Verges: Germanic & Slavic Studies in Review

Introduction

Janine Wulz — 2020-11-10

From Replacement to Elimination

Eliza McClenagan — 2020-11-16

Most scholars agree that the majority of German Protestant churches were silent in response to the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany; however, the so-called “German Christian” movement was different, as it enthusiastically supported the Nazis’ goals, attempting to extract “Jewish” elements from Protestant texts. This article examines the precursors to this movement, looking at to what extent German Protestant theology was radicalized in the years leading up to the Holocaust. I argue that this radicalization of Protestant theology acted as a transition between traditional Protestantism and the later more radical anti-Semitism of the German Christian movement. During the years directly preceding the Holocaust, Protestant theology not only began emphasizing the irrelevance of Judaism, but argued that it was necessary to completely eliminate Jewish influences from Christianity. I approach this topic by situating an analytical overview of theological texts from this time period within the broader historiography on this subject.

Keywords: Anti-Semitism; anti-Judaism; Holocaust; Jewish-Christian relations; Protestantism; theology

Polish Collaboration and Contemporary Memory Polemics

Giorgia Anna Ricciardi — 2020-11-10

In 2018, the term “Polocaust” was used by the Polish PR advisor to describe Polish suffering experienced during the Second World War. To this day, the Holocaust remains a controversial historical topic and traumatic national memory in Poland. The ruling Law and Justice Party continues to polarize Polish-Jewish relations, particularly with the January 2018 law which rebukes anyone who alleges that the Polish state or nation collaborated on any level with the Nazi occupiers of the 1930s and 1940s. This paper analyzes the modern national memory polemics of the Polish state and Holocaust memory transmission today, specifically examining the “Holocaust law”, the narratives surrounding the Jedwabne (1941) and Kielce (1946) pogroms, and provides a reflection on the type of relationship Poland should consider developing with its national memory moving forward.

Keywords: Holocaust, memory studies, Jewish studies, Poland, Jedwabne, Kielce, politics, memory trauma, memory polemics, “Holocaust law”

The Hall of Mirrors and A Landscape of Multiple Layer

Chris "Kikila" Perrin — 2020-11-10

The space created within the “hall of mirrors” that is university organizes knowing into constituent parts, isolating them from their connections until something is knowing intricately yet individually. This paradigm has begun increasingly to draw Indigenous academics and scholarship into its silos where the ways of knowing those academics bring are to be pulled apart and explored, enfranchised within the colonial system until they themselves are colonized. My paper explores how the fundamental basis for knowing in many Indigenous worldviews, relationship, is capable of undermining this pulling apart, creating a resurgent space within the university structure that is counter to the colonial paradigm that informs learning within.

Revisioning ‘The Visionaries’: A Critical Pedagogy of Place, Settler Implication, and Modes of Selected Remembrance & Erasure on Papaschase Cree Land (University of Alberta campus)

M-A Murphy — 2020-11-10

This paper focuses on a critical reading of a monument on Papaschase Cree land (University of Alberta campus) entitled ‘The Visionaries’, which is of two white settler men - Rutherford, who was Alberta’s first premier and who introduced legislation for the campus, and Tory, who was the university’s first president. How does this monument work within memory making to strategically erase and forget? In this case, forget the Papaschase Cree. And how can this erasure be made visible?

After situating this research in a brief history of the Papaschase Cree and Rutherford and Tory, I will analyze the differing ways that Indigenous geographies and settler colonial geographies interpret place and relationships with the land. A critical pedagogy of place, inspired by Jay Johnson, will be used to re-read the monument and look at questions of representation, memory, settler implication and responsibility. My hope is that this analysis can encourage people to examine relationships and geographies of power, place and privilege that envelope monuments and institutions, such as universities, and ask: Who is being remembered and forgotten, and why?

Keywords: Indigenous-settler relations, settler implication, memory, decolonization

Martial woman/chaste woman in Bollywood historical films

Terhi Hannula — 2020-11-16

Bollywood films have been a powerful tool to build the Indian nation, and historical Bollywood films construct the dominant ideology of the time of their making. As in the general ideology of nationalism, gender figures as a specific social construct – muscular nationalism – which implies a gender binary of a martial man, guarding a chaste woman. Gender features strongly in the Hindu nationalistic ideology in recent Indian films. We see strong, female national heroes in films like Padmaavat (2018) and Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi (2019). However martial the female bodies in the films are, they still remain trapped in the construct of muscular nationalism, which posits women in the role of a chaste woman that is a symbol for the nation rather than an agent in herself.

The Dangers of the Internet

Gabrielle Parent — 2020-11-10

In recent years, since the invention of the internet, misogyny and anti-woman rhetoric has significantly evolved and changed. Several anti-woman communities have emerged online, including MRAs (Men’s Rights Advocates), the PUAs (Pickup Artists), MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) and most significantly, incels (involuntary celibates). Incels are the topic of study for this research paper, as they are an understudied online group, as well as the radical sect of the misogynistic communities. This research explores the history of incels, the ways in which the internet acts as a facilitator for incel ideology, provides a digital space for practicing misogyny, and the ways in which incels navigate the online world as a hate group. This paper reveals the role the internet plays for incels and the ways in which the digital rhetoric has translated into far-reaching and real-world violence.

Keywords

Incels, involuntary celibates, misogyny, social media, Internet, Reddit, hate-group, mass shootings, anti-woman, ideology.

Resounding Sound

Esther Hool — 2020-11-10

The repetition of sound patterns on different linguistic levels is a dominant characteristic of the Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry and recalls elements of both folk poetry and avant-garde texts. Tsvetaeva’s German translator Elke Erb not only considers the sonic dimension as being especially important for poetry in general but also emphasizes the complex sound structures in Tsvetaeva's poetry in particular. In this paper, I use Erb’s translation of the poem “Sad” [“The Garden”] to illustrate the ways in which the sonic dimension of the source text and the poem’s references to both the literary avant-garde and folk poetry can be preserved.

As the Eye is Formed: Marie-Gabrielle Capet and the Artist in her Studio

Emma Rodney Drouin — 2020-11-16

Marie-Gabrielle Capet’s painting Studio Scene (Adélaïde Labille-Guiard paints Joseph-Marie Vien, lay invisible for 185 years, between the Paris Salon of 1808 and its purchase in 1993 for the Munich Neue Pinakothek. This paper analyses this complex painting, its meaning and importance to art history, within the context of women’s art education, self-portraiture, and exhibition culture in France during the last quarter of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Capet’s painting documents how a woman in Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century navigated a man’s world and succeeded in putting forward powerful messages on women’s rights to an education within the studio, and equality between the sexes amongst artists. First, Capet’s journey to becoming an established working artist is examined. Then, the Salon of 1808, its politics and the critical reception of Capet’s painting are discussed. Finally, the image of the professional working woman artist and the underlying messages in Capet’s painting are analysed. This paper concludes by discussing the importance of Capet’s painting for art history and its relevance to today’s viewer.