#my relatives are like the historical documents that I examine on a daily

[changelingsandothernonsense]

Fun fact! Ancestry.com helped me find my biological family because Catholicism said my grandmother was a bad person for getting pregnant out of wedlock and now I have 0 connections to anything or anyone! Thanks!

Please understand why some of us use the site, it's because we don't have the luxury of a family history, or heritage.

Also, I need a 1.2 million strong clone army to retake Balmora castle from the Queen's dead body. ;)

You know to get the luxury of family history and heritage. XD

Ancestry.com says I come from a long line of drunken village oafs

[qqueenofhades]

Women and “medieval cruelty and ignorance”

Okay. So. We could probably have guessed that this tweet was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, but here we are anyway.

(Tagging @artielu​ because I know she enjoys my history smackdowns and this is right in her wheelhouse of interest.)

First: nobody denies that the Alabama bill and similar efforts are absolutely heinous, are designed to be test cases to get Roe v. Wade overturned, and are deliberately gratuitous in their constitutional overreach and general horrible Handmaid’s Tale nature. But for well-meaning liberals, such as above, calling them representative of “medieval cruelty and ignorance” is a) not accurate and b) counterproductive. If we insist on using “the medieval” as a conceptual category inferior to “the modern,” these recent bills bear a complicated, at best, resemblance to medieval canon law and social practice. And there was never, I promise you, any law that prescribed a 99-year jail term for abortionists. So if we want to point out how the modern Republican party is actually much worse than their medieval counterparts, we can do that, but also: trust me, this is thoroughly modern cruelty and ignorance, and we should insist on that distinction.

First, obviously, women’s bodies have always been subject to a social discourse of power, control, gendered anxiety, and attendant responses. This was certainly the case in the medieval era, but our modern interpretations of that discourse can be... iffy, at best. In discussing the feminization of witchcraft in the late 15th century, M.D. Bailey critiques how scholars have tended to take the Malleus Maleficarum, the famous witch-hunting handbook, as representative of a self-evident and endemic medieval and clerical misogyny. In fact, the Malleus was the equivalent of the extreme right wing today, was relatively quickly condemned even by the church itself, and was largely reworked from earlier ecclesiastical anti-sodomy polemics, because the idea of “disordered gender” was certainly one that occupied medieval moralists and theorists. I have discussed the Malleus in other posts, but while it certainly is virulently and systematically misogynist, it also was a work of rhetoric rather than a reflection of historical reality. Medieval misogyny absolutely and obviously existed, and it impacted women’s lives, but we also really need to get rid of The Medieval Era Was Bad For Women, (tm), Therefore Everything Was Worse Back Then.

The possibility of magic being used to cause impotence/loss of fertility was another concern, and one of the main anxieties about the practice of witchcraft was that it would bring “sterility” and irregular sexual activity (usually with the devil). However, an extensive corpus of contraceptive and abortifacient knowledge has existed since antiquity, and in tracing the representation of unborn children in medieval theological thought, Danuta Shanzer notes:

My findings suggest that it is overstatement to claim that from the start Christianity considered the fetus a living being from conception. Augustine is a major agonized and agnostic counter-example.

Hence, contrary to right-wing claims that the church has “always” thought that life began at conception (spoiler alert: the church has never once “always” thought the same thing on anything), it was almost never the case in medieval legal or theoretical practice. Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians argued that “ensoulment” or the separation of the fetus into a living being happened at quickening, when the baby could move on its own (which medieval medical treatises had various standards for measuring, but it would be the equivalent of about 20 weeks of pregnancy). Monica Green, a leading medieval medical and gender historian, has examined a vast corpus of obstetric and gynecological Middle English texts, and in “Making Motherhood,” argues:

Texts on women’s medicine might also be concerned to “unmake” or prevent motherhood, either by preventing conception in the first place or expelling a dead foetus that would not emerge spontaneously. Abortion per se was almost never mentioned.

In other words: abortion was not paid attention to in nearly the same way we do today, and while canon law, in theory, prescribed penalties for contraception and abortion, historians have consistently (surprise!) discovered a disconnect between this and secular law and everyday practice. And while some twelfth-century (male) jurists did attempt to equate miscarriage with homicide, and to install it in canon law, these laws were almost never practically used or prosecuted. In Divisions of Labor: Gender, Power, and Later Medieval Childbirth, c. 1200-1500, Rebecca Wynne Jones surveys the extant literature and notes:

In his 2012 book The Criminalization of Abortion in the West, Wolfgang Müller documents how 12th‐century jurists' increasing tendency to equate violence resulting in miscarriage with homicide was institutionalized in canon law. Though this development led to the widespread criminalization of abortion in ecclesiastical jurisdictions, Müller has little to say about gender relations on the ground. Rather, by highlighting local communities' reluctance to prosecute, he presents laws that might once have been seen as proof of a medieval “war on women” as legislative enactments whose practical power remained limited.

Once again: medieval ecclesiastical proscriptions against abortion were, at best, sporadically enforced, communities were reluctant to actually prosecute women or to criminalize early-term pregnancy loss, and church law was not identical with secular law, which was the standard ordinary people used and were subject to. This concords with what Fiona Harris-Stoertz has found in her survey of pregnancy and childbirth in twelfth and thirteenth-century French and English law:

It is striking that in these thirteenth-century English texts, no penalty was assigned for the loss of less developed fetuses. This absence flew in the face of high medieval church legislation, which, in theory at least, took all contraception and abortion seriously. John Riddle finds that the idea that early-term abortion is less serious than late-term abortion occurred in the work of Aristotle and appeared occasionally throughout the early Middle Ages, particularly in church penitentials, although it also appeared in the early medieval Visigothic code.

While late-term abortion of potentially viable fetuses was still a crime, secular law still essentially held to quickening as the moment at which a pregnancy could not be terminated. Before that, however -- anywhere in the first 4-5 months of pregnancy -- it could often be dealt with, if desired, without any penalty. Anne L. McClanan has investigated the material culture of abortion and contraception in the early Byzantine period. And Ireland, which as recently as last year remained one of the last European countries to outlaw abortion, had a medieval hagiography that actively canonized abortionist saints:

Medieval hagiographers told of Irish Catholics par excellence, the saints themselves, performing abortions as well as of “bastards” becoming bishops and saints. In hagiography and the penitentials, virginal status depended more on a woman’s relationship with the church than with a man. To my knowledge, no other country in Christendom, medieval or modern, produced abortionist saints or restored virgins, apart from the nun of Watton. Why Ireland is among the few European countries to maintain severely restrictive policies on reproduction remains an unanswered question, but it clearly cannot be attributed to its medieval Catholicism.

Last part bolded because important. Modern bans on abortion don’t relate to how these notions were conceptualized or used in the past, and they are not holdovers from The Medieval Era (tm). They don’t represent medieval concerns or medieval ideas of gender, or at least certainly not in a direct genealogy. Even as late as the seventeenth century, when ideas of childbirth, marriage, and reproduction were more strictly controlled, the period prior to quickening, or the movement of the baby, was still generally not penalized or subject to legal control or coercion. So in sum: while religious moralists and canonical lawyers absolutely did object to abortion (aka right-wing men, the same ones who object to it today, funnily enough), in secular law and daily practice, a pregnancy that was terminated prior to quickening was not subject to practical prosecution or legal punishment, and medieval women had access to a vast corpus of gynecological texts, medical practices, herbal recipes, rituals, and charms intended to accomplish a wide range of fertility goals: conception, contraception, abortion, a healthy pregnancy and delivery, and so forth. I also answered an ask a while ago that discussed all this in detail.

Also: abortion was explicitly mobilized as a wedge issue in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of the religious right in American politics, and that happened not because of abortion, but in resistance to the IRS penalizing them for refusing to racially integrate evangelical schools and colleges. Randall Balmer has written about the history of the “abortion myth”; do yourself a favor and read it. The Southern Baptist Convention campaigned in 1971 for the liberalization of American abortion laws, and hailed the 1973 Roe decision as a win for the rights of the mother. (Oh how the mighty have fallen?) The right wing came together as a political force to resist racial integration, exemplified by their loss in the 1983 Supreme Court case Bob Jones University v. United States. But since it was not a winning political strategy (yet, at least) to fly the flag of “let us be racist in peace,” they, as Balmer discusses, created the “abortion myth” to make themselves look better and to present a narrative of holy/moral concern for the lives of the unborn. The reason abortion is as huge as it is in the present American political landscape owes to modern religious conservatism and extremism, resistance to racial equality, ideological control over women, and other bigotry, and (again) not to medievalism or medieval practices.

So, yes. Let us call the Alabama bill and other heinousness exactly what it is: a modern effort by a lot of terrible modern people to do terrible things to modern women. We don’t need to qualify it by fallacious equivalences to so-called “medieval cruelty” -- especially, again, when medieval practice and perspective on these issues was nowhere near the stereotype, and certainly nowhere near this “99 years in prison for performing an abortion” dystopian nightmare. If we want to shame the GOP, by all means, do so. But we should not resort to distorting and simplifying history to do it, and using the imagined “bad medieval” as a straw man to club them with. There’s plenty on its own. The modern world needs to take responsibility for its own misogyny, and stop trying to frame it as a historical issue that only existed in the past, and that any manifestations of it must be medieval in nature. Because it’s not.

[sussex-nature-lover]

Wednesday 20th January 2021

History from Long Ago and a Bit of Nature Thrown In

See Update edit at the end of this blog*

Another dark day here, absolutely bogging as we might say. Wet and uninviting. There’s no way I want to venture into the great outdoors despite the younger Nature Watch flagging up this helpful article.

So instead, I’ve stayed snug indoors and embarked upon a history lesson. Settle down as you could lose an afternoon on this one. I do apologise for rambling on so much, but it was one of those that once you started, you I just couldn’t stop.

For obvious reasons photos today are not my own but are credited to the sites linked

On an historic day in American history, when a woman takes a presidential role for the first time, I’ve been focusing on women.

The question is do you know anything about Edith Pretty?

Edith Pretty (1883-1942) photo credit: National Trust

This is she.

Now I very much doubt that Edith Pretty is a name that springs to many people’s mind? but if it wasn’t for her, it seems Britain would have been denied one of its greatest national treasure collections.

I started off looking at Edith and her story at Sutton Hoo because I was looking into another little known but hugely influential woman who made an impact on natural history, with barely any recognition at the time and then I got side-tracked by news of The Dig, a new Netflix film, out at the end of this month - the 29th to be precise. Now I’m not a big film fan, but this tells the intriguing true story of how a wealthy and idiosyncratic widow with a ferocious sense of civic duty, lead an archaeological excavation just before the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945)

Just what I want on these horrid Winter evenings, history and mystery.

Edith had a very privileged background and travelled extensively with family in her youth, not just pleasure trips but educational journeys far and wide. The family were interested in ancient sites and antiquities and this stayed with Edith.

When she married at the age of 42 she purchased a marital home and estate named Sutton Hoo*in South East Suffolk. Frank and Edith went on to have a son born when Edith was 47, but sadly Frank only lived until the boy was four years old, after which it’s possible that Edith became more and more interested in spirituality and lives that had gone before.

Sutton Hoo derives its name from Old English. Sut combined with tun means the southern "farmstead" or "settlement" and Hoh refers to a hill "shaped like a heel spur"  Wikipedia

* when the Tranmer family Trustees later donated the house to the National Trust, it was renamed Tranmer House

There’s a far longer and more involved tale than I can unravel here. It started with curiosity, hunches and investigations into some strange mounds of earth in the grounds, with the help of Basil Brown.  Brown, who Edith was introduced to via acquaintances, was a self-taught archaeologist with an interest in astronomy.

The mounds of earth had undoubtedly been the subject of investigation by grave robbers centuries before, but fortuitously, they’d not gone far enough to make any significant finds and the land continued to lay undisturbed. It’s incredible to think that before the qualified experts became involved, the first excavations took place using household items such as penknives, pastry brushes and bellows. The whole wonderful significance of such an impressive discovery and the way it came about, is fairly earth shattering. 

Basil and Edith’s project uncovered the shape and remains of a ship which was at first thought to be Viking, but later determined to almost certainly be a burial chamber marking the death of an Anglo-Saxon king. Interred with it were many priceless, perfectly preserved gold and silver jewelled and highly decorated artefacts from the early 7th century and before. These treasures had been gathered from far and wide; the products of breathtakingly deft workmanship, which, even today, with precision tools and artificial lighting, cannot be matched easily. Some of the items seem, to me, reminiscent of Fabergé’s finest.

A gold shoulder clasp decorated with garnet and glass cloissoné

Image credit National Geographic

Cloisonné is the technique of creating designs on metal vessels with coloured glass paste. This is placed within enclosures made of copper or bronze wires, bent or hammered into the desired pattern. Known as cloisons (French for “partitions”), the enclosures generally are either pasted or soldered onto the metal body. The glass paste, or enamel, is coloured with metallic oxide and painted into the contained areas of the design. The vessel is usually fired at a relatively low temperature, about 800°C. Enamels commonly shrink after firing, and the process is repeated several times to fill in the designs. Once this process is complete, the surface of the vessel is rubbed until the edges of the cloisons are visible. They are then gilded, often on the edges, in the interior, and on the base

The collection of 263 objects included weapons, silver cutlery, gold buckles, coins, and a distinctive full-face helmet, of a kind never before recovered in Britain. 

The purse lid on this Link is photographed from various angles and the standard of the materials, design and workmanship is just mind boggling, as is the condition of something which was crafted in the 7th Century.

Bronze Washing Pot decorated with glass and enamel. The hooks are to hang it up. Image credits National Geographic

Two other women who played a key role in documenting the investigation were Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff. People I hadn’t heard of either. They were both schoolteachers who had a passion for photography and for Anglo-Saxon archaeology. As friends they had previously spent school holidays photographing carved stone for the British Museum and they brought their skills to bear on recording the early days of the Sutton Hoo excavation. They likely responded to a public appeal for photographers to help out and turned the Summer break into a holiday stay as well. Their images, many of them neatly annotated, provide a fascinating insight into the project, and include some of the earliest colour photographs from an archaeological investigation in this country. Of all the volunteers their work was the most professional.

Image credit: National Trust, Twitter

The National Trust has undertaken a project to digitalise this collection and preserve it for posterity.

Unfortunately, as is often the way, in the dramatisation the film follows the book upon which it is based, where the author chose to replace them with a fictional (male) character. Like Edith, Mercie also bequeathed her artefacts from the dig to the British Museum. You’d really liked to have thought that the women’s contributions were recognised and noted and not airbrushed out of the story.

Incredibly, after a treasure trove inquest (August 1939 at Sutton Parish Hall) it was determined that the astounding find - which would entirely revolutionise historians’ understanding of the Anglo-Saxons - belonged not to the Crown but to the landowner and extraordinarily Edith donated the entire haul to the nation.

 In 1951, having been stored in Aldwych Tube station during the war, it went on display in the British Museum - albeit with no credit, not a single namecheck, for Basil Brown.  Sadly, Edith was no longer around to object. Basil was almost 90 when he died in 1977, but after suffering a blood clot on the brain, she had died in 1942, aged just 59.

Winston Churchill had offered Edith a CBE in recognition of her extraordinary generosity, but she declined the honour, almost certainly on the basis, according to Laura Howarth, archaeology manager for the National Trust, that she had ‘merely been doing her duty’  

Laura Howarth says ‘There have been notable Anglo-Saxon finds since, but nothing like this, a fully furnished, undisturbed ship burial. We know of only three Anglo-Saxon ship burials, two at Sutton Hoo and one near by at Snape. So it was a very localised practice’ 

Wikipedia Link Sutton Hoo

TIMELINE:

1926 Edith Pretty buys the site of Sutton Hoo, and becomes fascinated by the strange mounds of earth on her land.

1939 Basil Brown discovers a funerary cache of 263 objects in tumulus 1. World War II breaks out in September.

1946 After being kept safe underground during the war, the treasure—owned by the British Museum—is put on public display.

1990s Further excavations uncover another intact burial site in tumulus 17 containing a young man, a horse, and weapons.

The British Museum link to Edith and to the treasures

Photo: Harold John Phillips in the public domain. The ‘skeleton’ of the almost 90′ Ghost Ship imprint in the soil. This size ship would have accommodated 40 oarsmen

There’s also a piece about recreating the ‘Ghost Ship’ on this Daily Mail link and it has a good piece of National Trust video showing the site.

Rebuilding the Ship and why use Green Oak?

The Ship’s Company Team is a group of people with the collective desire to resurrect King Raedwald’s burial ship and turn the famous ghost imprint into a living reality.

Although there is no evidence left to examine the identity of the illustrious occupant of the burial ship, a strong guess is that it was possibly King Raedwald? It certainly must’ve been someone fabulously wealthy and highly regarded. The Sutton Hoo sword video from the British Museum at the end of this blog is very well worth a watch, exploring more about the man.

Within the ship, archaeologists found various treasures from across both the British Isles as well as the Byzantine (eastern Roman) and Frankish (western European) empires — including the famed Sutton Hoo helmet.

The grave itself is thought to belong to King Rædwald of East Anglia, a member of the Wuffingas dynasty which has been associated with the Wulfing clan of Sweden, who appeared in the Old English epic poem Beowulf.

If you’d like to read more and see some absolutely fabulous original photographs do go over to this Anonymous Blog. Edith was the cousin of the author’s Great Grandmother and it is a really personal and detailed account of what the family know of this incredible lady. I highly recommend it.

So there we are, you can see how I became utterly absorbed and went from internet site to site following all the history. I’m really interested in catching the film and seeing how the whole story of the people and the discovery is portrayed. Remember the date 29th January, if you have access to Netflix.

*UPDATE:

Please do read this blog about Basil Brown, written by John Cooper

WHAT ELSE DID I LEARN TODAY:

The Seventh Century covers the years 601-700 and I picked out this fact

Only one woman has ever sat on China's throne as Emperor in her own right. That woman was Wu Zetian (624-705) of the Tang dynasty

[xtruss]

Srebrenica, 25 Years On: How Genocide Denial is Adding to Survivors' Pain

— More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by ‘Criminal Christian Bosnian Serb Forces’ in July 1995. Survivors say history is being rewritten and war crimes celebrated

— By Peter Osborne and Jan-Peter Westad | July 10, 2020 | Middleeasteye.Net

Mejra Djogaz, 71, a survivor of Srebrenica, prays between the tombstones of her sons, Omer, 19, and Munib, 21, on 3 July 2020 (AFP)

Survivors of the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia Herzegovina 25 years ago say they are enduring a double-edged nightmare due to a growing local culture of genocide denial, in which war criminals are celebrated and history is being rewritten.

“It is unimaginably painful to be in Srebrenica,” Munira Subasic told Middle East Eye ahead of Saturday's anniversary of the fall of the formerly Muslim-majority town to Bosnian Serb forces.

Subasic is the president of the Mothers of Srebrenica organisation. She lost more than 20 family members in the Bosnian war, which followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia near the Serbian border, had been declared a safe area by the United Nations and was officially under the protection of UN peacekeepers, who surrendered the town to the Bosnian Serb army on 11 July 1995.

Over the next few days, more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were murdered.

Both of the main architects of the Bosnian Serbs' genocidal campaign, political leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Ratko Mladic, are now serving life sentences for their crimes, arrested by Serbia after years in hiding and convicted by a UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague.

But survivors say they are being haunted by those who tried to kill them or drive them away from their homes, many of whom they still see on the streets of the town and who have never faced justice. Some, they say, have gained positions of authority on the local council and in the local police force.

“We are faced with injustice and denial almost on a daily basis, even though we are on our land. We get looks that make us feel that they want us to be dead as well,” said Subasic.

“Genocide denial is killing us again. It is an additional phase of genocide because... the genocidal plan never ended. Srebrenica is a living genocide and it is denied just like the killings of our loved ones were denied.”

General Mladic Street

For the past quarter century, Srebrenica has been under the control of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb-controlled entity that was recognised as part of a federal Bosnia Herzegovina in the peace deal that ended the war later in 1995.

About 14 percent of the population of Republika Srpska is Muslim, according to the last census.

Many local schools segregate Muslim and Serb children, while teaching of the genocide was removed from the curriculum in 2017.

Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb war criminals and their allies at the time of the conflict are being honoured with street names, buildings and statues.

In the village of Pale, which is in the Srebrenica municipality, there is now a Radovan Karadzic Student Residence, named after the former Bosnian Serb political leader.

Genocide Criminals: Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic (L) and political leader Radovan Karadzic, pictured in November 1994. Both men are now serving life sentences for war crimes (Reuters)

In Bozanovici, there is General Mladic Street, dedicated to the Bosnian Serb military commander who was born in the village.

In 2018, Republika Srpska erected a statue of Vitaly Churkin, the former Russian ambassador to the UN who vetoed a resolution condemning the killings in Srebrenica as genocide.

Republika Srpska is not alone in the region in honouring figures accused or convicted of war crimes. An investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in May also found examples of a street in a Croat-majority Bosnian town named after a Croat general accused over the killings of at least 100 Serb civilians, and a mosque honouring a Bosnian Army general accused over the killings of 34 captive Bosnian Croat soldiers and civilians.

But with most of Srebrenica's historic Muslim population having either been killed or forced to leave the town, campaigners warn that genocide denial is in the ascendancy.

“Denial strategy started slowly with the funding of small NGOs and academics who were tasked with discrediting the internationally accepted truth of events. Now it is a state policy,” Hikmet Karcic, an academic and researcher on genocide based in Sarajevo, told MEE.

Denial among Bosnian Serb figures of authority goes to the very top.

Srebrenica's mayor, Mladen Grujicic, has denied that the killings that took place constituted genocide, as they have been repeatedly recognised in international law.

“When they prove it to be the truth, I’ll be the first to accept it,” he has said.

Ramiza Gurdic, who lost two sons in the genocide and still lives in Srebrenica, told MEE: “So much has changed but in reality nothing has changed. It is painful because it reminds me of everything. I still have not entered the municipality building since Grujicic was elected.”

Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the joint-presidency of Bosnia Herzegovina, called the genocide a “fabricated myth” only last year.

Documented Atrocity

Yet Srebrenica is perhaps the most well-documented atrocity of its kind in history.

After the fall of the town to the Bosnian Serbs, thousands fled to the nearby village of Potocari, where around 200 Dutch UN peacekeepers were stationed.

Faced with the Bosnian Serb army and with no support from the international community, the peacekeepers withdrew.

On 12 July, executions and evacuations of men and boys to killing sites began. Meanwhile, thousands of women and girls suffered sexual assault. By the end, more than 8,000 had been killed.

Ramiza Gurdic says she is still searching for the remains of her loved ones (Supplied)

Details about these events are known because of painstaking efforts to identify the bodies of the dead. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) was created in 1996 in response to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.

Since then, almost 90 percent of the Srebrenica victims have been identified.

“That’s unprecedented,” said Kathryne Bomberger, director-general of the ICMP.

For some, however, the long wait for confirmation of the fate of missing relatives continues.

“I am still searching for the remains of my loved ones,” said Ramiza Gurdic. She tells a story that is common among the women survivors. It is one of watching husbands and sons marched into the forest.

“My Mustafa was born in 1975 and Mehrudin in 1977. I am still searching for Mehrudin's skull to be found and identified from mass graves. It's not easy remembering how both of them left with their father, my husband, to go through the forest and never seeing them again,” she said.

Bomberger describes how the perpetrators of the genocide tried to cover up their crimes, using bulldozers to move bodies to different locations across eastern Bosnia.

“It was common for the body of a victim of the genocide to be found in anywhere from five to 11 different locations sometimes 50 kilometres apart from each other. That's how extensive the cover up was,” she said.

A Bosnian pathologist examines skulls recovered from mass graves and wooded areas in a hospital in the city of Tuzla in 1997 (Reuters)

The scale of the challenge led to the pioneering use of DNA identification of the victims whose bodies had been mutilated and dismembered.

“The evidence that has now been provided is irrefutable. It’s scientific. It’s been subject to rigorous court proceedings. To deny these events is ludicrous and dangerous,” Bomberger told MEE.

European Inaction

This makes it all the more extraordinary that the events at Srebrenica 25 years ago are being largely ignored.

In 2009, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on Srebrenica calling "on the Council and the Commission to commemorate appropriately the anniversary of the Srebrenica-Potocari act of genocide by supporting Parliament's recognition of 11 July as the day of commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide all over the EU, and to call on all the countries of the western Balkans to do the same."

But Waqar Azmi, founder and chairman of the Remembering Srebrenica campaign, told MEE that despite two EU resolutions calling for member states to commemorate Srebrenica Memorial Day on 11 July each year, “only Britain holds a national commemoration or has developed educational programmes”.

'It's not easy remembering how both of them left with their father, my husband, to go through the forest and never seeing them again' — Ramiza Gurdic, survivor

For Azmi, this lack of effort to commemorate and educate by other EU member states is “deeply shameful”.

“It is also deeply worrying that this inaction on the part of [European countries] is emboldening those seeking to deny the genocide whilst glorifying the architects of the genocide,” he added.

The reluctance of EU states to adequately remember the Bosnian genocide may point to unease surrounding their own conduct at the time.

According to The Clinton Tapes, an account by Taylor Branch of Bill Clinton's presidency based on recorded conversations with its subject, the US president believed European leaders were prejudiced against Bosnia Herzegovina on account of its Muslim-majority population.

Clinton is reported as saying that European allies constantly blocked proposals to adjust or remove the arms embargo imposed on Bosnia because "an independent Bosnia would be 'unnatural' as the only Muslim nation in Europe”.

“[Clinton] said President Francois Mitterrand of France had been especially blunt in saying that Bosnia did not belong, and that British officials spoke of a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe," wrote Branch.

This attitude was reflected in comments by Boris Johnson, now the British prime minister but then a journalist, who wrote in the Daily Telegraph in 1997: “All right, I say, the fate of Srebrenica was appalling. But they weren’t exactly angels, these Muslims.”

In a message posted on the Remembering Srebrenica website in 2018, when he was foreign secretary, Johnson described the genocide as "one of the worst crimes in Europe’s modern history".

Recently declassified British government office documents reveal distrust and disagreement between the UK and France, both United Nations Security Council permanent members, about how to respond to the situation.

British officials accused French President Jacques Chirac, who had replaced Mitterrand in May 1995, of “lunacy” and “grandstanding”, and also suggested that France may have made a secret deal with the Bosnian Serbs to halt air strikes in return for the release of peacekeeping troops being held hostage.

British officials also sought to limit military involvement in Bosnia and resisted pressure from Washington for more air strikes targeting Bosnian Serb forces in the aftermath of the fall of Srebrenica.

Munira Subasic: “As a living survivor and a witness, I carry the burden of seeking truth" (Supplied)

One senior official advised that British peacekeepers should be withdrawn from the final Bosnian Muslim safe area of Gorazde, which was facing imminent attack, to avoid being sucked into the war.

These are new details for historical accounts of how western powers failed the victims of Srebrenica. But the official added: “We must not allow ourselves to be identified as a country responsible for ‘the defeat of Bosnia’ (implications for our trading position etc in the Arab world).”

British Government Document

An extract of a British government memo discussing how the country should respond in the aftermath of Srebrenica (National Archives)

Yet the Bosnian genocide has become a reference point for contemporary far-right ideology and an inspiration for its most violent advocates.

The perpetrators of last year's attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people died, and a 2011 far right-inspired attack in Norway in which 77 people died, both took inspiration from the Serbian ultra-nationalist cause of the 1990s.

Munira Subasic told MEE that campaigners were seeking “truth and justice, not revenge”.

“The day when I last saw my loved ones, my son, husband and close relatives, is a day when a part of me was killed as well. I remember every detail,” she said.

“As a living survivor and a witness, I carry the burden of seeking truth, because it is the only way to prevent the Srebrenica genocide from happening again. As a mother, I am still screaming for justice.”

[loudlytransparenttrash]

This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 14

A Princeton student believes that the radical progressive groups Antifa and Black Lives Matter are merely “organizations that stand for equality” who “bravely face off” against Neo-Nazis. Writing in The Daily Princetonian, Cox alleges President Trump intentionally endorsed Nazis, and openly supported fascism. “Institutions like Princeton should be expected to be functioning parts of The Resistance... White silence is white support for the wrong side. If one who is white remains silent, then they give the KKK a non-vocal stamp of approval... To my fellow white students and peers, we are not forced to walk amongst statues that glorify individuals who killed our ancestors. We are in a position of privilege regardless of how we look at it and remaining complicit at times like these only puts us in a position of support. This is not the time to remain neutral.” 

A woman’s studies professor at Clark University, attending a baseball game at Fenway Park declined to clap as a veteran was honored, cringed when the American flag was unfurled, and would not stand when the rest of the crowd did so to sing “America the Beautiful.” This was her personal way of protesting the patriarchy and what she calls “militarized, masculinity-heroism patriotism.” Trust me, it gets worse. Cynthia Enloe goes on to claim that these displays of honoring our service men and women, or as Enloe puts it, "militarized, masculinity-heroism patriotism,” only exists to remind women in the audience that they are inferior. “Women are popularly expected to be grateful to men and to the masculinized state for offering them militarized protection. Sentimentality, entertainment, appreciation and gratitude, each are routinely gendered to the extent that all four can be mobilized to serve masculinized militarized patriotism and patriarchy will be perpetuated.”

The University of Texas-Austin removed statues of three Confederate figures in the middle of the night as their continued presence would run “counter to the university’s core values,” UT President Greg Fenves said he was excited to show off his statue-free accomplishment to the incoming students, providing them with an “open, positive and inclusive learning environment.”

A University of Michigan fraternity announced that it canceled a “Nile”-themed party after a student from the school’s Egyptian Student Association criticized them for cultural appropriation. The event’s facebook page said students could come to the party as a mummy, Cleopatra or King Tut. ESA president Yasmeen Afifi lambasted the fraternity, repeatedly signaling them out for their skin color. “I am the president of the Egyptian student association and these whites don’t know what they got themselves into,” she said. “I will not allow my culture to be appropriated for your entertainment. White people have invaded, stolen, erased, and defaced numerous ancient Egyptian symbols and temples in attempt to claim one of the greatest civilizations as their own. This is much larger than just a party, it is the privilege that led them to think it was remotely okay.” Subsequently the fraternity released a statement apologizing, “We sincerely apologize to anyone who was hurt by the theme choice. We have learned our lesson and will take more precaution in the future when deciding themes for events.” 

A group of female high school students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats were repeatedly harassed and threatened with violence while visiting Howard University. The students were on a class trip to Washington D.C, and decided to stop at Howard University for lunch along the way. Howard students quickly took to social media to shame the high schoolers and alert other students of their presence, saying, “who told these lil yt girls they could come to the HU like it was about to be some joke.” In response, another student suggested asking the visitors to “meet you behind south” so she could “beat the f*ck out of them.” The university itself released a statement warning students that “there were visitors on our campus who were wearing paraphernalia that showcased their political support.” Multiple organizations affiliated with the university eventually responded to the incident, though only to soothe and reassure students that the female high schoolers had left campus. “We will take any action necessary to ensure that HU students feel safe and comfortable. This group is no longer on campus.” Meanwhile, the university’s NAACP chapter harshly rebuked the two high schoolers, writing that “Howard University students have no time for white supremacists and neo-nazi sympathizers on campus.”

A dean at George Washington University has a clear message, “Either you challenge the president’s blatant racism, or you are an accomplice to his repugnant views and a detriment to your own sense of personal honor.” “Events in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville have made this abundantly clear. For the first time in our history, a Nazi sympathizer occupies the Oval Office,” says dean Reuben Brigety. “If anyone continues to serve Trump without denouncing him, he or she will “have to explain why you chose to silently serve America’s first Nazi-in-chief.”

Students at the University of Pennsylvania have published an open letter calling upon the university to adopt numerous measures to combat “hate speech” on campus. “We are not satisfied that all reasonable preventative action has been taken to protect the wellbeing and physical safety of students at Penn who are not white,” reads the letter. The outrage stemmed from a op-ed co-authored by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who made the reasonable argument that single parenthood, antisocial habits, thug culture and anti-assimilation ideas - prevalent in all races - shouldn’t be embraced in a first world, 21st-century environment. The students replied with numerous demands for the university to censor this “hate speech,” saying if the university does not comply, they will be held responsible for “harming” and “dehumanizing” its “vulnerable students.” 

Brown University has announced it will be the recipient of a $30,000 grant from the Association of American Colleges and Universities to address “racial justice.” Two of the initiatives the university is planning are discussion groups for female Muslim students and another for black students. The latter will focus on - wait for it - “issues of colorism.” Well that’s a new one. Initiative leader Janet Cooper Nelson said she hoped to create an “intimate setting” which would provide Muslim women “hospitality, healing and empathy” and holding a dinner for black females will allow participating students to “discuss issues of identity, race, gender and colorism within communities of color.” 

Sam Houston State University will offer a course this semester called “Understanding Whiteness” to help students understand “white privilege” and develop “white racial literacy.” “How might white people better understand white privilege and their potential role in dismantling systemic racism?” the description asks. “What is white privilege and how does it apply to you?” ... Let me guess, if you’re white, it applies to you? The many topics the course aims to cover includes “the role of race in one’s life; examination of white racial identity; how whiteness operates within institutional structures; systemic privilege and oppression; key historic events advancing white privilege (global colonization, holocaust); and current dialogues about whiteness in the US.” The course pledges to students that by the end, they will be better white allies, having “developed white racial literacy in acting upon systemic racism.”

Yale University censored a stone work of art on campus depicting an armed Native American and Puritan side by side. The stone carving was edited to cover up the Puritan’s musket, while the Native American’s bow was left as is to spare the students from being exposed to a “hostile environment.” The censorship of the school’s historic stone carving marks one of the first major accomplishments of the newly elected art committee and a win for their “A More Inclusive Yale” campaign. It is unclear why officials decided to cover the musket while leaving the bow untouched, or why they deemed the artwork inappropriate in the first place as there’s been no recorded student complaints.

A Clemson University professor went on quite a rant to voice his contempt for Trump supporters and Republicans. “All trump supporters, nay, all Republicans, are racist scum,” Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing Bart Knijnenburg wrote. “This society is aggressively structured to make cis white males succeed, at the expense of minorities.” Additionally, Knijnenburg explicitly endorses the Antifa slogan of ‘punching Nazis,’ “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy. Violent or non-violent. This needs to stop, by any means necessary. #PunchNazis”

Students at Stanford University can join a “Disrupting Whiteness” club in an effort to end the “white liberal apathy” and “white privilege” of their peers. “White students must step up to educate themselves and those around them,” the club description states, adding that “white students can and should do a lot more than we currently do in when it comes to race education and anti-racist action.” The group recently attracted attention after they published a document following the Charlottesville riots in which they sought to teach white people how they can “step up,” and to give money “to actual black, brown, and Jewish people.” Micaela Suminski, the group’s leader, says that “every white person can do things to disrupt whiteness and work against these skewed systems,” such as “talking with coworkers, relatives, and friends about implicit bias or the dangers of white supremacy; buying from POC-owned businesses; or donating money.”

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Tuesday protested against a confederate statue on campus known as Silent Sam, chanting “tear it down” and holding signs reading “White People-We Must Own Our Racism.” At one point the event became heated when a male protester was detained by police, prompting the crowd to chant “cops and Klan go hand in hand.” Protesters then surrounded the police van the man was held in, chanting “let him go” repeatedly. As the protest continued into the night, it migrated to streets near campus, and the loonies chanted: “Hey hey, ho ho, this racist statue has got to go.” They finally gave up, not before vandalizing the statue first, of course. 

San Francisco State University plans to launch a “Black Unity Center” this fall to provide black students with an “intersectional, afrocentric environment.”  The creation of the center stemmed from student protesters who “were feeling unsupported on campus,” according to the director of the center. Black students protested and accused the school of “failing to address their needs” and ultimately listed a set of demands, one of them was creating a Black Student Center. As a result the administration along with faculty did as they were told, now the demands have been met, the university’s president, Les Wong, proudly affirms a “commitment to diversity and social justice.”

Two professors, one from Purdue University and the other from Stanford University, are assembling a "Campus Antifascist Network" (CAN) to serve as a “big tent” for “anyone committed to fighting fascism” with the goal of confronting groups it considers fascist and “driving racists off campuses.” “Since Trump’s election, fascists, neo-fascists, and their allies have used blatantly Islamophobic, anti-semitic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist messaging and iconography to recruit to their ranks and intimidate students, faculty, and staff,” the professors write, adding that CAN will “build large, unified demonstrations against fascists on campuses.” “The time to take action is now.” 

A professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston wants business professors to engage in more “intellectual activism” to promote “social justice.” Alessia Contu urges business professors to join the fight by adopting an activist stance in the classroom, which she calls a “form of political work” inspired by “black, feminist, critical race scholars.” This activism, she explains, calls upon professors to fight against “white supremacy, hetero-normative patriarchy and environmental exploitation.” While she acknowledges that business schools aren’t exactly known as a hotbed of progressive politics, Contu argues that there are still opportunities for professors to engage in this activism while on the job, such as infusing “intersectionality” into syllabi and asking “radical questions.” 

A professor at the University of Minnesota states the concerns of people over illegal immigration’s impact on the U.S are rooted in “racist nativism.” According to Bic Ngo, “As these immigrants are positioned as outsiders and scapegoats for the disorders of US society, whites are constructed as the native population with a legitimate place in the country.” Ngo then takes her argument a step further, claiming Trump’s proposal to build a wall along America’s southern border and improved vetting of visitors from terror-riddled countries, apparently shows Trump “aims to revive the American Dream through an instantiation of whiteness and global isolation.”

Students at the University of Virginia have issued a list of demands that includes racial quotas and mandatory “education” about Thomas Jefferson’s connection to white supremacy. The ultimatum was issued Monday during a rally to “send a message to the university that we demand more from them.” The list begins with a demand that UVA remove Confederate plaques and change the plaque on a Jefferson statue to refer to him as an emblem of white supremacy. They also insist that buildings “named after prominent white supremacists or slaveholders should be renamed after people of marginalized groups.” Other items on the list demand explicit racial quotas for both the faculty and the student body and here’s the funniest one of them all: They demand that the school spends $13,000 on minority students, because - wait for it - one hundred years ago, the KKK gave the school $1000, which would be $13,000 today, so to prove that the school is sorry for its racist history, it must spend the KKK money on its non-white students. 

[gyrlversion]

This Constitutional Crisis Probably Won’t Be Trump’s Last

Photo: Pete Marovich/Getty Images

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, the constitutional crisis brought on by Trump’s opposition to Congress, the Trump tax exposé, and Michael Cohen’s dirty work for Jerry Falwell Jr.

With the decision to assert executive privilege to keep the unredacted Mueller report away from the House Judiciary Committee, Donald Trump continues to treat Congress, in the words of John Yoo, “like they’re the Chinese or a local labor union working on a Trump building.” Will his stonewalling work?

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that we’ve hit a moral bottom where John Yoo is aghast at Trump. John Yoo! For those with short memories, Yoo was the Bush-Cheney deputy assistant attorney general who endorsed uninhibited presidential power grabs and drafted the so-called Bybee memo green-lighting “enhanced interrogation techniques” (a.k.a. torture). Even Yoo, it turns out, must draw a line when a Republican president waterboards the Constitution.

In any case, Trump’s stonewalling will “work” in the sense that the ensuing court battles over the wholesale White House effort to bury the unredacted Mueller report, resist subpoenas, and shut down all testimony by administration officials could drag on for months, if not years. But in a way this may be the least of the country’s problems, as Trump stops at nothing to hold on to power. As Jerry Nadler and Nancy Pelosi have said, we are in “a constitutional crisis.” But even constitutional crises are relative. The ultimate crisis may arrive, as Pelosi has been warning, when Trump, if defeated, attacks the legitimacy of the 2020 election. If his loss is narrow (and perhaps even if it isn’t), the imagination reels at picturing what havoc he and his riled-up base, a third of the country, might sow to extend his rule.

A comparable constitutional crisis could also be triggered if the Supreme Court does rule against Trump’s wonton invocation of executive privilege before Election Day arrives. Do we really believe that Trump and Bill Barr would obey that ruling? Would they actually release the evidence such a ruling would make public? Richard Nixon seriously considered burning the White House tapes before the Court mandated their release during Watergate. The comparable records of this White House include the copious notes taken by Donald McGahn’s chief of staff Annie Donaldson, described by the Washington Post as a daily “running account of the president’s actions” documenting “conversations and meetings.” Trump is already on record asserting that McGahn’s “notes never existed until needed.” It’s not beyond him or his attorney general to find a way to ensure that they keep never existing.

The easiest break in this stonewall could be accomplished by Robert Mueller. If Trump can’t prevent Congress from calling him to testify, testify he must. Alternatively, if Mueller can’t testify before Congress, then he must exercise his First Amendment rights and tell what he knows to the public in the forum of his choice. For a public servant who sees himself as a patriot and a tribune of the rule of law, shirking that duty is not an option.

Examining ten years of Trump’s tax transcripts, the New York Times reports that from 1985 to 1994 Trump was not only a massive business failure, but “appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer” during the period. Will their findings put to rest the strangely persistent mythology of Trump’s self-made success?

No, it won’t. Which is not to say that this latest investigative report by the Times is anything less than conclusive and devastating in its exposure of the lies that have abetted Trump’s self-portrait as a business genius.

But how one wishes this and other exposés like it had appeared in 2016 or before. As I wrote in my piece about Roy Cohn last year, the Times executive editor from 1977 to 1986, Abe Rosenthal, was a social crony of Cohn, Trump’s fixer and promoter, and the paper’s failure to seriously scrutinize Trump during his rise to fame and power was a consequence of that relationship. It’s during that period, just before the publication of The Art of the Deal and long preceding both Trump’s Apprentice franchise and presidential run, when the myth of Trump’s self-made business success was firmly cemented in the public mind. The laxness of the Trump coverage then — not just by the Times but by most major news organizations — helps account for the strange persistence of that mythology despite all the evidence to the contrary uncovered by the Times, the Post, and other outstanding organs of investigative journalism over the past few years.

That said, it is impossible to imagine any information that could be reported about Trump at this point that would cause his hard-core supporters, including the Vichy Republicans in Congress, to abandon him. This includes any facts that may emerge if we see Trump tax returns for the quarter-century following those revealed by this week’s Times article. Trump could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot the commissioner of the IRS and he’d still be Making America Great Again.

In a recorded conversation reported by Reuters, Michael Cohen spoke of helping Jerry Falwell Jr. destroy “a bunch of … personal photographs” in 2015, possibly shedding new light on the reasons for Falwell’s influential endorsement of Trump. Should the new developments in the Falwell story line force a reconsideration of what we know about Trump’s Evangelical support?

No further reconsideration is required. To borrow Pete Buttigieg’s coinage, Trump’s Evangelical supporters long ago swallowed whatever moral, religious, and ethical scruples they had and enlisted as cheerleaders for “the porn star presidency.” Falwell, who endorsed Trump because he would bring his “business acumen” to a country “so deep in debt,” has been a particularly embarrassing example. He praised him for his “life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught in the great commandment.” (The Times found not a single itemized charitable deduction in Trump’s 1985–1994 tax documents.) Falwell defended the Access Hollywood tape as a possible “conspiracy among Establishment Republicans” to benefit Paul Ryan. He has compared Trump to Churchill and declared that he “cannot be bought.”

Evangelical voters’ unwavering support of Trump is historically consistent with their support of preachers who turn out to be either financial scam artists, closet cases, or sexual offenders when they are taking a break from preaching against LGBT civil rights and women’s abortion rights. Falwell wraps up all the hypocrisy in one execrable package. His denial of Michael Cohen’s claim that he helped him and his wife destroy “personal” photographs is every bit as convincing as Trump’s past claims that he knew nothing about Cohen’s hush payments to Stormy Daniels. And what are we to make of the seemingly synergistic news, broken by the same reporter, Aram Roston, when he was at BuzzFeed News last year, that Falwell and his wife put up $1.8 million to support a business managed by a 21-year-old pool attendant with no business experience whom they had met at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach? No doubt another example of “loving and helping others as Jesus taught in the great commandment.” Amen.

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[leftpress]

In an Angry and Fearful Nation, an Outbreak of Anti-Semitism

| ProPublica: Articles and Investigations | March 8th 2017

by A.C. Thompson and Ken Schwencke

In late November, Marna Street, a violist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was walking to her car after a rehearsal. Street was shocked by what she discovered: Someone had painted a swastika, about 14 inches across, on the trunk of her car.

The vandals, Street said, had probably targeted her vehicle, which was parked in a garage not far from the University of Cincinnati, because she’d placed a magnet on it indicating that she is Jewish. Street eventually managed scrub off the graffiti. She put the magnet in the glovebox of her car.

“I had that feeling in the pit of my stomach, like somebody just punched me,” recalled Street, 68, speaking publicly for the first time. It was, she said, “a cross between ...

fear and just plain hurt.”

Working with a coalition of organizations, ProPublica late last year launched “Documenting Hate,” an attempt to gather evidence of hate crimes and episodes of bigotry from a divided America. The account from Cincinnati is one of the anti-Semitic incidents the project has chronicled. But there are scores more.

Indeed, “Documenting Hate” recorded more than 330 reports of anti-Semitic incidents during a three-month span from early November to early February. The accounts — our list is by no means comprehensive — come via personal submissions, police documents and news articles. The majority, though not all, have been authenticated through either news reports, interviews or other evidence, like photos.

The incidents have taken place in big cities and small towns, along the country’s liberal coasts and in deep red states. Some of the episodes — swastikas and threatening messages spray-painted at schools and colleges around the nation — have been worrisome, though relatively minor. Others have been more serious, such as the 65 bomb threats targeting Jewish organizations across the country during the period we examined (there have been nearly 70 more since then). In many cases, the culprits singled out specific individuals for abuse, defacing their homes and autos with swastikas and menacing comments.

Map: Bomb Threats to Jewish Community Centers and Organizations

A timeline of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers and other organizations See the graphic.

President Trump, after weeks of criticism for being slow to condemn the incidents, last week called them “horrible” and “painful” and “a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.”

The remarks, however, came after a number of confounding comments about the issue. During a Feb. 16 news conference, Trump castigated Jake Turx, a reporter for Ami, a Jewish magazine, for asking what the government was doing to address the increase in anti-Semitic events. Trump accused Turx of lying about the question he wanted to ask, and instructed him to sit down. And without citing any evidence, Trump has wondered whether some of the recent anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by liberals, or Jews themselves, intent on discrediting him.

“There’s a push on the left to conflate anti-Semitism with Trump, while at the same time criticizing him for having Jared Kushner, who wears his Jewishness as proudly as anyone, as his most trusted confidant and in the highest echelons of the White House staff,” said Joe Borelli, a Trump supporter who represents Staten Island on the New York city council, according to Breitbart News. “It is mind-boggling.”

The White House would not comment for the record when asked whether President Trump had in any way contributed to the threats and violence.

On a national level, data on hate crimes and bias incidents is spotty at best. The FBI admits the information it collects is incomplete — many police departments don’t participate in the hate crimes tracking program — and the bureau has yet to release statistics on 2016 and 2017. As a result, determining with authority whether anti-Semitic events are rising or declining is difficult.

There is little question, however, that the incidents have generated genuine concern. In a rare show of unity, all 100 U.S. senators this week issued a public letter urging the Department of Justice, FBI and Department of Homeland Security to protect Jewish institutions and prosecute those responsible for terrorizing them. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently announced a $25 million grant to better protect day care and community centers from threats.

The available data does support the idea of an uptick. After years of decline, anti-Semitic crimes began trending upward in 2015, according to FBI data. Experts say that increase seems to have accelerated in recent months, as Trump’s unique brand of nativist populism has helped to pull more extreme right-wing groups, some of them avowedly racist, closer to the political mainstream. On Twitter, openly anti-Semitic figures have built vast networks of supporters and cultivated large audiences, while the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website geared towards millennials, has seen its traffic grow to roughly a half a million unique visitors per month. In New York City, the police department said anti-Semitic hate crimes nearly doubled in the first two months of 2017 as compared to the same period last year.

“One of the constituencies Trump mobilized was the KKK-style anti-Semitic extreme right,” said Lawrence Rosenthal, a scholar of fascist history and director of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. These groups “had been absolutely on the fringe of American politics for at least my lifetime — and I am getting old.”

Oren Segal, who tracks anti-Semitic incidents in his role as director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, concurs. “The anti-Semites think they have a champion in the highest office,” said Segal, who believes that “divisive rhetoric” aired during last fall’s presidential campaign has emboldened racists and inspired them to strike out at their perceived enemies in the Jewish community.

“We have seen a significant uptick in the reports we’ve received, certainly starting around the election in November and continuing through the first two months of 2017,” Segal told ProPublica.

Amid the larger national debate about any responsibility Trump may bear for racist and anti-Semitic behavior, the accounts emerging from the “Documenting Hate” database offer a chance to appreciate the very personal experiences of violation and fear.

We identified:

Incidents at colleges and universities, like the man who wandered the University of Florida’s campus in Gainesville wearing a swastika armband.

Incidents at K-12 schools, including swastikas painted on almost any surface you could imagine — including students’ hands.

Incidents at government buildings, most of which were libraries, though one involved the words “Heil Hitler” and “Trump” scrawled inside of a Brooklyn wastewater treatment plant.

Incidents at private homes and businesses, including swastika graffiti and propaganda on businesses in Eugene, Oregon.

And incidents at public parks, mostly graffiti, though one enterprising vandal dug a 20-foot by 20-foot swastika into the grass at a park in Levittown, New York.

ProPublica’s review, which did not involve incidents occurring online, where anti-Semitic trolling and abuse have become widespread, uncovered many episodes which had never before been reported by the media or investigated by police.

Our tally is almost surely an undercount. It consists of incidents covered in media reports, as well as accounts gathered by the Southern Poverty Law Center and a coalition of news organizations including ProPublica, Univision News, Buzzfeed News and The New York Times Opinion section.

The reports we examined generally fall into two categories. Most appear to have been committed by angry individuals who aren’t affiliated with any organized group. They are often teens or adolescents who defame Jews — and other minority groups — through graffiti or verbal taunting. In some cases, the Nazi symbol was specifically aimed at non-Jews.

A smaller number were orchestrated by extremist political groups, such as the New Order, an outgrowth of the long-dormant American Nazi Party founded by George Lincoln Rockwell, and the Atomwaffen Division, a new, youthful fascist group. A handful of cases involved a saboteur who remotely hijacked computer printers at Stanford and other colleges, programming them to spit out page after page of neo-Nazi propaganda.

Some experts tracking this wave of incidents said it was crucial to situate them within a wider historical context.

“Generally, we’ve seen a remarkable decline in anti-Semitism over the past 40 years,” noted Jonathan Sarna, a history professor at Brandeis University and one of the foremost chroniclers of Jewish-American life. “In the 1950s, we didn’t just have bomb threats — we had bombings. Synagogues in the south were bombed.”

Sarna added: “It’s important to be vigilant and concerned. But it’s also important to not to overreact.”

Across the nation, Jews were directly harassed with hateful imagery and messages in dozens of instances we examined.

During Hanukkah last year, vandals desecrated a large home-made menorah that stood in the front yard of a home in Chandler, Arizona,

[imaginationsjournal]

 8-1 | Table of Contents | DOI 10.17742/IMAGE.GDR.8-1.2 | HetzerPDF Coming Soon!

[column size=one_half position=first ]Abstract | The visual essay is based on research carried out between 2010 and 2015 under the title “Bodies of Crisis—Remembering the German Wende.” The project mainly consisted of oral-history research and a series of performance events presented in the UK and Germany. In 27 interviews, women from East Germany recollected their embodied quotidian experience amidst the political transition from a socialist to a capitalist state in 1989 and thereafter. Live performance opened up access points for a transcultural translation of this experience involving practitioners from diverse cultural and creative backgrounds. The performance work extended the culturally specific experience beyond the East German case by pointing toward global struggles for existence, acceptance, and emancipation.[/column]

[column size=one_half position=last ]Résumé | Cet essai visuel est le résultat du projet d’études «Bodies of Crisis – Remembering the German Wende» (Corps de la crise – Souvenir de la chute du Mur), réalisé à l’Université de Warwick de 2010 à 2015. Au moyen de 27 interviews, des femmes de l’Allemagne de l’Est se sont remémoré les expériences corporelles de leur vie quotidienne pendant l’époque troublée de 1989 et 1990. Ces interviews ont jeté la base d’un spectacle vivant impliquant des artistes variés, ouvrant un espace d’expression transculturel et artistique de ces expériences de temps de crise. La performance a montré l’universalité des expériences spécifiques de l’Allemagne de l’Est au regard des enjeux mondiaux que sont la survie, la reconnaissance et l’émancipation.[/column]

Maria Hetzer | Berlin

Negotiating Memories of Everyday Life during the Wende

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The visual essay is based on collaborative research a group of performance-based researchers conducted between 2010 and 2015 under the title “Bodies of Crisis—Remembering the German Wende.” The project mainly consisted of oral-history research and a series of performance events presented in the UK and Germany. In 27 interviews, women from East Germany recollected their embodied quotidian experience amidst the political transition from a socialist to a capitalist state in 1989 and thereafter. Live performance opened up access points for a transcultural translation of this experience involving practitioners from diverse cultural and creative backgrounds. The performance work extended the culturally specific experience beyond the East German case by pointing toward global struggles for existence, acceptance, and emancipation. The following sequence of images and clips invites readers to reflect on the embodied quotidian as a valuable approach to the study of the historical experience of 1989. Short commentaries consider how memories of somatic quotidian experience influence the experience of the body vis-à-vis wider social change.

Performance collaborators: Maiada Aboud, endurance art researcher (UK/Israel); Jessica Argyridou, video performance artist (Cyprus); David Bennett, dancer-researcher (UK); Michael Grass, heritage researcher and visual designer (UK/Germany); Linos Tzelos, musician (Greece). Further studio collaborators: Elia Zacharioudaki, actress (Greece); Osama Suleiman, media artist (Saudi Arabia/Jordan); Gordon Palagi, actor (USA).

Copyright lies with the project or photographers/agencies referenced in the image captions. Project photographers for Bodies of Crisis: Michael Grass (MG), Maria Rankin (MR), Ian O’Donoghue (IOD). My sincere thanks go to Seán Allan and Nicolas Whybrow, who supervised this research project, as well as Marc Silberman and two anonymous reviewers who made valuable comments on a draft of this essay. More information on the performance research can be found on the project’s website http://bodycrisis.org.

TRACK ONE: Historiography and the embodied quotidian

A reassessment of historical writing about 1989 reveals a general disregard for everyday and somatic practice. This is by no means a particular disposition of the discourse about the German Wende. Indeed, Henri Lefebvre reminds us that the body and more embodied practices tend to be forgotten in Western philosophical thinking and history (161). In cultural studies, critics have explored everyday practices as a resource for resisting modernity’s tedious routines and repressive demands (de Certeau xiv; Highmore 3). Here, the everyday encapsulates a limited set of practices by excluding a wide range of the sensate, i.e., issues of the body such as nutritional habits and hygiene. (For nutritional habits and German-German cultural history, see Weinreb in this issue.) One of many aspects nurturing this disregard of the somatic quotidian in Wende history is the relatively limited amount of available visual documentation depicting daily life before the advent of the digital age. In our studio work, we explored the ephemerality of everyday practice and created potential historical documents of the everyday of 1989. The image on the right is based on eyewitness accounts relating the changing taste of apples (“appearing shiny and delicious, but not tasting like an apple at all”) and other daily products.

Tasting apples. ©Bodycrisis / MG (IMAGE 1):

Twentieth-century German historiography has given the everyday prominence as a space of performing Eigen-Sinn in capturing individual agency vis-à-vis wider sociopolitical demands and state control (Lüdtke 13). In this context, the everyday functioned as a gatekeeper for the reassessment of GDR reality in light of the still dominant totalitarianism approach in historiography (Lindenberger 1). (On the need for a new approach to researching the everyday of the GDR, see Rubin and Ebbrecht-Hartmann in this issue.) In the context of writing and remembering 1989-90, however, the everyday has remained out of focus, as has the individual agent of change. Accordingly, historians have largely analyzed East Germans as a political mass (Grix 3). The image on the right shows one of the most significant demonstrations of East Germans for political reforms, taking place on Berlin Alexanderplatz on November 4, 1989. This image belongs to the canon of documents framing the reality of the Wende.

November 4, 1989, Berlin, Alexanderplatz © Andreas Kämper, Robert Havemann Gesellschaft (IMAGE 2):

In some cases, historians have turned to examine the everyday of prominent agents for political change, for example, Bärbel Bohley as a leading representative of the GDR civil rights movement (Olivo ix). In short, we know little about how ordinary citizens organized and accomplished the everyday of 1989-90 when confronted with substantial socioeconomic and political change, nor do we know how it is remembered today. The period of the political Wende, 1989-90, disintegrates when employing an everyday approach. Many envision 1989 as the last year of the GDR and thus subsume its everyday under a more generally defined GDR normality that finally came to an end in November 1989. Correspondingly, East Germans woke up to the everyday of the now unified Berlin Republic in October 1990. Accounts following this narrative declared the temporary end of everyday life (Moran 216).

Round Table talks, East Berlin, 1989 © dpa / BAKS (IMAGE 3):

Frequently researchers approach the everyday of 1989-90 as a transitional, extraordinary, and somewhat anarchic period in which many East Germans made rules on the go and experimented in all areas of life (Links et al. 1; Holm and Kuhn 644). Hence, these accounts tend to document experimental practices and thriving subcultural communities, e.g., squatting and alternative living experiments, techno culture, and political projects. (On squatters and techno culture, see Smith, and on subcultural artists, see Eisman in this issue.) In summary, when we do find pictures of the everyday in 1989-90, they depict a temporary, exceptional period of sociocultural practices that render obsolete the realities hitherto known as ordinary.

Kommune I, the most famous squat in Mainzer Straße, East Berlin 1990 © Umbruch Bildarchiv (IMAGE 4):

In the context of narratives that focus on 1989-90 as a period of state and sociocultural transition from an Eastern to a Western model, this exceptionality seems particularly obvious. Searching for traces of the everyday in this discourse, many examples establish GDR citizens as the historical Other. They feed German-German cultural stereotyping by concentrating on consumption, depicting extraordinary events such as shopping sprees to West Berlin and West Germany, targeting a demand for bananas, cheap electronics, second-hand cars, and other Western daily goods. This kind of focus still dominates the discussion about the nature of GDR citizens’ needs and wishes for the future.

Example of an East German supermarket (Kaufhalle) addressing the desires of East Germans in 1990 © dpa / MZ.web (IMAGE 5):

By contrast, the interviews I conducted for this research project emphasized the persistence of known quotidian practices. Interviewees maintained that mundane practices of the everyday remained the same, in line with Lefebvre’s analysis that in times of change the everyday is last to change (131). This continuity of practices sanctioned feelings of reliability in a suddenly insecure political environment. It also enabled political participation on a daily basis, for example, by providing reliable childcare to workers so they could convene and rally for political action during the transitions of 1989-90. As a result, interviewees remembered integrating political participation into their daily routines and regimes, rather than substituting known everyday practices with new ones or changing their approach to daily life altogether. This everyday stability enabled societal change through active engagement with a political situation that was perceived as highly precarious, potentially changing the everyday forever.

Young East German woman eating © Bodycrisis / private (IMAGE 6):

On the level of the somatic, our group of performers undertook research in a studio setting that drew attention to the importance of conceptualizing a vital, energetic, accelerated political body. As such, the interviewees framed the everyday as characterized by all sorts of seemingly ordinary practices, a heightened level of energy that further supported restlessness, and a resistance to sleep, thus pushing the limits of the everyday. In our analysis of the interviews this corresponded with remembered practices of hesitation and excessive media consumption, consequently postponing obligations or fulfilling them halfheartedly.

Yet how do we translate this ambivalence of an everyday on the edge, an everyday we have come to understand as precarious but equally stabilized by repeated embodied practice? The live, performing body can generate insight into these parameters by allowing for a provisional and temporally limited identification of the self in others through somatic empathy, situatedness, and avowal of difference. As a result of our performance work, we devised hybrid cultural performance nodes that capture and intersect with the somatic experience from other cultural conflicts and scenarios. These nodes not only reflect back on the analysis of the specific historical experience of 1989-90, but also deflect attention from the extraordinary and unique aspects of the historical situation to focus on common, transcultural parameters for the explication of the relationship between somatic experience, the everyday, and social change.

The following video showcases our aesthetic engagement with the interviews on the precariousness of living through 1989 and grasping embodied quotidian experiences of 1989.

The ambivalence of everyday practice in a state crisis. Scene from the performance, Apples © Bodycrisis / IOD (IMAGE 7). Please click on the image to start video sequence of live performance:

TRACK TWO: Beyond the East/West divide

Stereotyping was and still is one of the most pronounced features of German-German memory work of the Wende (see Weinreb on stereotypes of German-German obesity and Klocke on attitudes toward medical care). Discussions of what it means to be East or West German intensified with the advent of the German unification process. Since then, cultural and social stereotyping prolongs the systemic competition that was part and parcel of the Cold War. Stereotypes predominantly derived from and referred to everyday practice: the way Easterners walked and talked, carried and dressed themselves (see Eghigian 37). These tropes remain virulent today and have become the legacy of successive generations. For example, in 2010 the German Federal Court was called upon to decide on the ethnic identity of East Germans after a woman from the East accused a Western employer of ethnic discrimination when he handed back her job application with the negative comment “Minus: Ossi” (Ossi is a derogatory term for Easterner). However, the Court rejected this instance of prejudice. While the ruling can be read as a rejection of lived experience as such, the Federal Court was unable to identify it as an instance of cultural discrimination. On these grounds, goes the legal argument, East Germans would be constituted as an independent ethnic community. We might speculate about the intellectual and material consequences for a revaluation of the Wende process in light of a postcolonial theoretical paradigm.

An East German woman’s application to a Western employer marked down “Minus Ossi” © dpa / n24.de (IMAGE 8):

Interestingly, the women interviewed for the project did not focus on the way in which the all-encompassing rejection of work experience mirrored an overall rejection of the lived experience of GDR citizens that was evident in the Wende process. This rejection ranged from blue collar to academic work in the context of liquidating and converting institutions (Abwicklung), not to mention political bureaucracy. While a minority of women employees were made redundant as early as 1990, the symbolic rejection of quotidian practices that came with ridiculing and mocking their outward appearance and habits seemed to weigh much more at this particular point in their lives. It was within this context that the interviews conducted for the Bodies of Crisis project picked up on stereotyping in relation to how it informed everyday practice. Meta’s account was the most pronounced in identifying a strategy of creative everyday resistance. She remembered engaging in camouflage tactics: “I hated the stereotyping, I really did… I moved to Berlin during that time… I got myself a map of Berlin and pretended to be a tourist, dressing like a stranger.”

Plan for the “New Berlin,” 1997. Map of Berlin with demarcation of Wall © Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin (IMAGE 9):

Against this backdrop, East Berlin occupies a specific place in cultural memory and the practice of cultural stereotyping—where counterculture thrived in the 1980s GDR and where subcultures blossomed in the early 1990s, often nurtured by activists from West Berlin seeking to extend their urban playground in the East. (On West German activists in East Berlin, see Smith in this issue.) East Berlin evolved as a comfort zone of social experimentation, while the new federal states in the East faced the consequences of rapid reorganization in all areas of life: mass unemployment and widespread industrialization, the breakdown of social and cultural services and institutions, rapid demographic declines caused by East-West and urban migration, shrinking cities and deserted rural areas—the post-socialist landscapes of change.

Projecting histories onto bodies © Bodycrisis / IOD (IMAGE 10):

Following Meta’s account of her resistance to stereotyping, we traced the transformation of the Easterner into a tourist or stranger in our performance work. Among many attempts at identifying transcultural nodes of resemblance, an Arab-Israeli member of our group injected her own cultural associations of self-estrangement. In her analogy, Arab women in Israel are the Other of history, confronted with strong social and cultural stereotyping and consequently social discrimination in many aspects of daily life. This stereotyping is nurtured from a multitude of perspectives which preclude women’s accounts of resistance from fitting neatly into normative ethnic narratives of subjugated victims (Aboud 1). As the stereotypes go: in Arab eyes, women are either submissive or deviant daughters within a patriarchal system; in Israeli eyes, they are looked upon as politically and culturally conservative and unmodern, if not a potential threat to society and state control. Women seem constrained to perform within this frame of social stereotyping.

Translating the comfort zone of stereotyping © Bodycrisis / MR (IMAGE 11):

However, Arab-Israeli women can also assume such ascribed social roles and practices to their advantage in order to secure individual agency and room to maneuver in the everyday. Cultural camouflage also plays an important role here. For example, mimicking an Arab girl who does not understand Hebrew may provide protection in challenging public situations. In situations such as these, women utilize the stereotype to reclaim individual agency. Metaphorically speaking, they stretch the veil and turn it back into a piece of fabric they can mold into multiple shapes. The ambivalence of this twofold approach to cultural stereotyping can be usefully applied to the everyday of 1989-90.

Tentatively exploring cultural practices for room to maneuver © Bodycrisis / MR (IMAGE 12):

As such, the continuity of everyday practices provided a comfort zone, helping to preserve a sense of self in the light of intense devaluation of the former life and everyday practices in dominant public discourses. Moreover, we might imagine this comfort zone as an oxygen tent that can conserve everyday practice and that counteracts the suffocating quality of capitalist consumerism and overall change. Prolonged everyday practices thus served as a source of social identification and belonging, but also as cultural capital to secure scarce financial resources. To give but one example, it limited potential excessive buying and experimentation, throwing out all household items in exchange for new Western goods (Bude et al. 31). Everyday practices also formed a cocoon against the bitter reality of social discrimination based on cultural stereotyping, for example, by fostering a disregard for public discourse on GDR politics of the body (e.g., disregard for makeup, mainstream naturism, and sex practices) or deliberately ignoring advertisements that promote specific ideals of beauty.

Lastly, Meta’s account reveals how reticence to assimilate culturally on the level of the everyday and particular practices could be used as a means for self-identification beyond the felt provincialism of German-German stereotyping. Here, everyday practices served as a buffer zone, confronting and undermining expectations and stereotypes of what East Germans are and how they prefer to identify themselves.

Scene from the performance, The map © Bodycrisis / IOD (IMAGE 13) Please click on the image to start video sequence of live performance:

TRACK THREE: Exploring socialist politics of the body

  Jahrhundertschritt Gleichschritt und eigener Weg, Hitlergruß und Proletarierfaust, Militarismus und Widerstand, Diktatur und Freiheit – ein Rückblick auf das 20. Jahrhundert. (Mattheuer 1)

[Step of a century Marching and individual pace, Hitler sign and proletarian fist, Militarism and opposition, dictatorship and freedom – Looking back on the twentieth century.]

  What is left of the liberated woman in German discourses of 1989 relating to embodied quotidian experience? Discussions of socialist politics of the body regarding the everyday remain infrequent and often limited to exploring nudist practices as an exotic but widespread phenomenon in the GDR. Nudist practices often signal a point of reference for cultural differences between East and West and symbolize generally a different image of women in GDR society—the liberated woman.

Jahrhundertschritt by Wolfgang Mattheuer © Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (IMAGE 14):

Naturism may have emerged as a powerful trope of cultural distinction because it was such a pronounced and visible feature of GDR beach culture. As West Germans began to frequent East German beaches and declared nude bathing inappropriate, many East Germans felt annoyed and deprived of a habitual, quotidian practice. Gradually the Eastern nude beaches turned into “textile zones” (i.e., swim suits required) for Western tourists where naturism was prohibited by local authorities. Naturism is also strongly connected to the image of the liberated woman, a trope that was cultivated as a reality in the GDR by authorities and citizens alike and that found its symbolic expression in visualizations of the confident female nude: natural, that is, nonchalantly unshaven and naked. Thus, we can regard the image of the nude bather as a seemingly strong document of performing mainstream East German politics of the body.

East German bathing © Eulenspiegel Verlag (IMAGE 15):

However, while some maintain that naturism is a movement grounded in turn-of-the-century German culture, others show its evolution among independent movements across the globe (BritNat 1). Be that as it may, by the 1940s it had become a cross-cultural phenomenon. In images of an early conference of British naturists, we can discern female presenters and participants.

Participants of the 1941 conference of British Naturists’ Associations © IMAGO / Welt.de (IMAGE 16):

The history of naturism in the GDR is complex, and by no means were the petty-bourgeois fathers of the new socialist German state initially inclined to accept it as a mainstream cultural practice (McLellan 143). Only gradually did it become a mass movement that gained political momentum and emerged as a defining symbolic feature of a society that strove for the liberation of people from all sorts of oppression around the globe.

GDR stamp illustrating allegiance to a global fight against racism incorporating a drawing by John Heartfield © 123RF (IMAGE 17):

By the end of the socialist state, however, mainstream nudism first and foremost stood for the emancipated GDR woman, freed from the patriarchal politics of the gaze.

The fist as a symbol for global feminist struggle © history.org.uk (IMAGE 18):

Correspondingly, West German public discourse since the 1970s has seen a strong correlation between feminism and culturally specific politics of the body related to shaving, rather than a permissive attitude toward displays of nudity. This correlation led to a cultural stereotype that still identifies women as lesbians and feminists on grounds that they employ a more “natural” approach to daily body practices, i.e., no body shaving. The cliché says: feminists are hairy and stink (Eisman 628). Needless to say, we have strong evidence to the contrary, for example, images of a female team from West Germany in the 1972 Olympic Games display unshaven armpits. The life circumstances of Ingrid Meckler-Becker, one of the women portrayed in the photo, suggest a non-correlation between unshaven armpits and feminism: she was a conservative party member, married with children, and a schoolteacher. This cultural stereotype based on daily hygiene has gained new momentum to include East Germans in the post-Wall Berlin Republic. It exemplifies the union of fashion-based everyday practices and time-specific politics of the body at work.

The Olympic team of the FRG, June 1972 © ullstein bild / Tagesspiegel.de (IMAGE 19):

As part of the Bodies of Crisis project, we realized performance research on the relationship between cultural stereotypes rooted in public discourse that links everyday practice to political struggle. The creation of living statues targeted the visualization of the fashion-based, temporal, and cross-cultural elements of symbolism and aimed to account for their situatedness in localized political narratives and cultural discourses. The image shown here depicts the design of a performance response to the research question: how can we ascribe politics of the body their space in situated—that is, local and culturally specific—historiography without unnecessarily exoticizing it?

Scene from performance work, Fist © Bodycrisis / MG (IMAGE 20):

This important question also provided the background for most audience reactions to the project. We performed Bodies of Crisis for festival and academic audiences in London and Coventry (UK) as well as Bremen (Germany) with 30 to 80 people attending at any one time. In different organized feedback formats as well as informal conversations, spectators reacted to aspects of the performance they deemed well-suited (or not) to creating a transcultural understanding of historical experience. German audience members tended to refer to the relationship between memory work and nostalgia, a good reminder of enduring discursive parameters. Some were pleased by the emphasis on quotidian experience, even though it might not lend itself easily to political ideologization. Others were concerned that the performance offered no commentary framing the particular historical experience of GDR women in a socialist dictatorship, since this provided the main material. These viewers wanted to draw out the dangers of nurturing a possibly nostalgic view on the past, in contrast to UK spectators who could identify with images, quotidian behavior, and the depicted conflicts. The latter felt encouraged to become engaged in a transcultural conversation of crisis experience. Yet, since the performance work had been the collective creation of performers from multiple cultural backgrounds, it ceased “belonging” to a single cultural meta-narrative. As such, talking about nostalgia, for example, a main driver for memory discourses of German and anglophone publics, proved meaningless to Arab spectators, who were instead eager to discuss the necessity to re-perform the specific politics of the body on stage, displaying unshaven female nudes.

Scene from performance work, Tub © Bodycrisis / MG (IMAGE 21):

Works Cited

Aboud, Maiada. Stigmata: Marks of Pain in Body Performance by Arab Female Artists. Ph.D. dissertation, Sheffield-Hallam University, 2016.

Bude, Heinz, Thomas Medicus, and Andreas Willisch. Überleben im Umbruch. Am Beispiel Wittenberge. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2012.

BritNat. bn.org.uk, accessed September 30, 2016.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. U of California P, 1984.

Eghigian, Greg. “Homo Munitus: The East German Observed.” Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Life     and Culture, edited by Paul Betts and Kathy Pence. U of Michigan P, 2008, pp. 37-70.

Eisman, April A. “Review of Art of Two Germanys / Cold War Cultures.” German History, vol. 27, no. 4, 2009, pp. 628-30.

Grix, Jonathan. The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR. Macmillan, 2000.

Highmore, Ben, editor. Everyday Life. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Routledge, 2012.

Holm, Andrej, and Armin Kuhn. “Squatting and Urban Renewal: The Interaction of Squatter Movements and Strategies of Urban Restructuring in Berlin.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 35, no. 3, 2011, pp. 644-58.

Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia UP, 2004.

Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. 2. Verso, 1991.

Lindenberger, Thomas. “Eigen-Sinn, Domination and No Resistance.” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, docupedia.de/zg/Eigensinn, accessed October 4, 2016.

Links, Christoph, Sybille Nitsche, and Antje Taffelt, editors. Das Wunderbare Jahr der Anarchie: Von der Kraft des zivilen Ungehorsams 1989/90. Ch. Links Verlag, 2004.

Lüdtke, Alf. The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life. Princeton UP, 1995.

Mattheuer, Wolfgang. Text next to sculpture in Bonn, Haus der Geschichte. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Der_Jahrhundertschritt%22_(Step_of_Century),_Wolfgang_Mattheuer,_1984 -_Bonn.jpg, accessed October 4, 2016.

McLellan, Josie. “Visual Dangers and Delights: Nude Photography in East Germany.” Past & Present, vol. 205, no. 1, 2009, pp. 143-74.

Moran, Joe. “November in Berlin: The End of the Everyday.” History Workshop Journal, vol. 57, no. 1, 2004, pp. 216-34.

Olivo, Christiane. Creating a Democratic Civil Society in Eastern Germany: The Case of the Citizen Movements and Alliance 90. Macmillan, 2001.

Clip and Image Notes

Image 1: “Tasting apples.” Copyright by Bodycrisis, Michael Grass.

Image 2: “November 4, 1989, Berlin, Alexanderplatz.” Copyright by Andreas Kämper, Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, 1989. Available online: revolution89.de/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_O_3.9.1_02_org_8b629c5d5d.jpg

Image 3: “Round Table talks, East Berlin, 1989.” Copyright by dpa / BAKS. Available online:

baks.bund.de/de/aktuelles/20-jahre-runder-tisch-in-polen-und-deutschland-demokratie-und-freiheit-in-europa

Image 4: “Kommune I, the most famous squat in Mainzer Straße, East Berlin 1990.” Copyright by Umbruch Bildarchiv.

Image 5: “Example of an East German supermarket (Kaufhalle) addressing the desires of East Germans in 1990.” Copyright by dpa / MZ.web. Available online: mz-web.de/kultur/ddr-geschichte-streit-um-vergangenheit-entzweit-viele-menschen-3193808

Image 6: “Young East German woman eating.” Copyright by Bodycrisis, private.

Image 7: “The ambivalence of everyday practice in a state crisis. Scene from the performance, Apples.” Copyright by Bodycrisis, Ian O’Donoghue, 2012.

Image 8: “An East German woman’s application to a Western employer marked down “Minus Ossi”.” Copyright by dpa / n24.de. Available online: http://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/media.media.f7378dec-32a6-4b52-b51a-1f3cf99b354c.normalized.jpeg

Image 9: “Plan for the “New Berlin” 1997. Map of Berlin with demarcation of Wall.” Copyright Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin, 1997.

Image 10: “Projecting histories onto bodies.” Copyright by Bodycrisis, Ian O’Donoghue, 2012.

Image 11: “Translating the comfort zone of stereotyping.” Copyright by Bodycrisis, Maria Rankin, 2012.

Image 12: “Tentatively exploring cultural practices for room to maneuver.” Copyright by Bodycrisis, Maria Rankin, 2012.

Image 13: “Scene from the performance, The map.” Copyright by Bodycrisis, Ian O’Donoghue, 2012.

Image 14: “Jahrhundertschritt by Wolfgang Mattheuer.” Copyright Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Available online: zeithistorische-forschungen.de/sites/default/files/medien/static/mattheuer1.jpg

Image 15: “East German bathing.” Copyright by Eulenspiegel Verlag / Welt.de.

Image 16: “Participants of the 1941 conference of British Naturists’ Associations.” Copyright by IMAGO / Welt.de.

Image 17: “GDR stamp illustrating allegiance to a global fight against racism incorporating a drawing by John Heartfield.” Copyright by Nightflyer. Available online: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Stamps_of_Germany_(DDR)_1971,_MiNr_1702.jpg

Image 18: “The fist as a symbol for global feminist struggle.” Copyright by history.org.uk. Available online: goo.gl/images/u9d1uK

Image 19: “The Olympic team of the FRG, June 1972.” Copyright by ullstein bild / Tagesspiegel.de. Available online: tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos85120130902_imago-jpg/8725044/4-format2.jpg

Image 20: “Scene from performance work, Fist.” Copyright by Bodycrisis, Michael Grass, 2012.

Image 21: “Scene from performance work, Tub.” Copyright by Bodycrisis, Michael Grass, 2012.

This article is licensed under a  Creative Commons 4.0 International License although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their right to fair dealing under the Canadian Copyright Act.

Negotiating Memories of Everyday Life during the German Wende  8-1 | Table of Contents | DOI 10.17742/IMAGE.GDR.8-1.2 | HetzerPDF Coming Soon! Abstract | The visual essay is based on research carried out between 2010 and 2015 under the title “Bodies of Crisis—Remembering the German…