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At the end of World War II the United States became Italy’s indispensable ally, and throughout the Cold War, US-Italian relations remained consistently strong, even accounting for some inevitable ups and downs. In the post-Cold War era, the relationship has remained strong in spite of a number of dramatic changes in both the international system and Italian domestic politics. The rise of populist movements on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years, however, might challenge the centrality of the United States in Italy’s foreign policy.

La Chiesa ricopre ancora un ruolo di primo piano in Polonia per quanto riguarda questioni politico-sociali, mentre la società polacca sembra sempre meno disposta ad accettarne il ruolo di guida, vissuto come un’imposizione anacronistica. In questo articolo si osserva come lo scontro con l’autorità religiosa avvenga di frequente sui palchi dei teatri polacchi, che sono da sempre un luogo privilegiato per riflettere sull’identità del Paese. A fronte di un rapporto conflittuale con l’autorità religiosa, si vuole tuttavia approfondire anche il perdurare di un profondo senso del sacro che è testimonianza di un dialogo ancora vivo con la tradizione romantica e che si esprime nelle forme di un teatro rituale che in Polonia ha dimostrato di essere ancora fecondo., SigMa - Rivista di Letterature comparate, Teatro e Arti dello spettacolo, No 6 (2022)

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Commercial “war” games in a post-1989 setting are popular among a large audience. They offer players an enjoyable gameplay experience, while also referring to contemporary “war” scenarios. As such, they have been studied in several ways, e.g., concerning the “realistic” nature of how they depict warfare. However, little is still known about the way in which the notion of “war” is conceptualized in these games. To fill this gap, this article offers a systematic analysis of the narrative content of 15 popular “war” games set after 1989, as well as their promotional descriptions, as these provide insight into how publishers respond to the interests of players. This is done based on the conceptual framework of conflict/war offered by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP).

Aquest article, amb el que es commemora el número cinquanta de Temps d’Educació, segueix un recorregut doble. En primer lloc, es considera la incidència dels esdeveniments que es van desencadenar el 1989, moment en què va veure la llum la revista, i el que van suposar per a l’educació. El canvi de rumb històric que es va produir en aquesta data, va aprofundir en la mort dels meta-relats anunciada pel postmodernisme, alhora que comportava un repte per a les possibilitats d’un coneixement teòric-normatiu de l’educació. A partir d’aquest repte, la segona part de l’article revisa la situació en la investigació educativa, i advoca, d’acord amb els termes de la filosofia política de John Dewey, per la recreació d’una gran comunitat d’investigació, articulada al voltant de tres criteris amb els que va néixer Temps d’Educació en aquell 1989: pluralisme ideològic, integració de pensament, investigació i acció, i caràcter interdisciplinari del coneixement pedagògic.____________________________________________________________________Cet article, avec lequel commence le numéro 50 de la revue Temps d’Educació, suit un parcours double. En premier lieu, nous considérons l’incidence des événements qui se sont déchaînés en 1989, moment où cette revue vit le jour, et ce que cela supposa pour l’éducation. Le changement d’orientation historique qui se produisit à cette date approfondit la mort des méta-récits annoncée par le postmodernisme, en même temps qu’il comporta un défi pour les possibilités d’une connaissance théorico-normative de l’éducation. À partir de ce défi, la deuxième partie de l’article révise la situation dans la recherche éducative, et se fait l’avocat, conformément aux termes de la philosophie politique de John Dewey, de la recréation d’une grande communauté de recherche, articulée autour de trois critères avec lesquels naquit Temps d’Educació en 1989 : pluralisme idéologique, intégration de pensée, de recherche et d’action, et caractère interdisciplinaire de la connaissance pédagogique., To celebrate the fiftieth issue of Temps d’Educació, this article has two subjects. First, it examines the events that led to the creation of the journal in 1989 and its effects on the world of education. The changes in the course of history experienced in that year were especially evidenced in the death of the meta-narratives heralded by the postmodernists and, at the same time, in the challenge faced by educators and academics to establish a theoretical and normative explanation of education. Having considered this challenge, the article then reviews the current state of research on education and proposes, in line with John Dewey’s political philosophy, that we should recreate a broader research community founded on the three pillars that originally constituted Temps d’Educació in 1989: ideological pluralism; the integration of thought, research and action; and the interdisciplinary character of pedagogical knowledge., Esta contribución, con la que celebramos el número cincuenta de Temps d’Educació, sigue un doble recorrido. En primer lugar, considera el acicate que los acontecimientos que afloraron en el año 1989, en el que vio la luz la revista, supusieron para la educación. El cambio de rumbo histórico que se produjo en esa fecha, ahondó en la muerte de los metarrelatos anunciada por el postmodernismo, retando las posibilidades de un conocimiento teórico normativo de la educación. A partir de este reto, la segunda parte del artículo repasa la situación en la investigación educativa, y aboga, en los términos de la filosofía política de John Dewey, por la recreación de una gran comunidad de investigación, articulada en torno a tres criterios con los que nació Temps d’Educació en aquel 1989: pluralismo ideológico; integración de pensamiento, investigación y acción, y carácter interdisciplinar del conocimiento pedagógico.

INTRODUCTION The tradition of the 1956 Hungarian revolution played a major role in undermining the legitimacy of the one-party state in 1988–89. However, the post-mortem victory of Imre Nagy over János Kádár, the glorious revival of the tradition of the revolution, coincided with the dissolution of the very same tradition. Recently, as the 50th anniversary of the revolution approached, the memory and celebration of 1956 became the most controversial historical and ideological issue in the Hun...

THE PUBLIC INTEREST. DO WE HAVE A DUTY? The results of a poll recently published in Romania indicated that 50 % of the population is not interested in understanding the activities of the political police under the communist regime. The poll also showed that 67 % do not want to find out if somebody in their family worked for the Securitate. These figures only confirm what we already knew: there is an obvious refusal to take responsibility for the criminal activities of the regime. More than ha...

INTRODUCTION This piece is intended as a contribution to the classic debate over the relationship between morality and politics. On a general level, it deals with the intriguing way in which this relationship has evolved in the contemporary era especially since 1989 in former communist countries, and with the profound manner in which this evolving relationship is bound up with the perception of the recent, communist past. In my opinion, simultaneous reflection on morality and politics should ...

I. From a certain point of view one may risk the thesis that the current discussion regarding historical policy is the third great debate among historians since Poland regained independence at the turn of the 1980s and the 1990s. The first debate is usually called “the discussion about the Polish People’s Republic (PRL).” It started when the communist system collapsed and continues more or less intensely today. It was and still is a mixture of cognitive, ideological, and ethical themes. From ...

While the very first non-communist government in Polish post-war history “demonstrated the truism that only revolutionaries are able to impose austerity,” its executives declared that austerity measures would bring fruits only when all links with the past were broken. The Prime Minister announced in his inaugural speech the need to draw a “bold line” between the inglorious past and the brighter future, and the technocratic finance minister justified the drastic dismantling of socialist indust...

Exhibitions on the communist past are scarce in Romanian museums. In contrast to this scarcity, the commemoration of the “communist tragedy” through memorials, monuments and the hybrid species of memorial-museum is disproportionately present. Only a very skilled and determined museumgoer will be able to discover the few places where aspects of the communist past are permanently exhibited in Romanian museums. In Bucharest, the visitor should be prepared to go underground to find the only perma...

Eva Hahn was a research fellow at the Collegium Carolinum in Munich until 1999. Since then she has worked as an independent historian in Oldenburg, Germany. She is the author of numerous studies on the intellectual history of Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, see http://www.bohemistik.de/evahahn. Hans Henning Hahn is Professor of East European History at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. He specializes in Polish and Czech history, concentrating on historical researc...

Contrary to radical postmodern approaches, there are limits to the representations of the past. Even if one subscribes to the trend which sends the traditional distinctions between facts and values, description and interpretation, to the junkyard of historiography, several rather lively “reality checks” ought to be taken into account, both within the craft and outside it. However, one might embrace the postmodern argumentation insofar as it indicates the fuzziness of the distinction between s...

Since the collapse of Communism, three major museums dealing with the recent past have been established in the capital cities of the Baltic states. Two of these—the Museum of Occupations (Tallinn, Estonia, established in 2003) and The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia (Riga, 1993)— linked the Nazi and Soviet periods together to present a history of continuous national subjugation and suffering at the hands of foreign powers, lasting from 1940 to 1991. The third—the Museum of Genocide Victims...

Rethinking the Soviet period has become one of the central problems involved in constructing a new model of collective memory in Ukraine within the framework of nationalized history. In contrast to more remote historical periods, the rethinking and rewriting of the Soviet past has had and continues to have special meaning in present-day historical mythology. First, the social and political meaning of that “past” has been actualized in the present; it has been used quite straightforwardly in p...

How do museums and cinema shape the image of the Communist past in today’s Central and Eastern Europe? This volume is the first systematic analysis of how visual techniques are used to understand and put into context the former regimes. After history “ended” in the Eastern Bloc in 1989, museums and other memorials mushroomed all over the region. These efforts tried both to explain the meaning of this lost history, as well as to shape public opinion on their society’s shared post-war heritage. Museums and films made political use of recollections of the recent past, and employed selected museum, memorial, and media tools and tactics to make its political intent historically credible. Thirteen essays from scholars around the region take a fresh look at the subject as they address the strategies of fashioning popular perceptions of the recent past. "Books on the CEE transformations that deal with media and popular cultures should be welcomed. Past for the Eyes belongs to this extraordinary breed. The book is devoted to the visual representations of the socialist / communist past and the forms they took. The interconnected processes of visualization of the past, and the collective memory sedimentation are the main focus. The book brings together perspectives of linked but still distinctive ways of enquiry: visual studies, cultural studies, area studies, museum studies and contemporary history with its passion for ethnography and oral evidence.

Since the late 1980s, when the changes in Eastern and Central Europe seemed overwhelming and access to previously restricted information grew exponentially, this region could safely claim an unpredictable past. Today, almost two decades after the fall of communist regimes, scholars working on the recent past are paradoxically challenged by the abundance of memory and the variety of witnesses’ accounts, which confront the professional historical narrative with the simple claim “I was there and...

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.

One can look back at the footprints left in the sandand see them as a road.Zygmunt Bauman, From Pilgrim to Tourist From a growing temporal distance, the Soviet historical “episode” seems to entail an emphatic beginning and a somewhat less spectacular but equally distinguishable end. The present article sets out to review the films of the last twenty years dealing with the Soviet period. Despite the declared break with the past, characteristic of transitional societies, a closer look at the so...

More than fifteen years have passed since the change of the political regime in Eastern Europe, but the countries of the former Soviet bloc still face the fundamental challenge of how to deal with the events of their recent past, how to come to terms with the legacy of Socialism and its local versions. There are countless ways of approaching these issues, but I will focus on the possibilities of interpretation provided by creative documentaries. The material for my analysis is Péter Forgács’s...

The debate between historians and revisionists such as Holocaust deniers rests on a number of issues in epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired: What is historical knowledge? How can we know if we possess the historical truth? What is the difference between a historiography that merely sympathizes with bizarre extremist politics and revisionist historiography that also fabricates misrepresentations of the past? Historiography, our ...

THE UNFINISHED PRESENT: INTERPRETATIVE CONFLICTS OF MEMORY AND HISTORY “Budapest is a city without time. If you visit here, you will not feel that you are in the nineties. (…) Here the politicians want to win World War I in Parliament.” This remark by Jenő Menyhart, underground musician and emblematic figure of the 1980s in Hungary, uttered in his subjective, sarcastic style, explicates the symbolic battle for possession of the past in post-socialist Hungary. Labeling the historical conscious...

Péter Apor (b. 1971) is a research fellow at Pasts Inc., Center for Historical Studies at the Central European University. His dissertation on communist representations of history in Hungary was defended at the European University Institute in Florence in 2002. His main research themes include the politics of history and memory, popular culture, and the history of historiography. Gabriela Cristea (b. 1980) is a research assistant at the Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest. She received her MA ...

“My views are quite explicitly stated: the Holocaust was the most extreme atrocity in human history, and we lose our humanity if we are even willing to enter the arena of debate with those who seek to deny or underplay Nazi crimes.” Noam Chomsky’s 1992 assertion would not be challenged openly in Germany today. However, even though the uniqueness of the Holocaust remains undisputed, comparisons between Nazi crimes and supposedly similar crimes allegedly committed by the Allies after World War ...

OVERVIEW Despite the fact that almost 18 years have lapsed since the Changes in East Central Europe, several “white spaces” (Jan Křen) in contemporary Czech (and Czechoslovak) history are yet to be reassessed objectively by historians. “Historical revisionism” has in many respects obscured understanding of several key events in 20th-century history (most notably concerning ethnic cleansing). However, when considering other significant historical periods in Czechoslovak national history specif...

INTRODUCTION: THE RISE OF ANTI-FASCIST SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE GDR AFTER 1949 After the end of World War II the Allies and the Germans themselves had to solve the questions of how to safeguard freedom and democracy, and how to deal with the heritage and moral burden of National Socialism, the Holocaust, and an unbelievable scale of devastation throughout Europe. While the Western parts of Germany soon found encouraging support in their Western Allies, the Soviet occupied zone (SBZ) was in a...

The “Velvet Revolution” in November 1989 brought about enormous changes in the political and social environment: the communist -regime was abolished and after forty-one years democracy was reestablished in Czechoslovakia. In art, the most important change brought by the Revolution was the end of censorship. Since 1989 artists have been allowed to do as they wish—as long as they can find the funding. Film in socialism was funded exclusively by the state, but since about 1990 the state has not ...

The archival reading room at Matica slovenská (the Slovak Cultural Organization) closed early 7 November 1973. Researchers were asked to leave so that Matica’s employees could join the march to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The employees were in a gay mood as they left, laughing and talking to one another. They were manda-tory volunteers to celebrate an event that was said to have set off a wave of self-determination that extended into Slovakia. Throughout that day an...

The visual record of Hungary’s transition to democracy is marked with comfortably familiar (if not canonical) images of key events and personalities. No visual representation of the Hungarian transition which takes its topic and itself seriously is complete without the black-and-white film of Imre Nagy, the prime minister of the 1956 revolt, listening to his death sentence, followed by the images of the immense crowd at his reburial ceremony before the catafalque on Heroes’ Square. The story ...