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German industrialization in the nineteenth century had brought forward a variety of conflicting ideas when it came to the agrarian community. One of them was the agrarian romantic movement led by Adam Műller, who feared the loss of the traditional German peasant. Műller influenced Reichdeutsche Richard Walther Darré, who argued that large cities were the downfall of the German people and that only a healthy peasant stock would be able to ‘save' Germany. Under Darré's definition, “Geopolitik” was the defense of the land, the defense with Pflug und Schwert (plow and sword) by Wehrbauern, an ‘Űberbauer-fusion' of soldier and peasant. In order to accomplish these goals, new settlements had to be established while moving from west to east. The specific focus of this study is on the original Hegewald resettlement ideas of Richard Walther Darré and how his philosophy was taken over by Himmler and fit into his personal needs and creed after 1941. It will shed some light on the interaction of Darré and Himmler and the notorious internal fights and power struggles between the various governmental agencies involved. The Ministry for Food and Agriculture under the leadership of Darré was systematically pushed into the background and all previous, often publicly announced re-settlement policies were altered; Darré was pushed aside once the eastern living space was actually occupied.

Inspired by 2009 pastiche Inglourious Basterds (US/DE), my research presents counterfactual historical film, firstly, as a marginalised type of film: the 2000s and 2010s have seen an abundance of overtly fictional films which do not intend to represent the past but nonetheless playfully refer to imageries of National Socialist and Holocaust history. These films have so far been neglected by historical film studies which, despite a consensus not to judge films according to their factual accuracy, tend to focus on genres close to historiography. My research considers as historical films the counterfactual parodies Churchill: The Hollywood Years (GB 2004) and Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (DE 2007), as well as Inglourious Basterds and, in a brief conclusion, Nazi zombie films. In this sense, counterfactual historical film is, secondly, a research approach which suggests reconfiguring academic definitions of the field of history and film and historical film. Assuming that historical film never visualises past reality but engages with a history that is always already medialised, I propose that the above films despite their counterfactual plots embark on a visual historical discourse, and what is more reflect upon cinema and history in their own enlightening ways. My analyses show how twenty-first century counterfactual historical films revise Nazi and Holocaust visual history, and how they describe National Socialist history as visually constructed and historical Nazism as an eclectic amalgamation drawing on fictional as well as factual media sources. In regard to the present, they explore tensions between popular and academic culture through the dissolving binaries of fiction film and historiographical fact, and propose to recognise the reciprocity of media representation and actual past as an object of research in its own right. My research demonstrates the value of cinema's playful engagement with history as a potential contribution to the theory and practise of historical film studies.

Hannes Beckmann (1909-1977). Dessau - Prague - New York This PhD thesis is dedicated to an exceptional, though still forgotten personality, an artist of German descent, Hannes Beckmann |1909-1977|. A graduate of Germany's Bauhaus, he was one of the refugees fleeing Nazism to Czechoslovakia, and among many other achievements, he later became the director of the photography department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Through his work, he fulfilled avant-garde ideas on the synthesis of artistic fields: he was a painter, stage designer, art theorist and pedagogue, but also a creator of abstract objects moving along the boundaries of minimalistic and kinetic constructions. His fate in life and created body of work began gaining a clearer form in the framework of research on visual artists, who found sanctuary in interwar Czechoslovakia from demagogic political systems. Until that time, Hannes Beckmann had been utterly unknown to Czech art history and elsewhere. This is seen in the absence of his name in Czech technical literature, but also because he was never mentioned even in publications published by the Bauhaus with which he had been involved for some time. There was only sketchy information on his pedagogical and artistic work in the area of Op-Art (optical art) from the 1960s to 1970s in the United...

In Holocaust research, the study of elderly Jews in Nazi German ghettos remains a blind spot. This thesis begins to fill the research gap by exploring the everyday life of elderly Jews and their agency under the structural conditions of the Warsaw ghetto. On a broader scale, my key findings contribute to scholarly debates and lay the foundation for further research, on Jewish responses to ghettoization and agency during the Holocaust, including the continuity and disruption of gender roles and social hierarchies in the family and Jewish ghetto community as well as religious practices as a coping strategy for elderly Jews in the ghetto. The theoretical framework augments current gender scholarship and explanations of agency and structure in the ghetto with intersectional theory, including gender, class as intervening variables, which represents a barely used theoretical approach to an under-researched subject. To answer my main research question "How did gender, class, and family as well as the Jewish community and German authorities influence the life of elderly Jews in the ghetto?”, the analysis is conducted in the tradition of the history of the everyday on the micro-level. My empirical analysis examines the living conditions, agency, survival, and vulnerability to violence and death of elderly people in the Warsaw ghetto. The primary sources used in the empirical analysis are a combination of archival documents - including the clandestine Oneg Shabbat ghetto archive -, diaries and memoirs by elderly Jews as well as oral history interviews of their grandchildren. A general scarcity of sources by elderly, especially poor elderly and female elderly Jews in the primary sources available to the author, constitute the limitations of this thesis.

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La thèse porte sur le travail effectué par la justice belge, après la Seconde guerre mondiale, face aux crimes commis par les Allemands contre les Juifs. L'étude porte d'abord sur la mise en place du cadre juridique international et national. Ensuite, elle tente de montrer à travers une étude de cas comment, malgré un cadre juridique trop étroit, les juridictions militaires belges ont tenté de poursuivre et condamner les responsables allemands des persécutions raciales. / Doctorat en Histoire, art et archéologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished