West Berlin Research Articles

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

The Association of Neurosurgeons in the German Democratic Republic and its First Congresses in Divided Germany.

The German Society of Neurosurgery (DGNC) was founded in Bonn in 1950 and saw itself as the all-German representation of neurosurgeons. The development of neurosurgery in divided Germany was different in each case as part of a system and was not unaffected by the confrontation between the two blocs (cold war), which also had a negative impact on the field of science. Thus, early on, restrictions on intra-German travel from the East made normal relations difficult. But travel restrictions also came from the West, where an Allied Travel Office in West Berlin decided whether an East German could enter a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) country. Nevertheless, it was possible that Georg Merrem from Leipzig took over the second chairmanship of the board of the DGNC of the election period from 1960 to 1962 and eight individual memberships of German Democratic Republic (GDR) neurosurgeons were still tolerated by the state side. The construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961 meant that these connections also collapsed. Merrem, at that time the only full professor of neurosurgery in the GDR, founded the "Association of Neurosurgeons in the GDR" in 1962 in agreement with the state authorities. With the foundation of a GDR neurosurgeons' society, the demarcation from the DGNC desired by the state was visibly accomplished. There were no official relations between the two neurosurgical societies. During the period of its existence until 1990, the entire work of the East German society was under the guidance and control of state institutions, which in turn derived their work from the guidelines of the party and the decisions of the council of ministers. Using the example of the congress activities of the first 5 years after the Wall was built, we show this dependence on state institutions. It extends from congress planning to reporting. With available figures of participating speakers from West Germany and other countries, it is demonstrated for the individual congresses in Leipzig, Magdeburg, and Erfurt that the German-German connection was continued despite all adverse circumstances. The presence of West German colleagues, who were not deterred from attending the congress even by the construction of the Berlin Wall, can be seen as a visible expression of an unbroken togetherness. However, already in 1967, the party and the council of ministers passed the resolution "On the organization of work in the field of science and culture of the GDR to West Germany as well as West Berlin." This regulated membership, the associated travel, and the conditions for publications in West German journals. Among other things, this directive prohibited membership in scientific societies, including the DGNC, based in West Germany. The organization of its own congresses took on a special significance because a congress visit from East to West was regulated by the state and thus only possible in isolated cases.

Greek trans women selling sex, spaces and mobilities, 1960s–80s

ABSTRACT This article shows how sex work, gender identity and spatial mobilities were entangled for Greek trans women selling sex. Selling sex, particularly as trans women, exposed them to severe threats due to restrictive legislation and bias against them. Nevertheless, sex work could also be an empowering experience, facilitating their gender transitioning and helping them develop professional self-esteem. Greek trans women selling sex experienced such barriers and empowerment between the 1960s and early 1980s. Thus, contrary to the powerful argument in the history of sexuality, the late 1970s witnessed no ‘turn inwards’ for them. Selling sex as a pathway to gender transitioning was a process situated in specific spaces and facilitated by mobilities. Gender transitioning through sex work transpired in niches that trans women selling sex carved out in Athens and Salonica from the 1960s on. Simultaneously, movement across space had a complex and, sometimes, cumulative effect on sex work as a road to gender transitioning. Individuals engaging in the latter process relocated within the urban centres or from villages and provincial towns to the large cities of Greece, populating the abovementioned niches. In these niches, they exchanged information on locations outside of Greece. Subsequently, some trans women travelled to Casablanca to undergo gender-affirming surgery and/or migrated to West Berlin to sell sex. Such cross-border mobility had an ambiguous impact on the link between sex work and gender transitioning for Greek trans women, sometimes consolidating it and sometimes helping weaken it. In exploring the experience of Greek trans women in West Berlin, the article also contributes to the conjoined study of sex work, on the one hand, and migration from Greece to West Germany, on the other, which historians have hitherto primarily analysed separately from one another.

A Well-Tempered Modernist

In the vast archive of literature from, and on, Hans Blumenberg, there are few mentions of theories of modern or contemporary art. Two exceptions exist, which both took place in 1966. One deals with the topic more obliquely: a lecture on Paul Valéry given at the Akademie der Künste in West Berlin. The second takes the topic of pop and op art head-on in a discussion led by Blumenberg for the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik. In neither does Blumenberg offer anything like a working theory of contemporary art, but his lecture enacts a performative contemporary reading of Valéry’s attempt to make Leonardo da Vinci relevant for the French poet’s age. Comparing Blumenberg’s comments on contemporary art with those in US formalist art criticism (Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried) provides a unique constellation of later modernist thinking on the plastic arts (painting and sculpture, chiefly). This article attempts to read Blumenberg as a contemporary thinker for art, an attempt that revisits the provocation that Blumenberg set for himself in 1966 when considering the stakes for contemporary art forms. Can one say that Blumenberg was himself a modernist?

“A Special Form of Making Foreign Policy by the Threat of War to Imperialists”. A Case Study of Military-Political Activity of Central Committee Presidium under N.S. Khrushchev, 1953–1964. Part 2

The results of Khrushchev's foreign policy can be considered, albeit not in everything and even more modest than planned, on the whole quite successful. To resolve the 2nd Berlin crisis (1958–1963), Khrushchev in 1960 reduced the Soviet ground forces by a third, thereby trying to encourage the United States to reduce its military presence in Europe. However, at the Paris Summit of the heads of the 4 powers (1960), due to the active opposition of France and Germany, he failed to push through an agreement on West Berlin on Soviet terms. Mao Zedong, who himself dreamed of leadership among socialist countries after Stalin's death, took advantage of the convenient situation to start a conflict with Moscow. In such an environment, Khrushchev escalated the Berlin crisis by threatening to conclude a peace treaty with the GDR and block Western powers' access to West Berlin (at the same time he conducts command and staff exercises “Storm”, 5–15.10.1961, together with the armies of the ATS countries). He hoped that the United States would not dare to start a war because of West Berlin, and this, in turn, would help to break off Western European states from NATO, showing them that the United States is not a reliable defender for them. His plan partially succeeded: in 1966, France will withdraw from NATO. In order to divert the attention and forces of the United States from West Berlin, the USSR has been actively creating distracting situations around the world since 1961. One of these situations was the Caribbean crisis, which almost led to a nuclear war (1962) and was a heavy defeat for the USSR, which had to fulfill all the conditions of the United States, but in return received Kennedy's promise to remove missile bases from Turkey. It will be possible to remove them only in 1963 in exchange for Turkey's support in its war with Greece over Cyprus. From Iran, due to the harsh Anglo-American pressure on the Shah, the USSR was able to achieve only an obligation not to deploy foreign missiles on its territory, but not to withdraw from the Baghdad Pact, nevertheless, the latter's activities were paralyzed. Under Brezhnev, despite the rejection of Khrushchev's tactics of nuclear bluff, the main directions and strategic goals of foreign policy remained the same as under Khrushchev: ensuring security on the western and southern borders of the USSR by splitting the opposing military blocs and establishing ties with Western European countries, especially France, improving relations with Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, linking them economically. The program of naval construction and the permanent presence of the Soviet Navy in all oceans, begun in 1959, continued.

The Art of Negotiation and Resolution of the Berlin Question (R.V. Dolgilevich. Soviet Diplomacy on the Quadrilateral Negotiations on West Berlin (March 26, 1970 – September 3, 1971) / preface. and publ. R.V. Dolgilevich. Saint-Petersburg, 2021)

The Art of Negotiation and Resolution of the Berlin Question (R.V. Dolgilevich. Soviet Diplomacy on the Quadrilateral Negotiations on West Berlin (March 26, 1970 – September 3, 1971) / preface. and publ. R.V. Dolgilevich. Saint-Petersburg, 2021)

Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko et al.

Reviewed by: Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses ed. by Evgeny Dobrenko et al. Inessa Medzhibovskaya Dobrenko, Evgeny and Jonsson-Skradol, Natalia (eds). Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses. Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Anthem Press, London, 2018. 362 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. £100.00: £175.00. This comprehensive and well-organized volume edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol is a major new achievement in the study of both a single method by which literature is institutionalized and globalized, and its lasting discourses. It is an achievement that builds on the strengths of Dobrenko and Thomas Lahusen's Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham, NC, 1997), the magisterial Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (St Petersburg, 2000) edited by Dobrenko with Hans Günther, and A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (Pittsburgh, PA, 2011) edited by Dobrenko with Galin Tihanov, and also enters into an illuminating dialogue with Tihanov's award-winning The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford, CA, 2019). This new collection features a skilfully arranged set of twenty detailed and lucid chapters by an international group of scholars from Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia and the United States by Imre József Balázs, René Bílik, Rossen Djagalov, Evgeny Dobrenko, Plamen Doinov, Helen Fehervary, Hans Günther, Anne Hartmann, Nenad Ivic´, Pavel Janáček, Natalia Jonsson-Skradol, Melinda Kalmár, David Norris, Ivana Peruško, Evgeny Ponomarev, Benjamin Robinson, Tamás Scheibner, Vít Schmarc, Tatiana V. Volokitina and Vladislav M. Zubok. This heavily archival and scrupulously theoretical volume is the impressive result of many years' work under the auspices of the research project, 'Literary Pax Sovietica: National Revival and Cultural Unification in Post-War Eastern Europe', based at the University of Sheffield. Prior to publishing these important results, they were showcased at two conferences funded by, amongst others, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the International Visegrad Fund and the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund. [End Page 183] On the cover of the book, Cyrillic typewriter keys capture the eye. Their gold inlaid tops are stuck frozen on their arms, idling and untouched. Nobody is using the typewriter: it is an artifact of an era long gone. Who stopped typing? When and why? What did the dominant ideological spirits of Socialist Realism have to do with the eventual abandonment of these keys? Focusing on the former Warsaw pact countries of Eastern and Central Europe — but omitting Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine — the editors thoughtfully place each contribution under one of the three sequential parts listed in the book's subtitle (institutions, dynamics, discourses). Most closely examined is the fate of Socialist Realism in East Germany, Poland, Croatia, Czecholslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia, with brief mention of Albania and Macedonia. With one exception — the Béla Bartók debates that were to influence the larger process of the development of Socialist Realism in Hungary — and unlike the approach used by Dobrenko and Lahusen in 1997 and Dobrenko and Günther in 2000, the volume covers only the literatures and literary criticism of this multilingual region. The volume's structure enables the reader to accurately track the arrival of Socialist Realism in the newly Soviet-occupied zones of war-torn Eastern Europe following the defeat of Hitler's Nazi Germany. After the extermination of many artists who had been anti-Nazi resisters, the devastations of the Holocaust and the purges in the Soviet Union, far from all the surviving writers were able to immediately return home from their places of displacement and exile. (Anna Seghers, for example, did not return from Mexico until 1947, and lived in West Berlin until 1950.) All the volume's essays are sensitive to the difficult circumstances surrounding the construction of the early institutions and discourses of the proto-socialist and popular-democratic cultural fronts in the region. Although comic in part, this was not a makeshift montage job for 'Kremlin gremlins', as Zubok calls them (pp. 78–82). These were...

Celluloid Critique: Documentary Filmmaking and the Politics of Housing in Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel

This is a paper about radical filmmaking and housing justice in the Märkisches Viertel in the 1970s. The satellite estate on the outskirts of West Berlin was one of the largest housing projects in West Germany and, for many residents, a space of increasing marginality and insecurity. As this paper argues, it was also a site of experimental filmmaking that documented the conditions faced by residents living in the Märkisches Viertel. The paper focuses on a group of students closely connected to the Deutschen Film- und Fernsehnakademie (dffb or the German Film and Television Academy) who began in the late 1960s to film various political activities and discussions in the neighbourhood. It places particular emphasis on the work of Helga Reidemeister, a social worker and student at the dffb whose documentary films adopted a working practice that depended on the direct participation of the families and women, in particular, with which she collaborated. Through a close reading of her 1979 film, Von wegen ‚Schicksal’ (1979), the paper foregrounds Reidemeister’s role as a feminist filmmaker whose work explored the mechanisms of displacement faced by tenants living in the Märkisches Viertel and the wider ‘structures of feeling’ that they generated. At stake here, is a broader commentary on the history of housing struggles in West Berlin and the importance of documentary filmmaking as a methodology for housing justice.

The Pleasure and Pain of Passing as (Dis)abled: Rudi Dutschke’s Exile in the United Kingdom (1968–1971) and the Ableism of the West German Student Movement

The Pleasure and Pain of Passing as (Dis)abled: Rudi Dutschke’s Exile in the United Kingdom (1968–1971) and the Ableism of the West German Student Movement

Tenant Trouble: Resisting Precarity in Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel, 1968–1974

At the heart of this article is a detailed reconstruction of the complex history of activism in the Märkisches Viertel in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The satellite estate on the outskirts of West Berlin was the largest housing project in West Germany in the 1960s and, for many residents, a space of increasing marginality and insecurity. During the same period, the neighborhood became a new “front” for student activists, who collaborated with local residents on a series of grassroots community initiatives. The article retraces the new forms of political action that brought students and residents together in the Märkisches Viertel while highlighting the different ways in which residents made sense of their own precarity. In so doing, the article seeks to recenter our understanding of precarity as a geographically grounded process rooted in long-standing patterns of exploitation, displacement, and vulnerability. It also connects a renewed interest in the everyday political geographies of activism, solidarity, and resistance with a historico-geographical commitment to the archive as a theoretically generative space. At stake here, as the article concludes, is a commitment to advancing our understanding of critical pedagogies and the challenges that accompany the development of emancipatory modes of geographical practice.

Becker , Peter Wheatley , Natasha Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands (review)

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 776 peasant assemblies that always drove toward unanimous decision-making, the Soviet public sphere tolerated no dissident voices. Whereas Jeffrey Brooks’s analogous study, When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton, NJ, 1985), can be tested quantitatively (literacy rates in late imperial Russia were steadily rising), no means can be devised to quantify the contributions of public speaking to the development of Russia’s civil society. It is hard to agree with the judgment that the Bolsheviks ‘achieved a synthesis of […] authority and democracy’ (p. 293). Nevertheless, this study significantly advances our understanding of late imperial Russian political history. Department of History Jonathan Daly University of Illinois at Chicago Becker, Peter and Wheatley, Natasha (eds). Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands. The History and Theory of International Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2020. xvi + 396 pp. Notes. Index. £80.00. In a speech to the Robert-Bosch-Stiftung in 1991, the German-born American historian Fritz Stern recalled how in April 1979 he was walking alongside ‘bombed-out squares and half-decrepit mansions’ close to one of the crossing points between West and East Berlin with the French public intellectual Raymond Aron when the latter suddenly turned to him and said: ‘It could have been Germany’s century’ (Fritz Stern, Verspielte Größe, Munich, 1996, p. 11). In some ways, this is also the starting point for the fine collection of essays under review here, except in this case the reader is invited to imagine that the century could have belonged to post-Habsburg Austria, or more specifically, to 1920s-era Vienna. This radical suggestion is based on the claim that, as a state whose finances, borders and even independent existence were controlled by the victorious Allies from 1919, Austria stood at the junction of competing but overlapping trends in world politics: the imperial, the national, the regional and the internationally-minded. As ‘Global Austria’ (Weltösterreich), an imagined ‘inter-national’ or ‘supranational ’ cultural and economic space already present in the minds of some Central European intellectuals before 1914, it also drew several of its near neighbours (and erstwhile dominions) into the same trajectory, notably Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In the first chapter, Glenda Sluga introduces a little-known fact: in 1927 governments in the region launched a deliberate campaign to move the headquarters of the League of Nations from Geneva to Vienna. This project REVIEWS 777 ‘lost its traction only once the League of Nations had taken the decision to build the Palais des Nations on Lake Geneva’ in 1929 (p. 31). Beyond the League itself, the Austrian capital hosted a variety of congresses in the early 1920s, including the 1922 International Postal Union Conference and the 1926 PanEuropa Congress. Its police chief, Johannes Schober, who also served twice as Chancellor of the Austrian republic, became the founding president of Interpol, or, as it was then known, the International Criminal Police Commission, in 1923 (p. 11). More generally, the hunger problems that the city suffered in the immediate post-war period made it a central meeting point for experts from across the world in the fields of nutrition, paediatric medicine and finance. In part, these developments mark a profound political shift in Austria as it was ‘reduced’ from empire to small nation, but they also reflect the continued influence of what Sluga calls ‘Habsburg-induced cultural internationalism’ (pp. 24, 28). One example of this would be the cosmopolitan idealism of the writer Robert Musil, whose world vision straddled the passage of Central Europe from site of great power rivalries to global war to mid twentiethcentury liberal internationalism. As Sarah Lemmen shows in her impressive essay on the foreign policy of the inter-war Czechoslovak Republic, the shadow of Vienna’s imperial past could also be seen in attempts to make Prague the new capital of the post-Habsburg lands after 1918, in other words the region’s ‘mainplayer’,throughitsdevelopmentofnewinternationalpolitical,economic, diplomatic and cultural networks extending well beyond Europe (p. 351). In 1920, President Tomáš Masaryk even enticed the Orientalist Alois Musil (a second cousin of Robert) to move from Vienna, where he had established an Oriental Institute...

“Moskva‐Berlin, Berlin‐Moskau, 1900–1950”: Memory and Forgetting

This article reconstructs and reexamines the dramatic events leading up to the “Moscow‐Berlin, 1900–1950” exhibition, jointly staged by the Berlinische Galerei and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in 1995–96. Modeled upon the landmark “Moscow‐Paris” exhibit that had taken place at the Pompidou Center in 1979 and the Pushkin Museum in 1981, “Moscow‐Berlin” has been largely forgotten by time, despite the fact that it, too, was intially viewed as a blockbusters event. Beyond changing professional and cultural conventions, a series of underlying factors help to explain the contrasting reactions to the two exhibits: international politics and the art market, passing trends, and media discourses. By the time “Moscow‐Berlin” opened, interest in the Russian avant‐garde had faded, while interest in 1930s art and culture was on the rise, fueled not by commercial but by an ideological demand to reconceptualize the canon for writing history and art history. Additionally, “Moscow‐Berlin” was conceived of as a political event, not only vis à vis the art on display, but its very location: West Berlin. But during the early stages of planning and preparation, however, both the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic disappeared from the map: this solved some thorny political issues surrounding the exhibit, but it created myriad other problems. At first, German politicians hoped the exhibit would facilitate the return of trophy art taken from Germany at the end of the Second World War. When reality dispelled this illusion, the German press launched an extended campaign against the exhibitions, which would later impact how it was remembered. Meantime, of course, when the exhibit arrived in Moscow it opened in a city in the throes of socioeconomic unrest and a contentious presidential election. The display of Stalinist art in all its radiant glory sparked in some viewers nostalgia for the Soviet past, and partially suppressed the question of whether shame should accompany the art of Stalinism. Collective memory hoped instead to glide over the more painful chapters of the recent past.

The Sixties in Berlin and in Hollywood: City with a Wall in Its Center—The Attempt to Erase the German Past

The Sixties in Berlin and in Hollywood: City with a Wall in Its Center—The Attempt to Erase the German Past

From North-South to East-West: The Demarcation and Reunification of the Vietnamese Migrant Community in Berlin

Abstract In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, marking the breakdown of the East-West demarcation and the reunification of the German Democratic Republic (gdr) and Federal Republic of Germany (frg). Consequently, thousands of predominantly Northern Vietnamese contract workers, who came to East Berlin under the bilateral agreement between the gdr and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (srv), stayed in the reunified Germany alongside thousands of Vietnamese thuyền nhân from South Vietnam, who were settled in West Berlin by the frg. Therefore, Berlin became the host of two Vietnamese communities. To this day, significant tension exists between the two Vietnamese communities in Berlin due to the geographical and ideological divisions linked to the deterritorialisation and consequently reterritorialisation of the imagined homeland and host-land within the diaspora. This tension is further exacerbated by the socioeconomic segregation in the Vietnamese diaspora due to the differences in settlement policies and reception by the host land. This article focuses on the migration paths, policies, and subsequent development of the Vietnamese diaspora in Berlin. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Berlin from 2016 to 2018, I argue that the differences in policies before and after reunification regarding two different groups of Vietnamese migrants ultimately shape the experiences and reinforce the pre-existing cleavages between them.

ОСМЫСЛЕНИЕ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОГО ПРОШЛОГО В МУЗЫКАЛЬНОЙ КУЛЬТУРЕ ЗАПАДНОГО БЕРЛИНА 1980-Х ГГ.

Статья посвящена роли популярной музыки в процессах осмысления и проработки нацистского прошлого в Западной Германии в 1980-х гг. Популярная музыка рассматривается на примере музыкальной сцены Западного Берлина, а именно группы «Einstürzende Neubauten». Рассмотрены политический, экономический и социальный контекст функционирования сцены Западного Берлина, проанализированы различные способы репрезентации национального прошлого в музыке «Einstürzende Neu-bauten». Сделан вывод о том, что в музыкальной культуре Западного Берлина происходило восстановление преемственности разных периодов немецкой культуры и вписывание проблемного прошлого в публичный исторический нарратив.The article is focused on the role of popular music in the processes of comprehension and dealing with the Nazi past in West Germany in the 1980s. Popular music is examined on the example of the music scene of West Berlin, namely the band «Einstürzende Neubauten». The article considers the political, economic and social context of the West Berlin music scene, analyzes different ways of representing the national past in the music of «Einstürzende Neubauten». The conclusion is made that in the musical culture of West Berlin the continuity of different periods of German culture was restored and the troubled past was incorporated into the public historical narrative.

Heterochronias: reflections on the temporal exceptionality of revolts

ABSTRACT Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of Heterotopias, the article explores how we can understand revolts and revolutions as ‘heterochronian’ moments. Revolts turn spaces of ordinary everyday life, streets and squares, factories and universities, into ‘absolutely different’ spaces, at least for a moment. But these are also times that radically differ from normal times. Revolts, the article suggests, fall outside the normalcy of time. As an empirical example, this article explores the urban revolts of 1980–81 in cities such as Zurich, Amsterdam, and, most famously, West Berlin, discussing how activists themselves interpreted their revolts as temporary disruptions for which the moment mattered, no matter the long-term outcomes.

El Foyer de la Philharmonie de Berlín. Un lugar entre cultura y barbarie

The research attempts to link Potsdamer Platz, which was turned into a field of scrubland after the Second World War, with the proposal of the Berlin Philharmonie. Wim Wenders and Peter Handke's film The Sky over Berlin shows the clashes between culture and barbarism, showing the traces of the war that the film expresses, in the face of the need to build an architectural space for culture in the place where the limit of space was destroyed. The analysis of the foyer of the Philharmonie is an investigation of the border generated by the boundary between East and West Berlin during the Cold War from the traces that show the confrontations and those that any peripheral place would generate in many of the cities of the West. The foyer of the Philharmonie is an enclosure that reveals a new way of defining a space of relation.

If You Want to Say Something—Speak in the Language of the Language: Ewa Partum's Model of Conceptual Art

Abstract The artistic practice of the Polish-born Ewa Partum can be divided chronologically into Polish (1965–1982), West Berlin (1982–89) and transnational / global (from 1989) periods. This essay focuses on the specificity of the conceptual art developed by Partum and her self-historicization as a conceptual artist. At the same time, it regards the local and global historicization of conceptual art as fragmentary and contradicting processes. The study examines local genealogy of Partum's conceptual strategies as part of a localized reflection on the geopolitics of knowledge; it considers a specific position of cultural production that is characteristic of Central and Eastern European neo-avant-gardes. It examines Partum's model of conceptual art in relation to Polish and Western practices. It is argued that Western conceptualism was only a point of reference for Partum's art. Works such as Presence / Absence or Luncheon on the Grass realized by Partum in years 1965–1972 formed a basis from which the artist responded to knowledge of the transnational conceptual movement that was disseminated through Mail Art and Fluxus networks. Analysis reveals Partum's model of conceptual art to be contrapuntal, as it is not subordinate to either its western inflection or local (Polish) cannons and protocols.

Табу на покликання вчителя

The work "Taboos on the teaching vocation" was read by the German social philosopher and representative of critical theory Theodor Adorno as a report on May 21, 1965 at the Berlin Institute for Educational Research (West Berlin). In this report, Adorno considered the socio-psychological and socio-cultural reasons that in the context of Western European culture have historically led to the social emergence of many psychological taboos on the pedagogical work of the school teacher. The philosopher theoretically deduced the dialectical connection between human hostility and disgust for the work of the teacher from the cultural tradition of German society, which historically developed as late bourgeois. A characteristic feature of the attitude of the overly materialistic socio-cultural system was aversion to the work of the teacher as a "hungry job", that is, to a poorly paid profession. Another factor of public disgust for the work of teachers, the philosopher called the socio-cultural tradition of society, which as a closed society willingly practiced physical violence as a means of social coercion. According to this tradition, through the use of violence, the teacher must subordinate students to his authority, subordinate to social and school ideology. The historical result of such dialectics was the socio-cultural (ideological) distortion of the image of the teacher, the castration of his image in social psychology, his self-alienation from the professional vocation and the ideological elimination of the power of his spirit. As an ideological alternative, Adorno suggested that society, if it consciously seeks democratic change, first of all take into account such young teachers who demonstrate the impulse of their individual spirit in the performance of their profession. According to the philosopher, only the spiritual freedom of such a young educator, a man who is capable of self-understanding, conscious of himself and his vocation, who reflects and is socially active, can democratize schools, devalue society and destroy dehumanized social traditions. First of all – in order to overcome the barbaric tradition of violence.

Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum?

<i>Unboxed: Transgender in a Gay Museum?</i>