Presents works by more than thirty artists from twenty countries across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, interspersed with pieces by Westerners grappling with the facts and the fictions of life under Communism.

The universe is expanding, the world has gone global, and the US has launched a crusade to export the universal right to democracy to every part of the world. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the concept of universality is making a remarkable comeback in aesthetic and political theory. The meaning of the world, however, seems more contested than ever. Some denounce it as the ideological guise of particular interests, others as the conceptual equivalent of totalitarianism. But a growing number maintain that universality is an indispensable notion for any genuinely critical aesthetics and politics. Confronting Universalites consists of 12 contributors that examine how contemporary works of art in different media and genres influence, shape, or confront the political realm in both theory and practice by way of the universal. The topics of the essays include depictions of German unification, identity politics of aesthetic taste, contemporary uses of van Gogh, globalized photography, the infamous Danish cartoons, iconic architecture, cinematic representations of migration, the speeches of Nicolas Sarkozy and the interventions of contemporary art in the war in Afghanistan. From various theoretical points of departure, they all demonstrate the importance of the universal in the description of political aesthetic practice in a globalising world.

What happens when an entire modern state's material culture becomes abruptly obsolete? How do ordinary people encounter what remains? In this ethnography, Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from that vanished socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory. What Remains traces the unsettling effects of these unmoored artifacts on the German present, arguing for a rethinking of the role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts. Bach juxtaposes four sites where the stakes of the everyday appear: products commodified as nostalgia, amateur museums dedicated to collecting everyday life under socialism, the "people's palace" that captured the national imagination through its destruction, and the feared and fetishized Berlin Wall. Moving from the local, the intimate, and the small to the national, the impersonal, and the large, this book's interpenetrating chapters show the unexpected social and political force of the ordinary in the production of memory. What Remains offers a unique vantage point on the workings of the everyday in situations of radical discontinuity, contributing to new understandings of postsocialism and the intricate intersection of material remains and memory.

In her long career, Ugresic has published several novels (e.g., The Ministry of Pain), but she made her name with her essay collections, which have caused controversy and earned her the admiration of writers and critics abroad. In these latest musings, written over the course of several years, Ugresic leaves no stone unturned and no thought contained, doing what she does best: writing about the human condition through her own experience. Refusing to establish a central theme, she touches upon a wide range of topics: the paradox of multiculturalism, metaphors as our "defense against nightmares," the eerie similarities between capitalism and communism, and ways in which we try to rise hopelessly above our less-than-perfect existence. Along the way, she pays homage to the works of literature that have influenced her own creative process, in an effort to pay "a symbolic literary tax on narcissim" because "writing is not the humblest of vocations." Perhaps not, but Ugresic certainly knows how to balance being a critic with being criticized. Recommended for all libraries collecting cultural criticism.--Mirela Roncevic, Library Journal Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bringing together the work of an array of North American and European scholars, this collection highlights a previously unexamined area within global comics studies. It analyses comics from countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain like East Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine, given their shared history of WWII and communism. In addition to situating these graphic narratives in their national and subnational contexts, Comics of the New Europe pays particular attention to transnational connections along the common themes of nostalgia, memoir, and life under communism. The essays offer insights into a new generation of European cartoonists that looks forward, inspired and informed by traditions from Franco-Belgian and American comics, and back, as they use the medium of comics to reexamine and reevaluate not only their national pasts and respective comics traditions but also their own post-1989 identities and experiences.

Historical revisionism, far from being restricted to small groups of ‘negationists,’ has galvanized debates in the realm of recent history. The studies in this book range from general accounts of the background of recent historical revisionism to focused analyses of particular debates or social-cultural phenomena in individual Central European countries, from Germany to Ukraine and Estonia. Where is the borderline between legitimate re-examination of historical interpretations and attempts to rewrite history in a politically motivated way that downgrades or denies essential historical facts? How do the traditional ‘national historical narratives’ react to the ‘spill-over’ of international and political controversies into their ‘sphere of influence’? Technological progress, along with the overall social and cultural decentralization shatters the old hierarchies of academic historical knowledge under the banner of culture of memory, and breeds an unequalled democratization in historical representation. This book offers a unique approach based on the provocative and instigating intersection of scholarly research, its political appropriations, and social reflection from a representative sample of Central and East European countries.

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: The speed with which the Berlin Wall fell on the 9 November 1989 was both surprising and inspiring. No longer would the people of East Germany be held captive under a repressive regime that deprived them, not only of western commodities, but of the most fundamental of human needs, the freedom to thrive. On 18 May 1990, politicians from the East and West signed a treaty creating an economic and social union. This was followed by the Treaty of Unification on 31 August 1990. The dream of one Germany had become a reality. It was now up to the German people to build a unified economy, a task that posed difficult questions most importantly, what to do with the state owned businesses that comprised the former GDR (German Democratic Republic). The former states of the GDR contain some of the highest growth regions in Europe. Despite this, there is social instability and high unemployment. As of October 2003, the unemployment rate in East Germany was 17.3% compared with 8.0% for the West, and 8.1% for the European Union. While there is a necessity to improve the situation for all of Germany, many hurdles remain. In the case of unified Germany, Deutschland einig Vaterland is more than a slogan of unity; it is a statement for economic survival. The aim of this thesis will be to explore the following questions: How did three East German companies the Rotkäppchen sparkling wine company, the Florena cosmetics company, and the Fit detergent company survive and even thrive after reunification? How did the Treuhand Anstalt (THA), or Trust Agency, help these companies, and what affect has this had on the German economy? What were some peripheral reasons for economic survival, including government incentives, global economic expansion during the 1990s, and ostalgia? What were some East German companies that did not survive, and why did they fail when others succeeded? How could these survival strategies be applied to other companies in other nations and what are the lessons for the future? In answering these questions, it will be necessary to explore the history, not only of the three companies, Rotkäppchen, Florena, and Fit, but also of the East German market. Due to the complexity of this topic, however, this thesis will remain focused on three main survival strategies. These will include how finding a niche market, using mergers and acquisitions, and using company and product diversification have helped companies [...]