Memory, Forgetting, and the Bluest Kind of Blue

Bucharest Reflections on the 20th Century

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington Memory, Forgetting, and the Bluest Kind of Blue: Bucharest Reflections on the 20th Century I am writing this while drinking my second cup of strong cappuccino on the veranda of Bon Pain, a wonderful small French patisserie in ...
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Memory, Forgetting, and the Bluest Kind of Blue

Before the War Ended

A short story by Kay Hoff

Kay Hoff is a German author born in 1924 in Neustadt/Holstein, a town in northern Germany by the Baltic Sea. In 1941, when he was seventeen, Kay and all fifteen of his classmates voluntarily applied to join the army just six months before they graduated from high school. Due to ...
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Manufacturing Victory

A review essay on A. J. Blaime’s The Arsenal of Democracy

These days people generally think of Detroit -- with its vast expanses of abandoned real estate that have given rise to the photographic genre known as ruins porn -- as the place where modernity went to die. But for a good chunk of the twentieth century, Detroit was the ...

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Manufacturing Victory

The War on Fascism

By my title,“The War on Fascism,” I do not mean the war between the US, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and imperial Japan on the other, the war that took place between 1939 and 1945. Rather I mean an unspoken ...

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The War on Fascism

Sleepwalking into the Future? II

Is there a European memory creating a sense of belonging and encouraging civic participation?

This is the prepared text of a contribution to a conference of the Europe for Citizens Forum in Brussels on January 28th, 2014.

The title of this discussion employs the metaphors that describe walking into the calamity of WWI, as framing both the ways Europeans remember the 20th century, and even ...

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Sleepwalking into the Future? II

Sleepwalking into the Future?

Memory and civic participation in Europe: East, West, North and South

This is the prepared text of a contribution to a conference of the Europe for Citizens Forum in Brussels on January 28th, 2014. Irit Dekel, Anna Lisa Tota and Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, also contributed to the Forum. Their texts are forthcoming.

It is an honour to reflect on European remembrance ...

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Sleepwalking into the Future?

Torture and Dignity

This lecture to the New School's General Seminar was originally published on the above date. Given the recent revelations concerning the CIA's program of torture, we are highlighting Bernstein's reflections today, Dec. 12, 2014. -J.G.

I. The Abolition of Torture

Human beings are the sorts of being who can undergo devastation: they ...

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Thought-Defying Evil

In the summer of 1945 Melvin Lasky, who was stationed in Germany with the American occupation forces, visited Karl Jaspers. Lasky, a correspondent for the Partisan review, mentioned the name of Hannah Arendt. Jaspers had lost contact with Arendt since 1938 and was stunned to discover that she was still ...

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