Punishing German Soldiers during the Cold War: The Case of Erich von Manstein

Bloxham examines the events and rhetoric surrounding the trial and premature release from custody of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Von Manstein was convicted of involvement in atrocities on the Eastern Front, yet his story aroused the sympathy of many in Britain, including influential politicians, who believed the Wehrmacht to be innocent of the crimes of Nazism. His trial also fell squarely into a period, the onset of the Cold War, when Britain was attempting to restore relations with West Germany. Pressure both from the nascent West German elite and from within the Conservative government (re-elected in 1951) and its foreign diplomatic corps ensured that a series of dubious legal devices would be used to accelerate the liberation of von Manstein at a time of negotiations about a German contribution to a Western European army. Similar contrivances abetted the early release of another field marshal, Kesselring, and a senior general, Falkenhorst. The releases, and the obfuscations of the soldiers' war-time records that were an essential part of justifying the releases, constitute a substantial British contribution both to the undermining of the process of war crimes trials and to the rewriting of the Second World War.     

Beyond the ‘Auschwitz syndrome’: Holocaust historiography after the Cold War

ABSTRACT

The end of the Cold war has seen an explosion in Holocaust history, and some significant changes in the main historiographical explanations. The ‘return of ideology’ that began displacing the ‘functionalist’ or ‘structuralist’ dominance of the 1980s remains strong. But it is being supplemented by very detailed regional and local studies, by analyses of different experiences of ghettoization in different places, and by a focus on the widespread plunder and corruption that accompanied the killing process. This enormous attention to detail reveals that the Holocaust unfolded differently in different places; but it also demonstrates the existence of an overall framework in which all the operations took place, what we might call an ‘antisemitic consensus’. Simultaneously, historians have broadened the discussion of the Holocaust, situating it into a transnational or world-historical context of imperialism and colonialism. Stone outlines in broad brush some of these themes, and asks what effects they have had and will continue to have on Europeans' self-understanding in an age in which the post-war anti-fascist consensus has been dismantled while Holocaust-consciousness is officially enshrined into European identity.     

证人记忆的影响因素及认知神经科学检测方法探新

影响证人记忆的因素众多,而证人的记忆准确性决定了其证言的可靠性,从心理学的角度对这些影响因素进行分析并找出应对方法,将证人的记忆提取效率提高到最大化,减少错误记忆的发生。讨论认知神经科学应用在探查证人记忆的可行性及现有理论支撑,该方式在证人记忆检测中将有极大的作用。     

Mediated and unmediated access to the past: Assessing the memoir as literary genre

A survey was conducted of a number of younger generation members of Estonian and Latvian émigré communities (11 and 16 subjects, respectively) who had ‘returned’ to the ancestral homeland, to determine the reasons for their decision. A detailed questionnaire was provided for the respondents. Attempts were made to ascertain the subjects’ level of ‘Latvianness’ or ‘Estonianness’ and their emotional commitment to their new-found homeland. While the small sample may not provide definitive answers, the study gives richly suggestive insights into the thought processes and motivations of these young Baltic people.     

Locating Kaliningrad And KÖNigsberg In Russian And German Collective Identity Discourses And Political Symbolism In The 750Th Anniversary Celebrations Of 2005

This article begins by briefly exploring issues of conflict and control in relation to the 750th anniversary of the city of Kaliningrad/Königsberg. An analysis of the tensions between Russian regional (Kaliningrad) and national (federal) identity discourses on the political symbolism of the 750th anniversary commemoration is offered, using Russian media reports and interviews conducted in Kaliningrad. German narratives on the political symbolism of the anniversary events and their implications for German national identity discourses are investigated via interviews conducted in Kaliningrad and Germany, German media reports, books, films and a theater production about Königsberg. Particular attention is given to the impact of the German expellee organizations on framing the discourse about Königsberg in contemporary Germany. The article will conclude by comparing and contrasting the various discourses and interpretations of the anniversary in the Kaliningrad region, Russia and Germany.     

Memory-Theater As Cultural Generativity: Eslingena: A Musical In Toronto And Riga

Linking the concept of generativity to expressive culture as a communicative resource, this article asks how recontextualization shifts meanings. I focus on the reception by audiences in Toronto and Riga of Eslingena: A Musical, a play about life in a Latvian Displaced Persons camp in post-World War II Germany. North American audiences responded to Eslingena as performed memory. Anticipation of its performance in Riga suggested it might evoke countervailing memories that would trigger memory as a competition about suffering. Instead, Eslingena successfully mediated diasporic and homeland memories to produce a dialogue about agency grounded in differential experience.     

西部麦客现象

甘肃麦客以其极端的吃苦和耐劳,支撑着曾号称天府之国的关中农区的富庶与繁盛。本文以大量可搜集到的零碎文字记载为依托,试图还原不为正史聚焦的几乎被当代史完全有意无意失忆的特殊群体之存在断面。     

Eyewitness Memory,Suggestibility, and Repeated Recall Sessions in Children with Mild and Moderate Intellectual Disabilities

This study of eyewitness memory questioned children with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities (ID) about a live staged event 1 day later and, again, 2 weeks later. Children with mild ID performed as well as typically-developing children of the same age in response to free recall instructions, and they were just as able as same age peers to resist misleading questions. However, they performed more poorly on general questions, probing for further information after free recall. The children with mild ID also changed their responses to specific questions more often in the repeated interview. The group of children with moderate ID showed markedly lower performance than peers of the same age on nearly every type of eyewitness memory question. Comparisons of the children with ID to mental age-matched peers indicated that performance was similar, although children with ID gave more information in response to free recall instructions and changed their answers in the repeated interview more often. Standardized measures of verbal memory (TOMAL) and suggestibility (Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale) were modest to moderate predictors of eyewitness memory performance.     

Unwilling to Forget: Local Memory Initiatives in Post-Franco Spain

It has been abundantly argued that the Spanish transition was based on an implicit ‘pact of silence’ by which the main political forces accepted to leave the thorniest aspects of past behind as the only way to peacefully construct a democratic future. And it has been widely accepted that Spanish society subscribed to this. This article defends a more nuanced version of this state-level agreement by focusing on memory-related initiatives at the local level. By doing so, it poses some challenges to existing literature on the politics of memory in general and the Spanish transition in particular.     

“It Will Never Happen Again”: The Myth of Flood Immunity in Brisbane

Although scholarship shows how collective memory aids community resilience to hazards, sociopolitical forces erode this transformative potential. A study of Brisbane River floods highlights the entanglement of memory with a myth of flood immunity, created by community faith in dams to prevent flooding, infrequent floods, drought and hydrological misunderstandings, and upheld by floodplain development perceived as an economic booster. When flooding threatened the myth of immunity in 2011, the event was framed as dam mismanagement to deflect attention from poor land use practices and government culpability. This myth endures, leaving South East Queensland no more resilient for unpredictable but certain future flooding.