Utopia Or Auschwitz

Download or read book Utopia Or Auschwitz written by Hans Kundnani and published by C Hurst. This book was released on 2009 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One thing above all separated the radical students who demonstrated on the streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 from their counterparts in Berkeley or New York. In the US, the baby boomers grew up in the shadow of what Tom Brokaw called the greatest generation. In its place, Germany had the so-called Auschwitz generation. What became known in Germany as the '68 generation' or just the Achtundsechziger had grown up knowing that their mothers and fathers were directly or indirectly responsible for Nazism and in particular for the Holocaust. Germany's 1968 generation did not merely dream of a better world as some of their contemporaries in other countries did; they felt compelled to act to save Germany from itself. It was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz. Kundnani shows that the struggle of Germany's '68 generation also had a darker side. Although the 'Achtundsechziger' imagined their struggle against capitalism in West Germany as 'resistance' against Nazism, they also had a tendency to see Auschwitz everywhere and, by using images and metaphors connected with Nazism to describe events in other parts of the world, they relativized Nazism and in particular the Holocaust. Even more disturbingly, despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the 'Achtundsechziger', there were also anti-Semitic and nationalist currents in the West German New Left that grew out of the student movement. "Utopia or Auschwitz" traces the political journey of Germany's post-war generation and examines the influence that its ambivalent attitude to the Nazi past had on the foreign policy of the 'red-green' government between 1998 and 2005, which included several former members of the student movement like Joschka Fischer. The red-green government's schizophrenic foreign policy, manifested its response to the crises in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, reflected the 1968 generation's ambivalent attitude to the Nazi past.

Download or read book Utopia of Understanding written by Donatella Ester Di Cesare and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speaking and understanding can both be thought of as forms of translation, and in this way every speaker is an exile in language—even in one's mother tongue. Drawing from the philosophical hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the testimonies of the German Jews and their relation with the German language, Jacques Derrida's confrontation with Hannah Arendt, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Donatella Ester Di Cesare proclaims Auschwitz the Babel of the twentieth century. She argues that the globalized world is one in which there no longer remains any intimate place or stable dwelling. Understanding becomes a kind of shibboleth that grounds nothing, but opens messianically to a utopia yet to come.

Download or read book Architects of Annihilation written by Götz Aly and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ultimately this would lead to the sinister 'adjusting' of the ratio between what were perceived as 'productive' and 'unproductive' population groups.".

Download or read book The Paradox of German Power written by Hans Kundnani and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Euro crisis began, Germany has emerged as Europe's dominant power. During the last three years, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been compared with Bismarck and even Hitler in the European media. And yet few can deny that Germany today is very different from the stereotype of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. After nearly seventy years of struggling with the Nazi past, Germans think that they more than anyone have learned its lessons. Above all, what the new Germany thinks it stands for is peace. Germany is unique in this combination of economic assertiveness and military abstinence. So what does it mean to have a "German Europe" in the twenty-first century? In The Paradox of German Power, Hans Kundnani explains how Germany got to where it is now and where it might go in future. He explores German national identity and foreign policy through a series of tensions in German thinking and action: between continuity and change, between "normality" and "abnormality," between economics and politics, and between Europe and the world.

Download or read book The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima written by Darrell J. Fasching and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1993-07-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the problem of religion, ethics, and public policy in a global technological civilization. It attempts to do what narrative ethicists have said cannot be done—to construct a cross-cultural ethic of human dignity, human rights, and human liberation which respects the diversity of narrative traditions. It seeks to do this without succumbing to either ethical relativism or ethical absolutism. The author confronts directly the dominant narrative of our technological civilization: the Janus-faced myths of "Apocalypse or Utopia." Through this myth, we view technology ambivalently, as both the object of our dread and the source of our hope. The myth thus renders us ethically impotent: the very strength of our literal utopian euphoria sends us careening toward some literal apocalyptic "final solution." The demonic narrative that dominated Auschwitz ("killing in order to heal") is part of this Janus-faced technological mythos that emerged out of Hiroshima. And it is this mythic narrative which underlies and structures much of public policy in our nuclear age. This book proposes a coalition of members of holy communities and secular groups, organized to prevent any future eruptions of the demonic. Its goal is to construct a bridge not only over the abyss between religions, East and West, but also between religious and secular ethics.

Download or read book Unfinished Utopia written by Katherine A. Lebow and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-12 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unfinished Utopia is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society.Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"—but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.

Download or read book The August Trials written by Andrew Kornbluth and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first account of the August Trials, in which postwar Poland confronted the betrayal of Jewish citizens under Nazi rule but ended up fashioning an alibi for the past. When six years of ferocious resistance to Nazi occupation came to an end in 1945, a devastated Poland could agree with its new Soviet rulers on little else beyond the need to punish German war criminals and their collaborators. Determined to root out the “many Cains among us,” as a Poznań newspaper editorial put it, Poland’s judicial reckoning spawned 32,000 trials and spanned more than a decade before being largely forgotten. Andrew Kornbluth reconstructs the story of the August Trials, long dismissed as a Stalinist travesty, and discovers that they were in fact a scrupulous search for the truth. But as the process of retribution began to unearth evidence of enthusiastic local participation in the Holocaust, the hated government, traumatized populace, and fiercely independent judiciary all struggled to salvage a purely heroic vision of the past that could unify a nation recovering from massive upheaval. The trials became the crucible in which the Communist state and an unyielding society forged a foundational myth of modern Poland but left a lasting open wound in Polish-Jewish relations. The August Trials draws striking parallels with incomplete postwar reckonings on both sides of the Iron Curtain, suggesting the extent to which ethnic cleansing and its abortive judicial accounting are part of a common European heritage. From Paris and The Hague to Warsaw and Kyiv, the law was made to serve many different purposes, even as it failed to secure the goal with which it is most closely associated: justice.