Post-war Society Research Articles

‘Anders dan de anderen’

Abstract During the early twentieth century, Germany and the Netherlands witnessed an unprecedented surge in discourses on sexuality, galvanized by the pioneering research of central European sexologists. Against the backdrop of sexological developments and the hedonism of post-war society, Berlin saw the emergence of a thriving homosexual circuit during the interbellum. Across the border, however, the conservatism of Dutch society meant that a Sapphic subculture would not fully emerge in the Netherlands until the mid-1950s. Drawing on a framework that Laura Doan has recently termed ‘queer critical history’, and through an exploration of a selection of literary, scientific and ‘emancipatory’ writings, this article will examine how societal and cultural constructions of female same-sex desire in Dutch contexts were often at odds with scientific depictions of the ‘congenital invert’. Acknowledging the existence of this incongruence, as the article will argue, can provide historians with a space to explore alternative configurations of same-sex desire in Dutch interwar society that cannot be interpreted in the sense of a self-reflexive ‘lesbian’ identity.

Managing Criminal Reputations

From the start the Nuremberg Trials were planned as trials of the power elites of Nazi Germany, including the military, corporations, government bureaucracy and party elites. By targeting those who had orchestrated the genocide of the European Jews from above and ultimately had ‘command responsibility’ for war crimes and crimes against humanity according to contemporary terminology, they set an important precedent for international criminal tribunals down to the present day. The Nuremberg Trials signalled a radical break with the past for the German people and their power elites, and a deep disruption in the lives of those who were charged, sentenced and imprisoned. This article explores the lives after punishment for selected groups and individuals of elite perpetrators, and their career trajectories when they returned from prison into the post-war society of West Germany in the 1950s and early 1960s. It uses a framework of ‘reputation management’ (as suggested by Gary A. Fine) to identify different routes and strategies as these sentenced war criminals navigated their way back into society.

Book Review: Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium, by Michael Z. Newman

Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium. Michael Z. Newman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 160 pp. $9 pbk. $8.99 ebk.Michael Z. Newman's Video Revolutions is physically a delightful book, pocket-sized with front dimensions similar to the proportions of a Sony Betamax videocassette. A television scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Newman explores how our thinking about as a category has evolved over the last three quarters of a century. Devoting a chapter to each of three historical phases of this evolution, the author argues that the way that we think about has not been determined by its actual capabilities as a technological medium, but by its status as a cultural force. Thus, is than a progression of material formats: cameras, transmitters and receivers, tapes and discs, decks that record and play them, digital files, apps and interfaces. Instead, over its history, has been used to indicate many things: television itself, a revolutionary alternative to television, the democratization of media production, a threat to the artistry of the cinema, and so on.The first two phases Newman identifies are easy to contrast: in the 1940s and 1950s, the terms and television were used interchangeably to describe broadcast television. Then, in a 180° reversal, from the 1960s through the 1990s, the term came to indicate an alternative to broadcast television. Thus, in the earlier of these phases, descriptions of broadcast television talked of video cameras, stations, sets, studios, personalities, programs, technique, and audiences. At the time, was contrasted with radio, with the term indicating that it offered a clear improvement over this earlier media form as it offered a visual component. Even the fact that was not as visually impressive as film was not a drawback, as this was thought to be more than compensated for by the intimacy and spontaneity of live television broadcasting-which compared favorably with the conveyor-belt production of scripted works coming from Hollywood. Newman argues that the positive image of at this time was an expression of hope for a new technology growing alongside hopes for postwar society. In contrast, by the 1960s, the utopian hopes people had had for television a decade earlier had dissolved, while the growing availability of recorders and cameras suggested that new interactive media experiences were possible, ones that could free the public from the monotony of broadcast television's fixed schedules. …

In Search of Carnivalesque Anomie: The Disavowal of the Liberation in Andreï Makine's The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

Focusing on The Crime of Olga Arbyelina (1998), Andreï Makine's fifth and arguably most complex novel, the article investigates the eponymous protagonist's intriguing scepticism about the Liberation. It does so by placing Olga's story in an intratextual context of Makine's other works of fiction whose protagonists are similarly reluctant to welcome peace at the end of World War II and are equally at odds with post-war society. However, unlike the ex-soldiers populating the Franco-Russian novelist's oeuvre, Olga has no direct experience of the front. Her position can therefore be elucidated as motivated by, amongst others, her fear for her position as a Russian exile in France, her concern about a potential resurgence of violence, and her anxiety about her own and her child's mortality. The heroine's attitude may also be explained as driven by her longing for a wartime anomie which takes her back to the revolutionary Russia where she grew up and which she tries to restage by engaging in an incestuous relationship with her own son. Finally, Olga's stance may be seen as reflective of the author's own reverential attitude towards World War II and his correlated nostalgia for the Soviet Union of his youth where the war was indeed celebrated as the defining episode in the Soviet (and European) history, a moment of national and transnational unity, and an event legitimizing the first communist state in the world.

Elsewhere by Doron Rabinovici (review)

Reviewed by: Elsewhere by Doron Rabinovici Laura A. Detre Doron Rabinovici, Elsewhere. Translation by Tess Lewis. London: Haus Publishing, 2014. 239 pp. In the late twentieth century, there was a revolution in Austrian literature. Perhaps beginning with the writings of Thomas Bernhard, Austrian authors began to throw off the conventions of the midcentury era and to reexamine the country’s history. Within this movement was a group of Jewish authors who wrote explicitly about the role that Jews played in postwar society and the challenges associated with being outsiders and yet fundamentally Austrians. Among those authors a few names have endured—Robert Menasse, Robert Schindel, and the writer whose work is under consideration here, Doron Rabinovici. Like his previous works, Elsewhere (Andernorts) is really about divided identities. The main character, Ethan Rosen, is both Israeli and Austrian. In many respects this story parallels Rabinovici’s personal history. Born in Tel Aviv in 1961, his family relocated to Vienna in 1964, and he identifies with both Austrian and Israeli culture. This is not the only duality in the book, though. Throughout the story there is the underlying question of Jewish identity. Who is a Jew? Does the answer to this question depend on the context in which it is asked? Or does Jewish identity change when you are dealing with Gentiles rather than other Jews? Many of the characters in this text struggle with what it means to be Jewish. Can people who largely reject religious practice consider themselves to be Jewish, or do you need those rituals to connect you to Judaism? These are all questions Rabinovici rasises in Elsewhere. The book begins with Ethan Rosen traveling from his family home in Israel to Vienna, where he works as an intellectual. He has been asked by an Austrian newspaper to write an obituary for Dov Zedek, a fellow intellectual and close family friend, but Rosen does not feel able to confront the task. This sets in motion a series of events that shake Rosen both personally and professionally and form the basis for the plot of the book. Another issue that lies at the heart of this novel is the relevance of the Holocaust to contemporary Austrians and Israelis. Rabinovici, through his characters, is asking how we can keep the memory of the mid-twentieth-century genocide alive as, increasingly, the people who experienced it are no longer with us. This is where you can see Rabinovici’s background as a historian and an intellectual as well as a second-generation survivor of the Shoah shining through. He is interested in this topic as a deeply emotional aspect [End Page 157] of family history as well as a matter of public discourse. Once again we are presented with a duality. How do we commemorate the lives lost and those forever altered in a way that respects individuals and also acknowledges that, for young people in particular, this is no longer Zeitgeschichte? In the end, people in the intellectual class are at the heart of this story. Much of the action of this story happens in academic contexts, and the characters, many of whom are intellectuals of some kind, represent different archetypes within academia. Rabinovici identifies Rosen as a “peddler of academic ideas who profited from floating between continents and continuities, between regions and religions” (2). Again, he is emphasizing the divisions in Rosen’s identity, but he is also situating Rosen within a Jewish tradition. Describing the character as a peddler evokes the image of Eastern European Jews who lived peripatetic lives. The shtetl may be gone, but that does not mean that Jews are rooted. The transnational academic has replaced the peddler, but his reasons for being remain the same. Even the existence of Israel, a Jewish state whose formation was, in large part, meant to address the rootlessness of European Jews, has not been enough to keep Rosen anchored and, in that sense, Rosen represents many post-Shoah Jews who struggle to find their place. Overall, this book was an enjoyable read. Tess Lewis’s translation is very good, capturing the spirit of Rabinovici’s story without any awkward phrases. She allows the reader to get lost in...

St Peter's Seminary, Cardross

Completed in 1966, St Peter's Seminary at Cardross, Dunbartonshire, has been described as the ‘greatest modernist building in Scotland’. Designed as a space for the collective training of Roman Catholic priests, the building was effectively renderered obsolete before it was even completed when Vatican II (1962) championed community-based training programmes for priests. Eventually abandoned in 1980, the building has fallen into dilapidation and ruin, although the performance company NVA are planning an experimental restoration of at least certain bare elements of the building complex.This article explores the extent to which the initial structure and the ruin of Cardross can be viewed through the lens of Negri's definition of the transition to postmodernity as a 1960s crisis of modernist regimes of measure and the functional logic of the factory system. That system provided the organisational basis of post-war society in imposing a series of spatial and temporal divisions in everyday social life in order to organise production. The organising principle of a Seminary like St Peter's Cardross can be conceived of as imposing a similar, indeed an even more comprehensive control over the entire spatio-temporal existence of the young priests within its walls. To a certain extent this rigid division can be seen in the concrete form of the building. The Seminary was designed such that the modulor dimension of one student priest's dorm is presented as an arch on the façade, and the series of these arches making up the length of the building is thus an expression of the individual's fully incorporated existence within the institution. To what extent, then, can the abandonment and gradual ruination of the strict spatially segregated and segmented complex of St Peter's Cardross be read as an extreme paradigm for the dismantling of the regime based on measures that came along with the western crisis in capital and collapse of industrial production from the 1960s on?This question is examined through an analysis of the cinematic representation of St Peter's in two experimental films, Space and Light (1972, Murray Grigor), produced when it was a working seminary, and Space and Light Revisited (2009, Murray Grigor), an attempted shot-for-shot remake of the original filmed when it was in a state of decay. Both films have been screened simultaneously and side-by-side (at the film's 2009 Glasgow premiere and at the 2010 Berlinale) and the article explores the specific experiences of this viewing experience.Cinema regularly deploys ruins as the locus for melodramatic action, operating as a visual parallel of the onscreen action; however, in these films St Peter's is the central object of attention, and a celebration of, and lament for, the original is offered up. While early experimental filmmakers experimented with temporality by rewinding film to reconstruct demolished walls or buildings, in this setting, the indexical qualities of the cinematic apparatus are deployed to juxtapose past and present. In doing so, they highlight the referential nature of both the cinema and the ruin as this high point of Scottish architectural modernism, commissioned by the church, lies in a state of ruination.

Robert Musil's Symptomatology: Oswald Spengler and the Clinical Picture of Society

In his essays from the early 1920s, Robert Musil repeatedly called the behavior and modes of thinking prevailing in postwar society “symptoms.” Moreover, he claimed that the same conditions that led to World War I were still present after the war. He argued that a process of working through these conditions and the prevailing symptoms was required to avoid another outbreak of large-scale destruction. In the essay “Geist und Erfahrung,” Musil found Oswald Spengler representative of a symptomatic manner of thinking. However, he also showed indecision about how to relate to the symptoms he found in Spengler's writing. Besides describing the problems Musil encountered when clarifying the “symptomatic” style of Spengler, this essay clarifies the “clinical picture” of society Musil repeatedly made throughout his life, which is crucial to understanding what he wanted to achieve with Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

Atomic Housewives: Shutter Island and the Domestication of Nuclear Holocaust

ABSTRACT:Martin Scorsese's 2010 film Shutter Island is one of several post–September 11 cultural texts that use Cold War settings to challenge the trend in US culture to displace social and political fears by escaping to a nostalgia for an idealized postwar society. The film ostensibly replaces the protagonist's wartime trauma with a domestic tragedy while simultaneously undermining that replacement. Its attempt to bury the guilt for war crimes under worries about the collapse of the nuclear family confronts the United States' attempt to justify its actions in the War on Terror through a nostalgic imaginary of the Cold War.

Injuries of Class: Mass Education and the American Campus Novel

Although many believe that “mass higher education” increased opportunity and egalitarianism in postwar American society, the reality has been quite different. While a greater proportion of students are enrolled in higher-educational institutions now than at any other point in history, economic inequality is at an all-time high. Postwar American campus novels largely misunderstand this historical development. While the genre represents the university as an institution that combats social inequality by expanding enrollment, these novels simultaneously obscure the social inequality that the university cannot combat and instead helps to legitimate. The symbolic work of American campus novels has thus been to imagine a system that stages social conflicts between the deserving and the elite when in fact the postwar meritocracy has made the two categories functionally indistinguishable.

The Use of History in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1945–65: Presentism and Historicism in the Work of Jan Romein, Pieter Geyl, and Leopold Flam

Central to this essay is the debate about the ultimate purpose of studying history and about the social role of the historian as it was conducted in the first two decades after the Second World War in Belgium and the Netherlands. Many historians took the view after the war that the study of the past must contribute directly to (political) reconstruction and the shaping of (democratic) public opinion. In the eyes of historians like the Amsterdam Professor Jan Romein and the powerful Belgian Inspector for History Teaching Leopold Flam, historiography should not be focused on knowledge of the past as such, and the same was certainly true of history teaching. On the contrary, the social capital that they represented was founded on their involvement with the present. Against this presentist position there grew the conception that the study of the past for its own sake remained of great importance in post-war society, and in fact that such an orientation towards the past itself and a critical attitude towards those who wished to use history to shape contemporary society could actually help prevent a new dictatorship or a new conflict. This historicist standpoint was regarded as anything but ‘aloof’ or ‘unethical’ by its advocates like the Utrecht Professor Pieter Geyl.

Conservatism for the Democratic Age: Conservative Cultures and the Challenge of Mass Politics in Early Twentieth Century England, by David Thackeray

David Thackeray has written an important and original book which investigates how the Conservative Party evolved and adapted its organisational culture, image and popular appeal in an age of profound political flux and uncertainty. His aim is to explain why a party which appeared to be in real trouble after its debacle in the 1906 election and the twin stalemates of 1910 rose to meet the challenges of post-war society and universal suffrage, and emerged as the dominant force of inter-war politics under Stanley Baldwin. Instead of focusing on high politics, ideology or the mechanics of electioneering, it joins a growing body of scholarship inspired by the ‘New Political History’, and focuses on language and local political culture. The structure of the book is refreshingly straightforward. It is divided into three sections which develop a cogent central argument. The first deals with the Edwardian era, and advances the contrarian reading that Joseph Chamberlain’s policy of Tariff Reform was not in fact an electoral albatross for Unionism after 1906 (contra Green, The Crisis of Conservatism [1994; rev. ante, cx (1995), 950–53], and Trentmann, Free Trade Nation [2008; rev. ante, cxxiv (2009), 477–9]). Rather, it served to inject enthusiasm into grass-roots activist cultures, and inspired the establishment of the Women’s Unionist Tariff Reform Association (WUTRA) under Mary Maxse, which proved to be a more dynamic, partisan and effective electioneering force than the better-known Primrose League. The second section deals with the neglected subject of wartime political culture, contending that the prior development of a female activist base allowed Unionists on one hand to exploit electors’ growing distaste for Victorian-style violent street politics, and, on the other, to guard against the temptation of alliances with rowdy and exclusionary radical-right organisations such as the British Workers League. In 1918, the party’s greater unity, and preparedness pragmatically to accept an enlarged state and a new Irish settlement, also proved telling. In the third section, on inter-war politics, Thackeray demonstrates that Unionist opposition to Socialism was not a monolithic discourse, but was adapted to local circumstances. Where Labour had no base, they were attacked as allies of Bolshevism; where they were ensconced in municipal government, their high spending on the working classes was portrayed as pork-barrel ‘Poplarism’. Moreover, Unionist women’s activism (again proving consistently superior to that of their Labour and Liberal rivals) was further improved by Neville and Annie Chamberlain’s Unionist Women’s Institute and a variety of domestic-centred magazines such as Popular View. These connected with working-class families more successfully than the middle-class ladies of WUTRA had, and gave Baldwin a firm base from 1923 upon which to cement the Unionists as a moderate party of the family who could promote affordable social reform to (in the words of the 1924 campaign poster Round the Fireside) ‘keep the home secure’.

GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence Ed. by Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr. and Detlef Junker (review)

Reviewed by: GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence Ed. by Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr. and Detlef Junker Kristen Dolan GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence. Edited by Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr. and Detlef Junker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 365. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-0521851336. Scholars examining the American advance into Germany during the latter stages of World War II frequently mention the non-fraternization order through which military leaders sought to prohibit US troops from close contact with local residents. After years of bitter conflict, the fact that authorities issued this order is in many ways less telling than the decision to rescind it in the fall of 1945. Thomas W. Maulucci and Detlef Junker’s thought-provoking and very readable volume describes this revocation as one step toward a broader range of formal and informal interactions between Americans and Germans in the wake of the war. As Maulucci emphasizes in his introduction, the resulting encounters were shaped by both policy from above and initiatives from below. Profoundly influenced by Cold War considerations as well as local circumstances, the overarching tenor of these interactions changed over time. The book explores developments related to the US military presence in Germany not only from multiple perspectives but also over the course of several crucial postwar decades. Indeed, because the volume moves beyond the more heavily scrutinized periods of Military Government and High Commission for Occupied Germany, it is able to “deal with an American military that is no longer an occupier per se but instead one element in a complex relationship between two sovereign states” (2–4). Taken together, the fifteen well-researched essays succeed remarkably in illuminating much of the complexity to which Maulucci refers. The contributions begin by probing key aspects of the broader framework within which these German-American relations developed. Bruno Thoß, for example, deftly locates West German deliberations regarding the Bundeswehr within rearmament debates in the early Federal Republic, NATO disagreements about defense strategy, and the overarching concern that Washington would redeploy a sizeable portion of American forces. Hubert Zimmermann offers an astute take on how political and economic factors played into the decisions by successive US administrations to maintain troop strength in Europe despite strong domestic pressure for reductions. The essays then explore the many implications following from the US decision to bring the spouses and children of service members to Germany. Thomas Leuerer perceptively notes that, while largely intended to curb troop behavior, American families’ presence fundamentally transformed the character of the occupation. Military communities helped stabilize the new Federal Republic by symbolizing the degree of “U.S. commitment to the common defense of the West” (133). Yet as he also explains, the resulting housing areas, or “Little Americas,” periodically generated substantial concern for nearby communities—such [End Page 218] as in 1972 when “a large group of American teenagers, the children of military personnel, fought a street battle with local police in Wiesbaden” (132). In one of several essays investigating frictions that derived from the American military presence in Germany, Gerhard Fürmetz charts “the public order crisis caused by GIs” until the late 1950s (196). Constraints placed on the German police by the Allies, he argues, not only prevented them from addressing GI delinquency but also impeded “their efforts to regain authority in a shattered postwar society” (211). Jennifer V. Evans draws on courts-martial cases in Berlin from 1945 to 1948, in particular those involving allegations of violence between American soldiers and German women, to illustrate the extent to which “the American military government found itself having to deal with its own forces in its struggle to contain the disorder that followed Germany’s political and social collapse” (232). Focusing on the 1970s, Alexander Vazansky notes that “much of the attention given to the social problems in the army by the government and the national press” moved to Germany from Vietnam (273). While the racial tensions and drug-abuse problems described meticulously by Vazansky persisted at the end of the decade, he cites the example of General Michael S...

Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1980 by Alexander Clarkson (review)

Reviewed by: Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1980 by Alexander Clarkson Patrice Poutrus Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1980. By Alexander Clarkson. New York: Berghahn, 2013. Pp. xiv + 231. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 978-0857459589. In Fragmented Fatherland, Alexander Clarkson analyzes the ways in which West Germany’s political institutions and intelligence agencies dealt with the political activities of ethnic groups in the Cold War. He divides the book into five studies that highlight West Germany’s varying approaches to immigrant groups: Ukrainian, Croatian, Algerian, Spanish/Greek, and Iranian exiles. By not focusing exclusively on members of a single nation-state, Clarkson moves beyond traditional scholarship on immigration research. Furthermore, he extends the concept of immigrant to refer to a wide variety of groups whose residency status in West Germany differed considerably, including displaced persons, political refugees, guest workers, and foreign students. In all cases, the political activities of these diverse groups brought conflicts from within their home countries to the attention of the affluent West German postwar society. Clarkson offers intriguing examples of the complex interactions between institutions and immigrant groups. Ukrainian émigré organizations, for instance, successfully reactivated their wartime contacts with influential West German elites. These networks helped secure West German institutional and financial resources for Ukrainian activist groups as allies in their fight against communism. This anticommunist coalition broke down with Konrad Adenauer’s decision to establish diplomatic relationships with the Soviet Union. With the sociopolitical changes in the Federal Republic, including the new SPD/FDP coalition government of 1969, Ukrainian emigrants lost West Germany’s political backing. In contrast, Croatian exile organizations [End Page 224] were unable to reestablish meaningful collaboration with their Nazi-era contacts. In the 1950s, the alliance with the radical nationalists opposing Tito had already turned into a political and moral burden, and their—sometimes violent—activities could not be sanctioned by the Federal Republic. Clarkson’s overview of the conflict surrounding Algerian refugees in West Germany demonstrates the increasingly supportive position of the Social Democrats, then in the opposition, to immigrant organizations during the 1960s. Because the majority of Croatian and particularly Spanish and Greek immigrants were skilled or semiskilled laborers, the Social Democrats saw a domestic and foreign policy opportunity to distinguish their party from the CDU-led government. Contact to Spanish and Greek laborers was part of party chair Willy Brandt’s foreign policy platform in order to consolidate the Socialist International and strengthen the southern European democratic Left while also hindering a shift toward Soviet-style communism. When the SPD finally took over the leadership of the new government in 1969, they had established strong contacts to fledgling leftwing democratic movements in Spain and Greece. Yet this support of leftist activism among Southern European groups in West Germany did nothing to improve the Social Democratic leadership’s understanding of the larger plight of migrant workers in the Federal Republic. Even under the Brandt and Schmidt governments, it became evident that domestic policy, state institutions, and the public were either unprepared or unwilling to confront the political, social, and cultural challenges posed by foreign workers. Here, Clarkson’s work implicitly reiterates the conclusions of established scholarly literature on the subject without explicitly framing it within that historiography. Similarly, it is unclear why Clarkson placed the case of Iranian activist groups as the final chapter and thereby broke the chronological flow of the book. The public protests against the Shah regime at the end of the 1960s served as both a forerunner and a beacon of hope for the Extraparliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition, APO). In contrast to the other exile groups, the Federal Republic openly opposed the Iranian activist community, viewing the Shah regime as an indispensable ally against the Soviet Union. Moreover, West German intelligence agencies suspected that the Iranian relationship with the APO was a cover for informal connections to East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (MfS or the Stasi). Clarkson concentrates almost exclusively on the state’s actions, particularly those of the intelligence agencies that monitored the activities of the various migrant communities. In his conclusion, Clarkson...

Shinro Ohtake and Post-war Japanese Avant-garde Art

Shinro Ohtake was born in 1955 in Japan when the country first entered its period of major economic growth. Post-war Japanese society was being heavily influenced by American consumerism and its cultural hegemony. Ohtake was no exception: American Pop Art, and Andy Warhol in particular, significantly affected his artistic development. The course of his successful debut in the early 1980s, his subsequent fluctuating career and the recent establishment of his artistic status both in Japan and abroad encapsulate the significant issues of Western-influenced, contemporary Japanese art. This article aims to identify the nature of his Pop Art–style creations by examining his key working methods and the underlying concepts relating to the whole body of his extraordinarily diverse work. In particular, the avant-gardism of Ohtake's art will be examined with reference to Gutai and Mono-ha, the recognised ‘traditional styles’ of the country's post-war avant-garde art. The significance of his anarchism will also be discussed in relation to Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s. By doing so, the article intends to contextualise his creations in the complex development of post-war Japanese avant-garde art, and at the same time explore the potential for transnational engagement of a contemporary artist who lives and practices in the age of globalisation.

The Platonic Idea of Ideal and its Reception in East Asia

In the history of philosophy, Plato’s theory of Forms has enchanted many philosophers, but it has faced more adversaries than proponents. Although it is unusual for contemporary philosophers to believe in the Platonic Forms, I confront Plato seriously and try to defend his thought by reflecting on its reception in modern Japan. For this purpose, the Japanese word “risō” (理想), which was originally a translation of the Platonic “Idea” or “Form,” will give us valuable hints.I discuss Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Popper, each of whom raised fundamental questions about the Forms as transcendent entities. First, Aristotle ignores one fundamental factor of the Forms, i.e., Eros: we aspire for the perfect or ideal state in our life with reference to the Forms. Next, Popper misses the important difference between the Form and the Ideal: i.e., the ultimate reality and its expressed form in words. Aspiring for the latter does not necessarily lead us to totalitarianism. Then, I argue that Nietzsche shares the same framework with Plato in considering the notion of “ideal.” We have to face his radical question of whether we should hold an “ideal” in everyday life.Finally, I introduce a brief history of how philosophers confronted reality by learning Plato in modern Japan. Michitaro Tanaka, in particular, cast critical eyes on the pre- and post-war society by studying Plato’s philosophy. To consider and discuss the Forms changes views and meanings of the world and of life. Plato thereby invites us to this common search through his dialogues, and leads us to the ideal (risō).

Blood transfusion at the time of the First World War--practice and promise at the birth of transfusion medicine.

The centenary of the start of the First World War has stirred considerable interest in the political, social, military and human factors of the time and how they interacted to produce and sustain the material and human destruction in the 4 years of the war and beyond. Medical practice may appear distant and static and perhaps seems to have been somewhat ineffectual in the face of so much trauma and in the light of the enormous advances in medicine and surgery over the last century. However, this is an illusion of time and of course medical, surgical and psychiatric knowledge and procedures were developing rapidly at the time and the war years accelerated implementation of many important advances. Transfusion practice lay at the heart of resuscitation, and although direct transfusion from donor to recipient was still used, Geoffrey Keynes from Britain, Oswald Robertson from America and his namesake Lawrence Bruce Robertson from Canada, developed methods for indirect transfusion from donor to recipient by storing blood in bottles and also blood-banking that laid the foundation of modern transfusion medicine. This review explores the historical setting behind the development of blood transfusion up to the start of the First World War and on how they progressed during the war and afterwards. A fresh look may renew interest in how a novel medical speciality responded to the needs of war and of post-war society.

The New Leisure, Voluntarism and Social Reconstruction in Inter-War Britain

In post-World War I social reconstruction, leisure acquired a new meaning as a social good with the capacity to contribute to the building of a new post-war society. A discourse of citizenship and leisure emerged which drew from Christian socialism and the works of John Ruskin, William Morris, and the social idealist thinking of T. H. Green and J. A. Hobson. The classical Athenian model of leisure was re-worked by Ernest Barker and Cecil Delisle Burns who argued that the function of a leisure class could become that of the whole community through a democratic redistribution of leisure. Although efforts to realize idealist visions were rarely successful they were nevertheless important to twentieth-century understandings of leisure and citizenship and brought leisure within the framework of social policy.

Where Are the Minorities?

This article analyzes the representation of Sri Lanka's communities in history textbooks that are currently in use. Even before the end of the war in 2009, the education system was recognized as an instrument with which the country's divided society could be rebuilt. The issues addressed in this article concern a period in which ambitious educational reforms are being implemented that envision textbooks as a tool for the creation of a new generation of citizens in a postwar society. It reveals that the general lack of recognition of minority communities, and the negative representations of the Tamil community in particular, that appear in these textbooks are not compatible with the proclaimed vision of a multicultural yet integrated society. Instead of fostering social cohesion, these textbooks may deepen ethnic divides and stereotypes, and therefore thwart reconciliation and long-term peace.

Advancing Gender and Peacekeeping Research

Research on gender and peacekeeping has been revolving around two strands of questions. First, what form of peace does peacekeeping contribute to establishing? And second what are the gender dimensions of how peacekeeping is implemented? Subthemes underlying these questions are concerned with whether women's participation and gender aspects of security should be integral parts of the post-war society and the effectiveness of current gender mainstreaming and balancing policies. In this commentary we argue that there has been considerable progress in the field of gender and peacekeeping. Feminist research has raised questions about the understanding and conceptualisation of peace and security, while empirical research systematically explores the gender dimensions of peacekeeping. Yet, in order for research on gender and peacekeeping to progress, it needs to address issues such as theory underdevelopment, lack of data and continued exclusion from mainstream research. The commentary highlights as an area of particular concern the failure of existing research to find common ground and outlines opportunities of building bridges between empirical and feminist researchers.

"Active and Conscious Builders of Communism": State-Sponsored Tourism for Soviet Adolescents in the Early Cold War, 1945-53

This article examines state-sponsored tourism for Soviet adolescents during the post-World War II years of Stalin’s rule, 1945–1953, a topic not explored in any depth within scholarship on the USSR, despite the surprising degree of importance ascribed to this area by the authorities. Through adopting the lens of tourism studies and childhood and youth studies, the essay enriches our understanding of Soviet postwar society, particularly the overt official endeavors to forge model young citizens and the covert efforts to legitimize the political system, encourage natalism, and spread the Soviet model throughout the world via Cold War public diplomacy. Finding striking convergences and illuminating disparities between the approaches of different political and social structures to young people and their leisure time, this piece advances our understanding of the ways that modern societies maintain and reproduce themselves, or fail to do so. Furthermore, the essay considers matters of broader humanistic relevance, such as the mobilization of emotions for government purposes and the politicization of childhood and youthhood. It compares the Soviet case study to authoritarian and democratic western states and uses the socialist context of the postwar Soviet Union to enrich and add nuance to current scholarly models, based overwhelmingly on case studies of western settings that undercount the importance of state organs.