analyzes were preceded by a review of lexicographic definitions as well as concepts of a decent man. Research has shown that the adjective porządny denotes a bundle of positive traits that are concretized depending on the context. Only in relation to women, the analyzed term is more precise and refers to the sexual and moral sphere.

Behind Barriers, Living a Man's Life: Imperial Masculinity in Graham Greene's "The Basement Room" and The Fallen Idol

Graham Greene's short story, "The Basement Room" (1936), and its later film adaptation, The Fallen Idol (1948), tell the story of how a young boy realizes the fallibility of his childhood hero. Although Greene has been lambasted as a middlebrow writer, his work offers an important critique of the lasting influence of imperial gender roles during the mid-twentieth century. Using the perspective of a young boy, the two works critique the Orwellian decent man as irrelevant and a façade for imperialism, insisting that the perpetuation of this form of middle-class English masculinity leads to individual alienation and self-destruction.

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai

Reviewed by: Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai Elaine Margolin László Krasznahorkai Chasing Homer Trans. John Batki. New York. New Directions. 2021. 91 pages. HUNGARIAN AUTHOR László Krasznahorkai is gifted with seductive powers that force us to go wherever he goes; we simply cannot negate him. In Chasing Homer, his anxious first-person narrator careens at breakneck speed through the vastness of Europe’s haunted spaces. We wonder why he is running so fast and from what. We know nothing about him; not his name, or whether he is a parent or father or husband or someone’s lover, or even if he is a good or decent man. He offers no confessions. Yet in a few short paragraphs we are entranced by the lusciousness and foreignness of his impossibly long sentences, which are unencumbered by any internal pressure to come to an end. His suffering becomes ours. We understand he’s under attack—by men who have deemed him unworthy to live—but he offers no clues as to why they want him dead. What was his transgression? Was there one? We aren’t really certain other than knowing that they simply want him to die. It’s not that we are naïve. We know that this last century has seen millions of men and women die for no reason at all; so many at the death camps in Europe, but Krasznahorkai, or rather his unnamed alter ego, never speaks of the Holocaust or any other atrocity directly. He seems disgusted by man’s barbarity to man in all its reincarnations. He describes for us proudly how he has survived this long in intricate passages telling us about the ingenious ways he slips in and out of a crowd without being noticed, or how he is able to remain hidden in the hull of a boat for days at a time without being detected. Krasznahorkai’s protagonist focuses his intention on surviving, which requires him to keep moving, often in counterintuitive directions, to throw off those chasing him. He finds remaining constantly vigilant exhausting. We don’t sense he yearns for any human contact, and he never reminisces about someone he misses from his past. It seems the fight to stay alive has extinguished all other preoccupations. One might think this would distance us from him, but the unfathomable thing is his ability to create in us strong feelings for him despite his obliviousness. We feel his agony and want to help, but he continues to ignore us. His narrative is enhanced by melancholy portraits by German painter Max Neumann that are for the most part indecipherable. The first one we see is a simple line drawing of a man with his eyes blacked out, and another painting shows three men in shadow seemingly scanning an interminable landscape. Another shows a man with a bat seemingly preparing to defend himself against a gang of pursuers whose faces are shielded from view. The book is also accompanied by the madly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós, made available to the reader by QR codes, which adds to the apocalyptic tension that ripples through his prose. I recall only one time when his voice possessed yearning for a past now long gone. “I never received any training in the skills my life now depends on,” he writes; “my education was about different things entirely. I’d been taught Old High German and Ancient Persian and Latin and Hebrew, and they’d instructed me in Mandarin and Japanese of the Heian era.” We wonder why he is telling us this. Do we hear the faintest drops of some sort of latent elitism for an earlier time? We aren’t certain. All that is clear is he remembers this time with a happiness that is no longer present and we wonder if this joy had something to do with providing for him some moral guidance in a world that already confused him. It occurs to the reader that his prose is strangely silent with regard to moral reckonings of any kind. The author shies away from philosophical assertions, choosing instead to angrily riff on the idiocy of mice and his...

The World In 2021

The World In 2021 Kevin O’Rourke With the dawning of 2021 some of us are experiencing an emotion that has become unfamiliar recently: optimism. The four long years of the Trump presidency are over. Instead of a deeply troubled egotist incapable of empathy and devoid of humour, the most powerful nation in the West – if not necessarily the world – is going to have as president a competent, consensual politician and a manifestly decent man. Thanks to the extraordinary talent and unselfish work of many thousands of scientists, there is hope that Covid-19 will soon be defeated and that our lives can return to something like normality. And, closer to home, the long-running saga of the UK’s exit from the European Union has finally come to an end, for better or worse. The deal is a pretty thin one, and many people’s lives will be damaged by it, but at least we know what the situation is and can begin to adjust to the new reality. There is something to be said for that too. At the same time, many of the underlying problems that gave rise to Trump and Brexit are still with us and Covid-19 has laid bare a host of others. Another reason for optimism, perhaps, since problems that are hidden are generally not solved. And perhaps Trump’s departure will allow us to debate some of these issues in a less ideologically charged atmosphere. The 2016 Brexit referendum, and the US presidential election that followed, were closely fought affairs. People voted to leave the European Union, or voted for Trump, for diverse reasons, and when the margins of victory are as tight as they were it makes little sense to seek to prioritise one reason over all others. Every one mattered. It would be wrong to deny the role of nationalism, xenophobia, and outright racism in the upheavals of 2016, but it would be equally ideological to deny that rising inequality, both between classes and between regions, was also at play, or that globalisation was one factor underlying that trend. There now exists abundant empirical evidence, produced by social scientists with no ideological axe to grind, showing a link between rising imports from China, poorer employment and income outcomes, and growing political polarisation.1 It doesn’t follow that President Trump was right to start trade wars, or undermine the World Trade Studies • volume 110 • number 437 11 Organisation, but neither should we hide our heads in the sand and pretend that the problems he benefited from electorally do not exist. Indeed,2020hasrevealedindramaticfashionthedepthoftheseinequalities. We have all seen how poorer workers have had no alternative but to work in dangerous conditions, putting their health in danger, and we have also seen how precarious their jobs and salaries can be. In sharp contrast, people like myself were able to work from home during the lockdowns of 2020, still drawing stable incomes, and protecting themselves and their loved ones from the virus. We have also seen that it is these lower paid workers upon whom society ultimately relies. The world could have done perfectly well without me in 2020, but it could not have done without them. The issue of inequality is not going to go away any time soon. 2020 also revealed new problems associated with actually-existingglobalisation . In the early months of the pandemic firms found it difficult to source components from China. Later, there were well-publicised problems associated with obtaining medical supplies. The concept of the spring was resilience – was our system capable of coping with very large and unexpected shocks? The market economy is very good at minimising costs, but that can become problematic when doing so involves putting all one’s eggs in one low-cost basket. Similarly, attempts by national governments to maximise efficiency and minimise costs when it comes to the provision of national health services may make sense in normal times, but become a major problem when a major shock arises and there is no surplus capacity available. In the event, the market adjusted remarkably quickly, and stories about scarce medical supplies faded away. But the events of the last year lent support to those...

ПОЕТИКА ТІЛЕСНОСТІ В РОМАНІ ГАБРІЕЛІ ЗАПОЛЬСЬКОЇ «КАСЬКА КАРІАТИДА»

The article attempts to analyze the novel of a polish writer Gabriela Zapolska “Cathy the Caryatid” from the perspective of corporeality - feminine and masculine. The article indicates the main aspects of the interpretation of the concept of corporeality - gender and sociocultural, which are important for understanding the artistic specifics of the representation of human corporeality in the novel. In the novel, female corporeality is represented by two perspectives: personal bodily experience and the objectification of the female body by men in patriarchal culture. The main character of the novel tried to preserve her innocence, considering it the greatest treasure. At the beginning of the novel, a young, healthy girl of twenty with exaggerated physical characteristics and idealized moral qualities appears before the reader. When the girl came to get a job, her body was viewed as a commodity that could be purchased and exploited at work. The main character dreams of getting married, so she strives to keep herself “pure”, because this is one of the conditions under which a decent man can marry her. G. Zapolska portrays the body of the heroine as a kind of “bargaining chip”: a girl can choose two ways - to preserve her innocence in order to “exchange” chastity for a legal marriage and a happy future, or to take the path of debauchery. The loss of virginity is a turning point in the novel by G. Zapolska. Rape inflicted a great psychological trauma on the girl, because until now virginity was her only chance for a happy future. The article analyzes how the patriarchal apparatus implements the objectification of women, as well as sexual objectification. Male dominance in society includes control over female corporeality, women are interpreted as objects that can be owned and changed at will. The value of an object, as a rule, depends primarily on physical data - beauty, health, fertility, etc., while the spiritual development and education of women are often secondary. The protagonist Jan Viebig is the personification of a typical masculine man who cannot contain his physiological desire and understand the girl’s refusal. A man is guided by instincts, raping a girl, using her body for pleasure, and then rejecting her and his promises. The main characteristics of the naturalistic style of the writer are presented, consisting in the depiction of ugly and sometimes disgusting details of the surrounding world, which were parts of reality, in particular, descriptions of rape, death and posthumous decomposition of the body. Attention is focused on the themes of morality and exemplary morality, female virginity, rape, illegitimate pregnancy, images of the human body in art, nudity for art.

С верой вокруг мира (язык и личность старовера Орегона)

This article describes the main features of the dialect at different language levels of Alexei Ivanovich Afonin, a respected North American Old Believer belonging to the Bespopovtsy group of Chasovennye denomination and the Sintsyantsy group. Most of his life Afonin lived in Oregon, the USA, and in 2016 he went to the Siberian Dubchessky Monastery. His personality is also depicted in the article as being an au-thoritative old man, a good builder, a traveller, a talented storyteller, and a decent man.

Obscenity Laws In India and U.S: A Comparative Study

The core part of freedom of expression lies in the capacity to imagine and converse unreservedly and to obtain knowledge from others in the course of various publication and civic discussion without any fear of punishment, limitation or suppression by the government. It is through freedom of expression that populace strengthens their morality and helps others to become moral and enlightened citizen. Derived from the Latin word ‘obscaenus’, obscenity can defined as any remark, comment or action that robustly offends the established integrity of time. As a legal term it refers to graphic depiction of people engaged in erotic & excretory activity. “Obscenity is a function of culture- a function in the mathematical sense, I mean, its value changing with that of the variables on which it depends”. Indecency is one term that is confused with obscenity, indecency includes anything that would be disgusting and revolting in the eyes of a decent man or women, indecency is a wider concept than obscenity, i.e. something, if it is obscene has to be indecent but indecency may be something which may not be obscene always, in the sense of tendency to corrupt the mind of the reader. In case the court succeeds in acknowledging the indicative function of obscene, it must then say that this type of communication is without constitutional value.

The Decency of Albert Camus

This essay explores the place of decency (l’honnêteté) and the decent man (l’honnête homme) in the moral and religious thought of Albert Camus. Focusing primarily on the major fictional works (The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall), we consider how Camus employs the semantic ambiguity inherent in the notion of being decent, and then develops this into a normative ethical call characterized by responsibility and solidarity. We then explore further how Camus pushes the envelope to make us reflect on whether decency is even possible, both in the sense of addressing the difficulty of taking on moral responsibility, as well as calling into question the decency of the religious mentality. We conclude with reading in Camus not so much a critique as a challenge for the Christian to be true to herself, her ethic, and her faith.

Discurso de un hombre decente, «Discours d’un homme convenable» (2011-2012) Le témoin en personne

El discurso de un hombre decente (Bruselas 2011 - Medellín 2012) es la segunda parte del tríptico "Anatomía de la violencia en Colombia". Si el núcleo problemático de la primera parte fue la tensión entre la celebración y las masacres perpetradas por los paramilitares; el segundo se centrará en la relación entre la fiesta y el tema del narcotráfico, antes de abordar, en la última parte del tríptico, la tensión entre la fiesta y la revolución, desde la perspectiva de la guerra de guerrillas: tercer tema sensible y difícil de la historia contemporánea de Colombia.

“Les Années noires avaient été grises:” A Meta-Ethical Examination of Pierre Assouline’s Appropriation of Primo Levi’s Concept of the “Grey Zone”

“Les Années noires avaient été grises:” A Meta-Ethical Examination of Pierre Assouline’s Appropriation of Primo Levi’s Concept of the “Grey Zone”1 Helena Duffy The Grey Zone: Readings, Re-readings and Overreadings Primo Levi’s landmark essay “The Grey Zone” opens with criticism of those who, when trying to understand the dynamics of l’univers concentrationnaire, reduce the complex network of human relationships to the mutually opposing categories of evil tormentors and saintly victims. Reflected in Christ’s gesture on Judgment day—“here the righteous, over there the reprobates”—, such dualistic thinking fails, according to Levi, in relation to Auschwitz whose horror consisted also in its indecipherability. Namely, some of the victims were dragged into defiling complicity with their oppressors, thus entering what Levi describes as an area so “incredibly complicated [in] its internal structure” that it “confuse[s] our need to judge” (The Drowned and the Saved 27). Within this “grey zone” the Italian writer-survivor situates all kinds of “privileged prisoners,” beginning with kettles washers, bed smoothers, checkers for lice or interpreters (29), and ending with Sonderkommandos. Recruited predominantly amongst Jewish inmates, these “special squads” were responsible for maintaining order among those to be gassed, disposing of the victims’ bodies, and sorting out their belongings. Seeking examples of the “grey zone” beyond the Lager, Levi invokes controversial leader of the Łódź ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, or even SS Erich Mühsfeldt, who briefly showed pity to a young survivor of gassing and whom Levi gives the benefit of the doubt by believing that, under different circumstances, he could have been a decent man (40). However, whereas Levi recommends that our moral judgment be suspended in relation to the “privileged” prisoners, in line with his more general and emphatic declaration of his unwillingness to ever forgive his oppressors, he fully endorses the 1948 verdict of the Supreme National Tribunal to sentence Mühsfeldt to death (37). [End Page 29] Since the publication of Levi’s essay, critics have been arguing about who indeed should be included in the “grey zone.”2 While some mobilize the morally murky area as a universal figure of enforced complicity with one’s oppressor, others believe it to be restricted to the physical space of Nazi concentration camps. Giorgio Agamben, for instance, has famously and controversially deployed the “grey zone” as a paradigm for post-Auschwitz ethics, positioning all human beings within this space of moral ambiguity (101).3 Others have reapplied Levi’s term to bystanders, collaborators or resisters, or have even assimilated it with Holocaust-unrelated situations.4 As for Levi himself, he expands the meaning of the “grey zone” by reaching with his intertextual references beyond l’univers concentrationnaire, as exemplified by the analogy he draws between the Sonderkommandos and the collectors of corpses in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (1827) (39). In the same vein, Levi likens Mühsfeldt’s brief hesitation to an old woman’s single good deed in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) (40). More directly, the Italian writer-survivor inscribes into this area of moral ambiguity, where dichotomies of evil and goodness are no longer operational, various collaborating governments, including Vichy (27). He also identifies it within the Soviet gulag or compares the Nazis’ strategy of burdening their victims with guilt to the practices of the Italian Mafia (27–28). Yet, despite Levi’s broader references, Adam Brown, who has written extensively on the “grey zone,” firmly believes in the term’s historical and topographical specificity (52). His view is shared by Debarati Sanyal who points to Levi’s repeated insistence on the singularity of the prisoner’s physical and emotional experience of the camp (34): “The mental mechanisms of Häftlinge were different from ours; curiously and in parallel, different were also their physiology and pathology” (The Drowned and the Saved 60). Another contentious point raised by Levi’s essay and relevant to the present inquiry is the confusion of victims with victimizers that some have inferred from the Italian writer’s definition of the “grey zone” as a space “with ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants” (27) or, from what...

Robert G. Tabor

Robert G. Tabor (Taborsky), 89, died on Jan. 21 in Austin, Texas. “I honestly can say my father was the most decent man I ever met, and he did not have a condemning or paternalistic bone in his body. He was an egalitarian. My father taught me to be fascinated by nature and experimentation and to wonder. He wanted me to be a scientist but was never pushy about it and accepted my artistic bent 100%. I was not ready to see him go; I was thinking he would live to be 100 years old.”—Laura Tabor-Huerta, daughter Most recent title: consultant and expert witness Education: B.S. chemistry, Case Western Reserve University, 1952; M.S., chemistry, Adelbert College, 1954; Ph.D., organic chemistry, Case Western Reserve University, 1957 Survivors: daughter, Laura Tabor-Huerta; one grandson To recognize your late loved one or colleague, submit obituary information at cenm.ag/obits.

ПРОФЕСОР ВОЛОДИМИР ПАВЛОВИЧ ЧОРНІЙ: ЖИТТЯ І ТВОРЧА ДІЯЛЬНІСТЬ

Abstract Background: Volodymyr Pavlovych Chorniy – a famous Ukrainian Slavicist, the Professor of the Department of History of Central and Eastern Europe, the Director of the Institute of Slavic Studies of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, the perennial editor-in-chief of the scientific journal “Problems of Slavic Studies”, the founder and chairman of the Organizing Committee of International Slavist Colloquium – passed away on February 3, 2018. During the life of the scientist many publications have appeared concerning his biography and scientific achievements, but as a rule, they are of a very general, outline nature and concern only specific areas or just results of his activity. Taking into consideration the fact that a lot of what have been done by Volodymyr Pavlovych has long been recognized by the general scientific community, the figure of the Professor undoubtedly deserves a more thorough and comprehensive study. Purpose : The article offered to readers has several main goals. Above all, it is to honor the memory of the scientist, as well as to highlight the major stages of his life and creative activity designed to initiate their further, more in-depth scientific research. Results : The life and work of Volodymyr Pavlovych based on a wide range of sources (autobiographical notes, family archive, oral evidence of relatives and colleagues as well as other materials) have been characterized in detail for the first time. The attempt is to analyze comprehensively the scientific heritage of the scientist and its role in the development of Ukrainian Slavic science has also been made. The special attention has been paid to different areas of the professor's scientific-organizational and teaching work, as well as the peculiarities of his outlook and talent. Everybody, who knew Volodymyr Pavlovych, has a lasting memory of a good, decent, sensitive and loving Man, a talented Scientist, a wise Teacher and Mentor who has been engaged in his favorite work with admirable honesty and perseverance for more than half a century; his versatile creative activity has become the part of the history of Franko University and marked an entire era in Ukrainian Slavic science contributing to the preservation and multiplication of its best achievements and traditions. Key words : Volodymyr Pavlovych Chorniy, biography, creative activity, scientific heritage, history, Bulgarian studies, Slavistics.

Listen to the Sound of the Quiet American: John Williams's <i>Stoner</i>

Stoner (1965), John Williams’s third novel, questions and complicates mythologised versions of modern American identity and way of life. The story moves through two World Wars, the Great Depression following the Wall Street crash, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New-Deal America, a prolonged time of social upheaval throughout the world. The book re-imagines stuff-of-dreams versions of the American cultural hero modelled on the image of the brash, risk-taking and economically-successful individual of the 1920s decade. The position mediated by the narrative is one of disillusionment with a nation more in step with passionate, impulsive actions associated with cultural heroism than with cool, astute consideration of possible destructive consequences. Confronted and brought into question is the presumption of silence as ineffectual resistance to the injustices that operate within public and private institutionalized power structures. At first glance, Williams’s eponymous hero, William Stoner’s, wont to quietly internalize, rather than loudly agitate against, conflict-driven social environments, appears to reaffirm this view. Portrayed as a decent man who thinks before he speaks, Stoner’s character proffers the idea that silence and care-full thought before acting can be constructive in the pursuit of a better, more balanced way of being in the world. This essay argues that Stoner’s habitual interiority functions as a political symbolic filter to challenge commonly-held impressions of heroism understood as a garrulous, action-based cultural code of behavior in the practice of everyday life.

Autobiographisches Schreiben in Alfred Anderschs Prosa der 50er Jahre

Alfred Andersch´s autobiographical texts from the 1950s have been heavily criticized in recent literature on the topic. W.G. Sebald´s essay about Andersch was of crucial importance. The details of Andersch´s stay in the Dachau concentration camp as well as the writer´s motivation to desert at the end of the war were questioned. The article aims at a new reading of Andersch´s autobiographical texts with regard to their credibility. It compares the early short story Flucht in Eturien with the autobiography Die Kirschen der Freiheit and a few less known texts. The analysis leads to the conclusion that Andersch “re-wrote” his biography as a creation that fulfils unconscious wishes of a whole generation. His intention was to adapt the image of decent young men of antifascist beliefs whose only guilt was the loyalty to their comrades.