The Emancipation 'Pantheon of Heroes' in the German-Jewish Public Memory in the 1930s

The decline of the emancipation of the German Jews in the early1930s and its ending under the Nazi regime motivated their variousspokesmen to reevaluate their past, by discussing the heritageof the major emancipation heroes. Based mostly on the Jewishpress, which was quite free to handle an internal Jewish dialogueuntil 1938, the article examines the representations of MosesMendelssohn, David Friedländer, Rahel Varnhagen, HeinrichHeine and Gabriel Riesser in the Jewish public of this time.It demonstrates how spokesmen of the major German-Jewish politicalcamps—the liberals, the Zionists and the Orthodox—referredto these figures in different ways in their effort to createa useful past for their readers. Thus, whereas radical Zionistand Orthodox Jews presented Mendelssohn's legacy as the beginningof the process of assimilation which was doomed to fail, others,who were mostly but not only liberals, portrayed a much morepositive Mendelssohn. For them, Mendelssohn did not demonstratethe roots of the 1930s German-Jewish decline, but rather thesources of its potential recovery. Friedländer, Varnhagenand Heine were frequently mentioned as betrayers of Jewish honour,but certain spokesmen referred to them differently. Riesser,whose nineteenth-century heroic struggle for emancipation seemedin the 1930s to be a total failure, was still embraced by certainJewish liberals as a hero who did the best for his time. Thearticle also shows how the escalation of the late 1930s moderatedinternal Jewish historical polemics, almost creating a Jewishconsensus about the past.     

Telling Stories: The Mycenaean Origins of the Philistines

The story of the Philistines as Mycenaean or Aegean migrants, refugees who fled the Aegean after the collapse of the palace societies c.1200 BC, bringing an Aegean culture and practices to the Eastern Mediterranean, is well known. Accepted as essentially true by some, yet rejected as little more than a modern myth by others, the migration narrative retains a central place in the archaeology and historiography of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age (LBA/EIA). In recent years, and despite an increasingly shaky theoretical basis, the migration hypothesis has nevertheless seemed to drown out other interpretations and characterizations of the period, claiming a normative position that is undeserved. In this paper I explore the continuing power of this nineteenth century narrative and seek to show why it is less convincing than its prominent status would suggest.     

Western utopianism/dystopianism and the political mediocrity of critical urban research

This paper seeks to summarise the interplay between utopian and dystopian thinking throughout the twentieth century with a particular focus on the city. The gradually shrinking appeal of the socialist utopia and its replacement with the globalised free–market as a 'revanchist utopia' left socialist utopian thinking in a state of disarray towards the end of the previous century. Utopian thinking, both as a literary and political genre has been rendered marginal in contemporary political practices. Urban dystopia, or 'Stadtschmerz', is now prevalent in critical Western thinking about city and society. It is concluded that the declining political impact of critical urban research is caused partly by its lack of engagement with crafting imaginative alternative futures for the city. The works by Sennett, Sandercock and the Situationists, among others, may contain elements to reverse the current utopian malaise in urban research.     

Late Holocene vegetation and palaeoenvironmental history of the Dunadd area,Argyll, Scotland: chronology of events

This paper focuses on the chronology and environmental significance of a sediment sequence from an alluvial locality in the vicinity of the historic site of Dunadd, Scotland. It outlines the rationale and statistical validity of an age model derived for a sequence of floodplain sediments from which detailed pollen-stratigraphical and plant macrofossil records have been derived. A series of radiocarbon dates are calibrated using a Bayesian modelling approach, the results of which can be refined by incorporating two independent age estimates based on tephra layers of known age. Analysis of the entire floodplain sequence for volcanic glass shards revealed the presence of discrete but geochemically very similar tephra layers within the upper (late Holocene) part of the sequence. Comparison with published geochemical data obtained from Icelandic tephras of historical age indicates strong statistical correlations with the Hekla 1947 AD and Hekla 1510 AD. While the Hekla 1510 AD tephra has previously been reported from sites within Britain and Ireland, the Dunadd sequence affords the first record of the Hekla 1947 AD tephra layer within Scotland. When the ages and stratigraphic positions of both tephra layers are incorporated into the Bayesian age model, an overall centennial to decadal precision for the late Holocene is achieved, with archaeological and environmental transitions discriminated with highest-likelihood age uncertainty ranges of 20–50 years at 95% confidence. The local environmental record is assessed in the light of this new chronological framework: the data support previously reported proposals for two periods of significant climatic deterioration with increased wetness, the first during the early Medieval period and the second during the late 16th and 17th centuries AD.     

I Will Follow You into the Dark: Death and Emotion in a Mycenaean Royal Funeral

Despite many years of intensive research into burial and funeral practices in Late Bronze Age (LBA) Greece, emotion remains largely absent from the discussion. Yet death and the emotions it provoked would have been familiar aspects of daily life in Mycenaean Greece. The dead had to be dealt with and moved on through various rites until they became a safe part of the landscape and memory of individuals and communities. In addition to anthropological and psychological research on death and grieving, we have several categories of evidence that can allow us a glimpse of the emotional world of death in LBA Greece: the Homeric poems the Iliad and Odyssey, iconographical representations of death, funeral practices and mourning, and the archaeological material itself – the tombs and offerings. In this paper, I introduce the various categories of evidence and draw on them to support an imaginative reconstruction of an event that happened, but which is not recorded in any historical sources – the death and burial of a great king of Mycenae. I argue that using emotion as a lens through which to view the evidence can sometimes allow deeper interpretation and enable fuller historical reconstructions of lived lives and experiences.