Destructive War Research Articles

‘Are we downhearted? NO!’: representing war damage and destruction following bombardment on the First World War ‘home front’

ABSTRACT Using four bombarded coastal locations in north-east England as case studies, this article explores the phenomenon of bomb damage imagery and its use in propaganda and commemorative processes during the First World War. Through an analysis of postcards, souvenirs and other aspects of wartime material culture, this article posits that depictions of bomb-damaged and destroyed buildings – both monumental and vernacular – were central to local and national efforts to memorialise and make sense of the passing of enemy actions on the home front, during a period when civilians were increasingly seen as legitimate targets.

The façade decorations of the tenement houses in Olsztyn's Old Town before and after the Second World War

AbstractThe article discusses the façade decorations of the tenement houses in Olsztyn's Old Town before and after the Second World War. This research comprises the original colour scheme of the tenement houses preserved from the destruction of war as well as the unique works of art in Olsztyn executed by local artists in the Polish People's Republic period. They include sgraffito, mosaics, and sculpted and colourful decorations of the tenement houses reconstructed after the Second World War. This article presents their history, authors, themes, techniques, and technologies. The documentation of this artwork sheds light on the art of that period and its artists, and shows a changing attitude toward historical monuments and the colour schemes during the postwar reconstruction in Polish towns at the time of the Polish People's Republic.

PERMANENT STRUCTURED CO-OPERATION KEY FACTOR FOR SECURITY AND DEFENSE IN THE EU

Permanent defense co-operation is a whole new policy that became possible in 2009. It was excluded from the areas of joint action in the EU after the prolonged and destructive war resulting from the negotiation of a new Europe. PESCO aims to create the modern capabilities of the EU rather than grouping or uniting outdated capabilities. By implementing modern projects, it will be possible to create battle platforms and capabilities that are world-class. The Republic of Bulgaria joined the new Permanent Structured Co-operation (PESCO) - a permanent EU military structure related to the implementation of military cooperation for joint development of armaments and proclamation of joint procurement for the modernization of the army equipment, as well as participation in joint exercises of the armed forces.

Działania z zakresu ratownictwa społecznego w Polsce w latach 1944–1948

The article concerns the field of social care and social assistance in the first years of the People’s Republic of Poland provided to individuals who suffered distress during World War Two. The timeline of the paper covers the years 1944-1948. At that time, the focus of social care and social assistance was satisfying the fundamental needs of the people, in particular in environments affected by the destruction of war. It included, among others, ensuring food, health care, accommodation, education and employment. The scale of the relief provided after the war by various Polish and international institutions was unprecedented in the history of the Polish social service with one in four Poles involved i.e. over 6 million people in total.

Planning and Functional-Spatial Transformation of the City of Szczecin in Period from 2nd Half of 19th to 21st Century, Remedial Suggestions

In the last century, Szczecin underwent three major planning and urban transformations. These transformations were resulting of historical, system-political, economical-economic and social factors. The aim of the current study is to present the stages of functional and spatial changes of Szczecin during the last century, together with an indication of their causes and their effects. At the same time, guidelines will be proposed for the recovery program aimed at enabling further cohesive development of the city while maintaining its identity. This is particularly important in the context of the deepening spatial disorder in the city. The first stage of intense development of Szczecin was initiated in 1873 by the decision to liquidate the fortifications surrounding the city, which allowed for quick expansion of the city area and development of post-fortress areas according to plans established in 1874. In 1912, a new spatial development plan was approved, which was implemented successively. As a result, parts of the city were created with different functions and character: industrial, workers, residences of middle and upper class, etc. The provisions of the plan included the issues of maintaining spatial order and establishing green areas. The next stage of spatial transformations was triggered by the huge destruction of World War II. Along with the annexation of German Szczecin by Poland, a new direction in the history of the city’s development was initiated. The continuation of pre-war plans was abandoned, while new guidelines were established based on Soviet experience in shaping housing developments. The space left by destroyed town houses was occupied by large-panel housing estates, the spatial layout of which did not, in most cases, continue the former building lines. The estates were designed according to the newly adopted indicators and guidelines, and their structure and management was based on the idea of a “neighbourhood unit”. Decisions made in the 1950s and 1960s irrevocably damaged the historical structure and character of the city before World War II. After 1989, the city of Szczecin is undergoing another planning and urban transformation. The change in the political system of the Polish State resulted in subsequent changes to the land development plans. The slow process of adopting local zoning plans in the years 2000-2010 caused another chaos in the city space. According to the regulations, the newly created housing communities independently decided on the appearance of buildings and their surroundings, which leads to the urban space being de-urbanized. This is a contradiction of the city’s spatial policy adopted in the study of the conditions and direction for spatial development of Szczecin. The action that could help in solving the problems would be to divide the city into a number of zones independent of the administrative division. These zones would cover typologically similar areas of the city, such as a residential zone with predominant pre-war buildings, a zone with dominant buildings from 1945-1989, and a zone with buildings developed after 1989, industrial and post-industrial areas, areas for investments, etc. The study of conditions and direction of spatial development of Szczecin should contain separate guidelines for all zones, because each of them has specific conditions and priorities. It would be advisable to set up urban and architectural commissions consisting of specialists in various fields that would help in setting the guidelines.

Kamien Pomorski – Health Resort on the Waterfront – Transformations of the Public Space of the Town after 1945’

Diversity of urban structures in Europe has its sources in cultural distinctness of different regions, in different pace of their development over millennia. Methods of designing towns in subsequent urbanisation periods differed. Nevertheless, frequently older structures were adapted to new needs. The question concerning the ideal of the European city remains open - is impossible to define one dominating spatial model encountered everywhere, despite attempts of ancient powers (Imperium Romanum), and by 20th -century totalitarian systems. The latter largely contributed to interruption of continuity of cities’ historical development, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Warfare and scale of destruction of the spatial/social structure in many cities in 1939-1945 were unprecedented in the European history. Examples of metropolises practically wiped off from the face of the earth, like Warsaw or Dresden, are common knowledge. This fate was shared by many other towns, especially in the Polish-German borderland. Their reconstruction after the war caused complete transformation of their urban/social structure. The study focuses on Kamień Pomorski, situated on a headland at Kamieński Lake, separated from the Baltic Sea by Wolin island. Before the war it was one of the nicest port towns in Pomerania, with history reaching back to the early Polish state and the clash of Slavic, Scandinavian, and German influences. The town, an episcopal see, bloomed in the medieval and modern times under the Pomeranian, Brandenburgian, and German rule. At the end of the WWII the centre was ruined over several days. Some religious and secular buildings survived. Traditional economic foundations of the local population, moulded for centuries, and the corresponding port structure, were nearly completely destroyed. Almost complete replacement of the local community, not fully grasping the local spatial, natural and landscape conditions, was connected with introduction of centrally planned socialist economy. The town changed its character, despite maintaining and developing some of its previous functions (e.g. health resort). Kamień Pomorski was reconstructed in forms not corresponding to traditional ones (prefabricated blocks of flats), although respecting previous transport/urban layout, which is an advantage. There were attempts to restore the most important preserved monuments –cathedral, town hall, several sections of city walls. In time these efforts brought the expected effect. In recent years several investments were implemented, referring to historical spatial layouts, following the rules of retroversion and revealing some relics. The port function was restored – predominantly as a recreational yacht and water sports marina, popular in high season. Some waterfront boulevards were renovated. Promenades are being built, the spa park is to be revitalised. To conclude, it should be stated that improvement of public spaces is observable in Kamień Pomorski, just like in its green areas and waterfront edge. Renovations of pre-war tenements and villas and growing abundance of services activating the public domain cannot be disregarded. It seems that despite enormous war destructions, which changed the appearance of the town forever, after many decades Kamień Pomorski has become vivid again.

Body as weapon: the archaeology of a war victim’s narrative

ABSTRACTThe soldier's body is the most important subject of violence and destruction in war. Humans live primarily through their body in the material world, and when the body is destroyed, their whole existence is affected, both physically and non-physically. Therefore, the first locus on which we can observe the effects of war and violence is the human body, mainly soldiers. In modern wars, the soldier’s body is combined with weapons and machines of war, but is also the first target of killing whether in attack or defence. On the one hand it is targeted and killed, but on the other hand the body itself targets and kills. In warfare, bodies are trained to be the mechanism of killing and they are employed on battlefields according to the political objectives of their sovereign power. Thus, the soldier’s body becomes a weapon separated from the individual human body by the political authority.

Antoninus Pius – císař reprezentující „zlatý věk“ římského impéria / Antoninus Pius – Emperor representing the ‘Golden Age’ of the Roman Empire

The coins of the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius struck in the mid-2nd century AD are very popular among collectors because they practically very often appear in all their denominations, and the numismatic trade offers a large scale of all coin types of this ruler. Also the personality of this Emperor representing the ‘Golden Age’ of the Roman Empire is extraordinary. There were no destructive wars during his 23-year-long rule, and the Roman Empire was economically significantly flourishing because of the political peace times. This should change in time of his successor and son-in-law, a successful warrior and ‘philosopher on throne’ – Marcus Aurelius.

EMIGRACYJNI BADACZE DAWNEJ LITERATURY

In the geopolitical area of Eastern and Central Europe 20th century was a period of unwilling and un- planned migration of huge numbers of individuals, groups of people, societies or even whole nations, and the displace- ment of borders and states. Two destructive wars, two totalitarian systems fighting against each other forced millions of human beings to change the place of living. Especially the experience of the World War II settled the fate of many people in the region and caused several waves of political emigration. The author uses the term ‘old literature’ in broad sense, including also 19th century literary output, as for the big number of young researchers this period of history seems to be a very old one. Among the Polish refugees fleeing the country in various times and circumstances there were also politicians, soldiers, artist, writers, people of culture and scholars. The article presents and reminds of some Polish researchers of literature who had to change their country of living by political reasons, but did not abandon their research. The first group of emigrants formed those who left Poland short before or during the world war II. Some of them worked as professors at west European universities, an decided not to returned into the country occupied by Germans or emigrated with Polish Government, others get in Western Europe leaving Soviet Union with the Polish army formed by general Anders. They continued scholar work abroad and took part in formation of several new generations of researchers in Slavonic litera- ture. Another wave of emigration took place after the war, in late 40. and included mainly Polish citizens of Jewish origin who in spite of surviving the holocaust and returning home decided to leave Poland for fear of communism. A numerous emigration of Polish Jews was also provoked by communist government of Poland in march 1968. The author presents briefly the silhouettes of such scholars as Stanisław Kot, Wacław Lednicki, Józef Trypućko, Wiktor Weintraub, Jadwiga Maurer, Rachmiel Brandwajn and Jan Kott. The situation of 20th century Polish emigrants seems very similar to that of 19th and also represents the common experience of many Eastern and Central European countries and societies. Losing the homeland scholars of these countries also lost the close contact with their cultural roots, but on the other hand they gained a wider glance, distanced outlook of national literature and art and common platform of dialog and confrontation. Many times the foreign Universities, where they found the possibility to provide their research and meet the representative émigrés of other nations, became for them such places as Collège de France for Adam Mickiewicz and constitute the space where they all could meet together without mutual distrust and give lectures about Slavonic literature and culture for German, British of American students, inspiring them to pursue studies in Slavonic philology.

Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: From Nazism to the Cold War by Mila Ganeva

Reviewed by: Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: From Nazism to the Cold War by Mila Ganeva Victoria Vygodskaia-Rust Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: From Nazism to the Cold War. By Mila Ganeva. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. Pp. x + 256. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-1571135766. Mila Ganeva's Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: From Nazism to the Cold War examines German fashion practices and their representations in film against the changing political milieus of the period 1939–1955, asking, in particular, how they involved women as spectators, consumers, and professionals. Ganeva's primary foci are the "continuities, the commonalities, and the interrelations" (11) that the fashion and film industries displayed during the Nazi dictatorship, the immediate postwar years, and on the eve of the Cold War. One such continuity is the paradoxical nature of fashion, which thrived and expanded despite the restrictions imposed onto general consumers—first by the Nazis and then by the destruction of World War II. Fashion in "the long 1940s," Ganeva's term, referred not only to elegant outfits featured in glossy magazines and on the silver screen, but also to the practices of repurposing the old into new as well as exchanging sartorial treasures for food on the black market. During "the long 1940s," fashion vacillated between reality and illusion, pragmatism and indulgence. Going beyond the familiar images of postwar German women as victims of rape, Trümmerfrauen, Amiflittchen, and Fräulein (the latter two known for their fraternizing with the occupying forces), Ganeva focuses instead on seamstresses, designers, graphic artists, fashion models, journalists, and movie stars, arguing for their vital role in the postwar economic regeneration as professionals and consumers in real life and on the silver screen. Chapter 1 explores fashion and cinema under the Nazis, identifying their twofold purpose: to promote Germany as the world's new capital of style and to combat shortages of goods with creativity and purposefulness. The glamorous outfits made out of luxurious materials appeared side by side with detailed descriptions of the [End Page 398] so-called Verwandlungskleid (transformation dress), which could be sewn out of old dresses, coats, or men's clothes—a content layout that would continue in the postwar fashion publications. A less explicit goal of the printed and visual fashion media, as Ganeva further illustrates in her analysis of selected films from the early 1940s (e.g., Großstadtmelodie, Achtung! Der Feind hört mit, and others), was to serve as an escape and diversion from wartime realities: the black market, the plundering of sartorial valuables by the Wehrmacht abroad, and the Aryanization of businesses. Chapter 2 delves into the revival of the fashion media and production between 1945–1947. Fashion industry became a vital part of Berlin's postwar reconstruction and the third-strongest sector of the city's economy, partially because of the support it received from all four occupying forces, but also because it reverted to an earlier system of cost-efficient production, e.g., women sewing at home. The Flickenkleid (patchwork dress) and above-mentioned Verwandlungskleider, prompted by the scarcities of the era, not only met popular demand for new clothes but also emerged as a sign of national economic recovery, appearing in film and fashion shows. Especially for women, fashion became a source of income and opportunity. The connection between fashion and the Jews in Germany runs as a subplot of chapter 2. The profitable Berlin Konfektion, or the stores that sold fashionable clothes for mass consumption run primarily by the Jews, was swiftly Aryanized after 1933, with Jewish owners forced to sell at low prices and/or sent into concentration camps. The revival of the Konfektion in the postwar years was characterized by a "double amnesia": the fashion discourse post-1945 not only avoided mentioning the Aryanization of the Konfektion, it also glossed over the horror of the deportation of Jewish fashion designers to concentration camps. Ganeva's archival findings about Charlotte Glückstein, a lesser-known Jewish designer, bring to light her both "exceptional" and "paradigmatic" career (68) in the industry post-1945. Glückstein's elegant if pragmatic designs, which took into account the...

Clarissa by Stefan Zweig

Reviewed by: Clarissa by Stefan Zweig Cynthia A. Klima Stefan Zweig, Clarissa. Translation by William Ruleman. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2016. 166 pp. Although this work is the fragment of a novel, left incomplete in Zweig’s papers at the time of his death, Clarissa is yet another major work that can be added to the author’s great oeuvre. Reminiscent of The Post Office Girl (Der Rausch der Verwandlung), Clarissa is yet another “coming of age” story that takes place just before the onset of World War I. However, Clarissa is less complete than The Post Office Girl. This becomes evident in the latter half of the novel, which appears to be more rushed and less cohesive than the first half. But this should not deter the reader; in fact, the rushed pace only adds to its mysterious personality, “a kind of Austrian novel” (156), as Zweig referred to it just a few weeks before his suicide. The original German of this novel, according to its translator William Ruleman, was rife with ellipses and contained incomplete sentences. Ruleman admits that there were many places that had to be filled in or embellished, in order for the novel to make sense to the reader. He has thus removed ellipses and awkward syntactical structures, “mainly with the reader’s comfort in mind” (165). In fact, the novel is thus very readable, despite its being unfinished. At the time of writing, Zweig was in exile in Brazil, having left language, country, and culture behind. Indeed, the work demonstrates the author’s determination to relate the world through the eyes of a young woman, a world that is turned on its head and rapidly changed with the sweeping destruction of the Great War. With the untimely death of her mother, the protagonist Clarissa is left by her military father at a cloister school, where she is educated and raised by nuns. She has very little contact with her father and her brother, who eventually follows in his father’s military footsteps. When her education is complete, Clarissa leaves the convent school and becomes an assistant to Dr. Silberstein, a Jewish neurologist. He becomes something of a father figure to her and opens her eyes up to the new possibilities in life that she had never had the opportunity to experience. Dr. Silberstein sends Clarissa out to Switzerland to a symposium in his place, due to her levelheadedness and organizational skills. It is in Switzerland that Clarissa meets her first love, the professor Leonard, who is involved in an unhappy marriage. Their prewar relationship gives Clarissa her first sense of being a truly happy young woman in love with a man with whom she has much in common. But World War I lurks on the horizon, and the work steadily involves itself in more [End Page 157] political tones. “Our democracy has grown too broad. Socialism is already just a system of mechanisms and organizations instead of a true community,” Leonard relates to her (55). The quiet and reasonable Clarissa thus begins to see the world through a new lens: the approaching war will not only shatter her quiet existence; it will also bring her to another relationship later in the novel, a relationship that will be as unstable as the world surrounding her and will leave her living a lie as well as drive her to an uncertain future. It is, in fact, the ending to this novel that leaves the reader in the lurch: there is no conclusion. Zweig has left it open, as if to emphasize his own exasperation with the world that will spiral ever so quickly to the next world war and his utter frustration with the notion of Fatherland. As Leonard exclaims, “We have to free ourselves from this crazy notion of Fatherlands! To Hell with Fatherlands!” (59). The inconclusiveness of the novel lends the reader no information as to the fate of Clarissa; her remaining life is only referred to as the “dead years” (155). In conclusion, this work is yet another excellent example of Zweig’s masterful storytelling about the “little people” who fall victim to the larger problems of the world. Clarissa herself endures, as...

ЮРІЙ ШЕВЕЛЬОВ ПРО СВІЙ ВИБІР УКРАЇНСТВА ТА ПРО СТАВЛЕННЯ ДО «ЧУЖИХ» У СПОГАДАХ «Я – МЕНЕ – МЕНІ... (І ДОВКРУГИ)»

Reflections of the outstanding scholar-Slavicist Yuriy Shevelov about his paradoxical experience of ethnic- identification, on the background of this problem as a general human and fundamental one, have a lot of weight. The escape of a young Ukrainian scientist from occupied Kharkiv to the West was driven by conscious aspirations to self-fulfillment and freedom. The path from Ukraine to Europe, and later to America, saved him from war and physical destruction, which threatened not only him but also a significant part of his people. Thinking of this path as salvation, he soberly and quite tolerably showed the environment of the Ukrainian and foreign intellectuals. He was a close acquaintance with them in pre- war and occupied Kharkiv and Lviv, in the German DP camps for Ukrainian refugees, in the research centers of Western Europe, and later in the United States. Openness and sincerity, as well as the scale of experience and depiction, the depth and self-criticism of comprehension of his own experience, make the book of Yu. Shevelov particularly valuable in the Ukrainian culture of the twentieth century. Yu. Shevelov rightly considered the reason for a special hatred on the part of representatives of the “Russian world” (in particular, in the face of the Russian emigrant Roman Jakobson and Ukrainian traitor Ivan Bilodid) their desire to destroy in his person a representative of an independent Ukrainian culture, a qualified researcher of its history and language, capable of advancing and advocating scientific ideas, those contradicted their Russification desires, which formed in the minds of the representatives of the scientific community of the western world non-penetrating barriers to the penetration of the voice of the stateless Ukrainian ethnic group. He called a complete defeat the result of his confrontation with the “Russian world” in the western scientific world. However, based on the fact that his labor is now in demand, and those who want to affirm the “Russian world” in the West and in Ukraine were already diminished, we can assert: his efforts have not gone in vain. Identification is that complex of ideas, which is made up in human heads, and here the truth goes up over the lie.

Third Party Intervention and Strategic Militarization

Codified at the 2005 United Nations World Summit, the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect articulates an ideal of international interventions motivated by compassion for victims and a desire to bring stability to hot-spots around the world. Despite this consensus, practitioners and scholars have debated the importance of unintended consequences stemming from the expectation of third party intervention. We analyze how third party intervention shapes the incentives to arm, negotiate settlements, and fight wars in a parsimonious game theoretic model. Among the unintended consequences we find: interventions that indiscriminately lower the destructiveness of war increase the probability of conflict and increasing the cost of arming makes destructive wars more likely. Other interventions, however, can have much more beneficial effects and our analysis highlights peace-enhancing forms of third party intervention. From a welfare perspective, most interventions do not change the ex ante loss from war, but do have distributional effects on the terms of peace. As a result R2P principles are hard to implement because natural forms of intervention create incentives that make them largely self-defeating.

A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis

Reviewed by: A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Stephen E. Maizlish A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. Kay Wright Lewis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8203-5127-8, 292 pp., cloth, $64.95. Kay Wright Lewis's goal is to correct past accounts of slavery and its aftermath that have inadequately acknowledged the fear and trauma created by the racialized violence African Americans experienced. In A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World, Lewis claims that "extermination was part of a racialized ideology used to sustain" slavery (2). For African Americans, the memories of that violence in the antebellum South and in the Jim Crow society that followed "remained significant into the Civil Rights era" (2). Whites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lewis argues, believed that emancipation and black equality would lead to a race war and the extinction of both races. It was to avoid this outcome that whites employed exterminating racial violence against blacks. Racial violence in America began with the first European settlements. It was initially directed against native peoples. As the colonies expanded, this culture of exterminating brutality came to dominate race relations generally, eventually extending to the imported African population. Lewis traces this growing determination to eliminate or enslave those whom European settlers considered barbarians through the entire colonial period. White people's fear of what they believed to be the warrior past of the Africans they enslaved drove them with particular force to treat their slaves with harsh and gruesome cruelty. Nevertheless, African slaves resisted their enslavement. That in turn, argues Lewis, led to retaliation and even more widespread exterminating white violence. This bloodletting persisted into the antebellum period and intensified in the aftermath of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. The result of this new explosion of terror was a series of lasting traumatic memories that haunted the black community for many years. Fear of a race war continued to consume the antebellum white South following Turner's insurrection and its bloody aftermath. Dread of a race war dominated the Virginia debates over slavery and formed the basis for Southern opposition to the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade. Lewis argues that this dread also explains the panicky Southern white people's reaction to John Brown's raid. The memory of the exterminating horror that came after Turner's upraising led African American slaves to be wary of and ultimately reject participation in Brown's plan for a slave insurrection. They feared a bloodbath, but even though they had not responded positively to Brown, one followed the raid anyway. Lewis follows her analysis of racial violence in antebellum America with the claim that South Carolina left the Union not only in reaction to its perception of Northern hostility to slavery but also from a belief that the Federal government [End Page 299] would no longer protect the South from a slave insurrection, that is, from the very race war Southerners had long dreaded. Slaves saw the war for the Union, unlike John Brown's raid, as an opportunity to at last achieve their dream of freedom, so they willingly participated in the Northern war effort. The white Southern response was predictable. As they had been for centuries, African American civilians, along with captured black soldiers, were slaughtered by white Southerners in another exterminating reign of terror that continued after the war and traumatized the black populations for decades to come. That trauma, Lewis explains, was only reinforced during the years of Jim Crow and by the violence visited upon returning black soldiers following the First and Second World Wars. Civil Rights leaders of the 1950s and 60s had different views of how to counter white violence, but, Lewis reminds us, they all recognized that this violence needed to be confronted. Lewis is correct to focus on the ever-present Southern concern over a mutually destructive war of the races. It is impossible to examine the Southern white past without continuously encountering this obsessive anxiety over racial conflict. Lewis's...

Warmia i Mazury jako palimpsest, czyli o oswajaniu poniemieckiej przestrzeni po drugiej wojnie światowej

Palimpsest to przenośnia adekwatna zarówno do przestrzeni, tj. Warmii i Mazur, jak i do okresu – po drugiej wojnie światowej. Wtedy nastąpiło ponowne „zapisywanie” tego terytorium nowymi znakami, symbolami, nazwami, nową architekturą, pozbawioną elementów pruskich, nowymi tradycjami odwołującymi się wyłącznie do polskich fragmentów historii. Po ucieczce, a następnie wysiedleniu Niemców, nowi osadnicy próbowali oswoić obce im kulturowo przestrzenie: zajmowali ewangelickie świątynie, przeznaczając je na miejsca kultu katolickiego, burzyli niemieckie pomniki, zmieniali drogowskazy z niemieckimi nazwami, szykanowali mówiących po niemiecku Warmiaków i Mazurów. W artykule zostanie poruszona kwestia zniszczeń wojennych, rządowych nakazów likwidacji pozostałości niemieckich, sporów o układ architektoniczny miast, adaptowania zabytków na budynki dostosowane do potrzeb społecznych, oswajania zabytków kościelnych, zagospodarowywania poniemieckich pałaców i dworów.

Dawson City: Frozen Time by Bill Morrison (review)

Reviewed by: Dawson City: Frozen Time by Bill Morrison Curtis Russell Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017) Directed by Bill Morrison Distributed by Kino Lorber www.kinolorber.com. 120 minutes Bill Morrison’s films revel in decrepitude, pairing damaged old strips of nitrate film stock with moody, minimalist scores to create a vision of the distant past at once plaintive and terrifying. Beyond Zero: 1914–1918 (2014) literalizes the destruction of war by incorporating actual decayed battle footage from World War I, while The Great Flood (2012) and The Highwater Trilogy (2006) render natural disasters stark and implacable with minimal contextualization. 2002’s Decasia may be the purest example of the Morrison aesthetic. Traces of damage from water, fire, decomposition, and decades of neglect infect the frame like a hyperactive disease, generating optical illusions that other productions spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars to create. The effect’s beauty is its randomness; a crystalline Lichtenburg figure is as likely to morph into an amoebic sludge as it is a haunting distortion of an actor’s face. Yet while his films are at once an elegy for celluloid and a reminder of its frail volatility, Morrison is an archival artist, not an archivist. His work has often been rooted in the archive without bearing much trace of it; it’s historiography as exhumation, not celebration. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017) marks a turn for Morrison. Converting the decaying strips of plasticized guncotton that have been his primary building block into the star attraction, Morrison uses the story of a cache of silent film reels buried in an old swimming pool in the Yukon as a lens to explore the [End Page 14] boom and bust chronicle of Dawson City, where the histories of First Nations, prospecting, politics, banking, mining, economics, sport, Hollywood, photography, literature, theater, and exploration all intersected. In 1978, a construction crew building a recreation center next to Diamond Tooth Gertie’s Gambling Hall in Dawson unearthed a trove of film reels mixed in with chicken wire, broken curling rocks, and bottles under what was once the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association, built in 1902 to be a hub of social activity. Its swimming pool became a curling and skating rink every winter. Morrison employs many of the discovered films themselves, along with period stills (such as Eric Hegg’s majestic plate glass negatives of prospectors crossing Chilkoot Pass) and other films (like Chaplin’s Gold Rush, natch) to tell his story. Over composer Alex Somers’ somber chamber score, onscreen titles patiently and methodically narrate the Klondike Gold Rush, a three-year frenzy that saw hundreds of thousands (today, billions) of dollars’ worth of gold extracted from what had previously been the hunting grounds for the Trondëk Hwëch’in people. The population ballooned to 40,000 in and around Dawson City’s 1,600 acres before settling to 3,000 in 1910, by which point Daniel and Solomon Guggenheim had purchased most of the surrounding mines, consolidating their claims to form the Yukon Gold Company. They extracted what gold remained with huge floating dredges, and the men that remained to work them sent for their families to build a life. All those hardworking people in the middle of nowhere needed to be entertained; the first movie theater in Dawson opened in 1910. The town, about 400 miles northeast of (and 15 years older than) Anchorage, was at the end of a film supply chain. It was prohibitively expensive to send the reels back to the studios, and there was little thought of posterity, so the reels simply remained in Dawson. In the meantime, the town served as a way-stop for several people who would go on to make notable contributions elsewhere, each of whom merits a mention in Dawson City: Frozen Time: Hegg, Jack London, Fred Trump (whose brothel, in nearby White Horse, was the origin of the Trump family fortune), Wilson Mizner (also featured in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s 2008 musical Road Show), boxing promoter Tex Rickard, founder of the New York Rangers and builder of the penultimate Madison Square Garden, future movie theater impresarios Sid Grauman and Alex Pantages, actors Fatty Arbuckle...

Ethics and War: A Critical Intervention

There has been renewed interest in the relationship between ethics and war. Traditionally, it has been thought that a robust set of principles could reduce the overall destructiveness of war but a growing body of more critical scholarship argues that it may actually enhance it. This article reviews three recent books on the ethics of war by Adil Ahmad Haque, Maja Zehfuss and James Eastwood. Defending more conventional accounts, Haque sets out to develop a normative framework that can be used to assess, clarify and refine the existing rules. Zehfuss and Eastwood, by contrast, argue that the invocation of ethics may work to legitimise, normalise and obscure the effects of this violence. This article suggests ways in which these texts might help to reinvigorate debates about ethics and war, opening up lines of inquiry that were previously foreclosed.

Commencement of Cultural Destruction Reparations Orders in Criminal Warfare: Precedence of the ICC Al Faqi Al Mahdi Judgment

This case note surveys the Reparations Order in the case of Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi issued on August 17, 2017, in which the International Criminal Court (“Chamber”) pioneered legal ground by holding a war criminal financially liable for the destruction of cultural property. For the first time, the Chamber tasked itself with calculating reparations owed to community members whose cultural and religious monuments were systematically destroyed by the Islamist militant in Timbuktu, Mali. The final amount awarded, 2.7 million euros, represented both collective and individual reparations owed to victims for the demolition of “historic and religious buildings, consequential economic loss, and moral harm.” Because neither liability nor victim reparation was ever previously contemplated for cultural destruction war crimes at the international level, the Chamber’s reasoning and final calculation will undoubtedly serve as precedent in subsequent cases. This paper begins by providing both a factual and legal foundation for the groundbreaking decision as well as a basic overview of the legal requirements for a Reparations Order. It then transitions to focus more specifically on the reparations issued against Al Mahdi and provides a detailed legal analysis on the impact of relevant victims, modalities of reparations, mitigating factors, and method of calculations. Finally, this case note ends with a brief practical analysis and evaluation of implications.

Threat of Limited Nuclear War

The article addresses the contemporary risks of limited nuclear war and its threat for societies. It offers a critical analysis based on the difference between the strategy of a global destructive war following classical application of standard nuclear weapons, on the one hand, and the new political military plan of limited nuclear war, without its global continuation, on the other. First, the article explains the problems connected with the new US strategic documents pursuing limited nuclear war. Second, within this context of the risks of limited nuclear war, it explains conflicts of political (potentially democratic), corporate, and technical military interests in global capitalism which can lead to the limited nuclear war. Third, it concludes by clarifying the historical trajectory of debates concerning the strategies of possible nuclear war, and stresses the current real danger of limited nuclear war and its possible global escalation.

Problems of commitment in arming and war: how insecurity and destruction matter

This paper analyzes a guns-versus-butter model in which two agents compete for control over an insecure portion of their combined output. They can resolve this dispute either peacefully through settlement or by military force through open conflict (war). Both types of conflict resolution depend on the agents’ arming choices, but only war is destructive. We find that, insofar as entering into binding contracts on arms is not possible and agents must arm even under settlement to secure a bigger share of the contested output, the absence of long-term commitments need not be essential in understanding the outbreak of destructive war. Instead, the ability to make short-term commitments could induce war. More generally, our analysis highlights how the pattern of war’s destructive effects, the degree of output insecurity and the initial distribution of resources matter for arming decisions and the choice between peace and war. We also explore the implications of transfers for peace.