Zero Hour Research Articles

Estimation of Formaldehyde Levels in Indoor Air of Gross Anatomy Laboratory

Introduction: Medical students spend majority of their times in Anatomy lab during their first year MBBS. Formalin has attracted attention as a health hazard for students and instructors as formalin concentrations in air of gross anatomy laboratories are often higher than permissible limits. Despite the known toxicity of formaldehyde and its potential health effects, laboratory workers and others have little enthusiasm for reducing or replacing the formaldehyde working solution Materials and Methods: The FA concentration (in ppm) of indoor air in Anatomy laboratory was measured using a SMILEDRIVE Portable air quality pollution meter. The mean FA concentration was measured after 1 hour after the cadavers were shifted to dissection table at three different levels a. At the level of floor b. At the level of roof c. 2 feets above the table (Breathing Zone of medical students) Three air samples from the breathing zones were tested and mean concentration of FA was taken with exhaust fan on at the level of roof and recorded as a. S1R- First immediately before the dissection (Zero hour), b. S2R- Second sample was collected after one hour after first sample was taken (First hour) and c. S3R- Third sample after two hours after first sample was taken (Second hour). Three air samples from the breathing zones were tested and mean concentration of FA was taken with exhaust fan on at the level of floor and recorded as a. S1F- First immediately before the dissection (Zero hour), b. S2F- Second sample was collected after one hour after first sample was taken (First hour) and c. S3F- Third sample after two hours after first sample was taken (Second hour). Results: The vertical distribution of FA was measured by taking the mean air samples at the level of floor, at roof level and about 2 feet above dissection table immediately after the cadavers were shifted to tables. It was found to be about 0.54ppm at the level of floor, 0.52 at the breathing zone and 0.51 ppm at roof level. The FA concentration was highest at the level of floor and least at the level of roof. On comparing S2F and S2R the p value was 1.335. Thus, it was not statistically significant. On comparing S3F and S3R the p value was 0.411. Thus, it was not statistically significant. Conclusion: The mean FA at the level of floor was 0.54 ppm. At the breathing zone the mean FA concentration was 0.51 ppm before the dissection was started. Exhaust fans at the level of roof were switched on and the second sample was taken after 1 hour. The FA concentration was 0.23 ppm. Third sample was taken at 2nd hour and FA concentration was 0.11 ppm. The exhaust fans at the level of floor were switched on. The air samples were measured at 0, 1st and 2nd hour at breathing zones. It was 0.51, 0.31 and 0,15 ppm respectively.

Liberation and the historical present: Gertrude Stein @ Zero Hour

ABSTRACT This essay takes up Gertrude Stein’s war writing, her autobiographical Wars I Have Seen and later play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, in several registers. The first is Stein’s record of her experience of the war itself toward the moment of liberation of her village by American troops on 1 September 1944. For Stein, this was the “Zero Hour” of liberation and new beginning—but also the end of unfreedom and compromise with the dark history of the Vichy Regime. In her third experimental autobiography, Stein reverses the form of the “continuous present” of The Making of Americans while including a wide range of historical references and personal reflections. The resulting construction of a “historical present,” while written on a historical timeline,plays with conventional beginnings, middles, and ends. Stein’s first reflections on war associate it with developmental stages of childhood, creating a ludic and a-rational account of war that allows her to distance herself from her earlier support of Marshall Pétain. The “middles” of her narrative describe the structural framework of surviving the war and the limited means for comprehending it as a present “unreality.” With the coming of Americans, its “end,” unreality becomes real and Stein’s narrative steps into the light of freedom associated with American democracy—and a new moment of media celebrity. In this historical limelight, she writes her only “realist” play, Yes Is for a Very Young Man, based on the contradictions of living within the Occupation, a vacillation between Collaboration and Resistance projected onto her characters. Stein thus fashions an historical allegory to explain to audiences at home the complexities of Occupation from her post-Zero Hour moment of triumphant Americanism.

Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana

Conceiving Liberty in Pax Americana Lisa Szefel (bio) Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroud, 2021. 880 pp. Notes and index. $35.00. In 1945, after decades of destruction and deprivation, freedom in Europe seemed to be within grasp. In contrast to the post-World War I retreat into isolationism, the United States, intent on forging a world order grounded in liberal democracy and capitalist prosperity, assumed global leadership. Melvin Leffler’s seminal A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992) set the terms of debate regarding postwar national and international economic, political, and colonial rearrangements. That doorstopper of a book began as the guns fell silent in Germany, a moment the defeated nation dubbed Stunde Null (“Zero Hour”), and representatives of Imperial Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War surveys the same landscape, but from a different angle. The Free World seeks to map out why, in this Pax Americana, paintings and poems, music and movies seemed to actualize liberty. Menand canvasses the shearing forces that caused this faulting and folding in art and ideas as Americans pivoted away from war footing. The Free World does not explore the use of culture as a weapon against Communism abroad, a field expertly mined by Frances Stonor Saunders’ landmark The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1991) and, more recently, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015) by Greg Barnhisel. Nor does Menand concern himself with the impact of politics on national identity, a vantage point first sketched by Stephen Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War (1991). In the context of superpower rivalry, totalitarian peril, and decolonization, Menand carves out deft insights as they form, strike, renovate, and ricochet—sometimes with a chisel, other times with a scalpel. The Free World ends with a bang rather than concludes, bringing Kennan’s prescription of Soviet containment to its logical conclusion in Operation Rolling Thunder, which rained down three-hundred pounds of bombs for every woman, man, and child in North Vietnam. The engines of American political, intellectual, artistic, and moral authority, developed over the previous two decades, came screeching to a halt, shifting [End Page 408] democracy into reverse. In the wake of this wheelspin, new articulations of freedom gained traction. Menand’s Tolstoyan epic examines a geometry of “vertical cross-sections” and “horizontal through-lines” (p. xiv), which unveils a deep and broad panorama. What results is not War and Peace, but a series of Polaroid snapshots, a device created in 1948 as one of the era’s technological innovations. Menand captures the moments when creators conceived their art: Jean-Paul Sartre jumping into the void; Jackson Pollock tossing a canvass on the floor; Merce Cunningham chucking choreography for chance. Critics charted this new territory, explaining films, explicating texts, criticizing consumerism, unveiling misogyny, and diagnosing racism. A second goal animates the inquiry: the education Menand absorbed from his parents, a more activist and elevated version of the kind of general readers Joan Shelley Rubin illustrated in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992). Considering art and thought in the Cold War might, Menand suggests, render a more complete portrait of his own subjectivity. What launched the notion that ideas matter? Menand argues that it began with George Kennan’s famous 1946 “Long Telegram,” which laid out in despairing detail the inherently expansionist nature of Communist ideology. With little hope of peaceful coexistence, only a policy of “vigilant containment” offered protection against yet another global conflagration. Among the first to gauge Atomic Age geopolitical threats was George Orwell whose attempt to join a Communist cell became fodder for Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell chronicled his battle against fascists during the Spanish Civil War, while the now-canonical Animal Farm (1948) and 1984 (1949) illuminated the despotic impact of Stalinist cant and dissimulation. Eastern bloc consolidation gave ballast to the publishing fortunes of another political prognosticator, Hannah Arendt. Her etiology of...

CULTURE ET RÉCONCILIATION POST-GUERRE : DE L’OPTIMISME À LA RÉSILIENCEPOST-WAR CULTURE AND RECONCILIATION: FROM OPTIMISM TO RESILIENCE

Culture and Post-War Reconciliation: from Optimism to Resilience. At the end of the civil war, Lebanon tried to rebuild itself but fairly quickly wars, assassinations, repeated political crises and an influx of refugees weakened it. From 2019, it is downright descent into hell with an aborted popular revolt and a whole series of financial, economic and health disasters culminating in the explosion of August 4, 2020, which transformed it into a true martyr nation. Once again, the Land of the Cedars falls back into the cycle of the absurd, even into the circularity of the myth of Sisyphus, going so far as to relive scenes of violence reminiscent of the civil war as if we were returning to the “Zero Hour”. These recent events show that the structural causes that led to the conflict among Lebanese have not yet been resolved. Today the majority of them are lost, living day to day without hope or perspective. Faced with this fatality, should we question the impact of artistic projects aiming at social reconciliation following a conflict? Can culture in general and theater in particular still be vectors for promoting peace? In which category of the process of social transformation can we place these artistic practices today? Do the practitioners of this approach always do sustainable reconciliation work or rather attempt at societal resilience? Does this resilience still have a therapeutic role that heals wounds and trauma? Or does it risk contributing to pushing the Lebanese into denial by adapting them to their new reality?

Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany Emily Richmond Pollock.

<i>Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany</i> Emily Richmond Pollock.

Shaping Memory: The Evolving Remembrance Culture at the Memorial Sites Mauthausen and Dachau - from Zero Hour to the 21st Century

Shaping Memory: The Evolving Remembrance Culture at the Memorial Sites Mauthausen and Dachau - from Zero Hour to the 21st Century

Zero hour contracts as a type of “atypical” working

Zero hour contracts as a type of “atypical” working

Ignoring Racism in the History of the German Immigration Society: Some Reflections on Comparison as an Epistemic Practice

The entanglement of the history of racism with the history of migration in Germany has been ignored thus far in German historiography. Exploring the epistemological significance of ignorance in sustaining racial knowledge in democratic, pluralistic societies is a relatively new field of research; in the German case it is virtually absent. Taking seriously Linda Martín Alcoff’s dictum that ignoring racism is a substantial epistemic practice of sustaining it, it seems worth studying the hermeneutic means by which German historiography creates this blind spot. One of the central motifs in this context is the “zero hour,” according to which German migration history only commenced in the mid-1950s and had nothing to do with how Germans had treated migrants since the turn of the century, particularly those considered as “<em>völkisch</em>”^{<a id="xrn1" href="#n1">1</a>} undesirable Others. In this article, the methods of comparison and omission are discussed as key epistemic tools for writing the zero hour into German migration history. This narrative path is contrasted with microhistorical accounts that reveal the ongoing production of racial knowledge and ignorance and their entanglement, which formed the basis of a new “art of communicating” about Others after the Holocaust. Racial knowledge is known and ignored simultaneously, so that even a supposedly anti-racist society does not have to erase it as long as it is “dominantly” ignored. This particular relationship reflects the idea that knowledge and ignorance per se are an entangled continuum with a myriad of grey scales where ignorance contains knowledge and knowledge is upheld by ignorance. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Ignorance,” edited by Lukas M. Verburgt and Peter Burke.

Introduction

Innocence is central to German memory politics; indeed, one can say that the German memory landscape is saturated with claims of innocence. The Great War is commonly portrayed as a loss of innocence, while the Nazis sought, in their way, to reclaim that innocence by proclaiming Germany as the innocent victim. After World War II, denazification and courts established administrative and legal boundaries within which claims of innocence could be formulated and adjudicated, while the “zero hour” and “economic miracle” established a basis for a different form of reclaiming innocence, one roundly critiqued by Theodor W. Adorno in his essay “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?”1 In the 1980s, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s famous pronouncement of the “grace [Gnade] of a late birth” (also translatable as “mercy,” “pardon,” or “blessing”) became the touchstone for a resurgence of war children’s (Kriegskinder) memory. In the 1990s, the myth of the Wehrmacht as largely innocent of atrocities was publicly challenged. Today, rightwing critiques that cast Holocaust remembrance as a politics of shame draw upon tropes of innocence, of German air war victims and post-war generations, while right-wing images of migrants are cast in classic forms of threats to the purity of the “national body” (Volkskörper). The quickening pace of contemporary debates over Germany’s colonial past pointedly questions the innocence of today’s beneficiaries of colonialism, drawing attention to the borders and contours of implication.

Reconstructing the Self and the City: Wolfgang Koeppen's Rubble FilmBei Betty(1946–1948)

This article discusses Wolfgang Koeppen's to date unpublished screenplayBei Betty(ca. 1948) and makes a case for its importance both within Koeppen's oeuvre and as an artifact of postwar German culture that helps us understand the category of theTrümmerfilmas well as the complexity of the “zero hour.” In contrast to other rubble films,Bei Bettyportrays postwar reconstruction (Wiederaufbau) as an ambivalent process, allowing some individuals to “remake” themselves while others remain damaged by the war. This visual narrative thus links physical reconstruction with acts of self‐refashioning in the aftermath of the war, highlighting the political and social stakes of performing a “new” self in response to the Allied occupation. In contrast to Koeppen's novels, full of interior monologue, the screenplay emphasizes the impenetrability of surfaces and performed social selves, the acts of concealment and masquerade that proliferated after the war's end.

8자줄넘기 프로그램이 초등학생의 PAPS, BDNF 및 학습태도에 미치는 영향

본 연구는 12주간의 8자줄넘기 프로그램이 초등학생의 PAPS, BDNF 및 학습태도에 미치는 영향을 구명하기 위하 여, Y초등학교 5-6학년 학생 35명을 대상으로 대조군(n=15), 운동군(n=20)으로 구분하여 실시하였다. 8자줄넘기 프로그램은 주 3회, 회당 30분으로 1-4주는 40-50%HRR, 5-8주는 50-60%HRR, 9-12주는 60-70%HRR의 강도 로 실시하였고, 측정된 자료의 그룹 내 차이는 paired t-test, 그룹 간 차이는 independent t-test를 실시하였으 며, 측정변인들에 대한 그룹 및 시기 간 상호작용을 검증하기 위해 two-way repeated measures ANOVA로 분 석하였다. 연구결과 PAPS(체지방률, 순발력, 심폐지구력, 유연성)와 학습태도에서 운동군 학생들이 대조군 학생들 보다 유의하게 더 향상되었다. BDNF는 운동군에서는 증가하였고, 대조군에서는 감소하였지만 통계적으로 유의한 차이는 나타나지 않았다. 결론적으로 12주간의 8자줄넘기 프로그램이 초등학생의 PAPS와 학습태도에 긍정적인 영 향을 주는 것으로 나타났다.

The Young People's Amicus Brief in Support of Plaintiffs in Juliana v. U.S.

This amicus curiae brief was filed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by Zero Hour on Behalf of approximately 32,340 children and young people in the landmark climate change lawsuit, Juliana v. U.S. The brief explains how the government's affirmative acts to support the fossil fuel industry violate the constitutional rights of youth to life, liberty, and property because of the impact that fossil fuels have on climate change. The brief also argues that the rights of youth to natural inheritance are held in public trust by the government, as well as that the U.S. Constitution imposes on all three branches of the U.S. government the duty to protect its citizens, including the nation's children and youth, and vests in the courts the power and responsibility to interpret the law, which in this case compels a finding that the young plaintiffs are entitled to take their legal claims to trial.

Like a phoenix from the ashes – or “sack cloth and ashes”?: The reconstitution of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany since 1945 and its consequences

Here, I attempt to formulate some thoughts about the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis and its institutions in Germany. To do this, I have employed my varied experience as a supervisor and consultant to many such psychoanalytic institutes over the past several years. Themes discussed include the history of psychoanalysis in postwar Germany, the organizational structure of German psychoanalytic institutes, and their cultures in regard to group and organizational dynamics, and political and economic aspects. Finally, I add brief thoughts about the future, taking into account recent developments relating to planned changes in laws governing psychotherapy in Germany. Further, I attempt to analyze and comment on: coming to terms with the past; how to begin after the “Zero Hour”; the form of organization of psychoanalytic institutes in Germany; missing patients and missing candidates; constructive debate and hurting people’s feelings; the lack of “detoxification” and “recycling” of the poisonous remains of psychoanalytic processes; and the future of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany. I end with an example of a typical primary task used in conducting large groups in the institutes in which I worked, and include an anonymized table listing individual interventions, their duration, and frequency. These should provide an idea of my way of working, and an overview of the dimensions of the task.

Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts by Pamela M. Potter

Reviewed by: Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts by Pamela M. Potter Martha Sprigge Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts. By Pamela M. Potter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 389. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0520282356. Despite research that has demonstrated the relative lack of control the Nazi party had over the arts, the conception that German artists and their output were closely monitored during the Third Reich has remained firmly entrenched in both popular imagination and scholarly literature. Pamela M. Potter’s latest monograph interrogates and dismantles this myth. Her central claim is that the notion of artistic practice was stifled and censored under the Nazi regime is actually a product of the “postwar suppression of inconvenient truths about artistic productivity during the Third Reich” (3). She assesses the continued appeal of this narrative across multiple disciplines, revealing that many of the institutional structures, aesthetic ideals, and successful artists from the Third Reich were sometimes carried over from the Weimar Republic, and often stretched well into the postwar period. This overarching argument contributes to an ongoing critique of the “zero hour,” adding important insights into artistic disciplines during the Third Reich and the institutional structures that supported the study of the arts in the postwar period. Potter’s focus is on disciplines that “subscribed to the ideal of the ‘apolitical artist’ and found it difficult to shake off such notions” (44), including art history, architecture, theater, film, and music. The six chapters are organized loosely chronologically, spanning from an overview of how arts and political surveillance interlocked during the Third Reich, to a discussion of the continued popularity of the myth of Nazi artistic suppression in reunified Germany. Several overarching narrative structures emerge over the course of the book. The first is an intentionalist approach to the study of the arts, in which party sources are taken at face value and the focus is directed at a small group of Nazi leaders. This promotes an understanding of Nazi figureheads as omnipotent, artistically opinionated, and capable of carrying out their aspirations for controlling artistic disciplines more thoroughly than they did in reality. The second is a related tendency to draw totalitarian comparisons between artistic practice under different dictatorships, especially the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, and the GDR. Finally, Potter reveals an underlying defensive gesture at work in much postwar literature on this topic. For both Anglophone and German scholars, it was often easier to cordon off developments in the Third Reich rather than expose continuities of artistic practice, both in German contexts and in international trends. Though the title points toward the Third Reich, much of Potter’s focus lies in the postwar period. Chapters 3 through 6 offer a rich account of how scholarship on the Nazi period was significantly shaped by Cold War concerns, where many of the tropes that were essential to the “suppression” narrative of the arts in the Third Reich developed. Recent studies on artistic practice in the Eastern bloc have demonstrated [End Page 193] that even in totalitarian societies with an official position on artistic production, politics and aesthetics rarely move in lock step. Potter reveals that in the Third Reich the guidelines for connecting the two were never firmly established in the first place. A reliance on key moments for understanding Nazi artistic policy—such as the Degenerate Art exhibit held in Munich in 1937—has produced striking misunderstandings of the connections between the two under the Third Reich, and facilitated the persistence of this totalitarian reading in the postwar period. The structure of the book often means that chapters circle back around key points to add another layer from a different angle, occasionally in ways that repeat rather than enhance the main argument. Yet this approach has many advantages, allowing for sustained comparisons between developments across the arts, exposing readers to trends outside their home disciplines, and adding layers of historiography that set the stage for the proposals Potter puts forth in the final chapter. Here she elucidates the consequences of relying on a narrative of the arts as suffering...

INTEGRASI NILAI NILAI PANCASILA MELALUI KEGIATAN KEAGAMAAN DALAM PROGRAM JAM KE NOL

A zero hour program is initiated by Disdikpora and the Government of Palembang City. This program is an effort to develop morals through religious activities held 20 minutes before the instructional process takes place. This program can also be used as a forum for introducing and practicing the value of Pancasia through religious activities. The purpose of this study was to explain the implementation of the recognition and understanding of the value of Pancasila through zero hour activities in SMK PGRI 3 of Palembang. This research was a qualitative research. The research approach used was case study. The process of collecting and extracting the data involved observation methods, interviews, and documentation. Interactive analysis model was used in analyzing the data. The results of the research were: (1) Educational institution had an important role in the effort to foster the value of Pancasila and religion to the students, (2) Zero hour program could be a medium to integrate Pancasila value with religious values, (3) The implementation of the introduction and practice of the value of Pancasila through Zero hour program at SMK PGRI 3 Palembang includeed (a) the spirit of nationality, (b) upholding unity, and (c) justice, (4) the impacts and benefits of this program could be seen through some facts. First, the students not only did became religious but their behaviors also reflected the values of honesty, self-control, mutual respect, cooperation, responsibility, and discipline.

After zero hour: States as “custodians of universal human culture,” or “guardians of advanced art”

The emergence of radically new, avant-garde movements in German music and throughout Western Europe after WW2 has often been seen as expressing a strivings to create on a tabula rasa, in order to create distance from the horrors of the recent past. In the countries of the communist bloc, the imposed ideology of socialist realism also created a sharp break, similar to that in the West, except that Zero Hour was conceived in quite a different fashion, as a move in the opposite direction from Western modernism. The case of post-war music in Yugoslavia is examined under the light of the fact that the country did not belong to either bloc.

Finding a Form for the Speechless

As articulated to Avigdor Arikha, Beckett saw “find[ing] a form” for speechlessness as one of his tasks as a writer. Different literary genres facilitated his exploration of the speechless in the motif of spectres. The Japanese artist and dramatist Miwa Yanagi’s theatrical piece Zero Hour—Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape takes on this task by borrowing some of the elements of Krapp’s Last Tape. Drawing on the historical context of the ‘Tokyo Rose Case,’ the article explores similarities and differences between the two artists in their incorporation of the spectral and their use of media, as well as analyzing the original use of mixed media (tape recorder and radio) in Zero Hour as a way to elucidate the speechless/the spectral.

Tolerance of hyperammonemia in brain of Heteropneustes fossilis is supported by glutamate-glutamine cycle

This report presents analysis of molecular switches associated with tolerance to hyperammonemia in Heteropneustes fossilis because it tolerates about 100-fold more ammonia than mammals. Brains of Heteropneustes fossilis exposed to 100mM ammonium chloride were dissected after Zero hour as control, 16h and 20h exposure. The status of neuron and glia were analysed by Golgi staining, Luxol Fast Blue, and Nissl’s staining. The expression patterns of genes associated to homeostasis of neuron and glia, management of oxidative stress and inflammation, ammonia metabolism and brain derived neurotrophic factor were analysed through reverse-transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction. After 20h of hyperammonemia glia were more degenerated than neurons. The expression of mRNA of lactate dehydrogenase (Ldh), super oxide dismutase (Sod), catalase (Catalase), arginase-I (Arg I), inducible nitric oxide (iNos), glutaminase (GA), and brain derived neurotrophic factor (Bdnf) was up-regulated than the control. The levels of mRNA of Arg II, glutamate dehydrogenase (Gdh), glutamine synthetase (GS), glial fibrillary acidic protein (Gfap), proliferating cell nuclear antigen (Pcna) and S100β were down-regulated than control due to hyperammonemia. It appears first observation on impact of hyperammonemia on the status of neurons, myelination and glial cells in brain of Heteropneustes fossilis by Golgi staining, Nissl’s and Luxol Fast Blue staining. The distribution of ammonia and glutamate metabolising enzymes in brain supports multi-centric mechanism (s) of regulation. The expression of Arg I and Arg II gets inversely regulated and glutamate-glutamine cycle also operates in Heteropneustes fossilis against hyperammonemia in brain.

Transformation in East Central Europe: 1918 and 1989. A Comparative Approach

The authors of the introduction to this special issue argue for a historicization of the concept of transformation by broadening our understanding of it to decrease its teleological spin. This allows us to discard the “zero hour” narrative and to rather consider phenomena that exist long before a “turn” or “revolution” accelerates the transformation process. The closely related terms of “continuity” and “discontinuity” can be relieved of their mandatory dialectical logic by introducing the concept of “adaptation” as an analytical instrument in order to explain what happens after a certain turning point. Consequently, a historicization of the concept of transformation, as the briefly presented case studies show, entails detachment from apodictic periodization and the narration of quasi-mechanized progress in order to specify every single field of accelerated change. However, this does not necessarily limit the usefulness of the concept, as examining individual cases using specific criteria and comparing and bundling them will contribute to a better understanding of societies in transformation as a whole.

Seeing, hearing, reading, writing, speaking and things: on silences, senses and emotions during the “zero hour” in Germany

This article focuses on senses, emotions and cultural practices such as writing, reading and speaking in West Germany after 1945. The period immediately following the end of the Second World War – the so-called Stunde Null, or “zero hour” – has generally been seen as a time of new beginnings, also with regard to cleansing the German language and breaking the silences of the past. This historical examination of sensory-emotional and material contexts and related cultural practices takes as its source Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s autobiographical novel Die Erfindung des Lebens (The Invention of Life), published in 2009. Ortheil’s novel is about a child’s enormous struggle to learn how to feel, see, read, write and speak. This so-called “ego document”, told by a first-person narrator, focuses on the links between things, objects, senses, emotions, and the acquisition of cultural skills and techniques while at the same time providing subtle commentary on post-war West German society.