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This thesis is based on the responses of Soviet Displaced Persons collected by the Harvard Study on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS), an oral history conducted in Munich and New York from 1950 to 1951 in which former Soviet citizens were interviewed. They were primarily interviewed about daily life within

This thesis is based on the responses of Soviet Displaced Persons collected by the Harvard Study on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS), an oral history conducted in Munich and New York from 1950 to 1951 in which former Soviet citizens were interviewed. They were primarily interviewed about daily life within the Soviet Union. A total of 331 displaced persons were interviewed over the course of the study, with most individuals receiving multiple interview sessions. These sessions were divided broadly as A and B sections. The A-section, which the majority of interviewees received and was viewed by the compilers as a broad sociological inquiry, was divided into subsections focusing on Soviet work, government, family, education, communication, philosophy of life, and ideology. The B-sections were used for deeper anthropological inquiries and are potentially more controversial due to the use of Rorschach tests and situational responses. Fewer respondents were continued on to the B interviews which contained a variety of subsections, though most respondents were only asked questions from one or two sections of the greater whole. A portion of the B section interviews do provide valuable insight to my thesis for their focus on the Displaced Person status of the interviewees. The project consisted of 764 separate interviews of the 331 respondents. The interviewers for the HPSSS were primarily graduate students, ranging from history, sociology, psychology and economics departments, with varying degrees of fluency in Russian and Ukrainian. Some of the interviewers went on to become leading experts in Soviet Studies in the years to follow. Others stopped publishing, following the major publication of the HPSSS in the late 1950s, which may indicate a move to the private sector or employment within the federal government rather than academics. While not possible to include within my analysis, the major publications of the study also included the insights garnered from nearly ten thousand written questionnaires of DPs that were tabulated and discarded prior to publication.
ContributorsWilder, Ian (Author) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Benkert, Volker (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that

The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
Created2014-05
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The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that

The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
Created2014-05
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ABSTRACT

German history during the 20th century was extremely complex—containing numerous events that can be labelled horrific and traumatic. The horrors and traumas of WWII forced Germans to actively address their country’s National Socialist pasts by taking responsibility for their roles, creating a national memory about the Nazi atrocities and

ABSTRACT

German history during the 20th century was extremely complex—containing numerous events that can be labelled horrific and traumatic. The horrors and traumas of WWII forced Germans to actively address their country’s National Socialist pasts by taking responsibility for their roles, creating a national memory about the Nazi atrocities and implementing the reparations program, the Wiedergutmachungsabkommen, with the newly formed nation of Israel. The social theorist Theodor Adorno wrote in his 1959 essay “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” about three subtly nuanced terms: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, Verarbeitung der Vergangenheit and Vergangensheitbewältigung, in which he addresses the various ways that Germany was dealing with traumatic events from this National Socialist past. Adorno specifically demanded a constant renegotiation of the past or Verarbeitung der Vergangenheit because it is the only way forward, through which people remember the horrors and atrocities of the past and work towards not allowing those events to occur again.

This thesis applies the theoretical framework set forth by Adorno to explore efforts to engage the DDR and Stasi past after the Fall of the Wall and reunification. Specifically, it examines the concept of Verarbeitung der Vergangenheit and demonstrates how Thomas Brussig’s satirical novel Helden wie wir, and two documentary films Aus Liebe zum Volk and Das Wunder von Leipzig are examples of working upon this DDR and Stasi past. More specifically, the utilization of humor in the novel and the paralanguage modifications in the films provide insight to the feelings and emotions that individuals had about their pasts in the DDR. It is through this expression of emotion and feelings while writing and speaking about the past, which serves as the immediate moment when individuals actively working upon their pasts.
ContributorsDietz, Dominik (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Alexander, John (Committee member) / Benkert, Volker (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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In the sixty-seven years following the end of World War II, West Germany and Japan underwent a remarkable series of economic and social changes that irrevocably altered their respective ways of life. Formerly xenophobic, militaristic and highly socially stratified societies, both emerged from the 20th Century as liberal, prosperous and

In the sixty-seven years following the end of World War II, West Germany and Japan underwent a remarkable series of economic and social changes that irrevocably altered their respective ways of life. Formerly xenophobic, militaristic and highly socially stratified societies, both emerged from the 20th Century as liberal, prosperous and free. Both made great strides well beyond the expectations of their occupiers, and rebounded from the overwhelming destruction of their national economies within a few short decades. While these changes have yielded dramatic results, the wartime period still looms large in their respective collective memories. Therefore, an ongoing and diverse dialectical process would engage the considerable popular, official, and intellectual energy of their post-war generations. In West Germany, the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung (VGB) emerged to describe a process of coming to terms with the past, while the Japanese chose kako no kokufuku to describe their similar historical sojourns. Although intellectuals of widely varying backgrounds in both nations made great strides toward making Japanese and German citizens cognizant of the roles that their militaries played in gruesome atrocities, popular cinematic productions served to reiterate older, discredited assertions of the fundamental honor and innocence of the average soldier, thereby nurturing a historically revisionist line of reasoning that continues to compete for public attention. All forms of media would play an important role in sustaining this “apologetic narrative,” and cinema, among the most popular and visible of these mediums, was not excluded from this. Indeed, films would play a unique recurring role, like rhetorical time capsules, in offering a sanitized historical image of Japanese and German soldiers that continues to endure in modern times. Nevertheless, even as West Germany and Japan regained their sovereignty and re-examined their pasts with ever greater resolution and insight, their respective film industries continued to “reset” the clock, and accentuated the visibility and relevancy of apologetic forces still in existence within both societies. However, it is important to note that, when speaking of “Germans” and “Japanese,” that they are not meant to be thought of as being uniformly of one mind or another. Rather, the use of these words is meant as convenient shorthand to refer to the dominant forces in Japanese and German civil society at any given time over the course of their respective post- war histories. Furthermore, references to “Germany” during the Cold War period are to be understood to mean the Federal Republic of Germany, rather than their socialist counterpart, the German Democratic Republic, a nation that undertook its own coming to terms with the past in an entirely distinct fashion.
ContributorsPiscopo, Michael (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Moore, Aaron (Committee member) / Machander, Sina (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
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ABSTRACT



The Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza is located across the street from the state capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona. Here, pieces of Arizona’s history are commemorated through monuments and memorials. Monuments and memorials reflect how people have conceived their collective identity, especially when those choices are made in

ABSTRACT



The Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza is located across the street from the state capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona. Here, pieces of Arizona’s history are commemorated through monuments and memorials. Monuments and memorials reflect how people have conceived their collective identity, especially when those choices are made in public spaces. The markers in the Wesley Bolin Plaza reflect the changing identity of Arizonans, both locally and in connection to national identity. Over time, they have become crucial to shaping the landscape and the historical memory of the city, state, or country. Of note, the memorials on the Arizona State Capitol grounds are unique in how they are placed all together in a park directly across the street. In 1976, the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza emerged through a conversation with broader currents in the region’s and nation’s history. Over time, the plaza has become a sacred space because so many of its memorials include relics and artifacts, or list the names of those who have lost their lives in their service to Arizona. In these ways the plaza became a landscape of memory where visitors come to remember and honor those people and parts of Arizona history. The memorial plaza also influences Arizonans’ knowledge of history. It engenders a local as well as a national loyalty and identity in its citizens and visitors. By researching the history of several of the prominent monuments and memorials in the plaza, I discovered a rich history and an intriguing story behind each one that is built. Most monuments and memorials are commemorating complex events or people in history, yet have only short inscriptions on them. As a result, much of the historical narrative, complexities, and symbolism can be lost. My purpose is to tell the story of the plaza, these memorials, and their history; highlighting their significance to Arizonans and explaining how the monuments and memorials fit into the larger story of historical commemoration.
ContributorsBurnham, Kaitlyn Brimley (Author) / Tebeau, Mark (Thesis advisor) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member) / Benkert, Volker (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019