Potter’s Wheel in the Iron Age in Central Europe: Process or Product Innovation?

The use of a rotational device for forming ceramic objects represents a fundamental innovation in pottery technology. This work addresses aspects of the transmission of this technological innovation on the basis of technological and provenance analysis of Iron Age pottery in a selected region of Eastern Bohemia. The possible trajectories of the innovative process are approximated specifically through the polarities between product and process innovation and transmission of cultural traits in open and closed learning networks. Apart from standard methods of petrographic and geochemical analysis, this analysis employs innovative methodology for identification of pottery-forming techniques. The results indicate the effects of various mechanisms of cultural transmission which shaped the evolution of techniques in the Iron Age society. The technological changes can be explained by shifting accents on product and process performance characteristics in changing selective environments.     

From ‘flight and expulsion’ to migration: contextualizing German victims of forced migration

Abstract

The forced migration of twelve million Germans was central to German memory after 1945, and reflects fundamental changes in remembering the Second World War, that is, refocusing from German victims, such as expellees, to the victims of Germany in the Holocaust. Within this discourse, ‘flight and expulsion’ demonstrates Germany’s entangledness with her eastern neighbours and is turned into a European and transnational mnemonic discourse with the debates over a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ in the 2000s. This article studies ‘flight and expulsion’ between two mnemonic patterns, that is, the loss of the homeland against migration. After the collective imagination of a lost homeland in the east, the emerging Holocaust memory both marginalized ‘flight and expulsion’ in the late 1970s and introduced new patterns of commemoration. These patterns enabled a turn toward individual victimhood and the decontextualization of ‘flight and expulsion’ from the Second World War. The ‘Centre against Expulsions’ project demonstrates the coordination of the German example with other cases of forced migration and the claim for a universal commemoration of past expulsion and the condemnation of any future attempts. The case of Syrian civil-war refugees, however, reveals that such forms of decontextualization only in part transfer into humanitarian imperatives.     

英国华侨社团的历史演变与当代华人社会的转型

历史上英国华侨社团是维系当地华人社会的支柱。巴黎和会、华盛顿会议前后, 受列强出卖中国利益的冲击, 英国华侨在民族主义风潮的影响下掀起了组建社团的高潮。抗日战争中, 华侨社团也积极支持了祖国的抗日运动。二战后, 土生华人的成长及香港新界移民改变了旅英华人的构成, 传统宗亲会、同乡会得以复苏, 同时出现了专业性社团、跨国性社团联合及华人社区中心。在当今英国政府的多元文化政策下, 部分华人社团获得新的发展空间, 部分社团却随着第二代华人的本土化而面临着衰落。     

Promise and challenge of European Memory

Abstract

This introduction identifies the ubiquitous, but controversial, public and academic debate on European Memory as a key for articulating assumptions and expectations about an enhanced process of European integration via references to Europe’s past. The authors outline contradictions that constitute this discourse by pointing to its inherently conflictive potential and carve out the implicit and explicit normative assumptions of European Memory. Albeit acknowledging differences in memories of twentieth-century mass violence, references to European Memory promise to overcome the conflicts inherent in the historical experiences of such violence. Confronting this bias, this special issue postulates an understanding of European Memory as a discursive reality rather than a normative ideal. European Memory becomes manifest whenever actors refer to ‘Europe’ in their interpretations of the past. Further developing an understanding of ‘entangled memory’, the contributions of this special issue share a common interest in the universalizing potential of references to European Memory. They demonstrate how mnemonic practices may lose contextual references and link or even transfer to other memories in order to articulate claims of relevance on a European level.     

'Is he still alive, or long since dead?': Loss, Absence and Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945-1956

This article uses the search for the ‘missing’ Wehrmachtsoldiers in the 1950s as a prism through which to explore theways in which we might insert the notion of trauma into ourunderstanding of West Germany's status as a postwar society.In seeking to point out the connections between the ways inwhich ‘ordinary Germans’ suffered during and afterthe war on the one hand, and the inability of post-war WestGerman society to ‘confront’ the crimes of the paston the other, it argues that the traumatizing impact of warhas to be considered alongside the ideological and politicalnecessities of the Cold War and reconstruction if we are tounderstand why West German society failed to place the Holocaustat the centre of its memorial culture in the immediate post-waryears. Moreover, in pointing to the Lutheran church as a keysite of memorial politics in the post-war era, it argues forthe integration of a study of religious narratives, mentalitiesand discourses into an understanding of the evolution of thecommemorative practices of the 1950s which has hitherto beenshaped by an excessively one-sided focus on secular sites andnarratives.