Search results for ""Author Thomas Cooper""

Hungarian Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.” His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical. In The Holocaust as Culture,Kertész recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self. The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.

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After World War II, a new community of elite emerged in Hungary, in spite of the communist principles espoused by the government. In Luxury and the Ruling Elite in Socialist Hungary, György Majtényi allows us a peek inside their affluence.Majtényi exposes the lavish standard of living that the higher echelon enjoyed, complete with pools, Persian rugs, extravagant furniture, servants, and groundskeepers. They shopped in private stores stocked with expensive meats and tropical fruits just for them. They benefited from access to everything from books, telephone lines, and international travel to hunting grounds, soccer games, and even the choicest cemetery plots. But Majtényi also reveals the underbelly of such society, particularly how these privileges were used as a way of maintaining power, initiating or denying entry to party members, and strengthening the very hierarchies that communism promised to abolish.Taking readers on a fascinating and often surprising look inside the manor homes and vacation villas of wealthy post–World War II Hungarians, Majtényi offers fresh insight into the realities of patriarchy, loyalty, gender, and class within the communist regime.

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The Hungarian city of Sztálinváros, or "Stalin-City," was intended to be the paradigmatic urban community of the new communist society in the 1950s. In Stalinism Reloaded, Sándor Horváth explores how Stalin-City and the socialist regime were built and stabilized not only by the state but also by the people who came there with hope for a better future. By focusing on the everyday experiences of citizens, Horváth considers the contradictions in the Stalinist policies and the strategies these bricklayers, bureaucrats, shop girls, and even children put in place in order to cope with and shape the expectations of the state. Stalinism Reloaded reveals how the state influenced marriage patterns, family structure, and gender relations. While the devastating effects of this regime are considered, a convincing case is made that ordinary citizens had significant agency in shaping the political policies that governed them.

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As the sun set on June 8, 1969, a group of teenagers gathered near a massive tree in a main square of Budapest to mourn the untimely death of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. By the end of the evening, sirens blared, teens were interrogated, and the myth of the most notorious juvenile gang in Budapest was born. The origin of the Great Tree Gang became an elaborately cultivated morality tale of the dangers posed by allegedly rebellious youths to the conformity of communist communities. In time, governments across Cold War Europe manufactured similar stories about the threats posed by groups of unruly adolescents. In Children of Communism, Sándor Horváth explores this youth counterculture in the Eastern Bloc, how young people there imagined the West, and why this generation proved so crucial to communist identity politics. He not only reveals how communism shaped youth culture, but also how young people shaped official policy.A fascinating read on the power of youth protest, Children of Communism shows what life was like for the first generation to have been born under communism and how one evening spent grieving rock and roll under a tree forever changed lives.

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As the sun set on June 8, 1969, a group of teenagers gathered near a massive tree in a main square of Budapest to mourn the untimely death of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. By the end of the evening, sirens blared, teens were interrogated, and the myth of the most notorious juvenile gang in Budapest was born. The origin of the Great Tree Gang became an elaborately cultivated morality tale of the dangers posed by allegedly rebellious youths to the conformity of communist communities. In time, governments across Cold War Europe manufactured similar stories about the threats posed by groups of unruly adolescents. In Children of Communism, Sándor Horváth explores this youth counterculture in the Eastern Bloc, how young people there imagined the West, and why this generation proved so crucial to communist identity politics. He not only reveals how communism shaped youth culture, but also how young people shaped official policy.A fascinating read on the power of youth protest, Children of Communism shows what life was like for the first generation to have been born under communism and how one evening spent grieving rock and roll under a tree forever changed lives.

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After World War II, a new community of elite emerged in Hungary, in spite of the communist principles espoused by the government. In Luxury and the Ruling Elite in Socialist Hungary, György Majtényi allows us a peek inside their affluence.Majtényi exposes the lavish standard of living that the higher echelon enjoyed, complete with pools, Persian rugs, extravagant furniture, servants, and groundskeepers. They shopped in private stores stocked with expensive meats and tropical fruits just for them. They benefited from access to everything from books, telephone lines, and international travel to hunting grounds, soccer games, and even the choicest cemetery plots. But Majtényi also reveals the underbelly of such society, particularly how these privileges were used as a way of maintaining power, initiating or denying entry to party members, and strengthening the very hierarchies that communism promised to abolish.Taking readers on a fascinating and often surprising look inside the manor homes and vacation villas of wealthy post–World War II Hungarians, Majtényi offers fresh insight into the realities of patriarchy, loyalty, gender, and class within the communist regime.

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An unexpected, exciting work from one of the most protean writers ever to win the Nobel Prize. To create the poems in this collection, Herta Müller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in the form of a collage. Father’s on the Phone with the Flies presents seventy-three of Müller’s collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-color reproductions of the originals. Müller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity, and startling, surreal metaphors—the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in color, font, and type size. Liberating words from conformity and coercion, Müller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience.

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The Hungarian city of Sztálinváros, or "Stalin-City," was intended to be the paradigmatic urban community of the new communist society in the 1950s. In Stalinism Reloaded, Sándor Horváth explores how Stalin-City and the socialist regime were built and stabilized not only by the state but also by the people who came there with hope for a better future. By focusing on the everyday experiences of citizens, Horváth considers the contradictions in the Stalinist policies and the strategies these bricklayers, bureaucrats, shop girls, and even children put in place in order to cope with and shape the expectations of the state. Stalinism Reloaded reveals how the state influenced marriage patterns, family structure, and gender relations. While the devastating effects of this regime are considered, a convincing case is made that ordinary citizens had significant agency in shaping the political policies that governed them.

Read more less